weichi

Again, I don't know what you mean by "capitalism", but it's simply not that case that "we can only take actions that benefit individuals in the short term". In the US context, it's certainly true that many companies make many decisions that are driven by short-term profits, but they also make many decisions that are driven by longer timelines (e.g. capital expenditures). I think the same holds true for non-profit entities, including governments (it's a mix of short-term and long-term thinking).

I think a better line of attack is that externalities are poorly accounted for in our current economic system.

I'm not sure what you mean by "capitalism", but the only reason the world's population is so large is that critical technologies like steel, cement, and nitrogen-based fertilizers have been deployed widely. Free markets and the profit motive have been critical drivers of this wide deployment. There are problems with these industries being so strongly profit-motivated, but it seems difficult to figure out what to do about those problems while maintaining current populations levels and material prosperity.

I'm won't claim that universities don't have a problem with adminstrative bloat, but looking at simple top-line numbers like number of non-teaching staff can easily be misleading.

I don't know about Brown specifically, but schools like MIT receive large amounts of federal funding to do research. Administrating that funding requires staffing (paperwork for proposals, contracting, accounting, invoicing, etc). MIT probably also has non-teaching research staff that are entirely grant-funded. I'd be surprised if undergrad tuition is paying for any of this.

"If you have any comments about our WEB page, you can write us at the address shown above. However, due to the limited number of personnel in our corporate office, we are unable to provide a direct response."

upvoting not because I think the article is great, but because I want someone to tell me (a magit user) why jj is better than using magit to interact wit git!

I'm not sure what you mean by "premise", but I really hope that the justification for "treating everyone equally under the law (or otherwise)" is not because doing so "helps prove beyond a reason of doubt who the elite truly are". For that would imply that if a better way is found of "proving" who the elite truly are, we could abandon the idea of equal treatment. Or that we could abandon equal treatment if we agreed that "proving who the elite are" is actually unimportant. In fact, I'm personally skeptical of the value of "proving beyond reason of doubt who the elite truly are", but also highly committed to the principal of equal treatment, so I think the two are unrelated.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding your point?

"the notion of counter-elites: those who are groomed for power and then excluded from it ... The tech industry is a better example ... Peter Thiel (classic counter elite Stanford-trained lawyer cum entrepreneur)"

Is what sense was Peter Thiel ever "excluded from power"? That's not my understanding of his career (but maybe my understanding is faulty).

More generally, is "wreak[ing] their vengeance by turning against the existing hierarchy" really a sensible way of thinking about the tech industry? Yes, the tech industry has certainly disrupted existing hierarchies in very significant ways, but it seems to me that the motivation there is not vengeance but rather profit.

Maybe I'm focusing too much on the word "vengeance". Is your claim more that there was significant "elite overproduction" in the 60's, 70's, 80's and 90's, and that absent this elite overproduction we wouldn't have the tech industry at all, or that the tech industry would be much smaller?

The article is too long and too wordy, but it provides many links to published studies on the effects of porn on the brain.

"In particular, there are ongoing efforts to try to make it the normal thing for scientists to make the programs they ran on their data available so that their results can be reproduced; aggressively dropping older programming language implementations rather gets in the way of that."

But if this is important to you then depending on the OS to provide your python seems like a bad idea, independent of the python2/python3 issues. Wouldn't it be much better to use something like conda / the anaconda distribution, so that you can specify precise versions of each library for your environment?

Having said that, I don't know how anaconda is going to handle the EOL of python2. So I guess the question is: if someone wants to be able to reliably reproduce a python2 environment with specific set of libraries, what is best way to do that?

Unless I am very badly misunderstanding TED, it provides none of the things that churches provide for their members. Some of these things are described succinctly but clearly in the post you are responding too. Could you expand on this?

I've read Griffiths, most of Shankar, some of Sakurai, and some of Feynman.

Of those, I would say Griffiths is the best option for someone with your background. It's short enough that you have some hope of going through the entire book, and it has you doing real calculations. The writing is good.

Shankar has lots of good stuff, but its 600+ pages long, so a bit overwhelming. I also found the explanations not as clear as in Griffiths.

The perspective in Feynman and Sakurai is quite different than in Griffiths, and it is possibly a better approach. But Sakurai is much more challenging than Griffiths and not nearly as well written. Feynman lacks the worked examples and exercises that Griffiths has, so is not (IMO) appropriate as your sole textbook, but definitely worth looking at for the different perspective. A text taking the Feynman (or Sakurai) approach, but at the length and level of Griffiths, would be valuable.

(I taught myself basic QM prior to going to grad school in physics, with a background similar to your, so I have some direct experience here. This was about 12 years ago. Perhaps there are better options now.)

Most of the comments here are completely missing the point of the article.

The article is not about whether the ideas espoused by old philosophers are worth learning about, or about whether old philosophers are worth reading. The article asks the question of why philosophers prefer to read the original works of old philosophers, instead of reading descriptions of these ideas by authors who have demonstrated competence is explaining philosophical ideas. Which is the way that education is handled in most (all?) scientific fields.

You need to write down the 1-1 correspondence you are proposing. Don't describe it in words, actually start writing the natural numbers in one column and the corresponding reals in the other. When you do this, you will find either that the 1-1 correspondence that you are envisioning doesn't actually work (i.e., it isn't 1-1), or that it does work ... but in that case, Cantor's diagonalization argument can be applied to it.