cykotic

This is a philosophical viewpoint but in some sense all of them are lucky.

Louis de Branges claimed for years to have a proof of Riemann Hypothesis. No one really agreed with his conclusion. He is certainly a first rate mathematician and had he came up with a proof that others accepted he’d be lauded as a great mathematician.

Abhyankar claimed that no one has ever really understood Hironaka’s resolution of singularities paper. Hironaka is a Field’s Medalist and Abhyankar a great mathematician in his own right. He was never able to find a simpler proof for resolution of singularities. If he had gotten lucky then he would have.

The point is, that luck plays a role in terms of whether or not the right idea pops into your head. How many brilliant people labored over problems that simply have no solution and thus aren’t considered one of the greats? Newton wrote more about alchemy than math or physics. He’s not considered a great chemist. One thing the greats have in common is spending a great deal of time thinking about problems. That increases the probability of coming up with a brilliant insight.

Of course, it is not all luck. You do have to have good intuition. Here’s a quote by Chaitin:

Gödel's incompleteness theorem tells us that within mathematics there are statements that are unknowable, or undecidable. Omega tells us that there are in fact infinitely many such statements: whether any one of the infinitely many bits of Omega is a 0 or a 1 is something we cannot deduce from any mathematical theory. More precisely, any maths theory enables us to determine at most finitely many bits of Omega.

In some sense we get a survivorship bias when talking about the greats. They happened to work on a problem that was solvable. I suggest there are many more equally brilliant people who didn’t get lucky and thus are unknown.

Out of curiosity I looked into Comcast cable tv prices in my area recently. All cable packages had a list price that did not include $20 a month for broadcast tv fee and $15 a month for regional sports tv fee. It’s not a surprise that people look elsewhere for tv. I hope Comcast and others like it go bankrupt.

Sometimes a regulation needs to be done at the government level for the protection of everyone. For instance, we didn’t leave it up to individual apartment complexes on whether or not they wanted to implement ADA requirements or fire detectors.

It’s generally bad policy to leave it up to landlords on whether or not something should done or banned for safety reasons. Their default mode is to do nothing.

That is certainly plausible and worth looking into.

On the whole though you would agree progress has been made, right? In a world with imperfect knowledge you do the best you can with the information you have.

The response to a paper ought not be, “This paper is bogus because they didn’t control for all variables.”. If the paper is bogus then give reasons for why this is the case. Was the statistical analysis wrong? Are there reasons why this can’t be true? Is this new information worthy of further investigation?

It’s sloppy thinking to say it’s a bad paper without having studied the issue and the data.

If we did science as you seem to think it should be done then very little progress will be made. You should read up on the history of progress in neuroscience. Metaphorically speaking; when you walk into a dark room one has to reach out and try to make sense of things before stumbling upon where the lamp is.

Higher median income places tend to have a fewer percentage of poor people. Probably some people assume poverty correlates to suicide rate. The authors did the best they could at making sense of the data they had.

Here’s a map of suicide rate in Italy. Note the north has higher rate of suicide than the south. The north of Italy is much richer than the south.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Ff...

We live in a world of imperfect knowledge. We look for patterns to try to determine cause/effect. The beginning process for this is to point out correlations and then further investigate. It’s not possible to account for all variables when it comes to things like suicide. It is possible and worthwhile to try to study the phenomenon as best we can.

I very much doubt this is true. Do you have any training in this area? I’m guessing no.

The post is light on details but they do cite one study. Do you have anything other than intuition for your beliefs? I’ve not studied the issue and know nothing about childhood development so my intuition is almost certainly riddled with misconceptions that have been debunked already. Do you have training in this area?

That Thomas has taken very expensive gifts from people with cases he ruled on is enough evidence of wrongdoing. One does not need any more information. In such a position as judge, member of Congress, or President the appearance of impropriety is enough. The Clinton's made $200 million since he was President. That's evidence enough of his corruption.

That others are corrupt though is not germane to whether or not Thomas and other members of the court are corrupt. By the way, there have been lots of calls for scrutiny of Congressmen who sold stocks at opportune times.

Would that people like you think as much about the poor when it comes time for the government to make its budget. We’d be a better country if it this happened.

I said nothing of the sort nor implied anything of the sort. In a financial sense, winners=rich and losers=poor. This has nothing to do with zero sum.

I had read about rainfall problems some years ago. I thought it was more of one time occurrence sort of thing. Humans have done a remarkably good job of messing up the environment.

I’m surprised it’s that many people. I’d be interested to know if the displaced people primarily lived near the railroad. Colon was a small city back then so I did not think it could be so many people. We in the Zone weren’t taught much about the darker side of the building of the canal.

I hope my prior comment isn’t taken as derogatory toward Panama. Based on when I was last in Panama they’ve done a great job of governance. At least compared to when the Canal Zone was still an American territory. I think, overall, we Americans by 1970s ended up being detrimental to the growth and development of Panama. While it bothered me to lose my hometown I can see the Treaty was the right thing to do.

I’m not up to date on things now. Thanks for the information.

Prior to the handover of the Canal there weren’t any issues with water during rainy season. But Panama City has ballooned in population and the ships going through the canal now are bigger on average. We Americans kept people out of the drainage system for Gatun Lake. We left the jungle alone. I don’t know if there has been a destruction of the jungle around Gatun Lake.

Gatun lake is man made. There was no lake as such prior to the building of the canal. There also weren’t a lot of people living in the area of what is now Gatun lake. Between Colon and Panama City was very sparsely populated.

Zonian here. There was zero chance of ever creating a lock free canal. The amount of digging required for that was not possible in the early 1900s. I think pumping water in those days was far too impractical. Ships need to get raised 85 ft and then lowered 85 ft for the passage. Using gravity to fill the lock chambers was an ingenious solution and minimized the amount of digging. Thousands of people died building the canal and digging from Gamboa to Gatun just wasn’t going to work.

In the rainy season there aren’t any water issues. It’s the dry season that is the problem.

In the U.S. bonuses are taxable income and the marginal rate of taxation for the bonuses comes at the high end of an employee’s tax bracket. In the U.S. corporate tax rates are lower than the income tax rate for high individual earners. Therefore, from a tax collection perspective, it’s good that the excess profit go toward bonuses.

Pensions don’t take a penalty. A penalty implies something being taken away from them or a charge to them. Nothing is being taken away from the pension.

According to the definition you linked to no suffering occurs because no one lost anything. You can’t lose something you never had.

I made an edit to my comment above. It may explain more my position.

We live in a society and there aren winners/losers in a financial sense. But we all have to live together. That 10 people have as much wealth as 150 million people is obscene and immoral. Taxing such wealth to use for the betterment of us all is right, just, and sound policy. Obviously we disagree on this. I hope your view does not win out in the long run. It has won out in the U.S. in the present and the effects have been bad. Such is my view.

Profits by definition mean leftover money after all expenses. Paying tax on profit does not incur a loss by anyone. It does mean that someone receives less than if there was no tax but it isn't a loss. You can't suffer if nothing was taken away.

I don't know Italian law and don't know if ex post facto tax increases are illegal. I'm guess not since they are enacting such taxes.

Windfall taxes don't bother me.

I think you don't understand what the word suffer means. Those entities don't lose anything. It's not possible to lose something you don't have. In an alternate universe where the windfall tax did not occur those entities have more money. But in this universe they don't lose anything. They don't suffer.

To call it a loss means that money was taken from them. If someone promises to leave me $1 million when they die and then they decide to change their mind I do not suffer. Nothing was taken from me. I did miss out on having $1 million but have suffered no loss. I never had the $1 million to begin with.

It does not bother me. But I think there should be a min/max for how much wealth a person has. No one suffers from taxing windfall profits. Windfall , by definition, being unexpectedly high profits.

The vast majority of climate scientists believe you are wrong. A very small minority of them believe you are right. Given that climate science is not like mathematics where absolute certainty is possible it’s best for people to go with the overwhelming consensus expert opinion. In a world of uncertain knowledge this is the best we can do and it isn’t hysteria to think there’s a huge problem.

If my view wins out in the political sense then we’ll end up with a world with much more clean energy, a lot less pollution, less reliance on plastics, less resource wars, cleaner water, cleaner air, more trees, etc. If your view wins out politically, and you are correct that the issue is overblown, then we end up with worse air quality, more pollution, unclean water, etc.

Whether or not my views on climate change are correct, mitigating the harm to the environment benefits everyone. This truly is a case where Pascal’s wager makes sense. So let’s stop swimming in our own shit and create a clean environment.

Hysteria is too strong a word. Perhaps you speak in hyperbole. Few people are actually hysterical over the destruction of the environment that we are doing collectively.

I just hope we don't kill too many people with the "degrowth" idiocy which is fueled by flimsy doomerist predictions that are only loosely based on legitimate science but mostly pushed by entities with political and/or financial interests.

Why is the idiocy on this side of the issue and not yours? In terms of pushing political interests I think a relatively objective analysis of how corporations are influencing research and the messaging with regard to climate science would lead one to the opposite conclusion you appear to have come to.

At least progress has been made. Thirty years ago people like you were at the denial stage. You aren’t denying the problem, just labeling those who want to take steps to mitigate it as hysterical. Soon you will be at the “We can’t do anything about it” stage.

I think the question ought to be why is your belief on the matter not the result of propaganda in the reverse direction? When you believe something that the overwhelming majority of experts disagree with then it seems it’s much more likely you are the victim of propaganda.

If 97% of the world’s oncologists say you have cancer then it’s likely you have cancer. Believing otherwise is deranged.

You may suggest it but I don’t care if someone thinks I’m biased toward one over the other. They are both assholes and neither deserve adulation of any kind. It is objectively true though that Mark will kill Musk in a real fight. Mark trains a lot in MMA and he will obliterate someone who does not similarly train. This is true regardless of any biases I have. It’s simply the case that those who train in MMA stand a much better chance of winning a fight than those who do not.