I think there are two unethical aspects to this: Firstly, less money spent will harm the economy, and, secondly, if lots of people do it, the system will adjust to lower salaries until it is not feasible anymore, i.e. this cheatcode depends on most other people still working their entire lives and constantly spending lots of their incomes.
If you're able to live with a lower consumption you should not increase it just to "not harm the economy". On the contrary I would find it unethical to increase your consumption beyond your need.
To your second point, I don't find it compelling either. First off, the FIRE way requires some amount of restraint and discipline - in many ways it's like dieting. It's good for you, but that doesn't mean people will do it - it will continue to be only a subset of people. Secondly, how would the system would adjust? What would be the driver for lower wages? The method is basically to save and invest half your income - that doesn't depend on your income. The people are still equally skilled, working equally hard during their working years. The output at their work while they work remains unchanged.
If anything it might drive wages _up_, as people would require increasingly higher compensation to stay at work, if the alternative is to live happily and safely without working.
No because instead of retiring at 60-70 and having a 40+ year career, you have a <20 year career, so twice as many people can get a bite at your career cherry, rather than subjecting half the population to under employment, low pay etc.
Plus large percentages of the population living in debt, and paycheque to paycheque isn't particularly sustainable. So everyone having lots of savings would add stability.
Just because money isn't spent on BS doesn't mean it's not active in the economy. Savers end up lending money to others who deploy it usefully as capital.
Either it's a flaw in the engineers (lack of social skills to admit a mistake accurately) or in the working climate (fear of unreasonable repercussion make the engineers defer disclosure of failure). I'm undecided. Eitherway it seemed surprisingly inefficient way of communicating.
Most normal people decide at some point that math is not for them in order not to embarrass themselves by claiming competence in a domain in which they are not confident at all. And hence, compared to nerds or seriously talented individuals who can confidently claim this status, they never spend much time on math and eventually seriously lack skills even in simple logical reasoning. This is basically math anxiety. Nerds, on the other hand, are incentivized to gain social status via math skills as a potential escape of their low status. I think this mainly explains the author's observations that these two skills are not correlated very much, basically an introversion vs extroversion polarization based on social expectations and incentives. Math is also intimidating, so I'd imagine someone with some experience in it also develops overall higher inhibition and hence is a worse verbalizer.
There is a huge literature on the relation between logical reasoning and verbalizing, which the author sadly ignores.
>Nerds, on the other hand, are incentivized to gain social status via math skills as a potential escape of their low status.
This is certainly not how I approached math, and it's the first I've heard anyone say it, even.
Instead, I'm good at math because I enjoyed it. It's simple and logical and my mind worked really well in that way. There was never anything standing in my way of learning math, so I always just picked up any new math easily. Later, because I was already so good at math (and so many people were bad at it) I sought out more math courses as a way for more easy A grades.
Never was it a conscious effort to set up my career or social status.
Some individuals are perhaps purely intrinsicly motivated, but I think it's a very tiny minority. I also think there is a good chance that intrinsic motivation itself is a status enhancing adaptation, evolved by runaway selection. So ultimately, you are executing this adaptation whether you want or not, much like this fish carefully creating beautiful patterns in the sand, not knowing why he is doing it. It's all about sex.
But they do get status. With their teachers. With their parents. And, probably the most important, with their peers, aka other nerds.
Damn I'd even expect most "cool kids" having more respect for someone better at math (all else being equal), even if their social context won't allow them to show this in any form.
Being good at math got me some "kudos" occasionally, but nothing like being good at almost anything else. Art (music, writing, singing) was way better to be good at. Even other nerdy things like spelling bees and programmer got way more acclaim than math.
Math, instead, got mostly derision from other kids and little to no respect from teachers or parents. No, "cool kids" never had even an ounce of respect for math nerds. If they secretly had any respect for them, they certainly never showed it.
And what's the point of trying to gain respect that nobody expresses? It's certainly not something that would be worth pursuing just to get that respect.
>Long-term planning/deferred gratification. You were setting up a career as a source of status later in life.
It sounds like you're tying yourself up in knots to explain something that everybody already understands. Math is intrinsically fun, but only if you can cut through the ruinously bad educational system and the difficulty of getting started.
To put it quite frankly, your position is entirely wrong, and you are doubling down on an even weirder position. I also have never even heard of someone just pursuing math "to get acceptance as a nerd".
Being good at math gives you no status in life. People are proudly anti-intellectual when it comes to math, so the most you'll get if you're quite good at at math is "oh wow, that's cool. next topic". People who really like math, simply like math, despite it not winning them any social favors for the most part.
Mathematics is quite interesting and beautiful in its own way, so for you to say it's mostly "out of wanting to escape their low status" is both rude and uninformed.
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Also, it's true that quitting doesn't do you any favors, but people quit things all the time. Especially math. Or new years resolutions. It's definitely not a tenable argument as to why people would stick with math.
Obviously, you're only saying that to get laid, so who can trust you?
You could just as well argue we're all paper-clip maximizers, and simply interpret any evidence to the contrary as short-sighted. The only sense in which you can reduce everything humans do to sex is in the irrelevant and unfalsifiable sense.
Because sex is a short-term goal, and the more heavily you optimize for it, the less you'll optimize for being accountable to the long term side-effects of dishonesty.
You risk getting bad reputation if you don't care about your offspring and social environment. People care about their reputation to be socially included (because that enables access to sex, among other reward signals of course, but sex is the strongest).
People could take vows of celibacy, and you'd probably just say they were really, deep down, only doing it to have more sex. And I'll certainly call you a liar, if only because you are so willing to brand everyone else with that label.
Our brains evolved to make decisions. Yes, they were constrained by a need to survive and reproduce. But those two goals are not the same thing. And the existence of those constraints does not actually preclude any other mode of operation.
You're being absurdly reductive when you conflate any motivation with a need to reproduce.
I think it's accurate. There is no doubt about it. I also don't see that there is anything is wrong with it. I think you have simply internalized modesty memes, but that ultimately makes you ignore fundamental motivations which in turn leads to dysregulation.
That's why we invented birth control. So we could be better at reproducing. When human decision making and the need to reproduce come head-to-head, reproduction is always the motivation, even if it results in less reproduction.
This is why your argument is nonsense. You're basically trying to define everything as sex. You're playing a silly word game so you can feel smug about this directionless and immature insight.
The video walks through interesting uses of ML in industry (mostly outside normal FAANG applications like optimizing your news feed) e.g
- precision farming
- blood delivery using drones
- monitoring construction sites
- writing more diversity-friendly job descriptions
- collecting relevant legal documents
Speaker also argues that we should focus on leveraging ML-human collaboration to surpass human performance, instead of falling into a "robots will replace us" narrative
> Speaker also argues that we should focus on leveraging ML-human collaboration to surpass human performance, instead of falling into a "robots will replace us" narrative
I didn't watch the full video, so I am only responding to your summary. These kinds of sentiments, where technologists profess that technology will always make everything OK, while not at all addressing how our current economic system will fail large swaths of our society if automation comes to fruition (beyond "new jobs will come up!" or "ignore the luddites!") strikes me entirely as a "Let them eat cake" attitude.
Here's a thought experiment: What would happen if, by the end of 2019, true, 100% self-driving cars became a reality. I know this is not going to happen, but it no longer seems a far-fetched fantasy. In the US, driving is the number one job for the majority of states. What are all of these people supposed to do, become self-driving car programmers?
I am a big believer in technology but I am very worried for the future of society.
> Here's a thought experiment: What would happen if, by the end of 2019, true, 100% self-driving cars became a reality. I know this is not going to happen, but it no longer seems a far-fetched fantasy. In the US, driving is the number one job for the majority of states. What are all of these people supposed to do, become self-driving car programmers?
In the "let them eat cake" scenario, those people will have plenty of free time to stage a revolution and take their piece of the cake by force. Below the threshold of civil war, you get a Wild West where armed bandits hold up trains of self-driving trucks and loot them, creating a thriving job market for security guards protecting the trucks.
Of course both of those scenarios are highly undesirable, so it's more likely that some kind of tax will be introduced to take automating jobs from extremely profitable to barely profitable, with the proceeds used to pay for unemployment benefits and retraining for the displaced workers. (With the amount of retraining depending on how many other jobs haven't been automated yet.)
That said, some people are going to see their standard of living decrease without any way to escape. Such people have existed since forever, and they usually end up homeless if not dead. Automation doesn't create any new problems in that regard, it just makes them large enough that they can no longer be ignored easily.
If i were to play the devil's advocate, these "Skilled" jobs have always been on the line. Look at what Uber and Lyft have done to F.T. cab drivers in all major U.S. cities. I have been using Scoop(Bay area wide Corporate Car share app). Its only a matter of time FAANG dumps their "Google bus" in favor of their employees scooping to work by incentivizing and subsidizing it. So there goes the cushy "Google bus" driver job. Not by automation but by a variation of mass transit. In such cases, the employers have to pick up the tab by offering those "skilled" workers displaced OJT/retraining and funneling them into more "non-skilled", knowledge-based jobs. It is not going to be easy and Corporate America finally has to acknowledge its Corporate responsibility. If not Mayhem will ensue and everyone stands to lose.
The video makes the argument that long haul truck driving is the job killing people most effectively. Besides fatal accidents the lack of physical activity is reducing life span. 69% type 2 obesity, 17% type 3 obesity and 27% get < 6 hour sleep. He also mentions 50 000 driver shortage
