Got this in my email and wanted to leave a note in addition to my double upvote that this was a great post. I’ve been extremely distressed by Cost Disease and see/saw it as one of the chief ills of our society. Am really bugged by a national conversation about forgiving student loans but minimal investigation into what these loans were even for.
Great post, good investigation and I hope someone does the same investigation for medicine.
When I think of my own college experience, it was awesome the wide variety of classes I was able to take and not slow down my graduation or impede my CS major. Here are some of my favorites : 4 semesters of performance art, 3D sculpture, linguistics, constructed languages, scuba diving, skiing, tree-climbing, lesbian fiction, singing tutoring, computer graphics (wrote own raytracer), religion in the Middle Ages, history of film, judo, modern dance, Alexander Technique… I am sure there were more, I was ravenous through the course catalog. I graduated in 2013 fwiw. So, at least for me, it gave me a huge base of life experience and was extremely enjoyable to study so many subjects. And ended up with a job in tech that made the college cost a non-issue. I’d do it again and have already done it again - I spent two semesters doing more art classes at a local college after the startup I was working on was acquired
I just had omicron while travelling in Canada for New Years and the biggest negative was being isolated during my vacation/ away from home. All 3 people in my group ended up getting separate hotels for two weeks, we probably spent 5k on hotels and cancelled flights and covid testing. Any enjoyment we hoped to get from the trip was ruined. Had to jump through lots of hoops to get back home too - returning via land border as by air requires 2 + weeks after a positive PCR (which I wasn’t able to get until a week into the illness, due to holidays).
I recommend going through effort not to get omicron while travelling, as the isolation is the most salient negative aspect. The disease itself was very mild after being boosted. And if you have upcoming travel plans, testing positive on pcr (which you might for weeks afterwards) is another big concern So if you are thinking of travelling in say March, it may be smart to get it now with your whole household (so you don’t need to quarantine from eachother). Be sure to document you had it with positive PCR - some places want either a fresh negative test or an old enough positive test, but look at the details of wherever you’re going
I mean, ’Ratio Breaks’ seems like it’s just lying there.
Are large models like Mu-Zero, or GPT3 trained with these kinds of dropout/modularity/generalizability techniques? Or should we expect that we might be able to make even more capable models by incorporating this?
Feels like it needed an ending... So you could open up the aperture of attention to get equanimity, but then what about the arguments? just ignore them since they're from a "hell realm" ? (That seems like it may lead to being unable to learn certain distressing information that is nonetheless true.
PS I'm really enjoying the Opening the Heart of Compassion book!