A few million people died in Iraq as well under the super-egalitarian, meritocratic, no equality of outcomes democracy of the USofA, so why does choice matter so much?
A vast majority of articles published right now will never even be reproduced and yet we take nearly all of them as if they are gospel.
>If the meaning of life exists, it must be possible to find it with science. I see no contradictions here. If you see, you are welcome to reveal them if you will.
Science is based on some kinds of assumptions taken on faith (like every thought system). Here are a few (there are more surely).
1) Everything is observable to us as human beings.
2) Everything scientific will be reproduced and confirmed by someone else despite there being very few financial incentives for anyone to undertake all this costly reproduction and confirmation.
For (1), we know that there can be multiple dimensions, yes. A 2d figure can never really experience and observe the third dimension. He can only wonder about it, ponder about it, conjecture about it, but never know it because his physical senses will not let him understand that third dimension. Observations are powerful but they are limited by our observing senses. For (2) there have been countless hoax papers snuck into scientific journals, I don't need to cover this too much. Most scientific work is not reproduced, but posting it online will make most people think it is true.
You also forget that the meaning of life may exist and yet operate in a way we cannot sense. Just as there are planets we cannot see and may never be able to confirm.
>That kid when he grows up might indeed feel weird about all the undeserved money...
Are you serious? How is taking money from one person who never worked for it and giving it to another person who never worked for it going to make one feel self-conscious and sympathetic to the other?
But according to HN people everyone is censoring them and they can't even go to work and write weird pseudoscientific rationales for why they hate diversity programs and expect their employer, who is promoting heavily and publicly lots of diversity programs, to not like this and fire them and it's all FEMINISM GONE TOO FAR!
>What we, as a society need to do is to encourage men to be less sexist, for instance, a manger who can hire a male and a female who are both eligble should not hire a male because he 'doesn't want female', that needs to be fixed.
But there are no managers who will say that. They'll rationalize it a different way that people will buy into.
> I have seen the reservation system in India and it is horrible, to be honest, it only helps the top % people but the bottom of the food chain is exactly where they were since the start, the bottom of the food chain.
I have also, and this is the point of the reservation system, to create wealthy powerhouse families in a society which had very few from those castes. For everyone who complains about it, there are many more who appreciate it for the good it does and who understand that reservations are not meant to eliminate poverty (else they'd be based on financial status) but are meant to build power and concentrated wealth in communities which had no opportunities to have such.
In India, before reservations generational wealth had cemented a very strong hierarchy. Overturning that hierarchy cannot be done solely by providing education equally, there has to be a balance shift somewhere. People are not going to voluntarily give away their inherited wealth and status, so similar wealth and status needs to be built in other communities. The best way to do this is educate some select few in that community, then perhaps they gain wealth from it, now their children get the same education they did, they inherit wealth and build some more, repeat repeat and now you have powerful families in underprivileged communities which could rival the ones in the privileged ones.
Imposter syndrome is real. But if you are literally on the board of a company, I doubt it matters as much. Also, lots of people inherited rather than earned their wealth. Should we outlaw that to save them from imposter syndrome?
Depends on where you are. Not all of these apply everywhere, but:
- lack of maternity leave
- being judged on personal appearance even in office settings because your appearance is more tied to your worth than it is for men
- when you are harsh as a boss, labelled "bossy" as a negative. I don't hear many men labelled "bossy".
- be chided about "being on your period" in case you say something people don't like
- people confusing you for secretary / non-technical role because you are not man
- people talking about things which may be sensitive to women in the workplace moreso than men and make them uncomfortable / unable to participate (for example, porn, I have seen this in my office)
- after-hours fraternizing at the bar or on the golf course (or other largely men's activity, it's never going to the salon, for example).
- harrassment / dating propositions (imo, it's not okay either way but obviously more likely for men to do to women in office than the other way around)
- late-night meetings, frequent expectation for workers to come in late and stay late (if women mostly take responsibilities of children at home, this affects them more).
- less pay because rather than keeping pays equal, companies only offer raises to those who ask
Surely there are others. Perhaps some of these seem innocuous to you, but altogether they are potent.
And you just have to make sure that any charity you donate to doesn't eventually get revealed to have been a sham where the people running it were secretly funneling the money to armed militants without your knowledge because then you can go to jail for the rest of your life (unless of course your name is Reagan and you funnel arms directly to the militants yourself!)
Few things I realized learning AI/ML in school and being around people who claimed to care about "social good" and "ethics":
1) As long as engineers chase after money and prestige first, there will be no ethical AI/ML. We live in a society which values money and status over everything else, especially moral values (it's quite trendy these days to reject traditional moral values, in fact). If that doesn't change, the incentives to create unethical, untransparent and unfair AI/ML don't change either.
2) The trendiness of ethical / fair AI/ML is the only thing it has going for it, and if companies can coopt it while actually using AI/ML for unethical goals, they will do so happily (for instance, if they were to sponsor ethical AI conferences or papers while still using AI to spy on people and draw up lists of possible terrorists without hard evidence, ala Palantir).
3) There is no desire to have a hardline, this is right and that is wrong code of ethics like doctors do with their Hippocratic oath and a large part of this is the entanglement that a lot of AI/ML research has with the military. It's not possible to talk about ethics and ignore the fact that lots of this AI/ML research is going towards killing over 1 million innocent civilians in Iraq. And yet, nearly all the labs which do this research receive US military funding. When this is the case, you have to leave loopholes for people to reason their way into justifying things which are, to most people's base instincts, morally wrong. And that leaves a kind of ethics where everything is ultimately permissible provided you think about it hard enough, in other words no ethics at all.