Third Base Not recognizing your blessings feeds into the dark side of capitalism and meritocracy: success is a choice, and that those who haven’t achieved success are not unlucky, but unworthy.
I’m relatively lucky. I don’t know how much of the techie hubris that I bear. I have unresolved feelings about meritocracy and fairness. Race is usually used as a proxy for bridging the gap, e.g. affirmative action at colleges....
Criticism/Defense Of Billionaire Philanthropy Taxes will probably not go to the same causes, e.g. reforming the bail system, grassroot efforts for migrants, etc.
Admittedly, these are things that the government should be doing, but it seems that the government doesn’t do enough. Furthermore, some of these issues so politicized, e.g. immigrants, that government support can be fickle.
Foundations are more effective than governments as they do their due diligence, e....
The paper is written in a period when NLP practitioners are producing bigger (# of parameters; size of training data) language models (LMs), and pushing the top scores on benchmarks.
Environmental Risks Large LMs consume a lot of resources, e.g. training a single BERT base model on GPUs was estimated to use as much energy as a trans-American flight.
Marginalized communities are doubly punished. They are least likely to benefit from LMs, e....
Quiz It’s hard to give pessimistic answers when the book’s title says “Things Are Better Than You Think”…
In all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school?
🔲 A: 20 percent
❌ B: 40 percent
✅ C: 60 percent
There has been lots of efforts to get girls to finish primary school, e.g. providing sanitary towels. Surely, they must be at \( \ge 40% \) completion rates....