> not as much as if they also got vaccinated, so it seems like the original point still stands
If previously-infected had as much resistance as vaccinated, they should not be more scared than the vaccinated. Even if they would have more resistance if they were also vaccinated.
Did you mean to say that previously-infected have much less resistance than the vaccinated? I would very grateful for a source on that. I tried to find out numbers on that but couldn't find apples-to-apples comparison.
Did you mean to say that previously-infected have much less resistance than the vaccinated? I would very grateful for a source on that. I tried to find out numbers on that but couldn't find apples-to-apples comparison.
I'm saying that the previously infected w/o a vaccination are more likely to get reinfected that those who were infected and then get vaccinates: about 2.34x as likely. Reinfection rates are low [0]
The risk of reinfection if not vaccinates may also be higher than the risk for an initial infection if vaccinated: Reinfection rates are about 0.31% [1] and as high as 0.7% in some populations [2] while infection rates among vaccinated are about 0.18% [3]
TLDR: The CDC is dishonest and cherry-picks data to meet their narrative. Multiple peer-reviewed studies have shown natural immunity to work at least as well as vaccine immunity for COVID.
The statements are logically consistent. You're incorrectly assuming he meant "only" in the first statement.
Those two statements are part of the same thread and LeCun makes it more clear in that thread. And the article says, right after the second statement: "If you read that thread, you’ll see that LeCun seems well aware of everything I’ve laid out in this post"
It's not just mammals and I wouldn't frame it as them being disposable when propagating the species.
There's a bigger payout at the right tail of the distribution for male genes. Male genes can sometimes have 1000 offspring. Female genes generally can't. Male genes are generally more likely to have 0 offspring. So male genes have less to lose and more to gain by taking risks, behavioral and biological risks. See also male variance hypothesis.
This varies by species and the pattern is likely stronger in more polygynous species and weaker in more monogamous species. See also sexual dimorphism. Human males take more behavioral risks on average and have higher mortality rates throughout life (not only from behavior).
I warn you though, this is a controversial subject because of some of its possible implications.
Also I should disclose that I'm not an expert, just a layperson interested in this and some related topics.
Alternatively, if you see a resume with Coinbase through 2020-2021, that person probably prefers the opposite, which may also be seen in a positive or negative light, depending on your stance.
Which, as your parent seems to not realize, is also a political stance. This dichotomy is exactly what MLK refers to in the Letter from a Bermingham Jail (i.e. positive vs negative peace).
What does this mean? If this is yet another “if you’re not for us you’re against us” argument (e.g. if you don’t discuss police violence in the workplace then you necessarily support police violence), then this is false on its face. If this means “the decision to not discuss politics—especially politics unrelated to one’s work—at work is itself a political decision” then fine, but what’s the point? Is the idea that it’s a self-inconsistent position? If so, how? One can discuss even the policy not to discuss politics at work without discussing e.g. police violence.
one inconsistency is that Coinbase is based in SF. Would you consider "sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep due to police sound grenades going off until 3am" a political statement?
> > Would you consider "sorry, I didn't get a lot of sleep due to police sound grenades going off until 3am" a political statement?
> No, of course not.
Awesome. So it follows that you would have no issue then with a coworker stating: "Police activity in SF has negatively impacted my ability to do work". Congratulations, you have a significantly broader definition of acceptable workplace speech than Coinbase.
> Awesome. So it follows that you would have no issue then with a coworker stating
Of course I wouldn't have an issue (ignoring for the moment that you're apparently conflating me with coinbase), because this isn't a political statement.
> Congratulations, you have a significantly broader definition of acceptable workplace speech than Coinbase.
The issue was never about people expressing their political opinions, but their demands that _Coinbase_ express political opinions and get mired in what police in SF may or may not be doing.
I think this is a very simplistic take. The reason we’re seeing a crackdown on this is not because companies are making a political move to support the status quo. It’s because they’re trying to weed out and get rid of legitimately problematic and toxic people who abused the previous culture.
For instance, there was an instance not too long ago at Facebook where one engineer publicly attacked another completely peaceful coworker on Twitter because the latter declined to put a BLM statement on the landing page of an open source project they maintained. The former employee was eventually fired. These kinds of antics are deeply divisive and destructive to the workplace.
> For instance, there was an instance not too long ago at Facebook where one engineer publicly attacked another completely peaceful coworker on Twitter because the latter declined to put a BLM statement on the landing page of an open source project they maintained. The former employee was eventually fired. These kinds of antics are deeply divisive and destructive to the workplace.
It is unclear from your comment which employee was fired, unless "former" is intended in the ordinal sense (ie. "first") rather than temporal (ie. "prior"). Can you clarify?
My wife works for a huge social media company that you've definitely heard of, and some of her higher-ups have told her they're worried that the rise of employee activism is going to tear the company's culture apart. I told her she should tell them to follow Coinbase's example.
For an action to be "political" in a strong sense, its performer it needs to be consciously thinking about their political alignment. Majority of people are economically motivated and do not engage in in-depth analysis of their actions or inactions and thus describing their actions as "political" is quite tendentious.
you don't need to be actively aware of gravity to not float off the ground. You can act politically without being aware of that fact, that just means you're not conscious of what's driving your decision making.
Most politics and also culture expresses itself tacitly. By requiring some sort of conscious intent you're actually ignoring what is arguably the vast majority of political interaction. For example casual sexism and systematic mistreatment of women was just "normal" but nonetheless political. Of course the people doing the subtle discriminating don't like to think of it as political, because that implies responsibility for action.
You are taking a "consequentialist" stance implying that if something has political consequences, then it is political. There are several problems with this.
First, literally anything could have political consequences, from a solar flare to a fly landing in someone's hair. This logic easily devolves into absurdity. Famously, Chinese government under Mao declared sparrows "public animals of capitalism" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_Campaign
Second, when anything could be political, the moniker "political" (like any other inflated moniker) loses a lot of its meaning. And yet real politics is still done by real people with real consequences.
Third, raising everything to the status of political is an example of politicization. This is typical of totalitarian regimes. Totalitarian regimes are in fact characterized by the fact that literally everything is raised to the realm of political, the realm of rule by the regime. By pressuring others to be political, you are creating a totalitarian environment, a very unpleasant environment for most people to be as we already know from some very bitter 20th century lessons.
Fourth, politics is about having political enemies. When political enemy (opponent) does not exist, there is no politics as such. By insisting that people act politically, you are simultaneously insisting that they have enemies. There are profound moral problems with this, whether you are Christian or even not religious at all.
The solar flare isn't political obviously, but the response to it is. human disaster usually is the consequence of bad responses to catastrophes which have been declared inevitable. (see the current American covid response). Something that actually is in the realm of politics is shoved into the category of thoughts and prayers.
>Third, raising everything to the status of political is an example of politicization. This is typical of totalitarian regimes
Politicisation isn't bad and the only thing your post is any evidence of is the typical midbrow "no politics or gulag" logic that every conservative American who is afraid of engaging in political conflict has been repeating ad nauseam. You may think you appear smarter if you complain about tribalism every five minutes and act like you're above the fray, but you are not. It's just a silly straw-man made by people who are afraid of political change.
Respectfully disagree. You're essentially arguing that they're not politically motivated in staying at/leaving their job. That's fair. Nevertheless their actions translate either support, inaction, or opposition. The implication which MLK argues is that inaction is harmful to the movement.
You are taking a consequentialist stance, deciding that if something has political consequences, then it is political. But literally anything could have political consequences. A solar flare could have political consequences. A fly landing on someone's hair could have political consequences. This does not mean that flies are political!
If everything is political, then the moniker "political" is meaningless.
It signals that a person did not want to be politically active at their workplace enough to lose/quit their job.
I think that says nothing of a persons political views and is just self-preservation or even indifference. Hiring would have to make some very tenuous assumptions to consider that a signal.
It's probably not a great signal for anything. How many Coinbase employees leave the company in an average month? And how much did this severance offer cause would-be future departures to cluster in October to take advantage of the payout?
> I think that says nothing of a persons political views
Rubbish - we all know what type of political activism is tearing these companies apart and we all know what political views are the only ones that can be safely expressed.
No, it is not. Politics apathy is present across all races, all classes, all genders.
Those who are politically possessed like to claim that “everything is politics” and that “it’s a privilege to not care about politics”, but every Hispanic and Filipino immigrant I’ve known (which is not a negligible number) care about family, hard work, and stability: not politics.
Getting involved in politics makes your life more unstable, which is why mostly privileged people engage in it. For example extremely few people from below median homes are politically active in USA, while home owners are among the most active. Ergo people are mostly politically active to defend their privileges and not to fix injustices.
I'm not sure how anyone can think that being politically active would make your life more stable.
Edit: An example of this is that black people are much less likely to vote than white people. Is this because black people support the status quo while white people want to change things? No, it is because black people don't have the time and energy to spare to vote. And no, this isn't about voting disenfranchisement, black people are less likely to vote even in very blue states.
Possibly by observing the actual changes implemented and interpreting them in their own context (i.e. IRS changes tax forms, but all the numbers stay the same when filling it out). Not being convinced that their fundamental right to attempt existence is threatened by imaginary what-ifs.
I'm not sure why an opinion being commonly held across race/class/gender would make it not political.
Your statement that the immigrants you know care about x and y and not politics doesn't actually make sense in response to the concept 'everything is political'. You are responding from the perspective that politics means elections, or some similarly narrow set of topics. But 'everything is political' explicitly rejects that perspective. It means that a Filipino immigrant thinking about whether their uncle and cousins will be able to visit them is political because it's harder for them to get a visa than my English cousins. It means that a Hispanic immigrant talking to her friend in a restaurant after dropping the kids at school should not risk being detained by ICE because speaking Spanish makes some dropkick immigration officer decide they must be illegal immigrants, which happened in Montana.
Staying in a job and supporting yourself and you family for a temporary time doing a normal job is not indifference. It is putting food on the table, perhaps literally.
Isn't it interesting that the crowd fighting for liberation & equity are mysteriously up against... the apolitical crowd? When the dichotomy is ethical realism vs. pragmatism, you have to ask yourself who's actually operating like a religion, who's actually a dogmatist in liberator's clothing.
Nah. I’m one of the “apolitical” crowd. I have all sorts of weird, controversial opinions, but I simply leave them at the door and do the job I’m paid to do.
Most people don't worry about all aspects of the world's problems, and many people find themselves convinced that the status quo is more comfortable than the alternative. It's not at all surprising to me that a lot of political issues would have a "thought about it, realized the problems, and trying to fix it" position and a "apolitical, don't like thinking about it, don't want to consider changes to the status quo" position that end up butting heads. I don't see how you can go from that to "anyone arguing with 'apolitical' people is following a religion". (Obviously there are bad variants of this scenario like where someone misidentifies a problem or misidentifies the fix, but that doesn't seem necessarily like religious thinking either.)
This is nonsense. There is no "the alternative;" there are no "apolitical" people. This is a circumstance of organizations, for whom being apolitical is the best way to alienate the fewest people. However, if you do indeed believe you have objective truth in your nonsensical dogmatic worldview, then hypothetically you'd be countered by somebody with a contrary truth. However this does not happen. The only opposition that these dogmatists get is from the new ethical relativists, i.e. people who advocate for apolitical organizations.
Any circumstance in which someone is looking at that is a circumstance in which they could also be treating you like a specific individual; aka, if it matters to them, you're there to ask.
Ironically / IMHO, the irritant at the center of the pearl that is many of these ('social justice') issues is people treating other people as a member of an imagined group rather than a specific human they can talk to.
Asking specific people about their political views during the hiring process (even general questions like "do you think tech workers should be politically active in the workplace?") is dangerous even if not necessarily illegal. Making hiring decisions based on the applicant's experience and employment history is pretty much best practice.
> If it's a problem that they're political or apolitical, then it's already a part of your hiring process.
Definitely not. Unconscious bias is a huge issue in interviewing. Blinding your interviewers to political orientation, or any other factor, is far more effective than telling them just to ignore it.
Hmm. I'd expect directly addressing it - instead of either attempting to ignore it or blinding - to be the most effective. IMO it's not just about hiring, it's also about whether or not they'll succeed once hired, and I would expect any unconscious bias to impact that.
Altho TBC I do think you're right that blinding is better than attempting to ignore.
Or they joined during the crypto euphoria era and have been disappointed by the general state of the market, and decided it was a good deal to give them some runway to find something that excites them more.
I would not go further than associating an October exit date as someone who took a buyout, and anyone with an exit date in the first half of 2021 as a sucker.
do people really read this much into resumes? I mostly just look to see if they have any relevant experience and/or impressive projects. aside from raising an eyebrow if I see a bunch of short stints at different companies, I don't try to ferret out their life story or political views by carefully analyzing their hire/leave dates.
If I see a bunch of short stints, let's say 3 or 4 tenures in a row that didn't make it past 1 year, I would definitely ask for some details during an interview.
I have some on my own resume and I don't mind explaining that here the company was acquired, here we ran out of money, here I had to move to be with family, etc etc.
It's just normal due diligence for a hiring manager.
As a way of reply to, "I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes."
"Well, whatever life is, you’re going to die. So if you’re going to make things better for yourself or for those you care about, you had better become an activist while you’re still alive." -- Will Provine
Viewing activism as a binary—the only choices being "I am an activist" and "I am not an activist"—glosses over a wide spectrum of dispositional diversity that people inhabit.
Put differently: There is a difference between advocacy and activism, between holding political opinions and being comfortable with them as a central focus of your life, or as a central characteristic that you wish people to see in you.
Not necessarily. Everybody knows the best way to move up in tech is to switch. Depending upon your options taking this offer and moving to another company where you make more is the best possible path you could take. Throw in the desire right now for people to leave SF and it gets even better.
Technical interviewing is so extremely biased. This sentiment of “Coinbase October resume is activist” is a prime example of where false negatives come from, even when the candidate correctly inverts the binary tree on the whiteboard in C.
“I personally am afraid to associate myself too publicly with a political stance, lest I be wrong and/or the environment changes.”
I can understand this fear, but generally if you choose a stance based on compassion for all beings you’ll be in the right in the long run.
This particular issue was sparked by Coinbase not taking a stance on Black Lives Matter, which they are wrong about. Standing for dismantling racism is always correct.
On the other hand working with crimecurrency is always wrong, so already there we can say that every coinbase employee who stays is evil.
> Standing for dismantling racism is always correct.
As opposed to standing against it, yes. As opposed to "we're just building a juicer, man", no.
Not every group of people "must" take an active stance on every social issue. If they did then they would do nothing but that.
This is why I'm hesitant to invest in Silicon Valley stock at the moment. If this trend continues they'll spend 100% of their time "making a stand", and not innovating or trying to fulfil their stated mission.
I have a responsibility to keep my own house in order. To make sure I'm not racist, homophobic, etc... I don't have a responsibility to spend my life on a cause you select for me, even if that cause is just.
If I were to pick a cause it would be that the central organization for a leading religion is actively harboring and protecting child rapists from international law enforcement. But still I would not, like you, say that every organization that doesn't march under that banner are "wrong about" that.
Companies are not "supporting status quo of child rapists" if they don't put up banners on their website. They're just not. That's nonsense.
You can't condemn me for not marching with you. That's fascism.
Funny, I don't see anyone complaining that Fruit Gushers hasn't taken a stand on child pornography?
I will disagree somewhat with the people who say that companies never have a place for political stuff. If you are any company involved in South Africa during apartheid you should choose a side on apartheid and voice that position.
If BLM means just the simple definition of what the words imply (that black lives matter), there's no point in saying it. Because there's literally no one on the other side. I suspect that's not what it means, because saying a broader statement "All Lives Matter" seems to be considered a kind of slur.
So "Black Lives Matter" means something deeper. More like "Black people are killed indiscriminately by police in this country. The cops get away with it, and it's a huge problem." That is full of assumptions and political beliefs that reasonable people can disagree about. And I don't see why every company should take a side on that issue.
> Funny, I don't see anyone complaining that Fruit Gushers hasn't taken a stand on child pornography?
Child pornography, from what I can tell, is not a controversial issue. Most companies haven't made statements about their views on murder, theft, and slavery either. But if the nation were prominently split over whether murder, theft, slavery, or child pornography are good things, I would hope some companies would make a statement.
Actually child pornography is a controversial issue, because it’s often use as a “think of the children” excuse to censor the internet or ban cryptography.
The nation isn't prominently split over whether racism is bad or whether black lives matter.
It is, however, prominently split over whether the specific, contentious version of "anti-racism" though promulgated by the likes of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo - "Critical Race Theory", to call it by its academic name - is the One True Anti-Racism that it claims to be, or whether it's counterproductive, divisive, anti-liberal and on track to set race relations back by decades.
Companies have as much moral obligation to state support for CRT as they do to state their support for Trotskyism or Randian Objectivism.
Standing for dismantling racism is always correct, but that's distinct from explicitly stating support for the Black Lives Matter political organization.
If you don't agree with some of their stated objectives, tactics, leadership, it should be OK to refuse to offer support, and that doesn't automatically imply a tacit support of racism, and it doesn't automatically imply resistance to lower-case black lives matter.
> but generally if you choose a stance based on compassion for all beings you’ll be in the right in the long run
I like capitalism and the free market because I think it's the best system to give most prosperity to a broad spectrum of society. I believe that I take this stance based on compassion but I can assure you that this view is not popular among other people who are in the compassion camp.
You can disagree about the methods to achieve the thing while still agreeing about what the compassionate stance is. We would likely agree that moving people out of poverty is a compassionate thing, even if we disagree about what the best way to do that is.
No one is asking Coinbase to take a stance and say that the police must be abolished, or that the way forward for Black liberation is X policy. They were simply asking them to acknowledge that racism exists and Black lives do in fact matter.
Standing for dismantling racism might always be correct, but burning down predominately black neighborhoods doesn't seem to relate to that in a positive way. You can't dismantle racism by causing devastation in the name of black people.
This is going to be based on conventional wisdom. The evaluators are a biased representation of general public. What do most people think are conspiracy theories?
Despite all the policy guidelines, in the end it's not just a legalistic decision but more like a survey to see what people think.
If you're running a search engine, you need to track of what people think somehow, or you'll totally miss things like cultural issues.
This (and other things about not knowing who the manual raters are, or what cultures they come from and bring to the conscious ans subconscious table)should be of concern.
Depending on what region of the world the publisher is in, and what region his/her readers are in.. and where the raters are from, can make some issues.
Some years ago I sat in a class at a college for building contractors when the subject of burying electrical lines came up, people scoffed at the cost, then the teacher did a survey and found that 90% of the class thought radon gas was a fairy tale conspiracy theory, not real, and not something they would ever consider when building.
Half of those in the class had already been in the building professions for years and some cases generations.
This is similar to what I've been thinking. I usually say "the brain is more like a board than a CEO".
One additional interesting tidbit I've noticed is that when the brain decides on a belief, it seems to suppress alternative beliefs. For example, with the old-lady-young-lady picture, it's hard to see them both at the same time.
I personally like how Obama viewed politics, as a game of football, perhaps like the recent "worst superbowl ever" where there is NOT much happening most of the time, just posturing/attempts. Lot of injuries, insults, fights, scandals, doping, but also occasionally beautiful plays that remind you sometimes teams are able to score. Analogy does break down on bi-partisanship, as ideally we'd get infrastructure, prescription drugs, and many other bi-partisan things done, and there are few "cooperative" things about sports when it comes to one team vs another.
Well, your explanation is also fundamentally wrong. There is nothing "stupider" about learning how to arrive to a consensus and how to drive a result. The notion that learning math "makes" your thinking "smarter", but also simultaneously unable to affect a large scale change on society (cause politics are stupid!!1) is so obviously wrong I'd question the underlying assumption.
Rather than separating claims into "covered" and "not covered", I recommend a third bucket "might be covered". I think this goes into that third bucket. Whether or not this particular claim should be paid doesn't mean it's not in the third bucket.
When buying insurance, you shouldn't rely on payments for claims in the third bucket, especially not without a legal fight.
Many consumers don't understand any of this. But I expect (hope) that most large businesses are sophisticated enough to understand this.
I don't think this will hurt Zurich's business, because most of their customers probably understand this.
The part that I found most interesting was the idea that we're moving away from low-capital startups.
Does that mean venture capital is going to have to get much bigger to fund these ventures? Does it suggest the ballooning of worldwide VC funding isn't just a bubble? (There's a really interesting chart in WSJ that I can't find right now). And will a few massive VCs become more powerful while smaller ones fizzle? What about ycombinator?
Does it mean that technical talent will be more or less valuable? Much more talent will be needed, but there's probably less opportunity to build a massive business with a few talented geeks as the low-hanging software fruit is probably plucked. Talented developers might be less critical to business success.
It's a solid presentation and full of insights (per usual). There were some puzzling aspects, however, like the point about the shift to capital intensive startups. Some thoughts:
(1) It isn't clear whether Evans believes the shift in higher capital requirements will occur in the early-stage or when a successful startup reaches maturity. The industries left to 'disrupt' do seem to be capital intensive industries, but that fact alone doesn't preclude 'disruption' from early-stage, low-capital startups. Technology changes the boundaries of industries through a process the economist Brian Arthur calls, "abstraction and redomaining". In Evans' terminology, new enabling layers allow us to do new things in new ways. I like to think of this as: technological change opens up competitive attack vectors that are neither inside, parallel to, or perpendicular with, but rather diagonal to an industry.
[Abstraction for Arthur is different than Evans' use of that term when Evans describes how ML will provide deeper levels of meaning in comparison to the query abstraction of Google, FB, and Amazon]
(2) He contrasts Yelp with Door Dash to illustrate this shift. I know for a fact that GrubHub was a low-capital endeavor in the early-stage. Is it now capital intensive? Perhaps.
(3) The original search engines, which Google subsequently eviscerated, were on track to be capital intensive at scale/maturity.
This is a direct counterexample to a simplistic take on Evans' narrative, unless we only care about the startups that come to dominate a space.
(4) Google may actually have been a capital intensive project as it was two guys in a garage... who were finishing CS Ph.ds from Stanford. It matters how we define 'capital'. The natural move is to classify Brin and Page as an "R&D" line item on the income statement, and say that moving forward "R&D" will be more expensive and/or other indirect costs will be significantly higher. However, this doesn't sufficiently clear things up.
----
I think the most we can say is that the Financial Services, Automotive, Industrial, Biotech, etc. sectors are more capital intensive than Media and much of Retail. Though, it isn't clear whether this means 'disruption' is any more expensive or complex than it was before.
If previously-infected had as much resistance as vaccinated, they should not be more scared than the vaccinated. Even if they would have more resistance if they were also vaccinated.
Did you mean to say that previously-infected have much less resistance than the vaccinated? I would very grateful for a source on that. I tried to find out numbers on that but couldn't find apples-to-apples comparison.