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I guess the didn’t have their programming class yet😂
If you wrote a C program and it doesn’t do what you predicted, would you assume that your compiler is broken or that you made a mistake? If I got a dollar for every time someone wrongly complained that “there is a bug in compiler”…
World is complex. We use theory to build models describing the reality and compare their predictions with experiment. If you notice mismatch between model and experiment, it might be a problem with:
- Your experiment.
- Your model.
- Or your theory.
You have to further dissect and understand the root cause of the mismatch before you make any judgement.
Run away while you still can. Yeah, it’s scary. And heartbreaking. But you might not have that opportunity later on.
Take everyone with you whom you can.
You don’t have to run to some extremely different country/culture. There is lots of relatively wealthy Slavic countries in the Central Europe.
And talented programmers can always find job here.
Let me know if you need help with that.
The plug map is wrong. Gibraltar is using British plugs and should be purple.
Well, the correct question is “What is energy”. And the answer is that energy is some number that we can compute for any physical system and it doesn’t change no matter what as long as the system is reasonably isolated from its surroundings. Kinetic energy is just a portion of this quantity we can compute for something that is moving.
It’s not very intuitive honestly. The best explanation for what energy is I ever read is this one from Feynman:
It feels to me that you lack a good intuition for how kinetic energy, momentum conservation,, Newton laws, and Galileo's relativity all play together and this is causing you confusion.
Relativity says that there is no objective notion of "being still". We can't objectively distinguish between being still and moving at constant velocity (same speed, same direction).
2nd Newton law: Force is equal to mass times acceleration: .
3nd Newton law: All forces in the nature exhibit the property that if object A acts on B with a force F, then B acts on A with exactly opposite force.
1st Newton law is boring, it just says that if F = 0, then a = 0.
Force and Energy are tied together through the concept of work which says that change in objects energy = work received by that object. And formula for work is , notice the dot product here! Force perpendicular to movement doesn't make any impact on energy.
Putting all of this together, it's useful for you to do following exercises:
- Try to derive the formula for kinetic energy.
- Try to derive the formula for potential energy in the gravitational field of Earth near the surface (neglecting change of gravitational force with height).
- Try to derive the law of conservation of momentum.
Once you do the three above, I have a tricky paradox problem for you to solve:
Imagine two cars driving on the road with the speed . Suddenly the first car accelerates to double the speed, thus travelling . This naturally required consumption of energy in the form of fuel. The change in kinetic energy was: and this should somehow correspond to the amount of the fuel consumed.
However, from the point of the view of the second driver, the car was starting still and accelerated to the velocity , thus the change in energy is simply .
But, this is paradox. It's not possible that the car would spend 3 times less fuel from the point of view of the other car than from the point of view of the observer standing still on the ground.
Can you explain this paradox?
That's an excellent question!
Change in energy must equal work done on the moving body .
Now, work is force over distance
But we also know that force is mass times acceleration, thus .
If you have a body moving under the influence of constant force over time , starting from the speed 0, it will have a speed at the end. It's easy to see that the average speed it travels will be though and thus the distance travelled will be .
Now, the kinetic energy equals work and thus .
Surely. You just need to make some prior on the 3rd. Note, that the 3rd hypothesis is something along the lines of “there is some other model besides Boltzmann hypothesis or Boltzmann brain”, not a specific hypothesis. It can be big bang, god created the universe, or we live inside simulation. Whatever.
Now, you would have to assign unreasonably small prior to this for it not to end up many orders of magnitude more probable than either of Boltzmann Hypothesis or Brain.
I understand your post as trying to argue that Boltzmann hypothesis is more probable than the Boltzmann brain because our subjective experiences are consistent with physical laws.
If that’s the case, your conclusions are wrong. Boltzmann brain is still more probable in this scenario. The mistake you make is excluding the 3rd option that the reality we experience is objective for some other reason (a reason we might not understand yet).
Now, your post is a good argument in favor of 3rd option and against both Boltzmann brain and Boltzmann hypothesis.
Thank you for writing this.
I always felt lots of empathy to all the people in my out-group[1]. Yeah, they believe to a bunch of wrong ideas for dubious reasons. So? My in-group usually believes a bunch of right ideas for similarly dubious reasons! They have no moral high-ground to claim the truth. Often, the out-group has better ideas to believe what they do than my in-group despite being wrong about the end result.
I actually think that it's worse when people are right for the wrong reasons than if they are wrong. In the latter case, there is at least a chance that reality will slap them into face eventually.
- ^
Out-group here is strongly topic dependent. Pretty much for every topic the in-group and out-group looks different to me.
I don’t think it’s much grey. It’s not the question of whether you are doing perfect job protecting your identity, but are you even trying?
I would say that the norm should be:
— If someone is building pure online persona, it isn’t appropriate to dox them because of their online activities. There essentially is no added value for society in doing this. The person is using pseudonym to freely communicate their views and opinions while protecting their day-to-day life.
— Once anyone starts to bring real physical life into the conversation (such as your example) they are becoming a fair game. It’s them who linked their online presence to real life, they doxxed themselves.
I would say, if you want to stay anonymous, you should show at least some effort in trying to protect your identity.
I would say that zip and unzip can be understood as an equivalent to rar and unrar, tar and untar. I wouldn’t say that it necessarily needs anyone imagining a bag being zipped. But, it might as well be the fact that English isn’t my first language.
If it seems weird to spend hours deliberating and negotiating over an Excel sheet with your partner, consider how weird it is not to do that - you are making a decision that will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars and is binding for years; if you made this type of decisions at work without running any numbers, you'd be out of a job and likely in court pretty quickly.
I am making decisions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars without running any numbers pretty often at work.
They haven’t fired me yet.
Well, on the similarity/difference point, I would say that the line between legally rearranging one’s affairs and not paying what is owed is a very thin line. Government usually doesn’t like when you rearrange stuff to reduce your taxes and thus often the legal doctrine says that as long as your primary motivation in rearranging your affairs was lower tax it’s classified as a tax evasion and thus illegal.
On the morality point, I am not defending the deranged “the end justifies the means” principle. All I am saying is that many people don’t consider the power the government is exerting over them (eg the power to collect taxes) as legitimate and thus don’t see anything wrong with not paying the taxes.
Why?
Some people don’t believe in the moral imperative to pay taxes they legally owe.
Well, these relationships have a very important characteristic which is that the younger catches up with the older quite quickly and often overcomes him/her. The asymmetry is often quite a temporary matter.
I would say that most visible is this on parent/child relationship. As the child reaches adulthood, he/she becomes more and more equal with the parent. I would claim that around 30 they are pretty much equals. And the relationships (at least from what I observed) become very symmetrical: parent brings up his/her problems as often as child. As the parent becomes older, the roles often reverse a lot. It’s the child that needs to help the aging parent to navigate the world.
Lastly, you mention 1/3 as somehow being a low factor. I don’t know what the true factor is but I would consider 1/3 to be quite a good ROI ;-)
I agree. But also, they often transform into friendship over time.
I would just say that it’s normal for many relationships to be asymmetric: mentor/mentee, parent/child, master/apprentice.
These don’t need to involve money. Investing your time on helping other human being to grow might be rewarding experience as of itself.
Wow. Once you start doing things in this bureaucracy manner it’s pretty much Game Over. The Moloch won.
I actually believe in a simpler solution: trust but verify. Let your managers make whatever decisions they decide and make sure that no form of corruption/nepotism will be tolerated. Then, if you happen to find an occurrence, fire the manager immediately and make it clear to his peers that this will happen to anyone who crosses the integrity line.
My understanding is that Jews were 1/3 of the total population, not 20%.
I agree though that the UN plan for Palestine was too generous to Israel, but that might have also be caused by Arab side essentially sabotaging it and not engaging in negotiations?
And the actual outcome for Israel turned out to be even more than the original UN plan was suggesting. Still, I don't know how a good solution would look like here. Jews were the underdog here and if they wouldn't secure the territory they secured, it would probably get pretty bloody bad for them. Simply, them having some smaller territory that wouldn't really be defensible doesn't seem like a stable equilibrium to me. Also, it's not like they are discriminating against their Arab citizens (20% of today's population). I don't think there would be any Jews alive today would the roles be reversed.
Don't get me wrong, this is not me trying to absolve them of the war crimes they did, nor me trying to say that it's fair that they pretty much got most of the land while Arab's live an an Apartheid state occupied by Israel.
I am just saying that I don't think that there was some magic easy solution back in 1948 that would lead to magically better situation than there is today.
FYI: This is the proposal from 1937 rejected by Arabs that would have been IMO fair according to population criteria. I have no idea whether that kind of land would be viable from the military point of view. The long thin stretch of blue seems like really hard to defend.
I am not saying that displacing 700,000 people was okay. I am saying is that splitting the region between two people who were already living there was right. Especially given that these two people could not be realistically capable co-governing together given their not-so-great relationship.
But you are changing argument on the go. First, you start by saying it's not ok to come to someone else's land and steal it (100% agreement on that). Then you pretend that somehow there were not living Jews in Palestine (they were already). They had as much right for the land as all the muslims that lived there.
Wow. I didn’t know about these details honestly. I guess we can agree that Israel did many things that were wrong, and we can even call those war crimes.
I just don’t agree with your original claim that the very creation of Israel was wrong.
Well, I guess that our memories work differently then. I truly don’t have a single memory that I would wish not to have. I see them as value. I don’t really feel that I am paying any price just by having them.
Well, there is a strict difference between "Sorry, I can't discuss this topic, I am under a strict NDA" vs sharing details of the contract you signed. Yes, I am aware that the content of contracts usually is protected by confidentiality, but not necessary the very existence of them.
Well, I am not a masochist. I don't like experiencing pain. Do you? ;-)
Yet, I experienced lot's of painful moments in my life, as I guess everyone. And I mean both physical and psychological. Now, I am not traumatised by these memories. I am not trying to get rid of them, why would I? They are often valuable lessons and they help me better calibrate what to expect from the future experiences.
For many, I am glad they happened. I believe that some amount of painful experiences is good for people to experience. Pain makes you grow.
For some, I don't think the value for pain was good enough and if I could choose, I would rather not experience them. But, does that mean I should wish to get rid of the value (memory) now that the price is paid (pain?)? That would be silly, wouldn't it?
Well, first I would prefer actual anesthetic that would render me unconscious. But if that’s not available, then I would rather retain my memories than not.
I think you are working under a wrong assumption that there was something as Palestine where Palestinians lived.
The reality was that there was an Ottoman Empire, they lost in a WW1, and thus they lost this region to British. There lived Jews and Muslims there, though there were more Muslims than Jews. It happened to go under the name of “Palestine region”, but thats similar like saying “What did those Czechs and Slovaks thought settling in the Hungary and carving out a portion of the country? Didn’t they notice that there were Hungarians living for like a thousand of years already?
If I would have to choose between drug A and no drug at all, I will take no drug any time. Why would I want to not have the memories but live through the experience? That’s really silly.
I would say it to be quite unusual to not be allowed to say that you are under NDA.
I am honestly confused with why everyone considers non-disparaging agreements bad in all contexts.
People often end up hating each other, eg sometimes bad break-ups happen. I do think that “I am not going to bad-mouth you, you’re not going to bad-mouth me” is a sensible fair thing to do that allows people a) move on with their lives without a fear of retaliation, b) allows more honest relationships when they work because you don’t have to be constantly collecting “evidence” for potential future defense?
And, the same way this makes sense in relationships, I see it making sense in employer-employee relationship?
I don't know how it looks like at your work, so hard to judge. But, I would say that your wife and kids do owe you, and you do owe them. It's not like you can stop carrying for your wife and kids tomorrow without breaching a strong (though informal) social contract.
And well, your colleagues are paid to do their job, but normally I would expect them to have a lots of freedom in how they do the job and how much of their attention will they spend helping other people? So, it's still kind of a choice if they do? But, again, I don't know your workplace, so maybe its more strict and formal?
I would say that for good workplaces the difference is smaller. Surely, especially in managerial position, you'll have to help lots of people with their psychological issues, insecurities, troubles, etc... I would say that about 30% of my meetings are closed door, other happen in common spaces. In most of the cases when the meeting is closed door, it's to provide the other person with privacy and feeling of security.
My oldest one is 6 and sometimes he really needs some privacy and thus we do sometimes close door behind us. It's not as often as at work because a) I have less kids than employees, b) I suspect older he gets more private talks will he want to have.
At work people are paid to talk to me. If they like me or not, they kind of need to with with me. In real life, relationships don't work that way. No one it's getting paid to help me and every interaction with me is a choice.
Actually, I see it much the opposite way. You can choose to not to talk with people at work, eg by quitting.
It’s much more difficult to stop talking to your kids, wife. Sure, you can get divorce, but that’s kind of extreme compared to quitting the job :-)
What’s wrong about closed doors meetings at home?
Sometimes your kid needs to have a feel of privacy for a hard conversation and it really helps to seclude from the group and talk behind close doors.
Sometimes you have disagreements with your wife about how to deal with behavior of your kids, again, the conversation you better leave for the time kids are asleep or not around.
I am quite confused what the statement actually is. I don’t buy the argument about game ending in 30 seconds. The article quite clearly implies that it will last forever. If we are not playing a repeated game here, then none of this makes senses and all the (rational) players would turn the knob immediately to 30. You can induct from the last move to prove that.
If we are playing a finite game that has a probability p of ending in any given turn, it shouldn’t change much either.
I also don’t understand the argument about “context of equilibrium”.
I guess it would be helpful to formalize the statement you are trying to state.
I don’t think this works. Here is my strategy:
- I set the dial to 30 and don’t change it no matter what.
- In the second round, temperature lowers to 98.3.
- In the third round all the silly people except me push the dial to 100 and thus we get 99.3.
- I don’t deviate from 30, no matter how many rounds of 99.3 be there.
- At some point someone figures out that I am not going to deviate and they defect too, now we have 88.6.
- The avalanche has started. It won’t take long to get to 30.
Now, this was a perfectly rational course of action for me. I knew that I will suffer temporarily, but in exchange I got a comfortable temperature for eternity.
Prove me wrong.
Actually you got it backwards. The so called intellectual property doesn’t have typical attributes of property:
– exclusivity: if I take it from you, you don’t have it anymore
– enforceability: it’s not trivial to even find out my “art was stolen”
– independence: I can violate your IP by accident even if I never seen any of your works (typical for patents), this can’t happen with proper property
– clear definition: you usually don’t need courts to decide whether I actually took your car or not.
Besides that, IP is in direct conflict with proper property rights (right to use your own property freely).
However, having IP is a practical way of overcoming the black passenger problem. But that’s the reason it was created in the first place. That’s the reason it actually expires after some time and works become a part of “public domain”. (Can you imagine a car becoming a part of public domain? See the difference?)
Now, even the US constitution is aware of this and explicitly states “progress of science and arts” as the only lawful reason to enact copyright.
[The Congress shall have power] “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
Nonsense. The fact that you can see some vague parallels between phlogiston and electrons or energy doesn’t make phlogiston theory any good. The fact that you can’t decide whether phlogiston represents electrons or energy should be a hint here.
Scientific theory should give useful predictions about the world and help us compress information. Phlogiston one does neither.
I would be careful to discern between fraud and police state allegations of fraud. Aaron Swartz is clearly the latter and it at least deserves to be mentioned in the article.
The line between good and bad is thin. This technique can be and often is misused for manipulation. The white-hat use of this technique is to make the other person stop and think.
Of course, my rewrite was a hyperbole;)
But you are right about value subjectivity. “I feel” are an amazing technique to deescalate conflicts and built rapport. You cannot disagree with my feelings! That’s quite powerful.
I agree with you these are useful in dialogues whether in person or in comments section.
I don’t believe they (usually) have a place in books or blogposts. Those are not situations requiring conflict deescalation. The “I think” is filler because it is implied. Of course the author writes what he thinks.
You are taking this to the extreme. The goal is to make text succinct, to get rid of fillers. It doesn’t mean that you can’t make likelihood statements when warranted, just don’t start every sentence with agnostic “maybe”, or “I think”.
I think you might be taking this to the extreme. I guess that the goal might be to make text succinct, or maybe to get rid of fillers. I would probably say that it doesn’t mean that you can’t make likelihood statements when warranted, but it might be better to not to start every sentence with agnostic “maybe”, or “I think”.
My understanding of Pascal Mugging is following:
Robber approaches you promising you lots of utility in exchange of giving him $1. The probability he is not lying is extremely low, yet the utility is extremely high, so you give him $1.
The above reasoning has one trivial flaw. How do you know that there isn't a person testing your virtues, which would actually give you lots of utility if you refused to give this person $1? What makes you think that receiving lots of utility when you succumb to the robber is more probable than receiving lots of utility if you stand up to the robber?
Agreed. Hitler was total amateur. Commies killed much more people and actually managed to terrorize people for almost a century.
The following two points are contradicting each other:
- In theory at least, Georgism is correct that a land tax will not cause rents to rise.
- Land will become cheaper to buy, and there will be more pressure to use it in an economically viable way.
I believe the 2nd is correct, whereas the first one isn't. The extra pressure will result in real rents rising. If the land is under-utilised today (e.g., empty, or a garden where nice big house could stand) the maximum possible rent is not being charged. Possible reason might be that the current land-lord can't make the required capital investments (building the house) needed to extract the market rent, yet he might not want to sell (speculation on future prices).
This will result in following two effects:
- The market rent will go down because the pressure on effectivity will increase the supply.
- The average rent charged in practice will go up because of the land where the market rate isn't extracted today.
The thing here is, that ancient people discovered that notes which have frequencies in a ratio of small integers sound good together. Eg. 2:3.
For a long time, people were creating scales trying to have as many nice ratios as possible. This has problems. I’ll let you think about those yourself.
Then some guy figured out that human ear is not perfect and we can’t really tell whether we hear 2:3 or 2:2.9966. And came up with idea of doing those 12th rootes of 2.
Now, try to do 2^(7/12). Try also 2^(4/12). You see ?
It’s more than that, there is no uncertainty about probabilities in the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_(game) and yet, there can be a conflict.
You might want to fight even if it’s more expensive than compromising, because you are playing a repeated game. You don’t want to send a signal that you are a kind of person who compromises with an aggressor.
Few quick examples:
Why is it “out of curiosity” and not “out of the curiosity”?
Why “see in context” and not “see in the context”? (See the button below this form)
Why “hide previous comment” and not “hide the previous comment”? (See the button above this form)
I am not a native speaker. Funnily, I don't do the kind of mistakes you mention, there are other much more counterintuitive aspects of the language for me:
- Capitalisation. That the century should be lowercase is obvious, but why is "English language" with the capital E? And why March with the capital M? Those are not proper nouns either.
- Commas. I would expect more people to have a problem with commas than with a phenomenon vs phenomena.
- Articles. I can never decide whether to put an article there or not.
- Yes
- Yes
- Only if they volunteer.
- It’s called taxes.
- Why would I? Everyone should have a right to harm themselves if they wish so.
- Never. Privacy is much more important than few lives saved.