We haven't done any of those things. No moderator touched any of those comments, let alone killed them. Also, "professional" management? Ugh.

It's difficult for me take your "deeply uncomfortable" seriously when you haven't taken any trouble to find out whether what you're saying is true. It's not like it's hard.

Edit: Also, it's disingenuous to quote that out of context to make it seem like comparing sexual harrassment to recruiter spam is completely innocuous, when everybody, including the person making that comparison, knows damn well how provocative it is.

Of course I know I'm being provocative. I'm intellectually questioning an emotional conclusion. Back in the day, HN was a good place for that.

You've created a long series of accounts to do serial ideological trolling on Hacker News over the years [1], that in turn have gotten serially banned for a long time. There's no change in policy or direction here—nor in your practice of keeping your main account studiously separate from the ones with which you stir up shit. That is not using this site in good faith. None of this is the least bit new—you're simply relying on the fact that the fair-minded users of Hacker News don't have access to all the data.

In the latest episode—this one—we learn that you're adding concern trolling to your repertoire. Your mention in another context of how this terribly-concerning "new direction" that HN is taking would never have happened under the author of "What You Can't Say" is especially rich, given that PG would have (and, as I recall, did) ban your ass hands down the fastest of any of us. It's I who have consistently been the moderator most hesitant to do that (Exhibit A, the present discussion), oh and I've been doing this job for years already, so maybe find something else to "concern" about?

You really got me with the "professional management" though.

1. Anyone with showdead turned on who'd like a glimpse of what I mean by "serial ideological trolling" is invited to peruse this eugenicist tidbit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7447575. There's a lot more where that came from.

Problem is, only 1.7% of college football players are ever going to play professional ball.

I think the % is higher, even if we're talking about practice squads.

As mentioned, the curriculum would also include tangentially related fields.

Lyft Line blows my mind. It's like a Lyft, but half price. Works great within the city.

Education can only make up for so much of a deficit in cognitive ability. We know that cognitive ability and income levels are correlated.

Correlated, sure. But you can easily argue that it's as simple as people with higher cognitive ability can figure out ways to increase their income level better than others.

Or you could argue, education is correlated with higher income, so educate people, increase their income, and hope that their abilities go up as well.

Not sure if we're disagreeing or agreeing here, but all I am saying the problem isn't always as easy as, let's just give poor people more money and education. Problem solved.

At some point we'll have to recognized these difference in people, but it's embedded deeply in our culture that everyone is created equal. Which to be honest, I love.

I wonder if we just need words/abstractions that narrowly identify some of these things.

So if we could very quickly call something an attack on in-out group psychology (you know, like aggressive branding, or professional sports, or so called amateur sports, or much of political discourse or ...), maybe it makes it easier to sway people to resist it.

I guess if you figure out the right package, you do better than when you wave your hands around and mumble incoherently.

For financing, a first step is to point out that the real cost is often hidden in the length of the contract.

We do more good for more people when our beliefs reflect reality, rather than what we wish were true. If it turns out that the cognitive science research showing that some people are smarter than others is correct we might decide that merely educating poor people will not convince them to act like less-poor people.

What will, then, beyond "merely" educating?

Chinese and Germans in the United States also do very well in the economy. Maybe there's some third factor that we're missing.

These kind of articles make the implicit assumption that countries are the same except for being located in different locations, and that successful institutions from one can be transplanted to another. But each is an organic entity, with different histories and cultures

How well do expats do in general? It seems that if you are able to afford to leave your country to work or study you are already doing quite well.

Not all expats are created equal. For example, Mexicans living in the US tend not to do so well in education or the economy, dragging a lot of US national statistics down. This is because a lot of Mexican-Americans come from lower class backgrounds and not Mexico's educated elites.

As another discussion pointed out on HN, Mexicans and poeple of lower class backgrounds will be referred to as "immigrants", while people from richer countries will be referred to as "expats".

I have started trying to swap the two around in my own language, to avoid stereotyping people based on class.

Asians and Jews beat vanilla whites at I.Q. tests, but also any other test that measures cognitive/academic ability - PISA, GRE, MCAT, LSAT, ASVAB - they're all correlated.

It is truly miraculous that racist white people managed to come up with so many tests that confirm the black/white cognitive gap while simultaneously screwing them all up and biasing them in favor of east Asians.

Charles Murray's books are all worth a read. He's likely the most meticulous data guy on the American Right.

He's a libertarian, not on "the right."

He might describe himself that way, but he advocates for socially conservative values more often than libertarians do (see "Coming Apart"). He's at least a borderline case, like a Ron Paul. AEI is a right-wing think tank.

That may be true, but "The Bell Curve" is a pretty poor book, full of questionable use of data. I wrote a fairly detailed critique of it, back in the day, which is now lost to history, but the gist was, "Murry doesn't do a very good job of making his case regarding IQ and race."

For one, "race" is a very slippery concept, and as a social construction is so deeply correlated with other determinants of well-being in the US that any imputation that it is an independent causal factor is problematic at best. Murry doesn't do a great job of untangling these effects.

For two, as applied to populations, IQ isn't necessarily more than a measure of general well-being. Alternative measures of IQ correlate pretty well with the Stanford-Binet, but you know what else does? Grip strength. The strength of your hands correlates about as well with your standard IQ score as various alternative IQ measures. The most plausible explanation for this is that all these measures are metrics of well-being, not "general intelligence".

The very notion that "general intelligence" is a measurable property, like height, rather than a complex multi-variate phenomenon that cannot be unproblematically reduced to a single number is worth taking seriously.

Murray seems mostly unconcerned by all that, and insufficiently aggressive about looking for ways of challenging his own hypotheses.

Nietzsche has interesting things about our need to tear down people who have great, unique accomplishments over common weaknesses - calling this the "slave morality". The weak need to feel superior to the great, so we redefine greatness to mean other things.

The context: slave vs. master morality. Democracy is a slave morality. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality)

Personally, I think slave moralities have much to recommend them, as movements against elite domination.

Intellectual culture has its own hype, like the computer world. Some with loudspeakers try to deify a few "great thinkers", focussing on (certain narrow aspects of) their personalities they wish others to emulate. Brushing others aside who don't fit their model, despite talent. (Like people with the wrong gender/race.)

Let's take another well-known philosopher (Chomsky), who pointed out how humanity's masters try to turn "great" figures into villains, when they act with exemplary slave morality:

"Compare Russell and Einstein, two leading figures, roughly the same generation. They agreed on the grave dangers facing humanity, but chose different ways to respond. Einstein responded by living a very comfortable life in Princeton and dedicating himself to research that he loved, taking a few moments for an occasional oracular statement. Russell responded by leading demonstrations and getting himself dragged off by the cops, writing extensively on the problems of the day, organizing war crimes trials, etc. The result? Russell was and is reviled and condemned, Einstein is admired as a saint. Should that surprise us? Not at all."

It feels in violation of the spirit of the event to have paid help in your camp, but otherwise Burning Man is for everybody.

Radical inclusion includes people with paid help.

Referred to as "Sherpas"!

I wonder if they picked that name ironically. Sherpas are probably best known for being porters and guides for Mt. Everest, a mountain that many in the mountaineering community consider to be, now, a playground for the rich.

Because I never get tired of this fun fact: the Sherpa people have a great tradition of building new homes as a community whenever a marriage occurs, as Sherpa families generally are quite large and live together until such marriages occur. This is generally a pretty intense process, since the culture has a huge emphasis on household deities and that kind of thing [^1], so houses (and land in general) is a big deal.

I'm not saying that being a professional mountain climber isn't super impressive, I'm just saying that if there was only one thing we could steal from their culture I wish it was less about making it easier to reach high elevations and more about building things together that last decades.

[^1]: I don't mean to be dismissive, I just don't know that much about their religious beliefs.

But it's not especially in keeping with Radical Self-Reliance or Participation.