If I had a pill that would cure Alzheimer's, would you take it? If you had a muscle wasting disease and I had a pill that would cure it, would you take it? If you skin were drooping and a pill could fix it, would you take it? If you had cancer and a pill would cure it, would you take it? That's all "immortality" or "curing aging" means - being in good health indefinitely. The 67% saying they wouldn't want good health if it were given to them in pill form are lying. Maybe to themselves. As a society we certainly seem to think that good health is a good thing. People are confused on the matter only because such a pill isn't available and we've romanticized what happens to old people as a coping mechanism.

Nope! Next you should go read James Damore's memo and compare it to what people say about him. This isn't some sort of unusual thing.

This is sadly and tragically ironic, since the premise of our discussion is that you are credulous. You prefer to believe that sources of information that frame information in unwarranted ways, for the purpose of manipulating you, are in fact credible sources of information and so you let yourself be deceived in spite of your intelligence. The justification is yet another strawman - we never discussed a statement "corporations never lie", in fact I've repeatedly stated that they do. Just not likely in this particular case.

If someone who sometimes lies looks to be 6 feet tall and they sign a contract stating that they will pay you 20 million dollars (that they do have) if they are not 6 feet tall, and that if you want they will participate in a televised measuring in which they'd be extremely embarrassed in front of the nation if they turned out not to be 6 feet tall, and you've known this person to be very risk averse in the past, they generally will only do things that benefit them and they've not lied in circumstances where it would hurt them to such an extent before (and in fact you know them to be very concerned about such things), and if whatever they are trying to achieve by saying that they are 6 feet tall could instead easily be achieved in many other ways... you can then reasonably conclude that they are 6 feet tall. Maybe they aren't, you can't be 100% sure, but it's overwhelmingly likely. Same thing here. It is in fact possible to have good judgement about what people and organizations are likely to do and not to do. You might wish to Google the concept of "costly signals", which is what Google is engaging in here. They are aware that this is what they are doing and the people who matter know it, too. They didn't have to provide in public a damaging exact quote from an email (if you are in this world, just these words "provide in public a damaging exact quote from an email" should send shivers down your spine and for good reason), they could have made some reasonable-sounding but actually unreasonable general statement that no one could prove one way or another (like they did with Damore). But they did provide it.

It's a strawman, the argument is not "they wouldn't lie, they might get sued", the argument is "they would in this particular case be very likely to get sued and be very likely to have to pay out an enormous sum and suffer the damage of having everybody know that they lied, both of which are far more damaging than any tiny benefit they might have derived from the lie in the first place. They are unlikely to have intentionally chosen such a future for themselves. The whole thing would be exceedingly out of character for upper management at Google in particular, not because they wouldn't lie, but because they wouldn't voluntarily choose such a future, especially when they would have had much easier and better other options available." I'm not making that assessment as some teenager speculating in his basement, this is a sort of thing that I'm very familiar with, if I weren't, I'd quickly get fired myself - you should be able to tell that by now, too. But it doesn't even matter, even without that the case is very clear from other information. The conclusion is inescapable, yet you are escaping it: you are trusting sources of information that are not worthy of your trust.

You've moved on to "spin", and it is perfectly possible that there are factors that would put the situation in a light less favorable to Google that they are leaving out, though in that case you'd expect Timnit to provide those factors and she hasn't done a good job of that, so it seems not, though there is much less certainty on that front. Google absolutely would leave out such factors if given the choice, as they in fact did in the Damore case.

They wouldn't get sued for wrongful termination (well they could, e.g. she could allege racial discrimination, which is illegal in CA, but that would be a different discussion), they would get sued for defamation. Google has alleged that Timnit sent an email containing an exact quote that would make her unemployable everywhere under normal circumstances. Look into Sarbanes-Oxley, emails can be accessed and verified in court, so the truth would be known. Damages would likely be very high given the salary levels and lifetime earnings in the industry, PR cost would be much higher and so would settlement costs to avoid that PR cost.

Were you aware that many corporations, and Google as well, has a policy that they will not ordinarily comment on anyone's employment there, other than to verify the dates of employment? They do that to avoid getting successfully sued. Corporations get sued, a lot. It's a big thing for them. It's not some sort of abstract thing as it might appear from a vantage point in academia. It's a daily moment-to-moment concern that leaves its mark on everything in corporations.

It's not that Google would be above lying or doing some other dastardly deed in order to screw with a problem employee, the Damore case makes that as clear as could possibly be, it's just that this particular dastardly move would be a bizarre choice for them. They would have much better options if it weren't true. And on top of that, the rest of the evidence is quite clear and corroborates the same clearly accurate version of events. I'm not saying that because I'm a fan of Google, quite the contrary, but I do like to acknowledge facts.

Timnit hasn't denied it, either. She did deny resigning, but Google has her threatening to resign if Google doesn't do certain things, and she hasn't denied that as far as I know. She's likely relying on logic along the lines of "threatening to resign isn't resigning, even if phrased in the form of I will resign if you don't do this" and Google is likely relying on logic along the lines of "if you say you'll resign if we don't do that, and we don't do that, then you've told us that you're resigning and we accept your resignation."

Something you might consider is that just as corporations lie, other people lie, too, and frame things unreasonably. You are trusting sources of information that are not worthy of your trust.

It appears you didn't go past the first sentence. :-/ It is indeed overwhelmingly clear. Corporations lie, but not likely like that for the reasons given. This may not be obvious to you from your position in academia, but corporations don't want bad PR, especially not easily avoidable bad PR. It wouldn't have been done this way if what they are saying happened didn't happen. These people are much, much cleverer than that and they don't have to make up lies to fire people, that's an unnecessary risk (which is a big no-no), instead they create situations (that don't require lying) in which people are fired or ideally slowly themselves come to realize and decide that they ought to leave on their own terms (the latter is how Google typically does it unless there are circumstances that don't allow that). Especially, corporations go to completely bizarre and extreme lengths to avoid setting themselves up to be sued in open-and-shut cases where they've assured by their actions that they'll lose. If you don't know that from lack of experience with corporations then I guess you might not believe it, but I assure you it's true. If you have some industry collaborators, ask them if their companies care about getting sued. Besides, one of the claims is emails sent to a large-distribution email list within Google. Of course the facts of whether that happened or not is known, it was a wide-distribution email list and Google is leaky like a sieve. https://www.teamblind.com/sear... The people verified-to-work-at-Google on there strongly disagree on what they think about it, but they all know what happened, that much you can tell from reading through there. You've arrived at the idea that this situation is unclear presumably from trusting some source of information and assuming that what that source says is probably right or at least reasonable, maybe because you generally like what they say or for whatever reason. Whatever source of information that was, your trust appears to have been misplaced and as a scientist that ought to concern you. Don't take my word for it, look into it for yourself and see if what I'm saying makes sense or not and if it does, perhaps that has much wider implications. I had that realization, incidentally, from the Damore case and it was... very disappointing to realize. I knew the facts of that case, as anyone who looked into it did, and I knew what was on TV, and they were seriously, seriously not the same thing. As they are not here. You have to apply your own judgement. But yeah, corporations lie, certainly, just not so much like that, because that wouldn't go well for them. In any case, I hope you have a good day. :)

They sort-of already do. They have cache servers in ISP access points all over the place and if you're viewing popular content you might well be streaming off those, so then the transfer to the cache is amortized across your usage and everybody else's usage, so that's a lot like multicast, except superior because it doesn't require simultaneous viewing. Even with all those efforts, it's still the biggest thing on the net, evidently. More compression helps with bandwidth for not as popular video and it improves the amount of data that can be stored on those caching servers and it improves bandwidth between you and the cache (which is probably not as critical unless you're on a mobile pay-per-bit plan).

The situation is overwhelmingly clear. You must think that upper management at Google has an IQ of 70 or something. Do you really think Google's lawyers would let them lie about very specific facts about something sent IN EMAIL, that could be determined to be true or false with 100% certainty in a lawsuit? Makes absolutely no sense, not even the slightest bit of sense. Of course what they are saying is true. If you read between the lines of what Timnit is saying, you can even tell that she's really just putting a different spin on the same thing and instead would rather prefer to talk about her paper, same as someone getting thrown in jail over a DUI would rather shift attention to the broken taillight that was the initial reason for the stop.

Compare to James Damore. Google refused to even point to any place in his memo that they didn't like. He was fired for "propagating gender stereotypes" and then they wouldn't say what that meant. They had nothing specific to say, so they in effect said nothing, because lying on very specific claims doesn't work great when you can get sued and then be found at fault for defamation because your specific claims were determined to be false. They had to be vague because they had nothing to say, they didn't just make up specific lies. They already knew that they were going to get sued.

Her paper wasn't even remarkable in any way, it's the same sort of repetitive school essay that people publish all the time on the matter, same sort of thing she's done in the past, same sort of thing that she was hired to do and the same sort of social justice thing that Google is all about. Obviously she wasn't going to get fired over that.

Read that article again, to the very bottom, as well as other sources. She wasn't fired for the content of her paper, she was fired for outrageous behavior. If you are yourself a manager and upper management makes a decision that you don't like, and you tell them that they must provide you with a list of the names of everyone they consulted while making that decision (for you to do who-knows-what with) or you will resign, while also behaving outrageously in other ways, don't be surprised if upper management takes you up on on your implied offer to resign. Got nothing to do with her paper. The contrast to James Damore is striking - he WAS fired for his memo, and everybody lied about what it was that he wrote. Timnit WASN'T fired for her paper, and everybody is lying about that, too, trying to put her into the same fired-for-truth category as James Damore.

The word steal invokes the mental image of taking away, while copyright infringement doesn't, so steal is an inaccurate label for copyright infringement since no taking away is involved. The same thing that makes it inaccurate is exactly what makes it a great rhetorical trick. It's like referring to a speeder as a "dangerous criminal" or someone who thinks that trains should run on time as someone who "holds certain views in common with Nazis". You can think and argue that copyright infringement is bad without reducing yourself to that level, so whether copyright infringement is good or bad is irrelevant to the topic.

I'm flabbergasted at your ability to not comprehend what you are reading. Well done.

How's that for cherry picking. You can eat your poison cherries, you just can't sell it as edible food to other people. You really think non-poisonous food laws are bad?

I see you don't like the facts. ;)

We call that voting.

Take a look at the comment by the poster called "N.J." on your link, which handily demolishes the whole thing. Key point is that if data is processed for European countries as it is for the US, the European countries suddenly come out on top, despite spending far less. Also, people who don't receive treatment or who stop receiving treatment aren't counted in the US. Here's another point from another comment on another story (http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/08/us-vs-europe-life-expectancy-and-cancer.html): Americans get sick earlier in life, and younger people are more resilient to disease, so survival rates are raised by that, even though the situation itself is actually worse. As an example of that, the more childhood cancer in a country, the better the cancer survival rates (I'm not saying that I know childhood cancer to be more prevalent in the US, it's an example). European governments sometimes run campaigns to increase awareness of health information, which is probably related to the potential for such campaigns to directly decrease health expenditure, and governments are very much involved in deciding for example what additives are legal in food, so I don't think that it's fair to say that prevention is outside the purview of the health care system. The US system just chooses not to engage that angle as much because the incentive isn't there.