Yeah, I'm aware. Happens to all my comments.
And as the other poster correctly guesses, this was a sarcastic reference to covid.
168 karma · joined August 4, 2023
And as the other poster correctly guesses, this was a sarcastic reference to covid.
Oh well. Maybe when that happens.
I'm not sure it's actually more evil than any other upper-class institution, but that evil manifests itself uniquely through extremely punchable human beings rather than through massive faceless investment firms. In the grand scheme of things, SBF almost certainly does less harm than a lot of defense contractors do, but SBF did it in a way that makes him, personally, the asshole (rather than just a blob of people following economic incentives).
"Azure" is an English color-word, but an English speaker recognizes "azure" as a kind of "blue". But "blue" is not a kind of "green" or a kind of "purple" or a kind of anything else. Hence, "blue" is a basic English color-word.
Typical English dialects have eleven basic color words: white, gray, black, brown, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. Other color-words in English are considered variants of one of these eleven terms. That wasn't always true ("pink" is the most recent addition, dating to the early 1700s), but it's pretty well-established by modern English speakers. Other languages may make fewer distinctions (e.g. until about the last century Japanese used ao(i) as a basic color word that encompassed both blue and green, so e.g. a traffic light is aoi by tradition even though the modern word for green is midori) or more (e.g. Russian distinguishes light blue goluboi and dark blue sinii similarly to how English distinguishes red and pink). To an old Japanese speaker, blue and green were both shades of ao, and to a modern Russian speaker, goluboi is as distinct from sinii as "red" is from "pink" in English (they are not both "shades of blue" any more than pink and red are "shades of reddish" in English).
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/12/13/whats-on-...
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/328241/americans-average-weight...
In a horseshoe orbit, when the small body approaches the medium body "from behind" (that is, the small body is moving faster than the medium body), the medium body tugs the small body forward. That is an effective forward thrust for the small body, which rises into a higher orbit and slows down as a result. That means the small body starts to fall behind, losing ground relative to the medium body.
After it loses enough ground, it approaches the medium body from the front (or, if you prefer, the medium body catches up to it from behind). Then the medium body's gravity tugs it backward, dropping it into a lower and faster orbit, and the cycle repeats.
The most exceptional example of this is two of Saturn's moons, Janus and Epimetheus, which share an orbit and periodically trade places in it as a result of these dynamics.
The classic example is the "Theorem on Friends and Strangers", which states that in any group of six or more people, there is always some subset of three people who are either pairwise friends or pairwise strangers (or, in graph theoretic terms, three vertices that are either all pairwise connected by an edge or pairwise not connected by an edge).
This generalizes to larger subsets: in any group of 18 or more people, there's always some subset of four people who are pairwise friends or strangers, and in any group of 49 or more, there's always some subset of five (49 may not be optimal here; it's known to be between 43 and 49). The known bounds are quite weak: the number of people required to guarantee a mutual-friends-or-strangers subset of n people is known only to be omega(2^(n/2)) and little-o(2^2n), with no improvements on those bounds made despite nearly a century of work.
Mathematically, this corresponds to solutions to a particular differential equation existing for particular values of energy (which appears as a constant in the equation). To use a simpler DE for an example: dx/dt = kx has solutions Ce^kt for all k, but a more complicated DE might only have solutions for some k.
Hence, in English-speaking usage, "Columbia" (with a u) is more common, as in the Columbia River or District of Columbia. But the (Spanish-speaking) South American country uses the 'o' spelling.
Carbon's chemistry comes from three major factors:
(1) It forms four bonds readily. (2) It can form double- and triple-bonds readily. (3) It bonds strongly to itself in a configuration that allows it to form long chains.
(1) is satisfied by other elements in its column on the periodic table, but silicon (the next element down in its group) and the following members (germanium, tin, and lead) fail (2) and increasingly (3). Silicon will form chains, but is reluctant to form double bonds; in general, double bonds become weaker for atoms further down the table. Silicon (and silicone, chains of Si-O bonds) are the most promising analogs but they have a lot of problems.
(2) is satisfied by most other light nonmetals, but those nonmetals mostly fail (3) and almost all fail (1).
The highly-electronegative oxygen doesn't really want to bond with itself (failing 3) and almost always takes a -2 oxidation state (failing 1).
Nitrogen actually does form four-bond atoms decently often (most notably the ammonium ion), so it somewhat satisfies (1) to some extent, but is so eager to form N2 that most polynitrogen compounds are wildly unstable to the point that "nitro" is a term even laypeople know is associated with explosives (failing 3).
Boron can form three bonds, allowing some of the complexity of (1), and will form nice polyboron compounds (3), but doesn't like forming double bonds (failing 2), and the bonds in boranes are so weak that they're mostly quite reactive (weakening 3).
Sulfur will form polysulfur chains (the most common form is an eight-membered ring), but sulfur (like its cousin oxygen) usually doesn't form more than two bonds except with extremely electronegative partners (like its effective total bond order of 3 in sulfur dioxide or 4 in sulfur trioxide).
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There's another problem here too: life is likely to form out of common elements in its environment, and carbon is just WAY more common than the alternatives. The mechanisms by which the elements are formed in stars very strongly favors elements with even atomic numbers (because they are mostly formed from helium-4 nuclei) and the burning processes peak at carbon/oxygen, neon, magnesium, and silicon.
As a result, carbon is very common. It's the fourth most common element in the Universe (after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen), and ~an order of magnitude more common than any of the elements discussed above except oxygen (which has basically no analogs to carbon chemistry).
A typical human cell is on the order of 10 micrometers. If you need to bridge even 1 cm of that, you're bridging ~a thousand cell-widths. If you think of a cell as the somatic equivalent of a house in a city, that's the equivalent of an infrastructure project spanning (based on a quick count of the number of houses on each block in Oakland) the equivalent of around six miles, or roughly from downtown Oakland to El Cerrito on a map of the Bay (~4 BART stations). And you have to do that on a scale where precision manufacturing is incredibly hard, where you're dealing with extremely difficult problems of chemical synthesis, in a living body, without provoking the body's defense or repair mechanisms to stop you. And that's assuming you even know what you're trying to do, which requires an understanding of the machinery of those cells that we often don't have.
Setting aside recruiters optimizing their own KPIs, hiring is about estimating the value a particular applicant will bring to the organization. And those estimates are hard to make. You are, necessarily, relying on various proxies for their ability within the org, and using those proxies to make more-or-less Bayesian judgements about their value. And those Bayesian judgements are, like any statistics, based on population-level observations - not on the individual.
The philosophical question at hand is: is it OK to use a statistically-powerful Bayesian proxy even if that proxy doesn't rely on any unique information about the individual?
I think we would all agree "only hire people whose families made six figures during their upbringing" would be a horribly unjust way to hire. But that probably does provide a LOT of meaningful Bayesian information - it correlates strongly with, say, test scores (a trait that many people here probably do think is fair to judge on, and which is also a proxy for a lot of other things), the likelihood of criminal backgrounds, social and political connections, and a million other things.
And then you have to ask how far we go with this. Certain genes might be useful proxies - can we go full Gattaca on hiring? What about biases that we know come from terrible social factors (e.g. a black man in 1955 would be very unlikely to be well-educated - would it be ok to use that Bayesian information?).
There is a fundamental conflict, one I think is not being acknowledged, between statistical rigor in optimizing local outcomes today and achieving anything resembling individual-level fairness in the medium-to-long term.
In the sense of "has internal workings that are not directly observable [at least in practice]", yes, emotions are a black box (or may be usefully treated as one, at least). But you can learn to predict the behavior of a black box, given particular inputs, even without understanding of its internals.
I don't perceive much difference between the dysfunctional feelings produced by mental illnesses and the feelings produced by everyday experiences, except that one is unpleasant and interferes with function to an unusual degree. But if a loved one of yours died tomorrow, those feelings would be unpleasant and interfere with function, too - it's only the normality of that unpleasantness and interference that separates the feelings of normal grief from those of depression.
When you say "feelings that happen for no good reason" in reference specifically to mental-illness-related feelings, I think you're sort of missing the point - no feeling happens for "a good reason" except perhaps in some broader evolutionary sense. Feeling and reason are wholly separate and incommensurable categories. If you say "I'm sad because my friend died", you are making a category error: you are sad, period, end of sentence. That is why, among other things, you become less sad as time passes after your friend dies - regulatory processes in your emotions are returning you to an emotional set-point, even though none of the "reasons" to be sad have changed (your friend is still dead, you still miss them, you still have things you can't do with them, etc).
It's not that being sad after your friend dies isn't a predictable emotional response, it's that the apparent logic and the response are separate, in the same way that the movement of a hurricane is predictable but carries no logic or intent. A hurricane doesn't weaken or strengthen, turn or move straight, because it's logical to - it just does so according to the particular dynamics that drive it. And while those dynamics may be analyzed by reason, they are not, themselves, driven by it, nor do they carry it. And so it is with emotions: any logic they carry is in our external understanding of the patterns of the black box, not something contained within it, and the fact that a black box may or may not happen to behave similarly to other peoples' black boxes is incidental.
I'm not arguing that you shouldn't or can't try to understand emotions from the rational side of yourself. I'm arguing that reasoned understanding of emotions is always "from the outside", while experience of emotions is "from the inside", and that the two are fundamentally different things. And I mean this more as a practical claim for living as a being with qualia than as any sort of philosophical claim - it's a way to understand and approach your emotions, not some claim about the Universe.
It turns experiences into thoughts. It separates you from your emotions by changing your priority from experiencing, processing, and accepting your feelings to trying to analyze them. And if you, like me, are prone to mental illness, this can be devastating - because emotions often do not have a reason, especially if your brain has strong natural tendencies.
When you're depressed or anxious, sadness or anxiety form of their own accord. You can feel terrible even when things around you are good, or scared even when there is no danger. And it is very easy to get into the habit of trying to justify these feelings after the fact. When you feel sad and the world around you provides you no reason to, the justification you can give - if you're trying to rationalize your emotions - is that the problem is you, and that is an abyss you can easily find yourself trapped in.
Worse, this habit leads to you being "on the side of" those tendencies. When someone tries to help you to understand that your view of the world is skewed, your habit of justifying and rationalizing makes that feel like an attack on your reason or intelligence. You're not depressed, see, because there's this logical reason you came up with for why you feel bad. And there is always a reason you can give, a justification for why you feel bad, because life always has problems that can be invoked to explain emotions that exist in their own right. But they're not why you're miserable, they're just the reasons you give for why being miserable is rational and right. Healing from that kind of illness requires recognizing your reason and your feelings are different things with different roles, and that to try to rationalize emotion is to make a category error.
Introspection can be good, but introspection must pair with experience, not replace it. You may like such a person because her voice puts you in mind of your mother's, but that origin or association is usually not what is important - the fact that you like them is. You may like the walk because you had a lovely day on it once, but what matters is that the walk brings you joy. The analysis is useful largely when your emotions misguide you ("I keep getting into bad relationships because they draw from X emotional weakness", for example), but even then, you want to feel your feelings even if you do not let them guide your beliefs. When I'm in a depressive episode, I can't not feel bad, but what I can do is recognize that my negative feelings are not truths about the world, so that they do not poison me into a factual belief that things can never improve. When I'm anxious, I can't not feel the fear, but I can recognize that it's not a sign of real danger and that I may need to endure it to make some personal progress. These things aren't about rational understanding of my emotions, they're about a recognition that I do not and cannot control them, only how I respond to them.
I tend to think this sort of thing is a pretty big "original sin" of Anglo-American (or perhaps more generally Protestant?) culture. It arises in a kind of guilt-based virtue ethics, one that I think was originally religious, that tells us that our moral value comes from our impulses and drives, not from what we choose to do with them. It told me, in particular, that my inability to force myself to be more motivated or calm was a personal failing, not a piece of me fundamentally separate from my reason or my virtue. It tells us, as a culture, not to listen to ourselves, not to accept half of what we are, in favor of suppression and repression and self-judgement, and it leaves us as half-people as a result.
I've had nothing but positive experiences with cars in thousands of encounters over many months, but tens of thousands of people still die in accidents every year. Not observing a rare event in a small number of encounters isn't much in the way of statistical evidence.
But bad actors are a much harder problem than computer vision or AI or recommendation engines or just about anything else non-adversarial. It's why discovering climate change 50 years ago hasn't led to a solution since. It's why we can't just educate people out of misconceptions, we have to actively fight against people trying to keep them wrong and make them wronger (and it's why institutions have lost so much trust that this becomes possible).
The only defense against this is virtuous people in power, but our system has done an incredible job - somewhat intentionally - of making sure that they aren't. Investors aren't lining up to support someone who'll make 10% less profit to avoid some horrible externality.
* The Daylight Comet of 1910, reached a magnitude of -5
* Comet Ikeya-Seki, 1965, reached a magnitude of -10 (close to the full moon!) during the day as it grazed the Sun
* Comet West, 1976, reached a magnitude of -3
* Comet McNaught, 2008, reached -5
* Comet Lovejoy, 2011, reached -4 (but was too close to the Sun in the sky to be easily observed by humans)
So that's five comets of greater brightness than Hale-Bopp in ~100 years, or about one every 20 years. Hale-Bopp actually wasn't notable for its brightness, but for its size.