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INGELRII

1,070 karma · joined September 17, 2018

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INGELRII··on Work disincentives hit the near-poor hardest (2022)
There is idea behind that, but continuous is not enough.

The variable is all transfers, taxes and benefits T = [all taxes - all benefits] as function of income per person (including children). T starts negative (benefits are negative taxes).

Goal: monotonously increasing effective marginal T rate.

INGELRII··on Did people in the 90s worry about the efficiency of the internet
The productivity paradox (also the Solow computer paradox) is the business process analysis observation that, as more investment is made in information technology, worker productivity may go down instead of up. This observation has been firmly supported with empirical evidence from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

Before investment in IT became widespread, the expected return on investment in terms of productivity was 3-4%. This average rate developed from the mechanization/automation of the farm and factory sectors. With IT though, the normal return on investment was only 1% from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

Measurement or Management?: Revisiting the Productivity Paradox of Information Technology. http://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/38739/v_00_4_9....

Then in the 2000 to 2020s productivity slowdown aka productivity paradox 2.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox#2000_to_2...

INGELRII··on Anscombe's Quartet
Always visualize first. Human 'eyballing' is a good pattern detector.

Linear correlation is just one pattern the data can have.

Unfortunately many social science publications have reviewers who know only the basics and can't judge or accept statistically valid analysis that is outside their competence. Fit it into line or nothing.

INGELRII··on The Moral Costs of Growth Mindset [pdf]
Studies indicate that manipulating "growth mindset" does not improve students' academic performance.

This new research suggests that growth mindset makes people more inclined to blame students for their failures

INGELRII··on I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft
>Third, Glen Weyl-style economic arguments have convinced me that, in the presence of superlinear returns to scale, the optimal policy is actually NOT Rothbard/Mises-style strict property rights. Rather, the optimal policy does involve some nonzero amount of more actively pushing projects to be more open than they otherwise would be.

(read the rest of his reasoning for this philosophical shift).

INGELRII··on German Court Orders Meta to Pay a Tiny 200€ Fine over GDPR Non-Compliance
This was damages paid to the individual.

(lets talk law on damages)

Many European countries have /the principle of the prohibition of enrichment/ within the law of damages. The injured party should receive compensation for the actual loss or damage suffered, but should not end up financially better off. The goal is to make the victim whole. Damages are not punitive.

There is separate case in EU against Google that can result severe penalty.

Maximums are high: For severe GDPR violations the penalty can be up to 20 million euros, or up to 4 % of total global turnover of the preceding fiscal year, whichever is higher. For less severe violations fines of up to 10 million euros, or up to 2% of its entire global turnover of the preceding fiscal year, whichever is higher. Turnover is from _undertaking_, meaning every corporation or natural person who is engaged in the activity (you can't avoid penalty with financing or corporate structure).

INGELRII··on Population Attributable Fraction (32%) of Dementia Associated with Hearing Loss
in s study of people age 65+ "Up to 32% of incident dementia over 8 years could be attributed to clinically significant audiometric hearing loss"
INGELRII··on BYD Blade prismatic cell vs. Tesla 4680 cylindrical cell with teardown analysis
Contrasting a BYD Blade prismatic cell and Tesla 4680 cylindrical cell with a teardown analysis of design and performance

Highlights

- Design, materials, performance, and process flow of BYD Blade and Tesla 4680 cell are compared

- Tesla uses laser welding; BYD combines laser and ultrasonic for electrode connections

- Tesla 4680 cell generates 2× the heat per volume of BYD Blade at a 1 C specific load

- PAA and PEO binders identified in Tesla 4680 anode warrant further investigation

INGELRII··on B-2 Spirit Stealth Bombers Begin Unannounced Deployment to Diego Garcia
Diego Garcia has four dedicated climate controlled hangars for the B-2 Spirit. Each one can house a single aircraft.

More than 4 and they are only visiting.

INGELRII··on Money bubble
Damodaran makes detailed analysis with assumptions in the open. Put your numbers to the Exel sheet and calculate valuations using your own numbers.

>Ever since Amazon was in its early days, he has said that Amazon was overvalued and he has always been wrong because Amazon has always found new verticals to build and create more value with.

Amazon has been overvalued multiple times.

Amazon stock had negative return 10 years between 1999 - 2009.

INGELRII··on Money bubble
Aswath Damodaran's Nvidia analsysis: Assuming 32% CAGR rate of over 5 years with 40% target operating margin at the end of period Nvidia is now 40% overvalued. https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-seven-samur...
INGELRII··on The forecasting fallacy (2020)
A forecasting system in aircraft autopilot that can accurately forecast when the plane hits the mountain is always wrong.

Forecasting when the forecast depends on the actions of agents that can be informed by the forecast changes the game. If the Fed model forecasts recession and the Fed takes action to prevent it from happening, it changes everything. Only a forecasting model that is not observed/believed by policy makers can predict without intervention.

Layman's idea of forecasting: Predict what happens in the future.

Economic forecasting: Forecast is input for actions. Predict what happens in the future, using this model, these variables, and everything else stay the same. You can check afterward if the model is an accurate forecaster by removing the changes caused by variables outside the model.

INGELRII··on [dead]
Garry Kasparov:

>'Putin isn't Hitler!' 'Trump isn't Hitler!' Wow, congratulations! You have failed the most basic lesson of learning from history in order not to repeat it!

>I wrote about this fallacy extensively in Winter is Coming and elsewhere, but am happy to recap it here. Of course Putin isn't Hitler, and Donald Trump isn't even Putin—no matter how much he would like to be. The point is that no one is making comparisons to the monster Adolf Hitler became in the 1940s. But in the 20s, even for most of the 30s, Hitler wasn't Hitler either! There could be no more important lesson to understand than how a race-baiting demagogue came to power in an educated and liberal country like Germany and how he transformed that nation into a fascist death machine capable of World War and unimaginable acts.

INGELRII··on On the Limits of Engine Analysis for Cheating Detection in Chess [pdf]
Elite Chess Players Keep Accusing Each Other of Cheating "Seeds of doubt have grown into a disturbance among some in the game’s top ranks." https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/25/crosswords/chess-hikaru-v...

The lure of money, where the risk of direct detection remains minimal makes cheating inevitable. Incentives are strongest with chess content creators, such as Hikaru.

Securing direct evidence is a near-impossible task. Direct evidence means, tracing through game statistics and behavioral cues. The evidence should be rock solid before starting to accuse any individual.

This is a systemic problem. While Kramnik and Carlsen might be right, their approach poisons the game deeper.

Perhaps a better tactic would be to abstain from naming culprits. Instead, they could have provided anonymized statistical evidence and explained their methodologies. Public consensus before naming the names could have been a plausible.

Systemic problem requires systemic solutions. Top players might have to play significant amount of their games in secure "SCIF" under observation, or something, to keep playing.

INGELRII··on Warning from OpenAI leaders helped trigger Sam Altman's ouster
Incentives are the force behind almost everything.

"Well, I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther." -- Charlie Munger

INGELRII··on Warning from OpenAI leaders helped trigger Sam Altman's ouster
Letter signing looks like a masterful use of the bandwagon effect. Quickly reframing the issue, going to attack, and creating a sense of outrage and hurry. People start quickly pressuring each other because there is a need to be unity for the scheme to work and no time to think.

> Within hours, messages dismissed the board as illegitimate and decried Altman’s firing as a coup by OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, according to the people.

>people identified as current OpenAI employees also described facing intense peer pressure to sign the mass-resignation letter.

>“Half the company had signed between the hours of 2 and 3am,”

INGELRII··on Warning from OpenAI leaders helped trigger Sam Altman's ouster
Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse

1. Pressure to maintain numbers

2. Fear and silence

3. Young ‘uns and a bigger-than-life CEO

4. Weak board of directors

5. Conflicts of interest overlooked or unaddressed

6. Innovation like no other company

7. Goodness in some areas atones for evil in others

from "The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse: How to Spot Moral Meltdowns in Companies Before It's Too Late", 2005 by Marianne M. Jennings, professor of legal and ethical studies in business in the Department of Management in the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona

INGELRII··on The Bluffers Guide to the Mythical Man Month
I agree. Mythical Man Month is a book to read. It's clear, interesting, and has better writing than summaries.

Many classics like this are so good because the author is among the first to observe new phenomena. They can write down what they have learned without cultural narratives that distort reality.

The hardest lesson in the book is the chapter 11 "Plan to Throw One Away". I have never seen this not to be the case in large systems. You must design the system to be rewritten. Accepting this is still a taboo.

> In most projects, the first system built is barely usable. It may be too slow, too big, awkward to use, or all three. There is no alternative but to start again, smarting but smarter, and build a redesigned version in which these problems are solved. The discard and redesign may be done in one lump, or it may be done piece-by-piece. But all large-system experience shows that it will be done.2 Where a new system concept or new technology is used, one has to build a system to throw away, for even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.

>The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers. Seen this way, the answer is much clearer. Delivering that throwaway to custom- ers buys time, but it does so only at the cost of agony for the user, distraction for the builders while they do the redesign, and a bad reputation for the product that the best redesign will find hard to live down.

>Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.

INGELRII··on Albert Einstein in 1939 composed a message for the people of AD 6939
I would rewrite the sentence as:

"Intelligence & character of the masses are incomparably lower than the intelligence and character of the individuals."

During the lifetime of Einstein, successful and educated mimicked the values of upper classes, even if they just pretended. After the WWII the middle class values took over. Today even upper class pretends to be middle class. Try to appear busy and productive. The "character" and intelligence have little to do with each another.

INGELRII··on When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
You understood the argument "When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think." very literally. Too literally.
INGELRII··on When you lose the ability to write, you also lose some of your ability to think
I completely agree with PG.

Writing is not just communication with others, or writing down information for later.

Writing is not just writing down something that already exists in the mind.

Writing is a part of thinking process. You talk to yourself few seconds or minutes later. It's back-and-forth. Marshaling thoughts and ideas, reading them back, reflecting, to be processed then writing them down again.

Writing is process of improving thoughts, generating new thoughts and ideas, making thoughts clearer for yourself.

INGELRII··on It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
Multiple accounts would be allowed since they don't circumvent the mechanism.
INGELRII··on It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
Killing UA business model would not be that bad. Protecting big business should not be the goal in itself.

We don't know what kind of games would replace these malevolent business models. We might get new kind of games and companies. Maybe less flashy, but more fun to play and better game mechanics.

INGELRII··on It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
My proposal would work equally to everyone because the limit would be related to purchase price.
INGELRII··on It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
It was thought that people would use less restaurants and bars if smoking was forbidden.

It's more likely that when incentives change, the whole customer base changes.

The current system of preying whales to pay for games has negative externalities for gamer's who don't have addiction. Playing is cheaper, but people play less games because addictive spending mechanics is affecting where the game development money goes.

Regulation would create incentives to make games that are expensive because they are so good.

INGELRII··on It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal
Regulation proposal: Set maximum spending limit/time tied to the purchase price. The limit is tied to account and player character.

example:

1. free-to-play: $100/year.

2. other: 10×purchase price/year. For a $50 game the maximum spending is $500 per year.

This would not set hard limit. It would only mandate up-front investment related to the amount of in-game spending. A Whale who spends $10k a year would have to pay $1k to get started.

I think this would effectively kill addictive impulse for people who can't afford it. At the same time it allows games to create expensive games.

INGELRII··on The rise and fall of Cathie Wood, controversial Wall Street investor
What Cathie Wood is doing is exactly what Semyon Dukach describes in "The real cause of the financial crisis – An MIT Blackjack Team perspective from 2009" http://semyondukach.blogspot.com/2009/01/real-cause-of-finan...

Cathie Wood is playing classical martingale strategy with investor money. Her business is ARK Investment Management, LLC. and fees. It's winning strategy for her, not long time ARKK investors.

INGELRII··on Robots are writing poetry, and many people can’t tell the difference
Poems and aphorisms are an art form that requires the reader to fill gaps in logical structure to create meaning. Humans naturally try to generate meaning from arbitrary nonsense if it's grammatically correct.

Human curated samples will almost certainly be good.

Consider MegaHAL from 1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaHAL From all the stuff it generated we are left with handful of gems like:

CHESS IS A FUN SPORT, WHEN PLAYED WITH SHOT GUNS.

COWS FLY LIKE CLOUDS BUT THEY ARE NEVER COMPLETELY SUCCESSFUL.

TIME. TIME. WHAT IS TIME? SWISS MANUFACTURE IT. FRENCH HORDE IT. ITALIANS WANT IT, HUH? WELL, I MUST BE THURSDAY. I NEVER COULD GET THE HANG OF THURSDAYS.

I COULD SHAKE MY TINY FIST AND SWEAR I WASN'T WRONG, BUT WHAT'S THE SENSE IN ARGUING WHEN YOU'RE MUCH TOO BUSY RETURNING TO THE LAVATOR.

INGELRII··on Book Review: A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis
General comment about theoretical systems like Lacanianism.

They seem to have these common features:

1) They are self-contained systems. They may be interesting in the terms of sci-fi worldbuilding, but you must suppress critical thinking and just absorb them or they fall apart.

2) Experts tend to discuss in the terms of what the founder or important figures meant. Understanding the subject is interpreting what few people said and thought. Right and wrong is about right interpretation.

3) Advance happens by forking or dissolving into smaller groups with different interpretations. There are main divisions, sub divisions, and so on.

I find hard to understand these kind of systems. There may be some initial core ideas that are interesting to ponder, but building whole system seems very limited and dogmatic.

If there is no way to create synthesis or settle questions among experts who disagree, and the only way is to branch, is there anything there?

--

edit:

My null hypothesis for the effectiveness of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in clinical setting is that the theory or method is just a framework that

A) helps analysts and patients that understand and work well together to find each other. Like Trekkie getting into therapy with a Trekkie fan therapist, or a Chatholic patient having therapist with Catholic backround.

B) it gives some needed structure, the theoretical framework itself is not that important.

C) the real help comes from interacting and talking with a person intimately.

In this sense, anything goes as long as it's not outright harmful.

INGELRII··on Cold treatment for insulin-making cells points to diabetes cure
Pancreatic islet cryopreservation by vitrification achieves high viability, function, recovery and clinical scalability for transplantation

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01718-1

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