igorkraw

Checking sources, looking for tells, assuming the other person isn't your friend until some basic trust has been established?

I've been online since I was 13 or so, I saw the tail end of Web1.0 and old school forums and back then the default was nobody knew who you were so the default assumption was that you were full of shit until proven otherwise - and that was before 4chan got big.

Social Networks were never really social, now with the pressure of avoiding impostor bots, I think there might be niches for actual web of trust social networks again

And if the community served by Notre dame consented that's fine. But I have been in places in Italy that specifically shut down the mass and certain parts of the churches to tourists because people use these places to have communion with God. The whole point is about respecting the communities you want to research. You can replace catholics with whatever group you identify as, and the taboo being violated by whatever thing you find is the red line

So what is the benefit of making it painful to end your life? They'll drown themselves out of sight and hopefully wash into the ocean? What is the solution to the suffering that making killing yourself harder brings?

This is a weird article to me. It seems to criticize the program for not failing to adequately force people to live in a society that makes them want to die. It even quotes someone pointing out that a high usage rate by people driven to give up on life by out of control housing and cost of living prices without sufficient income, or those unable to afford other treatments could be a leverage for arguing for better designed welfare (UBI?) or markets - but it's framed as callous, ridiculous idea while we still make it "too easy to die"?

Like, I don't think people need a lot of help convincing themselves of not wanting to die unless they are already desperate, and making access to death harder is like forcing the homeless to take a one way bus to another town - you are just hiding the problem. As long as nobody is pushed to use the program, the same arguments that say "well, nobody is forcing you to take that shitty job/pay that exorbitant rent" apply.

It's just that in this case, the signal sent by multiple people choosing death over life because the system isn't working for then is very clearly "what the fuck are you doing to poor people", which is an uncomfortable question, so the impulse is to make access to death harder - then you can again ignore the fact that these people might commit suicide anyway, or suffer immensely, because that will show up just as mental illness or personal failure in the statistics

I'm wondering, does this example work as anti-euthanasia instead of pro-UBI to anyone reading it (or the rest of the article)?

It seems excessively cruel to me to try and force people to live in misery big enough to make the want to kill themselves instead of alleviating the misery. Like, the article seems to frame the argument that MAID can be used to lobby for better welfare as a ridiculous idea, but that's really it: if the only thing keeping people in your society from killing themselves that it's hard and scary, what the fuck is your society doing to these people.

Thanks, I think your perspective is very valid and it boils down to what we are more concerned with (and I think diversity helps here).

For me, I'm more concerned with high probability manipulators, bad faith players and power seekers (i.e. billionaires and their sycophants) exploiting the tendency to charity and pushing leeway to the limit than by failing to win over supporters (for various reasons).

But I do agree it will scare away the supporters and those who care more about the "principle of charity" (or the appearance of that principle, since it's so rarely extended to those without power when they commit desperate crimes or do stupid shit).

That you think Elton John isn't masculine says more about toxic masculinity than you might have intended. Why exactly is he not "masculine"?

I think people often conflate empathy and sympathy. I agree it's worth to try and have empathy with billionaires - otherwise, like you said, we can't build useful models of the world. The problem is that we usually can't empathise, because their reality is so detached from ours. Except when they behave extremely petty and stupid in public in very predictable ways, then it's possible to build empathy with them via these very revealing actions.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you, personally are intending to engage in this tradition, but pointing to anyone reasoning out that in general we are very charitable to those in power while very strict to those without. While you individually might be an exception, in general I don't expect people to point out how anyone hit hard enough might fall into drug abuse/other types of socially low-ranked patterns. In germany, there is even a joke about the difference between "eccentric" and "crazy" - about 1 million euro in private wealth.

So yes, I agree there needs to be a space on how everyone in a position like Elon could or would fail - but I think it's worth keeping this explicitly not charitable but simply as an argument on why nobody should be in that position. Otherwise we, unwittingly, contribute to that apologia.

All of these is just what we call being overcome with passion, fearlessly spreading truth, daring to step into the public arena, demonstrating personal values, cunning political manoeuvring and sticking up for yourself/revenge if we find them pathetic. The point of toxic masculinity is that the things we valorize as "traditionally male" (e.g. famously, being a rock without emotions except maybe revenge, lust and rage) are not healthy ways of dealing with bad things.

Whether he does it consciously or not, if your model of musk is a Macho whose "honor" has been impinged (by himself, but also public snipes at e.g. his private jet while posing as the man to save the climate with Tesla) and who's pettily trying to pettily re-assert his "manliness" then you've been getting a lot of ROI out of the predictions that has allowed you so far.

As I said to the other comment or, you can also pay for therapy. Which maybe Elon is already getting, I don't speculate about his private life.

I was responding to a comment which I agreed with except in their in my opinion overly sympathetic portrayal of a rich and powerful person who has all the capability to take personal responsibility for his mental health - making any humanising or "give him a break" rhetoric, no matter how earnest, also a part of a tradition of deflection and distraction from the debate on how to make sure no flawed human has that much power without just creating an authoritarian nanny state

The sister comment has said it, already but to add to what they said, in our society, these two are intricately linked - think of the fact that most high paying or high jobs are not compatible with participating in personally raising a family. Or the fact that (with regards to Elon) he's using the archetype of the family protector (intentionally or not) to justify going after Elonjet

They can also buy therapy or relinquish their wealt if they feel empty, but the inverse (relinquishing poverty) is much harder. At a certain point (and billionaires definitely cross that), I still have empathy for them, but I think personal responsibility makes it "their problem" while the damage they can do to others is more important.

While I agree with your last paragraph I would like to quote Robert Caro talking about power:

"But although the cliche says that power always corrupts, what is seldom said ... is that power always reveals. When a man is climbing, trying to persuade others to give him power, concealment is necessary. ... But as a man obtains more power, camouflage becomes less necessary."

Elon is definitely a victim of capitalism and patriarchy to some degree, as are other billionaire. But they are also the main beneficiaries ans can wipe away their tears with hundred dollar bills, blackjack and hookers, so my empathy has limitations.

Public records are public records, doubly so if they concern billionaires. Musk has been begging to be a public person for decades now, he does not get to decide the framing

I did not realize the 18th amendment only banned the possession and consumption of alcohol for the top 0.1% of drinkers, which is what a hard cap at about a billion would introduce. 99% of private wealth is closer to 0 than to a billion. Calling policy aimed at ensuring billionaires don't exist a war on private wealth is ridiculous and like calling the state monopoly on violence a "war on justice"

How exactly? You can still be rich - but there will be a cap on power. That's like saying "if amazing dictatorial power is made illegal, only outlaws will amass dictatorial power". No, in fact, sometimes systems do what they are supposed to achieve, especially when it comes to things like power where we can have a conversation that the ultra-rich are usually already engaged in morally and legally questionable behaviour (Bill Gates anti-trust skirting and various anti-competetive antics, facebooks whole business mode centered around tracking users against their will,so much of Elon Musks skirting and flat out ignoring of labour and safety regulations and other recent antics...).

I'm not saying a hard cap on wealth is the best way to achieve this or that achieving any form of control of private power that doesn't turn authoritarian is possible, but in general, I'm against using these types of "you can't make the thing we do regulated, because then only criminals will do it" argument. Beer, recreational weed and medical services tightly regulated and we don't see massive crime rings build on top of them. If we regulate wealth to such a degree that most people feel like it's fair, it'll be difficult to establish proper crime syndicates around it - the question of how to keep a state that can do this effectively from being authoritarian is a much better question to raise

It is a Markov chain. Your input context is your state.

Specifically "generalised withdrawals" which are later referred to "as usual". SBF also admits to "fungibility between buckets" across TOS lines and they didn't want to spend the days of the crash "frantically coding up a new way of withdrawals". To finance and law nerds: did he actually just admit to fraud here?

Serious question: why? If I understand OP correctly, it's a 1 line math equation which is provided if necessary and you just need to turn into some useable interface?

Sure. Just like Tay, Galactica and other public ooopsies were actually just genius crowdsourcing techniques.

Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity works for genius as well.

Not really. Public insurance in Germany was explicitly designed to have independent governing bodies, which is why you get to vote on certain decisions. Few people do, but it's one of the examples of non-state democratic governance that is a success story (another being cooperatives...)

With what income, which insurance and what type of issue? German public healthcare is pretty comprehensive and cheap (one of the few things I miss) and definitely not on par in terms of price with Switzerland which is even further away from the US nightmare

Yes. Because they aren't attacking bloated bureaucracies that have been sufficiently captured and privatised, and the offered solutions might be subtly biased. It's only an ad hominem if after using the heuristic and critically checking any hidden bullshit the personal bias of the interlocuteur you stick to your hostility even if you don't find anything. Otherwise it's just context that helps you think

Ben Recht actually has a line of work showing that we aren't over fitting the validation/test set for now (amazingly...). What I mean is, by chasing higher and higher SotA with more and more money and compute, whole fields can go "improving" only for papers like https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.08505 or "Implementation matters in deep RL" to come out and show that what's going on is different from the literature consensus. The standards for showing improvement are low, while standards for négative résultats are high (I'm a bit biased because I have a rejected paper trying to show empirically some deep RL work didn't add marginal value but I think the case still holds). Everyone involved is trying their best to do good science but unless someone like me asks for it, there simply isn't a value add for your career to do exhaustive checking.

A concrete improvement would be only being allowed to change 1 thing at a time per paper, and measure the impact of changing that one thing. But then you couldn't realistically publish anything outside of megacorps. Another solution might be banning corporate papers, or at least making a separate track...from reviewing papers, it seems like single authors or small teams in academia need to compete with Google where multiple teams might share aspects of a project, one doing the architecture, the other a new training algorithm etc...which won't be disclosed, you'll just read a paper where for some reason a novel architecture is introduced using a baseline which is a bit exotic but also used in another paper that came out close to this one, and a regulariser which was introduced just before that ...

If you limit the pools, you can put much higher standards on experiments on corporate where you have the budget, while giving academia more points for novelty and creativity

Because the variance can be uniformly high, making it difficult to properly judge the improvement of one method vs the baseline method: did you actually improve, or did you just get a few lucky seeds? It's much harder to get a paper debunking new "SotA" methods so I default to showing a clear improvement over a good baseline. Simply looking at the performance is also not enough because a task can look impressive, but be actually quite simple (and vice versa), so using these statistical measures makes it easy to distinguish good models on hard tasks from bad models on easy tasks.

I should also note 1) this is about testing whether the performance of a model is meaningfully different from another, not the coefficient of the models 2) I don't reject papers just because they lack this, or if they fail to achieve a statistical significance, I just want it in the paper so the reader can use that to judge (and it also helps suss out cherry picked results)

This is one of my default suggestions when I act as reviewer: t test with bonferroni correction please. ML, ironically, has absolutely horrible practices in terms of distinguishing signal from noise( which at least is partially offset by the social pressure to share code, but still)

But in the real world, bitcoin and indeed all of crypto is a/are token/s without an army behind it or any form of legal promises except those conferred to them by $L1. Unless you want to go to El Salvador or that one other nation that made it legal tender, Bitcoin is L2 (and a shitty one at that looking at stability, fees and speed)

Wealth=non democratic power. Fully compatible with OPs characterisation

On the system level:tax the billionaire?

1. Found a unicorn. Congratulations!

2. Get a tax bill

3. Either loan against your shares (good luck) or(and probably even if you do get a loan)

4. Go public early, selling your shares and let others partake in the companies growth

Alternatively, give your shares to employees, donate, whatever. It's not really rocket science, just tax wealth (radical markets proposes a nice way to get honest self assessments...) and as a side benefit, you benefit employees by creating much more incentive against staying private forever