Nick Mangold, long time football player for the New York Jets and Ohio State Buckeyes, just died of a kidney disease at 41. He put out a call to the public asking for a donor just a couple weeks ago (and I assume was searching privately before that).
This might be a good news story for WaitlistZero to use to get support for their work in improving kidney donations.
It is amazing how much "the personal is the political" on the English language social media now. UI don't know whether that is good or bad. There was this thing: "My husband eats 12 eggs a day, how does that make you feel?" Answer: "Amazing how fast I can spot a Nazi."
Breakdown: the "how does that make you feel?" probably sounded like "Vegans, we enjoy being ruel", and also the whole thing felt like a right-wing obsession with masculinity, protein, muscles, testosterone.
On the whole this is probably a bad thing, because as long as people focus on these personally-political catfights, they don't pay attention to the big issues.
Also it is divisive in the sense that it pushes me to take sides about something I don't want to take sides about, like when the right-wingers see the Vikins series as serious alpha role models, that I find ridiculous, but on the other hand I do know how therapeutic can be to grow muscles, that "I am finally safe from bullies" feeling...
Celebrating an election is an interesting way to put it. I guess its a mistranslation or a false friend, but I like the spirit of the phrase. Maybe democracy would work better if we thought of elections as celebrations instead of as fights.
"Kvant" ("Quant") is the preeminent Russian-language magazine of popular math/physics for schoolkids and college students. It's recently got a revamped gorgeous new website https://www.kvant.digital/, with the entire archive going back to 1970.
The most recent issue features a set of 4 problems for "younger schoolchildren" - my guess this is something like grades 5-7 of K12. I liked them a lot - quite fun and not very easy. I'm going to translate three of them and suggest you prove your mettle against hypothetical high-achieving Russian middle-schoolers. If you suggest answers/solutions in replies, please rot13 spoilers away and spell out numerals as words when you do so.
1. The forest animals established a fruit exchange station, where you can exchange as follows:
- one orange for two pears
- one apple and one pear for one orange
- one orange and one pear for one apple
To promote the new station, they're currently giving away a free marble for every exchange you do. Mr. Fox has 30 apples, 30 oranges and 30 pears and is awfully fond of marbles. What is the maximum number of marbles he can obtain?
2. Winnie-the-Pooh eats jam twice as fast as Piglet does, and he also eats pie three times as fast as Piglet. Once they ate a tin of jam and a whole pie together. Winnie started on the pie and Piglet on the jam; Winnie was finished first and then he helped Piglet finish the jam and they were done with everything in 2 hours. Another time they had another tin of jam and a pie, just the same size as before; but this time Piglet started on the pie and Winnie-the-Pooh on the jam, and having finished the jam, Winnie helped Piglet with the pie. How much time did it take them this time?
3. Tile a 10x10 square with strips size 1x9, so that each square is covered by either one or two strips, but there's no 1x2 rectangle such that both its squares are covered by two strips. Strips are laid horizontally or vertically only and never exceed the boundaries of the 10x10 square.
For many of such things, a good method is that if they do not give you the value of a variable, you are free to assume any convenient value. This is much easier than writing equations with x and y or percentages.
So WP assume eats jam in 10min, P in 20 min, WP eats pie in 10min, P in 30 min. So another time is (the first is irrelevant), WP finishes the jam in 10 min, and P has another 20 min left going on the pie, of which 2/3 is left, WP helping means he eats twice as much in the same time, so he eats 2/3 of the 2/3 so 0.444 so about 4.44 minutes, as we assumed they finish it at the same time we do not have to calculate P. So it is 14.44 minutes by these assumed values or 1.444 times WP jam-eating time by the original formulation.
Greg Egan's 31-page story "Death and the Gorgon", which was published in January 2024 in Asimov's magazine, and which was voted "Best novella" by magazine's readers, is now available online for free.
I had a theory that 4o infamous "piss filter" - distinct yellow tint on generated images - was main culprit behind people turning black or chinese when you ask the model to recursively regenerate the same image, compounding the effect each time and biasing model towards darker skinned people.
For a long time I wanted to test the theory by running the same recursive generation on images with color-correction, and a couple of days ago I finally did after getting some free OpenAI credits.
Turns out I was wrong.
People still turn into caricature minorities even if you remove yellow tint.
The Diversity Attractor is real, it's not an artifact of color drift.
I run the script with color correction on the same images I did before when it was first discovered, and results were very similar.
I think I may have missed this in a FAQ somewhere, but what's a good reason to believe that g or IQ can be united in a single number metric? Because of numerous proven correlation? Can we decide that it's actually the combined part that matters instead of some division (spacial, numeric) that may actually predict better?
Is there a or Athleticity Quotient? Why or why not?
Yeah, this has been something I've always found a little awkward. My interpretation (non-expert, please correct if misunderstanding):
Basically, g and IQ are statistical ideas that are sometimes useful for thinking about how good we are at cognitive stuff, but they are only useful insofar as intelligence is mysterious.
When we test a load of cognitive tasks, a very large component seems to be explained by "some shared mysterious underlying trait(s)", which is/are invisible to us. This is probably not a single trait, and is more like a combination of inscrutable brain stuff like synapse speed/efficiency, executive control, working memory etc. But IQ tests still give us a way of quantifying this, which actually allows us to make more sense of real-world outcomes (despite only being a messy proxy).
An athleticity quotient is statistically similarly valid, and you would find such a correlation. But I guess we don't use it because 1) it wouldn't help us to uncover anything mysterious, and 2) would explain less than its constituent parts! When someone is good or bad at many somewhat related athletic tasks, it usually feels relatively clear why that is: some combination of hand-eye coordination, strength, cardiovascular capacity, body fat etc. We can say: "this guy's good at weightlifting, boxing, and rugby because he's super strong, but also bad at marathon running, swimming, and ballet because he's too heavy".
Economics concepts like TFP (Total Factor Productivity) are good parallels to g/IQ. There's nothing "real" about TFP, but it explains a big gap in the big economics questions we have around "how do we produce more with the same inputs?".
Something that's happened recently that I've not seen remarked on much is the death of internet optimism. Throughout most of my life there was always a dream being sold about how greater internet access would revolutionise the world. It changed a lot through the 90s and 2000s but was generally popular until it died silently at some point in the past few years.
Good morning, and welcome to your new job at XHW Consulting. XHW doesn't actually stand for EXploiting Human Weaknesses -- it's Xue Harcourt Weinstein, actually -- but maybe it should.
You'll be working on the Novo Nordisk account. They make Ozempik, a weight loss drug. They want us to find a way to make Americans fatter. Now, the US is no slouch in this department, with a 42.9% adult obesity rate. But that doesn't even put them in the top ten internationally, so we have our work cut out for us. We're excited to hear your ideas. Good luck.
Offer to supply schools with free coca cola and other soft drinks for all students. Maybe we can offer a free supersized happy meal every week to all kids as well.
I see a lot of complaining posts from teachers losing it, "my kids are complaining about having to write five sentences", "my kids literally never listen and most just sleep in class", "my kids are so rowdy and uncontrollable, it didn't used to be this bad". I'm just... surprised that they're surprised? What incentive, exactly, is there for children and teens to "care" about school or behave respectfully? Even if you're a smart and conscientious teen, you can still sleep/watch Netflix through classes and get good grades on homework and tests.
1. The clue is probably in the ‘it didn’t used to be this bad’. A certain amount of schoolchildren’s disaffection is priced in, since everyone knows there is some level of don’t want to do the work, don’t want to pay attention, don’t want to behave, in children and teens. But that doesn’t mean there can’t exist a *surprising* amount of these things, especially if they have increased from the previous level.
2. There seems to be a group on this site who think it’s obvious that school is obviously without merit and a negative experience, particularly for the smart and conscientious. I do think that’s a minority position, and most smart and conscientious people like school, value school and got on well with school (I fall into this category, as do all my IRL friends). And it seems to me obvious that learning things, building educational capital for the future, and getting the approval of parents and teachers, are all common-knowledge and widely accepted reasons for children/teens to care about school.
In recent years, it has dawned on several Arabian petrostates that the age of oil will at some point come to an end, and with it the glut of wealth enjoyed by their elites. So, while the money faucet is still wide open, they have started to invest in building up alternative income streams, which is, in itself, wise and sensible. But the next part is where I'm getting lost:
They are sinking huge sums of money into propping up tourism. In a region where the greatest attractions are driving around the desert in a pimped out Mercedes G class and going shopping in gold-plated malls. There are beautiful beaches, sure, but when it's 50°C / 120°F outside, this pleasure loses its allure about as fast as a drive through the dunes does. Tourism! As if that could sustain the kind of wealth they're enjoying now.
Or they're trying to establish their cities as centers of finance. Those already exist in sufficient quantity. Why would banks and PE firms move their locations from NYC or London to Abu Dhabi? And even if they did, and if they can move so easily – what's to stop them from moving away again after the artificial incentives sustained by the current oil income stream dry up?
And then there's The Line. Enough has been said about it.
These investments are all dumb. And maybe understandable if they were the only options. But there is another one: green energy. The Arabian Peninsula receives an ungodly amount of solar insolation – 2500 kWh/m² per year, or roughly 2.5x as much central Europe. Capture this energy with photovoltaics, which have become incredibly cheap, smooth out daily supply with batteries, which have also become incredibly cheap. Use the electricity to desalinate seawater, of which there is an unlimited amount, then use the electricity to split off hydrogen, then use the electricity to capture carbon from the air, of which there is also an unlimited amount, then react hydrogen and carbon to methane, and sell and ship it to the rest of the world for heating and electricity production.
None of this requires fundamental research or new physics, all of it already exists on a smaller scale. Scaling it up and improving efficiency are huge engineering efforts, and huge engineering efforts can be sped up with huge amounts of money.
It would be absolutely perfect for the Arabian petrostates. They can exploit abundant natural resources of the land (just like they're doing now). They can rely on companies and experts from foreign countries, which aren't intellectually and ideologically stuck in the middle ages, for the actual high-tech engineering (just like they're doing now). They can supply a commodity which much of the rest of the developed world is utterly dependent on (just like they're doing now). They don't have to change culturally and can go right back to oppressing women and exploiting slave laborers (just like … do I have to say it?). And they can keep on driving Lambos in Monaco instead of camels through the desert, which they'll be back to in a generation or two if they stay on their current path of idiotic investments.
So. Why aren't they doing this? I mean, _really_ doing this, as if the future of their countries depended on it?
The oil is generally expected to last longer than the useful life of solar panels. So in the meantime all these solar farms would be producing energy for states that have such abundant energy, some give it away literally for free.
Despite that there is a lot of solar development in the Middle East. Only serving local demand since it’s currently too big of a problem to send energy over long distances to where it would be needed.
Like I said in another comment [1], the solar panels aren't the investment. Solar panels are dirt cheap, and replacing them every 20-30 years is a complete non-issue.
> The oil is generally expected to last longer […]
The age of oil will end not for lack of supply, but because of dwindling demand. The world is moving towards renewable energy. It will take decades, and demand for oil will never fade away completely, but consumption will fall dramatically, and with it the revenue that petrostates depend on.
I'd guess it's because the cost of solar is constantly falling and solar panels don't have an infinitely long shelf life. So any investment they make in solar now wont be returning very much decades into the future which is the timeline for when the demand for oil might fall through.
A better plan might just be to build up a Norwegian style national fund, and live off rents from investments in other countries instead of trying to make their domestic economy more productive.
I think you missed the point. The solar panels are the cheapest part in this production chain, they're not the investment. The investment is in the immense desalination and chemical plants for hydrolysis and methane synthesis. And that investment is only enabled by the cheap power provided by low cost photovoltaics coupled with high solar insolation.
In general though it's usually not economically rational to build infrastructure a long time in advance. Assuming the process isn't currently profitable it's probably not a good plan to direct current investment towards it in anticipation of future profitability. The globalised economy gives them a lot of other investment options and if the process does become profitable probably foreign investment can find somewhere on the planet that's a suitable location, and the oil states wont have much of an advantage doing it themselves.
Well, you seem to assume that decisions in those countries are made rationally. However these are absolute monarchies, and decisions are made by very few individuals, who mostly grew up as millionaires and billionaires. They seem to almost be unable to do reasonable, good enough projects that would help the country. No, it always has to be the best, biggest, most expensive or special thing, it's not really grounded in reality. In addition there is an industry of specialized consultants who try to sell those people absurd projects like the Line.
You even see it in the tourism projects in Saudi, which instead of building normal hotels for middle class people it's super luxury resorts in the Amaala project.
I certainly don't expect the leaders of those countries to make altruistic decisions that benefit the general populace, but at least to plan for the well-being of their (male) children and (male) grandchildren.
But you bring up a great point about them having grown up rich. They didn't become wealthy by making sound business decisions – nor did their fathers – but by being born into it. This remark:
> it always has to be the best, biggest, most expensive or special thing
I don't know if solar power/methane can provide the same level of prosperity they enjoy now. After all there are plenty of other deserts which are just as suitable for that.
Possibly being a financial centre is much more lucrative. There are plenty of reasons to be present in Dubai (instead or in addition to London/NYC). The UAE is not hostile to Russia to China so a lot of your business is there it makes sense to be there. Also, there is no risk that they'd elect a democratic socialist mayor in Dubai :) Once a city is established, there are network effects and it's not so easy to move out.
But it's true that they are also spending huge money on lots of stupid shit
> After all there are plenty of other deserts which are just as suitable for that.
Those other deserts are missing a crucial ingredient: absolutely huge amounts of money looking to be spent. Electricity-powered hydrolysis, carbon capture, and methane synthesis are all existing technologies, but they'll require massive amounts of chemical and process engineering to make them economically viable. Apart from the Arabian petrostates, there's not really any competition possessing the same advantages in location and financial resources.
> Possibly being a financial centre is much more lucrative.
Have the financial centers in London and NYC made the UK or the US rich? I mean on their own, not as a part in a wider, highly-developed economy? I don't think so.
>Have the financial centers in London and NYC made the UK or the US rich? I mean on their own, not as a part in a wider, highly-developed economy? I don't think so.
I think in the UK case, yes? Even if this is ignored... Hong Kong (pop 7m) and Singapore (pop 6m) seem to be cases where a financial centre made a smaller nation rich. In Hong Kong's case only loosely connected to a large country, and in Singapore's case totally disconnected.
This past month, I noticed an upsurge in Xeets denigrating Eric Weinstein and his Geometric Unity ToE. Many of them were ad hominem attacks. It almost seemed coordinated (but maybe Weinstein got some recent media or social media coverage that triggered the attacks?). I decided to check out his GU. I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, but rather than making any concrete proposals, he seems to be offering a series of questions that are laid out along with a framework of mathematical approaches that would address those questions. The maths are way beyond me, but I've learned a lot trying to decode what he's saying (LLMs are particularly useful for helping me understand what he's talking about).
Weinstein starts by riffing on Einstein's rhetorical question: “What really interests me is whether god had any choice in the creation of the world.” ...
>Because Einstein did not specify what he meant exactly, we have taken the liberty of reformulating his question as follows:
>>“Starting from X4, as the topological structure underlying the SpaceTime construction, to what extent can the observed universe together with stylized contents and laws mirroring its own be generated without further assumptions?”
Weinstein hooked me with that intro. It seems like one of those basic questions that physics should be attempting to answer. But what do I know?
Considering that scads of non-falsifiable ToEs have been produced, I don't understand where all this anti-Weinstein sentiment is coming from. Is it purely tribal?
This is a good read from Timothy Nguyen who published criticism of GU.
Instead of responding to the criticism as you might expect of a normal scientist, Weinstein got some podcasts to cancel their episodes with Nguyen, then instead of a reasonable response instead resorted to ad-hominem attacks because Nguyen's co-author was anonymous.
Wild stuff. He's a regular subject on the Decoding the Gurus podcast too.
I don't know what triggered him, Sean is the most civil person you can imagine, as you can see in the video, but instead of answering Sean's questions about GU, Eric repeatedly launches into personal insults. It's painful to watch and may have contributed to the public backlash. I have no opinion on GU other than "any model that purports to explain something better than an existing one should strive to at least reproduce what existing models already do, and then go further." This does not seem to be the case with GU, or with Wolfram's hypergraphs, or with many other promising models. Maybe someone some day...
> "In the 1940s, when the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard asked good mathematicians how they came up with solutions to hard problems, they nearly universally answered that they didn’t think in words; neither did they think in images or equations. Rather, what passed through the mathematicians as they struggled with problems were such things as vibrations in their hands, nonsense words in their ears, or blurry shapes in their heads"
I'm not interested in the post's thesis about wordless vs. verbal thought, which is a common topic of discussion and covered well elsewhere. But I would like to know if anyone agrees that, as they struggle with hard math problems, they hear nonsense words in their ears. If so, what is this like? Are the words clear? Can you transcribe some of them?
I certainly don’t hear nonsense words when I’m working in math problems. (Sometimes I think I’m images).
Very, very rarely I hear brief auditory hallucinations when I’m very tired. These are hard to transcribe. (If you can imagine bursts of random phonemes that don’t form recognizable words).
Once, amusingly enough, after reading Julian Jaynes. I put the book down. It’s dark it’s late, I’m tired. The book has primed me to be aware that auditory hallucinations exist. Wait .. what was that? I heard a brief burst of chatter.
I'm a working mathematician. I don't get any nonsense words in my head while working, but I also don't have an internal monologue fwiw. I do have a couple of "nonsense mantras" that I repeat to myself in order to regain focus, but they are mostly some phrases that got stuck while working particularly hard on a problem in the past.Most of the fun solutions float to the surface as if from nowhere, when I'm not thinking too seriously; however, this only happens when I've been stuffing my head with computations/ideas/other people's work prior to that.
The process of thinking itself is… varied. I don't think it makes sense to divide it into auditory or visual; instead it is more of a push and pull of exploration of what's possible against well internalized ideas. Maybe a good analogy is learning to ride a bicycle. You can rationalize it all day long, but at the end of the day you are acquiring a "feeling in the bones". Once you have it, and try to learn some new tricks, you don't really conceptualize how your body or the bike operates. Instead you think "huh, I wonder if I can do this", and then you kind of feel around in that direction of possibility space. With math, I guess you also develop a "new sense" in some pocket of your brain, the difference being that it does not really correlated with anything in the real world.
For me it's usually just pretty much the standard stuff in words and images, but sometimes thoughts outpace words, and I find myself repeating meaningless statements in my mind while finding the correct solution.
The words are pretty clear, and the contents are just whatever I've been thinking 10 seconds ago on repeat, or something like a bad AI-generated proof, which sounds like a proof but makes no sense on examination.
My experience isn't anywhere near as mysterious as this post describes, so it's possible this isn't the same thing.
Not pure math but I took competitive programming seriously for a while and when solving hard problems I would sort of force my mind into a state of thinking deeply about a particular thing in the abstract without actually forcing it.
The best way I can describe it is clearing your mind completely like a vacuum then opening a small hole where the problem is and letting your mind draw in whatever it wants through that hole like a vacuum filling up with air through an opening. Usually what rushes in are abstractions in the form of random shapes and constructions representing the problem in different ways, sometimes colors and symbols. It wouldn't always work but it was a great way to force creativity.
I don't know about the vibrations in the hands or the nonsense words in the ears, but when I think about philosophical questions, I have the blurry shapes in my head. If I were to hypothesize as if I were a neuroscientist, I'd say my visual cortex was being used as a place where I process ideas, then they solidify as if I were pulling a blurry object out of murky water into something I can put into words. If I were to hypothesize as a mystical idealist, I'd say the ideas were floating around out there in the universe, and I was just grabbing them from somewhere outside myself.
I'd also be curious how much people observe the processes of their mind while they're involved in various activities. I get the impression that most people don't do this. Maybe this is a positive side effect of sitting and meditating regularly for 10+ years and watching my thoughts arise? Otherwise, I can't say I got much out of meditation.
I would like to register my disapproval at the ongoing calendar compression of the USA "holiday season". Halloween isn't until Friday, but we've already got advance notice of Christmas goods arriving Real Soon Now(tm). This is dumb, since there's still the (for grocery) biggest game of the year to get over, that being Turkey Day. Nobody is gonna want candy canes and panettone until after that.
Kinda feel like it's not-wrong to blame tariffs for this year's notable acceleration, though it's a longstanding trend anyway. When market conditions are uncertain, you wanna lock in seasonal purchasing agreements early...
Home Depot put out the Christmas stuff back in September. (I'm renovating my house, so I'm at Home Depot basically every day.)
The seasonal section has basically looked like this:
July/August: "Back to College" supplies like box fans, paper towels, and storage crates.* Lawn supplies like fertilizer and grass seed for the upcoming fall grass growing season. Window AC units on the other side of the store in a "secondary" seasonal area.
Early September: Halloween supplies in the main seasonal section. An entire aisle outside that used to be full of grass seed got repurposed to store excess boxes for the Halloween merchandise. (As in, the basic cardboard boxes that the cases are shipped in, with just SKUs and barcodes. Not intended for customer-facing display.)
Late September: Halloween stuff moved to the secondary seasonal area on the other side of the store. Christmas trees and lawn inflatables put out in the main "seasonal" section. Lawn supplies still stocked in a small corner.
Early October: a spot that had been bug spray the week prior was cleared out and replaced with a large flag display. Possibly a combination of Veteran's Day and sudden demand for flags due to the No Kings protests. (I immediately bought two handheld flags.)
Yesterday, a week before actual Halloween: the Halloween merchandise has been packed up. The secondary seasonal area is now completely empty. I eagerly await what they put there next.
*The basic black-with-yellow-lid Home Depot Plastic Storage Crate has kind of a cult following. It's a whole meme.
Ten years ago I started getting advance notice of Christmases that were more than one year in the future. So in July, I wasn't just hearing about the coming Christmas, I was hearing about the Christmas after that one. I thought that was the height of lunacy, but before long I was hearing about Christmases two entire years in the future, then three years, then four. The rate of Christmas foresight got faster and faster. I was seeing ads for the Nintendo Switch 2 before the original Nintendo Switch had even been announced. By 2018 I was getting premonitions of Christmas in the then-distant year of 2033.
I thought that the times between me hearing about the next Christmas would continue to shrink exponentially, until I was seeing Christmases that were 100s or 1000s of years in the future. I feared that learning about a new future Christmas every second would overwhelm my brain and leave me in some sort of permanent hallucinatory fugue state.
But even though almost eight years have gone by since then, I haven't heard a thing about 2034's Christmas. Just a weird staticky sound where the jingles used to be.
Nick Mangold, long time football player for the New York Jets and Ohio State Buckeyes, just died of a kidney disease at 41. He put out a call to the public asking for a donor just a couple weeks ago (and I assume was searching privately before that).
This might be a good news story for WaitlistZero to use to get support for their work in improving kidney donations.
It is amazing how much "the personal is the political" on the English language social media now. UI don't know whether that is good or bad. There was this thing: "My husband eats 12 eggs a day, how does that make you feel?" Answer: "Amazing how fast I can spot a Nazi."
Breakdown: the "how does that make you feel?" probably sounded like "Vegans, we enjoy being ruel", and also the whole thing felt like a right-wing obsession with masculinity, protein, muscles, testosterone.
On the whole this is probably a bad thing, because as long as people focus on these personally-political catfights, they don't pay attention to the big issues.
Also it is divisive in the sense that it pushes me to take sides about something I don't want to take sides about, like when the right-wingers see the Vikins series as serious alpha role models, that I find ridiculous, but on the other hand I do know how therapeutic can be to grow muscles, that "I am finally safe from bullies" feeling...
In Argentina, Milei's party just won in the midterm elections celebrated yesterday (https://apnews.com/article/argentina-midterm-election-javier-milei-66d7c03825a7a0f56ce5808ff3ac1df4), getting more than 9% over the Peronist opposition. Stocks are up, the risk premium of the Argentinian debt (vs US debt) is down, and the peso has appreciated against the dollar.
Celebrating an election is an interesting way to put it. I guess its a mistranslation or a false friend, but I like the spirit of the phrase. Maybe democracy would work better if we thought of elections as celebrations instead of as fights.
So why do they need Trump bailout? But I guess I would vote for a bag of rocks if the other option would be a Perónist.
"Kvant" ("Quant") is the preeminent Russian-language magazine of popular math/physics for schoolkids and college students. It's recently got a revamped gorgeous new website https://www.kvant.digital/, with the entire archive going back to 1970.
The most recent issue features a set of 4 problems for "younger schoolchildren" - my guess this is something like grades 5-7 of K12. I liked them a lot - quite fun and not very easy. I'm going to translate three of them and suggest you prove your mettle against hypothetical high-achieving Russian middle-schoolers. If you suggest answers/solutions in replies, please rot13 spoilers away and spell out numerals as words when you do so.
1. The forest animals established a fruit exchange station, where you can exchange as follows:
- one orange for two pears
- one apple and one pear for one orange
- one orange and one pear for one apple
To promote the new station, they're currently giving away a free marble for every exchange you do. Mr. Fox has 30 apples, 30 oranges and 30 pears and is awfully fond of marbles. What is the maximum number of marbles he can obtain?
2. Winnie-the-Pooh eats jam twice as fast as Piglet does, and he also eats pie three times as fast as Piglet. Once they ate a tin of jam and a whole pie together. Winnie started on the pie and Piglet on the jam; Winnie was finished first and then he helped Piglet finish the jam and they were done with everything in 2 hours. Another time they had another tin of jam and a pie, just the same size as before; but this time Piglet started on the pie and Winnie-the-Pooh on the jam, and having finished the jam, Winnie helped Piglet with the pie. How much time did it take them this time?
3. Tile a 10x10 square with strips size 1x9, so that each square is covered by either one or two strips, but there's no 1x2 rectangle such that both its squares are covered by two strips. Strips are laid horizontally or vertically only and never exceed the boundaries of the 10x10 square.
For many of such things, a good method is that if they do not give you the value of a variable, you are free to assume any convenient value. This is much easier than writing equations with x and y or percentages.
So WP assume eats jam in 10min, P in 20 min, WP eats pie in 10min, P in 30 min. So another time is (the first is irrelevant), WP finishes the jam in 10 min, and P has another 20 min left going on the pie, of which 2/3 is left, WP helping means he eats twice as much in the same time, so he eats 2/3 of the 2/3 so 0.444 so about 4.44 minutes, as we assumed they finish it at the same time we do not have to calculate P. So it is 14.44 minutes by these assumed values or 1.444 times WP jam-eating time by the original formulation.
Greg Egan's 31-page story "Death and the Gorgon", which was published in January 2024 in Asimov's magazine, and which was voted "Best novella" by magazine's readers, is now available online for free.
https://asimovs.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/DeathGorgon_Egan.pdf
It's short, pretty fun and it's satirizes Effective Altruism and LessWrong communities. (Greg Egan don't like us much :c )
If you don't want to read the story but want to read criticism of it - check out this lesswrong post
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hx5EkHFH5hGzngZDs/comment-on-death-and-the-gorgon
Back in April I discovered what Scott later called "Diversity Attractor" in GPT-4o model.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor?open=false#%C2%A7the-diversity-attractor
I had a theory that 4o infamous "piss filter" - distinct yellow tint on generated images - was main culprit behind people turning black or chinese when you ask the model to recursively regenerate the same image, compounding the effect each time and biasing model towards darker skinned people.
For a long time I wanted to test the theory by running the same recursive generation on images with color-correction, and a couple of days ago I finally did after getting some free OpenAI credits.
Turns out I was wrong.
People still turn into caricature minorities even if you remove yellow tint.
The Diversity Attractor is real, it's not an artifact of color drift.
I run the script with color correction on the same images I did before when it was first discovered, and results were very similar.
https://x.com/papayathreesome/status/1982503101119828097
I think I may have missed this in a FAQ somewhere, but what's a good reason to believe that g or IQ can be united in a single number metric? Because of numerous proven correlation? Can we decide that it's actually the combined part that matters instead of some division (spacial, numeric) that may actually predict better?
Is there a or Athleticity Quotient? Why or why not?
Yeah, this has been something I've always found a little awkward. My interpretation (non-expert, please correct if misunderstanding):
Basically, g and IQ are statistical ideas that are sometimes useful for thinking about how good we are at cognitive stuff, but they are only useful insofar as intelligence is mysterious.
When we test a load of cognitive tasks, a very large component seems to be explained by "some shared mysterious underlying trait(s)", which is/are invisible to us. This is probably not a single trait, and is more like a combination of inscrutable brain stuff like synapse speed/efficiency, executive control, working memory etc. But IQ tests still give us a way of quantifying this, which actually allows us to make more sense of real-world outcomes (despite only being a messy proxy).
An athleticity quotient is statistically similarly valid, and you would find such a correlation. But I guess we don't use it because 1) it wouldn't help us to uncover anything mysterious, and 2) would explain less than its constituent parts! When someone is good or bad at many somewhat related athletic tasks, it usually feels relatively clear why that is: some combination of hand-eye coordination, strength, cardiovascular capacity, body fat etc. We can say: "this guy's good at weightlifting, boxing, and rugby because he's super strong, but also bad at marathon running, swimming, and ballet because he's too heavy".
Economics concepts like TFP (Total Factor Productivity) are good parallels to g/IQ. There's nothing "real" about TFP, but it explains a big gap in the big economics questions we have around "how do we produce more with the same inputs?".
Something that's happened recently that I've not seen remarked on much is the death of internet optimism. Throughout most of my life there was always a dream being sold about how greater internet access would revolutionise the world. It changed a lot through the 90s and 2000s but was generally popular until it died silently at some point in the past few years.
I've written about it in greater detail
https://open.substack.com/pub/thedistantpresent/p/the-internet-is-dead-long-live-the?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=5a1s78
Good morning, and welcome to your new job at XHW Consulting. XHW doesn't actually stand for EXploiting Human Weaknesses -- it's Xue Harcourt Weinstein, actually -- but maybe it should.
You'll be working on the Novo Nordisk account. They make Ozempik, a weight loss drug. They want us to find a way to make Americans fatter. Now, the US is no slouch in this department, with a 42.9% adult obesity rate. But that doesn't even put them in the top ten internationally, so we have our work cut out for us. We're excited to hear your ideas. Good luck.
Offer to supply schools with free coca cola and other soft drinks for all students. Maybe we can offer a free supersized happy meal every week to all kids as well.
Captchas now require you to eat a spoonful of ice cream, to prove it won't make you short-circuit like the robot in A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
captcha related fun, watch the AI vtuber Neuro-sama play No Robots Here, a humor game about them:
https://youtu.be/J6MXwyGT3w8?si=4a-e1vJGTxhPbglY
honestly neuro-sama is an outlier about attitudes on AI, surprisingly popular with her creator Vedal ( the turtle) as straight man.
please drink verification can
https://i.imgur.com/g2S0snR.png
I see a lot of complaining posts from teachers losing it, "my kids are complaining about having to write five sentences", "my kids literally never listen and most just sleep in class", "my kids are so rowdy and uncontrollable, it didn't used to be this bad". I'm just... surprised that they're surprised? What incentive, exactly, is there for children and teens to "care" about school or behave respectfully? Even if you're a smart and conscientious teen, you can still sleep/watch Netflix through classes and get good grades on homework and tests.
I Am Not A Teacher, but:
1. The clue is probably in the ‘it didn’t used to be this bad’. A certain amount of schoolchildren’s disaffection is priced in, since everyone knows there is some level of don’t want to do the work, don’t want to pay attention, don’t want to behave, in children and teens. But that doesn’t mean there can’t exist a *surprising* amount of these things, especially if they have increased from the previous level.
2. There seems to be a group on this site who think it’s obvious that school is obviously without merit and a negative experience, particularly for the smart and conscientious. I do think that’s a minority position, and most smart and conscientious people like school, value school and got on well with school (I fall into this category, as do all my IRL friends). And it seems to me obvious that learning things, building educational capital for the future, and getting the approval of parents and teachers, are all common-knowledge and widely accepted reasons for children/teens to care about school.
Where did the your review on the Russo-Ukraine War go? I had not finished reading it and it seems to have disappeared altogether...
The author asked it to be withdrawn
Do we know why?
Personal security I believe - see Scott's message on the previous Open Thread [Or the edited winners announcement]
Please help me understand something:
In recent years, it has dawned on several Arabian petrostates that the age of oil will at some point come to an end, and with it the glut of wealth enjoyed by their elites. So, while the money faucet is still wide open, they have started to invest in building up alternative income streams, which is, in itself, wise and sensible. But the next part is where I'm getting lost:
They are sinking huge sums of money into propping up tourism. In a region where the greatest attractions are driving around the desert in a pimped out Mercedes G class and going shopping in gold-plated malls. There are beautiful beaches, sure, but when it's 50°C / 120°F outside, this pleasure loses its allure about as fast as a drive through the dunes does. Tourism! As if that could sustain the kind of wealth they're enjoying now.
Or they're trying to establish their cities as centers of finance. Those already exist in sufficient quantity. Why would banks and PE firms move their locations from NYC or London to Abu Dhabi? And even if they did, and if they can move so easily – what's to stop them from moving away again after the artificial incentives sustained by the current oil income stream dry up?
And then there's The Line. Enough has been said about it.
These investments are all dumb. And maybe understandable if they were the only options. But there is another one: green energy. The Arabian Peninsula receives an ungodly amount of solar insolation – 2500 kWh/m² per year, or roughly 2.5x as much central Europe. Capture this energy with photovoltaics, which have become incredibly cheap, smooth out daily supply with batteries, which have also become incredibly cheap. Use the electricity to desalinate seawater, of which there is an unlimited amount, then use the electricity to split off hydrogen, then use the electricity to capture carbon from the air, of which there is also an unlimited amount, then react hydrogen and carbon to methane, and sell and ship it to the rest of the world for heating and electricity production.
None of this requires fundamental research or new physics, all of it already exists on a smaller scale. Scaling it up and improving efficiency are huge engineering efforts, and huge engineering efforts can be sped up with huge amounts of money.
It would be absolutely perfect for the Arabian petrostates. They can exploit abundant natural resources of the land (just like they're doing now). They can rely on companies and experts from foreign countries, which aren't intellectually and ideologically stuck in the middle ages, for the actual high-tech engineering (just like they're doing now). They can supply a commodity which much of the rest of the developed world is utterly dependent on (just like they're doing now). They don't have to change culturally and can go right back to oppressing women and exploiting slave laborers (just like … do I have to say it?). And they can keep on driving Lambos in Monaco instead of camels through the desert, which they'll be back to in a generation or two if they stay on their current path of idiotic investments.
So. Why aren't they doing this? I mean, _really_ doing this, as if the future of their countries depended on it?
The oil is generally expected to last longer than the useful life of solar panels. So in the meantime all these solar farms would be producing energy for states that have such abundant energy, some give it away literally for free.
Despite that there is a lot of solar development in the Middle East. Only serving local demand since it’s currently too big of a problem to send energy over long distances to where it would be needed.
> useful life of solar panels
Like I said in another comment [1], the solar panels aren't the investment. Solar panels are dirt cheap, and replacing them every 20-30 years is a complete non-issue.
> The oil is generally expected to last longer […]
The age of oil will end not for lack of supply, but because of dwindling demand. The world is moving towards renewable energy. It will take decades, and demand for oil will never fade away completely, but consumption will fall dramatically, and with it the revenue that petrostates depend on.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-405/comment/170597676
I'd guess it's because the cost of solar is constantly falling and solar panels don't have an infinitely long shelf life. So any investment they make in solar now wont be returning very much decades into the future which is the timeline for when the demand for oil might fall through.
A better plan might just be to build up a Norwegian style national fund, and live off rents from investments in other countries instead of trying to make their domestic economy more productive.
I think you missed the point. The solar panels are the cheapest part in this production chain, they're not the investment. The investment is in the immense desalination and chemical plants for hydrolysis and methane synthesis. And that investment is only enabled by the cheap power provided by low cost photovoltaics coupled with high solar insolation.
Ok, that might make more sense then.
In general though it's usually not economically rational to build infrastructure a long time in advance. Assuming the process isn't currently profitable it's probably not a good plan to direct current investment towards it in anticipation of future profitability. The globalised economy gives them a lot of other investment options and if the process does become profitable probably foreign investment can find somewhere on the planet that's a suitable location, and the oil states wont have much of an advantage doing it themselves.
Well, you seem to assume that decisions in those countries are made rationally. However these are absolute monarchies, and decisions are made by very few individuals, who mostly grew up as millionaires and billionaires. They seem to almost be unable to do reasonable, good enough projects that would help the country. No, it always has to be the best, biggest, most expensive or special thing, it's not really grounded in reality. In addition there is an industry of specialized consultants who try to sell those people absurd projects like the Line.
You even see it in the tourism projects in Saudi, which instead of building normal hotels for middle class people it's super luxury resorts in the Amaala project.
I certainly don't expect the leaders of those countries to make altruistic decisions that benefit the general populace, but at least to plan for the well-being of their (male) children and (male) grandchildren.
But you bring up a great point about them having grown up rich. They didn't become wealthy by making sound business decisions – nor did their fathers – but by being born into it. This remark:
> it always has to be the best, biggest, most expensive or special thing
nails it, I think.
Well, the UAE does build solar infrastructure, they were #22 in the world by generation in 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
The Gulf countries are also the world leaders in desalination capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination_by_country
I don't know if solar power/methane can provide the same level of prosperity they enjoy now. After all there are plenty of other deserts which are just as suitable for that.
Possibly being a financial centre is much more lucrative. There are plenty of reasons to be present in Dubai (instead or in addition to London/NYC). The UAE is not hostile to Russia to China so a lot of your business is there it makes sense to be there. Also, there is no risk that they'd elect a democratic socialist mayor in Dubai :) Once a city is established, there are network effects and it's not so easy to move out.
But it's true that they are also spending huge money on lots of stupid shit
> After all there are plenty of other deserts which are just as suitable for that.
Those other deserts are missing a crucial ingredient: absolutely huge amounts of money looking to be spent. Electricity-powered hydrolysis, carbon capture, and methane synthesis are all existing technologies, but they'll require massive amounts of chemical and process engineering to make them economically viable. Apart from the Arabian petrostates, there's not really any competition possessing the same advantages in location and financial resources.
> Possibly being a financial centre is much more lucrative.
Have the financial centers in London and NYC made the UK or the US rich? I mean on their own, not as a part in a wider, highly-developed economy? I don't think so.
>Have the financial centers in London and NYC made the UK or the US rich? I mean on their own, not as a part in a wider, highly-developed economy? I don't think so.
I think in the UK case, yes? Even if this is ignored... Hong Kong (pop 7m) and Singapore (pop 6m) seem to be cases where a financial centre made a smaller nation rich. In Hong Kong's case only loosely connected to a large country, and in Singapore's case totally disconnected.
This past month, I noticed an upsurge in Xeets denigrating Eric Weinstein and his Geometric Unity ToE. Many of them were ad hominem attacks. It almost seemed coordinated (but maybe Weinstein got some recent media or social media coverage that triggered the attacks?). I decided to check out his GU. I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, but rather than making any concrete proposals, he seems to be offering a series of questions that are laid out along with a framework of mathematical approaches that would address those questions. The maths are way beyond me, but I've learned a lot trying to decode what he's saying (LLMs are particularly useful for helping me understand what he's talking about).
Weinstein starts by riffing on Einstein's rhetorical question: “What really interests me is whether god had any choice in the creation of the world.” ...
>Because Einstein did not specify what he meant exactly, we have taken the liberty of reformulating his question as follows:
>>“Starting from X4, as the topological structure underlying the SpaceTime construction, to what extent can the observed universe together with stylized contents and laws mirroring its own be generated without further assumptions?”
Weinstein hooked me with that intro. It seems like one of those basic questions that physics should be attempting to answer. But what do I know?
Considering that scads of non-falsifiable ToEs have been produced, I don't understand where all this anti-Weinstein sentiment is coming from. Is it purely tribal?
https://saismaran.org/geometricunity.pdf
This is a good read from Timothy Nguyen who published criticism of GU.
Instead of responding to the criticism as you might expect of a normal scientist, Weinstein got some podcasts to cancel their episodes with Nguyen, then instead of a reasonable response instead resorted to ad-hominem attacks because Nguyen's co-author was anonymous.
Wild stuff. He's a regular subject on the Decoding the Gurus podcast too.
https://timothynguyen.org/2025/08/21/physics-grifters-eric-weinstein-sabine-hossenfelder-and-a-crisis-of-credibility/
There is a podcast where Eric comes across as a complete and utter nasty ass to Sean Carroll https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1ktvuab/debate_between_sean_carroll_and_eric_weinstein_on/
I don't know what triggered him, Sean is the most civil person you can imagine, as you can see in the video, but instead of answering Sean's questions about GU, Eric repeatedly launches into personal insults. It's painful to watch and may have contributed to the public backlash. I have no opinion on GU other than "any model that purports to explain something better than an existing one should strive to at least reproduce what existing models already do, and then go further." This does not seem to be the case with GU, or with Wolfram's hypergraphs, or with many other promising models. Maybe someone some day...
https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/wordless-thought says that:
> "In the 1940s, when the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard asked good mathematicians how they came up with solutions to hard problems, they nearly universally answered that they didn’t think in words; neither did they think in images or equations. Rather, what passed through the mathematicians as they struggled with problems were such things as vibrations in their hands, nonsense words in their ears, or blurry shapes in their heads"
I'm not interested in the post's thesis about wordless vs. verbal thought, which is a common topic of discussion and covered well elsewhere. But I would like to know if anyone agrees that, as they struggle with hard math problems, they hear nonsense words in their ears. If so, what is this like? Are the words clear? Can you transcribe some of them?
I certainly don’t hear nonsense words when I’m working in math problems. (Sometimes I think I’m images).
Very, very rarely I hear brief auditory hallucinations when I’m very tired. These are hard to transcribe. (If you can imagine bursts of random phonemes that don’t form recognizable words).
Once, amusingly enough, after reading Julian Jaynes. I put the book down. It’s dark it’s late, I’m tired. The book has primed me to be aware that auditory hallucinations exist. Wait .. what was that? I heard a brief burst of chatter.
I'm a working mathematician. I don't get any nonsense words in my head while working, but I also don't have an internal monologue fwiw. I do have a couple of "nonsense mantras" that I repeat to myself in order to regain focus, but they are mostly some phrases that got stuck while working particularly hard on a problem in the past.Most of the fun solutions float to the surface as if from nowhere, when I'm not thinking too seriously; however, this only happens when I've been stuffing my head with computations/ideas/other people's work prior to that.
The process of thinking itself is… varied. I don't think it makes sense to divide it into auditory or visual; instead it is more of a push and pull of exploration of what's possible against well internalized ideas. Maybe a good analogy is learning to ride a bicycle. You can rationalize it all day long, but at the end of the day you are acquiring a "feeling in the bones". Once you have it, and try to learn some new tricks, you don't really conceptualize how your body or the bike operates. Instead you think "huh, I wonder if I can do this", and then you kind of feel around in that direction of possibility space. With math, I guess you also develop a "new sense" in some pocket of your brain, the difference being that it does not really correlated with anything in the real world.
For me it's usually just pretty much the standard stuff in words and images, but sometimes thoughts outpace words, and I find myself repeating meaningless statements in my mind while finding the correct solution.
The words are pretty clear, and the contents are just whatever I've been thinking 10 seconds ago on repeat, or something like a bad AI-generated proof, which sounds like a proof but makes no sense on examination.
My experience isn't anywhere near as mysterious as this post describes, so it's possible this isn't the same thing.
Not pure math but I took competitive programming seriously for a while and when solving hard problems I would sort of force my mind into a state of thinking deeply about a particular thing in the abstract without actually forcing it.
The best way I can describe it is clearing your mind completely like a vacuum then opening a small hole where the problem is and letting your mind draw in whatever it wants through that hole like a vacuum filling up with air through an opening. Usually what rushes in are abstractions in the form of random shapes and constructions representing the problem in different ways, sometimes colors and symbols. It wouldn't always work but it was a great way to force creativity.
I don't know about the vibrations in the hands or the nonsense words in the ears, but when I think about philosophical questions, I have the blurry shapes in my head. If I were to hypothesize as if I were a neuroscientist, I'd say my visual cortex was being used as a place where I process ideas, then they solidify as if I were pulling a blurry object out of murky water into something I can put into words. If I were to hypothesize as a mystical idealist, I'd say the ideas were floating around out there in the universe, and I was just grabbing them from somewhere outside myself.
I'd also be curious how much people observe the processes of their mind while they're involved in various activities. I get the impression that most people don't do this. Maybe this is a positive side effect of sitting and meditating regularly for 10+ years and watching my thoughts arise? Otherwise, I can't say I got much out of meditation.
Comment subthread for people wanting to discuss questions for the Metaculus contest.
Wow...first comment?
I would like to register my disapproval at the ongoing calendar compression of the USA "holiday season". Halloween isn't until Friday, but we've already got advance notice of Christmas goods arriving Real Soon Now(tm). This is dumb, since there's still the (for grocery) biggest game of the year to get over, that being Turkey Day. Nobody is gonna want candy canes and panettone until after that.
Kinda feel like it's not-wrong to blame tariffs for this year's notable acceleration, though it's a longstanding trend anyway. When market conditions are uncertain, you wanna lock in seasonal purchasing agreements early...
Home Depot put out the Christmas stuff back in September. (I'm renovating my house, so I'm at Home Depot basically every day.)
The seasonal section has basically looked like this:
July/August: "Back to College" supplies like box fans, paper towels, and storage crates.* Lawn supplies like fertilizer and grass seed for the upcoming fall grass growing season. Window AC units on the other side of the store in a "secondary" seasonal area.
Early September: Halloween supplies in the main seasonal section. An entire aisle outside that used to be full of grass seed got repurposed to store excess boxes for the Halloween merchandise. (As in, the basic cardboard boxes that the cases are shipped in, with just SKUs and barcodes. Not intended for customer-facing display.)
Late September: Halloween stuff moved to the secondary seasonal area on the other side of the store. Christmas trees and lawn inflatables put out in the main "seasonal" section. Lawn supplies still stocked in a small corner.
Early October: a spot that had been bug spray the week prior was cleared out and replaced with a large flag display. Possibly a combination of Veteran's Day and sudden demand for flags due to the No Kings protests. (I immediately bought two handheld flags.)
Yesterday, a week before actual Halloween: the Halloween merchandise has been packed up. The secondary seasonal area is now completely empty. I eagerly await what they put there next.
*The basic black-with-yellow-lid Home Depot Plastic Storage Crate has kind of a cult following. It's a whole meme.
Ten years ago I started getting advance notice of Christmases that were more than one year in the future. So in July, I wasn't just hearing about the coming Christmas, I was hearing about the Christmas after that one. I thought that was the height of lunacy, but before long I was hearing about Christmases two entire years in the future, then three years, then four. The rate of Christmas foresight got faster and faster. I was seeing ads for the Nintendo Switch 2 before the original Nintendo Switch had even been announced. By 2018 I was getting premonitions of Christmas in the then-distant year of 2033.
I thought that the times between me hearing about the next Christmas would continue to shrink exponentially, until I was seeing Christmases that were 100s or 1000s of years in the future. I feared that learning about a new future Christmas every second would overwhelm my brain and leave me in some sort of permanent hallucinatory fugue state.
But even though almost eight years have gone by since then, I haven't heard a thing about 2034's Christmas. Just a weird staticky sound where the jingles used to be.
I like this :)