> If you were correct, then women should have economic parity with men. They don't.
Every statistic I've seen seems to indicate that modulo life choices that seem correlated with gender (ie, on average women prefer different things to men, though individuals vary greatly), there is economic parity between men and women (in most developed nations, but I'm most familiar with the US).
There are some very real issues with the direction that women are steered by society, but there are also some real issues that men face (eg, school, legal system, etc).
However, there's also a non-trivial number of women (in places like the US) who blame sexism for the consequences of choices they've had to make in life between things that they want, and seem to treat it as an affront to their gender that they're not treated as catered princesses by the world -- getting to have every want. And then hide that behind talking about "economic parity".
> The exact details may vary a bit, but the feminization of poverty is a phrase in our lexicon for a reason.
Doesn't this mostly have to do with poor women being forced to carry the economic burden of many children in developing nations?
It's also definitely not a common term to use -- which makes me think that you likely have a biased view from hanging out in a very polarized, niche crowd.
> But I feel pretty worn down and hopeless of late.
As a fellow human, are you sure you're not inventing a narrative that's worse than the truth, and then stressing yourself out battling phantoms? (This is something I do all the time, on issues small to large.)
There are real issues in the world -- quite serious ones, at that. But modern charities and other social purpose organizations deploy weaponized psychology meant to send you into an emotional state in order to boost their funding (or membership, but really power), and the consequence of everyone doing this "for the right reasons" is a completely toxic society, polarized in righteous anger over every issue to the point its emotionally burnt out and fragmented. This habit has even been exploited by foreign states to attack the nation. (True for virtually every country, and definitely all of the European and "Western" ones.)
This is quite possibly the best of times on any of those issues, so instead of worrying about how you're going to feed every woman in Africa with too many kids (hint: you won't), just try to focus on what's the next small step that you can take to fix one of the issue a little. Then do that.
That's something you can actually do right now, won't exhaust you even if you have to do it for the rest of your life, and would completely fix the problem if everyone would just stop panicking and do that.
Late reply, but I think there's a second harm to throwing out generalists in addition to what you outline:
Specialists aren't as good as generalists at integrating the work of specialists across domains (almost by definition). A lack of generalists can then lead to a situation where specialists are all making locally good moves, but the overall direction is negative -- something akin to Simpson's paradox (though, in the other direction).
If you look at per energy expenditure, I'd argue that "webcams for pets" or "delivery for X" are probably delivering more value per unit energy used, because of relative efficiency.
I think the implication is that "free" is being quoted from elsewhere and the author doesn't necessarily agree that it is without cost just because such cost is not denominated in dollars.
So Google deployed malware against... tens of millions of people?... in order to steal confidential data for profit, by bypassing security mechanisms on those devices as they interacted with Google servers, exceeding authorized access, and using installed code to track the activities of people against their efforts to raise technical barriers?
That sounds like an international criminal act on a scale most malware authors would wet themselves over.
It's also not surprising that the public is getting fed up with the wanton criminality that seems to be embodied by modern capitalism.
I don't know why this is getting downvoted. They did, in fact, acted against someone's setting not to do this, and I completely agree, this is a criminal act, not just a technical glitch.
IMHO storing cookies in a machine explicitly configured to block them seems to fit the "exceeds authorized access" language of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
..as opposed to the lily-white lack of criminality of communism or socialism? Criminality occurs everywhere within every system, the only difference is who is committing it and the degree of which it it reported.
Digital currency isn't competing with credit card networks, it's competing with ACH.
ACH transfers take days; wire transfers take minutes to hours and cost tens of dollars. There's ever possibility of running a digital currency that can clear transactions on the order of minutes with minimal cost. Bitcoin isn't well suited to that, partially because it hasn't been managed well.
A credit card would still pre-authorize against a balance at an institution, but it would settle between the customer and merchant bank on the same schedule (when the merchant cleared their transactions for the week) or faster (eg, on the order of minutes). That makes credit cards considerably closer to cash (fast) than what they are now, like checks (slow).
And for people who wanted it to settle immediately or treat it like cash, they could make a direct transfer, and have it clear on the order of minutes. (Not great for coffee, but something like buying a car.)
Digital currencies can be those things, they're just not.
And for people who wanted it to settle immediately or treat it like cash, they could make a direct transfer, , and have it clear on the order of minutes.
Can you please elaborate on this a bit more. What is direct transfer and how is it different from bitcoin /ethereum payments. From what I understand, they are the same.
That was connecting on to the previous paragraph, and contrasting with pre-authorization through a payment network -- I meant a direct transfer of currency from customer to merchant, instead of using a financial institution as an intermediary to vouch for you having money.
It varies by sport and how accurate you need your timers to be. NBA needs a timer within "seconds" -- Formula 1 and NASCAR need timers within milliseconds.
> Why has the government taken such a hands off approach?
Because it's something like win-win-win for them?
1. They don't stifle a new technology for no reason.
2. They can always regulate it later, with the added bonus that they'll be able to stick a bunch of people they want to investigate with non-compliance charges for failing to register at the appropriate time. Similarly, how many people do you think are doing their taxes right on BTC? Easy arbitrary audit material if you can ever link their accounts.
3. I'm not sure the government is opposed to digital money that leaves an immutable, public record of cryptographic witnesses to transactions. The pseudo-anonymity isn't worth much against a pervasive global adversary watching all the pipes. They link the BTC to your actions, the keys to your machine, and you may as well have signed a confession.
So there's little incentive to act quickly and lots of incentive to give the radicals into BTC a chance to slip up on OPSEC.
To add a little socialist critique, governments have been hands-off crypto-currencies because major financial institutions haven't started ramping up the pressure, yet.
It's because we think in 3D, so we only really see three steps of exponential growth.
If we thought in 100D, we might have a better sense for it, because we'd be able to see a hundred of them.
Hypervolume grows exponentially.
One way to get a really rough idea is to try and control each and every joint individually.
Close your eyes and try to imagine that each joint, each muscle is a dimension along which you can move (by moving it), and your posture at any given moment is a point in that space. When you move, you make a line through it. Don't picture it, just feel it.
What is the shape of that space?
You can get an idea of what exponential growth is like by exploring how the shape of that space changes as you add more and more things you're controlling.
> ... In the case of a discrete domain of definition with equal intervals, it is also called geometric growth or geometric decay, the function values forming a geometric progression. ...
That is growing exponentially with number of dimensions. The earlier post assumed fixed but large number of dimensions and varying linear size, so that would just be a power law.
> It's because we think in 3D, so we only really see three steps of exponential growth.
> If we thought in 100D, we might have a better sense for it, because we'd be able to see a hundred of them.
This is pretty clearly talking about getting a better sense of the asymptotic behavior in number of dimensions, and having a better intuition if you see a hundred steps than if you see three. The three steps of exponential growth mentioned are in transitioning from a single cube, to a line of 10 cubes, to a grid of 10x10 cubes, to a block of 10x10x10 cubes. But that's sort of where we tap out, because we're so heavily wired for 3D -- if we dealt with 100D, we'd have 100 such steps we could intuitively observe, and so have a better sense of asymptotics.
This is further seen in that the exercise is based on increasing the number of dimensions to explore the growth of the space as the dimensionality changes. It's literally adding more and more terms to a product space, and so clearly dealing with issues about dimensionality.
You're simply wrong, and incredibly uncharitable in your interpretation.
Further, geometric growth isn't a power law -- it's exponential growth. So the person asking the question was indeed confused, regardless of the fact you're wrong about what I was talking about. Geometric series are r^1, ^2, r^3, etc while a power law will look like 1^x, 2^x, 3^x, etc. Asking if an exponential growth is "just geometric growth" is being confused -- they're the same thing.
Oh oops, you’re totally correct that geometric growth is a synonym for exponential growth. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I may have been confused by the fact that volume grows polynomially faster than surface area for any fixed n dimensions (I now fear I may also be incorrect about this claim, although I’m confident it’s true for n=3).
Still, geometric growth is exponential in n when n is the number of dimensions, which isn’t really the n we were talking about in this context.
I discuss how seeing 100 steps of a sequence with regular behavior gives you a better sense of its asymptotics than seeing 3 steps, and then how you can generate some steps of that sequence as a mental model.
The N that is changing is the number of dimensions, both in comparing which model gives better asymptotic intuition and in terms of constructing a phase space by adding a dimension at a time.
I'm actually unsure how you could think there's an N that's not dimension, given that the only values discussed (or changing) were dimensions.
Did I not use fancy enough language when making a point to laymen, so you assumed you knew more than me and took a really uncharitable read so you could "correct" me?
When you say “volume grows” most people assume an increase in 3D volume. If you meant something else, like growth with number of dimensions, then you should’ve clarified it better. I think that’s why you are being downvoted despite the insightfulness of your comment.
It's actual a real problem with people who are moderately good at math:
They sabotage explanations to laypeople by incorrectly nitpicking technical details because they hear informal language that sounds similar to something they know, and rush to regurgitate that fact as a "correction" without really understanding the conversation -- and will insist on doing so unless you use language too sophisticated for the audience you were trying to reach in the first place.
This actually happens with nearly every field, I just experience it most with math -- it's probably related to Dunning Kreuger or whatever.
An interesting way to look at human thinking patterns. Is there any book on it?
I never completely figured out Aikido with it’s joint locks and levers. Maybe talented aikidokas have a grater capacity to visualize/fill this type of activity?
(Aikido SanDan, ~28 years of practice, still going to the dojo 3 times a week).
Interesting point, but I don’t think Aikidoka have any special talent for that: we use a small number of techniques and what changes is the way you use them in response to different attacks/holds.
Also, you tend to work on your specific Ryu (school) technicsl curriculum and nobody goes around “inventing” new locks.
(Some argue that Aikido is not really adapting to modern world nor cross-pollinating with other martial arts due to -arguably excessive - reverence for tradition).
Honestly, it's just a mash-up of a few Buddhist ideas and a few math ideas:
You can model what you're doing as a phase space, which is the product space of the state of each thing you control. This generally has a lot more dimensions than three. (You see this in robotics; a 5-axis CNC has a 5 dimensional phase space for position (5 axes of motion), plus a few more dimensions for things like speed and coolant flow.)
That mashed up with the meditation idea of starting with your focus on something really small -- the soles of your feet, for instance -- and drawing it up your body until you can feel all of it.
If you do the two, you can slowly draw yourself into awareness of higher and higher dimensional phase spaces, which shows you a curve of exponential growth.
Well, okay -- I also followed Terry Tao's excellent advice on dealing with higher dimensions, to stop trying to picture math and start trying to find systems that expressed it in what they did. You can often get a feel for a system doing something more complex than what you can directly picture.
Every statistic I've seen seems to indicate that modulo life choices that seem correlated with gender (ie, on average women prefer different things to men, though individuals vary greatly), there is economic parity between men and women (in most developed nations, but I'm most familiar with the US).
There are some very real issues with the direction that women are steered by society, but there are also some real issues that men face (eg, school, legal system, etc).
However, there's also a non-trivial number of women (in places like the US) who blame sexism for the consequences of choices they've had to make in life between things that they want, and seem to treat it as an affront to their gender that they're not treated as catered princesses by the world -- getting to have every want. And then hide that behind talking about "economic parity".
> The exact details may vary a bit, but the feminization of poverty is a phrase in our lexicon for a reason.
Doesn't this mostly have to do with poor women being forced to carry the economic burden of many children in developing nations?
It's also definitely not a common term to use -- which makes me think that you likely have a biased view from hanging out in a very polarized, niche crowd.
> But I feel pretty worn down and hopeless of late.
As a fellow human, are you sure you're not inventing a narrative that's worse than the truth, and then stressing yourself out battling phantoms? (This is something I do all the time, on issues small to large.)
There are real issues in the world -- quite serious ones, at that. But modern charities and other social purpose organizations deploy weaponized psychology meant to send you into an emotional state in order to boost their funding (or membership, but really power), and the consequence of everyone doing this "for the right reasons" is a completely toxic society, polarized in righteous anger over every issue to the point its emotionally burnt out and fragmented. This habit has even been exploited by foreign states to attack the nation. (True for virtually every country, and definitely all of the European and "Western" ones.)
This is quite possibly the best of times on any of those issues, so instead of worrying about how you're going to feed every woman in Africa with too many kids (hint: you won't), just try to focus on what's the next small step that you can take to fix one of the issue a little. Then do that.
That's something you can actually do right now, won't exhaust you even if you have to do it for the rest of your life, and would completely fix the problem if everyone would just stop panicking and do that.