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D&D.Sci: The Mad Tyrant's Pet Turtles
knite1y40

I did some initial exploration of the dataset and came to similar conclusions as others on the thread.

I then decided this was a good excuse to finally learn how to use LightGBM, one of the best-in-class tools for creating decision trees, and widely used in the data science industry. In other words, let's make the computer do the fun part!

The goal was to output something like:

If color = blurple: weight is 1234
Else
  If segments > 42: weight is 2345
  Else weight is 3456

What I actually got:

Fangs: ~17 pounds
No fangs: a big tree that outputs in the range of 18-19.5 pounds

I used default settings, transformed color/fangs/nostrils into 0-N categorical variables and marked them accordingly, then basically did "give me a regression with a single tree and 15 leaves".

As others have mentioned, all gray turtles have fangs and weigh noticeably less (4-7 pounds), so this is obvious nonsense.

This tool is supposedly the non-AI state-of-the-art. It confidently fails with out-of-the-box settings. I remain baffled as to how anyone in tech ever gets anything done, myself included.

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Signaling isn't about signaling, it's about Goodhart
knite4y40

TLDR: Honesty is the best policy, and don't be a try-hard.

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San Francisco shares COVID data only when it's too late
knite4y10

I understand that data collection is difficult and empathize with the people responsible for doing the work.

The thing is, SF used to publish everything as soon as they could! We accepted that numbers could be revised up or down as data was fully coded. This 5 day lag is IMO far on the wrong side of timeliness vs correctness.

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Paths Forward: Scaling the Sharing of Information and Solutions
knite4y10

Obvious next step: if there's a lot of low hanging fruit like this, let's find it? Have you considered using your LW/Twitter/blog to publicly solicit obvious, simple, and high leverage solutions to other big problems?

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Self-Integrity and the Drowning Child
knite4y10

In dath ilan, it is virtuous to write more stories about dath ilan.

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Obesity Epidemic Explained in 0.9 Subway Cookies
knite4y10

I expect agave to be generally preferred over table sugar and HFCS due to having a significantly lower glycemic index. I'm unfamiliar with Karo.

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Covid 8/12: The Worst Is Over
knite4y100

Something I've been wondering for a while: are organizations/journalists/individuals filing FOIA requests to get emails and other relevant documents about how the CDC and FDA made their COVID decisions?

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Who wants to run a B2B SaaS startup?
knite4y10

Potentially interested!

Big picture, if your friend wants a different blend of upside-to-work, perhaps they should consider hiring someone to work 15-20 hrs/wk, freeing them up to do <5 hrs/wk of supervision?

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Why Prefetch Is Broken
knite4y10

This post is a bit hard to parse - please consider replacing "a.test" with something like "test.com/a" or "a.test.com/page" to clarify whether the issue is per-page caching or per-domain caching.

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D&D.Sci April 2021 Evaluation and Ruleset
knite4y20

I posted my answer a bit late but this was a ton of fun!

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10San Francisco shares COVID data only when it's too late
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15Grading myself on SSC's 2020 predictions
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5Best of LessWrong: Jan 10 - Jan 17
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15Where are the post-COVID complainers?
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12Ongoing free money at PredictIt
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20Current guidance for COVID-19 self-care?
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5Which COVID-19 serology (antibody) test is best?
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8Maximizing impact at startup with high EA potential?
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