It makes sense to measure absolute production output if your goal is to grow a domestic industry. It doesn't matter how many people you serve (well, the more the better; more customers). The more you build, the better you get at building it.
This leads to better, cheaper, superior products that other countries will line up to buy.
It happened with electronics; they're trying to make it happen with advanced energy.
Depends. "winning" often involves perfecting the manufacturing environment as well. Including the supply chain, support businesses, logistics and most importantly, the workforce.
That's something that builds upon itself and can't be moved overnight. It's why the US has historically been such an economic powerhouse: it's industrial production strength.
Losing the next wave of manufacturing advanced energy products can be a pretty big loss. Both in terms of economic growth, employment and even more importantly, negotiating power during trade agreements.
We already lost the electronics manufacturing economy. Missing out on the renewable energy economy would seem to be a blow we can't take.
The demo doesn't involve pre-recorded instructions. You literally have a plumber sitting in his office with a hololens guiding some guy at the house. Saves commute time and he can multiplex between multiple houses when there's downtime.
Well, you need to learn *those* english words. Probably a few subsets as well. That's really about it.
There's a vast difference between understanding the words in programming syntax -- which more often than not are not contextual and have a 1-to-1 transliteration with whatever language you know -- than it is to understand why "10k spoons when all you need is a knife" is not ironic.
While not remote, one of the demo ideas for hololens was to allow a master plumber to guide people remotely to do the job. Either the homeowner themselves or a novice whose time costs 1/10th the master plumber's.
And how do you teach algorithmics? More importantly, do current curriculum that teach what you would assume to be "algorithmics" teach the necessary mechanisms to communicate using it? Because that's what programming (even if you call it "algorithmics using pseudo-code" or some such) teaches primarily. At least, introductory programming courses.
You can make it less about the machine if you want and more of a language and communications class. But having the machine makes it more fun and interactive as you have a built-in correctness checker for your algorithms/logistics.
Currently, each discipline (be it physics, math, business, medicine or law) has some sort of ad-hoc, hodge-podge short-hand for logistics that nobody uses after they're done with school (or the specific professor's course).
Teaching some kind of universal short-hand (or pseudo-code, if you will) at least in each linguistic demographic would help significantly in speeding up and clarifying communications in the professional (and not-so-professional) world.
You don't need to know the C library or the Java API. But being able to communicate through step-by-step instructions with loops, conditionals, functions and synchronization -- and having everyone know how to readily do that instead of using english -- would be a huge leap for humanity.
Your next email regarding package handling procedure could involve 20 lines of pseudo-code that details every possible contingency instead of some vague 20-page instruction manual.
At some point, the same was said about reading and writing. Or basic math skills. Or basic understanding of physics.
Not everyone needs to learn the Linux kernel or even how to write an app in Swift/ObjectiveC.
But knowing how to understand and even communicate using pseudo-code is a much more precise, concise and robust way of communicating for many many many many things people encounter in life.
If all people were taught the basics of understanding if-statements, loops, look-up-tables, functions, procedural steps, synchronization, etc. then everything from instruction manuals, legal regulations, tax codes, corporate policy, accounting, project management, business agreements etc. etc. could be communicated with much less ambiguity and far fewer need for 50+ conference calls.
That's an overall gain in efficiency and productivity.
Valid points. However, the statement was "94M Americans still out of work".
Not underemployed. Not retired early. "out of work". First of all, that number seems totally pulled-out-of-ass. But more importantly, that number includes people under 18, over 65 and in college.
The situation is obviously more nuanced than that.
See, here's the thing. People like to throw out "it's unconstitutional" like the arm-chair lawyers they are. Except of course, if it were, we have a 3rd branch of government to check the executive for this very purpose. And that 3rd branch took DACA into consideration and thought it to be perfectly within the Executive's powers.
You may personally disagree and Congress-critters may personally disagree. But that doesn't make your opinion any more valid than, say, 8 Supreme court justices (half of which are conservative, originalists when it comes to the Constitution rather than "living document" types).
It should be noted that when Obama tried to expand DACA, it was shot down and halted by the Judicial. Which seems to indicate the expansion was indeed executive over-reach.
I'll quote the Supreme Court:
"[W]e recognize that an agency’s refusal to institute proceedings shares to some extent the characteristics of the decision of a prosecutor in the Executive Branch not to indict—a decision which has long been regarded as the special province of the Executive Branch, inasmuch as it is the Executive who is charged by the Constitution to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”"
A good source on the justification of the Executive (and btw, Deferred Action for immigration goes back to around 1972 and was exercised by just about every Administration since then) authority to pick-and-choose who to prosecute for action can be found:
Again. You may not personally agree. But stating "it's Unconstitutional" as if you were some legal authority with vast Constitutional knowledge is fairly ridiculous.
1. Non-cluttered public streets. 2. National parks. 3. Non-cluttered, no-charge freeways. 4. Patents. 5. Copyrights. 6. Cell phones and radios that work 10% of the time.
Say what you want about how poorly they're implemented in the US, those things have uses in a modern society. You can look to some areas of India to see what a cluster-fuck letting anybody build anything they want on shared public land will do.
It's funny. In Europe, people trust the government more than corporations. So it's usually the government screwing them over.
In the US, people trust companies more than governments. And it's usually the companies screwing them over.
Just because it's not a "government" doesn't mean it can't get big and centralized enough to become abusive. Especially when it provides what, in the first world, has become a near-essential good/service. See, for example, Comcast.
The impression I get is that much of the hardcore algorithms behind AI are old and basically well-known and set. There's a lot of work to build frameworks (like Tensorflow) and API's that allow people to experiment with their own processing pipelines that take the basic AI building blocks (memory, error feedback, convolution) so that they can trial-and-error at a rapid pace using large data sets.
We're talking about interest, not result. That is to say, women tend to self-report themselves as more interested in people-related tasks rather than tasks that focus on things. That doesn't mean they don't end up going into money making fields like engineering though.
When surveying interest, the personality traits of things vs people were indeed invariant amongst all the countries surveyed.
What do you mean by a statistical edge over them? His argument wasn't that male engineers were better than female engineers, simply that women may be less likely to want to have careers in computing. You may want to actually read his document.
His language was far less nuanced than that. He basically took some very valid research into culture and time invariant differences in preferences between men and women (which, if you read the source material, the researcher acknowledged as correlation and not something he has established as causation, but it does suggest a biological link) and -- like a typical Libertarian -- jumped to conclusions and stated definitively that this means women find software engineering less interesting and that's what's causing the disparity.
Ignoring that in particular, software is drastically non-diverse *even compared to other STEM fields* by a huge margin.
Ignoring that the possible biological link to "thing based" interest doesn't necessarily translate into disinterest in computers (computer science, prior to the 1970's, was predominantly female).
Ignoring that -- even though he admitted there is systemic bias -- that there shouldn't be counter-measures for said systemic bias.
Almost all of the evidence (at least everything I've seen) points to it being largely biological. I've seen a lot of people claim it isn't, but they have yet to post all of this evidence that supposedly suggests otherwise. I think that many here are more than willing to consider this other evidence, but so far no one has actually posted any of it.
This is false. Even the original study that started most of this (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/) acknowledges: 1. It's correlation. Though the fact that it's culturally invariant suggests a biological link. 2. It's only really relevant for *one axis* of a 5-axis personality measurement (thing vs people interest). 3. It's based on self-reporting. Where people report their own *relatively* interest compared to what they think their place falls in society.
So much of it is non-conclusive (and the author, a proper scientist, acknowledges this). But it *does* suggest there is some biological link to one axis of a personality trait.
The problem is that blogs, armchair pundits and apparently young and impressionable Libertarians take a scientific finding of a possible link and does that classic "science says men are X and women are Y!".
What's sad is that normally, this type of behavior would be laughed at for being the sensationalist over-simplification that it is by critical thinking minds. But somehow, because it re-affirms some pretty deep-seated existing stereotypes, it's not thought of as critically by otherwise critical thinking white men.
From the sound of it. His management chain was pressured to fire him. If it had been on his blog, they could chalk it up to "personal views outside of his role at Google".
And if you read Richard Lippa's paper, it is far more nuanced and far from concluding "this definitely proves it". In fact, as the paper notes:
Personality and interest inventories Research on gender differences in personality and interests typically relies on data from standardized tests. Because such tests use self-report scales, their scores may be influenced by social stereotypes, social desirability response sets, and self-construal processes (See Feingold, 1994; Guimond, 2008).
All Lippa presented (correctly) was that there are statistical differences in *self-reported* interests that fall under different personality types (things vs people).
And that these differences tend to be culture and time invariant (that is, they don't seem to change with culture, which suggests biological link).
Another difference is that in more gender-open societies, people self-report themselves as being more gender-roled than gender-closed societies.
But the main skepticism (which Lippa notes) is that this is *self-reported*. That is to say, whether or not someone is "more interested in things vs people" or "follows traditional gender roles more than average) is entirely anchored on what they themselves think is "average".
In general, be weary of blog-style posts that reference a conclusion from scientific papers. They almost always overstate the certainty of the conclusion.
Do you call "I will say that statistically, women are X and men are Y" observation? Because it seems hard for someone to observe the vast statistical differences of the entire population and know immediately that it's all biologically caused.
Which is the conclusion he jumped to in the second part of his scribe. Which is why anyone reading it with a critical thinking mind should go "wait...how did you come up with that?"
Of course, confirmation bias amongst people who already assume those bullet points to be true "well, it just makes sense, I know that because I observe it through...stereotypes? the 50-100 women I know in real life?" will think this is "perfectly logical".
The author starts by rightly claiming that more nuanced approaches to the causes of gender gaps is necessary. He then makes wildly-unsupported claims of what differences in the *whole population of women and men* are biological and are in no part social constructs. That's the conclusion he jumped to. Then he works backwards, with this assumed as true already, to go "well it just makes sense that there'd naturally be less women in cut-throat fields, their delicate, cooperative and nurturing sensibilities just couldn't handle it".
Oh and btw, not one post from the "he speaks the truth!" crowd have bothered to actually advance his point with actual data. Instead, all we see are whiny crying of "PC culture!!".
Right. And if the manifesto had stopped there -- i.e. calling for more nuanced exploration into gender differences based on biology as opposed to social structures -- it may have garnered better reception. Instead, what happened was:
1. Starts out by rightly pointing out that gender gaps can often be a mix of systemic biases, discrimination as well as biological origins. And that just flat-out assuming that any part of the gap was due to one or the other was irresponsible. And flat-out trying to force the result without understanding the root causes of the gender gap is also irresponsible. 2. Proceeds to make tons and tons of assumptions and assertions about the differences between men and women (even statistically) without any regard to whether those differences truly are biological, social or some combination of the two. Or whether those differences even exist with the modern demographic and to what degree (lacking data, instead just assuming it's true). 3. Concludes by downplaying systemic sexism (as well as the aftermath of historical systemic sexism) and proclaims all is well and whatever gap we're seeing today is due to the womenz being too nurturing and not cut-throat enough.
This is by no means a flaw seen only in conservative men. But I find this line of reasoning all too familiar with the scribes of various blogs. And more often than not when you point out the clear hypocrisy and contradiction, the originator cries "oppression" and how everyone disagreeing with him is just part of a "PC movement".
I don't know that the valuation is artificially low. I think, in this particular case, the market is pretty efficient at pricing out the relative value of cleaning toilets vs technical work.
The technical work just has a global reach now. Whereas the janitor job does not. If one person does work that sells to the whole world and the second person does something that's valuable to maybe 10 people in the building, the valuations for the former vs the latter is obviously going to be really off.
Of course, the self-righteous can always come up with some conclusion of "you don't really deserve that!". People on all sides think that, rich or poor. But that ignores the need for practical, not-subjective ways to improve people's lives.
Slashdot Mirror
It makes sense to measure absolute production output if your goal is to grow a domestic industry. It doesn't matter how many people you serve (well, the more the better; more customers). The more you build, the better you get at building it.
This leads to better, cheaper, superior products that other countries will line up to buy.
It happened with electronics; they're trying to make it happen with advanced energy.
Depends. "winning" often involves perfecting the manufacturing environment as well. Including the supply chain, support businesses, logistics and most importantly, the workforce.
That's something that builds upon itself and can't be moved overnight. It's why the US has historically been such an economic powerhouse: it's industrial production strength.
Losing the next wave of manufacturing advanced energy products can be a pretty big loss. Both in terms of economic growth, employment and even more importantly, negotiating power during trade agreements.
We already lost the electronics manufacturing economy. Missing out on the renewable energy economy would seem to be a blow we can't take.
Wow, I had no idea someone could have animosity towards plumbers....
Fuck that greedy perv Mario.
The demo doesn't involve pre-recorded instructions. You literally have a plumber sitting in his office with a hololens guiding some guy at the house. Saves commute time and he can multiplex between multiple houses when there's downtime.
Well, you need to learn *those* english words. Probably a few subsets as well. That's really about it.
There's a vast difference between understanding the words in programming syntax -- which more often than not are not contextual and have a 1-to-1 transliteration with whatever language you know -- than it is to understand why "10k spoons when all you need is a knife" is not ironic.
While not remote, one of the demo ideas for hololens was to allow a master plumber to guide people remotely to do the job. Either the homeowner themselves or a novice whose time costs 1/10th the master plumber's.
And how do you teach algorithmics? More importantly, do current curriculum that teach what you would assume to be "algorithmics" teach the necessary mechanisms to communicate using it? Because that's what programming (even if you call it "algorithmics using pseudo-code" or some such) teaches primarily. At least, introductory programming courses.
You can make it less about the machine if you want and more of a language and communications class. But having the machine makes it more fun and interactive as you have a built-in correctness checker for your algorithms/logistics.
Currently, each discipline (be it physics, math, business, medicine or law) has some sort of ad-hoc, hodge-podge short-hand for logistics that nobody uses after they're done with school (or the specific professor's course).
Teaching some kind of universal short-hand (or pseudo-code, if you will) at least in each linguistic demographic would help significantly in speeding up and clarifying communications in the professional (and not-so-professional) world.
You don't need to know the C library or the Java API. But being able to communicate through step-by-step instructions with loops, conditionals, functions and synchronization -- and having everyone know how to readily do that instead of using english -- would be a huge leap for humanity.
Your next email regarding package handling procedure could involve 20 lines of pseudo-code that details every possible contingency instead of some vague 20-page instruction manual.
At some point, the same was said about reading and writing. Or basic math skills. Or basic understanding of physics.
Not everyone needs to learn the Linux kernel or even how to write an app in Swift/ObjectiveC.
But knowing how to understand and even communicate using pseudo-code is a much more precise, concise and robust way of communicating for many many many many things people encounter in life.
If all people were taught the basics of understanding if-statements, loops, look-up-tables, functions, procedural steps, synchronization, etc. then everything from instruction manuals, legal regulations, tax codes, corporate policy, accounting, project management, business agreements etc. etc. could be communicated with much less ambiguity and far fewer need for 50+ conference calls.
That's an overall gain in efficiency and productivity.
The Xiaomi's are also pretty good, but they don't target the US. There's also the iPhone SE -- which will likely get a refresh early next year.
Replace every instance of "self-driving car" you just wrote with "plane" and you have the same argument. Except it hasn't happened.
Valid points. However, the statement was "94M Americans still out of work".
Not underemployed. Not retired early. "out of work". First of all, that number seems totally pulled-out-of-ass. But more importantly, that number includes people under 18, over 65 and in college.
The situation is obviously more nuanced than that.
See, here's the thing. People like to throw out "it's unconstitutional" like the arm-chair lawyers they are. Except of course, if it were, we have a 3rd branch of government to check the executive for this very purpose. And that 3rd branch took DACA into consideration and thought it to be perfectly within the Executive's powers.
You may personally disagree and Congress-critters may personally disagree. But that doesn't make your opinion any more valid than, say, 8 Supreme court justices (half of which are conservative, originalists when it comes to the Constitution rather than "living document" types).
It should be noted that when Obama tried to expand DACA, it was shot down and halted by the Judicial. Which seems to indicate the expansion was indeed executive over-reach.
I'll quote the Supreme Court:
"[W]e recognize that an agency’s refusal to institute proceedings shares to some
extent the characteristics of the decision of a prosecutor in the Executive Branch
not to indict—a decision which has long been regarded as the special province of
the Executive Branch, inasmuch as it is the Executive who is charged by the
Constitution to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”"
A good source on the justification of the Executive (and btw, Deferred Action for immigration goes back to around 1972 and was exercised by just about every Administration since then) authority to pick-and-choose who to prosecute for action can be found:
https://pennstatelaw.psu.edu/s...
Again. You may not personally agree. But stating "it's Unconstitutional" as if you were some legal authority with vast Constitutional knowledge is fairly ridiculous.
320M people total. 200M workforce participation rate. https://data.bls.gov/timeserie...
48M people over 65. https://www.census.gov/newsroo...
74M people under 18. https://www.childstats.gov/ame...
So you want retired people and children to work?
Think that one through. We'd be without:
1. Non-cluttered public streets.
2. National parks.
3. Non-cluttered, no-charge freeways.
4. Patents.
5. Copyrights.
6. Cell phones and radios that work 10% of the time.
Say what you want about how poorly they're implemented in the US, those things have uses in a modern society. You can look to some areas of India to see what a cluster-fuck letting anybody build anything they want on shared public land will do.
It's funny. In Europe, people trust the government more than corporations. So it's usually the government screwing them over.
In the US, people trust companies more than governments. And it's usually the companies screwing them over.
Just because it's not a "government" doesn't mean it can't get big and centralized enough to become abusive. Especially when it provides what, in the first world, has become a near-essential good/service. See, for example, Comcast.
If two are equally corrupt (assuming that's the case), I'd prefer the competent one who has a history of at least getting positive laws passed.
Even if you agree with Trump's platform, his ability to actually bring forth any progress on implementing it has been...disastrous.
The impression I get is that much of the hardcore algorithms behind AI are old and basically well-known and set. There's a lot of work to build frameworks (like Tensorflow) and API's that allow people to experiment with their own processing pipelines that take the basic AI building blocks (memory, error feedback, convolution) so that they can trial-and-error at a rapid pace using large data sets.
That's certainly what Lattner is good at.
We're talking about interest, not result. That is to say, women tend to self-report themselves as more interested in people-related tasks rather than tasks that focus on things. That doesn't mean they don't end up going into money making fields like engineering though.
When surveying interest, the personality traits of things vs people were indeed invariant amongst all the countries surveyed.
What do you mean by a statistical edge over them? His argument wasn't that male engineers were better than female engineers, simply that women may be less likely to want to have careers in computing. You may want to actually read his document.
His language was far less nuanced than that. He basically took some very valid research into culture and time invariant differences in preferences between men and women (which, if you read the source material, the researcher acknowledged as correlation and not something he has established as causation, but it does suggest a biological link) and -- like a typical Libertarian -- jumped to conclusions and stated definitively that this means women find software engineering less interesting and that's what's causing the disparity.
Ignoring that in particular, software is drastically non-diverse *even compared to other STEM fields* by a huge margin.
Ignoring that the possible biological link to "thing based" interest doesn't necessarily translate into disinterest in computers (computer science, prior to the 1970's, was predominantly female).
Ignoring that -- even though he admitted there is systemic bias -- that there shouldn't be counter-measures for said systemic bias.
Almost all of the evidence (at least everything I've seen) points to it being largely biological. I've seen a lot of people claim it isn't, but they have yet to post all of this evidence that supposedly suggests otherwise. I think that many here are more than willing to consider this other evidence, but so far no one has actually posted any of it.
This is false. Even the original study that started most of this (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/) acknowledges:
1. It's correlation. Though the fact that it's culturally invariant suggests a biological link.
2. It's only really relevant for *one axis* of a 5-axis personality measurement (thing vs people interest).
3. It's based on self-reporting. Where people report their own *relatively* interest compared to what they think their place falls in society.
So much of it is non-conclusive (and the author, a proper scientist, acknowledges this). But it *does* suggest there is some biological link to one axis of a personality trait.
The problem is that blogs, armchair pundits and apparently young and impressionable Libertarians take a scientific finding of a possible link and does that classic "science says men are X and women are Y!".
What's sad is that normally, this type of behavior would be laughed at for being the sensationalist over-simplification that it is by critical thinking minds. But somehow, because it re-affirms some pretty deep-seated existing stereotypes, it's not thought of as critically by otherwise critical thinking white men.
From the sound of it. His management chain was pressured to fire him. If it had been on his blog, they could chalk it up to "personal views outside of his role at Google".
And if you read Richard Lippa's paper, it is far more nuanced and far from concluding "this definitely proves it". In fact, as the paper notes:
Personality and interest inventories
Research on gender differences in personality and interests typically relies on data from
standardized tests. Because such tests use self-report scales, their scores may be influenced
by social stereotypes, social desirability response sets, and self-construal processes (See
Feingold, 1994; Guimond, 2008).
All Lippa presented (correctly) was that there are statistical differences in *self-reported* interests that fall under different personality types (things vs people).
And that these differences tend to be culture and time invariant (that is, they don't seem to change with culture, which suggests biological link).
Another difference is that in more gender-open societies, people self-report themselves as being more gender-roled than gender-closed societies.
But the main skepticism (which Lippa notes) is that this is *self-reported*. That is to say, whether or not someone is "more interested in things vs people" or "follows traditional gender roles more than average) is entirely anchored on what they themselves think is "average".
In general, be weary of blog-style posts that reference a conclusion from scientific papers. They almost always overstate the certainty of the conclusion.
Do you call "I will say that statistically, women are X and men are Y" observation? Because it seems hard for someone to observe the vast statistical differences of the entire population and know immediately that it's all biologically caused.
Which is the conclusion he jumped to in the second part of his scribe. Which is why anyone reading it with a critical thinking mind should go "wait...how did you come up with that?"
Of course, confirmation bias amongst people who already assume those bullet points to be true "well, it just makes sense, I know that because I observe it through...stereotypes? the 50-100 women I know in real life?" will think this is "perfectly logical".
The author starts by rightly claiming that more nuanced approaches to the causes of gender gaps is necessary. He then makes wildly-unsupported claims of what differences in the *whole population of women and men* are biological and are in no part social constructs. That's the conclusion he jumped to. Then he works backwards, with this assumed as true already, to go "well it just makes sense that there'd naturally be less women in cut-throat fields, their delicate, cooperative and nurturing sensibilities just couldn't handle it".
Oh and btw, not one post from the "he speaks the truth!" crowd have bothered to actually advance his point with actual data. Instead, all we see are whiny crying of "PC culture!!".
At the company you work for? I don't think that's ever been a thing, even at conservative companies.
In fact, it's been kinda Germane to leave politics out of the office. Cause, you know, it's a place of business.
Right. And if the manifesto had stopped there -- i.e. calling for more nuanced exploration into gender differences based on biology as opposed to social structures -- it may have garnered better reception. Instead, what happened was:
1. Starts out by rightly pointing out that gender gaps can often be a mix of systemic biases, discrimination as well as biological origins. And that just flat-out assuming that any part of the gap was due to one or the other was irresponsible. And flat-out trying to force the result without understanding the root causes of the gender gap is also irresponsible.
2. Proceeds to make tons and tons of assumptions and assertions about the differences between men and women (even statistically) without any regard to whether those differences truly are biological, social or some combination of the two. Or whether those differences even exist with the modern demographic and to what degree (lacking data, instead just assuming it's true).
3. Concludes by downplaying systemic sexism (as well as the aftermath of historical systemic sexism) and proclaims all is well and whatever gap we're seeing today is due to the womenz being too nurturing and not cut-throat enough.
This is by no means a flaw seen only in conservative men. But I find this line of reasoning all too familiar with the scribes of various blogs. And more often than not when you point out the clear hypocrisy and contradiction, the originator cries "oppression" and how everyone disagreeing with him is just part of a "PC movement".
I don't know that the valuation is artificially low. I think, in this particular case, the market is pretty efficient at pricing out the relative value of cleaning toilets vs technical work.
The technical work just has a global reach now. Whereas the janitor job does not. If one person does work that sells to the whole world and the second person does something that's valuable to maybe 10 people in the building, the valuations for the former vs the latter is obviously going to be really off.
Of course, the self-righteous can always come up with some conclusion of "you don't really deserve that!". People on all sides think that, rich or poor. But that ignores the need for practical, not-subjective ways to improve people's lives.