But that really wouldn't change anything vs. your estate suing after your death (which is already possible), except for perhaps accelerating the legal proceedings, which seems to be the goal here.
as cephus has repeatedly pointed out, if the choices are all truly equal, any distribution or pattern of choices is meaningless, and interpretations of those distributions is subjective.
No, what's interesting is that the options are truly equal (in terms of number of grapes received); logically there *should* be no pattern, yet the responses DO show a clear pattern nonetheless.
"I am saying that loss aversion is prioritized above risk aversion for a demonstrable reason that transcends mathematical interpretations of an artificially equivalent scenario." - Well, sure, if there is a bias in the response, it may well be because most situations encountered over evolutionary time were different than the laboratory setup. Any heuristic (even a good one that works most of the time in the real world) can be made to look 'stupid' by manufacturing some artificial circumstance where it fails. Over-generalizing the narrow results of a simplistic lab experiment is bad interpretation. However, it is still important to understand what our biases are, and understand under what conditions they fail, so we can make good decisions more robustly in the future, even if people are trying to manipulate us.
Many of the economic theories that our governments have been adhering to over the past few decades have as a core premise that overall, markets behave rationally.... The question is: If humans naturally make irrational decisions because we are biologically predisposed to do so, then how can markets be assumed to behave rationally?
Not so fast... perhaps the assumption here is not that people behave rationally, but instead that rational behavior is good, and ought to be rewarded, while irrational behavior is bad and ought to be punished.
Science creates models of how things are. Policy, on the other hand, creates instruments that are intended to have some desired effect. Incentives and punishments usually contradict human nature; otherwise they wouldn't be necessary.
He doesn't even have to retire - just accept the $50e6 windfall and move on to another similar position. With friends like Ellison and Murdoch (and those are just the ones who've publicly taken his side) there will be a big bidding war for him to take the reigns of the next company - not unlikely someplace many slashdotters work:)
Allowing the CEO to remain after getting caught stealing from the company would be incredibly demoralizing to everybody else working there. The corporate culture would be equal parts cynicism and kleptomania.
NEARLY. NEARLY. They said NEARLY every person with Alzheimer's tested positive. If NEARLY every person develops the characteristics you are testing for, NEARLY ALL ALL. NEARLY 100%. That means they are getting FALSE NEGATIVES.
That's not the point - the claim was that "researchers have found a spinal-fluid test can be 100 percent accurate in identifying patients with significant memory loss who are on their way to developing Alzheimer's disease." You are inferring that people who already have Alzheimer's should also test positive - but nobody said it was 100% effective for that. Perhaps the spinal fluid protein levels characterize people who are on their way to developing Alzheimer's, but not always those in whom the disease is advanced. I don't know if that's true, I'm just saying the article is not internally inconsistent.
Read it again, because there is nothing in the article that contradicts the claim that "researchers have found a spinal-fluid test can be 100 percent accurate in identifying patients with significant memory loss who are on their way to developing Alzheimer's disease.":
"Nearly every person with Alzheimer's had the characteristic spinal fluid protein levels. Nearly three quarters of people with mild cognitive impairment, a memory impediment that can precede Alzheimer's, had Alzheimer's-like spinal fluid proteins. And every one of those patients with the proteins developed Alzheimer's within five years. And about a third of people with normal memories had spinal fluid indicating Alzheimer's. Researchers suspect that those people will develop memory problems. "
However, the test can only be 100% accurate if the spinal fluid proteins that presage Alzheimer's decrease after full onset.
The fact that not everybody who tested positive developed Alzheimer's during the study is no counter-indicator at all, especially if they kept testing new subjects throughout the trial (i.e. some were only tested recently).
Of course, the usual caveats apply - you can't predict with 100% accuracy who will develop Alzheimer's years from now because some will die first of other causes. And in biology (and medicine), even if your test is correct on the first 10 patients, and the first 100, and 1000, you just know some smart-alec is going to buck the trend eventually:) Biology is just too messy to follow any simple rules all the time. But that doesn't necessarily have a whole lot of relevance to clinical applications.
In the report, the Civic hybrid didn't quite break even during their arbitrary 5 year cutoff, but it was very close (-$290), and that was with no tax incentives. That car would have shown a positive return if they had even extended the time window to 6 years, or assume it was driven slightly more miles per year. (They also placed the value of a 37% reduction in CO2 emissions at $0.) So, the case for the Civic is very easy to build.
In fact, the case for all the hybrids near the top (Civic, Prius, Insight) is very close, and several assumptions in the study are fairly arbitrary. It seems clear we are within a year or two of a new headline, "non-hybrids fail to provide savings." At that moment will everybody not driving a hybrid be accused of wasting money just to project an image of wanton wastefulness and pollution? I find the argument rather silly. People spend $1500 on leather upholstery and another $1200 on a fancy stereo system, and nobody complains. But spend an extra $290 to avoid emitting thousands of pounds of CO2, and suddenly you're some kind of leftist rebel.
So less talkative youngsters tend to grow up to be socially awkward? Gee, you don't say! Astounding insight, there. Do people really get paid to produce studies as daft as this?
1) I guarantee there will be a lot of responses to this thread from people who claim to have willed their personality to be different.
2) If this were strictly true it would imply that parenting kids older than 7 or so makes little difference - agree or disagree?
3) Since you used the British slang "daft," I will also go out on a limb and speculate that Americans will be more resistant to the idea that personality is immutable. We're all about the self-reliant personal re-invention.
We are really only fit (in the Darwinian sense of that word) to inhabit the plains of Africa. Is Northern Europe out too, because it requires technology to thrive there?
wholeheartedly agree with you that companies should behave ethically but it appears from experience that they rarely do this voluntarily.
I would argue it's worse than that - if the marketplace simply allows unethical behavior, and if there is a competitive advantage in being unethical, then natural selection will actually weed out all the ethical companies as inefficient. Thus your options are 1) play dirty or 2) don't play at all. (Same as how you can't get elected without making unrealistic campaign promises.)
If you could go after people working for a company personally then nobody would work for a company, because it would be impossible to limit your liability, and the economy would collapse.... Typical step 1 leftist group thinking.
Wow, responsibility and accountability are leftist now?
You've heard of the concept of "privatize the profits socialize the losses." I've realized it's not some vague allegation; it's how our system is designed: limited liability shields the individual, thus the consequences fall on somebody (or everybody) else.
That said, I still support limited liability (a reasonable degree of it), for exactly the reasons you state. By allowing entrepreneurs to fail, and fail again, and again, and then finally succeed, I am persuaded that some degree of socialism (that's what it is) actually stimulates business. The same goes for allowing individuals to file personal bankruptcy, and the same goes for unemployment insurance and (IMHO) nationalized healthcare. If you give people a safety net, they can make much bolder economic leaps (just like trust fund babies are allowed to do).
However, now that we're socializing some of the losses, you have to look at the flipside - privatizing the gains. By accepting limited liability and other socialist benefits, you accept some responsibility to contribute back to the system, in various ways. One is that people can go bankrupt and screw their creditors, which may include you. Another is paying a reasonable amount of taxes.
No, none of this means I think the USSR had it right; most of the profits should be privatized, and most of the losses should too.
Yeah, IIRC I got frustrated with Woody and went to Unstable before Sarge made it across the finish line. It also seemed like debian did not have any reasonable support for proprietary software (NVIDIA drivers, vmware... even mp3 files IIRC). dpkg on my Unstable system got hopelessly confused and the install was trashed.
I switched to gentoo since it had a lot of momentum (critical in staying both up-to-date and stable - lots of eyeballs and fingers at keyboards) and thinking local compilation would provide more flexibility to mix & match versions of everything, so I could update packages more selectively. But not really; basically you can install whatever you want but that doesn't mean it will work. In the end even firefox wouldn't run (though it built just fine!)
I just updated another system from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 (which requires a brief stop at 9.04) and happily the system survived. Most of my customized config files don't work on my new software versions. That's life, but I sure get sick of reconfiguring exim.
$50e6 probably sounds very reasonable when you're accustomed to making $30e6 every year. It's funny, how small must have his fraudulent expenses been, compared to being paid over $100K every single work day. He probably feels like he just got fired for going home with an HP ballpoint pen in his pocket.
Just kidding. I like debian but switched to Ubuntu years ago seeking more up-to-date packages. But I find all the config files etc in Ubuntu a little hard to work with (providing simplicity for the user makes things more complex behind the scenes, which isn't good if you like to fiddle around behind the scenes). Is debian any more up-to-date these days?
Maybe somebody from Switzerland can speak up on whether it is legal and conventional for ordinary citizens to carry their assault weapons into the bank with them.
I don't believe guns cause fights, bank robberies, or anything else. That's all human nature. But what they do sometimes is turn a stare-down or a fistfight into a homicide. Even cops wind up murdering people sometimes [1][2]. That said, the horse is well and truly out of the barn, you won't see people banned from keeping a shotgun around the home for self defense and I'm fine with that. But no, I do not favor forcing banks to allow customers to be armed.
That's exactly why it's a trick question, because the first thing that pops into people's minds is different than a legal interpretation with some actual well-defined meaning. "Do you believe in freedom?" "Of course!" "Should I have the freedom to walk into your home and take whatever I want?" "No! That's not freedom!" (i.e. 'I don't like it therefore it's obviously something else.')
I guess a better way for her to answer the question would have been to say, "well, I don't think the govt. can mandate that everyone eat three vegetables and three fruits a day, if that's what you mean."
I can name a lot more countries where bank robberies with firearms are rare due to limits on gun ownership (e.g. most all of europe) than I can nations where peace is maintained by everybody being armed all the time (e.g. Afghanistan, Somalia). So, I really have no clue what you're basing your opinion on. Unless it's a thought experiment of some sort.
Also, some of her terrible answers--she couldn't answer the question of whether or not the government has the power to tell you what to eat.
Kudos to her, because it's obviously a trick question with no meaningful answer. If she said "sure they can tell you what to eat" people would go nuts. Yet most of those same people would agree that some drugs/medicines should only be taken by prescription; they want the USDA to watch over slaughterhouses and Chinese imports; they want local government to do health inspections on restaurants; etc etc.
There were zero commercial airline deaths in the US in both 2007 and 2008. (Maybe some since, I don't know). Granted, I don't seriously expect privately driven vehicles to ever approach that (just as civil aviation does not), and over a long enough time horizon, 0 approaches impossible.
Well, I think it is vision. Elon Musk made a fortune with PayPal and could easily have retired to a private island. Instead he re-invested his fortune into Tesla and Space-X -- two companies which, IMHO, are pretty awesome. I applaud the Obama administration for recognizing the awesomeness and redirecting funds from NASA Ares to Space-X. Falcon 9 launched successfully with only $278 million from the govt. There are some other amazing people in the race, like Burt Rutan. These guys couldn't accomplish what they do without some marketing savvy, but they are not cynical con men either, they are hands-on engineers and entrepreneurs and from what I know of them, I admire it.
Slashdot Mirror
But that really wouldn't change anything vs. your estate suing after your death (which is already possible), except for perhaps accelerating the legal proceedings, which seems to be the goal here.
Like how baby boomers still like the Rolling Stones.
No, what's interesting is that the options are truly equal (in terms of number of grapes received); logically there *should* be no pattern, yet the responses DO show a clear pattern nonetheless.
"I am saying that loss aversion is prioritized above risk aversion for a demonstrable reason that transcends mathematical interpretations of an artificially equivalent scenario." - Well, sure, if there is a bias in the response, it may well be because most situations encountered over evolutionary time were different than the laboratory setup. Any heuristic (even a good one that works most of the time in the real world) can be made to look 'stupid' by manufacturing some artificial circumstance where it fails. Over-generalizing the narrow results of a simplistic lab experiment is bad interpretation. However, it is still important to understand what our biases are, and understand under what conditions they fail, so we can make good decisions more robustly in the future, even if people are trying to manipulate us.
Neither choice is any more risky, negative, or anything else, than the other.
Have you actually watched the video or not?
Not so fast... perhaps the assumption here is not that people behave rationally, but instead that rational behavior is good, and ought to be rewarded, while irrational behavior is bad and ought to be punished.
Science creates models of how things are. Policy, on the other hand, creates instruments that are intended to have some desired effect. Incentives and punishments usually contradict human nature; otherwise they wouldn't be necessary.
He doesn't even have to retire - just accept the $50e6 windfall and move on to another similar position. With friends like Ellison and Murdoch (and those are just the ones who've publicly taken his side) there will be a big bidding war for him to take the reigns of the next company - not unlikely someplace many slashdotters work :)
Allowing the CEO to remain after getting caught stealing from the company would be incredibly demoralizing to everybody else working there. The corporate culture would be equal parts cynicism and kleptomania.
That's not the point - the claim was that "researchers have found a spinal-fluid test can be 100 percent accurate in identifying patients with significant memory loss who are on their way to developing Alzheimer's disease." You are inferring that people who already have Alzheimer's should also test positive - but nobody said it was 100% effective for that. Perhaps the spinal fluid protein levels characterize people who are on their way to developing Alzheimer's, but not always those in whom the disease is advanced. I don't know if that's true, I'm just saying the article is not internally inconsistent.
However, the test can only be 100% accurate if the spinal fluid proteins that presage Alzheimer's decrease after full onset.
The fact that not everybody who tested positive developed Alzheimer's during the study is no counter-indicator at all, especially if they kept testing new subjects throughout the trial (i.e. some were only tested recently).
Of course, the usual caveats apply - you can't predict with 100% accuracy who will develop Alzheimer's years from now because some will die first of other causes. And in biology (and medicine), even if your test is correct on the first 10 patients, and the first 100, and 1000, you just know some smart-alec is going to buck the trend eventually :) Biology is just too messy to follow any simple rules all the time. But that doesn't necessarily have a whole lot of relevance to clinical applications.
In fact, the case for all the hybrids near the top (Civic, Prius, Insight) is very close, and several assumptions in the study are fairly arbitrary. It seems clear we are within a year or two of a new headline, "non-hybrids fail to provide savings." At that moment will everybody not driving a hybrid be accused of wasting money just to project an image of wanton wastefulness and pollution? I find the argument rather silly. People spend $1500 on leather upholstery and another $1200 on a fancy stereo system, and nobody complains. But spend an extra $290 to avoid emitting thousands of pounds of CO2, and suddenly you're some kind of leftist rebel.
1) I guarantee there will be a lot of responses to this thread from people who claim to have willed their personality to be different.
2) If this were strictly true it would imply that parenting kids older than 7 or so makes little difference - agree or disagree?
3) Since you used the British slang "daft," I will also go out on a limb and speculate that Americans will be more resistant to the idea that personality is immutable. We're all about the self-reliant personal re-invention.
We are really only fit (in the Darwinian sense of that word) to inhabit the plains of Africa. Is Northern Europe out too, because it requires technology to thrive there?
I would argue it's worse than that - if the marketplace simply allows unethical behavior, and if there is a competitive advantage in being unethical, then natural selection will actually weed out all the ethical companies as inefficient. Thus your options are 1) play dirty or 2) don't play at all. (Same as how you can't get elected without making unrealistic campaign promises.)
Wow, responsibility and accountability are leftist now?
You've heard of the concept of "privatize the profits socialize the losses." I've realized it's not some vague allegation; it's how our system is designed: limited liability shields the individual, thus the consequences fall on somebody (or everybody) else.
That said, I still support limited liability (a reasonable degree of it), for exactly the reasons you state. By allowing entrepreneurs to fail, and fail again, and again, and then finally succeed, I am persuaded that some degree of socialism (that's what it is) actually stimulates business. The same goes for allowing individuals to file personal bankruptcy, and the same goes for unemployment insurance and (IMHO) nationalized healthcare. If you give people a safety net, they can make much bolder economic leaps (just like trust fund babies are allowed to do).
However, now that we're socializing some of the losses, you have to look at the flipside - privatizing the gains. By accepting limited liability and other socialist benefits, you accept some responsibility to contribute back to the system, in various ways. One is that people can go bankrupt and screw their creditors, which may include you. Another is paying a reasonable amount of taxes.
No, none of this means I think the USSR had it right; most of the profits should be privatized, and most of the losses should too.
I switched to gentoo since it had a lot of momentum (critical in staying both up-to-date and stable - lots of eyeballs and fingers at keyboards) and thinking local compilation would provide more flexibility to mix & match versions of everything, so I could update packages more selectively. But not really; basically you can install whatever you want but that doesn't mean it will work. In the end even firefox wouldn't run (though it built just fine!)
I just updated another system from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 (which requires a brief stop at 9.04) and happily the system survived. Most of my customized config files don't work on my new software versions. That's life, but I sure get sick of reconfiguring exim.
$50e6 probably sounds very reasonable when you're accustomed to making $30e6 every year. It's funny, how small must have his fraudulent expenses been, compared to being paid over $100K every single work day. He probably feels like he just got fired for going home with an HP ballpoint pen in his pocket.
Just kidding. I like debian but switched to Ubuntu years ago seeking more up-to-date packages. But I find all the config files etc in Ubuntu a little hard to work with (providing simplicity for the user makes things more complex behind the scenes, which isn't good if you like to fiddle around behind the scenes). Is debian any more up-to-date these days?
I don't believe guns cause fights, bank robberies, or anything else. That's all human nature. But what they do sometimes is turn a stare-down or a fistfight into a homicide. Even cops wind up murdering people sometimes [1] [2]. That said, the horse is well and truly out of the barn, you won't see people banned from keeping a shotgun around the home for self defense and I'm fine with that. But no, I do not favor forcing banks to allow customers to be armed.
I guess a better way for her to answer the question would have been to say, "well, I don't think the govt. can mandate that everyone eat three vegetables and three fruits a day, if that's what you mean."
I can name a lot more countries where bank robberies with firearms are rare due to limits on gun ownership (e.g. most all of europe) than I can nations where peace is maintained by everybody being armed all the time (e.g. Afghanistan, Somalia). So, I really have no clue what you're basing your opinion on. Unless it's a thought experiment of some sort.
Kudos to her, because it's obviously a trick question with no meaningful answer. If she said "sure they can tell you what to eat" people would go nuts. Yet most of those same people would agree that some drugs/medicines should only be taken by prescription; they want the USDA to watch over slaughterhouses and Chinese imports; they want local government to do health inspections on restaurants; etc etc.
There were zero commercial airline deaths in the US in both 2007 and 2008. (Maybe some since, I don't know). Granted, I don't seriously expect privately driven vehicles to ever approach that (just as civil aviation does not), and over a long enough time horizon, 0 approaches impossible.
But at some point it will be possible to restore them from backup.
Exactly... the request to "return" the documents means the Pentagon doesn't know what Wikileaks has.
Well, I think it is vision. Elon Musk made a fortune with PayPal and could easily have retired to a private island. Instead he re-invested his fortune into Tesla and Space-X -- two companies which, IMHO, are pretty awesome. I applaud the Obama administration for recognizing the awesomeness and redirecting funds from NASA Ares to Space-X. Falcon 9 launched successfully with only $278 million from the govt. There are some other amazing people in the race, like Burt Rutan. These guys couldn't accomplish what they do without some marketing savvy, but they are not cynical con men either, they are hands-on engineers and entrepreneurs and from what I know of them, I admire it.