>the hunter, logger, and geologist will walk through the same patch of wilderness and see an entirely different forest, for each eye is trained to notice something different. The more abstract the things observed the greater individual variance there will be. For intangible social processes like market exchange, mass movements, and elections, our understanding is all model, no matter.
I really like this snippet. Captures an idea I hadn't ever been able to put into words before.
By using that analogy, the author puts himself above his subjects. He understands various perspectives (reporters, editors, rationalists, SV "decentralization" fanatics), and that they are mere perspectives, while also acknowledging their relative validity.
This entails a meta-perspective, a perspective-of-perspectives. This kind of consciousness is why people like Scott Alexander: he makes an attempt to understand other people's perspectives and rarely dismisses anything out of hand.
The questions is...why is this sort of consciousness, that understands the relative validity of virtually everyone's perspective, so uncommon outside of various internet blogs? Is it too much to ask for editors and reporters with this kind of open-mindedness?
I think this book, "The Master and his Emissary"
https://www.amazon.com/The-Master-and-His-Emissary-audiobook...
would argue that the right hemisphere of our brain acknowledges multiple perspectives and contextualizes them, and that our culture suffers from a severe left hemisphere bias.
Brain lateralization probably isn't what you think it is since pop culture gets almost everything about it wrong and it has become a career-ender for academic study so that no one synthesizes the research into coherent theses. Sadly, the topic has gotten such a bad reputation that I have to take a brief moment to defend the validity of bringing it up.
It's possible that too much openness has a failure mode in indecisiveness, and acceptance of any and everything.
Not dismissing people's perspectives is one thing, but if you cannot actually understand them, will that really help you make better decisions, or are you getting lost by adding more complex dimensions to a problem you already barely understand?
Open-mindedness is beneficial in general, but it cannot be blind. Some perspectives are just wrong. How do you cut through the noise?
You do have to pick a side. But you should be able to choose while keeping in mind that your choice is contingent. That is, if circumstances change, so might your choice. And even when picking a side, there's no need to purge from your mind the recognition of the relative validity of other perspectives.
The issue of accounting for other people's opinions and experiences is a good one to bring up - it is a broad way of framing this whole SSC controversy.
Part of the reason why it's rare is, I think, because of our schools. A lot of education pushes people to see things as having only one correct answer. That it's more important to win the debate than to explore ideas. There is not much emphasis on how one develops solid and correct ideas. There is a tendency towards justifying ideas, coming up with good-sounding reasons, whether or not they are actually true.
Also, writing that explores other perspectives in a fact-based manner can easily come across as an if-by-whiskey fallacy [1].
As far as a real answer goes - I think that it's a genuinly difficult problem. Religious figures have been talking about perspectives and empathy and compassion for thousands of years. It's clearly a big thing.
As far as the specifics of the SSC controversy, my attempt to understand both sides is this: Scott made ethical commitments as a psychiatrist, both to his clients in particular and his profession in general. The NYT made ethical commitments both to their readers in particular and to journalistic standards in general. In the SSC controversy these commitments conflict. Whose commitments should win? Whose commitments are the most important?
Scott found a way to make his ethical commitments work for him. Maybe it was a compromise, but I think it worked well enough so that his patients couldn't easily find out who he was. I think that the NYT could have easily made it work with their commitments, and everyone would have been better off.
> Scott made ethical commitments as a psychiatrist, both to his clients in particular and his profession in general. The NYT made ethical commitments both to their readers in particular and to journalistic standards in general. In the SSC controversy these commitments conflict.
I'm sorry, what "ethical commitments" did the NYT have that required them to reveal Scott's identity? They have—over the last few years—systematically abused the privilege of anonymous sources. If this was some sort of manifest reversal of said abuse, I could maybe understand. But that's not what this was. It was a partisan choice to "out" him in a direct or incidental attempt to cancel/silence him.
They hold absolute secrecy for other sources that seek anonymity. (Or, in some cases, when revelation of that source wouldn't be a good look for their paper.) I cannot fathom any sort of ethical purpose—to their readers or to journalism—that necessitates his reveal.
Maybe you can help me understand the gymnastics of contorting ethics in such a way that this makes any logical sense, I would appreciate it. Because—from my vantage point and from innumerable other examples—the NYT has tossed every ethical framework out the window for the sake of their ego, id, wallets, power, and agenda.
They try to maintain the aire of integrity in their rapidly crumbling empire, but the emperor has no clothes. So please help me see what I'm missing.
I honestly don't know all of the ethical commitments that the NYT has made. But I'm assuming that they are at least broadly following some standard of journalistic ethics [1]. I believe that journalistic ethics are a fairly standard part of journalism school, and that many of the reporters at the NYT have been exposed to them.
As far as the NYT abusing their sources for the last few years, well, I could easily believe that it's true. But I think that it was clear from the context that I was speaking specifically about the current SSC controversy.
As far as doxing Scott, I agree that it was the wrong thing to do. Also, as Scott himself often discusses, it's important and worth while to try to understand the other side. For example, the New Statesman wrote about Scott's doxxing [2] earlier. It at least considers the possibility that the NYT has a reason for doxxing Scott, that they have a reason for their policies regarding anonymous sources.
It's certainly possible that the NYT is simply a bunch of slavering monsters who, as you wrote "tossed every ethical framework out the window for the sake of their ego, id, wallets, power, and agenda." But I'd bet that there was a fair bit of internal discussion over the issue. I'm willing to give them at least some credit, even if I disagree with their conclusions.
> I honestly don't know all of the ethical commitments that the NYT has made. But I'm assuming that they are at least broadly following some standard of journalistic ethics [1]. I believe that journalistic ethics are a fairly standard part of journalism school, and that many of the reporters at the NYT have been exposed to them.
I understand you aren't sure what they've enumerated for themselves. The point is that they don't follow most of the most obvious standards one could conceive on a whim. If one had no formal knowledge of ethics, but chose to engage in a quick thought experiment in which one identifies "the basis of communicating truth", the NYT (currently) do not adhere to practically any beyond "factual".
Let's say they follow the generalizations in your wikipedia link:
> ...most share common elements including the principles of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness, and public accountability.
Abject failure on:
- accuracy
- objectivity
- impartiality
And just a bit further down:
> ...the ethics of journalism include the principle of "limitation of harm." This may involve the withholding of certain details from reports, such as... information not materially related to the news report where the release of such information might, for example, harm someone's reputation.
Well the NYT article is an absolute rejection of this principal. (Not that you disagree.)
I'm not sure what ethical standards you do think they follow, but whatever conversation they had about whether to reveal his name (or the ethics of the article at large) clearly didn't emphasize honorable intent in good faith.
The most generous interpretation I can muster for their ethics revolves around some notion of, "for the greater good." But history is pretty clear that's an invariably evil form of ethics.
I have no doubt they think they're doing "good", but their rejection of objective standards puts them in the camp of "partisan propaganda", far away from "journalism".
Editors and reporters have to reflect their audience and given them something at least somewhat relatable.
I would be careful though: we could also describe a meta-meta-perspective, where you recognize the dangerous seductiveness of thinking yourself one level of abstraction higher than others. But then that leads to an infinite recursion...
This perspective is what high end journalism like the NYT should be, but clearly isn't. I think that part of why the NYT has it in for Scott Alexander is because they know he is light years better than them.
If they used crumb rubber asphalt hybrid, it wouldn't be a problem, but the fucking unions lobbied and blocked it. I cant find that source but recall it was a story on the news years ago in Chicago. Unions said if that was used, they'd be out of jobs becuase roads would last longer... yeah.
If you think that a lightweight drone will give just as much wind power as a heavy helicopter, you need to think about F=MA a bit. The weight of the pilot (and supporting systems) act as balast against which the "fan" can push. Otherwise the fan would accelerate into the sky. More ballast = bigger fan, and a huuuuge fan is way better than a small fan given the problem at hand.
For short flights, I do not mind the development of "standing seats." Airline margins will remain razor thin and the savings will be passed to the subset of customers who choose to be more cramped. There WILL continue to be "premium economy" or similar for those who choose it, that is undoubtable.
If the price sensitivity tradeoff of customers ultimately dictates that these standing seats do not gain adoption, I would not be surprised.
History has shown that customers want cheap flights more than they want comfort, but complaining all the while.
I don't believe that "customers want cheap flights more than they want comfort".
Really customers have about as much choice in the comfort of a flight as they do in the cost of health care services.
For years it has been "pay 4 times as much as economy or suffer", in the last ten years they've introduced "basic economy" which at least is realistic.
I might rather fly in a widebody on a domestic flight but I don't get the choice. One reason you hate to fly is that you hate to fly in a 737 (or A320) and you never get to fly in anything else so you just don't know it could be better (at a lower cost per seat mile!) in an A220 or E195.
Tell me by what means I can "vote with my dollars". Is there a travel site where I can sort flights by seat pitch?
I see options to sort by price, by airline, by number of minutes in the air, or by number of transfers, but I've never seen the option to sort by seat pitch. Half the time, it's nearly impossible to even figure out what kind of aircraft it will be.
I choose by price because it's the most relevant of the limited and mostly useless options that we're given.
Personal space is a competitive advantage. Hotels get this. The website for the nearest hotel to me has a top-level "ROOMS" page, with photographs and square footage of every room. I will pay a little more because I know what I'm getting. With air travel, I have no way of knowing which flight will pack me in like a sardine, so I might as well save the money and spend it on a hot meal at the end to recover.
I've been trying to vote with my dollars for a long time. The problem is that what used to be economy is now premium and it costs twice what the current economy seats cost. There is no gradient, it's cattle class or $$$$$
This is a naive comment. The airline industry is hardly competitive. You do realize the issue is the limits on gates. Please visit Canada and our shitty airline and telecom monopoly/oligopoly to understand how airlines can lower service, make money and pass almost nothing back to customers.
Yeah, but it “solves” it at a monetary and privacy cost (albeit relatively small for the former).
It bothers me that we tolerate various personal possessions (in this instance privacy) being taken away and then given back, generously (/s), for a small fee. I would rather be groped and spoken down to then hand more information/money over to another poorly-managed organization.
Moreover, the Airline-Security group has always been reactive rather than proactive. I don’t see how TSA pre-check prevents anything in the first place. What’s to stop someone from deciding at some point after the Pre-Check process that they want to create havoc on a flight? Nothing. Then we’ll have Super-Pre-Check, for only $190 and this time you “only have to” give a DNA swab. Sorry for the cynicism, etc, but I doubt I’m alone in calling the whole thing a facade.
Anyway, I forgot my initial point, but there’s my rant.
No it doesn't. If the precheck lanes are closed you get to go through the regular line first. That's it. Add to that, there is no evidence to show that our intrusive security is any better than the former metal detectors that existed prior. Flying is needlessly impacted. It's theater as it's trivially easy to bypass most security measures in place and get weapons on board all you want. The best security measure that was implemented was locking the cockpit during flight. It's the only one that made any real improvement in security and it cost nothing.
I'm fine with paying a bit extra for more comfort and better service on a flight, but anything short of double the cost of the cheapest coach-class ticket never seems to get me that.
Soon after the 2008 financial crisis I flew from Ithaca NY to Washington DC multiple times for about $100.
These flights went through what is now American's hub in Philly.
I thought, gee, I'd like to take my son to Philly but then I found they charged $400 for the flight from ITH to PHL.
When the pricing obviously is disjoint from the cost to provide the service, the airline industry just can't expect us to take anything they say about pricing and service seriously. It's just like it is with these pharmacy benefit managers.
>For short flights, I do not mind the development of "standing seats."
There are always those customers who would be willing to sit in the luggage hold or lay in the overhead bin or hang onto the wing to save $10.
But these new seating choices remind me of my train travel through Poland in the late 70's on my way to the USSR. I bought a first class ticket to Ukraine from Warsaw and when it pulled into the station there were people climbing through windows while folks used the doors to exit. By the time I got to my 1st class cabin there were about 15 people in there (seating for 6 comfortably). I had to stand in the aisle for about 8 hours overnight hanging on. Good Times...Good Times....LOL...
We need hyperloop to work and national high speed rail to offer alternatives and competition. I do a 2 hour flight, about 1000 miles for work once or twice a quarter, I’d seriously consider a 4-6 hour train ride if the experience was better. Rather than paying extra to carry my bag on, I wouldn’t mind paying extra for a proper meal and some comfortable work space. And if they streamlined the security process the time difference would be that much smaller.
Do you have TSA Pre? Security normally takes me about 5-10 minutes. I do prefer the experience taking the train but there's only about one destination a few hundred miles away where it makes sense.
So the solution to you is that citizens should pay for the privilege of giving up their right to privacy so that the government can pretend it's doing something more than it was before. What does pre check do that they didn't already know? It's frankly mind boggling that people aren't up in arms over how plainly silly the idea that the TSA makes you safer than it was too fly before. It's the same people with more toys, less training, and more stress. The solution is to make the security meet the actual risk. Current airport security is more about making money than it is about security.
Apparently they have over 180 million passengers a year[0]. That means that, at most, they're making $7 per passenger. It's not like they're gouging their customers.
It doesn't mean that aren't stuck in vicious circles.
For instance, Boeing has dumped 737 MAX planes (and duped regulators, endangered passengers, ...) to fight off advanced competitors such as the A220 and Gen2 E195.
Smaller less-capitalized companies have done the right thing and embraced innovation, somehow Boeing decided that international widebody passengers deserve better planes but that narrowbody passengers should suffer and that neoliberals will parrot that "there is no alternative".
Modern airliners can be smaller than the 737 bit have much better passenger comfort and lower seat-mile costs. Boeing has to let up on the anti-competitive behavior for that to happen.
with revenue in the same year of $44b, this is pretty much the average profit margin for an american business. I'm not sure which direction you're trying to argue here.
If I were a mid-level manager at Epic, I wonder how I would handle internal politics at this time. So many competing objectives...
1. Focus on producing novel content to keep the game interesting, mixing things up enough over weeks/months, but without killing the core mechanics.
2. Hire lots of new employees, all while knowing that the popularity bubble may burst and they may need to be laid off in the near future.
3. Give bonuses to my employees, who are working their tails off, to prevent resentment. Especially in the over-worked video game industry.
4. Acknowledge that this lucky streak is unrepeatable, and that if the game falls out of popularity, there is likely no one to blame. But when it happens, the demoralization will hit hard and the layoffs are inevitable.
5. All this, while the company reaps huge profits.
> Give bonuses to my employees, who are working their tails off, to prevent resentment. Especially in the over-worked video game industry.
Hah.
I've know a few people on break-away titles(on the level of fortnight for an era) in my time in that industry. In most of those cases the employer or publisher had slipped in some sort of cap in royalties on a per-employee basis. So while their % cut of royalties was in the 7-figures they never saw anything above 6-figures.
Kudos on you for thinking this way but I'd be surprised if most of the people working on Fortnight are seeing more than mid FAANG compensation.
Mid FAANG level compensation goes a lot further in Cary, NC than it does in the Bay Area though. If bonuses are 3-4x salary like mentioned in the article, then most employees are making more than they would for an equivalent role at FAANG (baring stock anomalies). According to glass door senior software engineers at Epic make around ~$150K. Three to four times that is $450K-$600K, which is higher than the equivalent at FAANG according to level.fyi (L5 at Google and E5 at FB make ~$350K). This isn't justifying crunch so much as it's pointing out that Epic games seems to be paying out bonuses that are on another level. I've worked on break-away game titles and currently work at FAANG so I generally agree with you and have points of reference.
I remote for Amazon (as part of twitch but know other amazon remotes) but from my experience when other FAANG recruiters cold call me remote at those companies is discouraged. Amazon pays based on regions so my salary does not match what the ancestor post claims but would if I lived in the Bay Area.
Total comp yup, but guess what.. if you are senior at a non faang company you will not be a senior at a faang company, likely L4. Even then your TC will be ~250 at the right company
4a. Acknowledge that some companies have too many "lucky streaks" for them to be "lucky streaks" (e.g. Pixar, Valve, Nintendo, etc.). Attempt to build a work environment conducive to great creative work such that if there's any way to make this kind of success repeatable, at least we're putting the chances on our side.
Valve does not belong in that list. They got their lucky streak and used it to buy themselves a work environment where nobody has to be accountable to anyone in order to stay profitable. Productivity is optional at Valve. Take Steam or leave it, they don't need to make titles anymore.
I think that this problem, that you fear will cause no local reporting to happen, will cause local reporting to still happen. It's just that the local reporting will be poor quality.
I'm having a hard time confirming it (can't find the original paper w/o a link), but you are probably referring to mechanical stress instead of fluid pressure.
if you hang a tensile load of 1000 Newtons from a 1mm x 1mm rod, the rod is under 1 GPa of stress.
This is all I saw to address the pressures required:
> Our higher operating pressures do not represent a barrier for applications because they can be generated by a small load in a large volume of material via a pressure-transmitting medium, e.g., using a vessel with a neck containing a driving piston, whose small area is compensated by its distance of travel.
A few thoughts after reading this as a mechanical engineer:
1. My understanding: this material relies on mechanical work (force x distance = work energy) to add energy to the material by compressing (or tensioning, or "magnetically stressing", which I don't understand) it. Some fraction of this energy is converted phase transitions which absorb heat, and some fraction is retained as spring potential energy. If the material is then heated by ambient air, and then the material is allowed to expand, it will now be at a temperature above the ambient temperature at the start of the cycle. In this way it is similar to a standard refrigeration cycle- just without pipes.
2. The cycle described in point 1 is not particularly unique to this material. You could do a similar process with any mechanical spring (google "rubber band heat engine"), and achieve similar results. This material is likely uniquely well suited to this application because it has usefully large amounts of heat associated with phase transitions at temperatures that correspond well with the temperatures used in a refrigeration cycle.
3. You want the material to dump heat to a hot reservoir while hot and suck heat from a cold reservoir while cold. Standard, fluid based refrigeration cycles do this by pumping the refrigerant to different locations (the condensor and evaporator). (I am assuming) This process would have to open and close dampers to get the hot reservoir air and the cold reservoir air to flow across the material; otherwise you have to move the material between the two locations. Both of these sound expensive/tricky to me.
4. A large challenge here is creating an electrical actuator that can compress the material. It would the following design objectives/constraints:
4a. The material should be shaped into long, narrow rods, or another shape with a large surface area, to be ideal for maximum heat transfer with the air of the hot and cold reservoirs.
4b. The actuator must recover the work energy provided when the material is allowed to expand.
4c. The actuator will have a very short stroke (solids do not compress very far), and large force.
4d. The actuator must last many thousands or millions of cycles without wearing out.
5. This style of refrigeration does not have any higher theoretical or actual efficiency than a fluids-based cycle. However, refrigerants have historically been environmentally damaging when released to the atmosphere. R-12 kills ozone, and is obselete/ outlawed. R-134a is currently in a lot of new systems, there are also newer refrigerants being put into new cars. The only thing particularly bad about R-134a is that 1 kg of R-134a equals several thousand kg's of CO2 in terms of global warming effect.
I have a couple of thoughts on how this material might be able to be used - but I'm not a mechanical engineer, so what I mention might be (probably is) worthless:
1. Mechanical compression using hydraulic fluid and electric pumps?
2. Could the hydraulic fluid be used as the heat transference mechanism?
3. Could this material be used in a liquid Sterling cycle pump?
I'm thinking a combination of these might be the answer; the material at one end of a closed cylinder with a piston compressing hydraulic fluid, and the reciprocating motion through some means (and the hydraulic fluid) moving the heat from the material one end to the other end of the cylinder (where it could be dumped).
Yeah, I read another article about this material a few days ago and I was trying to figure out how exactly to handle actually moving the heat. Easy to do with a liquid, you can pump it fairly easily and piping can be pretty flexible with routing. Maybe some sort of rotating disk design, with rods rotating from cold zone to hot zone and static blowers in each zone?
I like that design idea for the rotating disc. It makes me wonder the best way to stress the material while on the "compressed side."
1. Make the edge of the disc rub against a low friction, spring-loaded compressing element (similar to commutator brushes, but designed to really transfer a large load). This is probably infeasible because friction would eat more energy than your cycle would move.
2. Have electric actuators that are mounted on the disk itself. These would have to be powered by slip rings via the shaft. These would be active for half of the cycle and inactive for the other half. Not sure whether they should be radial, azimuthal, or axial mounted. Seems kludgey.
3. Have the disk pass through a magnetic field, exploiting the magnetic effects the article mentions. I have no idea of any of the implementation details of this, but it sounds like a better idea than 1 or 2...
Put a heat sink on the outside and a water cycle on the inside of the pump.
If you want to cool, you pump heat outside by stopping the water cycle when the material is cold, thus allowing the water to dump it's heat into it.
If you want to heat, you pump heat inside by stopping the water cycle when the material is hot, thus allowing the water to absorb the heat from the material.
You can increase the efficiency of this by having more water touch bot the inside and outside phases (increase material surface area in contact with water and increase surface area of water cycle heatsink).
If you want to allow sub-zero temperatures, add anti-freeze to the water.
Piezo crystals can produce electricity in response to mechanical stress; this material can produce temperature differentials in response to mechanical stress. In that regard GP's analogy holds.
I really like this snippet. Captures an idea I hadn't ever been able to put into words before.