pillowkusis

TF2 was one the first major game to introduce a F2P+microtransactions+loot crate economy. I think they did it fairly.

Paid content was always for purely cosmetic changes (with some very small exceptions, removed in 2013). You could pay for items if you want, but they also were granted to you weekly entirely for free.

You could/can purchase every weapon in the game for about $5 total.

I played TF2 at a competitive level for a year without spending a cent on the game.

> The person entrusted with this decision (typically the manager) now wields tremendous amount of power over others.

This happens anyway in Google's "objective" promo system. Your manager assigns your projects, gives you your non-promo performance ratings, sets direction for your team, they sit in the room with the promo committee, and their feedback is critical to the promo committee's decision. You need their help and support to get promoted. If they didn't have significant impact on your work, they're not a manager.

Ostensibly you can go try for promo even if your manager disagrees. I never had any evidence this worked for anyone and I have no idea how it would work. Sometimes borderline promo cases would go up for promo when their manager thought it was unlikely, and it would succeed. But if your manager doesn't think you should get promoted, they're going to tell the committee that, and I don't know what the promo committee would see that would cause them to overrule the manager.

Exactly! I don't respect it, but it's a very understandable response. Just stop making this controversy our problem.

The "correct" response in my eyes is to say "we are a platform, we aren't responsible for the speech of our users as long as it is legal," but that's a very expensive and profit-negative strategy these days.

This thread is an interesting perspective on social media "censorship" that you don't hear often.

Of course everyone working at a social media company has an ideological bias, and that can come out in the product. But consider also that the latest censorship controversy creates negative PR, makes people leave the platform, attracts regulatory attention, and ultimately, hurts the company's profits. Content moderators are at least as worried about that as they are about making sure their ideological opponents aren't given a voice.

Social media companies are in the unenviable position of playing referee in the culture war, and like referees in any sport, they're going to constantly be criticized for doing it, right or wrong. These companies are global and universal, and there's no way they can satisfy all parties. Sometimes, the values of left and right, or Iran and the US, or Israel and Palestine, are just irreconcilable. You're better off just trying to avoid as much trouble as possible, and avoiding negative media attention.

Reddit is probably the most ham-fisted example of this approach. Their content moderation is pretty hands off, but as soon as any subreddit attracts negative attention, it's quarantined or banned, no matter if the controversy is justified or not. When Russia invaded Ukraine and Russia Is Bad Now, they just straight up banned /r/russia and any link to an .ru domain! That does nothing to address the conflict, but it does keep those NYT opinion pieces from showcasing Problematic Russian Bot Behavior on Reddit.

I'll note that I don't think this model fully explains moderation policies at Twitter or other social media sites. I genuinely believe moderation leans left due to an ideological monoculture (I've seen it first hand). But it's important to recognize the difficult situation social media sites are in.

>Google fired the three workers... for "clear and repeated violations" of the company's data security policies. The four deny they accessed and leaked confidential documents...

Surely if they can prove they didn't leak anything (or Google can't prove they did), they would have an easy wrongful termination lawsuit? They wouldn't need to sue on these flimsy grounds?

This article takes the angle that Lambda's profitability efforts may hurt its students:

> the school can still reach profitability by enrolling 2,000 students a month while only placing less than half of its graduates in qualifying jobs.

>Class sizes are like 150 students to one instructor — I've only heard that number going up

I don't see what the problem is here. For students, the only cost associated with Lambda is the opportunity cost. The incentives are still aligned here -- the school wants people to get placed. It can't "scam" students with higher teacher:student ratios or bad curriculums without hurting its bottom line. If it's failing at teaching students, that's incompetence, not a drive for profitability. If only 40% of students get placed -- that's still 40% more than would have been placed without Lambda, right?

>"Those students that are in the bottom 10%, why would they invest resources into helping those students succeed? Just let them fail out after six months"

...exactly? You are going to school for free. The school is not obligated to waste resources on students falling behind, because those students aren't paying anything.

If you think 6 months of wasted time is a bad deal, just wait until I tell you about this other educational program that lasts 4 years, costs over $100,000, and has a much lower placement rate: Your local university's liberal arts degrees.

Still, it's unfortunate to hear that Lambda is playing the same placement-rate games as bootcamps. I'm surprised they have to do this at all; if I was running admissions, I would be extremely selective, only accepting extremely bright students that I feel the university system had "missed," to get placement rates as high as possible. Maybe they try to do this, and this is just a sad sign of the state of non-college education opportunities?

I'm pretty skeptical of this study.

The breakdowns by age and gender make me suspicious of p-hacking. It seems this journal does not require pre-registration of studies so it's hard to know if the study was pre-registered. It very likely was not.

Note that the only statistically significant finding was for boys, ages 10-17. No other category had a significant increase. That sounds like a negative result across most dimensions of analysis to me.

>There was a 28.9% increase in suicide among Americans ages 10-17

>The study found that boys were far more likely than girls to kill themselves after the show debuted. Suicide rates for females did increase, but it was not statistically significant

This is an enormous effect size. What exactly is the supposed method of action here? So only boys, who watch netflix, only ages 10-17, who decided to watch a show about a girl committing suicide (teen boys do not usually watch female-led dark serial dramas), account for the majority of the 30% increase in suicide across their entire age group?

>The spokesperson noted that the study conflicts with research published last week out of the University of Pennsylvania. That study found that young adults, ages 18-29, who watched the entire second season of the show "reported declines in suicide ideation

Now we have two seemingly "significant" studies with opposite conclusions. It beggars belief (if either of them are even representative of a real life causative factor at all).

Girls, older teens, and adults are completely immune from this effect. What possible method of action would affect such a specific demographic so disproportionately, with absolutely no spillover to any other demographic? How can it be that teenage girls, who watch more dramas and presumably empathize with a female lead more, show absolutely no effect? Or could it be that the researchers had an expected result, broke down the data until they found a dimension that had a large enough increase by chance, and submitted it to a journal full of peer reviewers who would find the result plausible and prestigious to their field?

Scott argues that Bitcoin is an example of why rationalists need to be more confident in their results — I’d argue it’s an example of where they should be much more modest. Hindsight bias is in play here.

The line of reasoning that “this investment has a 1/10000 chance of going huge, and a 9999/10000 chance of being at best a waste of time, so I should invest” is not a rational strategy by itself. If you applied this logic to every moon-shot investment you came across you’d barely break even between the few winners and thousands of losers. You need to know something more interesting about the investment than “this could go to the moon”. Otherwise you’re spending all your time buying and then losing money in penny stocks.

You also have to hold onto Bitcoin much longer than seems rational. It’s rare to find that someone buys Bitcoin at $1 a coin, and doesn't sell at $1000/coin. A 1000x return is the definition of moon-shot. Scott claims that “most people” agreed Bitcoin had a more than 1/10,000 chance of achieving $10,000 a coin — but this is a totally non-obvious result to me. Maybe it’s 1/1000 chance of a price of $1,000? A 1/100,000,000 chance of $100,000? In 2011, how could you reliably make such a precise prediction? For a community centered around epistemic modesty, such a finely calibrated probability like that seems unreasonable.

And for the record — Bitcoin was expected to grow in price proportional to its value as a currency, tool, technology, etc. Nobody said “I’m going to buy Bitcoin because it’s going to enter into a giant speculative bubble and I want to be on the bottom”. Nobody seems to know why Bitcoin has exploded in price, so I’m hesitant to award points to rationalists. Seems more like a case of “correct by coincidence”. You made statistical inferences and acted on the result, and ended up being right, but not for any of the reasons that your statistical inference is based on.

Never ever regret making a decision that you thought would make you happier. The fact that it didn’t work out like you thought is nothing to regret. that’s life. It turns out, with the benefit of hindsight, that maybe staying a traditional career path would have been a better choice — but you only know that because of the journey you’ve taken. There was no other way for you personally to have learned that. Now you’re 4 years older and you know much more about who you are and the type of life to want to live. Lucky for you, you get to make the choice between your ambitions and a traditional career again, this time with more knowledge that will hopefully lead to a better decision.

That said, don’t discount your ambitions — sometimes a poor, unsuccessful life spent in pursuit of something beautiful is more happy than a traditionally successful life in pursuit of nothing at all.

> As software developers and designers, we have a responsibility to the world to think these things through carefully and design software that makes the world better

I’ve seen this opinion, especially in the post-2016 world. I’m not sure I agree completely. I think it totally misses the core issue, which is that somebody was incentivized to be paid to do this work. If you’re an engineer at Facebook who thinks the News Feed algorithm is tearing people apart, quitting is not going to solve the problem. Facebook has an incentive to make the algorithm the way it is. Your refusal just leads to your replacement with someone who will do the work (and get paid well for it).

That’s not to say that you don’t have a moral responsibility to stop doing work that makes the world worse. But “all software engineers in the world should refuse to work on bad things” is hopelessly naive. If you want Facebook to stop showing people crappy news, find a way to stop Facebook from getting rewarded from it. Write laws. Raise awareness. Write a competitor that does better. But refrains like these, I worry, are just hoping that everyone will commit to doing the right thing 100% of the time. There are better solutions.

>happens to limit messages to 140 characters and that happens to create, unintentionally, a subtlety-free indignation machine, which is addictive as heck, so this is the one that survives and thrives and becomes a huge new engine of polarization and anger.

I am glad to see someone definitely smarter than me find this opinion too. As far as I can tell the only value in twitter is network effects and the total removal of nuance.

I was sure that I had come across something but didn't know what to google! Thanks for the links.