rachofsunshine

Even if polling had been exactly right, you wouldn't have been that confident in the outcome.

In my unsophisticated toy model, plugging in the exact actual result as the polling average (but not telling it how the actual vote went) spits out 66% R-34% D. Clearly one side favored, but hardly a guarantee. Because the result was close, and even highly accurate data in a close result yields an uncertain forecast.

Remember that asteroid a month ago? We knew what its position would be seven years in the future with a precision of a few hours. But because the position was very close to an impact, even that high precision was not enough to rule out an impact.

What they're good for is telling you that things are close. A tied poll or a 50-50 model can tell you that if your beliefs think it's 99% to go one way, you're probably overconfident, and should be more prepared for it to go the other way.

I cared about the result, because it was going to decide whether I settled down in the US or whether I wanted to find a different place to live. And because I paid attention to those polls, I knew that what happened was not particularly unlikely. I prepared early.

A lot of people I know thought it couldn't happen. They ignored the evidence in front of them, because it was distasteful to them (just as it was to me). And they were caught flat-footed in a way that I wasn't.

That's not the benefit of hindsight: I brought receipts. You can see the 5,000 equally-likely outcomes I had at the start of the night (and how they evolved as I added the vote coming in) here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11nn9y9fusd-6LQKCof3_... .

Sometimes it helps to just remember that we're talking about people.

Like most people, Himba men mostly adopt the norms of their culture, and structure the way they think about the world through that lens. For a Himba man, it is normal to love children that were born via another father. Half of them were raised by fathers who were not their own bio-parents! It doesn't represent a threat to his masculinity, because his own father and every man he knows in his social groups has children this way, too. He never expected otherwise. And it doesn't even reduce his number of offspring, because he's having extra-pair children with other women, too.

In the west, on the other hand, the offense in cases of "extra-pair paternity" (to use the article's term) is not usually about genetics. It's a social violation. It offends the husband because his wife has broken an implicit or explicit promise of exclusivity. He can't go have kids himself outside the pair without committing another social violation. It's not normal or accepted in his world, so it makes cultural sense to react negatively to it.

You can ask why Western culture and Himba culture differ in how they think about these things, but then you're not really doing raw EvoPsych - you're doing cultural anthropology.

> In the modern world, I don't see how one can be obsessed about such a thing...

The version of this I've seen most often has been certain Very Online groups who are convinced that if they have kids they'll turn out to secretly be someone else's.

They can't test that hypothesis because it's directly interfering with the conditions that would enable them to test it.

I think it's fair to say that there is a subset of people for whom this kind of thing does border on obsession. By analogy, it's normal to care about your weight, but it's still possible for that normal concern to become an anxious obsession that gets blown way out of proportion.

There's this piece of product-management wisdom that I've been thinking about lately, which is that users almost always understand their problems better than you do. If the metrics say things are going well, and your users say everything sucks, your metrics are probably wrong. But the complement to that is that users mostly suck at solutions: you understand the constraints and difficulties of your product better than they do, so they tend to suggest things that are infeasible, overly specific, or prohibitively difficult to build.

When the public gives (or random bloggers give) give a damn about economics, it's a sign the economy isn't working. Of course they don't have useful solutions - they're not economists - but that feels a little beside the point: you don't have to be a plumber to recognize that your house is full of sewage. And since no one can be an expert in everything, life demands the ability to identify and call attention to problems you cannot personally solve.

An article like this is the equivalent of your roommate going "oh, damn, the living room is full of sewage, we better do something about that!" Of course you'll vigorously agree at first, because you're talking about the problem (which is clear to everyone). But then your roommate suggests fixing it by dropping dynamite down the drain - i.e., talking about the solution - and you're a lot more likely to disagree.

Your resume link 404's for me.

This is a good general tool for less-mathematically-deep folks to keep in their pocket: look for well-behaved objects that do something nice under the operation you're interested in. Typical "well-behaved" objects do things like stay where they are, or end up as a constant multiple of themselves, or end up as 0 or 1, or something like that. Then try to represent everything else in terms of those objects, so that you can take advantage of their convenient behavior. Less-difficult examples include:

- Prime factorization: primes have nice properties, and you can turn every integer into a product of primes (polynomial factorization is an extension of this idea) and work with the nice prime properties

- Vector spaces: basis vectors have nice properties, so you write vectors as sums of them and do operations on the coefficients instead of the vectors themselves

- The exponential function: it's the unique function with f'(x) = f(x), so you try to turn everything else into exponentials anytime you have to solve some painful differential equation because you know those terms will go away

- Fixed points in dynamical systems: if you don't want to analyze how arbitrary things change, find the points that don't, then think of the other points as (fixed point) + (small perturbation) and reduce your work to handling the perturbation

- Taylor series: polynomials are easy, smooth functions are hard, so turn your smooth function into a polynomial and do polynomial things with it

I don't know how OP does it, but Elo ratings are a pretty good tool for this kind of thing. In each pairwise comparison, the selected option "wins", the other option "loses", and ratings are adjusted accordingly.

You can incorporate priors by setting initial ratings differently, or force correlations between items by treating a win against option X as something like 0.8 wins against option X and 0.2 wins against options correlated with X.

That was my first thought before I even clicked the link.

Maybe "bracket" or something tournament-associated.

> Delete the bottom 5 states from the data (red Bible belt places) and suddenly this is no longer so true.

It's less true, but it's still mostly true.

Even the highest life-expectancy state in the US (California, at 80.9 years) isn't very good by rich-nation standards. It ranks below - deep breath - Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, French Polynesia, Andorra, Switzerland, Australia, Singapore, Italy, Spain, France, Norway, Malta, Sweden, Macau, the UAE, Iceland, Canada, Martinique, Israel, Ireland, Qatar, Portugal, Bermuda, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, Germany, the UK, Bahrain, Chile, and the Maldives, coming in just above Costa Rica.

> This trend holds for a lot of the things on your list: homicide rates, physical health, and so on.

Rhode Island is the US' safest state at 1.5 homicides per 100k per year. That's seven times Japan's, triple China, South Korea, or Italy's, double Malaysia, Norway, or the UAE, and 50% higher than Denmark, Iceland, or Belgium.

Colorado is the US' least obese state at 22.6%. That's triple South Korea, double France, and 50% more than Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, or the Netherlands. (I'm including only high-income countries in this list, since many poor countries have low obesity because food insecurity is a problem.)

Even the most cherry-picked favorable stats are still awful. Does the South drag most US averages down? Yeah, but not by that much.

I get that there's an argument for "if we make sure innovation can thrive and make sure people have a lot of resources to work with, we'll come up with lots of solutions to problems and people will be able to access them". But if that were true, wouldn't it be coming through in our societal outcomes? In life expectancy, or crime, or social stability, or a general feeling of peace and safety and security?

We lag Europe by five years in life expectancy, despite spending 2x as much on healthcare. We even spend more public money on healthcare, by far. We're in worse health while we're alive. Our life expectancy is ~the same as it was in 2001, in an age of medical miracles. Our homicide rate is close to the global average, and trailing many poor countries. We have the fifth-highest incarceration rate on Earth, many times higher than countries we think of as having terrifyingly oppressive governments, and on par with several of the world's worst dictatorships. Our citizens don't feel secure: that's one of the few things almost everyone in America agrees on, and part of why we're reaching a level of instability that hasn't been seen in a rich country in a long time.

That doesn't sound like a thriving country to me - certainly not given that we started as a superpower, have had 150 years of relative internal stability, are the beneficiaries of a global brain-drain in our favor for the entire postwar era, enjoy some of the world's richest natural resources, have tons of space to spread out, have friendly neighbors who haven't made war on us in a century, invented the stuff half the world runs on, operate the world's reserve currency, and have both literal and figurative mountains of capital.

We should be a shining utopia, the envy of planet Earth. But we aren't. How can that be if we're doing everything right, or even if we're closer to right than our contemporaries?

> It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash.

I ask this as a person who takes market forces very seriously: why?

I think it's pretty obvious at this point that these forces are not producing very good outcomes for the population (even if they are on paper efficient in the market-efficiency sense), or at least, that the public doesn't feel like they are. That's causing massive social instability that is threatening nearly the entire developed world. That instability poses a pretty high threat to the approach you're arguing for. Neither protectionist reactionaries, nor leftists, are very well aligned with free-market philosophy, and those ideologies are ascendant nearly everywhere right now. Isn't that a greater threat to free-market economics than relatively mild welfare-state and workers-rights stuff?

(Full disclosure: I am very much pro-labor and pro-regulation, so this is arguing for things I support, but even with your views it seems pretty clear to me that the status quo is dead no matter what you do. Wouldn't you rather have reforms that make the existing system work for the public than a revolution that destroys it entirely?)

The way I did it was by deliberately going against my normal impulses. The rule was "whatever you would normally do, do the opposite of that". If you would stay home, go out. If you would eat a steak, eat spaghetti instead. If you would get drunk, stay sober. If you would stay sober, get drunk. Basically, as long as it's not something that's likely to do irrevocable harm, do things that don't seem like good ideas and just see what happens.

The limits on our experiences are usually self-imposed by the fact that we tend to make specific choices limited to specific contexts. The experiences you have are the experiences that derive from what you think is a good idea. So doing things you think are bad ideas tends to result in a lot of new experiences.

Especially with such a small number of rigid bodies to worry about. The literal only thing that has to collide with anything else is the pinball itself, unless we're talking about a pretty weird pinball machine.

This puts water on Mars into the time range where life was known to exist here on Earth. The Martian water that carved these rocks was around until 3.7 billion years ago, which is around the age of the oldest known geographic evidence of life on Earth. (Life likely existed before that, since very few rocks that old still exist.)

That means that even if life did not evolve on Mars, it could conceivably have been thrown from Earth to Mars at a time when Mars had liquid water. We know that bacterial spores today can remain viable in space for very long periods of time, much longer than the time for (say) a rock blown off by an impact on Earth to reach Mars.

This was always a possibility, but the possibility that that life could've landed in liquid water makes it a lot more likely, I would think.

Yeah, it's very intentionally not a typical leetcode problem, precisely because leetcode is nearly worthless for screening people these days. I was replying to someone who seemed to be objecting to my opinion of some candidates' skills on the basis that maybe they just didn't know the specific thing we ask.

We don't ask "make the longest palindrome". We ask "convert this English into code that does what it says". If you want to make the discussion more concrete, we have a public practice problem [1] that we send out with our interview bookings so that people know what to expect. The real problems we ask are very similar to it.

Do you feel like there's anything there that any reasonably skilled programmer shouldn't be able to figure out on the fly?

[1] https://www.otherbranch.com/shared/practice-coding-problem

The death of shitty interviews has been greatly exaggerated.

AI might make e.g. your leetcode interview less predictive than it previously would have been. But was it predictive in the first place? I don't think most interviews are written by people thinking in those terms at all. If your method of interviewing never depended on data suggesting it actually, you know, worked in the first place, why would it matter if it starts working even worse?

Insofar as it makes the shittiness of those interviews more visible, the effect of AI is a good thing. An interview focused on recall of some specific algorithm was never predictive, it's just now predictive in a way that Generic Business Idiots can understand.

We frequently interview people who both (a) claim to have been in senior IC roles (not architect positions, roles where they are theoretically coding a lot) for many, many years and (b) cannot code their way out of a paper bag when presented with a problem that requires even a modicum of original reasoning. Some of that might be interview nerves, of course, but a lot of these people are not at all unconfident. They just...suck. And I wonder if what we're seeing is the downstream effects of Generic Business Idiots hiring primarily people who memorize stuff than people who build stuff.

Former head of product there here: no, we didn't do this kind of identity verification. That would have prohibitively damaged people's willingness to actually do the interview. We did use various means to try to identify people signing up multiple times, and we caught plenty of people trying to duplicate themselves that way, but you didn't have to physically go to a center to do our interview.

I've considered something like that for my current company, which is doing basically the same thing, but:

(a) this has not, in practice, been a problem for us in identifying good candidates

and, far less importantly:

(b) you need very high scale to have interviewers everywhere that candidates are OR you're paying extra for a third-party controlled environment

(c) scheduling and cancellations become more difficult and costly respectively

Any object that approaches the Solar System from interstellar space is necessarily moving at least (solar) escape velocity. It's "falling down" into the Solar System's gravity by a distance equal to how far it has to "climb up" to get away in a system with little appreciable friction.

The paper assumes 100 km/s, which is more than double the solar escape velocity at Earth's orbit. The mass doesn't make a difference in the absence of friction and assuming it is much less than the primary body; escape velocity depends only on the mass of the primary.

There would be some "friction" (since the hole would be eating up small amounts of mass on its journey and that mass would be moving at less than solar escape velocity), but without doing any calculations I'm almost certain it's nowhere close to enough to slow it down.

Because it isn't big. It's massive. Those are not the same thing. Our everyday intuitions deal with solids with densities within a couple of orders of magnitude (from very light foamy solids at perhaps 0.1 g/cm^3 to very dense metals around 20 g/cm^3), so the two can never be that far apart in everyday experience. But small black holes are many, many, many, many orders of magnitude denser than that.

When a big solid object (where "big" is "macroscopic") strikes your body at a low speed (where "low" is "a few km/s"), it interacts with the atoms in your body. It applies pressure to your body, primarily the degeneracy pressure[1] that pushes back when electron clouds push up against one another. The interaction tine is long (on the order of milliseconds to seconds), so not only is the applied force high, the force has time to do its work. The push overcomes the mechanical strength of the structures in your body, like the walls of your blood vessels or the membranes of your cells, shattering them and causing the secondary damage of bleeding, organ dysfunction, inflammation, vulnerability to infection, etc.

When our black hole here passes through you, though, it is both extremely small (smaller than an atom, if by "size" we mean its event horizon) and moving extremely fast (about ten times Earth's orbital velocity, or about a hundred times faster than a bullet).

It's too small to directly "eat" your tissues, and it isn't "pushing them out of the way" by much, either. It interacts with your body by tugging on it. That tugging would be enough to tear your body's structures apart if it were sustained (the tidal forces here are very extreme), but the hole is moving so quickly that while the force is very large, the impulse (force times time) is not. It does devastating damage along the very narrow corridor where it's munching up an atom or three as it goes and where it's applying ultra-extreme forces that matter even over these millisecond timescales, but the corridor of damage is so narrow that it doesn't disrupt the function of your body. (The paper establishes the mass cutoff where this would no longer be so, and where the gravitational shockwave would indeed be enough to start tearing at your body's structures.)

It's kind of like how you can snuff out a candle with your fingers, even though a typical candle flame is not much cooler than the surface of the Sun. The heat flux from the flame to your skin is extreme, but it's applied for such a short period of time that the total energy delivery is tiny and does not deal meaningful damage to the skin.

[1] Electrostatic repulsion plays a role, but degeneracy pressure is the primary thing that makes matter take up space.

Black holes emit Hawking radiation regardless of ambient temperature. It's just that right now, the mass(-energy) of photons falling into the hole from the CMBR is outpacing the mass loss to Hawking radiation for large black holes, so large black holes aren't currently evaporating from their own Hawking radiation.

It's like standing next to a campfire. Your body is still emitting thermal radiation in the IR, it's just that you're receiving more thermal radiation from the fire than you're putting out.

It's important not to blow off a few joules when you're speaking of radiation. The LD50 dose for a 75 kg human is only about 375 J (5 Sv) of gamma rays[1]. In this case, the 5 J delivered inside you (I didn't check your calculations on this, just using your number), and perhaps another 5 on approach and exit, only end up being about 10 J (0.12 Sv), which is not enough to kill, but it is still a rather large radiation dose. It's more than twice the annual limit for occupational safety in the US, and is near the lower limit of the dose that could cause acute radiation syndrome. If the hole passed directly through your digestive tract, concentrating the dose in the vulnerable tissues there, there's a decent chance you'd get mildly sick.

[1] Gamma rays have a weighting factor of 1 in the gray -> Sv calculation, and the black hole emits them isotropically, so they're roughly distributed across the body. So in this case, 1 Gy ~ 1 Sv.

This is one of the best things I've read in a long time. It's not exactly saying anything new - I'm sure this sentiment will be recognizable to almost everyone - but it's saying it quite eloquently.

I'm a big believer in the power of the zeitgeist, and this quiet desperation is all over the air of the year 2025. It doesn't really have a name yet. It's not just ennui, because ennui is just boredom. The feeling of 2025 is boredom and fear and despair, all mixed together. But it doesn't seem to be entirely new:

“...and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

I'd encourage you to read my reply to the sibling comment to yours.

In brief: depression is a feedback loop, because it interferes with your ability to take the actions you need to take to be less depressed. If you've been depressed for a while, that loop is probably pretty well-established. Antidepressants make the feedback weaker, and that lets you begin to work on breaking the loop.

Antidepressants don't solve your problems, and they don't make you unaware of them. They just make the problems easier to work on. They don't make you weak. They give you the ability to work on being stronger.

Therapy, and even psychiatric treatment like antidepressants, are not the same thing as gaslighting yourself.

When I tried an antidepressant for the first time, I thought the same thing you do. "I don't need medication! I'm sad because everything is terrible, and getting worse!". Everything was terrible. Everything was getting worse. The worst day of my life would come about a year later; I wasn't wrong that I was in very deep trouble. I was poor and getting poorer, my life had been decaying for years, and I could see that I would be out on the street very soon if my course didn't change, which was true (I found a place to go with a matter of hours left before I'd have been pitching a tent).

What I WAS wrong about was that that meant I couldn't be depressed, in the sense of "having major depressive disorder".

Antidepressants DO NOT make you happy. They don't make you ignore your problems. The day they kicked in for me, I was every bit as aware of the situation I was in as I had been when I began taking them a few weeks before. I still knew I was in deep trouble, I still had many things I wanted to change about myself. My values were not any different.

The difference, though, is that I wasn't drowning. This comic - https://www.dumbingofage.com/2016/comic/book-7/01-glower-vac... - describes my feelings almost exactly. It was like the difference between being inside a wildfire, and standing on a hilltop with a vantage point on it. The problem is still there and you still want to solve it, but you can pause, strategize, and turn the volume down enough to hear yourself. Now, in my case, it turns out I had been depressed in some form for most of my life, so this was a profound revelation to me. You mean most people's internal voices don't spend days abusing them for every small error? You can just like, go about your day and not have an internal voice telling you how worthless you are? I genuinely did not know that that was possible.

What people who "don't get it" don't realize, I think, is that major depressive disorder - the "chemical imbalance", in layperson's terms - can both occur on its own AND as a response to ongoing life stresses, in the same way that lung cancer can be genetic OR a response to toxic air. And depression is, somewhat by nature, self-sustaining once it is established: depression interferes with you doing precisely the things you'd need to do to not be depressed. Working on things you're invested in, exercising, getting social contact and support, all of these things are far harder when you're depressed than they would be if you weren't.

When you get on an antidepressant, you're not making your problems go away. You're just helping yourself interrupt the feedback loop that traps you within those problems. You still have to solve the problems, and that's why you still go to therapy. But therapy + antidepressants are more effective than therapy alone because it is far easier to apply what you learn in therapy when your mind isn't tearing itself apart with fear and pain.

Today, my depression is much better managed, because I've had a long time to learn to understand it from a position of safety. I still spiral into it sometimes. But the loops are not unbreakable now, because I'm trained to recognize them and interrupt them. Because of my time on medication, I know what part of my mind that screaming abuse comes from, and I can better separate it from myself. I'm better, on any axis you care to measure: I'm 60 pounds lighter, make ten times the income, have more experiences, am better-liked, have had more fulfilling and durable relationships, whatever. And if I had not gotten on a medication, I would've been rotting in the ground for about six years now.

(That is not to say that we don't need broader societal reforms to fix what is putting all of our brains under enough stress to cause damage. We should absolutely pursue those, and we should expect our world to get sicker until we succeed, in the same way that a polluted city should expect cancer rates to increase. But that's not mutually-exclusive with antidepressants being an extremely valuable part of individual recovery, in the same way that regulating pollution is not mutually-exclusive with treating someone's cancer.)

That might very well be true! But I didn't have hard numbers on that, and I did have hard numbers on crypto-industry-openness.

People really struggle with things that have measurable, probabilistic effects. You see it with healthcare ("Steve smoked his whole life and never got cancer, so cigarettes aren't bad for you!"), environmental effects ("Alice was poor and she didn't rob anyone, so poverty is no excuse!"), hiring ("Charlie is a great employee and he had no experience, so you should never look at backgrounds!"), etc.

It should be a general standard of proof for any sort of sociological claim that you look at rates, not just examples, but it usually isn't.

I'm a founder who is pretty sympathetic to the idea of cooperatives.

The simple answer is that I am not savvy enough with financial instruments to be confident that I can structure something that can't be preyed upon if it's successful. I know I care about making sure my employees are well-treated - you shouldn't believe me when I say that, but I believe me, and that means that in terms of my own ethics there's not much reason not to maintain control and depend on my own judgment. If I want to divide 70% of the profits up among my employees, nothing is going to stop me from doing that, so why not keep my options open?