> The hack to beat AI at Go probably isn’t as interesting as I thought.
I still think it's interesting. Yes, the adversarial AI is winning by getting into game states where human judges, playing by standard human rules, would consider it to have lost. But the standard Go AI was trained on Tromp-Taylor rules, not normal human rules, and it is losing by Tromp-Taylor rules, and it should know it's losing because those are the rules it was trained on. It's not like they are tricking the standard AI by changing the rules. You could never beat a human this way.
"Peterson first courted controversy for refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns while teaching at the University of Toronto."
Peterson has never said he refuses to use a person's preferred pronouns. He said if someone personally asks him to (e.g. a student in one his classes), he will use them. What he became famous for was his opposition to Bill C-16 which he argued would legally compel people to use a persons's "preferred" prounouns (not really a "preference" if it's legally enforced...).
Obviously false, and false in a substantial and meaningful way.
But is the journalist lying or is the journalist just badly informed?
Given how badly informed the average journalist is, you'd have to work pretty hard to convince me that he's actually lying rather than repeating some bullshit he heard somewhere else.
I'm trying to track down an article/post/book review that I believe was linked to here. I can't find it on Google. The premise was essentially that if higher education were a prescription drug, it would be illegal (i.e. its grandiose claims would not be accepted by the FDA without evidence of efficacy) and also scandalous due to the cost (as happens to some drugs).
I'm not aware of a specific article, but Bryan Caplan has studied the merit and lack thereof of higher education and written a book and numerous articles, on it.
In general, he finds that educational attainment is beneficial primarily as a signal of being superior to someone else, rather than for the actual knowledge it imparts. So it is beneficial for the individual, but society does not benefit from subsidizing education, since it just creates an "arms race" of everyone trying to be above average, creates credential inflation, rather than actual value.
Why is the comibination of "AGI will not be achieved any time soon" and "AGI has the potential to be existentially catastrophic" beliefs so rare? It seems obvious to me that AGI has a million ways to destroy us, and at the same time it seems like nothing that has been created to date resembles AGI or something that would in any remotely direct way lead to AGI.
Most people do not generate their opinions on a particular topic through detailed analysis of the facts. So most widely known or discussed topics tend to generate "camps" of belief, based on differing opinions of those who do discuss and study the topics (or various people interested in the political effects and throw out various opinions).
In this case, there are two major camps. 1) AI is scary - which tends to believe that AGI will come soon, and also is potentially catastrophic, and 2) AI is not scary - which tends to believe that AI is a non-issue either because it will not happen or will not be catastrophic.
Those who do not study AI specifically will therefore latch onto either of the headline camp's ideas (that AI either is, or isn't, scary) and build their underlying opinions based on whichever line of thought supports that. So combinations of "AI is scary" and "AI is not scary" beliefs getting combined will be rare among the general population. It's a mixed message that doesn't relay the minimal understanding that most people will hold.
This is true of lots of other (I would say most) sets of beliefs on a given topic. This topic is newer and harder to understand, so we should expect less nuance than in older topics or topics with greater societal distribution (like "is [sports player] good?").
If AGI will not be achieved any time soon, then it will probably be achieved by a relatively slow process. A slow process of developing AGI, makes it much more likely that the problems will be recognized and corrected before they become catastrophic. And most of the catastrophic AI risk scenarios, at least in the "rationalist" discussion space, seem to involve "AI Foom" which implies easy and rapid development of AGI.
Fair enough, though I don't like long timelines necessarily imply slow gradual development. I think there will be little progress made for a long time, and then things will go foom.
As a territory or a set of states? If the latter, the expansion of the Senate, from 100 to (presumably) 120 members would probably be the most significant disruption. (The Canadian population is too small to affect the House in the same way.) I don't know enough about Canadian politics to say how many new "red" and "blue" Senators we'd get, but it would definitely shift the status quo.
Presumably it would be as a set of states. How many? By population, the fair number is five or so, but that would have to be negotiated. And, yes, the transfer would shift US politics somewhat leftward, given the political views of Canadians.
No I would be strongly opposed to it for political reasons. But I would never have to worry about such a scenario because Canadians would be even more opposed to joining the US. Works out for both!
The likeliest scenario is probably not that the whole of Canada tries to join, but that the province of Alberta does so. Alberta is basically Canada's Texas: they are quite conservative, have a lot of oil money, and have resented the eastern establishment for a long time. If anyone were to break out of confederation, they would be the best bet.
Alberta is conservative by Canadian standards(which on the whole is ridiculously shifted to the left by global standards) but it isn't particularly conservative by American ones. In any case, domestic politics from the left would make it impossible for Alberta to join as well. Not to mention, taking over Canadian territory, even in a democratic fashion, wouldn't be taken too kindly by Ottawa. So I imagine the whole foreign policy establishment would be strongly opposed as well. Alberta may very well become independent but it will not be allowed to join the US.
It's established in Canadian law and political culture that a province can leave Canada through democratic process. The typical example for that is Quebec, but I see no reason that wouldn't apply to Alberta, too.
They say in the close 1995 Quebec independence referendum, the Canadian government pulled off some shenaningans to tip the scale in favor of the "no" campaign. These were within law and justifiable like ensuring as many immigrants were citizens so they could vote(non-French white immigrants overwhelmingly preferred a united Canada). But this just shows, that regardless of Canadain government's talk, if the separatists are expected to win, Ottawa will do something about it.
But even, if Ottawa's "covert" actions don't succeed, no serious government will ever give independence to a core territory just because of a vote. If Alberta or Quebec ever vote for independence, Ottawa can just claim some irregularities in voting or some legal issues and just ignore it. Unilateral secession is mostly not accepted by the international community. No one would support the Albertans or Quebecois.
Seperations of core territories occur for sure. But the costs must be really high for the central government. Generally lots of violence, with deaths in the tens of thousands at the very least and a wrecked local economy. The idea of Albertans or Quebecois violently protesting let alone actually fighting the Canadian military/law enforcement for independence is laughable on the face of it. All Ottawa has to do is call the white boomers in favor of Alberta/Quebec indepenence, "racists", and the whole movement will fizzle out.
This is also why the Scotland will never be independent.
The dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia happened without violence, so such a thing is at least possible.
Also, you may not be aware of the full history of the movement for Quebec independence. There was a part of the movement called the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) which definitely took violent action for the cause, planting bombs and kidnapping people. The government clamped down hard on the FLQ, going so far as to invoke the War Measures Act, which suspended habeas corpus nation-wide and let them toss a bunch of people in jail without charge. But they did not act against the peaceful portions of the larger independence movement.
This is generally interpreted as an implicit two-part deal: violent action for separation will not be tolerated, but peaceable action through the democratic system will be accepted. It's an attempt to avoid violence, to make sure that something like the UK's Troubles doesn't happen, and it will only work if the second part is actually credible. And the government certainly seems to take the notion of peaceable partition seriously. The question of whether separation is even possible went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled that yes, it is.
In that case we would have to purchase the territory like we did with Louisiana or Alaska. Prohibitively expensive, but not impossible. Or maybe not even that expensive, if it was certain they were leaving anyway; just a face-saving number for Ottawa to say they got something out of it.
I'd probably be for it as long as it was an accession under the US Constitution rather than negotiating a new governing compact.
I'm not terribly worried about the political impact, am generally "the more the merrier" on immigration and adding more cultures to the melting pot, and genuinely miss the gossamer pre 9/11 boundary. (Who ever imagined it would ever be treated like a real international border?)
But I find it really hard to imagine Canadians accepting those terms. Quebec in particular has a bunch of First Amendment dealbreakers, and isn't going to give those up after getting them from Ottawa.
Or any terms, really. So much of Canadian political and cultural identity seems to be defined specifically in contrast to the US, it's hard to see them voting in favor of Amerentry.
(I mean, renaming Kraft Dinner to Mac & Cheese alone...!)
I'm guessing we'll just have to stick with the current arrangement.
Quebec wouldn't do it. They view Louisiana as a cautionary tale. Canada doing such a thing would be preceded or immediately followed by them leaving Canada.
It would be a tremendous boon to the Democrats, so I imagine that on average Democrats would support it and Republicans oppose it. It would make America less racially diverse (at least in the short term - see above re: increased Democrat political power), though it would also dilute whatever distinctly American culture and identity that still exists here today (by much less than the majority of immigrants would, but it would happen all at once).
And I imagine that a lot of GDP-worshipping fools would say America's economy would be so much bigger, but that's an advantage only if a significant synergistic boost to canadian productivity would be acheived through annexation, because Canada's GDP per capita is much lower than America's.
Less racially diverse? Canada has a higher portion of its population composed of immigrants than the US does.
Economically speaking, I do believe the GDP per capita of (former) Canadians would rise after union. Trade between the US and Canada is quite free, but not completely free, and movement of people is not free at all, so I would expect some Canadians to be able to find more lucrative economic niches after union. But I don't think it would quite span the gap, except maybe on a generational timespan.
At first blush, your answer on Canadian GDPPC seems right. The best explanation of Canada's low productivity relative to the US that I've read is its smaller internal market and corresponding lack of economies of scale (Canadian economists have studied this question interminably for decades.) Fully integrate Canada into the US economy and you should begin to see large productivity improvements.
However, one factor that's been overlooked in this discussion: you should almost certainly anticipate a mass migration of Canadians into the lower US, due to the combination of better weather and better economic opportunities on one hand and the reduction of "Canadian distinctives," e.g. single-payer healthcare, on the other.
Compare the case of East and West Germany -- that border is still as clear as day and night by any social or economic statistic and will be for the foreseeable future, as it makes more sense for the young and ambitious to leave than to try to build businesses there (and not many are moving there from the West). Canada isn't as economically deprived as the GDR was, but unlike the GDR it has a large climate differential to contend with.
So most likely Ontario becomes Rustbelt 2.0, with Toronto depopulating just like its nearest neighbors among major US cities: Detroit and Buffalo (though probably with less social dysfunction along the way). Western Canada probably does better, and as Washington State continues to boom, BC might actually benefit on net.
> So most likely Ontario becomes Rustbelt 2.0, with Toronto depopulating just like its nearest neighbors among major US cities
Maybe. There would be at least a small exodus. But maybe Toronto is able to hold on as a regional center like Minneapolis or Chicago, two cities that are not known for mild weather. The Quebec-Windsor Corridor is going to be governed from somewhere, and Toronto is the likely candidate, possibly at the expense of Montreal. But it's hard to know what will happen.
The difference between Toronto and Minneapolis/Chicago is that the latter have managed to hold onto a number of megacorp HQs, and Chicago remains indispensable as a secondary financial center -- though on both those fronts Chicago's recent losses really sting. In the end, Chicago and Minneapolis overcome their crappy weather through high wages. If you have low wages and bad weather, you're Buffalo.
I have to think Canada's domestic corporations would probably lose market share as American firms with more muscle (and adapted for a more competitive environment) moved in more aggressively, and this would hurt cities in which those Canadian companies are headquartered, above all Toronto. This is what the productivity benefits of economies of scale look like. Of course the reverse will happen to some degree, with Canadian firms gaining market share in the US, but I think for the reasons I stated US firms would dominate.
But your point is valid, Toronto might shrink but it's still indispensable, and it might well be the case that mid-sized cities in Ontario would be hurt much worse by southward migration.
The problem Day 1 is going to be that unless Canadian wages adjust overnight (which doesn't seem to be how these things ever work in practice), talented Canadian college grads will look at the American wage premium and it will be hard for most of them to resist (and did I mention the weather?) And I think once that Canada-to-US pathway for talent gets started, it will have a momentum that will be hard to reverse.
Maybe the person is using 'racially diverse' as code for 'number of black people', rather than considering the very large Asian population in Canada? (both Chinese and Indian immigrants are common)
Which is fine when everyone in your country uses a similar system. In USCan, people could cruise along without coverage until something came up, then head up to the northern states for expensive care. The free rider problem would bankrupt you.
Well, yes. There would need to be some sorts of rules to deal with that sort of free-riders, just as private US insurers have rules about coverage for pre-existing conditions.
OHIP, the Ontario health plan, currently has a six-month residency requirement. That would probably be raised.
I expect Canada would try to maintain its healthcare system, and that just might be possible, assuming the feds play ball and subsidize one-for-all state level plans through tax advantages just like they subsidize employer-provided health insurance. I doubt the Canadian plans are any less efficient than the US health care bureaucracies.
But there is no doubt that the health care system in the former Canadian provinces would change. If nothing else, whatever system they went with would have to pay American rates for health care practicioners, and they are steep.
Stop using the metric system? Come on, it's easy. You buy in kilos, you sell in grams, and if anyone tries to mess with you, you handle it with your nine millimetre. You'll love it.
With three hundred shootings per day in the country, it seems like there should be plenty of data available to settle the long-running 9mm-vs-.45 feud.
I read here in the comments today and I've seen it said elsewhere that black authors are severely underrepresented in American School's literature. This does not jive with my memory so I checked my local school district's reading lists. This comes from an extremely GOP town (+20), but not in the South. And I checked only 7th and 12th grade but figured they'd be fairly representative. Of those 77 authors:
31% Female and 69% Male
15% Black, 81% White, and 4% Other.
(Also interesting, of the black authors, half were female)
So at least with my quick check of the local conservative school district, black authors are represented roughly proportional to their US total population (note that my town ~4% black).
Female authors were underrepresented. White Male authors overrepresented. And non-black-minority authors were significantly underrepresented (esp Hispanic).
This means that of all races and genders, black female/male authors are the only ones who actually are "correctly" represented in the school curriculum, where correct means roughly proportional to the total US population*. Are there parts of the country not like this where black authors are actually underrepresented? Or are people just thinking "I only read 1 or 2 black authors a year in school" and not doing the math to realize that if you read one book a month in school, 1 or 2 black authors a year is representation consistent with total population?
*Obviously, "correct" is extremely subjective. And this is likely too simplified, even if we're going for proportional racial representation as likely you'd want some type of historic weighting. E.g., in 1900 the US was something like 88% white, 12% black and less than 1% other, and since much of our literature is historic, it makes sense that white is overrepresented relative to today's population.
From surveys where this comes up periodically, I think literally something like 90% of Americans overestimate America's black percent of the population (almost no one underestimates it). A non-trivial minority thinks it's 50% or greater.
Even a lot of people with graduate degrees have never thought about this question mathematically and wouldn't know how to go about answering it.
I would guess that the average person looks at the heavy black representation in sports and entertainment and uses that as a rough heuristic for the country as a whole.
There's no reason, from a purely literary perspective, that we should expect equal representation. Black people have a very low average written literacy rate compared to whites, and whites have an extremely long, rich literary tradition that is not present amongst blacks, so it only makes sense that whites have more elite authors than blacks. If you want to say that we "need" more black authors for "representation" or something, 1) There's no evidence that "representation" improves black schooling performance, and a higher % of black kids already express a desire to go to college than white kids do! 2) Wanting this is one thing, but we should make it absolutely clear that there's no literary basis whatsoever for thinking that all races are equally skilled writers.
Nobody has a problem with the NBA being majority black due to blacks being better at basketball than everyone else, so it's crap for people to expect parity in every other area of life not presently dominated by blacks.
When it comes to the NFL and NBA being 75% black or more, the subject is completely unmentionable. Those leagues even ludicrously win awards for having such great "diversity." And instead we get complaints about a supposed underrepresentation of black Americans in baseball, despite the percentage of American players who are black being right in line with that of the general population.
Possibly an effect of people remembering their own school days. This certainly wasn't true in the 80s/early 90s in southern Missouri, for example. Sometimes we fix things but don't get the word out.
There being less black authors than their proportion of the population is not ipso facto a "problem" that needs to be "fixed". Black people's written literacy abilities are on average vastly below those of white people's, so them having fewer great authors is precisely what would ought to expect.
And the evidence that artificially boosting the prominence of black e.g. authors so that black kids will do better in school is non-existent. In my experience it merely makes them feel entitled to success and to blame "racism" when they don't achieve it.
Leaving aside the rest of your post, the OP asked why people think black authors are underrepresented when his memory indicates that their representation is approximately in line with their proportion of the population, which he then verified against at least one current curriculum. I gave a plausible reason. Feel free to substitute the verb "change" for "fix" in my OP, if it makes you feel better.
Black people's written literacy abilities being on average below those of white people's, is *itself* a problem that ipso facto desperately needs to be fixed. Which, in the process, will presumably "fix" the bit about underrepresentation in school libraries.
And the idea that front-loading the process by boosting black representation among authors showcased in school districts with a significant number of black students, that they may serve as role models, is not entirely without merit. Not automatically sound either, but worth being debated.
IMO adequate "representation" is oft demanded but rarely defined, deliberately. And fewer and fewer people realize that the US was huge majority white for most of its history, or that Europe was almost entirely white until very very recently. These things are being deliberately obfuscated.
It's often much easier to see that the marginal return on a dollar of increased school spending in a particular environment will be greater than one dollar than it is to work out at what point diminishing returns will stop that being the case.
(An even stronger example of this is minimum wages, where there's less data. I think the minimum wage in the UK should be higher, because we have high poverty, high corporate profits and low unemployment, but I don't have a clue how much higher, because I don't know at what point the negative impact will balance the positive).
>It's often much easier to see that the marginal return on a dollar of increased school spending in a particular environment will be greater than one dollar than it is to work out at what point diminishing returns will stop that being the case.
No, it's not. It's often claimed but this supposed relationship between school funding and results is almost entirely imaginary (at least for the levels of funding seen in the US - obviously going from $0 to $1,000 will have some effect but that's irrelevant). And that's putting aside the issue of financially quantifying the impact of better school outcomes, which is typically done in an arbitrary way so as to always support more funding).
Is there such a thing as working 20hr weeks for half the salary at a software engineering role ? I assume not since I haven’t heard of such a thing but wonder why not.
Many big tech companies (definitely Microsoft and Adobe, probably others as well because companies I've checked are two-for-two) officially support modified work schedules with prorated compensation. It requires management approval, and I get the impression that the difficulty of getting signoff is proportional to the amount of reduction you want (e.g. 80% of full time is pretty easy to get if you're reasonable senior and a good performer, but asking for 60% yields more push-back).
At both companies, benefits are binary rather than them trying to prorate somehow: more than 50% of full time gives you full benefits, but 50% or less excludes you from most benefits.
I haven't seen anyone hiring specifically for part time SWE positions. It seems to be intended as an accommodation for existing employees who can't (or don't want to) continue to work full time.
It might be easier for you to de-facto get this rather than de-jure. Like, just apply to a software engineering job and work 20hr weeks. It's quite likely that you'll advance your career less quickly (though it'll be a smaller difference than many would think), but especially in a remote role no one will really do the math. And at a good company no one would really care, unless you were providing less impact than expected for your level.
At Google/Waymo where I've got experience, no one is counting the hours you're in a desk. If you get your job done in 10 hours or 60 hours a week, that's none of my business.
Try not to get involved in a team with a difficult oncall rotation though, since that is one of the cases where you do have to be online a lot more.
quite a few allegedly full-time big-tech roles are not de facto even 40 hrs/week and are in reality very chill. GOOG and MSFT are known to be the more chill cos though it's also team-dependent.
Definitely! If you're an independent contractor, it's pretty easy to end up on contracts like that. I have two such contracts right now since I prefer 40h weeks but I could quit one of my contracts tomorrow and have exactly what you describe.
As a contractor, you generally charge a higher fee than the corresponding salary to compensate for the extra risk and (and sometimes more boring tasks) you take on. I'm a poor European so I have no insight into "big tech level salaries", but if you are working at such a company currently there are presumably contractors there you can discuss this with. You can also send feelers to a couple of brokers, they are usually quite open with how much they think they can sell you for if they want to work with you.
What are some known exceptions to the "unbearable accuracy of stereotypes"?
I recall reading a study that found blondes have higher average IQs than women of other hair colours, although I don't know if this has been replicated.
On a global scale, it's trivially true that blonde women are smarter, because there's amost no natural blondes who aren't european, and europeans have a higher mean IQ than most of the world outside of north-east asia. And I expect it to be true for the US too given how diverse it is.
It's also worth pointing out that this is one of the few socially acceptable stereotypes despite the fact that it is true.
I don't have any data (would like to see some) but it's my impression that there are lots of collider bias examples like good-looking, socially adept people are also generally smarter than stereotypical nerds.
"There is one type of stereotype, however, that the bulk of the research shows to be inaccurate – national stereotypes of personality."
As far as the hair color, it seems obvious that that would be the case, at least in the US, since African Americans rarely have blonde hair (Asian Americans also rarely have blonde hair, but they constitute a significantly smaller share of the US population.)
I assume what you were thinking of was this study: http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2016/Volume36/EB-16-V36-I1-P42.pdf which excluded African Americans and looked only at Whites which found that blondes have marginally higher IQ which is mostly not statistically significant.
Threats don't usually come from the clear blue sky, with no warning. Anyone living where a major earthquake might happen has experienced many smaller tremors. Places that flood have generally flooded before, often many times. There were an awful lot of reconnaisance aircraft overflying the French coast in 1944. And so on.
With this in mind, have there already been events related to AI that might be accepted as early warning signs pointing to a real problem in the future?
One event that comes to mind is the 2010 "flash crash," although I'm not sure that was really an AI-specific problem, but rather an illustration of how automated systems can behave in unexpected and undesirable was when presented with conditions outside the range for which they were designed.
Well, there is the Battle of Palmdale, where a rogue military drone threatened a kamikaze attack in Southern California, and the Air Force couldn't even shoot it down because the fire control systems on their shiny new jet fighters refused to lock on to their fellow AI. Fortunately, while there was a fair bit of property damage in that one, nobody was killed. And there have been no recurrences in the years since.
"rogue military drone threatened a kamikaze attack"
That's a clickbaity way to say "remote-controlled plane stopped responding and flew until it ran out of fuel". It didn't threaten a kamikaze attack, it threatened a crash (and, I assume, one with no risk of explosion or fire since it's fuel would have been depleted by then). And as noted by trebuchet, the damage came from attempts to shoot it down.
The attempt to shoot it down, actually, surprise me. My time playing war thunder led me to believe that interceptors still had cannons/MG (which sure would seem a more reliable way to shoot down a plane flying in a very predictable way) until at least vietnam.
The Battle of Palmdale sounds like the perfect cover for a secret history story involving supers, or maybe aliens. Pretty much anything that could sub in for the "drone" that took 200+ missiles and chugged along to terrorize Palmdale with flying debris/heroically ensure that the consequences were limited to property damage, before crashing though power lines into the desert floor.
I'm thinking maybe Rocketeer sequel, or Greatest American Hero prequel.
"But when his drinking and lusting and his hunger for power became known to more and more people, the demands to do something about this outrageous man became louder and louder."
That's from from the 1978 hit "Rasputin." Who do they fit best today?
French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour fits all except "drinking", but he also don't have a reputation for sobriety either so I'm assuming he does drink.
lusting: had an affair that got his (much younger) campaign director pregnant.
hunger for power: was candidate to the presidency
demands to do something about him: he gets a lot of lawsuits for most of the things he says.
Very few people, because of the "drinking" clause.
Power-hungry men with excessive or unpleasant sex drives are still common, and problematic alcoholism is not uncommon, but successful men drink much less nowadays than they used to, I think.
The only recent powerful figure known to have a drinking problem I can think of off the top of head was Boris Yeltsin, although I'm sure there are a bunch I don't know about or don't remember. And I don't think he was especially libidinous, at least not controversially so?
Not sure about Yeltsin; Boris Johnson is widely known for his drinking and has been a "busy boy" throughout his adult life....he has two young children with his present (third) wife, with whom he began living before his second marriage had officially ended. He has four adult children with his second wife; the first of those was born five weeks after they married in 1993 which was 12 days after Johnson's first marriage was annulled.
Between 2000 and 2004 he had an affair with a journalist which, according to various printed sources which Johnson has not disputed, resulted in one miscarriage and one abortion.
He has another child who is the result of an affair conducted in 2009. A judge's comment during court proceedings [fallout of the affair because he was Mayor of London at the time and because the woman he was sleeping with was also married and had an official connection to the city government] seemed to say that there was a second child as well, but that has not been confirmed and Johnson denies it.
Another affair conducted between 2012 and 2016 has come to light but it did not produce any children.
And then defenestrating him. It's quite hard in the UK system to be ousted as PM when you have been leading a party with a comfortable Commons majority. It eventually happened to Mrs Thatcher, but that took eleven years. For it to happen to Johnson well under three years after a big general election win was....well, notable.
And in part, Johnson's fall was because of "drinking and lusting", or at any rate personal behaviours of that type. It was also in a sense because of his "hunger for power". Johnson carries very little ideological baggage indeed, and can present differently according to circumstances. I recall at Oxford in the mid-1980s there weren't many Conservatives around, but the ones that did exist tended to be quite ideologically committed, and they didn't like Johnson. When Johnson's popularity dived from late 2021, there was no one there to make a stand for "Johnsonism" because Johnsonism wasn't a thing (and wasn't intended to be so)
Some of it was known years ago; some came out (or took place) more recently.
But anyway there's no particular evidence that, on net, this stuff helped or hurt Johnson politically. Like with Trump: many of those deciding to vote for him were doing so for reasons other than his qualifications or fitness for public office, while those repelled by him simply stayed repelled when new specific crap he did became known. I believe the current term of art among political scientists and polling analysts is "baked in".
Does anyone have a good, mechanistic, explanation ofthe difference between sleep paralysis and acting out dreams?
Like if you were to look at on person with sleep paralysis, and one person that acts out dreams on an fMRI, what would the difference be?
I get GABA is an important part of the physical difference between the two, but I don't get why the brain is seemingly 'awake' AND asleep in both cases yet the experience of the two is incredibly different.
I wonder if the humor processing part of our brains will be attacked by unaligned AGI. When I find something deeply funny, the laughing response feels both overwhelming and involuntary. Certain sentences should be testably able to elicit this laughing response. Our saviors will be the humorless.
Here's an AI question I've wondered about--with the current state of the art (ChatGPT or similar), what happens if you feed the output of one session into the input of another session and vice versa? They do have to be separate sessions so they're isolated and only have the embedded transcripts to work on.
Does it actually converse semi-normally? Or does it quickly spiral into utter garbage or just start going in circles? Especially once it's filled its entire input transcript buffer so it starts losing context. You'd have to prime it with some question or statement to get it started, but....
Ignore me if you were already aware, but there are some videos on youtube where people did just this with various ai models(some 11yr old ai model, gpt3, gpt3):
To be clear: Because of the architecture It doesn't really matter whether we use one gpt 3 instance to generate the next part of the conversation or use two models and repeatedly append the output of one to the end of the transcript which we give to the other one as the weights are already fixed, ie we dont train them.
Character.ai lets you do this directly, without even having to copy the output of one and paste it into another. I'm assuming each AI's "reasoning" is still isolated from the other's and it's only the text being shared between them, just on one screen for convenience. The conversations can occasionally go off on weird, unexpected tangents (but don't human conversations also?), but in general the conversations are about as coherent as ones between yourself and a bot. You can make an account and try it out yourself if you're really curious and want to observe this firsthand, it's the "create a room" functionality, which you can add two or more chatbots of your choice to and set a conversation topic for.
Has Mars' lack of geological activity undermined it as a potential source of minerals? Isn't the convection of magma and having active plate tectonics necessary for concentrating minerals in strata (including veins) from which they can be easily accessed through mines?
Mars does not have plate tectonics, that we know of, but it has had plenty of vulcanism. And it has had running water, with erosion and sedimentation and minerals dissolved in one place to be deposited in another. That I think gives you most of the usual ore-formation methods, though geology is not my area of expertise.
The dry lake beds are particularly interesting, particularly if (as suspected) there's still subsurface water in some of them. The last bits of liquid water to remain, are often holding on to interesting concentrations of dissolved minerals. Most of our civilization's lithium, for example, comes from such sources. But on Earth, dry lake beds tend to be washed away by water falling from the sky over geologic times, with only the most recent deposits in the most arid regions now accessible. Mars, had its entire ocean evaporate away, and hasn't hat water falling from the sky in a couple billion years or so.
A related question is how much of Earth's diversity of accessible mineral resources is a result of whatever massive impact created the Moon. The crust might have been significantly lighter and poorer in dense elements in the absence of that cataclysm.
Considering that there is (as of this writing) absolutely no geological evidence of such a collision actually occurring, that is a very difficult question to answer.
The evidence is selenological, rather than geological. The Earth's crust has been reshaped, flooded, folded over, etc, too many times to be confident of much, but when we got hold of actual lunar rock samples, they looked an awful lot like someone whacked a chunk of crust and mantle off the proto-Earth and not so much like anything else.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis under the heading "Evidence". But see also the heading "Difficulties". Basically we're still unsure but the giant impact hypothesis seems to be in the lead.
Bear in mind that we're talking about the very early solar system, Earth was still getting hit by quite sizeable objects all the time. The idea of one particularly large one is not unlikely.
In answer to the grandparent comment though, the vast majority of the Earth's crust is newer than the moon-forming impact (if it occurred) so I doubt that Earth's surface geochemistry has much do to with the moon.
It is indeed just a theory. There is some tenuous evidence in the form of tungsten levels in the crust (supposedly should be higher if there had been no impact, but... it's not like we actually have Earth II to do a side by side comparison).
Fundamentally it comes down to how much faith to put in various models of planetary formation. I think the 'Moon resulted from collision' is the only one that gives a good account of the difference in density between Earth and Moon, but it could also just be that we don't have good models.
Mars had significant volcanic activity in the past. Some of them are still clearly visible as volcanoes (especially the Tharsis Montes close to Olympus Mons - that whole area was once extremely volcanic). Besides that, there are several large impact sites on Mars where asteroid strikes could have had a similar effect to volcanoes in creating the right conditions for minerals. We also know there are minerals close to the surface. Several rovers have found them, though quite how much there is and how concentrated it is, is still unknown.
I'm not a geologist, but I would guess the surface of Mars would have to be held at a high temperature, at least semi-molten, for a very long time for density stratification to entirely remove the heavier metals, especially under the significantly weaker Martian gravity, which seems unlikely. Most probably lava reaching the surface of Mars a billion years ago cooled as fast as lava does at the Earth's surface today, which is much too quickly for the heavier compounds to settle back deeper, which means whatever was deposited by lava is still there waiting. I suppose it won't be replenished, but even on Earth I doubt that happens on less than a 10-100 million year timescale, so it doesn't have much practical significance anyway.
Besides that, we already know Mars's surface has lots of iron and aluminum, although how they are distributed is an interesting practical question -- e.g. whether there are good ore concentrations and where they tend to lurk. (There's always lots of silicon on any rocky object.) I don't know that anyone has looked for anything more exotic, like platinum or tungsten, but it would be surprising for the reason above were the heavier metals not around in about the same (low) concentrations they are in the Earth's crust.
I just analyzed the results of the predictions contest that I hosted for 33 of my friends and family (about 3/4 of the questions were taken from the one ACT sent around last year). If you had guessed 50/50 on every question, you would've placed 8/33. If you had answered the average prediction for each question (wisdom of crowds treatment), you would've placed 3/33. The former result may be a bit of an indictment on my bubble. A lot of people struggled to understand the Brier scoring system so I'm hoping Year 2 shows improvement. I placed 6/33 so at least I barely beat the coin flip...
Interesting, but oof at a rock outperforming all but 7 people. What was their reaction when learning this? Did the placement of the people line up with what you would have guessed before the contest?
If they were trying to maximize their chances of placing first then it might be less surprising that a cautious but average-score-maximizing algorithm beat most of them.
If you have 33 people do a winner take all competition to get the best Brier score by predicting the outcome of 20 coin flips, the winning strategy is not to (correctly) assert a 0.5 probability for all 20. Or more precisely that play is only a very small fraction of the mixed strategy that represents a Nash equilibrium.
Yeah for sure, I meant to note that about 6 people did end up assigning .99 or .01 to every question, hoping to shoot the moon. They all did terribly, although one did get 34/50 directionally correct which was near the top.
This is surprising to me, I would not have expected that there would be people optimising for first place between friends and family instead of just reporting their true credences. Was there a monetary incentive for first place? Have you given a basic introduction to predicting with probabilities (proper scoring rule, tetlock, etc..)? When I did similar things with friends/family this was never a problem. Nevertheless there is a good method for aligning incentives to reporting true credence with monetary incentives: https://metaculus.medium.com/aligning-incentives-for-forecast-accuracy-relevance-and-efficacy-a-new-paradigm-for-metaculus-26b0e79616cb
Per the intuition that it's the smell of lavender that does the anti-anxiety heavy lifting...https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1550830723000022?dgcid=raven_sd_aip_email
DMT: https://newrepublic.com/article/169525/psychonauts-training-psychedelics-dmt-extended-state
> The hack to beat AI at Go probably isn’t as interesting as I thought.
I still think it's interesting. Yes, the adversarial AI is winning by getting into game states where human judges, playing by standard human rules, would consider it to have lost. But the standard Go AI was trained on Tromp-Taylor rules, not normal human rules, and it is losing by Tromp-Taylor rules, and it should know it's losing because those are the rules it was trained on. It's not like they are tricking the standard AI by changing the rules. You could never beat a human this way.
Just came across a blatant media lie: https://globalnews.ca/news/9386896/jordan-peterson-ontario-psychologists-college-public-statements/
"Peterson first courted controversy for refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns while teaching at the University of Toronto."
Peterson has never said he refuses to use a person's preferred pronouns. He said if someone personally asks him to (e.g. a student in one his classes), he will use them. What he became famous for was his opposition to Bill C-16 which he argued would legally compel people to use a persons's "preferred" prounouns (not really a "preference" if it's legally enforced...).
Obviously false, and false in a substantial and meaningful way.
But is the journalist lying or is the journalist just badly informed?
Given how badly informed the average journalist is, you'd have to work pretty hard to convince me that he's actually lying rather than repeating some bullshit he heard somewhere else.
I'm trying to track down an article/post/book review that I believe was linked to here. I can't find it on Google. The premise was essentially that if higher education were a prescription drug, it would be illegal (i.e. its grandiose claims would not be accepted by the FDA without evidence of efficacy) and also scandalous due to the cost (as happens to some drugs).
Can anyone provide a link to this post?
I'm not aware of a specific article, but Bryan Caplan has studied the merit and lack thereof of higher education and written a book and numerous articles, on it.
In general, he finds that educational attainment is beneficial primarily as a signal of being superior to someone else, rather than for the actual knowledge it imparts. So it is beneficial for the individual, but society does not benefit from subsidizing education, since it just creates an "arms race" of everyone trying to be above average, creates credential inflation, rather than actual value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/01/opinion/schools-education-america.html
https://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-education/
https://fee.org/articles/bryan-caplan-s-convincing-case-against-education/
Thanks but it wasn't Bryan Caplan. This post was very specifically making the comparison between college and prescription drugs.
Why is the comibination of "AGI will not be achieved any time soon" and "AGI has the potential to be existentially catastrophic" beliefs so rare? It seems obvious to me that AGI has a million ways to destroy us, and at the same time it seems like nothing that has been created to date resembles AGI or something that would in any remotely direct way lead to AGI.
Most people do not generate their opinions on a particular topic through detailed analysis of the facts. So most widely known or discussed topics tend to generate "camps" of belief, based on differing opinions of those who do discuss and study the topics (or various people interested in the political effects and throw out various opinions).
In this case, there are two major camps. 1) AI is scary - which tends to believe that AGI will come soon, and also is potentially catastrophic, and 2) AI is not scary - which tends to believe that AI is a non-issue either because it will not happen or will not be catastrophic.
Those who do not study AI specifically will therefore latch onto either of the headline camp's ideas (that AI either is, or isn't, scary) and build their underlying opinions based on whichever line of thought supports that. So combinations of "AI is scary" and "AI is not scary" beliefs getting combined will be rare among the general population. It's a mixed message that doesn't relay the minimal understanding that most people will hold.
This is true of lots of other (I would say most) sets of beliefs on a given topic. This topic is newer and harder to understand, so we should expect less nuance than in older topics or topics with greater societal distribution (like "is [sports player] good?").
If AGI will not be achieved any time soon, then it will probably be achieved by a relatively slow process. A slow process of developing AGI, makes it much more likely that the problems will be recognized and corrected before they become catastrophic. And most of the catastrophic AI risk scenarios, at least in the "rationalist" discussion space, seem to involve "AI Foom" which implies easy and rapid development of AGI.
Fair enough, though I don't like long timelines necessarily imply slow gradual development. I think there will be little progress made for a long time, and then things will go foom.
A question for the Americans:
If Canada were to announce that it wished to enter into negotiations to become part of the United States, would be for it or against it?
As a territory or a set of states? If the latter, the expansion of the Senate, from 100 to (presumably) 120 members would probably be the most significant disruption. (The Canadian population is too small to affect the House in the same way.) I don't know enough about Canadian politics to say how many new "red" and "blue" Senators we'd get, but it would definitely shift the status quo.
Presumably it would be as a set of states. How many? By population, the fair number is five or so, but that would have to be negotiated. And, yes, the transfer would shift US politics somewhat leftward, given the political views of Canadians.
No I would be strongly opposed to it for political reasons. But I would never have to worry about such a scenario because Canadians would be even more opposed to joining the US. Works out for both!
The likeliest scenario is probably not that the whole of Canada tries to join, but that the province of Alberta does so. Alberta is basically Canada's Texas: they are quite conservative, have a lot of oil money, and have resented the eastern establishment for a long time. If anyone were to break out of confederation, they would be the best bet.
Alberta is conservative by Canadian standards(which on the whole is ridiculously shifted to the left by global standards) but it isn't particularly conservative by American ones. In any case, domestic politics from the left would make it impossible for Alberta to join as well. Not to mention, taking over Canadian territory, even in a democratic fashion, wouldn't be taken too kindly by Ottawa. So I imagine the whole foreign policy establishment would be strongly opposed as well. Alberta may very well become independent but it will not be allowed to join the US.
It's established in Canadian law and political culture that a province can leave Canada through democratic process. The typical example for that is Quebec, but I see no reason that wouldn't apply to Alberta, too.
Thats just talk.
They say in the close 1995 Quebec independence referendum, the Canadian government pulled off some shenaningans to tip the scale in favor of the "no" campaign. These were within law and justifiable like ensuring as many immigrants were citizens so they could vote(non-French white immigrants overwhelmingly preferred a united Canada). But this just shows, that regardless of Canadain government's talk, if the separatists are expected to win, Ottawa will do something about it.
But even, if Ottawa's "covert" actions don't succeed, no serious government will ever give independence to a core territory just because of a vote. If Alberta or Quebec ever vote for independence, Ottawa can just claim some irregularities in voting or some legal issues and just ignore it. Unilateral secession is mostly not accepted by the international community. No one would support the Albertans or Quebecois.
Seperations of core territories occur for sure. But the costs must be really high for the central government. Generally lots of violence, with deaths in the tens of thousands at the very least and a wrecked local economy. The idea of Albertans or Quebecois violently protesting let alone actually fighting the Canadian military/law enforcement for independence is laughable on the face of it. All Ottawa has to do is call the white boomers in favor of Alberta/Quebec indepenence, "racists", and the whole movement will fizzle out.
This is also why the Scotland will never be independent.
The dissolution of Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia happened without violence, so such a thing is at least possible.
Also, you may not be aware of the full history of the movement for Quebec independence. There was a part of the movement called the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) which definitely took violent action for the cause, planting bombs and kidnapping people. The government clamped down hard on the FLQ, going so far as to invoke the War Measures Act, which suspended habeas corpus nation-wide and let them toss a bunch of people in jail without charge. But they did not act against the peaceful portions of the larger independence movement.
This is generally interpreted as an implicit two-part deal: violent action for separation will not be tolerated, but peaceable action through the democratic system will be accepted. It's an attempt to avoid violence, to make sure that something like the UK's Troubles doesn't happen, and it will only work if the second part is actually credible. And the government certainly seems to take the notion of peaceable partition seriously. The question of whether separation is even possible went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled that yes, it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Crisis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_Re_Secession_of_Quebec
In that case we would have to purchase the territory like we did with Louisiana or Alaska. Prohibitively expensive, but not impossible. Or maybe not even that expensive, if it was certain they were leaving anyway; just a face-saving number for Ottawa to say they got something out of it.
For. I'm more or less always for the aggrandizement or expansion of my country.
I'd probably be for it as long as it was an accession under the US Constitution rather than negotiating a new governing compact.
I'm not terribly worried about the political impact, am generally "the more the merrier" on immigration and adding more cultures to the melting pot, and genuinely miss the gossamer pre 9/11 boundary. (Who ever imagined it would ever be treated like a real international border?)
But I find it really hard to imagine Canadians accepting those terms. Quebec in particular has a bunch of First Amendment dealbreakers, and isn't going to give those up after getting them from Ottawa.
Or any terms, really. So much of Canadian political and cultural identity seems to be defined specifically in contrast to the US, it's hard to see them voting in favor of Amerentry.
(I mean, renaming Kraft Dinner to Mac & Cheese alone...!)
I'm guessing we'll just have to stick with the current arrangement.
Not Quebec.
But. yeah, as an Alaskan, Canada being part of the US would solve a lot of interstate transportation issues.
Quebec wouldn't do it. They view Louisiana as a cautionary tale. Canada doing such a thing would be preceded or immediately followed by them leaving Canada.
Les Quebecois, feel free to correct me.
It would be a tremendous boon to the Democrats, so I imagine that on average Democrats would support it and Republicans oppose it. It would make America less racially diverse (at least in the short term - see above re: increased Democrat political power), though it would also dilute whatever distinctly American culture and identity that still exists here today (by much less than the majority of immigrants would, but it would happen all at once).
And I imagine that a lot of GDP-worshipping fools would say America's economy would be so much bigger, but that's an advantage only if a significant synergistic boost to canadian productivity would be acheived through annexation, because Canada's GDP per capita is much lower than America's.
Less racially diverse? Canada has a higher portion of its population composed of immigrants than the US does.
Economically speaking, I do believe the GDP per capita of (former) Canadians would rise after union. Trade between the US and Canada is quite free, but not completely free, and movement of people is not free at all, so I would expect some Canadians to be able to find more lucrative economic niches after union. But I don't think it would quite span the gap, except maybe on a generational timespan.
At first blush, your answer on Canadian GDPPC seems right. The best explanation of Canada's low productivity relative to the US that I've read is its smaller internal market and corresponding lack of economies of scale (Canadian economists have studied this question interminably for decades.) Fully integrate Canada into the US economy and you should begin to see large productivity improvements.
However, one factor that's been overlooked in this discussion: you should almost certainly anticipate a mass migration of Canadians into the lower US, due to the combination of better weather and better economic opportunities on one hand and the reduction of "Canadian distinctives," e.g. single-payer healthcare, on the other.
Compare the case of East and West Germany -- that border is still as clear as day and night by any social or economic statistic and will be for the foreseeable future, as it makes more sense for the young and ambitious to leave than to try to build businesses there (and not many are moving there from the West). Canada isn't as economically deprived as the GDR was, but unlike the GDR it has a large climate differential to contend with.
So most likely Ontario becomes Rustbelt 2.0, with Toronto depopulating just like its nearest neighbors among major US cities: Detroit and Buffalo (though probably with less social dysfunction along the way). Western Canada probably does better, and as Washington State continues to boom, BC might actually benefit on net.
> So most likely Ontario becomes Rustbelt 2.0, with Toronto depopulating just like its nearest neighbors among major US cities
Maybe. There would be at least a small exodus. But maybe Toronto is able to hold on as a regional center like Minneapolis or Chicago, two cities that are not known for mild weather. The Quebec-Windsor Corridor is going to be governed from somewhere, and Toronto is the likely candidate, possibly at the expense of Montreal. But it's hard to know what will happen.
The difference between Toronto and Minneapolis/Chicago is that the latter have managed to hold onto a number of megacorp HQs, and Chicago remains indispensable as a secondary financial center -- though on both those fronts Chicago's recent losses really sting. In the end, Chicago and Minneapolis overcome their crappy weather through high wages. If you have low wages and bad weather, you're Buffalo.
I have to think Canada's domestic corporations would probably lose market share as American firms with more muscle (and adapted for a more competitive environment) moved in more aggressively, and this would hurt cities in which those Canadian companies are headquartered, above all Toronto. This is what the productivity benefits of economies of scale look like. Of course the reverse will happen to some degree, with Canadian firms gaining market share in the US, but I think for the reasons I stated US firms would dominate.
But your point is valid, Toronto might shrink but it's still indispensable, and it might well be the case that mid-sized cities in Ontario would be hurt much worse by southward migration.
The problem Day 1 is going to be that unless Canadian wages adjust overnight (which doesn't seem to be how these things ever work in practice), talented Canadian college grads will look at the American wage premium and it will be hard for most of them to resist (and did I mention the weather?) And I think once that Canada-to-US pathway for talent gets started, it will have a momentum that will be hard to reverse.
Maybe the person is using 'racially diverse' as code for 'number of black people', rather than considering the very large Asian population in Canada? (both Chinese and Indian immigrants are common)
I would be for it, but they'd have to renounce their monarchy, and stop using the metric system.
And lose their healthcare. Terrible deal on their end.
The provinces themselves administer the healthcare and fund 80% of it
Which is fine when everyone in your country uses a similar system. In USCan, people could cruise along without coverage until something came up, then head up to the northern states for expensive care. The free rider problem would bankrupt you.
Well, yes. There would need to be some sorts of rules to deal with that sort of free-riders, just as private US insurers have rules about coverage for pre-existing conditions.
OHIP, the Ontario health plan, currently has a six-month residency requirement. That would probably be raised.
https://www.ontario.ca/page/apply-ohip-and-get-health-card
I expect Canada would try to maintain its healthcare system, and that just might be possible, assuming the feds play ball and subsidize one-for-all state level plans through tax advantages just like they subsidize employer-provided health insurance. I doubt the Canadian plans are any less efficient than the US health care bureaucracies.
But there is no doubt that the health care system in the former Canadian provinces would change. If nothing else, whatever system they went with would have to pay American rates for health care practicioners, and they are steep.
My prior would be that they're much more efficient. But I don't think they could survive open borders with us.
Stop using the metric system? Come on, it's easy. You buy in kilos, you sell in grams, and if anyone tries to mess with you, you handle it with your nine millimetre. You'll love it.
Real Americans use .45s
With three hundred shootings per day in the country, it seems like there should be plenty of data available to settle the long-running 9mm-vs-.45 feud.
I read here in the comments today and I've seen it said elsewhere that black authors are severely underrepresented in American School's literature. This does not jive with my memory so I checked my local school district's reading lists. This comes from an extremely GOP town (+20), but not in the South. And I checked only 7th and 12th grade but figured they'd be fairly representative. Of those 77 authors:
31% Female and 69% Male
15% Black, 81% White, and 4% Other.
(Also interesting, of the black authors, half were female)
So at least with my quick check of the local conservative school district, black authors are represented roughly proportional to their US total population (note that my town ~4% black).
Female authors were underrepresented. White Male authors overrepresented. And non-black-minority authors were significantly underrepresented (esp Hispanic).
This means that of all races and genders, black female/male authors are the only ones who actually are "correctly" represented in the school curriculum, where correct means roughly proportional to the total US population*. Are there parts of the country not like this where black authors are actually underrepresented? Or are people just thinking "I only read 1 or 2 black authors a year in school" and not doing the math to realize that if you read one book a month in school, 1 or 2 black authors a year is representation consistent with total population?
*Obviously, "correct" is extremely subjective. And this is likely too simplified, even if we're going for proportional racial representation as likely you'd want some type of historic weighting. E.g., in 1900 the US was something like 88% white, 12% black and less than 1% other, and since much of our literature is historic, it makes sense that white is overrepresented relative to today's population.
From surveys where this comes up periodically, I think literally something like 90% of Americans overestimate America's black percent of the population (almost no one underestimates it). A non-trivial minority thinks it's 50% or greater.
Even a lot of people with graduate degrees have never thought about this question mathematically and wouldn't know how to go about answering it.
I would guess that the average person looks at the heavy black representation in sports and entertainment and uses that as a rough heuristic for the country as a whole.
I bet the phenomena is even more pronounced in the UK. I was shocked to read that it is only 3% black. By movies/TV I would have thought it was 20%.
There's no reason, from a purely literary perspective, that we should expect equal representation. Black people have a very low average written literacy rate compared to whites, and whites have an extremely long, rich literary tradition that is not present amongst blacks, so it only makes sense that whites have more elite authors than blacks. If you want to say that we "need" more black authors for "representation" or something, 1) There's no evidence that "representation" improves black schooling performance, and a higher % of black kids already express a desire to go to college than white kids do! 2) Wanting this is one thing, but we should make it absolutely clear that there's no literary basis whatsoever for thinking that all races are equally skilled writers.
Nobody has a problem with the NBA being majority black due to blacks being better at basketball than everyone else, so it's crap for people to expect parity in every other area of life not presently dominated by blacks.
When it comes to the NFL and NBA being 75% black or more, the subject is completely unmentionable. Those leagues even ludicrously win awards for having such great "diversity." And instead we get complaints about a supposed underrepresentation of black Americans in baseball, despite the percentage of American players who are black being right in line with that of the general population.
>When it comes to the NFL and NBA being 75% black or more, the subject is completely unmentionable.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The nine-millionth use of a reference is never cute, especially when misapplied.
Possibly an effect of people remembering their own school days. This certainly wasn't true in the 80s/early 90s in southern Missouri, for example. Sometimes we fix things but don't get the word out.
There being less black authors than their proportion of the population is not ipso facto a "problem" that needs to be "fixed". Black people's written literacy abilities are on average vastly below those of white people's, so them having fewer great authors is precisely what would ought to expect.
And the evidence that artificially boosting the prominence of black e.g. authors so that black kids will do better in school is non-existent. In my experience it merely makes them feel entitled to success and to blame "racism" when they don't achieve it.
Leaving aside the rest of your post, the OP asked why people think black authors are underrepresented when his memory indicates that their representation is approximately in line with their proportion of the population, which he then verified against at least one current curriculum. I gave a plausible reason. Feel free to substitute the verb "change" for "fix" in my OP, if it makes you feel better.
Black people's written literacy abilities being on average below those of white people's, is *itself* a problem that ipso facto desperately needs to be fixed. Which, in the process, will presumably "fix" the bit about underrepresentation in school libraries.
And the idea that front-loading the process by boosting black representation among authors showcased in school districts with a significant number of black students, that they may serve as role models, is not entirely without merit. Not automatically sound either, but worth being debated.
IMO adequate "representation" is oft demanded but rarely defined, deliberately. And fewer and fewer people realize that the US was huge majority white for most of its history, or that Europe was almost entirely white until very very recently. These things are being deliberately obfuscated.
Representation is like school funding. You'll rarely get an actual number out of anybody, the answer is always just "more".
It's often much easier to see that the marginal return on a dollar of increased school spending in a particular environment will be greater than one dollar than it is to work out at what point diminishing returns will stop that being the case.
(An even stronger example of this is minimum wages, where there's less data. I think the minimum wage in the UK should be higher, because we have high poverty, high corporate profits and low unemployment, but I don't have a clue how much higher, because I don't know at what point the negative impact will balance the positive).
>It's often much easier to see that the marginal return on a dollar of increased school spending in a particular environment will be greater than one dollar than it is to work out at what point diminishing returns will stop that being the case.
No, it's not. It's often claimed but this supposed relationship between school funding and results is almost entirely imaginary (at least for the levels of funding seen in the US - obviously going from $0 to $1,000 will have some effect but that's irrelevant). And that's putting aside the issue of financially quantifying the impact of better school outcomes, which is typically done in an arbitrary way so as to always support more funding).
Quite so
Is there such a thing as working 20hr weeks for half the salary at a software engineering role ? I assume not since I haven’t heard of such a thing but wonder why not.
I work 30 hours for 75% salary, and have done the 20h thing in the past. But I live in Austria.
It's actually quite common here.
That's a shitty defect move against those that do 20h for the full salary.
Thanks for the laugh :) Also agreed!
Many big tech companies (definitely Microsoft and Adobe, probably others as well because companies I've checked are two-for-two) officially support modified work schedules with prorated compensation. It requires management approval, and I get the impression that the difficulty of getting signoff is proportional to the amount of reduction you want (e.g. 80% of full time is pretty easy to get if you're reasonable senior and a good performer, but asking for 60% yields more push-back).
At both companies, benefits are binary rather than them trying to prorate somehow: more than 50% of full time gives you full benefits, but 50% or less excludes you from most benefits.
I haven't seen anyone hiring specifically for part time SWE positions. It seems to be intended as an accommodation for existing employees who can't (or don't want to) continue to work full time.
It might be easier for you to de-facto get this rather than de-jure. Like, just apply to a software engineering job and work 20hr weeks. It's quite likely that you'll advance your career less quickly (though it'll be a smaller difference than many would think), but especially in a remote role no one will really do the math. And at a good company no one would really care, unless you were providing less impact than expected for your level.
At Google/Waymo where I've got experience, no one is counting the hours you're in a desk. If you get your job done in 10 hours or 60 hours a week, that's none of my business.
Try not to get involved in a team with a difficult oncall rotation though, since that is one of the cases where you do have to be online a lot more.
quite a few allegedly full-time big-tech roles are not de facto even 40 hrs/week and are in reality very chill. GOOG and MSFT are known to be the more chill cos though it's also team-dependent.
Definitely! If you're an independent contractor, it's pretty easy to end up on contracts like that. I have two such contracts right now since I prefer 40h weeks but I could quit one of my contracts tomorrow and have exactly what you describe.
Is it possible to get big tech level salaries as an independent contractor ?
As a contractor, you generally charge a higher fee than the corresponding salary to compensate for the extra risk and (and sometimes more boring tasks) you take on. I'm a poor European so I have no insight into "big tech level salaries", but if you are working at such a company currently there are presumably contractors there you can discuss this with. You can also send feelers to a couple of brokers, they are usually quite open with how much they think they can sell you for if they want to work with you.
What are some known exceptions to the "unbearable accuracy of stereotypes"?
I recall reading a study that found blondes have higher average IQs than women of other hair colours, although I don't know if this has been replicated.
But do they have more fun?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016517651000114X
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/sbp/sbp/1985/00000013/00000001/art00002
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053535712000327
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.5694/mja2.50419
On a global scale, it's trivially true that blonde women are smarter, because there's amost no natural blondes who aren't european, and europeans have a higher mean IQ than most of the world outside of north-east asia. And I expect it to be true for the US too given how diverse it is.
It's also worth pointing out that this is one of the few socially acceptable stereotypes despite the fact that it is true.
I don't have any data (would like to see some) but it's my impression that there are lots of collider bias examples like good-looking, socially adept people are also generally smarter than stereotypical nerds.
https://www.cspicenter.com/p/the-accuracy-of-stereotypes-data-and-implications
"There is one type of stereotype, however, that the bulk of the research shows to be inaccurate – national stereotypes of personality."
As far as the hair color, it seems obvious that that would be the case, at least in the US, since African Americans rarely have blonde hair (Asian Americans also rarely have blonde hair, but they constitute a significantly smaller share of the US population.)
I assume what you were thinking of was this study: http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2016/Volume36/EB-16-V36-I1-P42.pdf which excluded African Americans and looked only at Whites which found that blondes have marginally higher IQ which is mostly not statistically significant.
Threats don't usually come from the clear blue sky, with no warning. Anyone living where a major earthquake might happen has experienced many smaller tremors. Places that flood have generally flooded before, often many times. There were an awful lot of reconnaisance aircraft overflying the French coast in 1944. And so on.
With this in mind, have there already been events related to AI that might be accepted as early warning signs pointing to a real problem in the future?
One event that comes to mind is the 2010 "flash crash," although I'm not sure that was really an AI-specific problem, but rather an illustration of how automated systems can behave in unexpected and undesirable was when presented with conditions outside the range for which they were designed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash
Well, there is the Battle of Palmdale, where a rogue military drone threatened a kamikaze attack in Southern California, and the Air Force couldn't even shoot it down because the fire control systems on their shiny new jet fighters refused to lock on to their fellow AI. Fortunately, while there was a fair bit of property damage in that one, nobody was killed. And there have been no recurrences in the years since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Palmdale
Probably not what you were looking for, but it's a cool bit of local lore nonetheless.
"rogue military drone threatened a kamikaze attack"
That's a clickbaity way to say "remote-controlled plane stopped responding and flew until it ran out of fuel". It didn't threaten a kamikaze attack, it threatened a crash (and, I assume, one with no risk of explosion or fire since it's fuel would have been depleted by then). And as noted by trebuchet, the damage came from attempts to shoot it down.
The attempt to shoot it down, actually, surprise me. My time playing war thunder led me to believe that interceptors still had cannons/MG (which sure would seem a more reliable way to shoot down a plane flying in a very predictable way) until at least vietnam.
The Battle of Palmdale sounds like the perfect cover for a secret history story involving supers, or maybe aliens. Pretty much anything that could sub in for the "drone" that took 200+ missiles and chugged along to terrorize Palmdale with flying debris/heroically ensure that the consequences were limited to property damage, before crashing though power lines into the desert floor.
I'm thinking maybe Rocketeer sequel, or Greatest American Hero prequel.
I like the way you think, and I'm up for either version. But as long as we have Jennifer Connelly around, let's do the Rocketeer sequel version.
I can't argue with reasoning that airtight.
"But when his drinking and lusting and his hunger for power became known to more and more people, the demands to do something about this outrageous man became louder and louder."
That's from from the 1978 hit "Rasputin." Who do they fit best today?
French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour fits all except "drinking", but he also don't have a reputation for sobriety either so I'm assuming he does drink.
lusting: had an affair that got his (much younger) campaign director pregnant.
hunger for power: was candidate to the presidency
demands to do something about him: he gets a lot of lawsuits for most of the things he says.
Very few people, because of the "drinking" clause.
Power-hungry men with excessive or unpleasant sex drives are still common, and problematic alcoholism is not uncommon, but successful men drink much less nowadays than they used to, I think.
The only recent powerful figure known to have a drinking problem I can think of off the top of head was Boris Yeltsin, although I'm sure there are a bunch I don't know about or don't remember. And I don't think he was especially libidinous, at least not controversially so?
Not sure about Yeltsin; Boris Johnson is widely known for his drinking and has been a "busy boy" throughout his adult life....he has two young children with his present (third) wife, with whom he began living before his second marriage had officially ended. He has four adult children with his second wife; the first of those was born five weeks after they married in 1993 which was 12 days after Johnson's first marriage was annulled.
Between 2000 and 2004 he had an affair with a journalist which, according to various printed sources which Johnson has not disputed, resulted in one miscarriage and one abortion.
He has another child who is the result of an affair conducted in 2009. A judge's comment during court proceedings [fallout of the affair because he was Mayor of London at the time and because the woman he was sleeping with was also married and had an official connection to the city government] seemed to say that there was a second child as well, but that has not been confirmed and Johnson denies it.
Another affair conducted between 2012 and 2016 has come to light but it did not produce any children.
All of which was known years ago, I believe. So, people chose to "do something about this outrageous man" by electing him to ever-higher offices?
And then defenestrating him. It's quite hard in the UK system to be ousted as PM when you have been leading a party with a comfortable Commons majority. It eventually happened to Mrs Thatcher, but that took eleven years. For it to happen to Johnson well under three years after a big general election win was....well, notable.
And in part, Johnson's fall was because of "drinking and lusting", or at any rate personal behaviours of that type. It was also in a sense because of his "hunger for power". Johnson carries very little ideological baggage indeed, and can present differently according to circumstances. I recall at Oxford in the mid-1980s there weren't many Conservatives around, but the ones that did exist tended to be quite ideologically committed, and they didn't like Johnson. When Johnson's popularity dived from late 2021, there was no one there to make a stand for "Johnsonism" because Johnsonism wasn't a thing (and wasn't intended to be so)
Some of it was known years ago; some came out (or took place) more recently.
But anyway there's no particular evidence that, on net, this stuff helped or hurt Johnson politically. Like with Trump: many of those deciding to vote for him were doing so for reasons other than his qualifications or fitness for public office, while those repelled by him simply stayed repelled when new specific crap he did became known. I believe the current term of art among political scientists and polling analysts is "baked in".
Does anyone have a good, mechanistic, explanation ofthe difference between sleep paralysis and acting out dreams?
Like if you were to look at on person with sleep paralysis, and one person that acts out dreams on an fMRI, what would the difference be?
I get GABA is an important part of the physical difference between the two, but I don't get why the brain is seemingly 'awake' AND asleep in both cases yet the experience of the two is incredibly different.
Reticular activating system.
I think the Pons is thought to be involved in these things
I wonder if the humor processing part of our brains will be attacked by unaligned AGI. When I find something deeply funny, the laughing response feels both overwhelming and involuntary. Certain sentences should be testably able to elicit this laughing response. Our saviors will be the humorless.
I sincerely doubt the world will actually be destroyed by the Monty Python "funniest joke in the world" sketch.
Here's an AI question I've wondered about--with the current state of the art (ChatGPT or similar), what happens if you feed the output of one session into the input of another session and vice versa? They do have to be separate sessions so they're isolated and only have the embedded transcripts to work on.
Does it actually converse semi-normally? Or does it quickly spiral into utter garbage or just start going in circles? Especially once it's filled its entire input transcript buffer so it starts losing context. You'd have to prime it with some question or statement to get it started, but....
https://infiniteconversation.com/
Ignore me if you were already aware, but there are some videos on youtube where people did just this with various ai models(some 11yr old ai model, gpt3, gpt3):
https://youtu.be/WnzlbyTZsQY
https://youtu.be/Xw-zxQSEzqo
https://youtu.be/jz78fSnBG0s
To be clear: Because of the architecture It doesn't really matter whether we use one gpt 3 instance to generate the next part of the conversation or use two models and repeatedly append the output of one to the end of the transcript which we give to the other one as the weights are already fixed, ie we dont train them.
Character.ai lets you do this directly, without even having to copy the output of one and paste it into another. I'm assuming each AI's "reasoning" is still isolated from the other's and it's only the text being shared between them, just on one screen for convenience. The conversations can occasionally go off on weird, unexpected tangents (but don't human conversations also?), but in general the conversations are about as coherent as ones between yourself and a bot. You can make an account and try it out yourself if you're really curious and want to observe this firsthand, it's the "create a room" functionality, which you can add two or more chatbots of your choice to and set a conversation topic for.
Has Mars' lack of geological activity undermined it as a potential source of minerals? Isn't the convection of magma and having active plate tectonics necessary for concentrating minerals in strata (including veins) from which they can be easily accessed through mines?
DSL (one of the sister sites of ACX) has a no-foolin' mining engineer who might be able to answer that question. Ask for Austin.
Mars does not have plate tectonics, that we know of, but it has had plenty of vulcanism. And it has had running water, with erosion and sedimentation and minerals dissolved in one place to be deposited in another. That I think gives you most of the usual ore-formation methods, though geology is not my area of expertise.
The dry lake beds are particularly interesting, particularly if (as suspected) there's still subsurface water in some of them. The last bits of liquid water to remain, are often holding on to interesting concentrations of dissolved minerals. Most of our civilization's lithium, for example, comes from such sources. But on Earth, dry lake beds tend to be washed away by water falling from the sky over geologic times, with only the most recent deposits in the most arid regions now accessible. Mars, had its entire ocean evaporate away, and hasn't hat water falling from the sky in a couple billion years or so.
A related question is how much of Earth's diversity of accessible mineral resources is a result of whatever massive impact created the Moon. The crust might have been significantly lighter and poorer in dense elements in the absence of that cataclysm.
Considering that there is (as of this writing) absolutely no geological evidence of such a collision actually occurring, that is a very difficult question to answer.
Seriously, where is the evidence of impact?
The evidence is selenological, rather than geological. The Earth's crust has been reshaped, flooded, folded over, etc, too many times to be confident of much, but when we got hold of actual lunar rock samples, they looked an awful lot like someone whacked a chunk of crust and mantle off the proto-Earth and not so much like anything else.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis under the heading "Evidence". But see also the heading "Difficulties". Basically we're still unsure but the giant impact hypothesis seems to be in the lead.
Bear in mind that we're talking about the very early solar system, Earth was still getting hit by quite sizeable objects all the time. The idea of one particularly large one is not unlikely.
In answer to the grandparent comment though, the vast majority of the Earth's crust is newer than the moon-forming impact (if it occurred) so I doubt that Earth's surface geochemistry has much do to with the moon.
It is indeed just a theory. There is some tenuous evidence in the form of tungsten levels in the crust (supposedly should be higher if there had been no impact, but... it's not like we actually have Earth II to do a side by side comparison).
Fundamentally it comes down to how much faith to put in various models of planetary formation. I think the 'Moon resulted from collision' is the only one that gives a good account of the difference in density between Earth and Moon, but it could also just be that we don't have good models.
"undermined" is an extraordinarily good unintentional pun
Mars had significant volcanic activity in the past. Some of them are still clearly visible as volcanoes (especially the Tharsis Montes close to Olympus Mons - that whole area was once extremely volcanic). Besides that, there are several large impact sites on Mars where asteroid strikes could have had a similar effect to volcanoes in creating the right conditions for minerals. We also know there are minerals close to the surface. Several rovers have found them, though quite how much there is and how concentrated it is, is still unknown.
I'm not a geologist, but I would guess the surface of Mars would have to be held at a high temperature, at least semi-molten, for a very long time for density stratification to entirely remove the heavier metals, especially under the significantly weaker Martian gravity, which seems unlikely. Most probably lava reaching the surface of Mars a billion years ago cooled as fast as lava does at the Earth's surface today, which is much too quickly for the heavier compounds to settle back deeper, which means whatever was deposited by lava is still there waiting. I suppose it won't be replenished, but even on Earth I doubt that happens on less than a 10-100 million year timescale, so it doesn't have much practical significance anyway.
Besides that, we already know Mars's surface has lots of iron and aluminum, although how they are distributed is an interesting practical question -- e.g. whether there are good ore concentrations and where they tend to lurk. (There's always lots of silicon on any rocky object.) I don't know that anyone has looked for anything more exotic, like platinum or tungsten, but it would be surprising for the reason above were the heavier metals not around in about the same (low) concentrations they are in the Earth's crust.
I just analyzed the results of the predictions contest that I hosted for 33 of my friends and family (about 3/4 of the questions were taken from the one ACT sent around last year). If you had guessed 50/50 on every question, you would've placed 8/33. If you had answered the average prediction for each question (wisdom of crowds treatment), you would've placed 3/33. The former result may be a bit of an indictment on my bubble. A lot of people struggled to understand the Brier scoring system so I'm hoping Year 2 shows improvement. I placed 6/33 so at least I barely beat the coin flip...
Interesting, but oof at a rock outperforming all but 7 people. What was their reaction when learning this? Did the placement of the people line up with what you would have guessed before the contest?
If they were trying to maximize their chances of placing first then it might be less surprising that a cautious but average-score-maximizing algorithm beat most of them.
If you have 33 people do a winner take all competition to get the best Brier score by predicting the outcome of 20 coin flips, the winning strategy is not to (correctly) assert a 0.5 probability for all 20. Or more precisely that play is only a very small fraction of the mixed strategy that represents a Nash equilibrium.
Yeah for sure, I meant to note that about 6 people did end up assigning .99 or .01 to every question, hoping to shoot the moon. They all did terribly, although one did get 34/50 directionally correct which was near the top.
This is surprising to me, I would not have expected that there would be people optimising for first place between friends and family instead of just reporting their true credences. Was there a monetary incentive for first place? Have you given a basic introduction to predicting with probabilities (proper scoring rule, tetlock, etc..)? When I did similar things with friends/family this was never a problem. Nevertheless there is a good method for aligning incentives to reporting true credence with monetary incentives: https://metaculus.medium.com/aligning-incentives-for-forecast-accuracy-relevance-and-efficacy-a-new-paradigm-for-metaculus-26b0e79616cb
It might be useful to you for future contests.