So many intellectuals that appear to dedicate their lives to developing coherent and consistent models of how to think and how to act in this world, who nonetheless decided that conversing with a known child rapist is A-OK.
The only people I've seen who have come out ahead morally are Nassim Taleb and Norman Finkelstein.
People have personae. They can have good and bad sides. On the evening news parents or neighbors will often say “he seemed like a nice kid; I never saw him do anything bad.” About some kid (or older adult) now being involved in some crime.
Don’t make heroes out of people. Many have significant flaws, even unforgivable flaws.
Something I think we should teach ourselves to do is never believe we know someone until we see their character tested. It's very easy to present as having good character under typical circumstances, but much harder when you're pressured by stress, duress, lust, impulse, or other forces. A good measure of someone's character is how they respond to these things, not only how they function in ideal circumstances.
Of course, there are more common measures like how they treat people they don't necessarily need to respect, but even that can be conjured on demand according to situational needs by cunning people. Getting to know people and drawing conclusions about them should be a longer process than it tends to be.
Money and sycophancy also corrupt behavior. Another measure of character, is the response to being broke.
In any case Bill Cosby on TV was a good role model -in life, out of the public eye, he was a bad dude who drugged and SA'd victims. The public has little chance to "know" him. One might hear rumors but one needs factual info to make judgements.
> On the evening news parents or neighbors will often say “he seemed like a nice kid; I never saw him do anything bad.”
If you're ever interviewed by the news, you have a moral imperitive to say "They were always such a good kid. I would have never suspected this." regardless of if you know the kid, or you would have suspected it. A) who needs reporters in neighborhoods digging up dirt like this. B) if it were you, or your kids, you'd want people to say the same thing for you.
Well, when I hear "people have personae" I'd imagine something like "This person is an esteemed professor at MIT but he's also a regular in erotic fanfiction forum," not "he's friends with a child sex trafficker."
With some experience you start getting the hand of how big a task you can hand off, and then you give the agent a way to test the changes, like using a browser and checking for a component, or adding unit tests for the backend.
Having a tight feedback loop for agents is critical for getting good output.
You need to understand more of basic physics and thermodynamics. Fighting thermodynamics is a losing race by every measure of what we understand of the physical world.
This isn't the flex you think it is. You're really illustrating my point... being able to understand context and make inferences is part of basic literacy skills
This website has no more than a year in video presence in Youtube. It talks exclusively about Iran-only affairs that are of interest for foreigners. [It was started in 2017 and is mostly funded by Saudi money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_International).
Sorry but we're going to need a more credible source than a propaganda site.
Yes, they are very obviously suggesting it didn't happen. I have no idea why certain people on the left want to ignore what is happening on Iran, and even pretend like nothing problematic is happening in Iran.
Nobody’s saying nothing problematic is happening in Iran.
What I’m saying is that a lot of people are extremely interested in seeing Iran fall and that Western media paid by Saudi Arabia has exactly zero credibility. So get better sources, that’s all.
I guess I thought that would be a good thing? Like shouldn't we be measured and critical? Check our sources? Recognize at least the possibility of being fooled?
I think we should always default to skepticism no matter our priors, even if that ends up being wrong, its not a fruitless position compared to the alternative.
yes, I think it's because HN users think that politics are comparable to systems design, and its not. Politics is very complex and a lot of non-rational things are done and rationalized later.
You're the one making a political argument by doing a whataboutism that attempts to negate the failings of this administration. Which you're not even doing correctly because by every measure the previous administration was drastically more competent by looking at the qualifications of the people who filled their posts.
Can you explain how leaking the phone metadata of 80% of Americans and compromising the integrity of the 2024 election campaign's private comms is better OpSec than a single leak?
It's the worst U.S. government leak of all time, by far.
Is your position that the 2024 election, despite having a foreign power intercept the phone communications of both campaigns (confirmed and on record), had no integrity compromises?
What do you consider a compromise of integrity if not a hacking of political campaigns?
Also, please clarify whether the 2016 DNC hack is an exemption to your prior answer so I can weigh your bias.
Why don't you enlighten us since you seem to know so much about the topic?
I know that none of the people who are experts at detecting the statistical artifacts that appears during voting roll have questioned the integrity of the US election.
In fact the only people questioning it are conspirancy-minded people who don't know that there are robust methodologies to detect election fraud.
What do you think of https://electiontruthalliance.org/ ? I haven’t deeply read their stuff, and I’m not really qualified to evaluate their statistics, but it seems like there are concerns worth following.
Being at an event with racists does not make you a racist. That would tar the entire Israeli parliament and anyone who currently works in the White House.
Can you point to anything Sultana has said which you think is beyond the pale? - a direct quote rather than indirect smears. As gross as it was, the grooming gangs stuff has been used by the right wing press to smear the entire immigrant population. The vast majority of abuse happens by people the child knows. I think reporting which distorts that -is- a smear, no matter how incompetent, misguided or corrupt the police response to what went on in Rotherham and elsewhere.
It will be driven down to the cost of having a good project and product manager effectively understanding what the customer wants, which has been the main barrier to excellent software for a good long time.
And not only understanding what the customer wants, but communicating that unambiguously to the AI. And note who is the "customer" here? Is it the end-users, or is it a client-company which contracts the project-manager for this task? But then the issue is still there, who in the client-company decides exactly what is needed and what the (potential) users want?
I think this situation emphasizes the importance of (something like) Agile. To produce something useful can only happen via experimentation and getting feedback from actual users, and re-iterating relentlessly.
So many intellectuals that appear to dedicate their lives to developing coherent and consistent models of how to think and how to act in this world, who nonetheless decided that conversing with a known child rapist is A-OK.
The only people I've seen who have come out ahead morally are Nassim Taleb and Norman Finkelstein.
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