notafraudster

Well, in this case, you're describing Fiverr with a slightly better user interface for the hirer and an incomplete contract problem (because you expect someone to do the work before you award the payment, and also reserve the right not to award the payment). This is fine but it's basically something we already have.

This all clicks with my experience with VR, but don't you think this is pretty small fry and additive? You've got some fun hobby-grade content production stuff, you've got a handful of good but small scale experiences, you've got a handful of things that already exist but that there are arguably benefits to doing in VR (in exchange for drawbacks), you've got an exercise video game that more or less compares to existing exercise video games, and everyone agrees it's a sort of fun novelty that fills the same kind of niche the Wii did 15 years ago. I agree all of this stuff is cool. I had a great time with some of the VR games I played on Steam including Beat Saber. But how is this totally underappreciated? I think most in the gaming community would exactly echo this level of appreciation. It just isn't and won't be a bigger deal than this.

For me it's less about "sucking" or not, and more about understanding the limitations of what could be delivered even if it didn't suck. You could take every drawback of current VR and solve it and it'd still be additive, not revolutionary, because of essentially inherent limitations. Unless someone is proposing a holodeck, and even then I'm not convinced it replaces much of what we already have because there'll always be a basic efficiency to existing pre-VR control paradigms.

But the question here isn't "can Meta do Second Life better than Linden did?" (maybe). Or even "can Meta do Second Life better than Linden, Sony, VRChat, IMVU, Epic, Tower Unite, etc. did?" (maybe). It's "Why is Meta presenting its vision for Second Life as being something revolutionary that cannot be discussed by analogy with existing products?"

If the pitch was "We make an already popular market segment more user friendly", that's cool. But the pitch is instead "We're making, from the ground up, a new market segment, and it's going to transform the world." followed by a list of things already done to various degrees of quality by dozens of products that already exist and that basically everyone formed an opinion on a decade ago and that at any rate aren't really revolutionary. Pitching stuff like "Universities will make virtual versions of their campus in the Metaverse and people will walk from virtual building to virtual building to take classes" or "The future of stand-up comedy is clapping as a cartoon avatar while you watch a cartoon avatar of a stand-up comedian do comedy in front of you."

If Meta pitched tomorrow that they were going to revolutionize transportation by coming up with a $1,000 self-balancing personal transportation device, I could definitely be convinced that they could spent their way to a better Segway or a better electric skateboard or a better electric skooter or a better wheelchair or a better AirWheel. But if they refused to discuss any of those existing products and their beta looked like a worse Segway and they were promising how the whole world would change because no one would ever use a car or walk up stairs again, I'd be really skeptical.

It's a little bit like Jeffrey Ketzenberg telling me Quibi is going to revolutionize television, while admitting he doesn't watch shortform video content and hasn't looked at any of his failed competitors, but saying "we've fundraised 10x what they have to make this work" and dismissing the widespread negative reaction to the concept and execution as people not daring enough to see his vision.

I asked a question a little while ago at a small stackexchange satellite site. It got a few upvotes but no responses. I used as much bounty as I could to feature it. It still got no responses. I was a bit bummed they didn't refund the reputation, but whatever.

I am quite confident that a working professional could give me an excellent answer in about 2 minutes, and I have to say subjectively the question is pretty interesting (not a "how do I <x>" or "do my homework" question). It is unusually hard to Google, Wikipedia doesn't have the right information, and there's only one major enthusiast forum that might have users that know the thing. I'd be willing to pay a token amount, maybe $20, to get the answer. Not that I think $20 is worth getting out of bed for, but given you were already using a Sunday afternoon to answer a few questions, not a bad minutely wage.

I think my main concern is that such a site is likely to become essentially micro-projects, more "do this for me" than "answer my question". And I think people who are paying would be even angrier than usual if their question gets moderated away for doing this.

It is true that (at least above the level of quantum physics) we tend to believe that reality is deterministic. When the meteorologist gives a chance of rain, in truth if they had perfect forward information on all of the clouds and pressure systems, they would simply declare whether or not there was future rain. In cases like physical phenomenon, you can think of observed uncertainty or chance as being a product of the exact settings of the unmodeled but deterministic factors underlying a particular outcome, or else errors in the functional form of the model with respect to the measure. We tend to assume that unmodeled factors are as-if orthogonal to the causes we are interested in modelling, and thus zero-centered, and our models minimize error predicated on this assumption.

In your proposed flipping model, there are likely to be very small physical imprecisions (vibrations in the flipper, say, drifting tension of some kind of spring or actuator, or small amounts of circulating air, or perhaps tiny imprecisions in the way the coin is loaded into a slot). The machine might always flip heads, but it's still possible to say that whatever arbitrary degree of certainty you need to model the coin's behaviour in the air to achieve 100% accuracy, there could still be arbitrarily smaller error below that threshold, and we'd view this as "randomness" even if it isn't by the laws of physics.

The biggest surprise to me is that he died of a heart attack in an airport, where presumably AEDs are in ready supply and people are everywhere so it'd be immediately noticed. I really thought the survival rate in such a circumstance, even for catastrophic heart attacks, was pretty good!

The air quotes around tortured are doing 100% of the work here. There may indeed be some nervousness associated with taking part in any sort of competition, but I think most people would stipulate that white collar adult professionals answering 15 multiple-choice questions in 30 minutes in a comfortable studio wearing clothes of their choice, preparing in a green room, given access to water and bathrooms is pretty low on the torture scale. Likewise, we don't typically consider, say, taking part in a poker tournament to be torture, or taking part in a 10K race or submitting something to an art contest.

There are, in fact, quiz shows that add torture elements. Rob Lowe hosts Mental Samurai, which is a quiz show where participants are put through physical disorientation[0]. This might be a closer parallel to what you are highlighting, but even still there are coherent and easily articulated ways in which this is not torture.

There are a great many reality programs that do actually involve a sort of physical depravation which is closer to torture. Big Brother and Survivor both involve not just physical challenges, but also punishments that are centered around depriving people of the sorts of creature comforts they are accustomed to in normal life. Even then you don't have torture, because again the vast majority of the experience involves being treated with comfort and dignity, the punishments that are small in scale and support systems in place to ensure they do not present real threat. So, for instance, you might have someone being awoken in the middle of the night as a part of a challenge, but they will be informed of that in advance, given additional time to sleep later, and the disruption will be minimal.

Mr. Beast's stuff has more in common with challenges like the Hands on a Hardbody challenge[1], where poor people go to a car dealership and have to touch a truck for an extended period of time to win the truck.[1] The contestant pool are mostly people who are quite poor, some of whom seem to be mentally ill, the willingness to do it for the prize almost surely implies they have inadequate access to transportation, and it's extremely undignified. But even this has hourly breaks.

It seems like a bit of feigned ignorance to respond to someone criticizing the Mr. Beast stuff by suggesting it is difficult or impossible to draw a coherent line in the sand, and then offering such a patently absurd example as something you think would have to be definitionally included. It comes off as playing language games rather than seriously engaging the substance of the criticism.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3gglCEsvGg [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hands_on_a_Hardbody:_The_Docum...

I think most people are going to find a moral equivalence drawn between "locked up children in cages" and "tricked Osama Bin Laden's relatives into taking a blood test" pretty hollow, even if an argument can be made that the latter led to a complex downstream set of externalities.

The use of "small multiples" here in the visualization is excellent, and the layout of the first visual is provocative and eye-catching -- love the vertical line! Great job, author!

I think people decided he’s cheating because he admitted to cheating the two times he got caught cheating online, denied ever cheating besides those times, has had a meteoric rise in terms of moving from low GM to his current state, was unable to explain his play in a reasonable way, played almost perfectly, beat a substantially better player, and that player feels he cheated despite having never made accusations like that against people before.

I’m not saying it’s a slam dunk because it’s not. I can respect people who come down in either side based on the current evidence. But it seems like willful ignorance to suggest that none of the above has any bearing at all.

This seems like an agenda-motivated post because even accepting your point as true, you ignored the actual subject of conversation and pivoted to the thing you wanted to talk about.

Imagine the following headline: Academics make stronger connections between sedentary lifestyles and heart disease. This is true. Imagine someone replied to that conversation with "I should go to the gym more often." You then butted in with "People 150 years ago didn't go to the gym, they just worked physically demanding jobs. Modern office jobs are the entry point for sedentary living. Therefor the solution is not going to the gym, it's becoming a construction worker."

You're not even wrong in that you are proposing something that's part of a solution, it's just bizarre to hijack someone mentioning dental hygiene into a hobbyhorse post about dietary sugar.

The person you're responding to is not speaking literally; they're using what's called a metaphor to make a point that employees of any company exert walking power. The point may or may not be useful, but you have to finish reading the post before trying to reply with a gotcha correction.

But on a fundamental level you're not describing a technical hurdle, you're describing a social-policy hurdle. Like, wouldn't you agree that if there was policymaker will to make this process more efficient, it could be more efficient without a blockchain?

Suppose that blockchain did not exist but that securities law did not require you to consult securities attorneys to "create the investment opportunity". You would have an efficiency gain by cutting out the attorneys.

In particular I think about your "dream": you dream that in lieu of paying people with a mixture of direct deposit and paper checks, you could pay them with an electronic currency; but presumably at least some of the people being paid with paper checks want to be paid with paper checks (if not, you'd presumably pay them all with direct deposit) and while securities law probably doesn't let you disburse via Paypal or Venmo or any other electronic account transfer, if it did, doing so would be approximately the same as USDC, right?

It seems to me to make a sustainable case for blockchain, you need to basically say assuming the exact same regulatory posture and the exact same degree of technical laziness in terms of automating steps not currently automated, would blockchain make it better?

The Senate routinely takes voice votes for which no rollcall division is recorded.

But there is generally little incentive to make votes private because in general legislators want to engage in credible credit-claiming (including about margins of passage and rates of bipartisanship) and parties want to preserve the whip as well.

This sounds like a bad experience. I find Wikipedia pretty daunting and I'm not surprised you got tripped up trying to edit.

But as a lay person reading your post, I do not know what "Deaf Cultures and Deaf Educators" is. Is this a book? I tried googling for it but didn't find it. Wikipedia does have an article on Deaf culture (lowercase c): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_culture -- it was created in March of 2004. I am not sure about "Deaf educators", but Wikipedia does have an article on Deaf education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_education and on Dead studies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf_studies and on Schools for the deaf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_for_the_deaf (this one is in notable need of expansion). It looks like the separate article for Deaf education sprung into being in the early 2010s and previously redirect-merged to deaf culture.

I think it's at least possible here that you were not discriminated against as part of an anti-diversity agenda, but rather that you misunderstood some of Wikipedia's needlessly complicated rules or maybe didn't present what you were trying to add in the right way.

I went back through the articles for deletion discussion for all of 2004 and could not find a discussion about deleting an article by the name you said. I went through the full list of deleted articles in 2001-2004 -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_log -- and searched for "deaf" and didn't find anything relevant ever. If your pages were deleted after 2004, they're only visible in the modern deletion log and that requires an exact title match unless you're an administrator, which I am not. So unfortunately I think without more information it's going to be hard to help you 18 years later.

But I'm pretty sure it was not because Wikipedia editors were anti-diversity.

I tend to just manually translate "best", "greatest", etc. into "A great" in my head, and then it's just a love letter to an awesome scene. Which this is!

You have given more of your attention to letting everyone know you don't care about dead people because that's life than I have to worrying about COVID, with the added bonus that your position comes off as sociopathic and mine doesn't.

Just to give my personal exposure here, my wife had a stroke during the omicron surge and when the hospital wheeled her away on a gurney to get an emergency thrombectomy, making it clear she had a decent chance of just dying on the table, I could not be with her because the COVID burden in the hospital was too high. After she survived the operation she was admitted to a ward full of 80 year olds. Later that night she had a stroke recurrence and the way I found out is that she didn't reply to my text messages for half an hour. My wife is 35, healthy, yoga, biking, hiking, and she had a stroke on our anniversary. We're in the middle of trying for kids. She lived, but it could easily have been the other way.

One response to this is "the problem here is the COVID restrictions, the hospital should have just let infection disease spread, hospitals have never tried to stop infectious disease before, stop treating COVID as anything special" but another response to this is that the medical system has been more or less in perpetual crisis mode this entire time because of the underlying infectious disease burden that you described as "just another of many diseases". And I believe that the infectious disease specialists are better able to gauge the actual risk to their patients than a SV devops guru.

When we got COVID it was two days of fever and a week of fatigue, worse than a cold, better than influenza. Do you understand how it's possible to be impacted by COVID even if like us, you are at little risk from COVID?

Again, I am not calling for any restrictions, any lockdowns, any infringements on your freedom, or any reaction beyond simply a sombre acknowledgement that a lot of people have died, there's a lot of pain, the deaths continue, there remains a huge burden on our society because of the effects of this disease, and we gain nothing from being glib or pretending the people who died don't matter. You have the capacity for empathy, but you need to use it.

Both the authors of this study and meta-analysts generally have followup responses and other diagnostics and models that work under degraded assumptions, so I don't think it makes a ton of sense to respond to "this is the absolute most introductory example of why this kind of intuition works" with "it doesn't work in <XYZ> case". There are a variety of ways to think through what data looks like under publication bias or not irrespective of what the "correct" effect would be.

I'd also add that this is a paper responding to an existing meta-analysis, so the claim that it's impossible to get a quantity of interest for a meta-analysis because the constituent studies are being inappropriately aggregated is itself an argument in favour of this paper's rejection of the original paper's finding.

I personally just rejected an m-a at a social science journal on thursday because I thought it suffered from unaddressed garbage-in garbage-out along the lines you mention (non-experimental data, no attempt to pin down causal identification, inadequate qualitative discussion of risks of publication bias, unclear QOI), so I am sympathetic to the criticisms, but just know that there are next steps. :)

This is why my PIN is 9998.

Based on present death rates, COVID will be number three for all cause mortality in the United States this year after all combined cancers and all combined heart disease -- possibly number two!; above all other infectious disease by an order of magnitude; above diabetes, COPD, organ damage, etc. This is despite a low overall mortality rate from COVID per infection.

It is possible that as it continues to be endemic the rates will tick down and so this will not necessarily be true in 2023, 2024, 2025, etc. I am not proposing any policy change or any lockout or anything. but your position is a little bit like saying "a rocket launcher is a weapon, just like a bread knife".

Put another way: a 9/11 every week, still. It would at least behoove us to be sombre about the bloodbath around us.

The easiest to understand diagnostic used to measure publication bias is the funnel plot. Suppose the true effect of interest is theta = 0.2. Then the observed effects in studies should be centered at 0.2; some will be higher, some will be lower. Assuming no systematic error, the degree to which study results vary around 0.2 should be proportional to the precision of the study (think sampling error given a sampling design). A hypothetical study of an infinitely large meta-population would produce the effect estimate of exactly 0.2, infinitely precisely. A series of very small studies will likely show quite divergent results, just on the basis of precision.

A funnel plot plots effect sizes on the x axis and precision on the y axis. The most precise studies should be tightly grouped around the meta-analytic average effect; the least precise studies should be spread more widely. This forms a triangular, funnel shape. If no publication bias exists, the spread of studies below the magnitude of the average effect should be comparable to the spread of studies above the magnitude of the average effect.

If there is publication bias, then the points that would form the left (without loss of generality; right if negative effect size) portion of the funnel will not be observable.

There are issues with funnel plots and there are other diagnostics but I hope this provides insight into one of the tools used. Notably, as a diagnostic, funnel plots work whether the true effect is positive, negative, or null; they assume only that the underlying assumptions of meta-analysis are true (that studies represent a sample of the same, true underlying effect -- other diagnostics and corrections exist when this is violated)

(This is a clarifying question, not an oppositional one) -- would a potential response to a gap between crude and pump prices be lack of refinery supply? How are we able to rule that out? Or is it completely obvious?

It's not just about chronic malignant threats like those countries; it's also about acute threats. Take as an example, if you were Ukrainian, you had about 2 months of runway during which there was ample evidence Russia was going to invade Ukraine and the country would likely be flattened. And yet, when Russia did invade Ukraine, there were throngs of people trying to escape. I'm not talking about people who are disabled or immobile, I'm talking about middle class people who simply thought they had more time and didn't want to disrupt their life for nothing. See also Afghans in Kabul, who thought either the Taliban wouldn't win or they'd have several more months to get their lives in order.

This is also a popular trope in fiction. In the recent Handmaid's Tale series, there are several episodes devoted to life immediately before the fall, and what you see is a lot of evidence stuff is going to hit a crisis point, and a lot of people insisting that it hasn't quite yet.

Obviously the threshold to act has to be fairly high -- and I'm not saying America is Kabul or Kyiv or Gilead -- but I think there's nothing wrong with listening to the part of your brain that says "wow, it feels like the shit is imminently going to hit the fan". Because if you wait until it actually does, you'll have significantly less capacity to act.

There are also options beyond leaving the country. Some places are physically safer and physically more isolated from threat than others. For example, in the event that there is a rapid institutional collapse in the United States, it seems likely that Hawai'i would be among the places most likely to endure a little while extra or to most easily facilitate leaving the country. Areas near unguarded border crossings on the northern border also have an appeal in that regard. I think the right degree of seriousness with which to take something like this is not so much "I should move to Hawai'i tomorrow in case there's a civil war" and more "If I can work remotely in Hawai'i or if a job opens up, I might gain some degree of personal safety/sovereignty by moving there."

Personal context: I am a non-American. I spent most of the 2010s living in the U.S., and I emigrated to another country in early 2021. The pull factor to emigrate was a job opportunity abroad that was great and that my wife agreed would be a fun way to spend a few years, but the push factor to emigrate was significant uncertainty about the institutional stability of the U.S. We were setting up our paperwork just as the Capitol Insurrection happened.

I can't fathom the idea that you don't know what the person you're replying to is trying to say. I think the more likely scenario is that you disagree and are trying to invite debate. If you want to do, feel free, it's no worse a derail than the entire thread is, but let's dispense with the coy tedium.

She's flown twice since. The first time there was some odd pressure on the way back that freaked her out, the second time no issues. We're fairly frequent flyers. Docs did not recommend against flying. For stroke the general recommendation is that "weird feelings" aren't an underlying indication of anything -- "strokes only take away, not add" (hence why all the actual indicators of an acute stroke are things not working, rather than weird feelings) so to not panic. I would presume if my wife's stroke was caused by an underlying pathology throwing off clots rather than a dissection they would probably recommended compression gear for flying, but it wasn't and they didn't. But I could imagine that given the odd things going on with pressure and air and sitting still, there's a lot of factors that could contraindicate flying with a past TBI.

Hope your partner is doing well. :)

My wife (age 35), had a stroke last year, caused by a ICAD (one of her two carotid arteries dissected -- tore -- leading to a loss of blood flow). Hers was 100% occluded. Although some ICADs are traumatic, e.g. from car crashes or bungee jumping or chiropractors, many are not. If you can't point to an obvious moment of knowing when you had one, and if you don't test positive for Ehlers-Danlos or other connective tissue problems, they just shrug and deem it idiopathic/spontaneous.

She has what the doctors say are "excellent collaterals", meaning her other blood supply routes were great, and it took less than 90 minutes from stroke to teatment. It was a wake-up stroke and it took maybe 10 minutes for us to call emergency. tPA (side note: tPA is a miracle drug; it clears your system in maybe 2-3 minutes, I'm talking about my wife going from near-death and in full stroke presentation to being alert and having a normal conversation in literally 2 minutes), thrombectomy, immediate management of blood pressure. No further episodes after the beginning of treatment being administered. Discharged after only 7 days in hospital. MRIs show 3 or 4 small dots of infarct. The neurologist characterized the dots as being unconcerning, and further noted that if she was 55 or 60, they'd expect that level of damage to have accumulated just from living. Post-discharge treatment was just blood thinners for 6 months, at the 3 month update doctor said they could easily take her off; she's banned from rollercoasters and olympic weightlifting for life and we need to talk to an obstetrician to figure out if they'll recommend a c-section for any future pregnancies. 3 month followup MRI indicates her carotid never re-opened and never will, so now she's just living with one fewer major redundancy.

TBIs are weird. My wife returned to work after about 3 weeks. I would say her work performance was unaffected. On the other hand, she had sudden and overwhelming bouts of tiredness that seemed to come on with no warning. She'd go walk 5k no problem, but then other times she'd get so exhausted from making lunch she'd have to sleep the entire day. She had a lot of random head pains. Not headaches, but weird and unknown pains in her head. The doctors say both of these things are common post-stroke symptoms and they've improved a bunch over the last six months and will likely subside. She had a work-related OT visit 4 months after stroke that showed normal cognitive function except that she got a bout of extreme tiredness half-way through the day. She's mostly coped by WFH and taking breaks or naps during the day and working extended hours to catch up.

Why should random small infarcts cause this? It's unclear. We tend to have a picture of neuroanatomy that is functionalist, with particular parts of the brain serving particular functions, and so it would seem like small dots of damage should either do nothing or else impact diffuse things weirdly, not cause big systemic problems like this.

The other component is pretty severe PTSD. She's in stroke support groups for young stroke survivors (read: 60 year olds...). She has survivor's guilt when she meets people who had it worse than her. She gets upset when stuff in the news is about people who had strokes. There's been a few times where it's felt like she didn't realize she had a near-death experience, and so when I have had to talk about my own feelings with family members or friends, I think it's been jarring for her to hear how much danger she seemed in from the outside. I can't rule out that some of the big feelings are also a result of the neuroanatomical insult, but most of it seems just processing everything.

I guess the final thing is that it seems to me like she's more forgetful. More lights left on, more stuff left out, more "what did I come to this room to do?". Could this be the symptom of a TBI? Unclear if this is a real pattern or just my hyper-vigilance, and if real if it's actually caused by the stroke or something else.

For anyone else reading: Stroke morbidity and mortality is tied ENTIRELY to the speed of response. Balance, Eye Gaze, Facial Droop, Arm Weakness, Speech. If you see a symptom that might be a stroke, call emergency services immediately. Waiting an hour will compound damage significantly, and waiting 4 closes off most avenues of treatment.

At-will employment laws aren't an equivalent tradeoff -- which is why they are very uncommon outside the United States -- but the alleged benefit of such an arrangement to an employee is two-fold:

1. In places where termination is for cause, termination often causes an employee not to have access to various government benefits 2. At-will employment likely encourages more hiring in the first place, so it's possible that with more restricted firing you'd never have gotten the job.

I do not feel these benefits make up for the drawbacks and do not favour at-will as an organizing principle for industrial relations. But I just figured it would make sense to at least say the apparent argument.

At-will employment says you can be fired any time for any reason except reasons that are explicitly illegal. This would include, for instance, discrimination against a protected class; anything covered by whistleblower laws (FCPA, all the relevant Dodd-Frank whistleblower provisions); or for organizing a union. It doesn't appear to me that the employees in this case have a slam dunk legal case, given that their allegations mostly don't seem to line up with whistleblower protection laws and while they were collectively speaking as employees, they were not formally unionizing. There are likely other ways to pretextually fire people engaging in protected activities anyway. But the question isn't crazy, this is certainly adjacent to the kind of territory that could have some legal protection.

I don't understand why "4. Stay at your company and try to change culture within by organizing collectively, either through the guise of a union or informally" isn't also something you are free to do, besides that you think doing so is not "do[ing] something positive to the society", but is instead "becoming a bunch of cry babies."

Also why is 3 binary? If I am a minority investor in a company, I am not free to criticize the management? I have to buy the majority of the company and fire the management?

It kind of seems like you don't actually understand that soft power exists. The canonical book on this within organizational politics is "Exit, Voice and Loyalty". Have you ever had a social interaction in your entire life? Not everything is an ultimatum, some things are conversations.