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Non-ionizing radiation is certainly able to have effects on biological systems, and there is no reason to believe that effects are strictly neutral or positive. Calling these facts 'anti-science' is blatantly asinine.

I'm curious, why not?

>It's not just a question of there being a huge pool of money, you can buy a car with loans and car prices haven't skyrocketed.

The obvious difference is that car loans are not Federally issued and defaults are possible. Hence creditors have to issue loans in a prudent manner or else they will incur a loss. Not everyone is able to acquire a car loan, and interest rates can be very high.

These incentives do not exist in the student loan market and thereby subsidizing demand. Students become price inelastic.

The Fed is not focused on the stock market. When they improve the status of the economy through monetary policy, they indirectly improve the value of publically listed companies. This makes sense, because companies are the central entities in the economy. I don't know how the Fed could improve the state of the economy without affecting the prices of shares.

Hey do you have a link to some more information on your one-shot learning algorithm? Sounds interesting, thanks.

What software do you use to rename PDF files and extract their metadata automatically? I have found this difficult to accomplish, despite trying multiple different tools. PDFs from Arxiv are commonly a problem.

Yes a blog post would be terrific, thanks.

Hi, I'm interested in program execution state and the different ways it can be represented/modelled. The "relational model" you describe sounds very interesting. Do you have a technical whitepaper on this topic, or perhaps some third-party literature that has guided you?

Are you talking about the yield curve or credit spreads?

Either way, as far as I understand they are independent variables to the absolute value of federal fund rate -- what matters more is the stage in the business cycle.

Hi, would you happen to have any additional information on #3? (links to companies that require these services and/or industry reports)?

I am work with technology that might be useful for this type of application. Thanks!

I think labelling one side of this debate as "pro-science" and the other as not, is disingenuous.

Science at its core is about scepticism and degrees of certainty - never about absolute truth (see: inductive logic, etc.). Using "science" as an appeal to authority to end debate is the opposite of scepticism.

I personally do not have strong opinions about this debate, but I think it is completely acceptable for someone to take a 'wait-and-see' approach, especially considering the number of times "scientific consensus" has been wrong in the past (see: smoking, fats, etc.).

Moreover, it seems to me that there isn't any immediate danger from people who are "GMO sceptics" since all they do is pay extra for organic products. Market forces will regulate this behaviour if any shortages occur; which I don't think is likely.

So overall I find the "pro-GMO" attitude (such as that displayed in the article) to be strangely insistent on influencing the choices of individual's, dispite such low stakes.

The thing is, "good for the world" is a subjective notion.

In my studies of philosophy I am yet to find any system of ethics that provides an objective and universal definition of right and wrong - if you find one, please let me know.

Until then, we are all dealing with subjective opinions - it's just that some opinions are more popular than others. In democracy the most popular opinion wins, but this does not imply that an opinion is objectively "right" (as we know from history).

Hence, I find this recent trend where people classify other people's beliefs as "objectively wrong" - with no consideration for the subjectivity of their own beliefs - to be deeply troubling. Such behaviour is a departure from reason; only dogma remains.

Just to be clear, most insurance companies have very strict risk management policies and almost exclusively invest capital in government bonds. As you are probably aware, these bonds have had very low rates of return in recent years - getting close to 0℅ yield (or even negative yield in some regions)

So I don't think the difference in efficiency will always be a significant factor.

In addition it is possible to create bond tokens on Ethereum, which might provide opportunities to invest the capital from premiums - provided that the bonds have sufficiently low risk.

Are you suggesting that such a scenario would be worse than the current situation - nVIdia having a monopoly on DL hardware?

I think you'll find that birthrates are negatively correlated with education level, so globally the reverse is happening (with regards to your breeding theory).

But more generally, the reason why evolution works is because organisms are not equal (mutation and crossover are random). I don't expect that this will stop any time soon.

I don't see how this study is 'presuming' anything. The results section quite early explores the creation between genetic and non-genetic factors:

> To test whether intelligence mediates the observed association between family SES and children’s educational achievement, we statistically controlled for intelligence by regressing GCSE on intelligence and entering the resulting standardized residuals into the bivariate GCTA model with family SES. When controlling for variance explained by children’s intelligence, which yielded a univariate GCTA estimate of 0.38 (0.11 s.e.) (data not shown), the phenotypic correlation between family SES and children’s educational achievement was reduced from 0.50 to 0.37 (0.02 s.e.). The GCTA estimate of the genetic covariation between family SES and children’s educational achievement dropped from 0.25 (0.09 s.e.) to 0.17 (0.09 s.e.). Mirroring the mediation observed at the phenotypic level, this suggests that one-third of the SNPs tagging variation in family SES and children’s educational achievement also captured individual differences in intelligence, implying two-thirds of the SNPs linking family SES and children’s educational achievement were independent of intelligence.

The heritability of IQ and it's effect on SES is well document, but it obviously isn't the only relevant factor. I don't believe equality of outcome is feasible in this regard.

In which jurisdiction?

Mods, could you please indicate in the title that the validity of this letter has not yet been verified. The attribution in the title: "(The DAO hacker)" assumes that this is an authentic letter.

Just out of interest, what was the outcome when your accounts were closed because of Bitcoin? Did you lose any funds?

> It's ironic that Taleb prefers a statistic that ignores extreme examples (i.e. black swans)

No that it incorrect on two fronts.

1) MAD does not "ignore" extreme examples, it just weights them the same as other examples. Nassim argues that the weighting of extreme examples in STD is excessive and makes STD less intuitive. I really don't know how you could say that MAD "ignores" extreme examples - they obviously do influence MAD.

2) The act of computing MAD or STD on a sample of observations has no relevance to Black Swan theory. In Black Swan, Nassim defines a black swan event as an unexpected event of large magnitude or consequence. Hence, by definition, an event that has already been observed cannot be a black swan event.

To put it another way, Nassim's main point in Black Swan is that using historical observations to estimate forward risk renders one fragile to Black Swan events - you could use any dispersion metric and this is still the case.

[1] https://btcvol.info/

> and see your money oscillate 20% per day

I get that you're not a fan, but exaggerations don't enhance your argument. Over the last 60 days the XBT/USD pair has an average volatility of 1.23 % [1] which is obviously higher than most major currency pairs, but comparable to a many stock markets. That is, many people invest money in securities with similar or greater volatility profiles.

> easily stolen by some hacker

Whilst Bitcoin is obviously less user friendly than fiat currency, an experienced user like OP can make store their Bitcoin in a way that makes it much more difficult to steal than conventional payment systems.

Firstly, using a hardware wallet (with offline backup) will make your Bitcoin almost invulnerable to 'hackers', plus the use of multi-sig can allow one to dial up physical security to very high levels.

Compare that to conventional payment systems like a credit card - all your credentials are on your card! Anyone who handles your card (waiters, cashiers) gets access to all of your credentials, for the life of the card! (Bitcoin's use of public key cryptography is far more sane in my opinion). And any malware on your computer that could steal Bitcoin could also steal your CC information etc. The only reason that this isnt more of a problem is because by using a bank you are paying insurance for your money and the Bank will generally reimburse you for small amounts - this doesn't make the conventional payment system more secure, just more insured.

Who would buy coins (or mine) on a unofficial Zcash network? I can't imagine many people would expend resources supporting an unofficial network since one of the major risks of a zero-knowledge protocol is that the initial operator could "premine" a large quantity of coins and no-one would know.

People will probably wait for the official Zcash launch because they trust the Zcash team to launch a secure network and (importantly) to maintain the network going forward. In some ways this is like a Schnelling point, where people will wait for the official network because their expect other people will wait for the official network, and so on.

Ues but not everyone can link Bitcoin addresses to individuals. Bitcoin has poor privacy in theory, but the practice of actually deanonymizing is non-trivial. Also since it is an open system, improvements are possible.

How do you decide what is right and what is wrong? I don't think a world where you can only act with 'permission' from a certain group pf people is sustainable or enviable. It's surprising how little people agree on with regards to the fundamentals of virtue.

You did say that because you said that using a Bitcoin mixer is equivalent to money laundering.

On the Bitcoin network all transactions are public and can be linked to an individual. Without mixers it quite possible that the details of all of your financial transactions will be public.

If you think it does, then I assume you also want to ban cash?

By the way, that is a valid opinion to have - it's just that not everyone agrees that it optimal in the long run for all personal information to be auditable by a government in real time.

KYC = Know Your Customer

As the name implies, this law only applies to (financial) businesses and their customers. Most Bitcoin transactions are P2P and hence there is no business/customer relationship and hence there is no KYC law applicable.

Using Ethereum to create a token would be a good option. by doing so you get the security of the Ethereum blockchain (i.e. you don't need to mine yourself) and you can use smart contracts for blockchain logic.

https://www.ethereum.org/token

> Right, but the gas cost cannot be distributed over _all_ nodes

All computation on the Ethereum blockchain is done through the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The protocol defines a gas cost for each opcode in the EVM, hence the gas cost is distributed across all nodes.

Any singular node can change the gas cost in their client, but if they pay less than the cost that the miners expect then their transactions will not be processed - as it typical with distributed consensus systems.

> I'll keep looking around for more info, but I do hope Ethereum people realize that YouTube videos are not the same thing as proper documentation

There is a lot of documentation on their Github page. I would recommend starting with the white paper, then check the wiki and if you are still not convinced (and also brave) check the yellow paper: -https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper -https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Design-Rationale -https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/FAQ -http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf