Love that the Integration Bee is still going!
2,562 karma · joined January 11, 2017
Propublica has done an excellent slate of investigatory articles recently about how insurance denials actually work.
I'm a dilettante who passes through industries for a few years at a time, so I have no doubt your perspective is more nuanced! I may have understated how much impact that supply chain issues are, I'm going through a similar issue.
What happened is that with the shutdowns, profits went from 2-3% to 20-30%. Some of that money was given back to consumers, but most went into an absolutely insane soft market where every carrier paid more than they ever had to acquire any driver they could.
This led to a lot of carriers having drivers on their books that they really didn't know how to price correctly. Everyone realized at roughly the same time that they had screwed up more than usual - and that was when drivers got back on the roads. Suddenly frequency and severity of accidents were up to historic levels because everyone forgot how to drive and is driving ANGRY.
So there's a double whammy, it's drivers they haven't insured before on the one hand and the drivers they do know how to price changing their behavior en-masse. So we've gone from once-in-a-lifetime industry profits to massive losses. For the first time, when the carriers tell the government the price is unsustainable they actually mean it. Hence the California shut downs - carriers are TRULY taking a loss on most policies they write and are trying to shut down new customer operations as much as legally possible. You'll notice a surprising lack of auto insurance ads on tv compared to 3-4 years ago.
Progressive's underwriters are so far ahead of everybody that they got a lot of their price changes submitted before everyone (the other carriers and the government) figured out what was going on. You can see that in many states where the prices are public, in an incomprehensible data format. So they have been one of the only carriers still getting new customers.
It's basically been a state-by-state showdown now between state insurance commissioners and carriers, and the commissioners are starting to give in. Premiums were up almost 20% last year nation-wide and it's only going up.
During COVID shutdowns, there was a massive drop in frequency (obviously, hardly anyone was driving) but a significant uptick in severity. This was attributed to higher speeds with emptier roads.
After re-opening, frequency is significantly higher per driver than before. So is severity. Everyone I talked to in the industry was convinced this was due to loss of skill during shutdown as well as people driving much more aggressively. This is on top of the serious increase in parts due to supply chain issues.
I find it strange that this isn't discussed in the article when it's a pretty widely-held belief in the industry.
And obviously before that, but the assumption of who government was responsible to underwent a massive paradigm shift. "Gee, Charlemagne doesn't seem to have the interests of us serfs in mind" wouldn't have been a very interesting conversation back in the day.
The overt driver of the system - and the one that is agreed to across the whole Jewish-Israeli population - is the security issue of a Palestinian population that has held since 1948 that they are still at war with Israel, will never accept a Jewish state in the region, and will one day drive the Jews into the sea. This belief is propped up by constant propaganda from other Arab states and UNRWA (which has defined itself to exist because of a Right of Return that applies to 750k Palestinians and their descendants in perpetuity, but doesn't apply to the 14 millions Indians & Pakistanis, 12 million Germans, or 2-3 million Poles & Ukrainians who were also displaced by ethnic partitions established in 1947-1948).
Israel shows every day that they are willing and able to live closely with the Palestinians who accept their right to exist and aren't trying to murder their families, without using apartheid-like systems of control. Israeli Arabs certainly face suspicion and unofficial day-to-day discrimination, but if you asked Israelis how they would feel about an equal two-state system where West Bank and Gaza were a sovereign nation populated by Palestinians who were like the Israeli Arabs, they would largely be on board. There would be friction for a while, but it would be tolerable for both states to survive and thrive without the security apparatus that needs to be in place right now.
There is no doubt that Netanyahu's current governing coalition is made up of racists and religious extremists who would NOT be okay with that. Many of those secretaries want to use security issues as a pretext to fully take over "greater Israel," and use the border wall as much to keep their actions there hidden from the Israeli public as they use it to keep Hamas and IJ terror attacks to a minimum. But the PA - for all its collaboration and security partnership with the IDF - still pays bounties to the families of suicide bombers. And the reason more moderate Palestinian leaders have never been able to really negotiate a settlement is that they would be immediately overthrown by a populace who never accepted 1948 as the end of a decades-long attempt to throw the Jews out of Palestine.
This has not been adjudicated in court, but I think it's difficult to claim that the current system is primarily an ethnic or racial one when it doesn't apply to the millions of Palestinians who are accepting of their neighbors. Even if it is often abused by racists.
She was down to 4 ingredients when we first met (5 if you count salt), but she's up to a fairly standard diet now. Lots of stress reduction, and she worked really hard to test out one ingredient at a time. At this point it's avoiding a blacklist rather than sticking to a whitelist which is such an amazing shift. Things can improve, even with extreme cases!
We've been considering everything ranging from hard science to total woo, with what's worked best documented here: https://edsetc.com/
If you have some sort of mast cell disease, did you happen to get the covid vaccine? Any issues?
This is a fantastic retort.
Very prestigious, selective, and status driven. Based on making deep science accessible to the outside world in a way that the rest of the institute wasn't willing or able to. Lots of projects based around the intersection between previously unrelated fields of study, with an eye towards catchy aesthetics.
At an institute where researchers were expected to knowing a single field of study to a mind-boggling level of detail, there was an assumption that mix-and-matching completely disparate fields required either a talent that surpassed the world-class talent in other departments, or a willingness to accept a much more superficial understanding of the constituent fields. The TED-talk/Malcolm-Gladwell shine on so many Media Lab researchers certainly made people assume it was the latter.
I've only read this blog post, the abstract of Oxman's paper, and the referenced section. Drawing together the aesthetic similarity of voronoi diagrams, phase diagrams, and metallurgy structures feels exactly on brand. It's the kind of insight porn that makes the Media Lab accessible to fairly intelligent outsiders who can fund it rather than bothering with a post-doctorate career of their own.
The paper is inherently about design, with the core thesis seeming to be "hey, what if we had designs emerge from the materials instead of designing first and then picking whatever materials we want later?" I'm not sure how deep of an understanding of the sub-fields is necessary. I'd expect an understanding of materials science, since the thesis is about materials, and a material scientist was on the review committee. But sprinkling in other fields without knowing them at a PhD level would seem very expected to me within the Media Lab's culture.
I appreciate a post looking at both pieces of work, given the politically-driven attacks in either direction. That being said, her section on Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations seems a bit over-explained for a PhD dissertation, but it certainly isn't "technical mumbo-jumbo" or particularly confusing. If he's complaining that she's fluffing up her word count I totally get it, but if he's saying it's GPT-style nonsense I have to disagree.
And if we have to choose between someone defending their MIT PhD (a) not knowing the equation for the hypotenuse of a triangle or (b) messing up the LaTeX and putting a radical in the wrong place... I'm personally going with "b."
The plagiarism itself speaks to the cargo cultism of dissertations themselves, and the need to write long boilerplate sections summarizing prior work and contextualizing the original research. That seems to be where people keep getting caught with verbatim or near-verbatim copying (my first experience with this was my first high school summer program in a lab, where the researcher pointed out a "nice sentence" I should grab from someone else's paper for the intro section).
The very concept of plagiarism in a scientific dissertation is a bit odd, almost a category error when not applied to the actual original research itself (research in the "did something new" sense not in the "read a bunch of other papers" sense). Why is a PhD candidate supposed to write an entirely original summary of the state of the field? I think it is very, very common to start with an existing summary and modify it for these sections. And I'm not sure that I find that un-ethical.
> Imagine joining an engineering team. You’re excited and full of ideas, probably just out of school and a world of clean, beautiful designs, awe-inspiring in their aesthetic unity of purpose, economy, and strength. You start by meeting Mary, project leader for a bridge in a major metropolitan area. Mary introduces you to Fred, after you get through the fifteen security checks installed by Dave because Dave had his sweater stolen off his desk once and Never Again. Fred only works with wood, so you ask why he’s involved because this bridge is supposed to allow rush-hour traffic full of cars full of mortal humans to cross a 200-foot drop over rapids. Don’t worry, says Mary, Fred’s going to handle the walkways. What walkways? Well Fred made a good case for walkways and they’re going to add to the bridge’s appeal. Of course, they’ll have to be built without railings, because there’s a strict no railings rule enforced by Phil, who’s not an engineer. Nobody’s sure what Phil does, but it’s definitely full of synergy and has to do with upper management, whom none of the engineers want to deal with so they just let Phil do what he wants. Sara, meanwhile, has found several hemorrhaging-edge paving techniques, and worked them all into the bridge design, so you’ll have to build around each one as the bridge progresses, since each one means different underlying support and safety concerns. Tom and Harry have been working together for years, but have an ongoing feud over whether to use metric or imperial measurements, and it’s become a case of “whoever got to that part of the design first.” This has been such a headache for the people actually screwing things together, they’ve given up and just forced, hammered, or welded their way through the day with whatever parts were handy. Also, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they’re still sort of holding up parts of the bridge. Nobody knows which parts, but everybody’s pretty sure they’re important parts. After the introductions are made, you are invited to come up with some new ideas, but you don’t have any because you’re a propulsion engineer and don’t know anything about bridges.
> Would you drive across this bridge? No. If it somehow got built, everybody involved would be executed. Yet some version of this dynamic wrote every single program you have ever used, banking software, websites, and a ubiquitously used program that was supposed to protect information on the internet but didn’t.
> You can’t restart the internet. Trillions of dollars depend on a rickety cobweb of unofficial agreements and “good enough for now” code with comments like “TODO: FIX THIS IT’S A REALLY DANGEROUS HACK BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S WRONG” that were written ten years ago.
This is pretty key to understanding Twilio's prospects as a business. In my experience, they are fantastically easy to integrate at first.
But they come with a cost that blows up your financial model if your product is any kind of high-volume use case, or if SMS is factored in as a direct cost and you're talking to investors about unit economics. At some point you have to get off of them and onto a cheaper-per-SMS solution, even if it costs more dev hours to maintain.
He seems stuck on interpreting feedback through the lens of a linear-odds, one-shot model. The player feedback is that it shouldn't be linear, and there should be less randomness for larger numbers.
That all makes sense to me... and I suspect makes sense to him when he's not giving a talk for comedic effect.
Suppose I start in Greenwich, walk - without rolling - down the prime meridian to the south pole, up the international date line to the north pole, and back down the prime meridian to Greenwich.
How many rotations do I go through? One. I get a full rotation because I've followed the earth's curvature all the way around the globe once, even though I'm walking straight without rolling.
So the answer is "how many rotations due to rolling" plus "one bonus rotation for passing around the curvature of the circle."
> By the end of the day, we had complete models on the screen, manipulating them with the controllers. Within a week, we had an environment to move the model through.
The Black Triangle was a leading indicator of a payoff that began happening by the end of the day. Too many similar projects result in a constant string of promises that we are just about to turn the corner on velocity/capability if only we would let the engineers focus on this refactor for a bit longer.
In practice, "Black Triangles" projects are bets like any other. If they work out, they unlock faster velocity and the ability to deliver better features. Often they deliver nothing but a refactor to someone's idea of a better architecture, and are lucky to ever reach breakeven on engineering time.
I think this community is better than most at keeping things analytical, and you're better than any other moderator I've encountered in decades on online communities. But it's not exactly a neutral framing to kick off the discussion. An article about the numerous rapes and tortures committed by Palestinians during October 7th and on the hostages afterwards would likewise not be the most neutral.
One particularly interesting topic is the "theories of superposition" section, which gets into how LLMs categorize concepts. Are concepts all distinct or indistinct? Are they independent or do they cluster? It seems that the answer is all of the above.
This ties into linguistic theories of categorization[2] that I saw referenced in (of all places) a book about the partition of Judaeo-Christianity in the first centuries CE.
Some categories have hard lines - something is a "bird" or it is not. Some categories have soft lines - like someone being "tall." Some categories work on prototypes, making them have different intensities within the space - A sparrow, swallow, or robin is more "birdy" than a chicken, emu, or turkey. Apparently Wittgenstein was the first to really explore with Family Resemblances that a category might not have hard boundaries, according to people who study these things.[3] These sorts of "manifolds" seem to appear, where some concepts are not just distinct points that are or aren't.
It's exciting to see that LLMs may give us insights into how our brains store concepts. I've heard people criticize them as "just predicting the next most likely token," but I've found myself lost when speaking in the middle of a garden path sentence many times. I don't know how a sentence will end before I start saying it, and it's certainly plausible that LLMs actually do match they way we speak.
Probably the most exciting piece is seeing how close they seem to get to mimicking how we communicate and think, while being fully limited to language with no other modeling behind it - no concept of the physical world, no understanding of counting or math, just words. It's clear when you scratch the surface that LLM outputs are bullshit with no thought underneath them, but it's amazing how much is covered by linking concepts with no logic other than how you've heard them linked before.
[1] https://transformer-circuits.pub/2023/monosemantic-features/...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002...