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As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found his wife transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect...
...but he concluded that since ontologically this insect was not his wife, his marriage vows no longer applied. He squashed it under his boot as he walked out.
Might this be an issue even for people without this gene? What is the risk that constantly producing low levels of ethanol can cause oral cancer for ordinary people?
I think this is a really interesting question since it seems like it should neatly split the "LLMs are just next token predictors" crows from the "LLMs actually display understanding" crowd.
If in order to make statements about chairs and tables an LLM builds a model of what a chair and a table actually are, and to answer questions about fgeyjajic and chandybsnx it builds a model of what they are, it should be able to notice that these models correspond. At the very least it should be surprising if it can't do that.
If it can't generalize beyond stuff in the training set, and doesn't display any 'true' intelligence, then it would be surprising if it can translate between two languages where it's never seen any examples of translation before.
Taking a thirder position:
The reason you don't usually accept a bet which you can only accept at most once is that you have a 2/3s credence the coin is tails, but given that the coin is tails there's a 50% chance the bet is fake (since you've already accepted it the first time you woke up). This halves your expected earnings, so the bet is net negative.
But this gives you a way to break the symmetry. You only take the bet if the room is blue, which means your expected takings are now = 1/3 * -$200 + 2/3 * $100 = $0. So you still don't take the bet, but would if slightly better odds are available.
Taking a halfer position:
When you wake up and see the wall is blue, your credence that the coin was tails must remain %50 (by conservation of expected evidence - you knew the wall would be either red or blue before you opened your eyes). So why should you take the bet?
The correct answer is that there is a better strategy than always refusing the bet. Namely: choose either Red or Blue beforehand and bet Tails only when you see that the room is in this color. This way the Beauty bets 50% of time when the coin is Heads and every time when it's Tails, which allows her to systematically win money at 2:3 odds.
You place $200 down, and receive $300 if the coin was indeed tails.
If the coin toss ends up heads, you have a 50% chance of losing $200 - expected utility is $-100.
If the coin toss is tails, you have a %100 chance of gaining $100 - expected utility is $100.
So you end up with expected 0 utility.
The point stands, but the odds have to be better than 2:3.
I don't see why the colour makes a difference...
So I refuse the bet same as in regular sleeping beauty.
Could be, but South Korea and Taiwan are in similarly precarious situations and have abysmal fertility rates.
When you look at other countries which are constantly at, threatened by, or threatening war they also don't necessarily look great: Ukraine, Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, Finland, etc.
That's not to say this isn't a factor, but I think you'll need to add in enough extra details to differentiate from other countries that it will be very difficult to prove one way or another.
The way the auditing works in the UK is as follows:
Students will be given an assignment, with a strict grading rubric. This grading rubric is open, and students are allowed to read it. The rubric will detail exactly what needs to be done to gain each mark. Interestingly, even students who read the rubric often fail to get these marks.
Teachers then grade the coursework against the rubric. Usually two from each school are randomly selected for review. If the external grader finds the marks more than 2 points off, all of the coursework will be remarked externally.
The biggest problem with this system is that experienced teachers will carefully go over the grading rubric with their students, and explain precisely what needs to be done to gain each mark. They will then read through drafts of the coursework, and point out which marks the student is failing to get it. When they mark the final coursework they will add exactly one point to the total.
Meanwhile less experienced teachers don't actually understand what the marking rubric means. They will pattern match the students response to the examples in the rubric, and give their students a too high mark. It will then be regraded externally and the students will end up with a far lower grade than they had expected.
Thus much of the difference in grades between schools is explainable by the difference in teacher quality/experience. This is bad for courses which are mostly graded in coursework, but fortunately most academic subjects are 90% written exams.
I believe that the US is nearly unique in not having national assessments. Certainly in both the UK and Israel most exams with some impact on your future life are externally marked, and those few that are not are audited. From my perspective the US system seems batshit insane, I'd be interested in what a steelman of "have teachers arbitrarily grade the kids then use that to decide life outcomes" could be?
Another huge difference between the education system in the US and elsewhere is the undergraduate/postgraduate distinction. Pretty much everywhere else an undergraduate degree is focused in a specific field, and meant to teach you sufficiently well to immediately get a job in that field. When 3 years isn't enough for that the length of the degree is increased by a year or 2 and you come out with a masters or a doctorate at the end. For example my wife took a 4 year course and now has a master's in pharmacy, allowing her to work as a pharmacist. Friends took a 5 or 6 year course (depending on the university) and are not Doctors. Second degrees are pretty much only necessary if you want to go into academia or research.
Meanwhile in the US it seems that all an undergraduate degree means is you took enough courses in anything you want to get a certificate, and then have to go to a postgraduate course to actually learn stuff that's relevant to your particular career. 8 years total seems like standard to become a doctor in the US, yet graduate doctors actually have a year or 2 less medical training than doctors in the UK. This seems like a total dead weight loss.
Newtonian mechanics is a bunch of maths statements. It doesn't predict anything at all.
The students constructed a model of the world which used Newtonian mechanics for one part of the model. That models predictions fell flat on its head. They are right to reject the model.
But the model has many parts. If they're going to reject the model, they should reject all parts of the model, not just pick on Newtonian mechanics. There's no such thing as gravity, or pendulum, or geometry, or anything at all. They should start from scratch!
Except that's obviously wrong. Clearly some parts of the model are correct and some parts of the model aren't.
So we have here a large Bayesian update that the model as a whole is incorrect, and a small Bayesian update that each individual part of the model is incorrect. The next thing to do is to make successive changes to the different parts of the model, see what they predict, and make Bayesian updates accordingly.
They will soon fine that it they model the base of the Pendulum as unattached to the ground, they will predict what happened perfectly, and so will make a large Bayesian update in favour of that being the correct model. Fortunately it still has Newtonian mechanics as one of it's constituent assumptions.
That's clearly not true in a general sense. Here's a pattern that points to a different sum:
1 + 2 + 3 + ... = 1 + (1 + 1) + (1 + 1 + 1) + ... = 1 + 1 + 1 + ... = - 1/2
Now the problem is this pattern leads to a contradiction because it can equally prove any number you want. So we don't choose to use it as a definition for an infinite sum.
So you need to do a bit more work here to define what you mean here.
In precisely the same sense that we can write 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + ... = 2, despite that no real-world process of "addition" involving infinitely many terms may be performed in a finite number of steps, we can write 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + ... = -1/12
I think this is overstating things (which is fair enough to make the point you're making).
The first is simply a shorthand for "the limit of this sum is 2", which is an extremely simple, general definition, which applies in almost all contexts, and matches up with what addition means in almost all contexts. It preserves far more of the properties of addition as well - it's commutative, associative, etc. In most cases where you want to work with the sum of an infinite series, the correct value to use for this series is 2.
The second is a shorthand for something far more complex, which applies in a far more limited range of cases, and doesn't preserve almost any of the properties we expect of addition. It's not linear or stable. In most cases where you want to work with sums of infinite series, the correct sum for this series is infinity. Only very rarely would you want -1/12.
Submission: Turing
MMAcevado simulates a Turing Machine in his mind, itself running a lossily compressed simulation of base MMAcevado. The simulated mind runs at 1/10,000th speed, and MMAcevado routes all IO through to the simulated mind.
On the assumption we have self navigating drones that can detect the weakest point in a tank as soon as it gets live of site, and head straight towards it, we would presumably have developed the ability to detect such drones via cameras on the tank as soon as they have line of site.
Than all you need is a bunch of pretty weak guns on turrets mounted on the tank to shoot the drone as soon as they are detected.
Most of these pieces already exist - modern Merkavas have cameras with 360 degrees view, the software to detect a moving drone quickly from a camera is pretty trivial, hardest part is avoiding false positives, but that seems easier than navigating, software to control guns and track targets has existed for a long time.
I assume that mounting a m16 style gun on a turret with 360 by 180 degrees rotation, and sub second rotation to any position is fairly straightforward. Imagine a few of these mounted along the sides of a tank. Most of the time they're lying flat for protection but can shoot a drone within a second of it becoming visible.
A drone moving at 70 km/h would take 5 seconds to cover the last hundred metres to a tank, plenty of time to shoot it down.
This is mostly proven technology - it's basically what trophy does, just we can use cheaper bullets against unarmoured drones, and use the theorised AI advances to use cheap cameras instead of more complex solutions, and the ability to distinguish enemy targets that are less obviously projectiles.
To a mother drone located farther from the enemy at higher altitude, but not high enough to be engaged. Using laser or directional (phased array) RF.
If it has line of sight to the drones, then it has line of sight to the target, and can be engaged by them.
I feel like the goalposts keep changing. This is not what was described in the original post.
So a few questions:
How do these drones communicate? Low on the ground P2P communications will have awful range, as will most low energy communication systems. Are they so autonomous they don't need to communicate at all?
What's their range? Existing drones only fly for about 20 minutes, and at a speed of about 70 km/h. Their range is usually about 10 to 20 km. Flying low to the ground and having to navigate will imply much lower speeds, and less efficient flight, as will having to run a powerful GPU, and whatever communication system you end up using. They also have to carry a payload capable of destroying a tank. Unlike in Ukraine that requires getting past the ADS (e.g. trophy), so is going to be more sophisticated than a grenade.
Again, how are you actually destroying the tank? Firstly ADS systems are likely to be extremely effective against drones. Secondly tank armour is actually really really difficult to pierce. Drones are only effective because tanks have weak spots where it was considered to be too unlikely that an enemy could target, and it turns out that assumption was wrong. The next generation of tanks will likely not leave such weak spots, possibly by using lots of slat armour, requiring far more sophisticated - and heavier - solutions to destroy a tank using a drone.
Now for this to revolutionise warfare requires that your drone + payload can be mass produced cheaply, but everything above seriously cuts into that. You need sophisticated communication systems, battery, navigation systems, payload etc. if each unit costs 100,000 dollars instead of 1000 dollars, sending 70 to destroy 3 tanks is much less valuable a proposition.
When is talking about kinetic energy weapons it's referring to armour piercing sabots, because that's what needed to pierce tank defences. I don't know how effective ADS would be against other kinetic energy weapons because there's never been any need to try, they're useless against tanks. These rounds are so heavy, and fly so fast, that's it's practically impossible to fire them from anything weighing less than a few tons. Not relevant for a drone/Javelin. Also notice how you're creating epicycles upon epicycles here. A drone that fires a Javelin, that fires a railgun, to defeat an existing fairly straightforward defence. Each of those is going to be an impressive technical achievement, the entire package is going to take a while to iron out the kinks, and is going to be expensive. If drones are so powerful they're going to completely replace existing armies, I wouldn't expect all the epicycles.
A single javelin missile on its own costs more than an iron dome tamir interceptor, so becomes a valid target for existing SAM defences.
Sure it might be existing ADS defences aren't enough to defend something like the phalanx, but there's lots of implementations out there, and the trophies characteristics were chosen because it was sufficient to protect tanks. Could trophy be modified to protect more delicate equipment, or could something like the Iron Fist work? I don't know, it's never been tested because it's never been necessary.
As for the drone you linked - it contains a turbojet. I cannot find any production turbojet with hundreds of kilos payload plus strong performance characteristics selling for less than a few hundred thousand dollars.
Finally I think all of this is mostly irrelevant. The phalanx consists of two parts - a relatively long range, delicate and expensive radar, and a pretty robust, shorter range, cheaper M61 Gatling gun + turret.
On a ship they're colocated because that makes sense given limited space. But most land based SAMs separate the radar and missile launcher.
I expect that if drones ever become a serious threat will see the proliferation of lots of Gatling guns mounted on tanks and other vehicles, linked to a decentralised radar system combining lots of different radars of different specs. The radars will generally be deployed further behind the front line, (although some cheaper short range ones might be mounted on tanks) and will give targeting information to the guns scattered across the front line which will take out the drones.
The guns are much less vulnerable, and less expensive so don't make good targets. The radars are very expensive but much further behind the front line, out of range of cheaper drones and well defended by both guns and missiles against more expensive solutions. And taking out a single radar just degrades performance, doesn't take down the whole system.
This will be expensive and complex to develop but far quicker than your autonomous drone army, since all the pieces are already in place.
Finally you claim iron dome is out of reach of most countries, but most countries do have SAM systems of various sizes. Iron dome is unique in it's ability to target SRBMs, and reflects the trade offs needed for that, but drones are much simpler to take down, and countries that deploy SAMs capable of taking down modern fighter jets could easily deploy ones capable of taking down drones. Tamir is just a good example since I know it's cost and it's not that expensive.
Like everything you have layers of defence. Phalanx takes out all drones in an area. Against any ATGMs you use trophy or an equivalent ADS.
Also once you have a javelin/anti armour carrying drone it's going to set you back hundreds of thousands of dollars and be a suitable targets for iron dome style defences, which can cover a larger area and where each missile costs some 75000 dollars.
Why compare with a Javelin, and not e.g. a Kornet which exports for 25,000 dollars (similar to a top range GPU), and can be produced for much cheaper (as evidenced by the fact Hamas is perfectly capable of producing them).
The chances of the vision you're espousing being viable (autonomous air based drones replacing the majority of all existing army units in the near future) is extremely low.
I think you're looking at a war between two seconds rate armies, which have not adapted to a new technology and are suffering a large rate of attrition due to it, and assuming based on that that such a system is unbeatable.
I'm not going to go into detail about all the issues with this article, I'm just going to focus on one specific issue.
If you manage to build this entire system, how would the US respond?
With ease.
The phalanx is a gun designed to track and shoot down cruise missiles. It fires bullets at a speed more than 300 times faster than a drone. It can track this stuff incredibly accurately since it's designed to be accurate enough to directly hit a jet powered missile moving 20 times faster than a drone. It can target at 115 degrees/sec, and usually engages targets at 2000 yards, but has a much higher maximum range. It can fire approximately 1000 bullets before being reloaded, and has a rate of fire of 3000 bullets/seconds.
At a distance of 1000 m a phalanx bullet takes less than a second to arrive. In that time, given costs of accelerating and decelerating, a drone could maybe get half a metre of uncertainty via jitter, at huge energy cost, something easily handled by firing 5 bullets instead of 1 (something the phalanx is already designed to handle).
The phalanx weighs about 6 tons, and has been adapted for land based use. If drones became a serious threat it could easily be mounted on tracks and provide defence for an armoured brigade over a range of a few thousand metres. It would shoot down any drone pretty much as soon as it came in range. In practice the Phalanx is probably overkill designed as it is for cruise missiles, but smaller cheaper systems could easily be developed.
The US army is not going to just obsolete all it's existing equipment because you've come up with some new technology.
Also I think you've seriously underestimated how much these drone armies you're trying to create will cost. Commercial drones are cheap, but not very useful once you buy an even cheaper jammer. Military grade equipment is expensive because it has high performance requirements, and is developed inefficiently for various reasons which drones don't magically fixes. Once you add high performance P2P links, some powerful GPUs, large batteries to run these GPUs, loads of custom software running on these drones, all the infrastructure this stuff will need, etc. you'll be looking at something no cheaper than existing weapons systems. But unlike existing weapons system which are designed to be hard to destroy, these things are basically sitting ducks. You could send a swarm of this stuff against an enemy battalion and within a few seconds a few million dollars of hardware would be shot straight out the sky.
Are bits of this valuable? Possibly. Cheap drones are likely to be used for reconnaissance, but they only have about 30 minutes of range before needing recharging, and will have to stay well away from enemy jammers, so are hardly a game changer, just another tool in the toolbox, to be used at the right times. Anti tank FPV drones? Almost certainly not long term as they're more expensive than ATGMs, and easier to defend against using existing ADS like trophy.
And as for other stuff, like missile carrying drones. That stuff literally already exists, and is widely used. The drones are just jet engines instead of quadcopters as quadcopters have terrible range, terrible speed, terrible payload, and missiles are heavy and expensive. JDAMs are commonly used on bombs weighing 500 pounds. The Quadcopter that could carry that would be massive, slow, expensive and could be shot down by anyone with a rifle.
Ok, that makes sense, targeted killings from a distance greater than a sniper rifle does seem like a good choice for a drone.
Just realised I misunderstood this section of the post, going to delete, rewrite and repost.
They coordinate with missiles to defeat countermeasure such as flares and chaff from slow moving aircraft (helicopters etc) by observing and transmitting the position of the target from somewhat further away and transmitting that info to their missile.
What is an example of a terrorist attack drones enable where with the same cost and effort terrorists couldn't do something similar already?
Now I don't doubt we'll be seeing incremental changes here, and more uses of drones and autonomy, but I don't think this is going to rewrite the rules of war anytime soon.
I think this is wildly off base.
Cheap drones are far easier to destroy than pretty much anything else on the battlefield, and are highly susceptible to electronic measures. Their only advantage is they are cheap, and current tactics and equipment hasn't yet adapted to them. Once every vehicle contains a cheap jammer, and every unit carries them around, the cheapest drones will be far less useful (except for reconnaissance).
You suggest various countermeasures, but these end up taking us back to where we started. For example you suggested reconnaissance drones communicate via missiles. There is no way to do that for a few hundred dollars, we're going to be talking about 10s of thousands of dollars and a much larger drone.
At that point it sucks if 50,000 dollars of reconnaissance drone is shot straight out of the sky by a cheap bullet. So you have to have some combination of armoring it, making it fly higher, giving it various countermeasures, making it fly faster, camouflaging it, etc.
Your 50,000 dollar missile carrying reconnaissance drone is also quite heavy. How long can it fly without recharging? 20 minutes? Adding more batteries barely helps because it just makes it heavier, and takes even longer to recharge. Kind of sucks to pay so much money for something which is only available 20% of the time. It's range is also far too short for it to reach the front lines by itself. It's going to need a mobile forward operating base with a huge battery or a generator pretty close to the front lines. Not a great place for delicate, poorly defended, expensive equipment.
All these things push you to get a petrol or diesel engine, and scale it up.
Suddenly you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars and have a platform not very dissimilar to ones that have existed for years.
Ok, you might say, but what if we have autonomous drones that lock onto a target from a distance, fly straight towards them, and blow them up? That won't be vulnerable to electronic countermeasures, and so can stay cheap.
We've had them for years. They're called ATGMs or Manpads.
I'm interested in how much processing time Waymo requires. I.e. if I sped up the clock speed in a simulation such that things were happening much faster, how fast could we do that and still have it successfully handled the environment?
It's arguably a superhuman driver in some domains already (fewer accidents), but not in others (handling OOD road conditions).
Interesting - how does the non AI portion work?
Reminds me of the risk from mirror organisms. Basically you create cyanobacteria using right handed amino acids instead of left handed ones, and it outcompetes everything else because nothing can predate it (it's indigestible to normal organisms).
Just read in Morris's Righteous Victims:
Agriculture was primitive, with little irrigation. During the first half of the nineteenth century, land was usually owned by the villagers privately tely or collectively. The second half of the century saw the growing impoverishment of the villagers, in large part owing to more efficient Ottoman taxation, and a great deal of rural land was bought up by urban notable families (in Arabic, a'yan), who had accumulated their new wealth as Ottoman agents, especially in tax collection, and through commerce with the West. By the early twentieth century, villagers in dozens of localities no longer owned their land but continued to cultivate it as tenant farmers.
I think this exactly describes our neighborhood. Our garden backs on to a park. On the other side of the park is a foundation school. Next to the foundation school are kindergartens and daycares of all different ages. Shops are all a seven minute walk away (closer ones are under construction).
The pavements are extremely wide and beautifully planted, with cycle paths everywhere. There's a play area every few hundred metres, as well as benches, shades, exercise machines etc.
It is dense (approximately 25000 people in 2.5 Square Kms, but that's what makes it possible to have wide pavements and tons of facilities - they'll actually be used.
Altogether it makes for an environment where people prefer to walk (it helps that the roads are only one lane each way and with limited parking), and so we constantly bump into friends whenever we go out.
This is very different to the area I grew up, (entirely single family homes) where every single thing was at least a 5 to 10 minute walk, and people drove everywhere.
The point isn't that chatbots are indistinguishable from humans. It's that either
- Chatbots are already conscious
Or
- There'll be no way to tell if one day they are.
Both should be deeply concerning (assuming you think it is theoretically possible for a chatbot to be conscious).
This is one of the reasons I think people should read a lot more local news. Fatal car crashes are rare enough in an area of 100,000 people that they'll usually be reported. Also positive and more relevant news is much more common - this restaurant just opened, that development just started, local job ads, deep dives into the mayoral candidates, etc. Generally end up better calibrated, less depressed, and more focused on issues that actually effect you.
It seems you've stepped on quite a land mine here, and the following is mostly just vague guesses.
As far as I can make out it dates back to the Ottoman land code of 1858 where for various reasons a lot of land was declared owned by the government, which would collect a tax in lieu of rent.
So in one case the Ottoman empire sold a large tract of land to a Lebanese Effendi, who then sold it to the Yishuv. There was an village on this land which had been settled for some 60+ years, and despite protests to the Ottoman government the villagers were all evicted by the Jewish settlers.
It seems the villagers paid a tithe. I suppose at first they would have paid the tithe to the Ottoman government, which would have seemed normal to them (and more like a tax), then they switched to paying a Lebanese Effendi, which wouldn't have made any difference to them either way. And then suddenly they were sold again, and evicted off their land, which would have felt very wrong given they'd been living there all their life, and viewed it as their land.
My impression reading the book is that whilst the Israelis definitely had ambitions on far more, they were prepared to grudgingly accept the partition plan. They were heavily dependent on international support for their cause and far weaker than the surrounding Arab States so would have had no incentive for war in the founding days of the state if it wasn't forced on them.
Certainly there weren't any concrete plans by the Yishuv or Haganah to take over any land pre the UN partition vote. This is despite the Haganah generally being quite well organised in that way, and having lots of contingency plans prepared. On the other hand that may well have been as a result of uncertainty about what the UN partition plan would mean in concrete terms, especially for the British.
Whether things would have stayed peaceful long term if the Palestinians had accepted partition, or war would have eventually flared up, is anybody's guess. In practice what happened was that the Arabs denounced the partition plan and initiated concrete efforts to undermine it, and Israel accepted it and mostly kept to it till far later in the war.
Another error - whilst chat GPT is correct that 41 is a centred square number, it's formula is wrong.
To be blunt, I think this post completely, and possibly wilfully, misrepresents Scott's post. Every single one of your points appears to be a strawman:
1. The post implies it's important not to change the words we use to refer to minority groups, but Scott doesn't say why.
The post makes the claim hyperstitious cascades are bad, where previously innocent words that noone took offense to become taboo, not changing the words we use to refer to minority groups. He also explains his reasoning perfectly clearly, as gjm points out.
2. The post needlessly drags its feet against the fact that language evolves.
Again that's not Scotts point. Scott is concerned about deliberate attempts to rapidly make a perfectly innocent word taboo, causing bother and potential ostracism to everyone for no reason, not natural long term evolution of words.
3. The post exaggerates the pace and breadth of lexical change... citing a purely hypothetical example ("Asian").
Scott cites many, many examples, e.g. "jap", "negro", "all lives matter", the confederate flag etc. "negro" was certainly quick - acceptable in 1966, completely unacceptable as far back as I can remember (so by about 2000).
4. The post exaggerates the arbitrariness of lexical change.
The post is not about new minority groups choosing new words for themselves. If a group of people choose to do that, that would be fine, and given Scott's other views he would be the last to disagree. It's about people turning old words and ideas taboo, just by negatively tarring anyone who uses them until it triggers a cascade. The problem isn't that most of the black people in the USA got together and said they prefer to be called black. It's that due to a single bad actor making up a fake history for an innocent word, lots of old grandpas get ostracised by their grandkids for being racist.
Demilitarisation would be necessary initially for this to be acceptable to Israel (apart from such small arms as are necessary to maintain law and order, and a coast guard to prevent smuggling), but could be removed long term given continued peace and economic integration.
Also it should be acceptable for Gaza to enter into peace treaties with e.g. Egypt to defend itself from Israeli aggression, and Israel to defend itself against Egyptian aggression.
Finally it should be expected that Gaza will maintain authority over it's airspace and waters.
I think this would count as a protected state instead of a protectorate, since it would be expected that Gaza will be responsible for it's own international relations. It would also be with a view to becoming a full sovereign state over time.
He was responding to the selfish reason - "my children will take care of me in my old age", not the social reason - "my children will be a small part of keeping the economy running in my old age".
In a world where Jews have so little cultural identity that they're happy to relocate Israel to Moldova, Palestinians and Israelis might as well have so little national identity that they're happy to live together in a one state solution.
This hasn't historically always been the case - there was widespread public acceptance of homosexuality in the first 500 years of Islam's existence, with homoerotic poetry being a staple of their culture - see e.g. here.
Judaism also unequivocally rejects homosexuality, yet many modern orthodox synagogues happily have openly gay members of their congregation. So this doesn't seem quite as impossible as you make out.
From what I know, the international peacekeeping force in Lebanon does precisely nothing. They leave whenever there's fighting, and have no interest stopping Hezbollah from rearming. I literally do not know if it would make any difference if they didn't exist at all.
This is to be expected. UNIFIL has no skin in the game, and would take significant risk if they attempted to stop Hezbollah operations.
As Yovel said, wildly off the mark.
Just one minor extra point - the poorer Israeli working class is mostly supportive of Netanyahu. It's the middle and upper classes who oppose him, who they see as corrupt.
Also the youth is generally more right wing in Israel, and the older generation more left wing.
In general you can't copy your model of politics from one country into another and expect it to accurately predict what's going on.
Isn't that the point? Where we stand now, we have to make a decision without knowing if there will or won't be a treacherous turn...
But wouldn't that be the case for any organelle, even one which is inherited from both parents?
But by making more copies of itself/poisoning other mitochondria isn't it more likely to end up in the female gamete?
Thank you very much for this excellent post!
Would you be able to give a more detailed explanation of Organelle competition? I'm afraid I didn't understand at all how having different types prevents it.
I think this is a suitable mechanism for grants for well defined mathematical problems, but not for more vaguely defined ones. To be frank, the well defined ones tend to be less interesting.
For example the Cray problems are all well defined, and are certain very interesting, but mostly not actually that fundamental to mathematics.
The Hilbert problems are in some ways far more important, and most of these are more vague questions or directions for research than an actual concrete conjecture.
Nobody would have been trading shares in godels incompleteness theorem before he proposed it - and rendering the theorem in concrete terms would already be halfway towards solving it.
How would you suggest making sure funding gets pointed towards these kinds of problems as well?
Hi, and welcome to Less Wrong!
It's great to see you trying to improve your decision making process, and being prepared to put your work in front of the public!
Here's a few thoughts on how to improve what you wrote:
Firstly, a terminology note. A theorem usually refers to a statement about the world that is either true or false, like "1+1=2" or "humans have 4 legs". What you have is not a theorem but a technique to improve decision making.
Secondly, you present a framework with some seemingly arbitrary calculations. Why is it (a*b+c)/(d+e), and not (a+b*c/d*e), or most simply of all a+b+c-d-e? To make your post convincing, try to explain what you're aiming to achieve, and why you made the decisions you did.
Thirdly, you give an example where it sounds like buying a Porsche 911 is a great idea, but for most people it really isn't - they're expensive and not all that practical. Is that a failure in the framework, or are you making some implicit assumptions about the status of the person whose making the decision? Maybe give some examples where intuitively someone might make the wrong decision, but this framework stops them, or the framework is useful for comparing two different options.
I think the biggest risk of DACs is that it incentivises people to fund contracts they don't actually want fulfilled to milk the proposer for cash.
My expectation is that if this becomes mature you'll get traders which try to predict which contracts won't be fully funded, and then push them up to say 50% (after which pushing them further risks them actually getting fully funded).
This not only discourages proposers from putting up contracts (to easy to lose money), but also makes it harder for users to easily see which contracts are worth funding and which aren't. There'll be a lot of contracts mostly funded, some because they're actually good and people want them, and some because they're bad and traders are trying to make money.
Interested to hear your thoughts in how to solve this?
I don't think this actually solves the freerider problem. It solves the coordination problem.
In your toy example Bob was able to specify that he wouldn't build anything unless everyone signed the contract - if this is possible you don't really need the dominant assurance part, as it's still worth it for the freerider to sign up, so long as they assume there's a decent chance others will as well (and if they don't, that's going to discourage non-freeriders as well).
In real life though, this is impossible. Instead the contract is along the lines of "I will do this so long as at least X people sign up, or we get Y dollars of funding".
In that case it's only worth it for the freerider to sign up if either.
- They estimate with high probability the limit will only be reached iff they sign up (but this is the case even with a standard Kickstarter, dominant assurance isn't necessary).
Or
- They estimate with high probability that the limit won't be reached (in which case they're on average just milking the contract for free cash)
There's still no incentive for the freerider to sign up if the limit would otherwise be reached.
Instead what this solves is the coordination problem. Prosocial people want to fund various markets, but it's a waste of time doing this if nobody else joins in. The dominant assurance contract makes this worth it either way, so it's easier for markets to get off the ground to the point where it looks like they'll probably make it.