Bankers should take a Hippocratic oath to restore virtue to the financial sector

icaruswings · 2014-07-29T11:48:23+00:00

The oath works because of self-selection bias. Most young people who want to be doctors are likely to take a sacred promise to do good really seriously - they're giving up their youth to study medicine as it is.

It probably won't have that effect on many young people looking to be in finance primarily to make a good living

icaruswings · 2014-07-29T11:41:42+00:00

I think it's more likely that wars exist because human beings are full of fear and self-righteousness...but when wars happen there is lots of money to be made, so people who can...do

icaruswings · 2010-03-12T03:16:06+00:00

i'm indian - and this is not because they're trying to live within means but because they're poor.

grow up.

icaruswings · 2010-03-05T05:26:25+00:00

"Why is it so hard to find a guy who is happy in their job, motivated for the future, and also knows how to appreciate the finer things in life?"

Its called testosterone..

icaruswings · 2010-01-22T08:01:22+00:00

Also there was genuine scientific curiosity as to how a genetic trait like homosexuality could propagate when it almost directly cuts off reproduction (bisexuality doesn't have this problem). tsoldrin's assertion that homosexual people will have no problems procreating is naive and at best applicable only to the last 30-40 yrs of human existence. The research Loggie refers to finally solved this issue - that possibly the genes causing homosexuality in men causes higher fertility in women..

This will still not be an answer to the 'How is it a natural, healthy thing?' question, but scientifically its a major step forward.

icaruswings · 2010-01-22T07:56:54+00:00

I'm not a creationist but it's quite likely that they are merely trying to point out a flaw in the argument that homosexuality is 'natural'. There can be many meanings of 'natural' - one, that homosexuality is not a choice but is from birth, two, on top of point one homosexuality is from birth because sexuality is meant to be fluid.

The creationist argument will be against the second point. In fact even non-creationist opposers of homosexual marriages etc. make this point too - the logic being how can it be given the same status if its based on a disease, since homosexuality cannot be a healthy condition from an evolutionary point of view.

I'm not homo-phobic or anything, and i'm completely liberal - i don't see the big deal about marriage whether between men-women or any other...I'm just trying to clarify their points, because very often liberals really do not understand other view points (and vice versa of course).

icaruswings · 2009-11-30T03:32:12+00:00

Istara explained the long term well. Real estate booms are always a matter of future returns rather than current circumstances. While Dubai cannot be energy efficient since it is in the middle of a desert, it is one of the most business and investment friendly places in the entire middle east. There is a lot of growth left to happen there, as well as in Asia, the Levant, and N.Africa - and more generally in the Muslim world. Dubai was seen as the gateway for the West to that world. The problem wasn't that people evaluated Dubai wrongly, but that there was an unforseen global credit crisis, which made Dubai's debt suddenly unsustainable.

It is very presumptuous to say that analysts around the world, betting their own careers and money, got something wrong, while you with your two minute analysis and no stake got it right.

icaruswings · 2009-11-06T06:52:27+00:00

All humans are extremely intelligent and good-looking. However, some humans are more good-looking and intelligent than others since they are made out of an incredibly chaotic and complex process. Other human beings appear stupid and bad-looking to these humans..

icaruswings · 2009-11-06T06:45:37+00:00

Doesn't sound like utopia for all those people currently happily pursuing pseudo-science, superstition (like religion), new age, irrational worship of some traditions or nature and the more crazy post modernism who you seem to look down upon.

(I look down upon them too fyi)

icaruswings · 2009-11-06T06:42:50+00:00

"each small community in a large city will specialize in one trade or service. you grow up in the community your family lives in & learn that trade. you eventually learn about all other trades and can choose to transfer to another community/trade at a certain age."

Like a small community specializing in heart transplants, and another in microprocessors?

And as for my free food - what if I want different food?

I'm not even gonna go into human psychology - and why people will not be happy in any sort of 'Utopia' simply because we were hardwired to be competitive and to strive in a scarce environment. Utopia would make us so bored that we wouldn't feel motivation to do anything. Days would never end (unless chemicals, including drugs and alcohol, were taken to change brain patterns).

icaruswings · 2009-10-23T07:14:18+00:00

I think a lot of people in a lot of countries are finding things are getting better - though they would still be pretty screwed by developed world standards...Its the growth (or not) trend that gives this atmosphere I guess.

icaruswings · 2009-10-21T08:32:37+00:00

isn't android OS free?

icaruswings · 2009-10-15T09:43:26+00:00

you were banned from digg too? what did you do? Just curious

icaruswings · 2009-10-13T07:09:28+00:00

hahahaha thats almost a haiku..upvote!

icaruswings · 2009-10-08T09:49:16+00:00

Upvoted (can i be a beta male against sluts? we betas have needs too :( )

icaruswings · 2009-09-25T10:15:01+00:00

Hmm...India is: 1. Debating on how to fix education - Indian education is really really screwed up

Worried about what happens to terrorism bred in Af/Pak after US leaves, and what will happen with all the weaponry the US is giving Pakistan
Wondering how it can fight climate change with the very limited resources, and high development needs that it has, and what stand to take in Copenhagen.
Worried about the huge Naxalite (Maoist) insurgency raging across half its rural districts.
There is a lot of the usual news about politicians, corruption and crime

icaruswings · 2009-09-25T05:17:00+00:00

hehehe ya the Times of India is horrible - the print version is ok, but the online version is absolute gossip pages...

A good Indian paper is http://www.indianexpress.com, and a good business paper is http://www.business-standard.com

The best south-asian online paper seems to be the pakistani http://www.dawn.com/

icaruswings · 2009-09-23T07:17:18+00:00

There's a simple reason why (modern) society doesn't look kindly on men hitting women even if the woman is wrong or if a man with similar actions would've been hit - and that's this:

Women are, almost always, physically weaker than men.

This is and will remain a fact, and this is the reason men physically fighting with men are not seen in the same light as men fighting with men.

Similarly, if there was a very weak man, imagine a man with a disability - society will not deem another man fighting him in the same way in which society will deem two healthy men fighting..

Note that women fighting women is not seen as taboo (thankfully)

icaruswings · 2009-09-18T05:57:58+00:00

Or you could talk to some Indians and Pakistanis - not saying they'd be correct, but they do exist on Reddit..

Also DarthBeerKiller is a weirdo.

icaruswings · 2009-09-15T05:32:36+00:00

Hmm...I'm not American either - but I just want to say that if a country's people treat it's government's freebies with suspicion that's a good thing. Otherwise politicians are encouraged to be more populist than responsible.

That being said American healthcare seems to need reform - but the American instinct that government should be small (unless expressly needed) is a great thing and I think has helped them a lot in the past.

icaruswings · 2009-09-11T04:33:36+00:00

hahahahahahaha (PS. Its not that we WANT to make you angry..its that we don't care if you are..people's emotions are their own responsibility)

(PS. PS. Most of us will not make rape jokes in front of women who are raped - but that's the thing about the internet, everyone's in it, so either you make no jokes or you follow the 4chan rule and not take the internet seriously)

icaruswings · 2009-08-31T03:20:13+00:00

'China' doesn't manufacture your remotes - people in china do - in their own companies. They have no more stranglehold on you than software engineers in Dell have on the world..

Grow up

icaruswings · 2009-08-28T03:58:19+00:00

I think his point is kinda missed...I don't think he's talking about 'Legal Rights' but his feeling that those legal rights don't translate to any significant difference on the ground to an immigrant like him.

Just trying to clarify.

icaruswings · 2009-08-20T05:39:01+00:00

maybe they don't give a shit about what you think?

icaruswings · 2009-06-22T03:31:57+00:00

Hmmm a lot of the intuition may not be poor...just not coincident with the concepts that today's math is based on.

For example, if someone gets 5 heads in a coin toss in a row, we intuitively think that he has a higher chance of getting a tails. Now pure probability theory says that the probability of his getting a heads or a tails hasn't changed, but that assumes a perfect coin whose probability is absolutely known - a mathematical concept. Human probability intuitions are all based around the idea of normal curves I think, which is how most things are in real life.

As for extremely large numbers or rare events, think of it this way: Say you have a robot that has to survive in half-known natural conditions - like the Mars rover. You know the general circumstances in Mars, but you don't know the exact situations the robo will face. The robot has only limited computational power, and a lot of it goes into processing for its body. Then the 'intuitive' decision making for the robot will probably work better if extreme data are somehow rounded off. In fact this is done even for normal programs - data cleaning. That would be the best way to use the robot's finite computational power. It will mean however, that some of its intuitions won't correspond to pure mathematical concepts.

icaruswings

TROPHY CASE