I'd worry that if we're looking at a potentially civilization-ending pandemic, a would-be warlord with a handful of followers decides that north sentinel island seems a kind of attractive place to go all of a sudden.
I'm not following why a larger Pareto frontier would mean fewer tradeoffs on the frontier, could you elaborate on that?
I'm not sure if these are examples of the thing you're talking about or something else, but:
Consider a missile that's guided by GPS until it reaches its rough target location, then uses sensors to locate the target precisely. (Though arguably this is simply "SIM followed by SIT".)
Or consider when I do something similar myself. I use the map on my phone screen to guide me to roughly where I want to be, and then I use my eyes to guide me to exactly where I want to be. And I don't just switch from SIM to SIT; I keep checking with both, in case e.g. I miss it and go too far.
We're want the rock that's closest but not higher, and that's what we get. We don't necessarily get the closest rock, but we do get the best one, which is what John said.
Apart from the things Jonathan mentions, the Pandemrix vaccine used for swine flu seems to have caused narcolepsy in rare cases.
Note that Fauci in that video is talking about delayed effects, not long-term effects.
The logical induction criterion requires that, in the limit, all logical inductors assign probability 0 to Fermat’s last theorem being false. Conditioning on an event with probability 0 is ill-defined, so we have no formal guarantee that these conditional probabilities are well-behaved.
From what I understand, an LI need not assign probability 0 to Fermat's last theorem at any finite time. She might give it price on day . In practice I don't know if the LI constructed according to the paper will ever assign price to it. For all I know that would d... (read more)
I took a screenshot from my anatomy atlas app, hopefully it's a bit helpful. https://i.ibb.co/RpMfpJX/Screenshot-20210603-191621.png
The muscle Christian is talking about is highlighted in blue, and the tendon sheath is the blue tube at the bottom. My read is that that sheath had moved to the side a bit, closer to the others?
For others confused like me: this is an update to a longer post. AGI in context is Adjusted Gross Income.
So, this seems like a fine policy. But calling it an "oath of reply" feels like it waters down the word "oath" in a way I dislike. (cf. the people who've taken the GWWC pledge, and said that if in future they think it's not a good idea, they'll just stop doing it.) Especially when the stuff you've said should be a universal understanding (around self care, rudeness, circumstances changing) is left implicit. That stuff won't be universally understood.
As a simple change that I personally would consider an improvement, I'd call it a "reply policy". A few word... (read more)
Dunno if anyone from the band still reads LW, but I just wanted to say thanks; I've been enjoying this album for, I guess, coming up on ten years now. I think "Carry On" and "Keeping Me Away" are my favorites.
A few short stories on the subject of time.
Standardized time across a whole country came into existence with train networks. It was important for these because people needed to know when the train would be there to catch it, and also being a few minutes off could cause crashes. They'd get someone with a good watch to sync it up in London, then travel around the network and have station operators sync their clocks from the watch. A clock on the side of the Bristol Corn Exchange still has both London and Bristol time, 12 minute... (read more)
Credit ratings agencies started in the late 19th century in Brooklyn. For a while if you wanted to buy from a shop on credit, that was fine, the shopowner knew you. Then more people started moving in, and owners wouldn't know who to trust.
The Sells brothers went around to all the shops, asked to look at their books, and compiled a list of people with simple categorizations: do they pay on time, do they pay cash, is there something you should talk to us about first? Then owners could have a copy of the book and look up an unk... (read more)
Rerun of a 2015 episode.
Queen City Appliances was founded ~1950, at some point the founder's son Ronny took over as CEO. It was doing well, and borrowing money to make money. Then 2008 happened, and in 2009 the business was doing badly, no one buying new refrigerators. So Ronny filed for bankruptcy. He had to sign the papers along with his 80something-year-old mother, who had helped to build the business from the ground up and still did accounts four days a week. It was one of the worst days of his life. These paper... (read more)
Imagine that I had a bit, and it’s either a 0 or a 1, and it’s either blue or green. And these two facts are primitive and independently generated. And I also have this other concept that’s like, “Is it grue or bleen?”, which is the XOR of blue/green and 0⁄1.
There’s a sense in which we’re inferring X is before Y, and in that case, we can infer that blueness is before grueness. And that’s pointing at the fact that blueness is more primitive, and grueness is a derived property.
I found it helpful to work through this example. Let's say is "is the bit 0 ... (read more)
Bill's house has flooded three times since he's lived there, and by now he's getting used to it. Why not move? Insurance!
You can't really get private insurance for floods, because it's too correlated. When the company has to pay out for one person, it has to pay out for everyone, and it goes bankrupt. So this insurance is backed by the government. He pays something like $4k/year for a house that cost him under $500k, and its paid out over $800k so far. That's not counting the most recent flood, after which it'll be over $1m. (I do... (read more)
Attention conservation notice: the LA Times says this story is untrue. (I've only skimmed that article but it has some more details and corrections, both wrt reality and wrt what PM reported. For example, his name was Richard, not Robert. h/t Money Stuff, when I listened to the episode I remembered seeing it link to this.)
Robert? grew up in a family of farm workers. He was bussed into a previously all white school, sat with the other Latin Americans, and all the white kids were like wtf at his lunch burrito. He asked... (read more)
In the 70s, Carter wanted to increase the retail price of milk by 6¢/gal, a decent amount. The point being that if the USA isn't self-sufficient for food that's a national security thing, so it's worth overpaying to keep your farmers local. Then congress outdid him and wanted the price to raise every six months?
But you can't just say "the price will be this now", you have to do something concrete which will have that effect, either lower supply or raise demand. Lowering supply means telling people not... (read more)
Two thematically related stories.
Once the Covid vaccine is available, there's a question of "how do we convince people to get it?" We speak to someone in this area. Her group tried a bunch of things.
In other news: Skinny jeans became popular in the e... (read more)
America lets you sell blood plasma for money. The centers will call it a donation, but you get money for it, so. You can come in a couple of times a week and especially for low income people it can be a significant addition to their income. There are referral bonuses, and you get paid more if you come in more often. (Seems weird?) These centers are mostly located in low-income areas.
There's a history here involving Nicaragua. Under a dictator there was a center doing this, and a journalist was writing about concerns,... (read more)
Berlin is known for its club scene, and this comes from the Berlin wall. No one really wanted to live in West Berlin, it was cut off from the rest of West Germany, so the government offered incentives: subsidized rent and food, exemption from mandatory military service.
(I'm surprised post-war Germany was allowed to have mandatory military service.)
This leads I guess to a bunch of musicians coming in, and they start defining a music scene. There's I think mutual influence between them and Detroit? They ... (read more)
Microsoft's CEO has announced that the company will be carbon negative by (2030 or 2050 or something). What does this mean?
(Explanation of carbon offsetting.)
One person selling carbon offsets is an Indonesian guy. He and a buddy bought up a load of Indonesian forest and now they charge money not to cut it down.
(Would cutting it down be a problem? Seems to me as long as you replant, and use the timber for construction, or store it, or otherwise make sure the carbon doesn't get released back in the atmosphere - ... (read more)
So I was thinking of this paper (pdf), which I misremembered somewhat - you can't make a coin biased for "toss and catch", but you can make it biased for "toss and let it bounce". (And for "spin on a table".) Given that, "can't bias a coin" is probably too strong, though it's in the title of the paper.
Props for suggesting an actual experiment! I didn't feel like doing it though :p
I've read that it's not possible to bias a coin - you can bias a coin toss if you know which way up it starts, but the coin itself will always be fair. But I confess that I don't know what assumptions they were making, so for all I know you could make something that would be recognizably a coin but that analysis wouldn't apply.
As long as the price of bitcoin is higher than the expense of mining it then PoW is not a waste in economic terms.
But only if the expense of mining it is considered to include externalities. If you include those, then this is perhaps true, but it means we can't reject the premise "PoW is a massive waste of resources" offhand. To reject that we'd need to further establish that the miners' surplus is larger than the externalities. And I note that if the miners' surplus is large, more miners can join, though there are complications in this argument.
Previously the Roman Catholic traditions officially won over Irish Celtic, but Irish Celtic stayed alive, especially in Northumbria. And a king shortly after some of the previous kings built a particularly important monastary in that tradition. It had a lot of books, that was a thing for important monastaries. A child (~4yrs) named Beade went to stay there, no one knows why: "orphan" and "noble child" are possibilities, with some evidence for the latter being that the name meant "praye... (read more)
There are a handful of cargo ships - officially 50, likely more - waiting around in or near a port but not allowed to dock, and the crew isn't allowed to leave. We hear mostly from Mehmed (?). He was third in command on his ship, which arrived in Egypt with a lot of cement or maybe it was concrete. By the time they arrived, their salaries hadn't been paid in months, and the owner said it would be even longer until they did get paid. They refused to unload until they saw the money. The owner resisted and thre... (read more)
Rerun of a 2018 episode.
Dan Roberts (?) got polio as an adolescent. It left him mostly paralyzed, needing an iron lung to breathe. Though he did learn to "frog breathe" so he could escape his wheelchair for a bit at a time. (Maybe he wasn't as paralyzed as I remember them saying?)
When he wanted to go to UC Berkeley, at first they said no, he was too disabled, his wheelchair wouldn't even fit through a dorm room door. Then someone suggested he live in what used to be a hospital wing, and the college agreed. ... (read more)
More superhero licensing, this time adaptations. The holy grail they want is a movie. Turns out NPR already has a deal with a studio, the same one producing the Hamilton movie. They paid (censored) to get right of first refusal on anything NPR produces for (censored) number of days, so PM can't shop around for that.
But they can go after other adaptations, and sign three deals. One is with a radio play group (I guess non-profit). Another is a choral music person, this one is more complicated because i... (read more)
There's a deli that's publicly traded and has a market cap of just over $100 million. This is crazy. Such a thing would normally be worth more like $100 thousand.
It came to public attention when someone mentioned it in a speech or something as an example of how there seems to be no prosecution of fraud, or something. Someone from CNBC looked into the filings, the CEO is the local high school team's wrestling coach, and another important figure is a Chinese businessman with ties to Macau. Other large shareho... (read more)
Previously Planet Money found and resurrected the superhero Micro-Face, who had been created long ago and lapsed into public domain. Now they're trying to make money from him, through licensing.
They put out a call for people who wanted to do a licensing deal, and then spent a day talking to them in turn, Dragon's Den style, either accept or reject. Speaking to an expert on licensing (she previously worked on Sesame Street and Beavis and Butthead) they decided to follow what they called the Elmo rule: don't ... (read more)
La Brega is another podcast, focused on Puerto Rico. It's produced with both Spanish and English versions. The name is an expression meaning something like "shit sucks but whatever". Roman interviews the author then runs episode 2.
Levittowns were deliberately built to be places where I think returning veterans from WWII could buy a place and become homeowners. In the American version of the concept they'd only sell to white people.
For a while America was happy to let PR be poor, but then there was the... (read more)
They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
I'm very suspicious of this line of reasoning, since I could also say: "those men kissing in public didn't ask for my permission to put themselves in front of me".
This isn't a knock-down rebuttal or anything, I just wanted to note this.
Minor, but: 5'11 is 71 inches and 6'5 is 77. And if Alice turns out to be 5'0 your friend would owe you $11, but if she's 6'0 you'd owe him $1.
Rerun of a show from 2018. In the present-day into, Roman and someone talk about how even though we can recite that 90% of an iceberg is underwater, we tend to picture that stuff being mostly below the stuff above it, like an ice cream cone, when actually it's a lot more spread out. Drawings can make this sort of thing much more intuitive. They mention a website where you can draw a 2d iceberg shape, and it'll show you how it would orient itself.
For a long time people thought dinosaurs were sl... (read more)
"Daryl" was an ETH user who fat-fingered a transaction. Went online for help, guest said sorry, nothing anyone can do. Then later guest went o shit maybe there is.
Daryl was playing with uniswap, a smart contract letting people provide liquidity for exchanging crypto, e.g. ETH for USDC. Normally when providing liquidity you'd do two things in one transaction, with something like a try/catch letting you do them atomically. I guess Daryl had only done one of them? Anyway, his money was just sitting there, and as soon ... (read more)
Now that people are writing Christian poetry in (old) English, they need to come up with English words for Christian concepts. One thing was that they had a stock phrase "blank-guardian", and Cadmin's poetry called god "mankind-guardian". (Cadmin was the cowherd from last episode.)
The only history I remember from this episode was a cross called the Roothschild cross or something, which had a poem written on it that was also found in the Italy book from last episode. In the 17th Century the cross ... (read more)
After Edwin became king in Northumbria, he didn't want Ethelbert's son down in Kent to do aggro at him, so he married Ethelbert's daughter. She agreed on condition she could stay Christian and bring a priest, which is similar to how her grandmother had eventually converted Ethelbert's father when she married him. (Or how her mother had converted Ethelbert?) The priest tried to convert Edwin. One day one of his enemies sent an assassin, but someone jumped in front of the blade, and al... (read more)
Rerun of a 2019 episode.
In theory, if you're a screenwriter for Hollywood, you have an agent who gets you the best deals because that's how they get money. But there's a practice called "bundling", where the agency puts together a collection of a writer, director, showrunner, and sells them to the studio as a package deal. (Agencies represent everyone. Not just Hollywood, e.g. pop stars, and one of them bought Miss America from Trump in 2016 or so.) Then the agency has less incentive to get the best dea... (read more)
The Mohists were a group from early China, either the Qin dynasty or whoever preceded the Qin dynasty. Then in the following dynasty, they were mostly forgotten.
They were consequentialists, and the consequences they considered good were something like, material wealth, something I forget, and people acting in their assigned roles. (Fathers acting as fathers, administrators acting as administrators, that sort of thing.) They were also anti-war, and th... (read more)
- Vitamin D is generally recognized (eg NICE, UpToDate) as effective COVID treatment: 70%
Vitamin D is good and important, you should be taking it, but I’m skeptical that such sources will recognize this in the future if they haven’t done so by now. Conditional on (I haven’t checked) the sources that matter not having made this call yet, I’d sell it to 50%, while saying that I definitely would use it to treat Covid if I had the choice.
This was a typo on Scott's part, he's updated it to "not generally recognized". He's previously written about why he d... (read more)
Note: it seems the paper itself is linked from your original blog, but not on LW? So for the benefit of LW readers, it's: Dodis, Y., Halevi, S., & Rabin, T. (2000, August). A cryptographic solution to a game theoretic problem. In Annual International Cryptology Conference (pp. 112-130). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
By using the techniques mentioned above, two players can then execute the following protocol:
I had trouble following this, but I think I get it. To add some maybe-helpful clarifications:
... (read more)
- At the beginning of the protocol, the Preparer r
Thinking in ways which systematically arrive at truth. Tie between rationality and metacognition.
Echoing what Rob said above: these labels apply in very different ways. "Rationality" applies in a definition-like way, which is how it's used on the page. Metacognition applies in an example-like way. You would never say "what we mean by metacognition is thinking in ways which systematically arrive at truth", because even if the practice has that result, that's not what the word means. (And I doubt the practice always does have that result.)
... (read more)I really do th
I think referencing Bayes in the name would be a mistake for the same reason as metacognition - it's a tool, and it's a law, but it's not an end and it's not The Thing.
America doesn't eat a lot of potatoes in general, but it does eat a lot of French fries. Unfortunately, French fries only take a few minutes to go from crispy and great to soggy and shit. This is a problem for fast food.
The industry partially solved the problem once, when drive-through became a thing. Previously it was "drive-in", you'd stay there in your car and a waitress on roller-skates would take your order and deliver it with plates and cutlery. But then people would drive off with their plates and... (read more)
I would prefer if the pattern I’m talking about could be implemented with if statements
This has its own problems, but you could use inspect.signature, I think?
Von Army (???, edit: it's Von Ormy) is a city in Texas. It used to be unincorporated, then some firefighters were grousing about how San Antonio was going to annex them and they'd get higher taxes but no representation. One of them was like "we should make our own city", the chief was all "go on then", and they did. That first one became mayor.
Wanted to be as cheap as possible. Initially had property taxes to get them going, but started reducing them every year. One thing they did: buy a squad car from a ne... (read more)
In the early days of jazz, musicians would be playing in a club and receive requests, Broadway hits were popular, and have to search through their mountain of sheet music for the song, which they'd then improvise on top of. Some people started making stripped-down versions of the sheet music, not enough to reproduce the original but enough to riff off. Those might have been legal in their original incarnation? And then people started collecting those in "fake books", which were much more convenient to carry ar... (read more)
I read it as
Rerun of a show from 2017. Charlie Shrem found bitcoin early, got into it like other kids would get into Ayn Rand. Founded BitInstant, which helped people something something with bitcoin. Other people who liked bitcoin at the time were criminals, some of them used BitInstant, Charlie knew this. He got arrested, convicted of aiding and abetting something or other, and two years in prison.
Prisoners aren't allowed cash so they used tins of mackeral from commissary, which is not a great currency. You coul... (read more)
The other thing about
filterPromotedPostsis that it kind of sounds like the input is promoted posts and the output is some unspecified subset of them.filterPostsForPromotedavoids that but starts to feel unwieldy to me. (But maybe I should just be more okay with unwieldy names.)Even in an impure language I think filter sounds to me like it would return a new list rather than editing in place. That's how the python filter function works for example, and Perl's grep (which is basically a synonym for me), and I had to look this up but JavaScript's filter too.