CodeyWhizzBang

It seems to work for doormen

I don't think that's necessary to refute the original point. The point I was disagreeing with was that automatic doors have "won" and doormen are no longer relevant. Whether 25,000 is a higher proportion of New Yorkers now than it was in 1930 isn't really a key point. 25,000 remains a large enough number that it is not true that doormen have been wiped out.

That said, to your actual points, as an intellectual exercise: while the population of New York has increased since 1930 (from around 7m to around 9m), the number of doormen has gone up much much faster (from "a few thousand" according to NPR to 25,000). So on the criteria you listed there, the number of doormen has increased as well.

The doorman example remains true.

If the automatic door hasn't been widely adopted, that literally proves the point I was making that automatic doors haven't "won".

When you say the automatic door "has won" do you mean it's won by rendering doormen obsolete? Because if so, that seems very untrue. According to Vanity Fair and NPR there are over 25,000 doormen working in New York City. 1930 there were an estimated few thousand. So since the invention of the automatic door, the number of doormen has skyrocketed.

Maybe, you'd say there are more automatic doors than doormen. I'm confident that is true, but those automatic doors haven't supplanted doormen; they're automatic doors where there would have been manual doors before.

So everything hasn't adapted around automatic doors. We've just got a lot more automatic doors now. And a lot more doormen.

I think that's maybe the point of the article:

"Whereas before, average was expensive in terms of both time and effort, average became cheap."

A car that starts 50% of the time isn't "average". The average new car starts more or less every time. (And if you said 'modal average', I'd say the modal average new car starts every time).

Not everyone can be average. Half of people will be below average.

I might not agree with the point, but I can see that idea that many things just need to be "good enough" (which we might define as "average") and we save our real expertise for the things that really matter.

My point more was that you said it wasn't a widely shared opinion, but to my mind, it is broadly the status quo. Whether that is good or bad is a separate point.

Is that definitely not a widely shared opinion?

I feel like I can think of lots of situations where society puts in to protect children rather than leaving it to the parents (age ratings on films and games, YouTube Kids, regulations around advertising to children, the whole concept of school, reduced speed limits around playgrounds to give a few examples off the cuff).

The article says:

Why is beauty a productivity-enhancing attribute for males in non-quantitative subjects? Generally, it is difficult to disentangle the reasons behind why beauty improves productivity (Hamermesh and Parker, 2005). However, relative to other students, attractive men are more successful in peer influence, and are more persistent, a personality trait positively linked to academic outcomes (Dion and Stein, 1978, Alan et al., 2019). In addition, attractive individuals are more socially skilled, have more open social networks, and are more popular vis-à-vis physically unattractive peers (Feingold, 1992). Importantly, possession of these traits is significantly linked to creativity (Soda et al., 2021). In our setting, the tasks faced by students in non-quantitative subjects, for instance in marketing and supply chain management, are likely to be seen as more ”creative”, and significantly contrast the more traditional book-reading and problem-solving in mathematics and physics courses, the latter presumably perceived as more monotonous. Together with the large use of group assignments in non-quantitative courses, these theoretical results imply that socially skilled individuals are likely to have a comparative advantage in non-quantitative subjects.

I am very struck by this remark:

"Kovid has stated numerous times that any patches which work towards python3 compatibility without hurting python2 functionality or performance would be happily accepted. Oddly enough, no one has ever taken him up on that, though a number of people have insisted it is very important that he himself do that work."

Unless it's the LTSC edition of Windows 10, which has support until 2029

I'm not convinced "big digital projects" in the private sector fare any better. As far as I can see, the scale of the project is a bigger problem than whether the originator is a private or public company. Public companies just have more of an obligation to be transparent with their failures.

This is only iOS