Or, if you were less charitable about the nature of Bronze Age social organization, you could say it's a society of former slaves hopelessly romanticizing their former masters.
On a related note, I think the whole mystery of the Bronze Age collapse becomes fairly obvious once you consider the nature of Bronze Age societies and the way they'd be affected by a technology [iron] that allows a village with a can-do attitude to resist the predations of the local god-king. (Or to become predators themselves, perhaps by taking to the sea.)
Athens too - the vast majority of the population were slaves or 'metics' - non-Athenian foreigners. Some slaves worked as partners with their citizen master and it wasn't unusual for such a slave to be adopted into a family and thus become a citizen. Such slaves had greater rights than women, who could never become citizens.
That was chattel slavery which doesn't generate the same feelings of devotion compared to divine monarchy. We've all seen the great sadness of the North Korean people at the passing of their Dear Leaders.
This in spite of the tendency of said Dear Leaders to keep their charges in famine conditions, something absent even from most modern systems that are close to chattel slavery, for example in the Gulf states and in human trafficking operations.
It's a lot less interesting once you look trough the names of senior Russian officers - de Tolly, Bagration, von Benningsen, Wittgenstein, Osterman-Tolstoy.
One begins to suspect that the reason Kutuzov replaced Barkley was for a sort of reverse-DEI reasons.
I remember reading one of Peter the Great's orders regarding creating 10 new units in the army. Out of names of the commanders only 3-4 were Russian. So hiring foreign talent was also part of westernization.
I guess even superstars like Evan You of Vue fame, or Andrew Kelley who made Zig, could get paid more with a well-paying (but not exceptionally so) position using their technologies.
If sociology is so much more rigorous, why aren't sociologists invading the economic field? Surely they can use their rigorous statistics to produce papers on economic matters and put the entire field to shame?
If anything, we're seeing the opposite results, where economists publish influential papers demographics, crime and social structure.
"When dealing with humans, linear regression is going to be good enough" is a huge assumption to make.
Are you saying linear regression = statistics? Linear regression is something you learn in your first class, it's hardly ever the main model used.
And if you're going to claim that economists are publishing influential papers in other fields - and especially if you're claiming that they're doing so in an unprecedented way, with no inter-disciplinary collaboration - please provide some examples. And if you're thinking of Freakonomics, know that no researcher takes Freakonomics seriously, and neither should you.
As for sociologists "invading" economics, they sort of are. Economics and sociology have quite a bit of overlap, and researchers from the two fields often collaborate. And any group researching economic phenomena, even an inter-disciplinary one involving sociologists, would be identified as economists, not sociologists, by people reading their work. Although David Graeber, an anthropologist, did write an excellent book on economic phenomena in "Debt: the first 5000 years", and it has done quite well. You could say that it's "influential".
Unfortunately, neoclassical economics also has wide political support among the people it benefits: wealthy people and institutions, e.g. banks. Which also means they get bankrolled (hah) much more than other social scientists, which means they get preferential treatment. E.g., this very "Nobel prize" in economy that this theead is about is funded by a bank.
The force to change economics qould have to come from within economics, perhaps from behavioural economics, or new Keynesian economics (the first one seems more promising), or even from movements like degrowth or circular economics. You can't expect a sociologist to fix a different field, and that wasn't the point. The point was simply that sociology doesn't suffer this embarassment because they are not burdened by ideological pressure backed by monies interest.
> You absolutely have lost money. You haven't realized the losses, but you are definitely poorer and should re-evaluate your risk tolerances based on your current worth.
They say long ago somewhere far away an astrologer managed to cause a panic by predicting a devastating volcano. People didn't just flee, they sold their homes for nothing, because they were convinced their homes would be under 3 feet of lava soon.
And that brings us to the key question - is your home worth less, just because everyone on the same streat is selling their houses for pennies? Isn't the opinion of the USGS slightly more important than the opinions of the real estate market?
Are your tulips worth less if you bought them in 1636 or were they fairly priced and we're just still waiting on the market to come back to rationality?
It's easy to say that the homes were undervalued in that situation with hindsight. If disaster had actually struck then those prices seem fair. Clearly some people sold their houses just before Pompeii and made out like bandits.
Yes, you can apply a rationale mindset to things and use statistics-based inferences to try and calculate what the "real" value of something is rather than what the current, "market-based" value is and, more often than not, that's likely to serve you better, but black swan events still occur plentifully over a human's lifespan and those events are incredibly difficult to factor in when you need to optimize your wealth for practical usability over a couple of decades.
> Are your tulips worth less if you bought them in 1636 or were they fairly priced and we're just still waiting on the market to come back to rationality?
When you’re broadly invested in the market (diversified portfolio), you’re basically saying to yourself that you are optimistic that the future will be better than today. There will be more prosperity, more peace, more human flourishing. If you believe those things, then it is rational to be invested.
If, on the other hand, you believe the future is doomed, then I supposed it could make sense to withdraw all your money in a defensive move and, I dunno, do something else with it.
> There's also a willingness to be less upset humans making a mistake than a machine.
There's willingness to be upset at anyone with deep pockets who can be found accountable. And the motivations for that aren't emotional, they are purely material.
There's a reason why people have spent decades trying to find pharmacological cause for autism, in spite of the enormous amount of evidence that the condition is mostly hereditary.
And a very good reason why vaccines in America are exempt from the legal system.
Delaware law exclusively protects the interests of the board of directors. It allows for a unique provision - the hilariously misnamed "Shareholders Rights Plan" that enable a board of directors to issue shares as they please, in order to make sure every attempt at takeover isn't against the interests of the directors.
The only check on the power of the board in a Delaware corporation is the Delaware court of chancellery.
The irony is that the Levine article the parent provided argues that DE did the exact opposite of shareholder wishes!
> it is weird that Tesla’s management and board of directors and (a large majority of) shareholders all agreed that Musk should get paid $55.8 billion for creating $600 billion of shareholder value, and he did do that, and he got paid that, and a judge overruled that decision and ordered him to give back the money. I can see why Musk — and Tesla’s board, and its shareholders — would find that objectionable! They’re trying to run a company here.
I agree, but I still suspect OpenAI and other LLM companies do stuff like that, when an example of a hallucination becomes popular.
If I see some example of an LLM saying dumb stuff here, I know it's going to be fixed quickly. If I encounter an example myself and refuse to share it, it may be fixed with a model upgrade in a few years. Or it may still exist.
Something about how you have to keep repeating "There is no seahorse emoji" or something similar reminded me of the Local 58 horror web series where it seems like the program is trying to get you to repeat "There are no faces" while showing the viewer faces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ-vBhGk9F4&t=221
South Korea isn't some sort of backwards nation and I'm sure it's chaebols share the same culture.
Having had unfortunate encounters with government IT in other countries I can bet that the root cause wasn't the national culture. It was the internal culture of "I want to do the same exact same thing I've always done until the day I retire."
Absent outside pressure, civil services across the word tend advance scientifically - one funeral (or retirement) at a time.
[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2232/fresco-of-a-statue-o...