Well, we can reduce every human activity to 0 value and take it from there: if there’s no value in understanding there’s no place for humans in the process, we can just go back to worshipping stones and let the AIs burn tokens deluding themselves chasing their hallucinations
yeah, this MBA-brained philosophy that 'everything must have KPIs' is so incredibly short-term. research looking for directly, immediately quantifiable production results goes against the entire grain of why we push for bleeding edge research
like, ask yourself, in Newton's time, was there much application for calculus? what about today? this is almost universally applicable to all research because even null findings are a map marker of where not-to-look
Take the tax system and the state out of the picture. How does a mathematician convince his fellow citizens that they should fund their work? Newton didn’t have to do that, he had income from other sources and did most of his mathematical research as a hobby
because it could lead to something. the whole point of academic research is to uncover, as closely as possible, truths about how all of our myriad, hyper-complex systems work. not every truth uncovered is convertable to direct improvements on people's quality of life. like, how does understanding evolutionary biology matter to your average person? or finding the Higgs boson? should we just drop these research avenues because your average person won't benefit? or can we trust, based on historical precedence, that the slow march of research has created many of the luxuries we enjoy today?
I don't think anyone is doing that? The value of entertainment is obviously not zero from the perspective of life quality. The point is that we should be honest about what is done for the sake of output, and what is done for the sake of entertaining the people doing it. If math becomes a hobby, then it's entertainment. There's nothing wrong about it as such (indeed, the ideal world is one where everyone only does things because they are fun for that person to do, not because they have to). But the people who are paying for it deserve to know.
Well, doing the most immoral and reprehensible thing on the edge of what’s lawful is a guaranteed “blue ocean” strategy so it’s inevitable that the most sociopathic will take the opportunity
Hopefully we get much better renewables support (and with it lower public transit fares...), fixes for the insane box 3 rules due to come in to effect, yimby reforms to let people actually build homes in cities, and the right to air conditioning enshrined in law...
Yes, that's definitely a valid complained you might have.
There's also what you might call 'economics of scale in compliance'. Ie in absolute terms, the big guys suffer under the rules just as much as you do, but they can amortise the necessarily effort and billable lawyer hours over a bigger business.
Your “counterargument” supports the argument that you quoted though. People can't eat spoonfuls of sugar, but they can drink it when dissolved in flavorful, acidic water.
Absolutely. It's not worth it unless you're more principled than anyone I know at least. Instead you're left with a minor punishment and most of your faith in the justice system left behind.
No; editing a post to meet the site's style expectations is not moderation, and I was not a moderator, just like 99.9% of everyone described anonymously and incorrectly as "a mod" in discussions of Stack Overflow on the Internet.
It's really annoying to see people insist that they should be the ones who get to decide how Stack Overflow either did, or should have, worked, when they can't even be bothered to understand who the mods were.
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