jmromer's comments

One more:

Aufhebunga Bunga

The global politics podcast at the end of the End of History. From a left perspective.

https://aufhebungabunga.podbean.com/

If you're open to being pissed off and want to go exploring beyond the SF / SV / liberal / rationalist / techie / IDW / iNtElLeckshualLY sTiMUlAtING hivemind, I'd recommend the following, all hosted by academics radioactive in one circle or another:

What's Left

What's Left? is a podcast hosted by Aimee Terese and Benjamin Studebaker, discussing political theory, philosophy, and current affairs from a [editor's note: materialist / marxist] left wing perspective.

https://soundcloud.com/whatisleftpod

Manifold

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics.

https://manifoldlearning.com/podcasts/

The Classicist

The Classicist is the weekly podcast of Victor Davis Hanson, an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

https://www.hoover.org/publications/classicist?go_type%5B0%5...

Reasonable Disagreements

Hoover fellows Richard Epstein and Adam White discuss major legal and policy issues and debate points of disagreement between their libertarian and conservative perspectives.

https://www.hoover.org/publications/reasonable-disagreements

(all the Hoover pods are pretty interesting)

> (they hope) is closely related to, or correlated with one's ability to perform the job. The idea is that if one can do these sorts of problems, one can probably do the actual job at hand

This is a claim about the intentions behind these practices.

Intentions aside, the whole point of this perennially recurring discourse is about effectiveness — that certain overused methods of filtering job candidates are ineffective on their own terms — and negative side effects — that they're biased against people with non-traditional / from underrepresented backgrounds.

> but to call it gender biased is ridiculous

Unlikely.

> women and minorities are just as capable of playing board games

Quite beside the point. Even leaving aside the implicit claims here that

(1) the board-game filter measures capability of playing board games rather than fluency with the social scripts involved in board-game playing, and

(2) that it does so without introducing any behavioral artifacts such that this measure would be a reliable predictor of on-the-job behavior,

the question is: What are the outcomes generated by the board-game filter? (reeeee equality of outcome)

If an assessment produces an adverse impact on groups already underrepresented in tech, at a minimum it ought to generate scrutiny.

In the case of leetcode-type hiring filters, I can suspend judgment or reach some kind of nuanced position.

In the case of using Settlers of Catan as a hiring filter, all I can do is chuckle.

That said, heterogeneity in hiring practices is a good thing. Presumably in the long run people sort themselves out and some kind of equilibrium is reached.

I look forward to experimenting with feats of strength and athletic prowess as a hiring filter in order to gauge tenacity, equanimity in the face of adversity, and general team-spiritedness.

The "board game interview" is a spectacularly clueless display of net-negative cultural and gender bias. Not to mention just juvenile and unprofessional (my bias, sure).

> A relatively recent demographic survey that elicited 3,427 responses among a publisher’s subscribers that found 91.7 percent of respondents were male and 8.1 percent were female.18 Another 2016 table-top gamer demographic survey of 2,397 respondents that found 24 percent of board gamers were women, 1.1 percent non binary and 0.6 percent were trans, while the remainder—74.3 percent—identify as male.19 The overwhelming majority of survey respondents were also white, with survey reporting that 2.1 percent were Chinese, 2.7 percent were Latin American, 0.6 percent were Aboriginal and 0.7 percent were Filipino.

http://analoggamestudies.org/2018/12/assessing-gender-and-ra...

> That's what a person who isn't in that position would think. In reality most people just want to live.

That's an exceptionally and offensively clueless thing to say. I speak from hard experience.

Indeed—it's a personal decision that every patient and family have to make based on their individual situation. (Just as mine had to.)

That's why a categorical claim that there's no harm to having fighting attitude is patently wrong...not to mention harmful because it contributes to the stigmatization of accepting and preparing for impending death.

A fighting attitude is harmful if it leads you to prioritize prolonging life at any cost.

> I've seen people give up and accept their low chances of survival. It's very rare.

This strikes me as being normatively loaded in a way that's unhelpful, at a minimum. There's a cost-benefit analysis that has to take place by patients and their families and there's a choice to be made between optimizing for length of life and quality of life.

I don't have any issue with the "fight" language, but the associations I make are to the body's fight with the disease, not the patient's actions.

In general though, all this talk of "fight", "battle", "never giving up", etc, strikes me as being somewhat American (in a pejorative sense of the term) -— it bespeaks an immature relationship with death.

Top-down / outside-in test-first development is BDD.

Somehow, and sadly, I wasn't surprised to learn the cause of death. To me Williams's jovial veneer never seemed very convincing. RIP to a gentle soul.

Done properly, the flipped classroom + MOOC format would allow for more personal interaction than the traditional university setting currently does for all but the best students at the most elite schools.

That they haven't succeeded says less about MOOCs than about the distribution of institutional power in traditional universities, where your typical administrator will see MOOCs merely as an opportunity to cut costs that wouldn't have to be cut if administrative bloat weren't crowding out everything else.

Compare D2L and Blackboard on one hand and the edX platform and Coursera on the other. Are they all LMSs? Absolutely. Is there some buzzword-mongering out there. Undoubtedly. But if you can't see (or, as a user, feel) any significant differences between those two groups of products, I'd suspect your faculties of discernment have been stunted.

Also, universities have failure and money-wasting baked into their institutional DNA. That they've failed at delivering content electronically (and almost everything else that's socially valuable) doesn't mean MOOCs can't be successful.

Something I see overlooked is that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. If you were getting real academic credits for participating in MOOCs, if your degree completion depended on successful completion of a MOOC, I'd wager that your completion rate would hover somewhat north of 10%.

It's also overlooked that most college courses look more like MOOCS than not. Much ado is made about the importance of teacher intervention for struggling or marginal students. Is anyone under the impression that such interventions actually happen at scale (or at all) at your typical large university? Especially the lousy ones most directly threatened by MOOCs?

Using race as a proxy for class is a great way to generate oppression along some margin (i.e., for some poor bastard(s) unlucky enough to be both poor and not a member of a protected racial/ethnic group). If you want to talk about class and poverty, talk about class and poverty. There's enough misery in the world.

>people who try to be progressive with respect to the policies of the rest of world, but are too selfish to be progressive here at home.

+9000

THIS. It's everywhere, you know. You just have to look for it.

Isn't it possible, though, that if nice, enlightened liberals, in their characteristic broad-mindedness, are choosing to restrict population density when it's good for them, that restricting population density (at some threshold, at least, if not necessarily theirs) might have something to recommend it?

Or, maybe not. Maybe we can safely just call them hypocrites and be done with thinking about it. I dunno.

But no one ever seems to consider that there might be a point of diminishing returns to density. Or, even if they do recognize the possibility somewhere in the back of their minds, they assume their understanding of returns is the transcendentally true one.

I think that heuristic attributes more foresight to people than they actually exercise in practice. It's more like the impressions one anticipates making on others create incentives and disincentives that shape behavior...but this applies offline as well. Even IRL, everyone's behavior tends to be bounded by "how people want to be perceived, not who they really are."

I suspect that if Henrik is already giving away a digital version, with the paid version he's targeting high-rollers motivated to buy one out of a sense of gratitude/largesse. So a high price tag sort of makes sense.

You're thinking in partial equilibrium. I've no doubt that many women suffer under the yoke of gender expectations that are at odds with their biology. So do men. And even now, somewhere, there are women who suffer because of gender expectations you'd no doubt be in favor seeing made the norm.

But a world in which your vision ("Gender needs to go" == "your conception of gender norms needs to go") is realized is one where many more suffer similarly oppressive expectations. And anywhere in between we're making tradeoffs that are costly to someone on some margin.

Somewhat relatedly: "Theor[ies] of oppression" would be all the more compelling if the humanists and sociologists who peddle them for a living bothered (or had the training) to think in terms of general equilibria.