lapsedacademic's comments

But, the honest answer to your boss's question: what bothers me is trading my time for money. My comp doubled. I can now afford to stop working in 3-5 years instead of 10+ years. I think this attitude has become much more common in the last 5-10 years.

The observation is that Big Tech plays the role of Powerful Boogeyman for both the left and the right in polarizing narrative construction.

Ofc non-partisans can also dislike big tech, and partisans can dislike big tech for rational reasons. Neither of those is inconsistent with the above observation.

On one hand, a congressional subpoena for "non-public moderation discussions and policies" is broad. On the other hand, there is certainly some version of that request that is within reasonable scope for a subpoena. In the hypothetical world where passing legislation in the US were still possible and Congress was capable of regulating Big Tech (e.g. changing Section 230 or so on), this is exactly the sort of thing a Congressional Subpoena would make sense for, since there would be a germane policy making interest in obtaining this information.

> I just don't see what warrants this round of grandstanding.

The paradox of Big Tech: everyone hates Big Tech because they think their political adversaries control Big Tech.

The Left views Big Tech as monopolies controlled by techno-libertarian ultra-billionaires. The Right views Big Tech as Democrat companies controlled by radical leftist censors.

(As an aside: in a sense, both views have a kernel of truth. Big Tech employees skew left, especially on social issues, although not nearly as homogeneously as the right seems to think and individual FAANG employees have far less power than people seem to imagine. On the other hand, the leadership of these companies are definitely not natural allies of progressives, but are also not -- AFAICT -- nearly as villainous as the left seems to think.)

But the real thing that both have in common is conspiratorial brain candy with Big Tech as the modern stand-in for Illuminati or whatever.

Because people with guns who said they wanted to kill her entered the capitol with their guns and started looking for her.

E.g., from one charging document: "Thinking about heading over to Pelosi CUNT’s speech and putting a bullet in her noggin on Live TV [purple devil emoji]."

Charges: Possession of Unregistered Firearms, Possession of Unregistered Ammunition, Possession of Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Devices.

So... he had a gun, said he wanted to kill pelosi, and then broke into a federal building and started looking for her.

He was probably just trolling and this is all a big over-reaction, right? /s

> unarmed

https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/capitol-breach-cases

> that Bernie supporter...

the main different here is that I don't recall there being a systemic effort to defend him and explain that it's really no big deal.

It is odd that jobs which don't require this knowledge test for it.

...how do you even spend $1M on a religion degree that costs less than $10k/yr?!

Surely this is just actual straight-up white-and-black fraud, or some sort of weird data entry error, right?

If I have code where that isn't literally free labor for my business/project, I'll keep it closed source. If I have code where that's free labor but also competes with or commodifies my business/project, I'll keep it closed source or use GPL.

This sort of boils down to "only use MIT if you really mean it", right?

Yes it does! I think you're misreading OP's post.

What was OP's claim?

>> The most accurate predictor of a person's lifetime income is the income of their parents. Children of wealthy parents are more likely to go to college. It's like saying "People who drive expensive cars in high school make more money over their lifetime, period".

OP's assertion about "best predictor" is true but irrelevant. The interesting question is why?

OP asserts that the answer to that question is literally "for the same reason that rich kids drive BMWs".

OP is asserting that college has the same causal effect as a parent purchasing a BMW for a child. I.e., none at all, it's just a proxy for parental wealth.

That strikes me as an unlikely causal hypothesis.

Could there perhaps be a reason other than parent income that the child of an MD drives a BMW to school? Probably not.

But could there perhaps be a reason other than parent income that the child of an MD does well in their premed program? Seems likely.

And indeed, the above article establishes a causal link that's directly relevant to falsifying that assertion, that college == bmw in terms of causal effect.

Elsewhere, OP asks if the college wage premium persists across family backgrounds. I think perhaps something related to that question is what you perhaps read into their post. But that's not actually the claim they are actually making in that post.

(BTW: CWP and PEP are positive for students from low income backgrounds... these are just numbers you can look up... why am I the thread secretary for basic statistics?)

Yes, there is a large college wage premium for students in lower income quintiles. The most that can be said is that it's smaller, but still quite large.

I assumed the point of contention was a more nuanced question about causation, since the above is just a simple factual question that can be checked without any sort of analysis.

> We also continue to interview in ways that are more accommodating for college graduates and attendees, regardless of whether it's needed or not.

Wouldn't Leetcode-style interviewing be more egalitarian? Assuming self-taught people know their stuff, I guess? The alternative in other engineering disciplines is to just check the degree and do some soft interviews, right?

Or do you mean something else?

But why? What are the CAUSAL relationships between parental earnings, educational attainment, and child earnings? The children of doctors are more likely to become doctors, but saying that educational attainment is therefore less related to doctoring than parental occupation is obviously a bit absurd. Just because a parent paves the path doesn't mean that educational attainment is irrelevant to walking that path. And anyone who makes it through med school and residency has the option to enjoy high earnings, regardless of parental income.

The MD example, for the curious and humble reader interested in Truth rather than Winning, makes it abundantly clear why section 3.6 of the linked paper asks a question that's directly relevant to untangling these causal links.

> Do you have another study?

There's an entire literature base on exactly this question. "lifetime earnings parental earnings education" returns 130K results on Google Scholar. But, to be blunt, I don't think you're interested in learning anything. I think you're interested in Winning the thread. So I'm not posting for your benefit; that would be futile. I'm posting for the benefit of intellectually curious readers.

Ugh. Why?

You asked for a statistically grounded conversation, so let's do that.

Let's start, for example, with pdf page 25 (and surrounding context) of https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/causal_educ_earnings.p...

The analysis done in that paper is a good starting point for a productive conversation. We could discuss the bounds on various coefficients and decide whether the conditional statements about those coefficients made in the paper have clear answers in either direction. Or we could critique the various modeling assumptions. Etc.

1. Latency. We really needed messages to go out to everyone all at once.

2. My personal phone became unusable for the rest of the event because people thought that number was a general event organizer contact mechanism. This was a big deal because I was a key member of the operations staff and really needed my phone to be useful.

Solving (1) and (2) was certainly doable, but twilio solved the problem for us and I had higher impact IT stuff to be working on for the org.

Tuition has been increasing at 8% per year.

Apparently lots of places, since the national average is substantially lower than the Ohio numbers.

But, more importantly, both UCLA and Ohio University are flagship R1s. Likely literally every other public university in Ohio is cheaper than OU, and I'd be unsurprised if UCLA is one of the more expensive public options in CA (wouldn't know, never lived in CA).

e: sure enough, the total cost at Youngstown State is 22K (tuition 10K, the rest is food and housing).

As an aside, including room and board in college prices always struck me as a bit odd (except in cases where living in a dorm is required, I guess, but that's somewhat rare). Do non-college-students not eat/drink/sleep?

Colleges/Universities and expensive enough and screwed up enough that exaggeration isn't necessary.

Right, I figured. This is entirely orthogonal to the discussion about the problems with higher ed in the us...