> I agree the U.S. does a lot of “unprovoked invasions.”
Sending U.S troops to intervene in a foreign civil war (1982) seems fairly provocative, along with fomenting a coup (1953), supporting a repressive regime, then harboring the illegitimate unpopular leader after he is overthrown (1979).
> Israel would probably be fine with a moderate government in Iran.
Maybe, but I think they are genuinely aiming for a failed state.
Israel is a state with a political apparatus that is predicated on providing security. That apparatus needs a persistent (but non-serious) threat to remain in power. I think best case for that power is to have a number of failed, weak states in the Middle East that occasionally launch relatively impotent attacks against Israel. This would also have the side effect of giving hard-line elements in Israel the enough justification to expand their borders and continue ethnic cleansing (e.g. what is happening in Lebanon right now).
You may disagree with the idea that militaries are responsible for civilians they kill regardless of intent, but it is not poor argumentation. And the fact that it triggers you to support the war reveals more about you than you may intend.
> Do you see Americans cheering for the dead school children?
I'm watching Iran cheering for the dead children in countries around the world every day for 40 years.
I agree, people should be ashamed of supporting killing civilians and any society that supports that should be criticized.
I’m not familiar with any instances of Iranis celebrating civilian deaths though? Do you have any examples?
Getting angry didn't seem to help you here. If you want to discuss the topic respectfully, I'm open to continue, and I'll explain what you've missed from the article.
First, you'll need to apologize as a show of good faith.
I did provide you with proof, and I can help you to see it. But I don't get from your angry tone that you want proof. It looks to me more like you want to shut down proof before it changes your mind.
> I think the biggest factor for us was that most attendees already had some technical baseline. That makes it way easier to pick papers and have productive discussions.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
How do you suss out peoples technical aptitude, and what was the minimum level you were looking for?
The group is open to anyone at Microsoft and I don't gatekeep. The papers themselves act as a natural filter. If someone finds the material interesting, they attend and keep coming back. If it's not their thing, they self-select out. Over time, it's led to a core group of regular attendees as well as many who will join ad-hoc.
We usually start with quick overall impressions, then go around with a few prompts: "what's something new you learned?", "what didn't you like?", and "what didn't you fully understand?" (every paper has something, whether it's the evaluation methodology or some algorithm detail). That last question tends to drive most of the discussion because people chime in and build on each other's answers. Sometimes you get lucky with domain expertise in the room. For example, when we read "What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory"[1], one of the attendees was a former Intel engineer who spent their career in memory systems. They answered questions the rest of us wouldn't have even known to ask.
I would be interested to hear others experiences with running these types of groups. We’ve tried this a couple of times at my current job and both times it’s petered out - people don’t do the assigned reading and then just stop attending.
Any suggestions on how to keep such a group alive?
I lead a book club once (Designing Data Intensive Applications)- read a chapter and meet every two weeks. Was a real flop. Attendance remained high, but only one other person actually finished the book.
What was a real slap in the face - maybe a year after that book had concluded, someone told me I should lead another one about this other topic. She had not finished the first book, and she wanted me to regurgitate another to the group?
Maybe there was value in the discussions that didn’t require the reading? But running seminars isn’t hobby material. If this was happening at my work, I may skim or not even read parts of the book, and still attend discussions.
I co-run a similar group at my company (added a comment above), what has worked for us and we realised this early on: not everyone will have the time to read and hence the sessions need to have a driver/lead. Assigning reading does not work unfortunately as many attend such groups voluntarily in addition to their primary work.
We as organisers (better to have at least 2) prepared before hand, either a presentation or a document, and then presented it in the group. While doing this, the group is free to discuss and interrupt at any time (we chose a slighly informal venue in the office).
Gradually, after about 10 sessions, we started seeing voluntary interest from the attendees to present a paper. And honestly this was an amazing feeling. So I'd suggest first finding a co-organiser who is interested in doing this and then pushing through the initial sessions by driving the topic yourself. That said, since you are preparing, you are free to choose the papers. We saw that if you choose papers related to a common larger theme that you are interested in, people would show up. Initially the attendance would be low, but with regular meetings, you'd start seeing regulars.
> He is someone who plugged his fingers into the power outlet that is the final mile of the enlightenment.
The fact that you used this analogy is amusing - something so obviously stupid and self-destructive being recast as a necessary step towards enlightenment does indeed reveal a lot about Thiel’s intentions and the attitude of his boosters.
There can never be such a thing as destructive information, as 0ermanent as a disability, no such thing as a loadbearing retardation. The tools we gain can not lead to our distruction, we do not self destruct under stress, in factcwe should embrace degrowth, for utopia is neigh. We should pool all together into a prosthesis god, the comon good, we shall overcome, the final mile of the hamster wheel. I wish you could for one day hear yourself, screeching at the poor guy trying to bath you, that he is a nazi
> humanity was stuck in a rut technology/progress-wise until the past few years
Can you please expand on this claim? The past 20 years have seen hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty, I’m not quite sure what you mean by “progress” here.
> The downplaying of Iran’s capabilities is a weird kind of racism IMHO.
Agreed, but it’s not at all surprising to me. Propaganda means that people will project fictitious motives and capabilities on their opponents, even if they are internally inconsistent (e.g. Iran must be attacked because they will threaten the USA mainland vs Iran’s missiles are very inaccurate and barely hit anything).
> I agree the U.S. does a lot of “unprovoked invasions.”
Sending U.S troops to intervene in a foreign civil war (1982) seems fairly provocative, along with fomenting a coup (1953), supporting a repressive regime, then harboring the illegitimate unpopular leader after he is overthrown (1979).
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