okintheory

In a recent discussion of Bezos's Blue Origin, a commenter made the point that

>>> [...] technology developed for space (1957-present) has made huge improvements in ground based life. At its absolute peak the Apollo program consumed 4.4% of the US federal government budget. <<<

This was used as an argument that we should all be glad that Bezos is diverting some resources toward escaping Earth instead of saving it. That only makes sense if a comparable amount of money is being spent preventing climate change. In 2018, the federal budget was $4.109 trillion, and we don't know what the federal government spent on preventing climate change, but it was probably less than $15.0 billion, or 0.3 % of the budget. In other words, we're not making a serious effort to prevent climate change.

Anyone who spends more on escaping Earth than on saving it is saying f*ck you to most of our 7.7 bio. people.

I get worried when I see something like this.

I'm inclined to believe a substantial number of researchers are currently being deliberately fuzzy about what "AI" can and cannot do. Why not call it algorithms and statistics? I think lay-people have a very skewed understanding of what has already been achieved through AI. They may also not understand the word algorithms but at least it doesn't make them think of Skynet. For example, if you asked a person on the street whether there exists an "artificially intelligent supercomputer" somewhere that could help you plan all aspects of a small but entertaining dinner party, they would probably say yes. They imagine that you could just ask IBM Watson to help out, and he'd tell you what to do. This is completely false. "AI" systems are very fragile, and yes, we could build something that plans dinner parties, but we'd have to start over if we needed to plan a kid's birthday party instead. It's very far from strong AI. Ten years ago when it was mostly IBM telling lies, the end result was a couple of billion dollars wasted by hapless healthcare conglomerates. That's already bad. But now we have people from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and more embracing the term AI and relying on unfounded hype to push for funding. It would be much less sexy if we called it "Facebook/Google/etc enable unfair/discriminatory advertising by combining intensive data collection with logistic regression, sometimes in multiple layers, and with some graph algorithms thrown in". But it would be a much better starting point for a well-informed debate. I'm not trying to minimize the importance of algorithms in our world, but a healthy discussion should be based on a sound understanding of the facts on the ground, and AI hype is not helping with that. I strongly prefer the less hyperbolic terminology adopted by someone like Aaron Roth at UPenn, e.g. see the blurb for "The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design".

Bonus AI rant: For the celebration of the new MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, which is a huge expansion of the arguably most important computer science department in the world, there was a discussion panel on AI consisting of MIT President Reif, Henry Kissinger (War criminal?, Theranos board member, wannabe AI expert), Tom Friedman (columnist of limited substance), and Stephen Schwarzman (business man, coined the "increased taxes on carried interest are like Hitler's invasion of Poland" analogy, brought the dough). How the heck is that the inaugural panel!?!

Also consider influencewatch.org's biases

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/influence-watch/

And yet there are countries with more government and much better outcomes along many axes, e.g. Denmark. So maybe there's a difference between a big government and corrupt one?

Yeah, what's all this hype with AI anyway?

An inconsistent theory can prove its own consistency, so in what sense does a system proving its own consistency provide evidence that it is consistent?

Could you elaborate on what the definition of free will you're going by is? And how it's possibly supported by quantum non-locality?

I think you're taking the wrong message away from the following simple idea: "Good decisions depend on taking the available information into account." If we take this for granted, then it's not clear why free will is a good thing.

How would you say pre-determined actions and free will are compatible? I would say they are not (and indeed randomness doesn't really help). In contrast, I would claim that the only sensible definition of free will is based on dualism: Many people seem believe there's some inherent aspect of them that is separate from the physical world and is the source of their self and will. If, like me, you don't believe in dualism, then the conclusion is that we don't have free will.

"So why did you move to Mars?"

"I won the Mars Colony Prize, so it seemed like the logical next step."

On Mathoverflow, there is skepticism:

"I'm voting to close this question as off-topic. It should be clear to everyone that Atiyah does not actually have a proof of RH." – Dan Petersen

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/311062/sir-michael-atiyah...

I'm surprised this is down-voted. Isn't this in fact the public perception? Last time I remember Yelp getting significant mainstream media attention, it was in relation to allegations of racket-like tactics [1].

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/03/is-yelp...

Well, regulatory capture is the problem here [1]. The FCC crooks were appointed by elected crooks. If the US didn't elect crooks, we wouldn't have this FCC.

Electing crooks, of course, is a very old tradition. When it's blunt, it looks like the Credit Mobilier scandal in 1867 [2]. When it's a little more subtle, it might look like LBJ destroying Leland Olds' reputation to keep him off the Federal Power Commission [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_of_Americ...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leland_Olds#Unsuccessful_re-no...

Isn't this very simplistic? In my (limited) understanding, the North was a Republican stronghold, controlled by manufacturing interests, and without a strong economic interest in maintaining slavery. This meant the abolitionist movement was not opposed by the economic elite. On the other hand, Northern industrialists always had an economic interest in fighting against unions. To say that their anti-union sentiment was an extension of the anti-slavery sentiment seems too generous.

When an em dash is used to indicate a pause, it's most often used without spacing between words and the em dash—except in newspapers [1].

[1] http://www.thepunctuationguide.com/em-dash.html

As a colleague of mine observed: If Joe and I have 100 mutual friends on Facebook, but aren't friends, that might be evidence we don't like each other.

If we could just pay everyone to write think pieces with as many assertions and as little evidence as this one, then we'd have an easy way to guarantee full employment with no training or knowledge required. Essentially UBI, but with worse output.

"Obviate" does not mean "make obvious", as I think was intended here. "To obviate" means "to remove (a need or difficulty)".

I'm going to repost a comment from citylab page:

This piece is lying or deceptive, depending on your perspective. The Roman Empire may have built cities on grids, but most major European cities are generally not on grids, at least not in the sense of American cities. Just have a look at London, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Rome and many more. They are full little side streets that head off in unpredictable directions. They're not full of Cul-de-sacs, though, as most streets are not dead ends. But, don't pretend that the main alternative to cul-de-sacs is the American grid. Both are awful, compared to Paris! Without being an expert, I would guess that what makes European cities more enjoyable that American ones (they usually are!), is that they have many streets that are for pedestrians only - this makes for a much more enjoyable experience walking the city, and creates lots of wonderful spaces for restaurants and other venues to have outdoor seating.

- by wowsuchgoodpoint

Yes, this can be made precise: For example, consider a uniform distribution on a d-dimensional cube with side length 1. Only a (1/2)^d fraction of the mass is within 0.25 distance of the average in every coordinate.

In high dimensions, almost all the mass is "near the boundary" in at least one coordinate.

In model of social networks, group boundaries promote the spread of ideas, study finds. Has the model been tested well?