ceras

Yes, they're exempt.

In adult language learning, practicing pronunciation early is far, far easier than fixing it later. Correcting bad pronunciation habits is extremely hard once engrained, but learning it the right way early isn't as hard as people think. Most courses don't focus on this enough IMO, resulting in people with hard-to-understand accents, which makes them feel less confident when practicing speech as they're asked to keep repeating themselves.

EA isn't limited to utilitarianism. A very substantial amount of people in EA would not consider themselves utilitarians. And of those who do, it's very rare to find a "pure" utilitarian with no deontological bent and thus willing to engage in fraud.

Even if you find a "pure" utilitarian (which is rare), it's considered "naive utilitarianism" to ignore the long-term and broad effects of creating harm, and it's also considered intellectually arrogant to think you know enough about the impacts of your decisions and moral philosophy that you can justify causing definite short-term harm for potential long-term gain against the moral frameworks of just about everyone else.

On the whole, I can't personally think of any one person involved in EA, or widely-read EA literature, that promote or support that type of thinking.

> suburbs are perfectly walkable anywhere in the northeast. Cities less so due to crime

This isn't true. I've lived in and visited plenty of northeastern suburbs and cities. The suburbs are largely not walkable: no sidewalk, long distances, and as a result basically nobody walks to any shop. The cities are walkable and with a large amount of residents actually walking.

Curious, does this apply to romantic partners too? Personally, I'd be sad if my wife didn't share things troubling her that she didn't need my help solving. I like knowing how she's feeling about things.

But at work, I understand this mindset. Though personally, I still actually don't mind hearing people complain. And since I'm a manager, complaints are a very useful signal for me: even if I'm just in listening-mode, they give me more clarity on precisely what's going on in my team.

Layoffs do sometimes happen this way. I was an EM at a company with layoffs where line managers were not told at all about layoffs or included in deciding who to lay off: all discussions happened at the director level and up.

That's what the article is arguing for -- delay school start by 1 year for boys, which they call "redshirting." Key argument is towards the end:

> One striking study, by Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of Northwestern and Elizabeth Cascio of Dartmouth College, drew on data from Tennessee to study the impact of a delayed school start. The children in their sample were allocated randomly into different classrooms. Overall, Schanzenbach and Cascio found that being a year older had a positive impact on eighth-grade test scores, reduced the risks of repeating a grade before high school, and improved the chances of taking the SAT or ACT. The benefits for boys were at least twice as big as for girls on all measures through eighth grade. By high school, only boys were seeing any gains.

> Lastly, they found that the younger classmates of redshirted children suffered no negative consequences. If anything, they wrote, there were modestly positive spillover effects. That’s one reason to believe that girls would only be helped by this shift—having more mature boys in classrooms would likely improve the learning environment.

> Cascio and Schanzenbach’s research is the most robust to date, but their findings have been confirmed by a number of other studies. And related research has shown that redshirted boys are happier, too.

Why not both? Work is ~40hrs a week, so it's nicer if you have the option to enjoy it. There are other software jobs with similar pay to Google, but with more rewarding work. Win-win to switch, if that's what you're looking for.

Personally, the type of problems I solve at work are more interesting than I could realistically come up with and work on on my own. Ymmv.

> at a time when cities are in decline

Do you have a source for that? Here in NYC things seem as popular as ever, with record-breaking rents due to high demand. Is it different elsewhere?

Regardless, even if it's true that some cities are struggling, that only makes it more important for them to focus on improving quality of life: a rise in WFH means people have more options, and a city that doesn't want to depopulate has to be an attractive place to live independent of economic opportunity.

This doesn't really match my experience for my own career or as a manager. Plenty of great engineers don't have a plan beyond "learn and get better," including those that have traditionally-successful careers (e.g. director+ at top tech company).

I'd expect that to matter more if you're, say, trying to be a founder - I can see that benefitting from intentional planning. But for careers at big companies, "learn and get better" seems good enough (and if that qualifies as a plan, I don't think I've worked with anyone that doesn't have a plan).

Most of that is growth, not churn. Alphabet has hovered around 20% net headcount growth per year for awhile, per their earnings reports.

IIRC the rumor leak around that was more nuanced: the leaks reported someone allegedly saying that market economics may not ultimately be able to support more than 2 leaders, because the economics will make #1 and #2 able to profit at prices that numbers 3+ can't compete with due to lack of scale. So the statement was that GCP has keep up or its ability to profit will be at risk, not that they'd shut down just because their slice of the pie isn't big enough if they end up as #3.

I don't believe it was clear who said this, how confident it was that someone said this, and whether it was an off-the-cuff comment in support of a push for more growth or an actual deep assessment of the economics of the space.

Princeton tried exactly this while I went there ("grade deflation"), and it didn't go well. They sent a letter to places like med school admissions alongside transcripts, but it wasn't enough. Ultimately, they abandoned the practice in 2014: employers, law schools, med schools often have minimum GPA requirements that are not school specific.

Students also didn't like it because they felt it made the environment more competitive and less collaborative than at other schools, because an A for your peer means one less A for you.

Somewhere else in this comment section someone mentioned how going to Princeton during grade deflation era stopped them from becoming a doctor, and I'd say that's accurate.