291–300 of 320 posts
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It wouldn't have worked if we lived in a world were start ups being led by women was normal and investors didn't think with their dicks. But alas.
It wouldn't have worked if people weren't biased in favour of women.
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How so? In my experience academics are far more likely to sweep big practical issues under the rug because they're primarily concerned with being something working one so they can write a paper, as opposed to making a product that has to work in practice. (It is surprisingly common to have delusions about the scale of engineering problems in management, which causes problems even when it doesn't explode into outright…
Science is discovery of new knowledge (that "pesky chemistry" which is literally don't know how to do). Engineering is applying that knowledge in a effective and efficient manner. Engineering is something that money and time can fix. There are less guarantees with science.
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> so that Capitalists never actually risk or lose money If you think capitalists never lose money then you're not on this planet. Obviously money is lost all the time. There are lots of investors, lots of companies, and few winners. This is mad. Of course bailouts happen, and they're done by the state . Capitalism would let them fail. > hundreds of huge Cathedrals all over Europe In this case the church was the capit…
Capitalism is not "when someone pays for something". By that logic when the USSR launched the Mir space station in 1986, because the state paid for it that made them capitalists. > Capitalism would let them fail. and yet ... Here we are. The state paying for things is Capitalism, and the state paying for this isn't Capitalism, in the same comment.
I see what you mean.
In the first example: the context is we're talking about workers vs capitalists. The state is acting like the capitalist in that dichotomy for things like the Manhatten Project. The Manhatten Project wasn't a triumph of the ability for workers to do incredibly complex, expensive, risky projects. The money to do it came from somewhere else than the workers. So the Manhatten Project is not an example of workers over capitalists.
In the second example I'm not talking in the frame of "everything is either worker or capital" (which wasn't mine) and introducing the much richer, more dangerous, and more powerful third entity: the state. Because state bailouts are not an example of capitalism.
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We have an entire insurance industry that makes money denying care to Americans while they die, or are those okay deaths since it's done under the confines of shareholder value?
Those denials are literally the only thing in the entire system keeping costs down
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My point is that the most prominent tech CEO definitely killed people through reckless action, without apology or remorse. The actual number is unquestionably more than ten; almost certainly in the thousands; and, based (again) on research from people who study this kind of thing for a living, likely in the hundreds of thousands. But even if he “only” killed 10 people (which we know for a fact based on reporting), th…
Many meaningful change in government policy will cause some people to die. Are you going to tar every politician who makes a decision/law/policy that causes some people to die to be persona non grata? I think much of people's response to this is driven by emotion, but that's the wrong approach to fighting the current administration and its enablers (organization, protest, daylighting actual problems, and understandin…
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Science is discovery of new knowledge (that "pesky chemistry" which is literally don't know how to do). Engineering is applying that knowledge in a effective and efficient manner. Engineering is something that money and time can fix. There are less guarantees with science.
Eh, In my experience this is not a clean distinction. My work is generally described as engineering and it often involves discovering new things about the technology, with a similar level of uncertainty. (and it often needs to be a lot more rigorous than a lot of the papers I read in the same field).
But broadly if you are dealing with building something in a world with constraints (time, materials, money, speed, safety) then it's more engineering. If you are studying how things work to try to build something without these constraints without then it's applied science. If you are developing new theories then that is fundamental science.
So yes, your criticism ("far more likely to sweep big practical issues under the rug because they're primarily concerned with being something working") is accurate but by design, not a weakness.
> the applied scientist is by definition not interested in changing reality, only in studying, explaining, and predicting it. The engineer, on the other hand, accepts the explanations and predictions of the applied scientist, and then acts to change reality to achieve some goal
https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/PCEEA/article/view/...
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I believe this is the article he's referring to: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund... It cites this study, published in The Lancet (open access full text): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Summary: The study calculates that 91.8 million all-age deaths, including 30 million deaths of children under 5, were prevented by USAID funding in the period from 2001 to 2…
The Harvard articfle is just PR for a documentary that focuses on an individual (IE, an anecdote intended to be emotionally manipulative). As for the article, this is modelling, not data (both the retrospective and the predictive). There is no direct causation being shown. You simply cannot make a claim like "X million people will die because USAID was terminated" based on this sort of evidence. It's not factual. It'…
How would one (ethically nor not) perform a randomised trial of this kind of intervention? Like, the Lancet definitely hop on far too many bandwagons for my taste, but it's almost certain that the withdrawal of USAID will cause ~millions of otherwise avoidable deaths.
And ultimately, it's the choice of the US government and people whether or not to fund these programmes. Personally, I think that they are worthwhile, but others may disagree.
But really, you're holding the evidence required here to a very high standard, one that many things you believe would probably not meet.
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>Musk has said his critics “cannot cite a single name of someone who died” and “If there were, it would be worldwide headline news!” When confronted with the names – including those of children who died because of the cuts – Musk called a journalist “an utter piece of shit and a liar” and “utterly evil”. Musk has claimed, without evidence, that US tax dollars went to arming militants and “corrupt politicians”. https:…
those are estimates, not data. I am asking about actual data. For example, mortality reports, piles of bodies, etc. I understand feeling emotional about this, I really do. But the important bit is that if you make a big claim "millions of people died", you have to back that with actual evidence, not models.
I think that this is an unrealistic ask, right now. Over the next 5-10 years enough time will have passed such that we can get more accurate numbers, but right now, all we have are estimates with wide confidence bounds (but narrower than they were last year).
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I find this a week comparison. I've driven a Tesla, I've used PayPal. My government has used spaceX to do space things. Whatever you think of Musk there's a significant amount of "actually exists and works" that's on a different planet vs Theranos
Don't use PayPal when pointing to an achievement of Musk's. PayPal was already a working prototype, trademarked, and ready to go when Musk's failing-to-take-off online bank merged with them. Musk was made CEO because he was the largest shareholder when they tried to figure out relative valuations at the merger. He lasted four months. Spent most of it arguing with engineering about throwing away the full working proto…
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Interestingly you won't find this for well connected white males. Sam Bankman Fried didn't hurt anybody else in his gender class, but somehow now all women have to carry the baggage of Elizabeth Holmes.
If you think about it a little harder, the pattern isn't just gender but "thing you are standing out for". In the Holmes case, she was visibly celebrated for being a young female (as a positive) so it's not shocking that it flipped to a negative on people's mind when she was proven to be a fraud. In the case of SBF, he wasn't celebrated for being male. But he was notable for his association with "effective altruism".…
Did Holmes create the "I'm an amazing FEMALE entrepreneur" persona? Or was she focused on the scam and the narrative was created around her?