HumanReadable's comments

We should be concerned about both.

That said, whether to spend your energy on global poverty or abolishing factory farming really comes down to how you highly you rank animal suffering.

Is a thousand chickens tortured from birth to slaughter, worse than someone dying from malaria? What about ten thousand?

It's not at all obvious to me how animal sentience compares to human sentience, but it's clear to me that we should at least give it some consideration.

Even when I give animals only a fraction of the concern I have for humans, it's clear to me that factory farming is an incredible source of unnecessary suffering.

I hope we can learn to be considerate of not only humans different from us but other species too.

coordination problem. Europe provides no competitive advantage to any first mover.

If you remove the bay from the equation, the US starts looking much more like the rest of the world. I now live in Copenhagen Denmark but still maintain a decent network in the bay. The difference of culture is astounding.

More than anything else the bay created a culture of innovation and excellence that cannot be found anywhere in Europe. That it happened to be the bay area that became this hub and not eg. Copenhagen, while not a coincidence, is still somewhat arbitrary.

If the great minds of the bay collectively moved to Europe, I feel very certain they would be just as innovative in Copenhagen as they were in silicon valley. EU's most innovative and bright minds move elsewhere to be part of a culture where they feel at home. Until they decide to stay and help cultivate such a culture in Europe, there will be little innovation.

Trade agreements don't need to be symmetric to be beneficial for both parties. Even if China didn't buy a single American good, it is beneficial for US to sell to china.

Export is what you pay for import. If China sells goods to US they will get dollars in return. These dollars are worthless except for buying American goods.

Even if China can't buy American goods, they can buy some other country's goods using their newly acquired dollars. Eventually someone somewhere will use those dollars to buy American goods.

Spreadsheets and finance has tremendous value!

Or do like apple and charge both!

That was exactly my experience.

Sold off every keyboard except one with sentimental value. Typing this from a macbook keyboard.

If India requires twitter murder a child every time someone tweets, I sure hope they don't just say: "Well, I guess that's just their way of life" and continue operating.

Obviously India is requiring no such thing, but what about when China wants google to build them a censored search engine?

we torture and kill so many more animals to eat meat and dairy, than we do to conduct science.

While I share your view, I think it's important to point out that this really isn't the best place to start if you want to reduce animal suffering.

Am I the only one who barely understands anything from that show?

Every episode I hear a dozen barely explained confusing terms with quantum this and higgs-field that.

I feel like they care more about impressing me with how complicated this stuff is than they do about actually teaching me much. Maybe I'm just not the target audience :(

I'm Danish and live in Denmark.

Please keep your next bigoted comment to yourself, they don't belong on this forum.

This is the same argument often made against prediction markets. I remain unconvinced this is a significant issue, but I'm always open to changing my mind :)

Yeah that's right.

I am somewhat torn on where to stand on this. On one hand I do see why we would want regulation against insider trading & pump and dumps, on the other hand I worry that regulation isn't preventing either, and society quickly would become inoculated if we legalized it.

When I read Robin Hanson's paper on insider trading and prediction markets, I became much more uncertain about whether we should regulate this area than I used to be.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228340813_Insider_T...

How is that perverted? Shorting a stock is fundamentally no different than other types of debt.

Imagine an economy of 3 people, A, B and C.

A has $5.

B borrows $5 from A.

C borrows $5 from B.

A borrows $5 form C.

The economy started with $5 and $0 debt, the economy ends with $5 and $15 debt. Despite the fact that the society's total debt is now 300% the size of its economy, it is no different than how it started. Debt isn't inherently bad. Debt is a tool that allows us to collaborate.

why is shorting a company perverted? I would argue it's a great asset to society.

Eg. those who shorted stock because they expected covid-19 to cause a market dip, sent a giant signal to the entire world that covid was going to be a big problem.

No, the opposite. Google aren't allowed to tell you how you can socialize with your colleagues outside of work

What other things were terrible about the biography? It's my favorite biography of all time. I'd love to know better what important parts were left out.

The best steelman I can come up with is that it's very difficult to give away that many billions effectively.

Give one billion to every charity on givewell's list, and now those have more money than can effectively spend in the foreseeable future. Yet you wil have spent nowhere close to your entire fortune.

While I don't understand why billionaires haven't done so yet, I can understand why it may make sense to be patient and search for great charitable opportunities.

I don't understand why this exact pattern of argument happens so much in online debate, but I really despise it.

Acrobatic_Road makes a reasonable point that they don't feel they were given the proper means to express their policy preferences, and reasonably calls it 'undemocratic'.

After all the reason we want democracy in the first place is so that ordinary citizens can influence the policy.

Chillwaves reasonably points out that America is a representative democracy and so you vote for candidates whom you trust to vote in accordance to your policy preferences.

That's two great points! We should be able to have an interesting discussion right? For example we could discuss ways in which the US system of representative democracy is failing Acrobatic_Road. We could also discuss why we might like it despite its failings.

But for some reason, online debate seemingly always end up in an inane discussion debating definitions with one side claiming X is not truly Y while the other side claims X lives up to standard definition of Y.

Nobody is any smarter. We entirely failed to learn anything from each others perspective.

We can be better than this :(

I find it pretty amusing that your last post was advocating for why we should hire you :D