While he is still uses the pseudonym Scott Alexander, he has told his real name in Astral Codex Ten so I don't believe it's supposed to be a secret anymore.
One way I use figure out if addiction is harmful is to consider: if I could freely edit my brain to make this thing no longer pleasurable, would I do it? I think some of the activities that are generally labelled as addictive can still be genuinely meaningful or have some instrumental value for some people.
One additional reason for reducing addiction is that addictions like video games can make your baseline of 'fun' too high, so doing productive things doesn't feel fun even though it would otherwise.
> Unfortunately, the more you focus on advertising the less you focus on technical knowledge.
If the law of diminishing returns applies, it's better to spend time on improving multiple skills or knowledge instead of focusing on just one. I don't think you need to be an expert in advertising for it to be useful to you.
If the original developer didn't care if the variable will be reassigned, in which situations can it be useful to know of that intent?
>The problem with these arguments is that they tend to fall short of justifying how constraining developers in this way and doing so by default, adds value to either the code or the development process.
If the developer doesn't need to browse through the code to see if the variable is reassigned, it saves time.
I think 'Uncaught TypeError: Assignment to constant variable' should be trivial to avoid since lint-like tools warn of it before the code is executed.
I have played some Steam games which support Remote Play Together (sharing screen and inputs from one device), so only one player needs to buy the game.
The police only kills about 1000 people per year in the USA, and some of those kills are justified. Including it in the same list as global warming is IMO an example of 'Availability bias means that after we see negativity, we overestimate its significance' mentioned in the article.
If someone doesn't care about his own privacy (but avoids endangering others' privacy when sharing information about himself), then that's his personal decision. One can list some of the possible but unlikely negative consequences that the person might not have thought of, but they aren't very strong counterarguments.
If the statement means "violating everyone's privacy is ok because I've got nothing to hide", then the counterargument is that some people legitimately have something to hide.
An another study [1] suggest that the effect could be rather small.
> We find that when a user’s cookie is available publisher’s revenue increases by only about 4%. This corresponds to an average increase of $0.00008per advertisement.
Although I didn't fully read either studies so I'm not sure if they are really about the same thing.