Gimpei

I’m reading a lot of cope here. This is not some isolated study. From all the evidence I’ve seen, the disastrous effect of social media is everywhere but in the data. I’m fine with phones being banned at school. It’s not like we allow TVs in classrooms either. And on net I think kids are better off with limitations on their phone use, just as they should have limitations on TV and gaming. But the Haidt narrative of phones as the root of all evil is nonsense. Would that the world were so simple.

This is not what falsifiability means in the Popperian sense. You are confusing falsifiability of a theory’s predictions with falsifiability of an additional claim of what those theories mean. We might as well say that the simulation hypothesis is falsifiable because the laws of physics govern our simulated universe, so if you can falsify those laws you can falsify the simulation hypothesis. That being said, the concept of falsifiability is not without its weaknesses.

We could also just hire a lot more cops. The US is underpoliced in relation to Europe and there’s decent evidence that it’s a major contributor to the higher crime rate in the US.

Because languages don’t matter so why bother.

The LVT seems to me to be a lot like a carbon tax: a wonderful technocratic idea that is politically untenable. LTV would be great for humanity, but very bad for present homeowners. Since homeowners are wealthy and thus more politically engaged on average, I just don’t see how this could ever get passed. Instead of starting with an impossible task, why not start instead with a merely incredibly unlikely task: repeal proposition 13.

I dunno. This doesn’t bother me in the same way that flock cameras do. A Waymo car is a private space that you don’t have to use if you don’t want to. Seems pretty reasonable to me that Waymo doesn’t want their cars used for drive by shootings. If a drive by were to happen in a Waymo, this would be compelled by law anyway.

I don’t understand this attitude. There’s zero evidence that South Park had any effect on any political outcome of any kind. South Park is a comedy show and they make fun of things, liberals and progressives included. I thought people were supposed to speak truth, or is that only the case when they say what you want them to hear.

The Pravda parallel is a stretch. It's definitely opinion, but they do consult actual research and more so than most other English language publications. As a social scientist I think they do a better job of treating research than the NY Times or the New Yorker. Often I get the sense the journalists at those publications haven't seen a number since high school. That being said, if you think the kind of statistics based research that comes out of social sciences is all bunk, we live in different worlds and will have to agree to disagree.

Terrible article title and framing. This is just about a QJE article, the QJE by the way is famous for being a little more out there. The article takes a standard gravity equation from economic geography and finds that it fits well to a dataset they created from Bronze Age slates. In general the gravity equation is one of the successes from economics so this isn’t super surprising, but it is welcome and notable. That’s pretty much it.

To be pedantic, the Roman Empire did not fall in 472. It lived on in the eastern Mediterranean for another one thousand years. The Eastern Romans even took back a fair amount of western Roman holdings for a bit. The people who actually killed the Roman Empire were the Franks, permanently weakening it during the Latin occupation.

You could also interpret this statement in a way that has nothing to do with exploitation. A lottery winner doesn’t exploit anyone, but they don’t “earn” their money either. I’ve always thought of the founder path to a billion as a bit like a lotto game where you can shift the odds through hard work and natural ability. I don’t think this process necessarily involves exploitation (although it certainly could). You’d have to believe in the labor theory of value for that. And I’m not convinced that even Marx would, were he alive today. It was supposed to have a scientific basis, after all, and that evaporated a long time ago.

My gripe is that they constantly spam me with overlays about purchasing a family account. As far as I can tell this is unblockable. So annoying.

I don’t understand this question at all. Types are there to prevent human programmers from making a certain class of mistakes. But is the same true for AI. Because if not, static types are just needless cruft.

I’m inclined to believe that you are being too charitable to the interviewers. This is an early stage mental health startup. They totally could have been asking very personal questions. I believe this used to be standard when interviewing psychoanalysts. They could have stopped the author at any time too. That would be the most natural thing. I’m inclined to believe that it was a clown show and they conducted borderline abusive interviews. Shame on them. But also, beware early stage startups. It’s a real roll of the dice and the dice are weighted against you.

If Europe wants to pick up the slack, it needs to start pumping an order of magnitude more money into its universities than it currently does. US universities dominate because they are rich. As a holder of a PhD from a European university, I don’t see this ever happening. But I would love to be proved wrong.