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Here, you can go hunt down the people who used the react that way on this comment instead.
The relevant figure wouldn't be the current value so much as its derivative: I don't know how that situation has changed over time, and haven't put in the effort to dig up information on what that data looked like in 1950.
I am not much of an economist, but the two thoughts that spring to mind:
- The change you want to see, of people not needing to do as much work, is in fact happening (even if not as fast as you might like). The first clean chart I could find for US data was here, showing a gradual fall since 1950 from ~2k hours/year to ~1760 hours/year worked. This may actually understate the amount of reduction in poverty-in-the-sense-of-needing-to-work-hard-at-an-unpleasant-job:
- I think there has also been a trend towards these jobs being much nicer. The fact that what you're referring to as a 'miserable condition' is working a retail job where customers sometimes yell at you, rather than working in the coal mines and getting blacklung, is a substantial improvement!
- I think there has also been a trend towards the longest-hours-worked being for wealthier people rather than poorer people. "Banker's hours" used to be an unusually short workday, which the wealthy bankers could get away with - while bankers still have a lot more money than poor people, I think there's been a substantial shift in who works longer hours.
The change you want to see, viewed through the right lens, is actually somewhat depressing. I would phrase what you are looking for as a world where society has nothing to offer people that is nice enough they are willing to work an unpleasant job to produce it.
If you have the choice between 'work long hours to get enough food to live' or 'work short hours and starve', it makes sense to call that 'poverty'. If you have the choice between 'work long hours to be able to have a smartphone, internet, and cable TV' or 'work short hours, still have shelter, clothing and food, but not have as much nice stuff', I would call that 'work is producing nice enough stuff that people are willing to do the work to produce it'.
On your definition of 'poverty', Disneyland makes the world poorer. Every time someone takes on extra hours at work so they can take their kids to Disneyland, you account the unpleasant overtime work as an increase in poverty, and do not account the Disneyland trip on the other side of the ledger. This seems wrong.
Yeah, I have no idea. It would be much clearer if the contracts themselves were available. Obviously the incentive of the plaintiffs is to make this sound as serious as possible, and obviously the incentive of OpenAI is to make it sound as innocuous as possible. I don't feel highly confident without more information, my gut is leaning towards 'opportunistic plaintiffs hoping for a cut of one of the standard SEC settlements' but I could easily be wrong.
EDITED TO ADD: On re-reading the letter, I'm not clear where the word 'criminal' even came from. The WaPo article claims
These agreements threatened employees with criminal prosecutions if they reported violations of law to federal authorities under trade secret laws, Kohn said.
but the letter does not contain the word 'criminal', its allegations are:
- Non-disparagement clauses that failed to exempt disclosures of securities violations to the SEC;
- Requiring prior consent from the company to disclose confidential information to federal authorities;
- Confidentiality requirements with respect to agreements, that themselves contain securities violations;
- Requiring employees to waive compensation that was intended by Congress to incentivize reporting and provide financial relief to whistleblowers.
'Securities and Exchange Commission' is like 'Food and Drug Administration': the FDA has authority over both food and drugs, not the intersection, and the SEC has authority over off-exchange securities.[1]
This authority tends to de facto extend to a fair level of general authority over the conduct of any company that issues a security (i.e. almost all of them). Matt Levine[2] calls this the 'everything is securities fraud' theory, since the theory "your company did Bad Thing X, it didn't disclose Bad Thing X, some people invested in your company not knowing about Bad Thing X, then Bad Thing X came out and now your company is less valuable, victimizing the poor people who invested in you" has been applied in a rather large number of cases to penalize companies for a wide variety of conduct.
- ^
Some caveats may apply e.g. commodities exchanges are regulated by the CFTC. The SEC also probably cares a lot more about fraud in publicly traded companies, since they are less likely to be owned by sophisticated investors who can defend themselves against fraud and more likely to be owned by a large number of random people who can't. I am not a lawyer, though. Get a real lawyer before making SEC jurisdictional arguments.
- ^
Levine is very, very much worth reading for sensible and often-amusing coverage of a wide variety of finance-adjacent topics.
'A security' is a much broader concept than 'a publicly traded security'.
For example, if you've been following the SEC's attempts to crack down on crypto, they are based on the SEC's view that almost all cryptocurrencies, NFTs, stablecoins, etc. are 'securities'. Whether you agree with them on that or not, the law broadly tends to back them in this.
This is no longer a question of ‘the SEC goes around fining firms whose confidentiality clauses fail to explicitly exempt statements to the SEC,’ which is totally a thing the SEC does, Matt Levine describes the trade as getting your employment contract, circling the confidentiality clause in red with the annotation “$” and sending it in as a whistleblower complaint. And yes, you get fined for that, but it’s more than a little ticky-tacky.
This is different. This is explicitly saying no to whistleblowing. That is not legal.
Are you sure about this interpretation?
(DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer at all, etc, etc.)
This came up on LW recently, and I didn't find the letter convincing as being the second rather than the first situation.
Remember, the whole legal theory behind the SEC's cases is that a clause like this:
I, EMPLOYEE, will not disclose EMPLOYER'S confidential information to anyone without EMPLOYER'S permission. If I do, I understand that EMPLOYER may pursue civil and criminal penalties, and if I receive compensation for disclosing such information I understand that EMPLOYER may recover said compensation from me in addition to any legal penalties.
if it doesn't contain an explicit carveout for the SEC, is itself 'a threat of criminal prosecution for whistleblowing' and 'a requirement to give up whistleblowing payments'.
If OpenAI's NDAs actually contain a clause like 'I will not tell the SEC anything, and if I do I may not receive whistleblower payments', I agree that would be very bad, much worse than a failure-to-exempt-the-SEC problem.
But I think the letter sounds much more like the usual failure-to-exempt-the-SEC. Is there something I'm missing here?
Not a lawyer, but I think those are the same thing.
The SEC's legal theory is that "non-disparagement clauses that failed to exempt disclosures of securities violations to the SEC" and "threats of prosecution if you report violations of law to federal authorities" are the same thing, and on reading the letter I can't find any wrongdoing alleged or any investigation requested outside of issues with "OpenAI's employment, severance, non-disparagement and non-disclosure agreements".
Matt Levine is worth reading on this subject (also on many others).
The SEC has a history of taking aggressive positions on what an NDA can say (if your NDA does not explicitly have a carveout for 'you can still say anything you want to the SEC', they will argue that you're trying to stop whistleblowers from talking to the SEC) and a reliable tendency to extract large fines and give a chunk of them to the whistleblowers.
This news might be better modeled as 'OpenAI thought it was a Silicon Valley company, and tried to implement a Silicon Valley NDA, without consulting the kind of lawyers a finance company would have used for the past few years.'
(To be clear, this news might also be OpenAI having been doing something sinister. I have no evidence against that, and certainly they've done shady stuff before. But I don't think this news is strong evidence of shadiness on its own).
(And I wonder which ghost your great-uncle is...perhaps we can get away with sending no exorcist at all to that one?)
Things about the dataset:
Each ghost statistic has a bimodal distribution, with one peak ~70 for 'high' stats and one ~30 for 'low' stats.
High stats correlate with other high stats: many ghosts have either all stats high or all stats low. This suggests a distinction between e.g. 'Major' spirits (which tend to have all stats high, but sometimes have a few low) and Minor spirits (vice versa).
Sliminess seems to be the stat most correlated with major/minor-ness: almost all Major spirits have high Sliminess, and almost all Minor spirits have low Sliminess. Hostility is the least correlated: Hostile Minor spirits, or non-Hostile Major spirits, both happen relatively often.
However, I haven't yet been able to come up with anything clever to do with this, and ended up mostly just using a linear regression.
Results of my analysis:
Most exorcists have one particular ghost stat that seems to primarily govern the difficulty they face:
- The Phantom Pummelers really do not like Sliminess.
- The Spectre Slayers really do not like Intellect.
- The Wraith Wranglers really do not like Hostility.
- The Demon Destroyers really do not like Grotesqueness (and also do better with low Hostility).
while some behave differently:
- The Entity Eliminators seems to dislike all stats, especially Sliminess: perhaps they have a hard time with Major spirits and a relatively easy time with Minor ones?
- The Mundanifying Mystics have a very high base rate, but actually charge slightly less for all stats - they are expensive in general, and get extra annoyed when you waste their time with Minor spirits?
We handle the idiosyncracies of hiring the various exorcists:
Paying the Demon Destroyers to come seems worth it: they might actually save us 400sp in expectation just on spirit W alone.
The Spectre Slayers seem more valuable than the Entity Eliminators: while the Eliminators are all-around okay at minor spirits, with our knowledge of who is good against which stats we can always pick out a better exorcist to use, while the Spectre Slayers are a uniquely good bet for spirits like S that have very low INT but high other stats.
There are exactly three spirits where I think the Pummelers save us money (N, U, and a little bit on H), so we don't need to fret about that constraint.
And we end up assigning (unless I find something else to do and change this):
A: Spectre Slayers
B: Wraith Wranglers
C: Mundanifying Mystics
D: Demon Destroyers
E: Wraith Wranglers
F: Mundanifying Mystics
G: Demon Destroyers
H: Phantom Pummelers
I: Wraith Wranglers
J: Demon Destroyers
K: Mundanifying Mystics
L: Mundanifying Mystics
M: Spectre Slayers
N: Phantom Pummelers
O: Wraith Wranglers
P: Mundanifying Mystics
Q: Wraith Wranglers
R: Mundanifying Mystics
S: Spectre Slayers
T: Mundanifying Mystics
U: Phantom Pummelers
V: Demon Destroyers
W: Demon Destroyers
Edit after seeing simon's answer:
We appear to have done pretty much the exact same things - identified the major/minor spirit distinction, not found anything to do with it, just fed the stats into a linear regression - and gotten the exact same answer.
I think FTX is somewhat relevant to my #4 (de facto cost of loaning money to prediction markets may be quite high), and to the comment thread around here about how accessible/usable various ways of working around US law to bet on prediction markets are. I don't think it changes my opinion very substantially.
While I think these arguments are sufficient on their own (and am unimpressed with Michael's arguments), there is one I think is missing:
'Guilty' can encapsulate a wide range of verdicts for a wide variety of crimes, and even a client who is guilty of something is not necessarily guilty of everything or deserving of maximal punishment.
A client who is unambiguously guilty of manslaughter can still deserve representation to defend them against a charge of murder.
This is also an area that requires expert support: most non-lawyers treat the phrases 'robbing a house' and 'burgling a house' interchangeably, but the first is a much more serious crime. Even 'how should I address the judge to not offend him unnecessarily and worsen my sentence' is something that a lawyer can legitimately help even a totally guilty client with.
I'm glad you liked it, thank you!
This entry was billed as "relatively simple", but I think it was about median difficulty by the standards of D&D.Sci; pretty sure it was harder than (for example) The Sorceror's Personal Shopper.
I guess that's fair. There's a complication here in that...uh...almost all of my scenarios have been above-median complexity and almost all of yours have been below-median. (I should probably write down my thoughts on this at some point). I agree that this one wasn't simpler than most of yours, but I think that it was still a much more approachable entry point than e.g. Duels & D.Sci, or League of Defenders.
(It's possible we should try to standardize a 1-10 complexity scale or some such so that we can stick a difficulty rating on the top of each scenario.)
"STORY (skippable)" was kind of misleading this time
Fair enough, I can tweak that for anyone who finds the scenario in future.
I intended that the story should not provide much help...the intent was not for players to notice that Anachronos was suspicious in-story, the intent was for them to notice from the data, and for the hints in the story to be just some quiet confirmation for a player who realized the twist from the data and then went back to reread the story.
On the other hand, I was expecting more players to get the twist, and thought that I'd only really catch players who ignored the ingredient names entirely and just fed the data into an ML algorithm, so I'm clearly not very well calibrated on this. I was really quite surprised by how many players analyzed the data well enough to say "Barkskin potion requires Crushed Onyx and Ground Bone, Necromantic Power Potion requires Beech Bark and Oaken Twigs" and then went on to say "this sounds reasonable, I have no further questions." (Maybe the onyx-necromancy connection is more D&D lore than most players knew? But I thought that the bone-necromancy and bark-barkskin connections would be obvious even without that).
"Archmage Anachronos is trying to brew Barkskin Potion" was A) the GM saying something false directly to the players
I...think I'm in general allowed to say false things directly to the players as a D&D GM? If the Big Bad is disguised as your innkeeper while the real innkeeper is tied up in the cellar, I think I can say 'The innkeeper tells you it'll be six silver for a room', I don't think I need to say 'The man who introduced himself to you as the innkeeper.'
(Also, you are a Data Scientist. Sense Motive is not a class skill for you. Clearly you failed a Sense Motive check and so believed him!)
...I'll think about whether I want to tweak that line for potential future players.
Are you sure you are reading the dataset correctly? In particular, which row number do you think shows him brewing together Crushed Onyx, Redwood Sap, and Vampire Fang to yield a Barkskin Potion? I suspect you may be looking at row 118078 (or 118079 if you include the header row), in which he did brew a Barkskin Potion and did use those three ingredients - but he also used a Giant's Toe, Ground Bone, and Oaken Twigs. Are you seeing something different in the dataset?
EDIT: Never mind, looks like you caught this and edited in your comment. Sorry for the bother, just wanted to make sure I hadn't screwed up the upload in some way.
I would accept the position 'this question is not well-defined'. However, I don't think I accept the position 'actually an electron is bigger once we define things this way'.
(For one thing, I think that definition may imply that an electron is bigger than me?)
Also, I think this overall argument is a nitpick that is not particularly relevant to Scott's article, unless you think that a large percentage of the respondents to that survey were quantum physicists.
The question is not comparing electrons to protons or neutrons, or even to atomic nuclei (in which case the electron has less mass but spread over a wider area, and you're right that the answer seems likely to be that the electron is bigger).
It is comparing electrons to atoms, which contain multiple electrons as well as protons and neutrons.
Seconded. I feel like much more of what I've seen before has taken the form of "no, we're not trying to target AI with ad-hoc changes to liability law/copyright, we're just trying to consistently apply the rules that already apply to people," which is rather in tension with this section.
This is true, but '80%' here means only 16/20. A result this extreme is theoretically p=0.005 to show up out of 20 coin flips...if you treat it as one-tailed, and ignore the fact that you've cherry-picked two specific material-pair options out of 21. Overall, I'd be very surprised if this wasn't simply randomness.
Every structure produced by an architect who apprenticed under B. Johnson or P. Stamatin is impossible. No structure produced by an architect who apprenticed under M. Escher, R. Penrose or T. Geisel is impossible. Slightly under half of self-taught architects produce impossible structures. Materials, blueprints, etc. have no visible effect on this.
There are 5 structures proposed by apprentices to B. Johnson or P. Stamatin (D, E, G, H and K), so we don't need to risk any of the self-taught people.
Cost is based on materials: Nightmares are by far the most expensive, Silver a distant second, the others seem comparable and cheap. G is the only one of our candidates who plans to use Nightmares, so we leave them out and fund D, E, H and K.
If a business doesn't value money because it can't convert money into political power for the CCP, that would in fact be somewhat disturbing.
I'm always happy to have more players: if you want more than one day that's not a big deal, I'm happy to delay until next week if you'd like.
Understood, I'll refrain from posting the solution tomorrow until I've heard from you - if you want more time, let me know and I can push that further back.
Shouldn't that be counting the number squared rather than the number?
If you enjoyed the concept there have been sequels to this: if you want one that's currently being actively played I have one running now, or there's a D&D.Sci tag with a list of all past scenarios.
I'm likely not to actually quantify 'relative to' - there might be an ordered list of players if it seems reasonable to me (for example, if one submission uses 10 soldiers to get a 50% winrate and one uses 2 soldiers to get a 49% winrate, I would feel comfortable ranking the second ahead of the first - or if all players decide to submit the same number of soldiers, the rankings will be directly comparable), but more likely I'll just have a chart as in your Boojumologist scenario:
with one line added for 'optimal play' (above or equal to all players) and one for 'random play' (hopefully below all players).
Overall, I don't think there's much optimization of the leaderboard/plot available to you - if you find yourself faced with a tough choice between an X% winrate with 9 soldiers or a Y% winrate with 8 soldiers, I don't anticipate the leaderboard taking a position on which of those is 'better'.
Will that extra credit be worth...uh...at least 1.98 gp?
I can't help but read this post as something like this:
- Current government mandates around children are very harmful to children.
- Enforcement of current cultural norms around children is very harmful to children.
- ???
- We need to add on and enforce these three new government mandates around children and these two new cultural norms around children.
There is one section arguing that schools are prisons that children hate and are miserable in. And then there is another section advocating for the schools to crack down harshly on children using their phones in school. I find this somewhat depressing.
Haven't found anything particularly good, but I've probably gone as far as I'll go. I've done some analysis trying to predict how much variance we expect from each turtle so that I know how much to overestimate, and for the non-special turtles I'm predicting:
Abigail: 23.0lb
Bertrand: 19.0lb
Chartreuse: 26.2lb
Donatello Dontanien: 21.1lb
Espera: 17.3lb
(Flint is already estimated as a gray turtle as 7.3lb)
Gunther: 30.0lb
(Harold is already estimated as a six-segmented clone as 20.4lb)
Irene: 23.7lb
Jacqueline: 20.0lb
I'm rounding these to 0.1lb even though I'm allowed to go more granular, because if the Tyrant weighs to the same precision we do he will also be rounding to 0.1lb, which means we don't gain anything from more precision (estimating 7.25lb gives a payoff exactly halfway between estimating 7.3 and 7.2).
I'll put these estimates in the parent comment for ease of GM extraction.
The one interesting thing I've turned up is that Abnormalities appear to convey a very large amount of variance: each abnormality adds ~1lb of average weight, but actually slightly over 1lb of stdev-weight. I suspect that abnormalities are adding weight in a highly-random way: my weight estimates for Espera, Irene and Jacqueline (0-abnormality turtles) are relatively low as a result because my confidence was higher, while my estimate for Gunther (6 abnormalities?) has a lot more safety margin built in.
A simple linear regression analysis on the remaining turtles (everything that isn't a Fanged Gray Turtle or a Six-Segmented Harold Clone) gives the following formula:
- 10.56lb base weight if green...
- +2.02lb if grayish-green,
- +5.47lb if greenish-gray,
- +0.359lb/Wrinkle
- +0.142lb/Scar
- +0.598lb/Segment
- +1.000lb/Abnormality
This does a reasonable job of prediction, but has a residual with a fairly-large ~2lb standard deviation. Our standard-deviation math suggests that this means we should give the Tyrant answers overestimating each turtle by 2.4-2.5lb, and should expect to lose on average ~35gp/turtle to error.
That seems like we might be able to improve on it, but I'm not sure how. I haven't been able to find any useful interactions yet. There does seem to be an obvious explanation of all the traits except Abnormalities being driven by some hidden Age variable: old turtles start getting grayish, are wrinklier, have grown more shell segments and accumulated more scars, and are larger. However, I'm not sure how actionable this is for us.
The one thing it does look like I can do is adjust the amount of overestimation I do: it does seem that our estimate is less accurate as turtles get older and larger, and so rather than overestimating by 2.44lb for every turtle I should overestimate the larger ones by more and the smaller by less. That's not going to be a very large improvement, though. I feel like there ought to be something else to do, but haven't found anything yet.
The Fanged Gray Turtle seems relatively simple, so we look at that first.
The weight of a Fanged Gray Turtle seems well-approximated by (0.425 + 0.4568*#segments) lb.
This leaves behind a residual that looks roughly like a normal distribution with stdev ~0.357lb. I'm not able to find any interaction of this residual with any other properties of the turtles - scars, mutations, etc. all seem unpredictive for the Fanged Gray Turtle.
Some quick math reveals that the Tyrant's asymmetric payoff distribution encourages us to overestimate a turtle's weight by ~1.22 standard deviations. Therefore, we're going to bump up all our weight estimates by 0.435lb in order to flatter His Tyranny.
(We could bump them up a bit further if we thought that reducing the odds of him having an unflattering portrait of us was worth trading off money for. However, I actually think we can plausibly use that to extract more money: whatever itinerant artist he kidnaps to do that portrait, we can demand that they give us part of their commission in exchange for us being helpful and sitting for the portrait! Kaching!)
There's only one Fanged Gray Turtle among the Tyrant's pets: Flint, with 14 Shell Segments. Our best guess of Flint's true weight is 6.8lb, but we're going to overestimate this to 7.3lb in order to optimize our payoff.
And two(low-priority) questions for the GM:
- Are we unusually careful and competent at weighing turtles in a way that the Tyrant is not likely to be? If he is careless about weighing his turtles, and introduces additional error, that increased variance makes us want to slightly increase how far we overestimate by.
- What level of granularity are we able to give the Tyrant in our weight estimates? I think that an estimate of 7.25lb for Flint is slightly higher-payoff than 7.3lb in expectation, but don't know if that's something I'm allowed to give.
When we look at the distributions of variables individually, there's a startling number (5-6k out of 30k) of green turtles with 6 shell segments (the lowest number, never seen otherwise), zero wrinkles, and zero abnormalities, that weigh exactly 20.4lb.
They do have varying numbers of scars, though, which makes me incline more towards 'some very particular turtle subspecies' and less towards 'one very friendly turtle that figured out that it can get extra attention by wiping off the mark you put on it and coming by again'.
Harold from the King's pets matches this pattern (and thus presumably is one of these strange clone turtles).
Removing those and looking at the rest of the universe:
- The remaining green turtles now resemble the grayish-green and greenish-gray turtles, making me draw the following three species:
- Fanged Gray Turtles.
- Six-Segmented Harold Clones.
- All Other Turtles.
- Most variables are now reasonably smoothly-distributed:
- Scars and Wrinkles look Poisson-like.
- Abnormalities peak at 0 and fall off: that might also be a poisson distribution, just from a lower mean, or might be something else.
- Weights are bimodal (with one peak around 5-6lb for the Fanged Gray Turtles, and one wider peak around 15-25lb for All Other Turtles).
EDITED TO ADD FINAL ANSWER:
- Abigail: 23.0lb
- Bertrand: 19.0lb
- Chartreuse: 26.2lb
DonatelloDontanien: 21.1lb- Espera: 17.3lb
- Flint: 7.3lb
- Gunther: 30.0lb
- Harold: 20.4lb
- Irene: 23.7lb
- Jacqueline: 20.0lb
Getting started with my favorite first step of calculating a bunch of correlations:
- It turns out that all fanged turtles are gray, and all gray turtles are fanged.
- This suggests some kind of speciation by color.
- When we break down by color:
- Grayish-green and greenish-gray turtles show near-identical patterns - I assume those are the same species and you've just categorized them a couple different way:
- Weight is positively correlated with wrinkles, scars, shell segments and abnormalities.
- The first three of these are positively correlated with one another, and probably reflect some hidden 'age' variable. Number of abnormalities is not correlated with the others, and seems to do its own thing. (Turtles grown larger with age, and also weigh more per extra mutant tentacle they have grown?)
- Nostril size has no effect.
- Gray turtles work differently:
- They show the same pattern of wrinkles, scars and shell segments being positively correlated.
- However, weight in this case seems to be almost entirely determined by # of shell segments.
- Perhaps these turtles grow at a more predictable rate, with one shell segment per year that adds a regular amount of weight?
- And green turtles also work differently:
- The correlations between wrinkles, scars and shell segments have broken down.
- Additionally, those variables have only small correlations with weight.
- The most predictive variable towards weight is the # of abnormalities.
- Perhaps these are strange mutant
ninjaturtles of some kind thatare perpetually teenagedon't have a regular growth lifecycle?
- Grayish-green and greenish-gray turtles show near-identical patterns - I assume those are the same species and you've just categorized them a couple different way:
- It looks like these three species of turtle behave differently enough that I'm probably going to end up modelling the three of them all separately (except maybe the what-I'm-assuming-is-age effect that shows up on both gray and mixed-color turtles).
- My planned next step is to try three independent simple regressions and see how predictive they are for each of those three types of turtle.
The argument Zvi is making.
They open with the Battle of the Board. Altman starts with how he felt rather than any details, and drops this nugget: “And there were definitely times I thought it was going to be one of the worst things to ever happen for AI safety.” If he truly believed that, why did he not go down a different road? If Altman had come out strongly for a transition to Mutari and searching for a new outside CEO, that presumably would have been fine for AI safety. So this then is a confession that he was willing to put that into play to keep power.
I don't have a great verbalization of why, but want to register that I find this sort of attempted argument kind of horrifying.
I'm surprised to hear you say that. I would consider it perfectly reasonable to use a line graph without a zero-based y-axis to plot gravity against altitude: the underlying reality is in fact a line (well, a curve I guess)! Gravitational force goes down with altitude in a known way! But the effects of altitude on gravity are very small for altitudes we can easily measure, and extending the graph all the way down to zero will make it impossible to see them.
If I measure gravitational force against altitude, and end up with points like the following:
- 0 ft above sea level, force is 9.8000 m/s2
- 1000 ft above sea level, force is 9.7992 m/s2
- 2000 ft above sea level, force is 9.7986 m/s2
- 3000 ft above sea level, force is 9.7980 m/s2
would it be egregious for me to plot this graph without a zero-based y-axis? Do I need to plot it with a y-axis going down to zero?
Certainly there are cases where it's misleading to not extend a graph like this down to zero. But there are also cases where it's entirely reasonable to not extend it down to zero.
I did not understand #8 at all. I am confident that this is not because I don't understand the general point. Does anyone have an explanation of #8?
<trolling>
The S&P500 has returned an average of ~8%/year for the past 30 years. As you say, we have on many occasions observed people lying, cheating, and scamming. But we have only rarely observed lucrative good ideas! Why, even banks, which claim much more safety and offer much lower returns than the stock market, have frequently gone bust!
It follows inevitably, therefore, that there is a very high chance that the S&P 500, and the stock market in general, is a scam, and will steal all your money.
It follows further that the only safe investment approach is to put all your money into something that you retain personal custody of. Like gold bars buried in your backyard! Or Bitcoin!
</trolling>
'Bike' is sometimes used as shorthand for 'motorcycle', in which case the 'absurdly dangerous' claim stands. I agree that riding a pedal-powered cycle without a helmet is somewhat dangerous, and unnecessarily so, but not 'absurdly dangerous'.
On the object-level of your particular case, I don't see how you've ended up rate-limited. The post of yours that I think you're talking about is currently at +214 karma, which makes it quite strange that your related comments are being rate-limited - I don't understand how that algorithm works but I think that seems very odd. Is it counting downvotes but not upvotes, so that +300 and -100 works out to rate-limiting? That would be bizarre.
In the general case, however, I'm very much on board with rate-limiting people who are heavily net downvoted, and I think that referring to this as 'censorship' is misleading. When I block a spam caller, or decide not to invite someone who constantly starts loud angry political arguments to a dinner party, it seems very strange to say that I am 'censoring' them. I agree that this can lead to feedback loops that punish unpopular opinions, but that seems like a smaller cost than communities having to listen to every spammer/jerk who wants to rant at them.
The 'full repayment' part is only sort of true, in a similar way to what happened with MTGOX, due to bankruptcy claims being USD-denominated.
Suppose that:
- You owe customers 100 Bitcoin and $1M.
- You have only half of that, 50 Bitcoins and $500k.
- The current price of Bitcoin is $20k.
You are clearly insolvent. You will enter bankruptcy, and the bankruptcy estate will say 'you have $3M in liabilities', since you owe $1M in cash and $2M in bitcoin.
Suppose that the price of bitcoin then recovers to $50k. You now have $3M in assets, since you have $500k in cash and $2.5M in bitcoin! You can 'fully repay' everyone! Hooray!
Of course, anyone who held a Bitcoin with you is getting back much less than a bitcoin in value, but since the bankruptcy court is evaluating your claims as USD liabilities you don't need to care about that.
This 'full repayment' is plausibly still important from a legal or a PR perspective, but e.g. this part:
there is typically a legal fight over whether a company was insolvent at the time of the investment or that the investment led to insolvency. If every FTX creditor stands to get 100 cents on the dollar, the clawback cases that don’t involve fraud wouldn’t serve much of a financial purpose and may be more difficult to argue, some lawyers say
is better thought of as 'our legal system may get confused by exchange rates and pretend FTX was always solvent' rather than as 'FTX was actually always solvent'.
Competition should improve meth and reading outcomes here.
Is this a typo, or a snarky comment on reducing student drug use?
We don't care about how many FLOPs something has. We care about how fast it can actually solve things.
As far as I know, in every case where we've successfully gotten AI to do a task at all, AI has done that task far far faster than humans. When we had computers that could do arithmetic but nothing else, they were still much faster at arithmetic than humans. Whatever your view on the quality of recent AI-generated text or art, it's clear that AI is producing it much much faster than human writers or artists can produce text/art.
This change would not get rid of the need for researchers to have a non-research skillset to secure funding. It would just switch the required non-research skillset from 'wrangling money out of grant committees' to 'wrangling positions out of administrators'. Your mileage may vary as to which of those two is less dysfunctional.
Keep quiet about it! If the FDA hears about this we won't be allowed to conduct surgeries any more!
Thanks for making this!
It looks like Simon was right about the effects of Pi and Murphy being linear/cubic in isolation: I modeled everything as logarithmic because it let me use simple linear regression more easily, and ended up just hitting pi/murphy with regressions until I got something that fit acceptably.
(I am surprised that I got such good fits off things like 1/(7-Murphy), I wonder if that fits well with the log version of the chart for some reason).
I think there was a bit of a missed opportunity in not having there be sneaky interactions/hypersphere effects. This was a scenario where it would have been extremely fair to have an effect that triggered based on a threshold not of e.g. Latitude but of something horrendous like cos(Latitude)*cos(Shortitude)*cos(Deltitude): in any other scenario an effect like that might be overcomplicated, but here I think it would have been perfectly natural and made sense when uncovered. I was looking for spheric-type effects, but the only thing like that was Longitude's effect being sine-wavey.
They can't weigh in, they're dead!