Posts
Comments
I understand that - with some caveats - a waluigi->luigi transition may have low probability in natural language text. However, there's no reason to think this has to be the case for RLHF text.
especially if Ukraine disperses their population.
Something that sounds simple - "dispersing" your population - really comes with a huge cost. You can't just send your population into the fields and expect them to live there.
And trucks can still drive off-road.
For which they require gasoline.
With NATO supply lines, Ukraine can afford to lose a million trucks a month to mud
I don't think this is accurate, Nato doesn't just have a million trucks a month lying around somewhere to send.
If the people aren't in cities, what is Russia going to target?
I don't particularly enjoy playing this morbid game of guessing what Russia could do, but targeting things like dams, bridges, power-plants, and other infrastructure would do far more damage than you seem to acknowledge.
Then continues to drive into Crimea.
Do they drive through the water, or how does this work? I feel like your arguments prove to much. If Ukraine had it that easy, why haven't they taken even Kherson yet?
Me: Do you agree reviewers aim to only accept valid papers, and care more about validity than interestingness?
I've reviewed papers. I didn't spend copious amounts of time checking the proofs. Some/most reviewers may claim to only accept "valid papers" (whatever that means), but the way the system is set up peer review serves mainly as a filter to filter out blatantly bad papers. Sure, people try to catch the obviously invalid papers. And sure, many researches really try to find mistakes. But at the end of the day, you can always get your results published somewhere, and once something is published, it is almost never retracted.
If retractions were common, surely you would have said that was evidence peer review didn't accomplish much!
Sure, let me retract my previous argument and amend it with the additional statement that even when a paper is known to have mistakes by the community, it is almost never retracted.
2: Some amount of trust is taken for granted in science. The existence of trust in a scientific field does not imply that the participants don't actually care about the truth. Bounded Distrust.
I don't think that this refutes my argument like you think it does. Reviewers don't check software because they don't have the capacity to check software. It is well-known that all non-trivial software contains bugs. Reviewers accept this, because at the end of the day they don't comprehensively check validity.
because the latter would have rubbed you the wrong way even more
No, I think that peer review at a good journal is worth much more than peer review at a bad journal.
I think our disagreement comes down to the stated intent being to check validity, and me arguing that the actual effect is to offer a filter for poorly written/ not interesting articles. There is obviously some overlap, as nobody will find an obviously invalid article interesting! Depending on the journal, this may come close to checking some kind of validity. I trust an article in Annals of Mathematics to be correct in a way that I don't trust an article in PNAS to be. We can compare peer-review with the FDA - the stated intent is to offer safe medications to the population. The actual effect is ...
I previously did an analysis of the tactical utility of nuclear weapons and came to the conclusion that they aren't as cost-effective as precision weapons.
We still live in a world where all use of nuclear weapons is strategic.
What if the Ukrainians take the nuclear threat seriously and disperse their civilian population?
So what? the point of Russia using nukes is to signal that it will do whatever it takes to defeat Ukraine. The tactical effects are beside the point. It's hard to predict what will happen exactly, but if a nuke gets used anywhere, there will be panic in every European city worse than the covid panic of 2020. The knock-on effects are debatable, but the ones that primarily affect this conflict will be the effects on the population in the West, who after all elect their leaders and therefore constrain them. I do not think there is an appetite for unlimited support of Ukraine, and I think the use of any nuke fundamentally changes the equation in a way that is very hard to predict. This is especially true if the nuke is used e.g. in the context of a nuclear test on Crimea.
But your discussion on tactical nukes misses an important point: Russia is so far not trying to exterminate Ukraine and its people. If it were willing to do so and use nukes, it could wreck havoc on Ukranian supply-chains and leadership in a way that goes for beyond "50% combat ineffective". Armies needs supplies, working logistics, etc. If someone is reckless enough to start using nuclear weapons, I don't think it's safe to assume they will be prudent enough only to use them on military targets.
Yes, I agree, and my argument was an oversimplification. That said, I don't think you're properly considering its context. The context here is that if Ukraine were to be in a situation where it had no chance of winning the war (e.g. due to nuclear weapons being in play). Here is what I'm replying to:
As for Ukrainians there are reasons to believe they're much more willing to die than Japanese in 1945. Anecdotes first. I asked a Ukrainian yesterday what should Ukraine do if nuked. She said obviously keep fighting.
Many of your examples (1-3, arguably 4) apply to individual local events/battles, or are hard to apply as-is to this context (6, 8).
There is a lesson here.
The lesson is that even the defenders of Mariupol eventually decided to stop fighting rather than to die. And those defenders were highly motivated, patriotic/nationalistic soldiers. I would expect and hope that the threshold for "normal" citizens is lower.
whether it's morally good, etc., but they work.
Define "work". They may "work" for an individual battle, but they tautologically don't win the war. It's telling that almost all of your examples are fictional or have unreliable (ancient) sources. I've never heard of a last-stand involving an entire army, and even completely crazy countries (WW2 Japan, Germany) capitulate eventually when faced with overwhelming firepower. And nuclear weapons are overwhelming firepower.
Care to bet on the results of a survey of academic computer scientists? If the stakes are high enough, I could try to make it happen.
No, no more than I would bet on a survey of <insert religious group here> whether they think <religious group> is more virtuous than <non-religious group>. Academics may claim that peer review is to check validity but their actions tell a different story. This is especially true in "hard" fields like mathematics where reviewers may even struggle to follow an argument, let alone check its validity. Given that most papers are never read by others, this is really not a big deal though.
But I'll offer three further arguments for why I don't think peer review ensures validity.
Argument 1: a) Humans (including reviewers) make mistakes all the time, but b) Retractions/corrections in papers are very rare.
Unless academics are better at spotting mistakes immediately when reviewing than everyone else (they are not), we should expect lots of peer-reviewed articles to therefore have mistakes because invalid papers rarely get retracted.
Argument 2: Computer science papers don't always include reproducible software, but checking code would absolutely be required to check validity.
Argument 3: It is customary to submit papers that are rejected by one journal to another journal. This means that articles that fail "peer review" at one journal can obtain "peer review" at a different journal.
PS: For CS it's harder to check "validity", but here's how papers replicate in other fields: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/11/18/how-i-made-10k-predicting-which-papers-will-replicate/
Peer review can definitely issue certificates mistakenly, but validity is what it aims to certify.
No it doesn't. It's hard to say what the "aims" of peer-review are, but "ensuring validity" is certainly not one of them. As a first approximation, I'd say that peer-review aims to certify that the author is not an obvious crank, and that the argument being made is an interesting one to someone in the field.
You just have to twist my words and make such an offensive response, don't you? To restate - the siege of Mariupol didn't stop Ukraine from defending Ukraine.
I don't see what's offensive, and I'm not twisting your words but pointing out something that's almost obvious: IF you have no chance of winning THEN you should stop fighting. This was true in Mariupol, and is true for the rest of Ukraine also. The siege of Mariupol absolutely stopped Ukraine from defending Mariupol. The important question is whether the IF applies. But once it does, throwing away human life just to make a point strikes me as somewhat nihilistic.
We're afraid he may start a nuclear war. That's pretty bad already.
Yes, is there anyone who could lead Russia of whom you would not be afraid that they'd start a nuclear war?
Yet you want to give him an opportunity to build a bigger army. To eventually give it to a successor who you think will be even worse.
No I don't "want" to "give" him anything, I'm just recognizing the realities of the situation, and noticing that what you're describing could happen with or without Putin.
Any proposed solution that relies on him promising to not invade again has very low probability of working.
I agree. But this doesn't mean that compromises can't be worked out, see e.g. the Black sea grain deal.
As I said in the comment above the perfect endgame is Putin no longer in power.
Not it isn't, because there are alternatives that are worse than Putin. I hope there are alternatives to Putin that are both realistic and also better, but I haven't seen much evidence for this coming out of Russia.
As for Ukrainians there are reasons to believe they're much more willing to die than Japanese in 1945
Are you familiar with Japan pre 1945 at all? You have heard of kamikaze pilots at the very least, right? I will quote the Wikipedia article on them: "The tradition of death instead of defeat, capture, and shame was deeply entrenched in Japanese military culture; one of the primary values in the samurai life and the Bushido code was loyalty and honor until death". Unless your argument is "Ukraine and its leaders are a death cult", I'm going to respectfully ignore this point as "throwaway62... has no idea what they're talking about".
This didn't stop Ukrainians.
Yes it did. Unless you're living in a weird alternative history where Ukraine still controls Mariupol. Sure, Ukrainians in the West will wax poetic about how they will rather die than submit, but when push comes to shove one hopes that this kind of idiotic WWI-style nationalism will give way to cooler heads.
Ukrainians understand it too well now and some are just plainly saying that they would rather die than live under Russian rule.
the old lie: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
The legalese was very thinly veiled (removing all NATO forces from those countries).
You've made a number of very questionable claims in your comment, so I think I'll start winding down this conversation. Removing NATO forces from post-soviet countries is not "thinly veiled" legalese for returning Soviet republics to Russia, it's not even close.
one should treat this as an open declaration of his plans
Words have meanings: is it "thinly veiled", or is it "open"?
I agree, though sanctions are always sold as being strategic even when they are moral.
The fact that Putin has not used nukes yet is to his credit, but I do think that there is a marked shift in his demeanor from how would sound in speeches before to now. Make of that what you will.
Then yeah, sure. Everybody would laugh themselves to death.
It's not that simple. Nobody in the West is even in principle open to Crimea becoming Russian (and for good reason). So this wouldn't be as ridiculous as you make it sound, especially given Putin's rhetoric over the years and how salty he is about Kosovo.
But that's the whole point. A dragged out war steadily destroys Russian firepower and manpower.
That's one way of seeing it, but neither Russian firepower nor manpower should be thought of as a fixed finite resource. If Russia's current strategy does not work, it would be idiotic for it to keep its current strategy, so it will adapt. We know that it is capable of doing so, see e.g. the withdrawal at Kiev. If Russia were fighting an existential war for survival and had already pulled all the stops, steadily destroying Russia would be a viable strategy. But Russia has no interest in being steadily destroyed, and still has plenty of ways it could escalate, especially when it comes to actions that hurt the West.
At some point Ukraine probably goes "too far" and nukes may be used in Ukraine. At this point the US can either engage directly, continue support Ukraine or negotiate some kind of a deal for Ukraine. The first may start WW3. A deal would mean Putin wins. Continuing to support Ukraine would mean millions more dead. But it would be contained to Ukraine and Russia.
I'm so confused. So the endgame you would like is that Russia nukes Ukraine, but Ukraine keeps fighting Russia (who has nukes, and is willing to use them). Does this keep going until there is no Ukranian left to fight, at which point the US just sends drones to Ukraine to keep fighting? Are Ukranians more willing to die for their country than Japan was in 1945?
But it would be contained to Ukraine and Russia.
It's already not contained to Ukraine and Russia (see: the shattered remains of NS1 and NS2 on the sea floor), so even more magical thinking here. If Russia detonates a nuke in Ukraine, the best case is that absolute chaos breaks out in European cities.
Make a peace deal. Putin repeats after a couple of years and wins.
Why would he win in a few years if he cannot win now?
As I said before if Putin wins chances of WW3 become too high.
You really haven't explained this reasoning? So Putin "wins", and therefore decides to nuke Europe to celebrate?
You could easily solve the whole crisis by admitting Ukraine to NATO overnight with a condition that it recognizes 5 already annexed regions as Russian. But then again, unrealistic.
Russia would call that bluff the moment it was made.
The goal of sanctions is not to incentivize regime change. The goal is to make it a bit more difficult for him to wage the war.
A nice story, but I don't buy it. How exactly does banning Russian flights to Europe, or banning Russian tourists, or banning Russian bank accounts with more than €100k from transacting make it a bit more difficult for him to wage the war? Or confiscating/stealing the wealth of oligarchs? If Putin "doesn't care that much" about sanctions, isn't it pretty stupid that the West is shooting themselves in the foot, and the developing world in the face, by still applying heavy sanctions?
(b) Putin will never allow an election or a referendum that he doesn't control.
Maybe not, but better than not trying at all. Putin's rhetoric about the West being hypocritical is spot on, except for the fact that Russia is just as hypocritical. Offering Putin the "rules-based" and law-based international order he has been asking for since at least 2008 is in my opinion a no-brainer, even if he goes on to reject it.
(c) Russian constitution now says Donetsk and Luhansk are parts of Russia.
Yes. Though I'm not sure it's the constitution that says this or the law. I don't see how this problem is unique to what I'm proposing, if Ukraine just gradually keeps winning like it is doing right now, the Russian constitution/law will still say this, and it will be an even bigger problem.
The problem is it doesn't solve the fundamental problem. Which is how Ukraine will protect itself against the next much bigger invasion.
Again: I see this argument thrown around a lot, but nothing solves this fundamental problem, so the existence of this problem proves nothing. Even a long dragged out war doesn't stop Russia from showing up again, with more firepower, in the future.
Fundamentally, Russia has nukes and Ukraine does not. In this sense, anything that de-escalates this war, while at the same time convincing Russia and China that trying something like this is a bad idea, is the way to go. If Russia decides that it doesn't like the way the West is supporting Ukraine, it has the means to escalate. In the end, the way I expect this to go is for Russia to credibly threaten/use some kind of nuke in Ukraine, and thereby forcing an agreement with the West. Alternatively, the West gets bored of Ukraine after another year of fighting and Russia slowly but surely takes the regions it has annexed. But saying "I hope everything keeps going like it is going" is magical thinking - the war will end, and I think it makes more sense to reason about the end-state than to pretend it can keep going like this forever.
I did refer to people who identify as either Ukrainian or Russian and not as Crimean Tartar when I said non-Crimean Tartar. So non-'Crimean Tartar'.
Aaah got it. My bad.
the main underlying "promise" that such an experiment holds,
I'm sorry for the (very late) side remark but an "underlying promise" is an oxymoron of sorts - if nothing was explicitly promised, nothing was promised :)
I don't see better options. What would you suggest?
The situation is pretty difficult,
a) Providing clear, unambiguous and automatic mechanisms for repealing Western sanctions that are also realistic (i.e. not "we drop sanctions once you get out of Crimea"). While I also like Bryan Caplan's suggestion to offer asylum + military compensation to defecting Russian soldiers, I recognize that this is politically not feasible.
Sanctions that are not directed at the military antagonize the Russian population. Somewhat counterintuitively, they can even lead ordinary Russians to increase their support for Putin.
b) Recognition of the annexation of Crimea, subject to a (future) internationally recognized referendum legitimized by a UNSC resolution and potentially some kind of autonomy within Russia. Ideally, this would be modeled on Kosovo or Hong-Kong in some way.
c) Some form of Minsk III that gives hard guarantees to Donetsk/Luhansk for a referendum, or makes them de facto independent states that are de-jure part of Ukraine.
d) Making weapons-deliveries to Ukraine conditional on Ukraine stating that it might be willing to give up Crimea + DNR/LNR under suitable terms. Something like this for the Russian side could be (a).
While I recognize that Russia will try to game this as far as possible, the main issue I see with this is that it may incentivize similar behavior by other states in the future. Borders are supposed to be fixed not because this is "fair" or anything, but to avoid people starting wars over borders.
Bandera was in prison when the atrocities in 1943 took place but not when those in 1941 took place.
First of all, thanks for catching this, I was mistaken. That said, it seems somewhat more complex, according to this link "Bandera was in occupied Poland when on June 30, 1941, his comrades proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state in Nazi-occupied Lviv — and the Germans banned him from traveling to Ukraine."
This doesn't, of course, vindicate him in any way - he was head of an organisation that performed atrocities and worked with Nazi Germany. But it also doesn't make him guilty of said atrocities.
It was also the case before 2014 that the majority in Crimea was Russian and there were a lot fewer Crimean Tatars.
I'm loosely familiar with the history of Crimea, my point is that non-Crimean Tartars (many of who live, and have always lived in Russia) are irrelevant to Crimea. But maybe I'm misunderstanding things, and you mean "non-Crimean" Tartars who happen to live in Crimea?
But even if you want to ignore the Russians the poll also separates out self-identfying Ukrainans and a majority of them were also in support of the referendum.
So what? It's a feature, not a bug, of the modern system of states that not everybody who wants a referendum to secede gets one.
It was a reason why Ukraine got less military support from the EU before the invasion in 2022 than it wanted.
The reason Ukraine got less military support from the EU than it wanted was primarily so as not to antogonize Russia, as far as I can tell.
There are probably also a lot of others who at the European institutional level think "We already have enough problems with Polish and Hungarian nationalists, do we really want to deal with Ukrainian nationalists as well?"
Yes, hence Scholz's ridiculous pivot away from unanimity in the EU in Prague recently.
It seems somewhat more complex, according to this link "Bandera was in occupied Poland when on June 30, 1941, his comrades proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state in Nazi-occupied Lviv — and the Germans banned him from traveling to Ukraine."
Anecdotally speaking, about two months ago a friend of mine tested this with several tests, and while she was consistently positive with nasal tests, she was only sometimes positive even when she swabbed her throat as much as she could.
Bear in mind that foreign authoritarian presidents are generally not considered reliable sources of information
I don't think the "foreign authoritarian" qualifier is necessary here...
But so far only one side has rape as part of its doctrine.
If you think Russian official military doctrine includes rape, then (and I'm trying to put this as politely as possible) you are deluded.
Only one side is engaged in wide spread plundering etc
Probably true, but I do wish we'd actually know how much plundering is going on relative to how many soldiers are there.
That seems like an important distinction.
I saw some pretty nasty psychological warfare-type stuff the Ukranians were doing that the Russian's weren't. Like sending pictures of their dead sons to Russian mothers, and it seems like Ukraine is potentially willing to kill 'pure' civilians abroad than Russia is (see the murder of Darya Dugina, yes I know about Russia going after ex-spies and arms-dealers, so it's not so clear cut). Obviously it's hard to compare two countries when one is invading, and the other is defending. But nobody can claim that either side hasn't committed atrocities.
For some reason public discourse in the Western countries gravitates towards either "let's stop helping Ukraine" with weak justifications like "will of the Crimean people" and "Ukrainians aren't saints too" or going all in up to directly fighting Russian army on the ground.
Yes, this is a good point.
I think policy of helping Ukraine but not engaging Russian army directly (basically just sticking to what's already being done) is superior to either extreme.
Wait what? I mean yes, obviously this is superior to batshit crazy options like sending troops to Ukraine or telling Russia it owns Ukraine now, but in terms of nuclear risk and global security it's pretty stupid. The current approach incentivises both Ukraine and Russia to continue and escalate as they both ultimately see themselves as prevailing given enough time.
In the Nüremberg trials, we decided that one aspect of our global democratic culture is that those who engaged in the Holocaust and mass murdered Jews and other groups were war criminals even if their excuse was that they followed orders.
While I agree with the conclusion, I really do vehemently object to the framing. Who is "we", and what on earth is "global democratic culture"?
Attempts to rewrite history and glorify fascists go both against our general Western consensus
I mean these are two separate things, and depending on who you ask rewriting history is what the West is pretty good at. But again, what "Western consensus"? Depending on who you ask, either Russia or the West is massively "rewriting history" regarding Ukraine.
Stepan Bandera was at a time a leader of the faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists in Kyiv where Ukrainian nationalists together with German death squads committed pogroms.
If I'm not mistaken, Bandera was interned at a German concentration camp when the atrocities took place. Which is quite a major detail, "our Western consensus" generally considers people innocent by default.
From my German perspective, where we consider the Holocaust as one of the worst episodes of the 20th century, declaring people who participated in the Holocaust to be national heroes who shall not be criticized feels deeply wrong
Ah, a German perspective, this somehow fits in very well with the extreme focus on nazis and/or nazi symbols as a kind of axiom from which everything else is derived. Here's an anecdote: I was friends with an Ukranian, who once wore a stylized swaztika necklace. Was she a Nazi? She was adamant that she was not. Turns out she just liked the pattern, had seen it being used in India, and didn't treat it as anathema the way a German would. The take that symbols that were used by nazis aren't proof of evil is an underrated one (especially in Germany). It's your actions that define you, not which symbols or Russell conjugation you use (or don't use) when talking about them ("I am a patriot, he is a nationalist, they are a government with a democratic mandate to put their population first").
That said: nationalism really is a problem in Ukraine at the moment. But I'm more worried about the kind of nationalism the West tends to support (making sure everyone says "Kharkiv" instead of "Kharkov", calling Russian soldiers "orcs", insisting that Crimea "is" Ukranian), rather than the "using Nazi symbols sometimes" form.
Right-wing ethnonationalism seems to me the best explanation for Ukrainians needlessly creating both internal conflicts that alienate internal minorities and conflicts with Europeans, at a time when Ukraine wants European support.
Unfortunately I don't think this harms their European support much - these are all things that are far in the past, and haven't stopped the EU waxing poetic about how Ukraine is fundamentally one of them. In fact, since in Ukraine, nationalism = against Russia, and "against Russia" is popular in Eastern Europe (for obvious reasons), the nationalist aspects may even find them support from the West. That said, it's just morally a bad policy, and absolutely affects how Ukraine is seen by Russia.
If we believe that Russia might have manipulated the counting of the referendum, the straightforward way to get a sense of what the Crimeans think is to look at polling data.
Unfortunately not, people who don't want to be in Crimea will have left, and polls aren't always reliable.
When pollsters asked again in 2017 in Crimea, 86% of non-Crimean Tatars say they would expect the same result in a repeat referendum
The non-Crimeans Tatars are somewhat irrelevant here given that most are Russian.
Punishing Crimeans for voting for the annexation feels morally wrong to me
There's a strong case that punishing Syrians for being ruled by Assad might just feel morally wrong too, but who am I to argue with a moral authority like the "Western consensus".
The fight of Ukraine against Russia is not one with clear lines between good and evil
Thank you for the great post on the clusterf*ck that is Ukraine and Ukrainian politics. Really this is a great case of a situation where it isn't clear what is actually going on given the rather one-sided reporting on both sides.
Crimeans deserve [..] a peace agreement [...] that respects the referendum of 2014
No they don't. The "referendum" of 2014 was a joke. Nobody needs to respect this joke.
Nobody here seems to have offered an unreserved defence of SMTM, so let me do it:
-
SMTM told the author of this post they advised against it, they still did it, and were happy with the result.
-
The author says "I don't think that SMTM has done enough to show that it was safe". But I notice that I am confused, because it is not the job of SMTM to make this study 'safe', whatever that means. The world is not "safe", and everyone is an adult, and adults should use their own judgement when following random internet advice. If someone regrets unreservedly following random internet advice, they got a valuable life lesson. There's no reason to think SMTM knew about and tried to hide information about Solanine poisoning, so it's unfair to make it seem like they are responsible when the participants could have equally well found out about it themselves. The author wishes SMTM had put up a neon sign, but their blog heading literally has "Mad Science Blogging" in it, isn't that enough of a neon sign already? .
-
Pre-registration wasn't really important, publicly announcing a study and getting participants who care about the result is a form of pre-registration.
-
Just because data isn't perfect doesn't mean it isn't valuable (even if it does nothing but teach the community what kind of data it makes sense to to investigate if you do something like this ).
Correlation is not causation. If the "best" data is garbage, it's still garbage. We should not update our priors based on garbage data.
My prior for this is that the population-level differences are probably almost entirely centered around care-homes, and questions related to care-homes (or, more generally, very old people). Since my knowledge on comparisons between care-homes in scandinavian countries is close to zero, I cannot really provide any insight here. But something as banal as "did people who are sick stop going to work in care-homes" will probably bias the results far more than population density.
Edit: regarding population density: I don't think there's no effect, I just don't know what the effect is or if it is even monotone. Almost all the people I know who got covid either (a) live in a village and don't trust the government or (b) are highly-connected even for big-city standards. So it could be that there is a sweet spot local-minimum where people in cities feel super at risk because of all the strangers around them and isolate, but the effects of the additional density don't meaningfully lead to more covid.
Not exactly a fair description of what the public health measures have been. What country has been in lockdown for "a year or two" (besides China)?
Is there an end in sight? What country hasn't had covid-related public health measures - especially on entry and exit of the country - for the last year? It may not have been a full lockdown (whatever that means) for most of the time, but public health measures have certainly been in place.
Population density is entirely the wrong metric to look at here. You could fudge the denmark "population density" count by just including Greenland, and including the empty swathes of land in the nordic countries has the same effect.
Funnily enough, I have yet to read a single not-completely-ridiculous cost-benefit analysis that goes this way. We must live in different bubbles.
An average vaccinated 30yo now loses about 6 weeks of expected life from contracting COVID instead of 2 weeks, because of waning vaccine efficacy.
The counterfactual here is "you never get covid", so I'd take this number with a large grain of salt. If, on the other hand, the counterfactual is "you get covid a few years later", then the loss of expected life does not occur. Additionally, if you do get covid, you're (probably) super immune for a while, which presumably increases your quality of life.
It's the terminology you use to signal that you believe the vaccine is safe and effective™ and therefore cannot be fully "evaded".
I'm from Germany but haven't bought any of the rapid tests myself, so I don't have any first-hand experience with the situation. From what I understand, you can use these tests to test yourself, but they aren't considered accurate enough to fulfill a condition of having to get a validated test for the bureaucracies.
I spent some time in Germany recently, and this is (or at least "was", when I was there) wrong. The tests themselves are considered accurate enough, but the bureacracies usually don't trust you to do it (or do it correctly). In some German states you can do a test at the restaurant to be let in. You can buy a test, take it to a pharmacy, and let the pharmacy do it and then validate it. In some German states it is ok for some jobs to test yourself regularly. Back then I think employers also had to provide take-home tests for free (or if not required, strongly encouraged).
though Delta is a bigger risk than Alpha, ignoring effects of vaccination
I keep seeing claims like this get thrown around, but I feel like the evidence isn't really there. Could you comment on why you think this?
Sorry for the late reply. I'm assuming you need to be "infected" in order to infect someone else (define "infected" so that this is true). Since being infected is a neccessary precondition to infecting someone else,
P(you infect someone else) <= P(you are infected),
and it's clear you can replace "<=" by "<".
This is basic probaility theory, I can't follow your notation but suspect that you are using some different definition of "infected" and/or confusing probabilities with expected values..
Sorry for the (very) late reply, but I do not understand this comment and suspect maybe my point didn't come accross clearly, cf. also my other reply to the comment below this one.
Apologies for the really late reply, but I don't think "marginal risk" in this context is well-defined. The marginal risk to yourself grows linearly in the number of people to first order. You could feel responsible for the marginal risk to all the other party goers, but they are people with their own agency, you aren't (in my opinion) responsible for managing their risk.
On the other hand, the other problem is that even if the person is accepting the risk for themselves, I'm not sure they're processing the risk that somebody else gets seriously ill or dies.
Well maybe, but are you thinking of the fact that (trivially) P(you infect someone else) < P(you are infected)?
Say you meet in a group of people that all care about each other. Then, by your reasoning, each of the people is responsible for risk, so in fact (by double counting once more as in the original post), the total risk is . If however, we share the responsibility equally each person is responsible for risk which is intuitive. So this quadratic growth assumption is a bit questionable, I'd like to see it done more formally because my intuition says it is not complete nonsense, but it's obviously not the whole truth.
I feel like this is almost too obvious to state, but question is really not about the marginal risk, but about the marginal benefit. Meeting 0 people probably is really bad your mental health in comparison to meeting 2. Meeting 98 people is probably not much worse for your mental health compared to meeting 100. Meeting 2 people might be more than twice as good as meeting one. But since we don't just care about ourselves, we should also think about the other person's benefit. So even if you are already meeting 98 people but the 99th meets nobody else the benefit you provide to that person may (depending on your age, preconditions, etc...) be worth more than the extra bit of risk.
Then I have misunderstood Everett's proof of the Born rule. Because the tensor product structure seems absolutely crucial for this, as you just can't get mixed states without a tensor product structure.
Well yeah sure. But continuity is a much easier pill to swallow than "continuity only when you aren't looking".
We don't lose unitarity just by choosing a different basis to represent the mixed states in the tensor-product space.
I think my question isn't really well-defined. I guess it's more along the lines of "is there some 'natural seeming' reasoning procedure that gets me QM ".
And it's even less well-defined as I have no clear understanding of what QM is, as all my attempts to learn it eventually run into problems where something just doesn't make sense - not because I can't follow the math, but because I can't follow the interpretation.
If we accept that mutually exclusive states are represented by orthogonal vectors, and we want to distinguish mutually exclusive states of some interesting subsystem, then what's unreasonable with defining a "measurement" as something that correlates our apparatus with the orthogonal states of the interesting subsystem, or at least as an ideal form of a measurement?
Yes, this makes sense, though "mutually exclusive state are represented by orthogonal vectors" is still really weird. I kind of get why Hermitian operators here makes sense, but then we apply the measurement and the system collapses to one of its eigenfunctions. Why?
Yes, I know all of this, I'm a mathematician, just not one researching QM. The arxiv link looks interesting, but I have no time to read it right now. The question isn't "why are eigenvectors of Hermitian operators interesting", it is "why would we expect a system doing something as reasonable as evolving via the Schrödinger equation to do something as unreasonable as to suddenly collapse to one of its eigenfunctions".
Ok, but OP of the post above starts with "Suppose we have a system S with eigenfunctions {φi}", so I don't see why (or how) they should depend on the observer. I'm not claiming these are just arbitrary functions. The point is that requiring the the time-evolution on pure states of the form to map to pure states of the same kind is arbitrary choice that distinguishes the eigenfunctions. Why can't we chose any other orthonormal basis at this point, say some ONB , and require that , where is defined so that this makes sense and is unitary? (I guess this is what you mean with "diagonalization", but I dislike the term because if we chose a non-eigenfunction orthonormal basis the construction still "works", the representation just won't be diagonal in the first component).
Isn't the whole point of the Everett interpretation that there is no decoherence? We have a Hilbert space for the system, and a Hilbert space for the observer, and a unitary evolution on the tensor product space of the system. With these postulates (and a few more), we can start with a pure state and end up with some mixed tensor in the product space, which we then interpret as being "multiple observers", right? I mean this is how I read your paper.
We are surely not on the same page regarding decoherence, as I know almost nothing about it :)
The arxiv-link looks interesting, I should have a look at it.
Right, but (before reading your post) I had assumed that the eigenvectors somehow "popped out" of the Everett interpretation. But it seems like they are built in from the start. Which is fine, it's just deeply weird. So it's kind of hard to say whether the Everett interpretation is more elegant. I mean in the Copenhagen interpretation, you say "measuring can only yield eigenvectors" and the Everett interpretation, you say "measuring can only yield eigenvectors and all measurements are done so the whole thing is still unitary". But in the end even the Everett interpretation distinguishes "observers" somehow, I mean in the setup you describe there isn't any reason why we can't call the "state space" the observer space and the observer "the system being studied" and then write down the same system from the other point of view...
The "symmetric matrices<-> real eigenvectors" is of course important, this is essentially just the spectral theorem which tells us that real linear combinations of orthogonal projections are symmetric matrices (and vice versa).
Nowadays matrices are seen as "simple non-commutative objects". I'm not sure if this was true when QM was being developed. But then again, I'm not really sure how linear QM "really" is. I mean all of this takes place on vectors with norm 1 (and the results are invariant under change of phase), and once we quotient out the norm, most of the linear structure is gone. I'm not sure what the correct way to think about the phase is. On one hand, it seems like a kind of "fake" unobservable variable and it should be permissible to quotient it out somehow. On the other hand, the complex-ness of the Schrödinger equation seems really important. But is this complexness a red herring? What goes wrong if we just take our "base states" as discrete objects and try to model QM as the evolution of probability distributions over ordered pairs of these states?
I'm very confused by the mathematical setup. Probably it's because I'm a mathematician and not a physicist, so I don't see things that would be clear for a physicists. My knowledge of quantum mechanics is very very basic, but nonzero. Here's how I rewrote the setup part of your paper as I was going along, I hope I got everything right.
You have a system which is some (seperable, complex, etc..) Hilbert space. You also have an observer system O (which is also a Hilbert space). Elements of various Hilbert spaces are called "states". Then you have the joint system of which is an element of, which comes with a (unitary) time-evolution . Now if were not being observed, it would evolve by some (unitary) time-evolution . We assume (though I think functional analysis gives this to use for free) that is an orthonormal basis of eigenfunctions of , with eigenvalues .
Ok, now comes the trick: we assume that observation doesn't change the system, i.e. that the -component of is . Wait, that doesn't make sense! doesn't have an "-component", something like an -component makes sense only for pure states, if you have mixed states then the idea breaks down. Ok, so we assume that , when acting on pure states, is equal to . So this would give , where is defined so that this holds. Presumably something goes wrong if we do this, so we instead require the weaker . And bingo! Since the are eigenfunctions, we get that , and let's redefine to include the term because why not. Now, if we extend by linearity we get that . Applying again gives , and the same for further powers.
Ok, let's interpret that last part in terms of "observations". If we take states of the combined system , then time-evolution maps pure states with only a component to pure states with only a component. Wait, that's exactly what we assumed, why should we be surprised? Well yeah, but if you started out with some linear combination of eigenfunctions, these will be mapped to a linear combination of pure states, and each pure state in this linear combination evolves as assumed, which may or may not be abig deal to you. In a mixed state that is a linear combination of pure states, we call each pure state a "separate observer" or something like this. Of course, mixed states in a tensor product state cannot be uniquely be written as a sum of pure states. However, if we take our preferred basis and express our mixed states as pure states with respect to that basis in the -component, this again makes sense.
So it's super important that we have already distinguished the eigenfunctions of at the start, we unfortunately don't get them out "naturally". But I guess we learn something about consistency, in the sense that "if eigenfunctions are important, then eigenfunctions are important".
Ok, now assume our system is itself a tensor-product of subsystems , which we think of as "repeating a measurement". Now what we get if we start with some pure-state is (in general) a mixed state which can be written as a linear combination of pure states of eigenfunctions. As the eigenfunctions of the different systems are different (they are elements of different spaces), if you start out with some non-eigenfunction in each subsystem, you'll end up with some mixed state that contains different eigenfunctions for the different systems. The "derivation of the Born rule" doesn't need this step with multiple systems. Basically, we can see this already with just one system. If we start with a non-eigenfunction , then this gets mapped to some linear combination of pure states via the time-evolution. As the time-evolution is unitary, and the |a_i|^2 sum to 1, we can see that each pure state has "length" |a_i|^2.
Thanks for the great paper! I think I've finally understood the Everett interpretation.I think the basic point is that if you start by distinguishing your eigenfunctions, then you naturally get out distinguished eigenfunctions. Which is kind of disappointing, because the fact that eigenfunctions are so important is what I find weirdest about QM. I mean I could accept that the Schrödinger equation gives the evolution of the wave-function, but why care about its eigenfunctions so much?
Thanks for the comments!
I agree with all of these points. In fact, with respect to (4) it is even plausible that some "once infected" people never go on to develop the kind of antibodies that are being tested for. Point (3) is why I control for age/sex, but of course there are a number of further complexities.
These further complexities, along with (1) and (2) are currently "un-modelable complexities" for me. There are just so many selection effects in play that it isn't clear if you gain anything from trying to take them into account. Given that there are a number of papers that try to calculate some kind of IFR making a number of basic mistakes, I wanted to set out to see what the data + simple models gets if you do the maths correctly, as opposed to doing ridiculous things like caring about the median study like the Ioannadis meta-analysis does. After all, it seems like the IFR is what everyone cares about, so it would be nice if we were doing things "less wrong" here.