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The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

chris-martin.org

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Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#271

Post by edanm »

chneu wrote: post #230
jimmydddd wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular take. While I agree with the sentiment, I still think it took some fortitude to walk away from the golden handcuffs of a successful finance career to do an Internet startup at that time. Bezos said he ran the idea past his boss at the time, and the boss said something like "that's a good idea, but not for someone who already has a great job like you." So I do applaud him for that. Bloomberg made a similar t…

Nonsense. He had comfort and security to fall back on. His family was also loaded. He wasn't walking away from anything. He would have been fine if it didn't work. The reality is he had a safety net to fall back on. 99% of people do not.

From the point of view of a good 50% or so of the world (if not more), pretty much every Westerner has comfort and safety to fall back on.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#272

Post by systemstops »

munificent wrote: post #253
systemstops wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the theory that gaps between groups are caused by systemic factors. The gaps exist, so an explanation and fix is needed, which is morally commendable. The problem is that the theory is far too overconfident and completely ignores the fact that the gaps also show up in cognitive testing.

The foundational document of our nation's government literally treats Native Americans as non-people and slaves (who were overwhelmingly of African descent) as 3/5 of a person. The majority of Black people in the US are literally descended from people who were brought here as slaves. Half of the country was so attached to the idea of being able to own Black people and treat them as property that they started a civil…

Both things can be true. That fact is that some groups that were discriminated against now thrive, and some don't (even after trillions of dollars in public spending). That is why cognitive testing is helpful at figuring out what is going on.

New ideas, such as the US was "founded on enslaved Black people" really only gained attention the last few years because of our inability to solve the gaps. People wanted an explanation, so the past had to be retconned. The other Anglo colonies - Canada, Australia, New Zealand - never had slavery and ended up about as well off as the US.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#273

Post by NikkiA »

arduanika wrote: post #182

"There once was[...] no search engine that could find what you were looking for." What's old is new again.

The web was only 3 years old when altavista burst on the scene.

So the window of there being 'no search engine to find what you were looking for on the web' was tiny.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#274

Post by tristor »

acdha wrote: post #242
llm_nerd wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, I really don't want to be a Damore apologist, but- "that women were innately less qualified" He never said that, though. If you have to grossly misrepresent his argument like that, you've demonstrated that you have no good faith retort and have lost the argument at the outset. His paper was about on the average traits. That if you've split humans into various subsets -- for instance ethnicity, sex, age, etc -- e…

The problem with the averages argument is not that it’s wrong but that the established biological causes have been for basic low-level things like grip strength but not for higher level cognitive behaviour, especially at the level of software engineering at Google which combines a number of different advanced skills – and there’s a fair variation in the mix of skills equally successful people use, too. Running is a m…

Hey, just wanted to say thanks for this comment. This is a substantive rebuttal that doesn't make any claims of what he said that are untrue, and I pretty much consider it also a response to my sibling comment in reply to you. I also agree with pretty much everything you said here.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#275

Post by K0balt »

carlosjobim wrote: post #270
K0balt wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the reason that life is a struggle is that there are other people that got here before you lol. Funny thing, there were also people that got here before me, so I’m having a tough time with your logic. It must have been a paradise of easy luxury a thousand years ago! So tell me, wise one, at what age do you plan to euthanize yourself? You do know that Logan’s run was a cautionary tale, right? Every generation…

> It must have been a paradise of easy luxury a thousand years ago! Much more recently than this I would say, when abandoned land was given away for free by the government to anybody who wanted it. Almost everywhere in the world, less than a hundred years ago. Land was not always owned by somebody. I was born in a place which is very sparsely populated. Uninhabited or unused land was considered to not be owned by any…

Yeah, it’s not an investment strategy for me. I give them away to people I think can use them or,rarely, leave them in the use of neighbors for some unlikely future use. I generally don’t ever sell land. Except in rare cases, to buy more land.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#277

Post by munificent »

systemstops wrote: post #272
munificent wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The foundational document of our nation's government literally treats Native Americans as non-people and slaves (who were overwhelmingly of African descent) as 3/5 of a person. The majority of Black people in the US are literally descended from people who were brought here as slaves. Half of the country was so attached to the idea of being able to own Black people and treat them as property that they started a civil…

Both things can be true. That fact is that some groups that were discriminated against now thrive, and some don't (even after trillions of dollars in public spending). That is why cognitive testing is helpful at figuring out what is going on. New ideas, such as the US was "founded on enslaved Black people" really only gained attention the last few years because of our inability to solve the gaps. People wanted an exp…

Perhaps the fact that the US was founded on enslaved Black people is considered a "new idea" is why we have failed to address cultural roots of that systemic problem.

> The other Anglo colonies - Canada, Australia, New Zealand - never had slavery and ended up about as well off as the US.

How well off are First Nations people in Canada and Aboriginal people in Australia and New Zealand?

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#278

Post by darth_avocado »

pmichaud wrote: post #165
ryandrake wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just learned this quote now and I love it. Very true. Much of tech mythology, where we are told "started from nothing" actually started from a place of at least some capital and privilege.

I think in conversations like these most people on the successful side underestimate how valuable the starting advantages were, and most people not on the successful side overestimate how valuable the starting advantages were. Meanwhile almost everyone misunderstands what the advantages really are. People will talk about the $300k loan Bezos started with and think "boy golly, with 300 THOUSAND dollars, I could do any…

It’s not just starting advantage, it’s also luck which gets talked about in the blog. You could start with a set of bad cards and still end up being much ahead than someone with good cards, if you have a little bit of luck.

> That you got lucky at a singular moment in history and now you're an old man is not an easy set of facts to accept.

This often gets talked about when we discuss CEOs and Billionaires, but it’s also equally applicable to engineers, managers and directors. You could go to the same college, start at the same company, work the same amount of hours, work similar projects, and bam, one of you gets laid off, the other one gets to see promotions and stock growth. And these successes then compound.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#279

Post by lo0dot0 »

hackrmn wrote: post #15

Ironically, perhaps, I just read the article while taking a micro-break from writing a triangle rasterizer (aliased, aka pixel-art / retro) in WebAssembly. It'll probably feature rendering performance orders of magnitude slower than a graphics card from 20 years ago, and I am well aware of it but the truth is I am not doing it because I am still nurturing a dream of becoming one of the rich rock stars of IT from an e…

Tbh I don't understand the need for games in web assembly. Is it really worth the effort developing an environment for games that runs in the Webbrowser when installing a game through steam or the play store is already very simple and quick

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#280

Post by systemstops »

munificent wrote: post #277
systemstops wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both things can be true. That fact is that some groups that were discriminated against now thrive, and some don't (even after trillions of dollars in public spending). That is why cognitive testing is helpful at figuring out what is going on. New ideas, such as the US was "founded on enslaved Black people" really only gained attention the last few years because of our inability to solve the gaps. People wanted an exp…

Perhaps the fact that the US was founded on enslaved Black people is considered a "new idea" is why we have failed to address cultural roots of that systemic problem. > The other Anglo colonies - Canada, Australia, New Zealand - never had slavery and ended up about as well off as the US. How well off are First Nations people in Canada and Aboriginal people in Australia and New Zealand?

How would you know when the problem is solved though? If you look at average earnings of groups and correct for IQ, the gap disappears. If you want all groups to score the same on tests of cognitive ability, we've been trying to do that for decades with no success. Every attempt to create a test where all groups get the same average have failed. Sorry, it sucks, but it's the truth.
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