pyrois

Why is knowing how to open an IDE or set up a mail server a prerequisite for good governance?

People really like to trash Freud, but you have to put him into context. Before Freud, we had a few branches of psychology: philosophical psychology in England arguing about empiricism vs. nativism, Wundtian psychology in Germany sitting around asking very specific questions that they answered using introspection, and in the States we had the very first blossoming of the behaviorism that would dominate psychology in the States until the '60s[0]. Some of these approaches had a concept of the subconscious, but they all viewed it as a static warehouse for previous experience, and very few people thought about it in a serious way.

Freud's major contribution to psychology was that we actually have a dynamic subconscious that profoundly affects how we live our lives. This aspect of his theory has become so ingrained in our culture that it's hard to imagine the world before Freud. Also, that aspect of his theory has held up over the years.

Also, he got a number of things correct: many of his coping mechanisms have strong empirical support, for instance.

Freud was wrong in detail, but his overarching approach changed psychology for the better.

[0] Yes, I know this "history" is a vast oversimplification.

Well, it sounds like they maybe shouldn't be:

> “Uber and Lyft can survive classifying drivers as employees,” she says. “It might cost them a little more, but it’s a successful concept. It’s not going to go away because we are trying to enforce the rules

> And several on-demand companies, such as the house cleaning start-up MyClean and the food delivery service Munchery, already treat their workers as W-2 employees. These companies’ labor costs are higher than their 1099-dependent rivals, but they get additional benefits, such as being able to train their workers and hold them to consistent schedules.

I wonder if Uber is fighting this because it will cut into profit margins and raise overhead costs, rather than because it is an existential threat. There seems to be two different opinions presented in the article (though I'm not educated enough in this area to be able to tell which one is closer to being right).

Compared to...? Because, compared to, you know, actual 5 star hotels, they kinda suck.

Yeah, that's the author's guess as well.

> And when I say "people" I mean mostly "algorithms," which are faster and more literal than humans.

That looks fine to me. He's talking about reducing a matrix to reduced row echelon form, and gives a pretty clear example. If you're giving yourself 4 pages on linear algebra, there's not much better you can do.

That said, you're not going to learn linear algebra in four pages. No royal road, and all that.

Sure, they are commensurate at some point. I'd pick one nanosecond of torture over the dust-motes, for instance. But I'm not certain that I would ever choose the 50 years of torture over the dust motes for any number of dust-moted people. That's because it's not continuous, so you can't do the sort of epsilon-delta proofs that Yudkowsky's argument depends on.

At least, in my opinion.

He's assuming linearity, which at the very least needs justification. He's assuming that the function that maps from the pair (number of people, type of torture) to suffering is linear in the number of people, and also linear in the type of torture. I don't believe either of those things are true.

To put it more clearly, he says: > So we can keep doing this, gradually - very gradually - diminishing the degree of discomfort

And I don't agree that you can. The difference between dust-mote and torture is not one of degree, but one of _kind_. It's a discontinuous function (in my opinion). I don't know where the discontinuity is, but it's there.

Yes, I agree, I would take the risk, but those are two entirely different things. It's not the same argument framed in a different way at all.

In Yudkowsky's argument, it's the option between one person _absolutely guaranteed_ to have 50 years of torture, vs 3^^^3 people _absolutely guaranteed_ to be dust-moted. I think the guarantee changes things significantly.