Locke1689

Joined 17 years ago

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Comment · 9 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
Once again, I think that's more of a statement on how he achieves his goals, not how he arrives at goals in the first place.

For instance, there's an inherent conflict between freedom and security. The government and the people must strike a balance on these issues. How does Trump decide what the right balance is? What philosophical principles does he use to decide how much freedom we should be willing to trade for security?

Comment · 9 years ago
By "vague statements" I was referring to his comments on "America winning" or "being great again." Does Art of the Deal describe those statements in detail?
Comment · 9 years ago
This is the Art of the Deal:

  1. Think big
  2. Protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself
  3. Maximize your options
  4. Know your market
  5. Use your leverage
  6. Enhance your location
  7. Get the word out
  8. Fight back
  9. Deliver the goods
  10. Contain the costs
  11. Have fun
Aside from the last one, these are simply statements of strategy on how to achieve your goals. This is not a framework for arriving at the goals themselves. You could use this strategy to work for autocracy or democracy or really any world you want. The first question to ask is which world you want to live in, not how to get there.

His only statements on normative, not positive, values come from things like "America winning" and "being great" and "going back." But it absolutely true that, for many Americans, these are a contradiction in terms.

I can attempt to infer his values from these vague statements, but I think that it is improper for a leader to not start with a set of first principles, independent from ill-defined notions like "winning", that guide what it means to win and what it means to be great.

Comment · 9 years ago
I see no contradiction.

You seem to believe that either winning elections or making money are satisfactory demonstrations of intelligence (as meant by IQ, or g). I do not.

I would be happy to reconsider if he released a simple IQ test, or even his old SAT scores (assuming he took the SAT).

Comment · 9 years ago
> figures based on Forbes estimate of his net worth.

You know Forbes is just a business magazine, and just a small one at that?

They don't have any privileged information. They probably just based their reporting on his self-reported wealth. At best they could look at the public valuations of some of his properties, but since the Trump organization is privately held they have no way of knowing how badly he's leveraged.

Here's a hint: check how much Forbes said Elizabeth Holmes was worth in 2015.

> I don't know about that. From what I can tell, he seems to consistently follow the same or similar playbook outlined in 'The Art of the Deal'.

That you don't see the difference between a set of strategies for making money in real estate and a governing philosophy of how you see the world and act as a person is the crux of the problem.

Comment · 9 years ago
Except that all the numbers on his net worth are based just on his word and he's clearly a serial liar.

Interestingly, I think the fact that he's quite stupid may be how he succeeded at the presidential election. An intelligent, principled person would have a vision and philosophy that guides their actions. When questioned on details or specifics they would use their philosophy to arrive at a reasoned answer.

Trump has essentially no record of this. He has no governing philosophy or sophisticated understanding of how the world works. He seems to do nothing but say what he feels in that moment -- even if how he feels isn't backed up by any reality.

However, in certain election environments that can also be a huge benefit. If the electorate is looking for a foil, someone to reflect their feelings, and the electorate itself isn't acting on calculated reasoning, the dunce with an acute sense of emotional environment is the perfect avatar.

In a sense, the reasoned candidate is at an inherent disadvantage since they will attempt to articulate a particular philosophy. If the electorate is mostly a coalition based on shared emotional reaction, stating a clear philosophy can do nothing but weaken support among your own constituency. In essence, being specific allows people to disagree with you. If you hand wave, they just imagine you think like they do, since they already think you feel like they do.

I can think of another group of people who a similar skillset: confidence artists. They're often not very bright or very skilled, but they are good at reading a room, a person, and an emotion. Interestingly, I don't believe Trump believes himself to be a con-artist; he's just a natural.

Comment · 9 years ago
Is Edge + the new Windows Application Guard similar in protection?
Comment · 9 years ago
Read the source for the compiler and find all the differences. There are constantly minor semantic changes, like numeric conversions, double parsing, scope of generated temps in for loops, delegate conversions, Nothing, etc.

I just started typing this list off the top of my head and every time I typed something out I could think of one more thing. And these are just the ones I remember, so they're probably the ones that were annoying to work around in the compiler.

Comment · 9 years ago
The breakdown of the rule of law is probably worse in that it will contain all the aforementioned, and more.
Comment · 9 years ago
The difference between populism and democracy is that populists always claim to speak "for the people" even if the people are divided. They'll even take action against the majority and simply claim that all the "real" people are for it.
Comment · 9 years ago
And despite lambda calculus being written entirely using single letter variable names, Scheme programmers all use proper word-size variable names in their programs.

Mathematics notation is so notoriously awful that mathematicians often can't even read equations from other disciplines without significant extra context.

Comment · 9 years ago
You are the one who imputed that 'cmurf referred to all parties named the Republican Party, rather than the more logical interpretation as the current party named the Republican Party.
Comment · 9 years ago
This is simply not true. I was there when my entire org got rid of its test team and the people who stayed were not more likely to be H1B holders. If anything, the reverse was true.
Comment · 9 years ago
I wouldn't say that's what most people mean by parallel, but in that case I think you're better off building a layer on top of the compiler for that.

For instance, provided deterministic compilation you could keep a networked cache of compiled libraries that would be delivered as needed.

Trying to be network-parallel at any finer level is probably a waste of time -- network and (de)serialization overhead would eat away all the advantages.

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