My point was simply that Theranos's claim of a groundbreaking technique was much more of a draw than seeing an attractive female CEO.
This was accepted because the attractive girl fits into one of our media tropes, the Girl Power! trope. It also fits into our Silicon Valley trope.
These tropes encourage us to believe that the unlikely is possible because that's the way it happens in movies. If Theranos had been helmed by an old white guy, there would have been media pushback, critical questions, etc.
Instead the consumer audience accepted it with glowing excitement.
Most things can be simulated from first principles, and unpredictable pieces of hardware are eliminated, either at the design stage or replaced in the field as they fail. Biology is the opposite: simulations are empirical and only work at the level of complexity where the fudge factors have been applied.
Insightful. I see this division all the time: some fields succumb to theory; others require a consequentialist outlook.
The problem with democracy is that it emphasizes appearance over reality, and that appearance is interpreted by people with both no ability to make decisions of that level, and no skin in the game. They vote, the consequences are socialized and externalities passed on to the group, so either way the consequences to the voters are minor.
If anything is wrong with leadership now, it is that the average company is too democratic in that appearance matters far more than reality/results at every level. They are choosing CEOs who can manage public relations disasters, not keep a company stable or drive it to new heights.
As much as I hate Apple, Steve Jobs was a great CEO in that he always forced improvement of the product where possible. He had his missteps, but he was able to as a fascist do things that a democrat could not.
It's time some women stopped bitching about not being in the same positions as men, and started asking whether men's positions are something they want to be in.
And maybe at that point we can ask if we could find a better use of our time than endless jobs, shopping, commuting, television...
Jobs are generally miserable, but the biggest misery is (1) you are judged on appearances (2) while doing work that is most of the time not essential or not really a positive contribution in any sense.
It's like something Solzhenitsyn would come up with. The prisoners count beans and file TPS reports, and if they do not, they get half the ration of borscht for the day.
See how loudly you can say I DECLINE TO PROVIDE THAT INFORMATION.
Government always wants more power -- like every other organization and individual, if you put your Machiavellian cap on -- and tries out its new ideas with test runs like this.
Push back and they will back off.
Give in and bend over, and expect more of the same, except worse.
I still keep optical drives on all of my machines. Not only do I need to rip CDs on occasion, but I like the durability of optical media. It can be filed away just about anywhere, resists moisture and static, and is a great cheap way to pass information on to others. I wish the recycling options were better.
Amazon: Erm, you don't quite qualify for one of our full-time positions, but we have a new part-time program. Unlike most part-time work, it is 30 hours and not twenty, aaaaand we expect you to go the extra mile and stay late sometimes.
Job-Seeker: So basically, work 40 hours and get paid for 20, without benefits or any expectation of future employment?
Amazon: (Sadistic Chuckle) Not officially, but that's what you'll end up doing. Now, do you want to advance your career, or not?
That way, they can watch the collapse of human civilization in real time, and leave behind cryptic scribblings for future alien visitors to decode and see where we went wrong.
At all. Continue to worship your new overlords -- Google, Amazon, Apple and Twitter -- while they flog dying products to a dying economy. Best of luck, may your deaths be painless.
Apparently Microsoft execs are wondering why people are using Firefox, Chrome, Google and Linux instead of Edge, Bing and Windows.
It is scapegoating and denial to say that the problem is popularity alone.
The answer is that Microsoft products, while usually well-engineered under the hood, are awkward in interface and exhibit a corporate mentality of control in forcing us to use other Microsoft products.
In what is clearly a shock to all the first-decade MBAs out there, people hate being forced to do things, and they hate schlocky time-wasting interfaces. Microsoft has made only part of the product, and that is why they are lagging.
Why did people stop using IE, Edge's ancestor, which was once a market leader? Answer: security problems, a cruddy interface, and being forced into using other Microsoft schemes like Windows Live or whatever.
Instead of looking at the actual reasons why their products are failing, Microsoft execs are dancing around the edges, looking for excuses for failure. This is a shame because it dooms to failure the quality work done by Microsoft engineers.
Another completely obvious fact which somehow industry has overlooked.
How would this be?
Well, let's see: each person's career depends on making his boss feel good and not rocking the boat. So the programmer does what he is told, chuckling about how stupid it is every day. His boss does what the committee says is right, shrugging off his frustration. The committee does whatever it can achieve agreement on among its members, while being "safe" because committees are ruled by fear. Its members are doing what they think the CEO wants, and he does what he thinks the shareholder wants, which generally means whatever is easy and inoffensive.
In this way, we all play "follow the leader" and end up approving stupid ideas because each person is afraid to push back against accepted "knowledge."
Enjoy your dysfunctional GUIs, badly-conceived products, stupid movie sequels and other committee output.
While I agree that Reddit is the nadir of the internet, I am not fond of Slashdot's system, as it also suppresses any dissent that is actually threatening to the narrative, while tolerating token dissent in a public show of how virtuous Slashdot is for tolerating such outre opinions.
If you state your opinion reasonably and rationally, Slashdot is almost always interested in hearing it.
I wish I could agree. I have seen too many quality posts get voted into the negatives to believe that. As to why, the answer is obvious: it is the same group of people voting here who are voting on Reddit. Ordinary people, in groups, make decisions based on emotions, fear and anger. They hide that behind a veneer of civility, called "liberalism" or sometimes SJW, but essentially, they are anti-realists who are posing at being open-minded while simultaneously striking out against anything that reveals the instability of their position.
The hype in this article about how Twitter is about "free speech" is designed to distract/deflect from the obvious fact of extensive politically-based censorship on Twitter.
Slashdot Mirror
This was accepted because the attractive girl fits into one of our media tropes, the Girl Power! trope. It also fits into our Silicon Valley trope.
These tropes encourage us to believe that the unlikely is possible because that's the way it happens in movies. If Theranos had been helmed by an old white guy, there would have been media pushback, critical questions, etc.
Instead the consumer audience accepted it with glowing excitement.
Insightful. I see this division all the time: some fields succumb to theory; others require a consequentialist outlook.
The problem with democracy is that it emphasizes appearance over reality, and that appearance is interpreted by people with both no ability to make decisions of that level, and no skin in the game. They vote, the consequences are socialized and externalities passed on to the group, so either way the consequences to the voters are minor.
If anything is wrong with leadership now, it is that the average company is too democratic in that appearance matters far more than reality/results at every level. They are choosing CEOs who can manage public relations disasters, not keep a company stable or drive it to new heights.
As much as I hate Apple, Steve Jobs was a great CEO in that he always forced improvement of the product where possible. He had his missteps, but he was able to as a fascist do things that a democrat could not.
How much of the hype behind this company centered on the fact that its leader was a young, attractive, blonde woman from Stanford?
How much actually focused on the product and the likelihood of it succeeding?
Our news today is more entertainment than fact.
We are living in Idiocracy.
And maybe at that point we can ask if we could find a better use of our time than endless jobs, shopping, commuting, television...
Jobs are generally miserable, but the biggest misery is (1) you are judged on appearances (2) while doing work that is most of the time not essential or not really a positive contribution in any sense.
It's like something Solzhenitsyn would come up with. The prisoners count beans and file TPS reports, and if they do not, they get half the ration of borscht for the day.
https://www.hackcanada.com/can...
See how loudly you can say I DECLINE TO PROVIDE THAT INFORMATION.
Government always wants more power -- like every other organization and individual, if you put your Machiavellian cap on -- and tries out its new ideas with test runs like this.
Push back and they will back off.
Give in and bend over, and expect more of the same, except worse.
I still keep optical drives on all of my machines. Not only do I need to rip CDs on occasion, but I like the durability of optical media. It can be filed away just about anywhere, resists moisture and static, and is a great cheap way to pass information on to others. I wish the recycling options were better.
I can tell how this one is going to go down.
Amazon: Erm, you don't quite qualify for one of our full-time positions, but we have a new part-time program. Unlike most part-time work, it is 30 hours and not twenty, aaaaand we expect you to go the extra mile and stay late sometimes.
Job-Seeker: So basically, work 40 hours and get paid for 20, without benefits or any expectation of future employment?
Amazon: (Sadistic Chuckle) Not officially, but that's what you'll end up doing. Now, do you want to advance your career, or not?
That way, they can watch the collapse of human civilization in real time, and leave behind cryptic scribblings for future alien visitors to decode and see where we went wrong.
At all. Continue to worship your new overlords -- Google, Amazon, Apple and Twitter -- while they flog dying products to a dying economy. Best of luck, may your deaths be painless.
Apparently Microsoft execs are wondering why people are using Firefox, Chrome, Google and Linux instead of Edge, Bing and Windows.
It is scapegoating and denial to say that the problem is popularity alone.
The answer is that Microsoft products, while usually well-engineered under the hood, are awkward in interface and exhibit a corporate mentality of control in forcing us to use other Microsoft products.
In what is clearly a shock to all the first-decade MBAs out there, people hate being forced to do things, and they hate schlocky time-wasting interfaces. Microsoft has made only part of the product, and that is why they are lagging.
Why did people stop using IE, Edge's ancestor, which was once a market leader? Answer: security problems, a cruddy interface, and being forced into using other Microsoft schemes like Windows Live or whatever.
Instead of looking at the actual reasons why their products are failing, Microsoft execs are dancing around the edges, looking for excuses for failure. This is a shame because it dooms to failure the quality work done by Microsoft engineers.
Another completely obvious fact which somehow industry has overlooked.
How would this be?
Well, let's see: each person's career depends on making his boss feel good and not rocking the boat. So the programmer does what he is told, chuckling about how stupid it is every day. His boss does what the committee says is right, shrugging off his frustration. The committee does whatever it can achieve agreement on among its members, while being "safe" because committees are ruled by fear. Its members are doing what they think the CEO wants, and he does what he thinks the shareholder wants, which generally means whatever is easy and inoffensive.
In this way, we all play "follow the leader" and end up approving stupid ideas because each person is afraid to push back against accepted "knowledge."
Enjoy your dysfunctional GUIs, badly-conceived products, stupid movie sequels and other committee output.
How would you like it if you had to go through life knowing that when most people see you they automatically think, "Oh right. Picard's catamite."?
While I agree that Reddit is the nadir of the internet, I am not fond of Slashdot's system, as it also suppresses any dissent that is actually threatening to the narrative, while tolerating token dissent in a public show of how virtuous Slashdot is for tolerating such outre opinions.
I wish I could agree. I have seen too many quality posts get voted into the negatives to believe that. As to why, the answer is obvious: it is the same group of people voting here who are voting on Reddit. Ordinary people, in groups, make decisions based on emotions, fear and anger. They hide that behind a veneer of civility, called "liberalism" or sometimes SJW, but essentially, they are anti-realists who are posing at being open-minded while simultaneously striking out against anything that reveals the instability of their position.
Here's the latest:
http://www.washingtontimes.com...
The hype in this article about how Twitter is about "free speech" is designed to distract/deflect from the obvious fact of extensive politically-based censorship on Twitter.