niknoble
5mo ago
Fair enough from a site rules standpoint, but I stand by this purely from a standpoint of "how confident can we be in these claims." Imagine that someone posts a claim that some celebrity got divorced, and it goes uncontradicted for a significant period of time on a site where people are active and diligent. At that point, I would be willing to bet a decent amount of money that the celebrity actually did get divorced. Whether the claim is inflammatory doesn't hugely change how much I would bet, although if anything I would bet more on an inflammatory claim since there would be greater incentive for people to challenge it if it were false.
niknoble
5mo ago
I would argue that for claims that are highly specific and falsifiable, the need for evidence is pretty low, because the absence of any debunking in the replies is itself very strong evidence.
niknoble
5mo ago
they're insulated from consequences in a way that warps their minds.
They frequently don't even realize what is realistic or not. I was talking about burnout once with one of them, and he gave me his sure-fire stress solution: just take a year off and go to Europe. I didn't have the heart to tell him that even if I could afford to take a whole year off work and start the job hunt when I got back, I still didn't have a family chalet that I could use rent free during my visit.
I know you're talking about specific people who've inherited their money, so I'm not calling your post wrong, but I've noticed that rich people very often have this kind of breezy, spontaneous, ultra-low-anxiety personality even before they get rich, or during periods of time when they're poor.
This attitude seeps through Musk's biography in a way that's impossible to miss. You see it in him at all stages of his life, like when he is couch surfing after arriving in the U.S. with very little money and a strained relationship with his family back home. You see it in his ancestors, his college roommates, and his early business partners, many of whom were undistinguished at first but slowly rose to eminence.
In my own life, I've found that you eventually get to a level in the startup scene where you're surrounded by these kinds of elites at company events, and everyone's backstory is like they studied Korean language in college, circumnavigated the globe on a cheap boat, and then started a rodeo business before discovering a passion for databases--and you feel distinctly out of place if your reaction to "spend a year in a foreign country with no money" is an anxious, "well obviously I can't do that."
Of course, it's also true that one strengthens this "everything will work out" attitude through collecting repeated evidence that it actually does, and that requires high and consistent competence. So I remain a bit torn on whether success or confidence comes first.
niknoble
5mo ago
I'm very doubtful that a natural superiority argument can justify the status of children in our culture.
Pick a quantifiable intellectual ability, and ask who scores higher...
- The median 15-year-old or the median 70-year-old?
- The median 15-year-old or the median adult woman?
- The median 15-year-old or the median adult black person?
Maybe the adult scores higher, but is it obvious? Can you tell without looking it up? It should be obvious, given that the difference in treatment between the adult and the kid is so extreme. The adults in these examples are full citizens and the 15-year-old has the legal status of a toddler.
niknoble
6mo ago
One question I've had throughout the ICE saga is why arresting illegals is even necessary. It seems like it would be easier to just cut off their access to American resources. For example, require employers, landlords, DMV, doctors, insurance providers, etc. to verify immigration status, and make a strong example of the first ones that don't. Then the country becomes like a desert to illegals and they just go home on their own. This would also hugely reduce the need for border security.
I guess part of the reason this isn't being done is that some of it would require changes to the law, which Trump can't implement on his own. But at least with employers, they're already legally obligated to check work authorization, so why isn't Trump just aggressively enforcing that law?
Is there a reason I'm missing why this kind of approach wouldn't work? Or, does Trump not really want to deport all illegals?
I read "I'm jealous of China" here as just a rhetorical flourish meaning "we should be more like China." I don't think this means OP is being driven by the emotion of envy, at least not any more than a person who cites Europe as an example of good healthcare.
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