argumentum

Interesting, if one of humanity's failures (climate change) mitigates another (lack of pandemic preparedness)

Rumble young man, rumble. Rumble in peace now ..

I suppose at some level how good of a Googler you are affects how well of whatever you want to be good at .. So you might say being a good Googler is part of being a good developer.

One of the greatest (and nicest) guys around. Best of luck Garry!

Whether you view a new fangled technology as "magic" depends on if you understand how it works. Scientists in the 1800s knew much about electricity, combustion, etc well before a "19th century rube":

Our 19th Century rube would fail to recognize cars/trucks, airplanes, helicopters, and rockets; radio, and television (the telephone was 1875, so just missed this one); toasters, blenders, and electric ranges. Also unknown to the world of 1885 are inventions like radar, nuclear fission, and atomic bombs. The list could go on. Daily life would have undergone so many changes that the old timer would be pretty bewildered, I imagine. It would appear as if the world had blossomed with magic: voices from afar; miniature people dancing in a little picture box; zooming along wide, hard, flat roads at unimaginable speeds—much faster than when uncle Billy’s horse got into the cayenne pepper. The list of “magic” devices would seem to be innumerable.

Similarly the perspective of the average 21st century "rube" (though likely to be better educated than his 19th century counterpart) has little understanding of computing or networking, or genome sequencing etc.

Growing up in the 90s reading Bruce Coville's "my teacher is an alien" series, I remember being awed by the description of a "universal translator" device gifted by aliens to the main character. Yet within 20 years, everyone I know has a much more capable version of that device in their pocket.

The author obviously has a right to his opinions, but it's clear that this article is just that: an opinion piece. Since he's a physicist, his perspective might be somewhat muddled by the place of science in technological progress:

Science > Engineering > Market Adoption

Today's scientists are discovering things that tomorrow's engineers will turn into technologies that day after tomorrow's entrepreneurs will consumerize. It's worked this way throughout history, and yes, it's faster now than ever before.

If it's any consolation, they were "normal people" before they became insanely wealthy. If anything, that's the point of YC .. to give "normal people" with intellect, determination and good ideas the chance to become "insanely wealthy" while improving the world.

You say "over-react", but in many ways the reaction is quite rational. When an airplane crashes, hundreds of people die. We are reacting not just to our fear of dying in a crash, but out of sorry of the lives lost and empathy for their families.

Humans also tend to react much more strongly to the malicious actions of others than to the arbitrariness of nature (including human error, as humans are part of nature). Even compared to your ordinary murder, terrorism takes it to the next level, since it indicates that there are others who share the ideology or membership in the terrorist group who intend to cause harm to your society, and they're still out there.

In short, it's not all about "risk". It's about justice. There's little irrational about the desire to live in a just world, and the willingness to pay for it.

I generally agree w/you .. I was referring to the professor who was interviewed, not HN users. I would say that the drug war component of mass-incarceration seems separable, and easier to solve than the violent crime component. It seems better strategy to me to go after the low hanging fruit, look at the results and then plan the next move.

I would worry that trying to solve the whole issue at once, like the professor seems to suggest, would be a non-starter politically.

The problem with the article is that the professor doesn't just argue the points you made, but suggests we shouldn't advocate for ending the drug war or reducing sentencing:

But according to John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School, neither of those efforts will make a significant dent in the problem, because they are based on a false understanding of why the prison boom happened in the first place.

"The reason it’s important to get it right is that if we’re trying to reduce the prison population, we want to make sure we do it correctly—and if you focus on the wrong thing, you won’t solve the problem. So if you think it’s the war on drugs, you might think, ‘OK, if we just decriminalize drugs, that will solve the problem.’ And, you know, it’s true that if we shift away from punishment to treatment that could be a huge improvement. But just letting people out of prison—decarcerating drug offenders—will not reduce the prison population by as much as people think. If you released every person in prison on a drug charge today, our state prison population would drop from about 1.5 million to 1.2 million. So we’d still be the world’s largest incarcerating country; we’d still have an enormous prison population.

And if we focused on cutting back sentence lengths, maybe that would weaken DAs’ bargaining power at plea bargaining, but since people aren’t serving the massively long sentences anyway, it probably won’t have that big an effect on prison population either."

This is a weird argument, because reducing the prison population by 17% is a significant dent ..

I disagree w/your latter assertion: the interviewee basically claimed that ending the war on drugs would, at most, reduce the prison population by 17%.

When you have a truly complex problem, the way to solve it is to pick it apart into simpler parts. If we start with ending the war on drugs, and the prison pop only goes down 17%, we can move on to the next reform.

There seem to be many flaws, but rather than go through them now, I'll assume that only 20% of incarceration is drug-war based.

Great, that means if we end the drug war, we'd get 20% reduction in our world-record incarcerated population. A half-million more people (roughly) will be freed to get treatment and attempt to contribute to the economy and society.

That sounds like a great start to me.

Well you could add in alumni then. All I'm saying is that measuring performance is not that hard a thing to do.