Will Lowe

Huh. 'Water' not a rigid designator after all.

The first bit seems correct but imho also desirable because we _should_ be subsidizing an urban public transport-using lifestyle that attracts (and generates more) young people. For a truly unwise lifestyle subsidy, there's the Pendlerpauschale.

I guess if I wanted

"in the name of (progress as a historical norm)"

I would have said

"im Namen des (Fortschritts als historischer Norm)"

or some other compression, so I read it the other way as

im Namen des Fortschritts (als einer historischen Norm)

but this is kind of vibes tbh 🤷🏻

Not a real German, but I don't think they 'counter' it at all. They encounter it, meet it, or (mildly stronger) confront it as a historical norm. The translation's 'treat as' seems loose but reasonable to me.

(That said, first time around I had 'it' as the SOE, so my translation can't be trusted)

afaik RStudio (Posit, whatever) came out of, and remains headquartered in Boston. And while I've not had the pleasure myself, I find that opinions on whether Kubernetes is evil tend to depend on whether the haver has had to use it much 😉

Ha. We probably should. I certainly got through without one.

Well, gosh, that sounds... uncomfortable.
[backs away slowly]

Corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture. But they are indiscernable, so by Mr Leibniz's famous principle... they're the same picture.

Clarke for the Serum

Uniteds Refriended

Oh, no problem. It made for some interesting web searches.

I have no idea what those are, but... you're welcome!

"The most interesting man in the world"

The first part probably explains my excessive and unironic fondness for this inspired product of a corporate marketing department. I still think it gets something important very right.

This is quite excellent (HT @economeager.bsky.social)

Part of what makes it excellent is that it could as well be titled "How do I?" because it's about being just a _little_ more deliberate about the task of being in the world.

"The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6 months, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/" - @mims.bsky.social

My takeway is that The US has gone ALL IN BET OF THE 21st Century on AI, while China has gone all in on green tech

a.k.a. "on the pull". English really can't keep its metaphors straight.

The thought of [sociology] is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Concretely it seems better to focus on the mechanics of influence - what would actually be effective? how would I tell? what might also happen? - than try to locate the boundary between things that are totally my problem and things that are totally not. imho that's asking for trouble.

One foundational set of objections to this kind of control principle would be the problem of 'moral luck' plato.stanford.edu/entries/mora... but there are more mundane concerns >

There is! And while that means a binary control concept won't work - some things are more controllable than others, some are more controllable only if others are left uncontrolled, etc (tbf the Stoic's 'assent' _isn't_ like this) - it's the tight connection to responsibility that's more ambiguous >

"Take responsibility for what you can control" is one of those ideas that sounds commonsensical and unambiguously ethical, but... isn't.

Exactly what a small gamete would say about a large gamete 🙄😁

This is a variation of on the Wikipedia Credence rule: Trust Wikipedia entries in proportion to how boring the subject matter is considered by the general reader.

This suggests a tip for the discerning consumer of pop sci (and yes, there are plenty): make the probability of reading about a topic inversely proportional to its commercialisation potential.

Psychology: mostly out.
Physical sciences, biology of plants & non-human undomesticated animals: mostly in

And more generally, variation in US college's 'breadth requirements' ought to give an interested social scientists plenty to work with.

If we were to think of 'treatment' as continuous, say proportion/probability of classes on each 'side', then Mudd's STEM majors and Caltech's socsci and humanities majors would be _very_ informative folk in any regression discontinuity design.

And as Cameron notes below, there's a pretty severe SUTVA problem as the take is usually expressed. I really don't know how to compare the 'treatment' my philosophy cohort got to those of the art historians!

Err, no? I mean the obvious implication is that people in the humanities/socsci would have been worse without and those in STEM would have been better with whatever 'treatment' we're imagining.

Some of that is (beliefs about) variation across interlocutors. If there isn't much variety (say you're institutionalized, e.g. in school or very online), or there is but you don't know (or perhaps care) then you'll assume common context, not worry how stuff will land, and fire on all cylinders.

I picture the plumber opening the cupboard below your suddenly non-working sink and saying "That's your problem right there, mate. Flageolets, innit?"