fanzhang

It's not just RNG. Men are known to have more variance so top record holder can be a very different spread than the 10th best person of each gender.

If they put the sign up first, you wouldn't know how much more information you'd need to give before doing a search (just a string), and that seems like it would undersell themselves.

This seems a lot better than those quizzes or quotes that ask a bunch of questions first and then ask for your email at the end -- or worse -- a payment.

Bingo -- analysts of Trump are way too overeager to attribute "4D Chess" super analytics driven goals to Trump.

In reality, he's doing exactly what is on the tin: reducing tariffs, and doing what he wants to do, because he feels like it.

Mostly because the definition of decent life has shot upwards way faster than economic standards.

From fixed standards, the median kid being raised today is doing way better than 100 years ago, even though people chose to have way more kids 100 years ago: - Cars were death traps. - Dying in infancy and 20s, 30s was common. - Very few people went to college.

100 years ago, no one felt "indecent" to raise a kid they can't afford to send to college, or knew at a 1% chance of dying due to malnutrition. Now, for many people, they would feel indecent bringing someone into the world in that state.

Agree that this is how papers are often judged, but strong disagree on how this is how papers should be judged. This is exactly the problem of reviewers looking for the keys under the lamp post (does the paper check these boxes), versus where they lost the keys (should this paper get more exposure because it advances the field).

The fact that the first doesn't lead more to the second is a failure of the system.

This is the same sort of value system that leads to accepting job candidates with neat haircuts and says the right shibboleths, versus the ones that make the right bottom line impact.

Basically, are "good" papers that are very rigorous but lead to nothing actually "good"? If your model of progress in science is that rigorous papers are a higher probability roll of the dice, and nonrigorous papers are low probability rolls of the dice, then we should just look for rigorous papers. And that a low-rigor paper word2vec actually make progress was "getting really lucky" and we should have not rated the paper well.

But I contend that word2vec was also very innovative, and that should be a positive factor for reviewers. In fact, I bet that innovative papers have a hard time being super rigorous because the definition of rigor in that field has yet to be settled yet. I'm basically contending that on the extreme margins, rigor is negatively correlated with innovation.

Yes -- all the people I know withdrawing from small banks are going to Chase or Morgan Stanley. These largest banks have to mark-to-market their losses and have a lot of cash (short duration) assets, and are literally too big to fail.

Does this show that current markets are working? Seems like the lowest cost energy storage solution are NG peakers, and it does seem like the US has a lot of gas energy production: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

If this were a concern, a user can easily bypass this by having a work-for-hire person add a minor transform layer on top of the DALL-E generated images right?

A lot of replies on twitter critique dang on moderating their comments. But in reality, I think this is a good thing. There are already enough near-total-free speech zones on the Internet (and we see how many of them turn out). It's far more personally interesting to me to see how a conversations in a space moderated above a certain threshold evolves.

The Copenhagen interpretation of ethics: you're automatically morally neutral if you don't take action. https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

Ah okay thanks for replying. That's great to hear you're speaking from experience then. Did you need to convince your spouse of it or was your spouse for it all along? Sometime I think having these conversations is hard. Also do you act as if you're married or is the relationship "looser" in many ways (like living apart)? I'm genuinely curious because I do think the institution of marriage is a little dated in many ways.

Is this something you've done yourself (either cohabing or getting married is fine), or is this more theoretical / speculative?

Well for almost any service, people would rather prefer it to be free than paid, so it's almost an instinctive emotional reaction. Google being huge makes it a particularly easy target.

When I first heard about LIBOR in 2002, I was surprised that the number is just based on a survey of bankers. Surely there would be accuracy issues with that?

But at that time I was young and had no finance experience, so though that the adults in the room knew best. Turns out not!

I don't think the base problem is that people shaded their numbers one way or another, it's that the system is designed wrong.

Some classes must be more equal than others!

Another view is that it's a great illustration of the relative price trends in the last 50 years. Healthcare has gone way up in price, and tech way down. What was a supercomputer 50 years ago is now a small fraction of the cost of a chemical test (which requires FDA approval).

Technically anything is "possible" -- but what does the Bayesian weight of evidence say at this point?

Is there any evidence of this in the data above (or elsewhere)? Labor productivity is a low degree-of-freedom datapoint and your explanation is indirect and has a lot of degrees of freedom.

Is there not a single dimension in which the paper is novel? If not, it seems like a mistake to publish this.

It would be way more convincing if the Arthur used primary historical source documents to justify this as a myth. For example, if he could find an old architect who wrote that the spiral staircases were for aesthetic reasons or for making the climb up easier, that would be more convincing.

Instead, the author argues from almost first principles and bulk observations, which seems to be unconvincing logic in establishing historical intent.

Your hypothesis of "bullwhip effect" would predict that global inventories are increasing (thus causing a surge in demand). However it doesn't square with all the graphs in the article that show inventories across the world at global lows.

Overall, I believe the Bridgewater story to be more correct.

First, a nitpick about a theme prevalent in psychological research: drawing sweeping conclusions from a single specific experiment.

Here the "broad conclusion drawn" is that depressed people see the world more realistically -- which if true could have sweeping implications in many areas of life (e.g. they would make better stock pickers, they should be put in command of armies).

The single specific experiment is a 1979 study on correlation between a light bulb and a button. Has this study been replicated? Is the result robust to trivial variations, like predicting a biased random walk, or a continuous correlation (like how hard someone hits a pad versus how many lights light up)? Where's the literature review article for the broad conclusion? (Oh right, this is Vice!)

Now that the nitpick is out of the way, suppose the conclusion is true. A thought experiment would be would a person who estimates light-button correlation accurately be the best at a particular job?

If you wanted to get the best statistical estimate of a correlation, then the more realistic estimator is best for the job. But imagine a situation where you press a button and a green light would light up 10% more often if you press the button versus not. If your goal instead is to get the maximum amount of green light, you'd actually want the person to be pressing the button as often as possible. You'd actually want the person who overestimates his own effectiveness because he'll put in more effort and yield better results!

Generally speaking, it's possible that someone who moderately overestimates her own effectiveness in the world will be better at getting things done in the world, versus the realistic estimate.

Partially related, but I'm reminded of Elon's quote: > I’d Rather Be Optimistic and Wrong Than Pessimistic and Right

Crazy. Was this just the result of a typo? Perhaps not, considering:

- The transaction sender set both the max total fee and the max priority fee to above 10 million. Most UIs require at least two manual setting changes to do this.

- The sender is Bitfinex -- they're pros and not just a mon and pop.

Maybe it could just be a transfer from the sender to whoever the miner is...

Good point. To add an exception to the original article then, perhaps the only general method to detect fraud is the trivial method: assume everything is fraud.

In practice though for most goals it's probably better to trade off Type 1 vs Type 2 error.

'Nothing incriminating" doesn't mean it it should be fully discounted.

The suicide theory is the strongest one in absence of a better explanation.

Not sure if this study will replicate:

The study had about 30 participants, with 15 in each arm, so that's not a lot of statistical power to begin with.

Both the low-glucose-label and high-glucose-label arms showed a spike in actual measured blood sugar after ingestion. The difference in blood glucose between the two arms was just about 10%.

The naïve p-value between the two arms was barely significant at 2%, 6%, and 2%, but the p-values were taken from a complex model that probably has p-hacking problems and needs p-value correction.

I would wait for the replication study before believing in this effect. If the effect is real, they only need to double their sample size to get a t-stat of 3 instead of 2, which would give a much more convincing p-value of 0.2% instead of the 2-6% right now.

I applaud the authors for exploring this theory though, and encourage replications to push the p-value down.

I don't see the point of the essay as how brilliant of an independent thinker he is, or even that being an independent thinker makes you a better person.

The essay is useful because has specific tactical points on how to think better: questioning whether a statement you hear is true, or watching how other people find their beliefs.

What do you think people should be doing more in the world? Or mental habits people should have?

Your solution would work well if everyone (or nearly all people) agreed to migrate to it.

It may need to be in a few steps. The first step might be, for a 5 year period, mail clients display a warning saying the sending domain doesn't have the correct SPF records. Then after that, those mail clients dropped those emails.

Overall, the cleverness of the OP solution is that it uses to current system to make the next iterative step in solving the problem in a backwards compatible way.

If we could break backwards compatibility, I think we can solve a large number of issues with email wholesale.

What's the right policy solution to this? Genuinely asking.

The proximal problems pointed out here are: - CA power transmission infrastructure is under maintained. - CA has overgrown forests of which anything can be a catalyst for forest fires.

For whether the CA infrastructure was indeed under maintained, let's look at the costs and benefits:

The cost of maintaining the infrastructure more is that you'd have to inspect much more of the power infrastructure much more often. The twitter thread suggests that there were many orders of magnitude more quantity infrastructure like this, and this tower was under maintained by at least one order of magnitude. (To be honest, I'm not sure whether the tower lasting 100 years is evidence in favor of more preventative maintenance or less!)

Costs are made worse by the rising cost of infrastructure in the last many decades. Think about the cost of building a new subway in Manhattan and now think about replacing all the century-old high tension towers in CA.

The benefit of preventive maintenance is that you'd get fewer accidents, and perhaps less downtime caused by accidental failures. How much fewer fire accidents you'd get is uncertain -- the rest of the comments here do a good job of dissecting between the camp that says this could have permanently prevented all electrical-caused CA wildfires (maybe a few fires per decade?) and the camp that says this would have no long run impact on the number of disastrous fires because a lighting strike would have started the next fire.

Now it seems to me uncertain that the costs outweigh the benefits, but suppose it does, what's the best way to make PG&E do more maintenance?

Currently PG&E is profit-incentivized to not maintain infrastructure very much. The gov't could force them to establish a liability fund that they must contribute 50% of profits to until they have enough money in a trust fund to cover one bad wildfire. This policy would have direct cost effect on Californians -- after all PG&E is not a genie that you can legislate free money or performance from. PG&E would raise electricity rates by an amount equivalent to its current profit margin (not that much) and perform more fixing of infrastructure to meet the CA rule. This seems like probably a good route to take, as PG&E would then focus maintenance on liability reduction. The liability laws should be written carefully to incentivize PG&E to fix the right things. PG&E should only have a certain percentage liability per event, where the percentage correlates with "how many new wildfire did you cause / how fire-proof this region would have been if not for PG&E".

There are some other fixes too for the legislatively-minded. CA could just literally force PG&E to replace towers every 50 years, conduct 2x as many inspections etc. This would probably raise PG&E's costs which would get passed to CA utility payers. The disadvantage of this solution over the last paragraph is that the specific maintenance is by law, instead of at the discretion of PG&E's technicians. But if you think PG&E's management is poor to begin with, then that's not too bad.

But what if we just take more of it from executive's pay? Probably the executives will just leave and go elsewhere, in which case it becomes similar to the next solution: nationalizing PG&E. Now this could work. The engineers of HN in PG&E will have to tell me how much mismanagement is really going on inside PG&E compared to gov't owned utilities they've worked in in the past. The higher that ratio, the better the case for nationalization. The lower the ratio (e.g. if you feel the state of CA would run PG&E worse than today's management), then the less argument there is for nationalization.

Overall, the extra maintenance has to be funded by someone. Your pick of whether electricity prices go up, or whether fire-endangered towns need to make 2x property taxes, or whether CA residents have higher income tax rates.

Are you actually their marginal customer though -- as in are you going to buy one of their competitors with high chance?

If so, then can you talk about which names you like more and they can do better. If you weren't in the market to begin with, then it might not matter for them.