Absolutely false, South Korea isolated the people with the disease after making very fast and swift vast amount of tests per day (30.000) after a joint effort with the private sector and such proceedings could be perfectly be labeled as "isolation"[0] which is exactly what a lockdown is.
No, because they caught their cases incredibly early, and were entirely willing to aggregate pretty much all data they could get to track spread, and do things that would have caused riots in different cultures (like the US).
I mean, look at how little people trusted the Google-Apple contact tracing model vs South Korea where they actually track everyone using QR codes and get mobile data to trace chains of infection.
It's a very different culture, and it appears to be based on their more recent experience of pandemics (like MERS and SARS). Note that Montreal has done pretty well here too, and was one of the few places in the West with a SARS outbreak.
Where did you get this idea that all professions need to be 50%/50%? Just for example 90% of nurses are female but we are as a society are OK with that right?
That is the flagship cliché of offtopicness for this argument. We've been through it countless times, and nothing new ever comes of it. Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents.
Nursing is an interesting example. In places right now in the U.S. with high unemployment among men, there are a lot of nursing jobs, however men are not taking them because said nursing job doesn't satisfy the traditional requirements of masculinity (not knocking it) with which those guys were raised.
The article actually cites other potential issues such as the quality of the job itself, but traditional gender roles is a big part of it:
> "It seems like an easy fix. Traditionally male factory work is drying up. The fastest-growing jobs in the American economy are those that are often held by women. Why not get men to do them?
> The problem is that notions of masculinity die hard, in women as well as men. It’s not just that men consider some of the jobs that will be most in demand — in health care, education and administration — to be unmanly or demeaning, or worry that they require emotional skills they don’t have. So do some of their wives, prospective employers and women in these same professions."
...
> “Marriages have more problems when the man is unemployed than the woman,” Professor Sharone said. “What does it mean for a man to take a low-paying job that’s typically associated with women? What kind of price will they pay with their friends, their lives, their wives, compared to unemployment?”
> That may be, he said, because other sociologists have found that while work is important to both men’s and women’s identities, there remains a difference. “Work is at the core of what it means to be a man, in a way that work is not at the core of femininity,” he said.
So at the moment society is trying to figure out if it is OK with nursing being a "woman's" profession.
I think the difference is that when a man does want to be a nurse, he isn't treated like shit by female nurses to the point where he wants to leave the profession.
The main reason for the lack of men in nursing is because it's viewed by most men as not being a masculine profession, not because of discrimination.
> when a man does want to be a nurse, he isn't treated like shit by female nurses to the point where he wants to leave the profession
Yes. They do.
Source: Was a male nursing student, changed degrees because every lecturer, student and nurse was clearly biased against men being nurses. This happened to multiple men in my year.
No I didn't, I rewrote it to make it sound less inflammatory because I though that was the reason it got flagged. I still believe its a valid point, you may think otherwise of course.
And even if you could please everyone that doesn't guarantees you are a net positive for society; for example Galileo had to bother a lot of people to convince them the earth rotates around the sun and not otherwise; and pretty much anyone with an unpopular opinion that at the end turned out be for the best had to bother a lot of people.
"If you're not making anyone angry, you're not doing anything important."
(Note, however, that the contrapositive is "if you're doing something important, you'll make someone angry", not "if you're making people angry, you're doing something important"!)
Not really, as an example bothering people that believe earth is flat by saying "it is not" is a positive in my book; in other words, bothering ideas that need to be bothered.
> extreme wealth inequality is inevitable in a globalizing world unless effective wealth-equalizing institutions are installed on a global scale.
Yeah, and water is wet; since ever is known that the best tool to make money is... money; so the resource tends to get unevenly distributed and pile up in the hands of a few. And what's worse is that the punishment for not having enough money is... to lose money, obviously overdraft fees are the best example of this, but there are a million ways more.
I did not know what 'overdraft fees' were until I came to live in the US. So for other non-US readers: For bank accounts where you are not allowed to overspend, but you try it anyway, there is a difference in how that is handled in the US vs European banks.
If you spend more than your current balance ('overdraft'), US banks allow that, but charge you a hefty fee (my bank charges me $35 per violation).
European banks just disallow it altogether.
It even happened that one day I had a withdrawal, and a deposit. Overnight, the bank first processed the withdrawal (account balance became negative), next added the deposit (balance became positive again). Then charged me the $35 fee! They could have done it the other way around and not charge for it....
Not only this, but banks were in the habit of ordering your account activity on a day-by-day basis so as to maximize your fee liability, a practice which cast Bank of America some $400 million a few years back and which Wells Fargo is trying to escape responsibility for at present through some other litigation strategy: https://consumerist.com/2011/07/14/bank-of-america-paying-ou...
To expand on humanity's historical experience, the best known method of reducing wealth inequality seems to be revolutions and world wars - the more devastating and catastrophic, the better.
This is the homeopathic theory of government intervention: the much-less-government Belle Epoque had greater wealth concentration than a century later because government still intervened some in 1875. The lower the concentration of government, the more potent grows its poison, as libertarians attribute society's problems to this diminished residual. If things aren't better following government reduction, the solution must be to shrink it further, not to reconsider the theory.
People still peddling revolutionary communism have a parallel homeopathic theory about capitalism. Bring up a bunch of empirically observed problems in the former USSR and they'll go "Oh, those 20th century 'communist' societies were state capitalist, not real communists; the problem was that they didn't get rid of capitalism enough. Under Real Communism we'd have all the good stuff and none of the bad."
Sorry for the confusion. I wasn't agreeing with "government intervention leads to wealth concentration" I was stating that people who bring this up do not believe it is a given that "extreme wealth inequality is inevitable in a globalizing world unless effective wealth-equalizing institutions are installed on a global scale". Cutcss was implying this is universally agreed upon but I've seen many people believe the opposite.
You say it like it is that simple to fix; they could ask for photo in the curriculum and just discard the few that looks old, -after targeting job ads on pages that are disproportionaly "liked" by the age range they want-
The only true way to solve this is to force by law to hire older people (e.g. 30% of your workforce must be over 40); otherwise all this proxies like trying to regulate third-party ads and else its just an endless cat-and-mouse game.
In which it became illegal to dismiss a juror based on race. A simple, sensible fix, which most agree did very little to stop race based discrimination from juries. Doing so just became a bit more complicated.
Selling access for attention of people that fit specific characteristics has been done for decades and its fully legal; that's why bingo shows aimed to old people get Viagra ads, that's why the Seventeen magazine gets acne treatment ads; sure there are some non-teenagers buying the Seventeen magazine but its such a tiny minority that its irrelevant.
But to categories that are not protected its against the law also FB was until recently allowing people to sell adds targeting people with anti semitic views
False; mostly because a simple analogy can make one understand at least slightly topics that one has no prior knowledge; dogs cannot understand even the simplest of analogies, mostly cause they have no language.
And even if that argument isn't good enough; the dog has no tools to escape its constrains; humans do; we are messing with our brains constantly looking for a way to make it better; may it be by genetic therapy (DNA mods), chemically induced (drugs) or hardware implants (artificial neurons).
As I read it, the point of the dog story is really to suggest that there are probably limits to understanding at every level of intelligence. Sure, humans have a lot of cool tools for thinking about the world that dogs don't have (analogies, language, symbolic thinking, whatever). But it's only a kind of happy accident that they have also made us pretty good at doing science. Is it really so unreasonable to think that there might be things about the physical world that we can't understand with these tools?
> we are messing with our brains constantly looking for a way to make it better; may it be by genetic therapy (DNA mods), chemically induced (drugs) or hardware implants (artificial neurons).
What makes you so sure humans can bootstrap their way into ever higher levels of intelligence, ad infinitum? Sure, it's possible to take that view, but I would say it's incredibly optimistic. And not one of those ideas you mention has yet made humans any better at doing science (well, maybe 'drugs' - scientists do love their coffee).
The set of things humans are in principle capable of understanding at least slightly are covered by the analogy about dogs. Try to imagine the relative complexity of concepts, for example how much more complex the concept of calculus is than the trick to sit when given a verbal command. Now imagine some concept that is equally more complex compared to the most advanced human math/physics as calculus is to the sit-trick. There is some scale of complexity where analogies break down, and even though they convey some concept that is familiar to the audience, its connection to the actual matter is so vague and strenuous that you haven't actually explained anything. There may be facts about the universe that are completely counter-intuitive, and the understanding of which depend on a regression of trillions of other counter-intuitive facts and processes.
We already see computer assisted mathematical proofs heading in the direction where there are simply too many steps for a human to understand. And thats merely us scratching the surface of the tip of the iceberg. At some point, I believe, computers will generate new maths such that not only is the proof incomprehensible, but the result too. There is no reason to believe that the universe is simple enough that humans can understand everything.
The ability to have mental models requires some form of perceptive learning, as far as we know. This has seeped into AI study.
An analogy is just a described mental model. A "thing that is thrown" is something a dog can understand. I throw a ball or a bone or an orange mouse toy, it makes no difference to the dog...unless I "fake throw" or perform a "magic trick". I think the dog is likely to understand some part of calculus, given it has a sufficient number of neurons and was to use them optimally. The study into injecting information into a monkey's brain is particularly tantalizing toward that end.
A mental model is the primary tool necessary to escape constraints e.g. the ingenuity of Crows. Without external pressure or evolutionary pressure, humans haven't observed most animals get measurably smarter.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/covid-exemplar-south-korea