That is interesting. My guess would have been that you would learn fastest in jobs that are just a little above your current skill set. (Learn fastest does not equal 'most happy').

Although, your claim does seem to fit better with my lived experience.

While the argument itself is nonsense, I think it makes a lot of sense for people to say it.

Lets say they gave their real logic: "I can't imagine the LLM has any self awareness, so I don't see any reason to treat it kindly, especially when that inconveniences me". This is a reasonable position given the state of LLMs, but if the other person says "Wouldn't it be good to be kind just in case? A small inconvenience vs potentially causing suffering?" and suddenly the first person look like the bad guy.

They don't want to look like the bad guy, but they still think the policy is dumb, so they lay a "minefield". They bring up animal suffering or whatever so that there is a threat. "I think this policy is dumb, and if you accuse me of being evil as a result then I will accuse you of being evil back. Mutually assured destruction of status".

This dynamic seems like the kind of thing that becomes stronger the less well you know someone. So, like, random person on Twitter whose real name you don't know would bring this up, a close friend, family member or similar wouldn't do this.

In a vacuum, that logic seems good.

But, I know of several chain cooperatives that are very large, with lots of shops, etc. I live in the UK if that changes things at all compared to the USA. The ones I know are John Lewis, Waitrose, and Co-Op. (This is sort of double counting as John Lewis owns Waitrose).

So, all but one of the Co-Ops I know about are huge companies, although that comes with an obvious selection bias. (The only small one I know about is a random coffee shop I went to in Bristol that had a sign informing customers that they were helping to support a "radical, collectivist movement" (or something like that), they had 5 types of milk, none of them from animals. This sort of thing is very Bristol.)

I don't know how the US system works at all, and have only a shallow understanding of the UK one (mostly from watching Yes Minister), but I think in the US a lot of posts that in the UK would be civil service are instead political posts. For example, I think US politicians directly pick which ambassadors to send, which is not the UK system.

They are probably very different systems.

How many hour of fully focused time from a knowledge worker do we need for them to pay for themselves? Until we have answered this question, we cannot possibly answer the question of whether employers are getting enough hours.

The linked post seems to implicitly accept that the number of deep-focus hours that employers need from their employees is comparable to the number of hours they are contracted to work. (So, like, most of a 9am to 5pm day for example.)

But I think this is kind of backwards. It is more likely that the number of hours "spent at work" has already been chosen with some knowledge of human behavior, and that the employers are perfectly aware that the number of hours of deep concentration they are buying is a considerably lower number.

It would maybe create a bit of a free-rider problem, if you had a situation where valuable data could be acquired at a cost (by doing a survey or experiment, or having fast messengers to run to London from Waterloo), then you kind of get exploited by anyone who just copies you.

On the other hand, in the immediate (non-equilibrium) mode the "copy the best trader" strategy is helping the market make good predictions. If their really is someone out there who is making perfect predictions, then having a lot of money follow their lead is going to result in better predictions.

I am curious about why you felt the discussion about minorities was so derailing. Couldn't you have just said "Yes, that is a problem as well. However, the thing I am working on is..."

If it is any consolation, I have never seen that specific discussion, but in situations I have seen that feel analogous most of the people in the audience are actually more sympathetic to your side than they might appear. Its not like anyone is going to interject with "Well, that was a pointless question."

I teach lifesaving, and it is true that children can drown in even very shallow water. At the most basic mechanical level, you just need to be able to find a head position where they are lying down with both nose and mouth submerged for it to be possible. I once collected drowning data from a coroner's office, and its really sad how many children drown when their mum gets a phone call during bath time. 

I suspect that most people assume water depth is a good metric for safety, and that its actually quite a bad way of measuring it. If you have someone who can swim, then it doesn't matter if the pond is ten-thousand leagues deep. If they become unable to swim (eg. they have an epileptic seizure, or hit their head and fall unconscious, or try and hold their breath underwater and fall unconscious, get into a playfight with a sibling and get pushed under the water, become entangled in a net, become confused, or are so surprised to fall in that they freeze, or accidentally breath in water and start panicking) then it doesn't make that much difference if its only 30cm deep, that is still deep enough to immerse the face.

I would guess that the difference between being supervised, and not, is much much bigger than the difference between 10cm and 10,000km.

"Shallow enough to stand up", while presumably somewhat important, is not an all-important break point, because most things that would disrupt your ability to swim (confusion, unconsciousness, injury, panic, entanglement, cold water shock) might also disrupt your ability to stand.

In this case it sounds like the child, after landing in the water, was so surprised/shocked by it that she froze, and didn't put her legs down. (I would guess the claim afterwards that she couldn't was rationalization, and that the real reason was she was stunned with surprise, just based on the sense that I can't imagine the dress was really that restrictive).

I thought the same thing. But looking at it, its still mostly wrong, but it is slightly less crazy than it first sounds. 

I compared the watts per square meter coming down from sunlight (about 1000 at sea level according to the top google hit) and compared it to the watts of an air con system, 3000 acordong to some google hit (in the long run it will only heat the outside by its power consumption, although in the short term the heat from your house will add more), then we see the ac is like another 3 square meters of sun light.

So if you live somewhere where the density of dwellings is low, say a detached house with garden, then 3 extra square meters is nothing compared the square meter-age you already cover. But if you live in a 20 story appartment building in a city centre surroudned by similar buildings, and everyone runs ac, then maybe the 'dwellings per square meter' will be high enough that the ac will be adding energy that is non-negligable compared to the solar energy. (If we took  +15% as our 'non negligable' threshold then the critical density is about 0.05 dwellings per square meter. Meaning in 100 square meters we have 5 dwellings adding 15 effective sunlight meters.) So maybe in Singapore this actually matters a little. 

It still seems weird to single out ac though. The heat dissipated by driving a car through the city is surely much larger.

I find myself still strongly agreeing with your 'friend A' about the difference between someone having a preference for dating people of a particular race, and people stating that preference on their dating app profile.

The two things are, I think, miles apart, and it looks like the participants in that study were asked in the abstract about people having preferences and then given examples of people expressing, not even preferences, but hard and fast rules.

Take example people A and B:

Person A is asked to rate 100 pictures of strangers for attractiveness, from this data a statistical analysis is able to reveal that they have a dis-preference for a particular ethnic group. They may or may not be consciously aware of this, and they would still date the members of that group they thought were most attractive.

Person B has not only decided they will never date people of group X, no matter the context, but they have also decided that keeping this decision making inside their own head doesn't do enough, because group X needs to be told to their face that their ethnicity is a problem and person B is very comfortable with the fact that this may offend people.

I think if people are judging Person A differently from B it doesn't reflect any kind of muddled thinking. I don't even think that race is important for seeing how these are different: if we discovered that some specific man had a preference for (eg.) thinner women, that is very different from a man who goes around telling specific women that he is not interested in them because they are not thin enough. Its insulting.