affinehat's comments

You can't lump together all forms of luck into a single "objectively true, pragmatically false" category without considering the magnitude of impact luck has on what you intend to do. In the extreme, playing the lottery is almost entirely luck, and it's very much pragmatic to believe that it is so.

It's not a binary choice between 0% luck / 100% power, and 100% luck / 0% power. There's a whole continuum in between, and the exact luck/power breakdown for any given action is a matter of objective fact. Where we run into trouble is when our perception of the breakdown does not match the objective reality, and we waste our time on impossible tasks or don't bother to try tasks that could have benefited us.

And the breakdown of luck/power is objectively skewed in favor of power for those who are white, and skewed in favor of luck for those who are minorities. So while white privilege and white supremacy might both be wrong, they are certainly not wrong to the same degree. While privilege is a view closer to the objective reality and is thus probably overall beneficial as long as you don't take it too far. Likewise for feminism/incel.

That all came later as an attempt to punish Wakefield for the negative consequences to society due to people not getting vaccines. But people only stopped getting vaccines in the first place based on a misinterpretation of the paper.

They emphatically did not paint the picture that vaccines cause autism, which is exactly what "We did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described. Virological studies are underway that may help to resolve this issue" is cautioning against. That picture was painted by the media.

From the paper (http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67...): "We did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described. Virological studies are underway that may help to resolve this issue".

What the paper really claimed is that, based on parent's recollections, there may be a link between MMR vaccine and autism, and further studies should be done on it, which is quite reasonable. Whether the paper is fraudulent (I don't think it is), and whether an author of the paper separately claimed a causal relationship, is orthogonal to whether the paper itself claimed that "vaccines cause autism" which is a creation of the media, encouraged by Wakefield.

I don't think it's fair to call it the "vaccines cause autism" paper. It didn't suggest a causal relationship. As usual, it was the fault of the media and public for interpreting it in that way.

I disagree with your assertion that it is "extremely risky" to apply current nutrition knowledge. Since we don't understand the effects of the "traditional" diet, it's not clear whether it is helping or hurting us. Yes, we have empirical evidence, but as you said it is poorly controlled. So all we can know is that if we eat a "traditional" diet, we will probably live close to the average lifespan and have average health issues as has been observed for traditional diets.

Additionally, there are a wide variety of traditional diets that cover very different foods. Since everything in the body interacts in complicated ways, we cannot even generalize specific foods as being "non-risky" to eat, since the empirical evidence we have only applies to the interactions of each food with the rest of the diet. So it's not clear what would actually constitute a definitive "traditional" diet; the best we could do would be to try and mimic a specific traditional diet as closely as possible, which still doesn't take into account the interactions caused by non-diet aspects of health like amount of exercise.

There is value in that kind of stability, but by incorporating mainstream nutrition research into your diet you can trade increased risk for what is likely to be a better average result. I say likely to be better than average because, as incomplete as nutrition data is, some data is still better than no data. It doesn't make sense to ignore what we know in the moment just because it might be wrong later. As long as you research carefully and stick to the most well studied aspects of nutrition, risk is minimal.

It's also worth pointing out that the normal person's diet today is already a large departure from traditional diets. So even if we assume a "traditional" diet is the goal, it does not follow that that Soylent would be better or worse than the normal person's diet today. It's likely that the human body is adaptable enough to handle whatever you eat.

Open source software isn't a zero sum game. When one person joins, that does not displace someone else who would normally gravitate to that field because open source can scale efficiently to any number of contributors.

On the contrary, not having enough diversity can and does put off those who would otherwise make great contributors.

I think the three questions are his main focus. Having a nice conversation and asking questions is just the example method used to determine the answers. It's not revolutionary, but showing that individually they are all necessary but not sufficient conditions was novel to me.

> Whether code is concise, clear and elegant has not been causally related to success, unless that's how you define success, which is not how the market defines it. Reductio: The brain is neither concise, clear nor elegant (as far as we can tell), but it is usable and furthermore it works. It successfully extracts value.

Sure, but success is a continuum not a binary switch. Who is to say that the brain could not have been more successful if it was more clear and concise? A body of experience points to code that is not clear and concise being much harder to maintain. True that it is not as good as having hard experimental evidence, but it seems silly to say that demanding code be clear and concise is purely egotistical.

> News flash, everyone is smart, some people just aren't as assertive as you, or aren't yet as educated. You could hire them and educate them, but you are so concerned about short term profits that you fail to invest in people, who are inherently valuable and can do anything they set their minds to.

I have to disagree with the statement that everyone is smart, but ignoring that, what is wrong with not wanting to train people? If I had to choose between someone who knows the material now and someone who could know it by the end of the year, I would choose the clearly more qualified candidate. If Aaron was complaining about a lack of talent to hire, I could understand blaming him for not investing in people, but he does nothing of the sort. The entire article is him explaining the process that works for him -- so why would he want to change a working process?

> Let's select against all the people we don't like by not giving them jobs.

Well, of course. If you start hiring people you don't like, then you will have major problems working with them. As Aaron says, "Someone you can’t work with, you can’t work with". I fail to see what the alternative would be in this case.