Seeds of Genocide

With the coronavirus pandemic surging and initial vaccine supplies limited, the United States faces a hard choice. An independent committee of medical experts that advises the C.D.C. on immunization practices will soon vote on whom to recommend for the second phase of vaccination. Historically, the committee relied on scientific evidence to inform its decisions. But now the members are weighing social justice concerns as well. Marc Lipsitch, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, argued that teachers should not be included as essential workers, if a central goal of the committee is to reduce health inequities. “Teachers have middle-class salaries, are very often white, and they have college degrees,” he said. Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.” [NYT (2020)]

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The Domains

The building blocks required to achieve success in a business domain and differentiate the company from its competitors: Core domains : The interesting problems. These are the in-house activities the company is performing differently from its competitors and from which it gains its competitive advantage. Generic domains : The solved problems. These are the things all companies are doing in the same way. There is no room or need for innovation here; rather than creating in-house implementations, it’s more cost-effective to adopt \ buy existing solutions. Supporting domains: The problems with obvious solutions. These are the activities the company likely has to implement in-house or outsourced, but that do not provide any competitive advantage. Domain experts are subject matter experts who know all the intricacies of the business that we are going to model and implement in code. In other words, domain experts are knowledge authorities in the software’s business domain. T

Meaning

Of all the information that every second flows into our brains from our sensory organs, only a fraction arrives in our consciousness: the ratio of the capacity of perception to the capacity of apperception is at best a million to one. A million times more bits enter our heads than consciousness perceives. Consciousness lags behind what we call reality. It takes half a second to become conscious of something, though that is not how we perceive it. Outside our conscious awareness, an advanced illusion rearranges events in time. Our consciousness lags behind because it has to present us with a picture of the surrounding world that is relevant. But it is precisely a picture of the surrounding world it presents us with, not a picture of all the superb work the brain does. The sequence is: sensation, simulation, experience. But it is not relevant to know about the simulation, so that is left out of our experience, which consists of an edited sensation that we experience as unedited. What we

The Evolution of Cooperation

The Tragedy of the Commons occurs when a group’s individual incentives lead them to take actions which, in aggregate, lead to negative consequences for all group members. It is a multi-player version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the version of the game from which it got its name, the players are two prisoners, held in separate cells. Each has to choose between “cooperating” with the other (keeping quiet) or “defecting” (giving evidence against the other). Each makes the choice without knowing what the other will do. If both prisoners keep quiet, they are each sentenced to one year in prison. If one rats on the other, he or she goes free and the other gets 10 years. If they both rat on each other, they each get 5 years. The problem arises because whatever your opponent does, defecting gives you a higher payoff than cooperating. In 1984 Robert Axelrod published a book called The Evolution of Cooperation, which contained a surprising reflection: if you play a Prisoner’s Dilemma game, n

Kafka In Amadora

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