duahncjak

Wow, this is a lot more intuitive. gowld for BDFL!

Humans make decisions based on arbitrary and capricious preferences, and are good at coming up with logical-sounding reasons to justify those decisions (eg: rejecting a candidate because she is a black woman, but saying it was because she didn't communicate well). A neural net makes a decision based on a perfectly reproducible sequence of calculations. There has been a lot of work published about how we can explain the output of neural nets, and IMO this has much better prospects than trying to explain a human’s decisions by scanning the brain or whatnot.

Countries have held much higher debt levels than the US currently does without being the global reserve currency.

Another interpretation of this data would be that causality runs in the other direction. You can also make up a plausible-sounding story for the mechanism - a dopamine response to stressful situations helps people solve their problems.

This paper estimates the cost at ~$2.25B/year, and notes that more than 50 countries have military budgets exceeding $3B: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae98d#...

They point out the plan assumes you can launch planes from a few different points around the globe. You don’t need global agreement, but at least access to some foreign airports.

I think solutions to climate change that require global coordination are doomed to failure. When things start getting rough it’s going to be some entity independently pursuing a geoengineering solution, with whatever risk that entails. It’s not the best approach, but it’s something that someone can impose on the whole world without conquering them and shutting down their coal plans.

I’m going to take this opportunity to call out Airbnb as having the best rejection experience I’ve ever gotten as a candidate. After a day of onsites (I think 9 interviews including the lunch culture interview), the recruiter called me at 6 PM and told me I was being rejected, and which of the interviews I failed (which matched my perception that I didn’t click with that interviewer). It left me with a positive feeling toward the company.

Interesting, I had no idea.

It’s common practice for the online video rentals (many different providers including Google and Amazon) to charge more for HD. In reality the marginal cost of providing digital content is almost zero, so there is never going to be “cost-plus” pricing. They are always going to charge whatever the market will bear. Price discrimination allows more value-conscious customers to get content at a lower price than they would otherwise.

I understand why Google works that way since the login is tied to gmail and chrome browser history, but I’m not sure about Spotify. They have a popular Facebook integration but I don’t know if you can get any private info out of the Spotify account.

Based on this reading, “people” elect the senate. If “people” includes travelers, does that mean travelers get to vote?

If this happens to anyone, see if you can get permission to record it.

Business would be a bit better if there weren’t robocalls. But free-rider/coordination challenges make it difficult for the diffuse category of all businesses to group together and fight it.

In my experience, Amazon drivers will mark packages as delivered when they haven’t gotten around to delivering yet. When I call Amazon to complain, they tell me to just wait and the package will show up later.

I suspect the drivers are given an impossible number of packages to deliver, and there’s a misalignment of incentives where everyone is better off pretending they delivered the package on time. It’s not hard to imagine how this situation would arise when the delivery company is also the merchant, and there’s a command from on high for everyone to get one-day delivery. If the package is marked as delivered, everyone up the chain makes their numbers. @bezos, are you paying attention?

I think this also applies to many kinds of low-grade chronic suffering. Changing your response to the sensation might be easier than stopping the sensation.

The only externality demonstrated is catching the Golden State Killer.

I don’t believe we should think of this person’s profession as a safety driver. We should think of them as a fall guy.

It’s not reasonable for a human to sit around for hours doing absolutely nothing, then suddenly be thrust into an emergency with seconds to respond without warning. Most humans aren’t capable of that level of vigilance. If they aren’t watching a video, they’ll be daydreaming. It’s very unlikely they will be able to recover from any kind of situation requiring an immediate response. At a system design level, by placing a human in that role you have already failed.

Maybe if you take the most qualified humans with the best reaction times, they would have a chance, but the qualifications for that job would be more like those of a fighter pilot. This job is not recruiting our best and brightest, it’s recruiting people who want to sit around doing nothing.

This person’s role in the system isn’t to provide safety - it’s to absorb liability. Ergo, a fall guy.