"I personally have lower taxes, high quality healthcare, and live in an awesome location, and I got all of that through an education and training. That is available to almost every American if they just put in the work."
So, not trying to be antagonistic but this is pretty much a perfect example of survivorship bias: "this worked for me/X so it could work for everyone."
It's also part of what the author is referencing: this idea that you can always point, post hoc, to ways in which someone could have worked harder.
It also ignores rampant structural problems. There are plenty of people with marketable skills, or who are capable of doing such work, but who are walled out of opportunities because of implicit or explicit rules that actually have nothing to do with ability to do the work at hand. So we, for example, assume that task X can only be done by someone with a score on some proxy standardized test A, or with specific degree B, or who come from a certain type of school C; or who have experience working with specific platform D.
These types of arguments always seem to devolve into extremes, which is frustrating to me. It's possible to say "the US can be a better place to be for more people by changing X, Y, or Z."
The irony is that if I could change things the way I'd like a lot of the changes would involve pretty extreme deregulation in some areas mixed with certain select areas where I would increase taxes and provide more things publicly through the government. But these kind of mixed solutions tend not to get anywhere in today's political climate.
Sure, for certain individuals the US, or Europe, or much of Asia would provide a better life.
But compared to how things were in the past, the US has changed for the worse.
I'm a white male, so I can't really complain about being mistreated in the sense you're mentioning. But in talking to many people, and in my own experiences, there's a sense that the "meritocracy" is increasingly a falsehood based on survivorship bias.
My own sense is that this is largely driven by increasing income inequality, coupled with or driven itself by monopolies and rent-seeking behavior across many many domains. So a smaller and smaller pool of money is going around to those who are able and willing, and a disproportionate amount of it is going to a smaller few who either game the system, or who are willing to tolerate abuse.
Part of what the article is referencing, I think, is a shame among Americans to say this, because it's labeled as sour grapes or something. I also think part of it is a sense that admitting the system might be broken is actually less optimistic because it amounts to some admission that you don't have agency. But these seem increasingly untenable as positions to have.
For some context, the "up to a rotation" argument is something that has gone on for decades in the psychological measurement literature.
This is true, but the clustering of points in space is not. So while the choice of axes is arbitrary, it becomes nonarbitrary if you're trying to choose the axes in such a way as to represent the clustering of points. This is why you end up with different rotations in factor analysis, because of different definitions of how to best represent clusterings.
I think there's some ties here to compressed sensing but that's getting a little tangential. My main point is that while it's true that the default word2vec embedding may lack meaning, if you define "meaning" in some way (even if in terms of information loss) you can rotate it to a meaningful embedding.
I actually thought they were linking it to the temperature + the fact that mate is often smoked during processing (which is one reason I think I actually like the flavor unfortunately)
Yeah, believe me, I understand the reasons for self-hosting in something like Rust versus not self-hosting in Julia. Also the fact that Julia is almost all Julia.
Still, the fact that it's almost all Julia suggests to me it could be all Julia, although maybe that's changed with 1.0+ releases.
Trying to think about why it matters to me, I think what it is a sense that if you can get what Julia offers from another language that does more, it probably is better to use that other language. So I want to see it pushed to be more general-use. Not just for the principle, but because I think in general there are gains to languages in doing so. E.g., my guess is that getting Julia to be self-hosting would require certain efforts that might pay off in other ways, or set the stage for such things.
This sort of thing is why I've started to wonder if employment rate is really all that meaningful as a general socioeconomic index. It is what it is, of course, but I'm not sure it's use as a proxy for well-being is really justified.
As someone who does a lot of meta-analyses I'd prefer you left in non-significant values as well, if they bear on the hypotheses at hand. Aggregating over nonsignificant effect sizes can still result in an overall effect that is significant.
The fundamental problem is that 0 is a privileged value of effect size. So you can replace a p-value with confidence intervals, or credibility intervals (which are the same as confidence intervals as N increases to infinity, and the data dominate the posterior), or whatever, but it will always be appropriate (in the relevant scenario) to ask "is there an effect size at all?"
This is why these calls to eliminate significance testing always seem really naive and short-sighted to me. P-values are abused, and people confuse p-values and effect size, but there will always be a need to focus on 0 as that supremely-important number. ε can be judged on its practical significance but 0 is always less.
Anyway, I agree with you but wanted to point out that there's two sides to the coin, and both lead in the same direction.
Psychologist here. Anger and optimal responses to it is a complicated issue. There is research (involving randomized controlled designs) suggesting that approaches to anger where you "act it out" can actually fuel the fire, like you're suggesting.
However, it's complicated because these studies generally focus on length of emotional response rather than complex, downstream effects. That is, they assume that the goal is to stop anger state; by that assumption, it's better to adopt a sort of distress tolerance approach than to act on it. But what about long-term effects on relationships and communication? Where does one draw the line? Stonewalling and cutting off communication is a strong predictor of relationship dissolution for example, even relative to intense expressive patterns. So if your response is to always approach your anger robotically and to shut it down, does it then lead to passive aggressive responses, which can be even worse?
There's also an important distinction between anger and aggression, which are different and have different associations empirically, even though people tend to conflate the two. This isn't unreasonable, because I'm not sure at what point you draw the line.
As a parent of a toddler, this article had me thinking a lot, and I'm not sure what I think. Lying to your child, for example, is manipulative. Is it better to express your anger or to lie to them and tell them a monster will bite off their fingers? Of course a child who's cognitively not developed enough to understand will become terrified, because they believe it. But is living in real fear of a disfiguring monster over a minor transgression really less aggressive than simply visibly expressing anger? Or is it just a manipulative aggressive response on the part of the parent?
I really don't know the answers to these types of questions. I wish I did.
I've done a lot of human behavioral genetics research and think there's not a lot more to say about big-picture questions regarding the genome and behavior (people can ignore what's been said but that's a different issue). Genes influence behavior, and so does environment. Both in big ways, and there's extremely complicated dynamic interactions between those systems. There can be big genetic insults to a behavioral system, and big environmental ones. Behavior is often measured crudely, especially in behavioral genetic studies, due to practical constraints, so distinctions that people here might care about don't get made in such studies often. There are a ton of details to flesh out, but I don't think people are going to find genes influence our behavior more than what's been documented. It's just not supported by the evidence -- and people have looked.
Also, even beyond behavior genetics, as neuroscience and genetics research progresses even further, we're going to have to face a bigger question, which is what to do about the fact we can actually intervene to influence behavior even in the face of congenital attributes. Let's say trait X is 80% heritable (they're often not, more like 50%), but you can use CRISPR-esque techniques with viruses, etc., whatever, to change the genome at any age. Think about the ethical and political issues surrounding that. When you can play God, you have the responsibilities of God too; there will be no excuses for altruistic intervention by society.
I'm happy about this article because I've also done research on psychosomatic issues, for lack of a better way of putting it, and this field is really mischaracterized and there is a lot of mob behavior against scientists.
So, not trying to be antagonistic but this is pretty much a perfect example of survivorship bias: "this worked for me/X so it could work for everyone."
It's also part of what the author is referencing: this idea that you can always point, post hoc, to ways in which someone could have worked harder.
It also ignores rampant structural problems. There are plenty of people with marketable skills, or who are capable of doing such work, but who are walled out of opportunities because of implicit or explicit rules that actually have nothing to do with ability to do the work at hand. So we, for example, assume that task X can only be done by someone with a score on some proxy standardized test A, or with specific degree B, or who come from a certain type of school C; or who have experience working with specific platform D.
These types of arguments always seem to devolve into extremes, which is frustrating to me. It's possible to say "the US can be a better place to be for more people by changing X, Y, or Z."
The irony is that if I could change things the way I'd like a lot of the changes would involve pretty extreme deregulation in some areas mixed with certain select areas where I would increase taxes and provide more things publicly through the government. But these kind of mixed solutions tend not to get anywhere in today's political climate.