I'm not sure how the government's messaging during the pandemic affects a private company, with global shareholders, claiming efficacy of a product whose results will be plain to see for all of those shareholders. You cannot lie about your products in an open market and be successful.
Sure, we should be skeptical of the government line on the pandemic, but why should we be skeptical of a product that comes from a company whose product must work for them to make money?
I think instead of letting our previous biases in one arena influence our current decision making in another, we should look at the evidence, make an independent decision, and then loop back on that when the evidence changes. Government bad != private company creates product that doesn't work
There is no reason to believe in long-term safety, neither is there reason to believe in long-term efficacy, the vaccine is too new for that to have any good data, meanwhile the manufacturers are indemnified to the hilt. Not that there's anything wrong with vaccine indemnification, when the product is proven safe and improves public health, as the vaccines on the markets all are, but this one was rushed through at unprecedented speed.
And what's with the trust in the market to fix things? The 737-MAX crashes did not affect Boeing share price or Boeing management in any meaningful way, neither are safety problems with the new covid vaccines going to affect Pfizer or Moderna.
This is rich. This throwaway account is going around posting short dismissals that don't add to the discussion, which is against site guidelines because it causes problems with reasonable discussions, and then uses these guidelines to try and protect themselves after injecting flamebait, which also happens against the site guidelines for the exact same reasons.
It would be impossible for the poster to not be aware of what they are doing.
Let’s say I own a bullhorn shop. In fact, I have purchased every bullhorn shop, distributor, and manufacturer of relevance in the world.
Someone, a self proclaimed Nazi, comes to me, the owner of every bullhorn, to buy a bullhorn in order to convince others to be Nazis. I, a Jew, refuse to sell the bullhorn to the Nazi.
Am I being overly simplistic? Probably, but I don’t see where my analogy fails. I fail so see the strength in the “Facebook controlling the content of the platform it owns destroys our constitutional rights” argument.
There's also the consideration to be made that you knowingly had been selling bullhorns to the nazi in the past, and are continuing to sell bullhorns to other folks of questionable beliefs
Define Nazi, define “in order to convince others to be Nazis”. Your analogy is dealing in extremes only. In practice it’s not a clear cut. That is missing in your analogy.
In my experience, stories like this are par for the course. While at Stripe, a few of my close friends and former co-workers were treated so poorly during the application process that I stopped referring anyone over a year before I left.
Wouldn't it make sense to give referrals some kind of VIP treatment, just to keep a pipeline of referrals open from any employees who are happy with their jobs?
I can't understand why a company wouldn't do that, even if they were overwhelmed with the challenge of hiring in general. The win is potentially exponential, if you get good people who come to work with people they already know how to work with.
Yeah. I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of these blog posts are just astroturfing.
Well designed astroturfing, nonetheless.
Edit: Astroturfing is the wrong word, perhaps. What I mean to say is vocalized better in the replies. These all should be taken with a substantial grain of salt. A rock of salt?
It's possible for both (a) people to enjoy working at a company and (b) for that company's recruitment process to be abysmally bad.
The people handling the recruiting functions are usually not the people you would be working with (unless you go into HR), and generally if HR starts ghosting you during the recruiting process it's because they're putting their efforts into the candidate they are trying to hire.
EDIT: Conversely, the opposite is also true. I used to work for a firm that was an absolute nightmare to work for, but the HR process was amazing.
That's a tough choice. In the end a functioning hr/payroll department beats a good experience.
I've worked in both. When the company with a good environment closes we were all let go. They mishandled my last paycheck so I'm still waiting. No way to get references. Had to contact government to get seperation papers. The bad environment place that stressed you out and then let your department go for something out of your control. The firing process felt good. They provided career support offered a reasonable settlement package. Easy to use as a reference as they provided a contact #
At most companies of this size, HR/payroll is separate from the recruiting department.
I'm definitely in agreement that a functioning HR/payroll department is a prerequisite for a good experience though. I had an employer that kept paying me after I left company, and they only stopped because I told them that this was the case. Obviously, afterwards, they sent me a letter saying they had "discovered" an overpayment, and I should send them back the money to exact cent, with no allowance for the cheque/mailing costs...
He's more famous for generally being a developer blogger, he was well known here well before Starfighter. I think he always had the most karma before they got rid of 'top'. He was always very open about his bingo card creator software, and then his appointment reminder sass. His yearly round up of BCC was always a top voted post.
Afaik he originally became well known for his helpful posts and advice on Joel Spolsky's business of software forums before HN even existed. That's where I first came across him, useful info about SEO.
This is a long way of saying I thought he'd been hired as a developer advocate for their startup thing, Stripe Atlas, rather than a recruitment advisor.
It's like when you see a dozen Glassdoor reviews for an employer where the only recommendation to management is to "keep doing what you're doing" and that any complaints are "sour grapes" or from employees who can't handle "growing pains".
Any positive glassdoor post should be suspect. You generally visit glassdoor for three reasons.
1. You are researching a company.
2. You own or work in hr at a company or have been told to post a review by management.
3. You are angry/unhappy at your current role or that you were let go. You go on to warn others / get even.
Rare is the person who is working a company and is happy who decides to visit glassdoor and tell everyone how happy they are. Have you done this? Know anyone who would follow this chain of events?
Glassdoor asks to leave a review for your current company or share your pay before looking up in detail about other companies. I wrote a review about my current company just for this reason but it was a honest review and not overly positive etc.
I don't see how that would be possible. If you say you like working someplace, we know that you work there. You couldn't possibly be hiding who is paying you. I don't think that is a fair accusation.
I think it would be much better said that we should take with a grain of salt anyone's assessment of their current job.
Fair. Wrong word choice. The point just being that there could be a lot of company... encouragement... to be vocal about what you think of working at the org.
And of course, to the point you raise, we must always take that with a grain of salt. Nobody is going to come to the table with complete honesty about the problems at a company with their name right next to it.
Astroturfing just means faking grass roots / community movement. Makes less sense here than in politics, but it would be possible if the marketing department was writing these blog posts on behalf of engineers.
The criticisms in this thread of Dyson’s wrongthink on climate science show us a lot about the current moment and how hard it is to have an opinion outside of the mainstream.
Sure, he appears to be quite incorrect now, but dismissing a mind of the caliber of Dyson’s because he got this one thing wrong is pedantic. And yes, he did appear to get this one extremely wrong, but that should not overshadow his amazing ideas and all of the things he got right. Ideas like Dyson Spheres, nuclear explosion based space travel, and many other Dyson ideas were just as outside of the standard deviations of thought as climate change denial at the time he came up with them.
It appears extremely popular right now to disregard an entire human’s work over an apparently incorrect opinion. Freeman Dyson is a great example of why this is probably a bad idea.
It's not "one thing wrong" it's just a dude not even bothering to learn research before dismissing it all as wrong. And then being proven wrong because he was being anti-scientific. It just happens to be the most critical challenge to humanity of this century, and he stupidly used his social power to undermine the science. Call "wrong think" as if it wasn't actually a terrible disservice to humanity and just being political. But it was actually wrong, both scientifically, morally, ethically, and gives future contrarians more difficulty.
This worship of personalities is very bad for science. We should prioritize data and ways to understand the data. Paying attention to misplaced authority is how we get lysenkoism.
Or maybe critics like Dyson forced climate scientists to grow up and become a real science, instead of relying on hand-wavy fallacies. Often the best thing for science is vigorous opposition. Maybe a populist irrationally posing opposition to climate science innoculated climate science, making it able to stand up against the likes of Trump. If your critics are all people you can dismiss, you don't know if your theory will survive a political enemy until it happens.
Except that Dyson was not dismissed for who he was, he was dismissed because of what he was saying. He got original aurhority for who he was. That is exact opposite.
He also was not making it stronger against limes of Trump, he was pawing a way for likes of Trump. Who is also someone dissmissed because of what he says and does. And also someone whose original disproportional benefit of doubt and trust (when he was young) was because of familly he was from.
First of all, thank you for the reference to Lysenkoism:
"as any deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable".
But I fail to see the connection with Dyson here.
Having an open discussion about taboo subjects is at the core of progress.
Conflating science with morality is adding another barrier to having those kinds of discussions.
I am aware of Brandolini's Law:
“The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
But if the criticism is done in good faith, with the tools of science, I think it's worth the debunking exercise.
Data is just data.
It can be collected with a lot of bias in place and can be interpreted with the same biases.
We are only humans after all.
When you say thinks like:
1. "it's just a dude not even bothering to learn research before dismissing it all as wrong"
2. "he stupidly used his social power to undermine the science"
I feel you are some priest that dismisses the sinner, by pointing out the vices of carelessness and stupidness, in the name of the sanctimony of science.
> as any deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable
This is precisely what Dyson was engaging in. There was no scientific backing for his critiques, he didn't even bother to learn about what he was critiquing. He just went on a political crusade and pretended that because he had scientific accomplishments in a different field, he was applying the same scientific rigor in climate science. In fact, he was not.
As far as being a "priest," excuse me for caring about basic scientific honesty. This sort of hero worship of Dyson, to the point of excusing extremely bad science and abuse of authority by calling criticism religious, is exactly the sort of stuff that happened in the Soviet Union! Lysenko and Dyson promote the right politics, so they are considered above reproach.
"Green" people opposing nuclear energy aren't missing their scientific authority with non-scientists about their scientific ability (because they have none). And they aren't misusing their scientific ability to negligently skip even learning about the science, because, again, they typically have none.
The most critical challenge humans are facing this century is the quite reasonable scenario where we start to run out of fossil fuels. We're consuming them at a faster rate than we are discovering them and literally all our systems currently depend on fossil fuel consumption.
While certainly the quantity of fossil fuels is finite. It is unlikely we will ever “run out of fossil fuels” because the price will simply increase as supplies begin to run low. Then two things will happen: we will consume less and expand the scope of production to more expensive source.
This has already happened repeatedly over the history of the fossil fuel industry.
> It is unlikely we will ever “run out of fossil fuels” because the price will simply increase as supplies begin to run low. Then two things will happen: we will consume less and expand the scope of production to more expensive source.
> has been repeatedly been debunked in practice...
You say debunked, then link to a table with a near total consensus that we'll have hit peak oil by 2060. The exception being the EIA putting out 2067 as a stretch goal. That is not a table of crackpots, that is groups like the World Bank, IEA, Shell, etc.
Debunked usually means 'disproven', not 'consensus position'.
> Then two things will happen: we will consume less and expand the scope of production to more expensive source.
Either of those outcomes are a bigger threat than climate change.
> This has already happened repeatedly over the history of the fossil fuel industry.
The US never felt the full effects of that peak [0]. The difference was made up by imports and the US didn't have to face a raw decline in oil availability. Global peak oil is going to change that, or spark more very nasty wars as the US bullies people into continuing to send them oil.
In this century it is quite likely that we'll see peak oil globally. It is a bigger threat than climate change. Anyone who was going to suffer from climate change is also one of the people vulnerable to the affects of oil availability reductions.
Dyson's arguments on climate are still quite valid. Climate has always been variable, never static, and CO2 is incredibly beneficial for plant growth. Climate models are inherently flawed. They do not model clouds or biological systems well at all. They are forecasts of nonlinear, dynamic systems for which uncertainty is an exponential function of time. Listen to his arguments: https://youtu.be/Pou3sGedeK4
First three minutes of his talk: the real world is messy and muddy and you can't use models to make predictions.
Minute five: if we convert all of the excess CO2 in the air into soil, we'll need to add 1/10th of an inch of topsoil per year. "Therefore I conclude that the CO2 problem is one primarily of land management."
After berating climate scientists for using mathematical models for using fluid dynamics (driven by huge supercomputers), he turns around and does a back-of-the-envelope calculation like this. It was so disappointing to listen to a brilliant person utterly fail at self-reflection.
As for the rest of your argument, there are books and books and books that address all of it point by point.
As for nonlinear systems, your trillion-cell body is beyond my comprehension to understand or predict a day or two in advance. However, I predict you will be dead in 90 years. I also predict it will be cold in winter and warm in summer. Do you understand that models are layered and not all inputs are the same?
> After berating climate scientists for using mathematical models for using fluid dynamics (driven by huge supercomputers), he turns around and does a back-of-the-envelope calculation like this. It was so disappointing to listen to a brilliant person utterly fail at self-reflection.
This conclusion does not necessarily follow. You can use a very sophisticated computer model based on statistical mechanics that takes into account all particles in the system and their interactions and I can tell you it's wrong using a simple thermodynamic equation. Sometimes a problem is tractable because you get rid of details.
Ok to be fair searching for a good reference specifically in book form isn't as efficient as turning up articles and websites.
For the "models are inherently reliable" schtick (holy heck, where would be if every field of science had motivated trolls jumping out of the woodwork to decry "models"--ffs the dynamics of a single atom--let alone molecule--are still based on models that need to be calibrated and make predictions)...please have a gander at how climate models are constructed and cross-validated. A good reference is https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm. It'd be great if we could instead take a look at how much computational power and painstaking care has gone into tuning and analyzing models. One important technique is that a model must be able to reconstruct the past based on limited data. That's one useful check that they aren't just generating complete garbage, but actually model some important underlying system dynamics. I do not work on climate models but I do work on performance of computer systems and after having a look at the math and modeling that goes into climate I can confidently say that we understand climate better than we understand the performance of computer systems which we designed and built ourselves.
As for the "CO2 is incredibly beneficial to plants"...people also test this and it turns out not as much as claimed, there are other limiting factors, like Nitrogen, and oh by the way, that all assumes that they are not significantly negatively affected by climate change as well. A good reference, from actual experts, here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-d.... The truth is that nobody is seriously jazzed about more CO2 somehow increasing crop production. Which really shows how outdated and simplistic Dyson's thinking was.
I’ll listen to him about physics but that doesn’t mean I have to give him any credit for what he thinks about climate. Incredibly smart people are still wrong about stuff all the time, being smart does not mean everything you have to say is worth listening to.
> how hard it is to have an opinion outside of the mainstream.
You can very easily have an opinion outside of the mainstream, but when that opinion turns out to be wrong then don't expect people to treat you as a smart person anymore or even as a "genius" (to quote the BBC).
In fact, anyone taking a speculative line of inquiry, with any vigour, will by definition, 'be wrong' probably quite a lot.
Especially if they have to pursue the subject alone, it with a million 'opponents' who are such due as much to ideology than anything else.
Every 'genius' you care to mention will have been 'very wrong' about many things, but because they were 'wrong' about issues that weren't politicized, we don't care.
Dyson is the opposite of a hack, and probably not ideological about whatever it is he wants to talk about ...
... these are exactly the kinds of geniuses we shouldn't mind 'being wrong'.
There are no Dyson spheres or nuclear powered spaceships, but there are a hell of a lot of climate deniers. If we’re weighing what part of his legacy, the part that had a negative effect on a very real crisis of human suffering is going to weigh heavier than some cool thought experiments that only showed up in scifi
While this might sound good, this would be impossible to enforce in practice, as everything a company does is revenue-related. Any rules the app store or iOS have are directly related to revenue by definition.
For example, if Apple allowed boundless permissions and tons of buggy apps, their revenue would probably decrease. This issue is harder to regulate than it first seems.
Yes, technically, "everything a company does is revenue-related". However, you can realistically draw a line sonewhere between blocking illegal material (pirated/malware) and blocking apps that don't pay Apple their 30%. My comment was not intended to be the exact legalese that would be required for such a limitation, but you can probably gather roughly where I draw the line from it.
I want to point out that the crux of my argument, the very reason I posted, was that I could not "draw the line" from the previous argument. There is no actual rebuttal or new information in the reply, just a restatement of the previous point.
My point was that everything a company does is revenue related, and thus we cannot draw some imaginary line between things that are "more" or "less" revenue related. Restating that we can doesn't move us forward. I would be interested to hear how we can separate some revenue related reasons from others.
Interesting. Rippling is the only company I’ve ever interviewed at that, with full knowledge that they were doing so, offered me a job working more hours for significantly less pay than I was currently making. When challenged, they calmly assured me that it was a good deal, asked me to value the equity at something quite above this new valuation, and urged me to take the offer. Bold, but not the way I would choose to try and grow a company.
that's the same with many startups, that you'd need to work longer and for less salary. but more potential upside on equity. they would have been telling you that the equity could be worth more in the future if they IPO etc. not that it'd be worth more in this round of funding.
I didn't have a great experience with their recruiter or interviewers either. Maybe things have changed in the past year as they've grown bigger, but they were pretty unprofessional at the time.
OTOH he is not necessarily "insulting people": he is likely correct that debate class (or logic class) is the best venue for learning about Hanlon's Razor and other ideas. But the application of such tools to real-life (as opposed to simple logical problems), where logic may not completely describe problems, is far more variable yet IMO still useful.
I, for one, do not feel insulted and even feel that his post is a useful elaborative warning along the path to "truth", which in the real world may have many traps, wrong ways and pitfalls.
I have an idea for a forum where ML buffers the conversation by becoming some sort of virtual referee, or that folks can score the comments in many dimensions, not just up down. Many posts just need a slight tweak to stay on track.
A kind of semi-automated lint for discussions.
Clippy could come out and say, """
I see you are insulting someone's mother in a discussion about Ayn Rand taking social security payments, are you sure this furthers the conversation?
I've seen this attempted in comments, turned out to be just a bad-word filter. A system that can track a semantic argument would be non-trivial, and if you could do it it would probably be wasted on this use case.
There are videos where we can clearly see these unmarked agents (yes they are unmarked if they have no name or number) attacking and detaining medics without reading them their rights.
Those are the violations of civil liberties we are discussing and this argument throws out.
Yes, but the point is that we should do that first before polluting the night sky.
There are also reasons for humans and animals to not want new, moving stars for reasons other than pure utility. At the very least, these shiny beacons are an insulting advertisement for Musk.
Sure, we should be skeptical of the government line on the pandemic, but why should we be skeptical of a product that comes from a company whose product must work for them to make money?
I think instead of letting our previous biases in one arena influence our current decision making in another, we should look at the evidence, make an independent decision, and then loop back on that when the evidence changes. Government bad != private company creates product that doesn't work