The P≠NP conjecture in CS says checking a solution is easier than finding one. Verifying a Sudoku is fast; solving it
from scratch is hard. But Brandolini's Law says the opposite: refuting bullshit costs way more than producing it.
Not actually contradictory. Verification is cheap when there's a spec to check against. 'Valid Sudoku?' is mechanical.
But 'good paper?' has no spec. That's judgment, not verification.
Florida passed a similar law, and a bunch of other states are attempting to but are blocked by federal courts. Will be interesting to see if the tech industry allows it, or decides to break up the federal government before it becomes too powerful.
As Charlie Munger pointed out, our economy does not run on greed, it runs on envy. Why? Because advertising discovered insecurity as the most effective crowbar. Advertising is the bedrock of the consumer value system, which has been the basis for the US economy since the end of World War II.
What can we as individuals do about it? Recognize advertising as hostile and banish it. Most of us, instead, are trying to assemble a worldview out of mismatched pieces of advertising, which is not working out very well. When we write and think, we are often thinking in units of advertising, which is a horrifying realization.
Even the fact that this discussion is being framed in terms of Happiness and Satisfaction is downstream of those qualities being centered by the consumer value system. Previous societies might have considered integrity or duty primary.
> [...] a larger problem, namely that overall economic inequality is way too high.
What economic inequality would you deem small enough?
And why do you care about inequality, and not eg the absolute livings standards of the least well off? We can 'solve' inequality by just destroying everything the rich have, but that won't make anyone better off.
Btw, the absolute living standards of all members of society, including the least well off, have never been better. And that's true for almost any society you care to look at on our globe. (Removing eg those currently at war, that weren't at war earlier.)
I once wrote a personal’s ad in SQL on Craigslist, back when they had that section. A DBA replied and asked if I wanted hawking. She had a Cooper’s hawk. I met her at a commercial park in a Saturday morning. She was driving a Honda CRV, the hawk was in the front passenger seat, and I hopped into the back seat.
She started driving and spotted some crows. The hawk saw them as well. Wearing a “don’t kill me either your claws” glove, she moved her hand to the hawk, who gleefully jumped on. She rolled down her window, stuck the hawk outside, and it was basically a drive by shooting with a bird bullet. This happened three times.
My most vivid memory of this was her ripping the crows apart into pieces and putting the then into a bucket, like it was sushi you’d order from KFC.
It’s a crisis of faith, caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. We had our first surplus as a species when we discovered agriculture and husbandry. The human mind has wandered since. We’ve built systems of belief, technological systems, political systems, every possible system you can imagine. All to deal with the simple fact that our minds feel like they should be doing something, but there isn’t actually anything that needs to be done; surplus.
Since our first surplus all those years ago, we have continued to increase our surplus relentlessly. The problem is the more surplus we have, the more the mind idles, the more we try to invent things for the mind to do.
That is where I see the cult, the cult consists of faithless wanderers who have decided that the only valid use of surplus is to gain more surplus, whether it’s through positive means like improving technology or business, or negative means like slavery and exploitation. It’s a hollow existence. There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones.
In any large organization, there are basically two classes of rules: 1) stupid red tape rules that slow everyone down and 2) really important rules that you can never break ever. Effective people learn which rules fall into which group so they can break the red tape rules and get more stuff done.
One of the best lessons I had was in my senior year of high school with my economics teacher. We did a project where we had to pick a career and research the average salary. Then he showed us how much taxes would be taken out of that pay check and you had your monthly spend. Then you researched a home, car, budget for food and if you could afford it, saving for retirement. Suddenly you saw how quickly the money disappeared and reality hit me. There were so many other factors you could have added in that would suddenly find yourself in negative each month like student loan payments and various "wants"
Living in Poland ruled by trumpists for 8 years I have these experiences:
- Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions.
- It is better to not use social media. You never know if you are discussing with normal person, a political party troll, or Russian troll.
- It is not worth discussing with „switched-on” people. They are getting high doses of emotional content, they are made to feel like victims, facts does not matter at all. Political beliefs are intermingled with religious beliefs.
- emotional content is being treated with higher priority by brain, so it is better to stay away from it, or it will ruin your evening.
- people are getting addicted to emotions and victimization, so after public broadcaster has been freed from it, around 5% people switched to private tv station to get their daily doses.
- social media feels like a new kind of virus, we all need to get sick and develop some immunity to it.
- in the end, there are more reasonable people, but democracies needs to develop better constitutional/law systems, with very short feedback loop. It is very important to have fast reaction on breaking the law by ruling regime.
The reason for this isn't a mystery: the world doesn't work for the plurality of its populace. The current generations were sold a lie of infinite prosperity and comforts by their elders and governments, a lie built on the exploitation of former colonies and underdeveloped nations. We see the lie now, and know it cannot be sustained in the face of our current polycrisis (climate, housing, necessities) simply by promoting infinite growth. There's an understanding that we need to curtail consumption and start properly engineering a global economy rather than letting it spawn and mutate naturally, but there's still enough people out there who believe that this demagogue, this partisan, this policy will give them the riches and posh comforts their elders enjoyed, thus returning their country to a golden era that never really existed.
It's the desperation of the masses for what they feel is rightfully theirs, because that's what they were told by those who pulled up the ladder behind them. That era is long gone, but nostalgia is a powerful force that's easily propagandized by those who benefit from said desperation.
Have posted this before, but it really left an impression about crows, and the bond between their mates:
Years ago I was putting out the garbage in the back alley behind our building where I lived on the 8th floor. A crow attacked me out of the blue. Distracted by the attack, the back door slammed shut behind me. Since my key was only good for the front door, I had to walk around the building. That damn crow followed me the entire time, dive bombing my head, and screaming bloody murder at me. It was a little spooky.
When I finally got back inside and upstairs, I went and looked out the living room window, which looked out the same direction as the back alley. The crow had flown back around and was at the 8th floor looking in the window, from the other side of the pigeon netting we had on our balcony. On the inside of the pigeon netting, was another crow, desperately trying to figure out how it could escape. Not really sure how it had got itself through the pigeon netting in the first place.
I went out and sliced a hole through the netting and the trapped crow quickly joined its mate outside, who finally stopped screaming bloody murder. To this day it still amazes me that the crow's mate, knew which apartment I lived in and spotted me downstairs.
I am pretty sure the test of "will you publish nonsense as if it were true for fame or money" has been replicated multiple times in many different fields.
You can read over a hundred years of extensive, exhaustive criticism of most social "sciences" for exactly that reason, and many of us grew up with a categorical understanding of a difference between "hard" material sciences like physics and chemistry and "soft" sciences like social sciences and many subdomains of biology and medicine.
But that distinction has largely fallen out of the zeitgeist and many people now just take anything ever published in a "scientific journal" as sound.
It represents a huge regression in scientific literacy among the public and sets us up for people becoming increasingly skeptical of "hard science" conclusions because so much of what they've incorrectly come to accept as science never really was.
I regularly had arguments on homeopathy with some close family members. I stopped, because belief in homeopathy is the same kind of belief as belief in flat-earth, and you can't be cured off it.
People get seduced by a somewhat internal logic. They get a fuzzy feeling of superiority in their discovery that the mainstream ignores. If you point out the absolute lack of evidence of any of what they believe in, it's because pharma is silencing them. They are excited to be enlightened, because only they can see how crooked big pharma is: they need you to be sick so you can buy their "allopathic medicine" (derogatory calling of drugs that actually work), so they're trying to kill homeopathy who would really save you ; which to be fair is not helped by the fact that pharmaceutical companies are indeed crooked and want you to be sick.
I don't think there's any volume that can be said on homeopathy that will convince anyone who already believes in it that it's all a scam.
A friend did her PhD in climate science and the research involved weather station data. She said all of the data is full of gaps, outliers, messy, and the way the "science" solves it is to just get rid of reports that don't align with priors and use very basic functions to fill in missing data.
When people say "trust the science" it means making scientists and researcher High Priests of the Religion of Truth. Until every single experiment is pre-registered, all data is public and transparent, and all results are published, the entire experimental scientific establishment should be treated with massive skepticism.
This is what I constantly tell my students: The hard part about doing a tech product for the most part isn't the what beginners think makes tech hard — the hard part is wrangling systemic complexity in a good, sustainable and reliable way.
Many non-tech people e.g. look at programmers and think the hard part is knowing what this garble of weird text means. But this is the easy part. And if you are a person who would think it is hard, you probably don't know about all the demons out there that will come to haunt you if you don't build a foundation that helps you actively keeping them away.
The OpenAI of the past, that dabbled in random AI stuff (remember their DotA 2 bot?), is gone.
OpenAI is now just a vehicle to commercialize their LLM - and everything is subservient to that goal. Discover a major flaw in GPT4? You shut your mouth. Doesn’t matter if society at large suffers for it.
Altman's/Microsoft’s takeover of the former non-profit is now complete.
Edit: Let this be a lesson to us all. Just because something claims to be non-profit doesn't mean it will always remain that way. With enough political maneuvering and money, a megacorp can takeover almost any organization. Non-profit status and whatever the organization's charter says is temporary.
Dismissing a multi-millenia multi-cultural fundamental norm as "indoctrination" severely downplays the collective learning of uncountable generations.
There is a common view of cultural norms as at worst tyrannical or at best random and arbitrary, rather than the sophisticated and curated product of billions of human lives.
Social iconoclasts dismiss organized religion, marriage, sexual norms, social duty, gender roles, and cultural traditions. Base human psychology and sociology must bow to their intellect and are theirs to shape as they choose.
> For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
> Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,
> Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God;
> Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
> For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts,
> Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
> If you think you know everything, you will miss a lot.
However, searching for low probability events in a large search space is not necessarily going to be a fruitful experience. For example, imagine that there is non-zero probability of a 20 karat diamond being on the beach somewhere, buried in the sand. You can look for it as much as you want, but you will still probably miss it.
Having a small outlet for things that seem crazy because they might turn out to be true is the same kind of logic as buying a lottery ticket because you can't win if you don't play. Yes, you will miss things, but you will almost certainly miss them anyway unless you expend more resources than they are worth -- and then you still aren't guaranteed to make progress.
On the other hand low probability risks that are likely to happen sometime are often worth investigating. For example, if there is a 1 in 1000 year earthquake event, it's highly unlikely to affect you in your life. But it will eventually affect someone so it may be work the effort to study what might happen. To get more esoteric, perhaps we can talk about large meteorites hitting the planet. Do we need a contingency plan for it?
To me, that's the main question you need to ask before you start: are we building up an understanding of something that will almost certainly affect us one day, or are we simply sifting through grains of sand on the beach hoping to find a diamond?
Any reasonable government needs to have a small outlet for things that seem crazy. In other words, you need X Files.
Not because you believe everything, most things, or even any thing in them, but because having an open mind is important. If you think you know everything, you will miss a lot. Being open minded means spending some time at the tail edges investigating things that look like utter garbage woo, even if the result is that they are invariably utter garbage woo.
Also, it is not complete nonsense.
Altering conscious states is absolutely real and there are many avenues to it. Altered consciousness is also solidly in the interests of an intelligence agency and research is only natural.
There is definitely a flavor of pseudoscientific nonsense that comes along with altered consciousness experiences, but you can look past that.
Reports like this look to me very similar into pre-flight experiments. There were a whole lot of people making patently ridiculous flying contraptions but with hindsight many of them had some important ideas right.
See also: alchemy as a precursor to chemistry
Studying and treating the brain by developing methods to alter conscious states is, I think, going to be a major achievement of the 21st century, and things like this are precursors.
This may be obvious or well-discussed but I had an epiphany some years back when my dad, regarding my kids, said (paraphrasing),
"they're not playing. 'Play' is a misleading term. They're testing the world. They're learning how things work. How gravity works. How friction holds lego together. How actions cause reactions. How friends and strangers behave when you do things. How to use language with make believe. How to comfortably and safely explore new ideas out loud with their action figures. How to discover what feels good and what doesn't. They're not playing. They're growing."
My kids are young. But I'm confident this is generally true for teenagers, too. One quick example: I played WoW and looking back... I learned a ton about how to work in a team. How to be social. What social behaviours work and don't work. How to deal with people you don't like. How to delay gratification. How to plan. And it was all in a low-stakes environment.
This really makes sense. I think I'll try to adopt something like this.
Part of what I nostalgically yearn for was that feeling of, "my homework is done, it's a Friday night, there's no hockey tomorrow morning. I have a Pentium 2 in my room, summer breeze through the window, the world is asleep, there's a distant train rumbling quietly by, and I'm about to spend an hour reading up on every detail of Baldur's Gate while it installs."
This is probably gone. There's so many parts of this that don't work anymore. But I guess I really cherish that it happened. Those were absolutely magical nights.
There should be Nutrition Facts but for scientific trials. Independent agency just publishing quality assessments of the trial.
This should be an async non blocking evaluation. The statisticians who do it should be anonymous by default. There should be an appeals process for a scientist to explain why an unconventional new method is actually robust.
There should not be a single number published by this process, but rather a list of stats that speak to the overall quality of the trial on many dimensions (power, sources of bias, etc).
Only information that would not be the same on 99% of trials should be written on this label (no sec style everything is a risk word vomit disclosures).
There should not be a pre-emptive application for a label - it can only be gotten after paper submission to reduce gaming.
There should be an independent advisory org that scientists can literally call to ask for advice on structuring the trials. These calls must not be disclosed. Much like farmers can call the government to ask for help on xyz crop problem.
And these labels should never be used as the primary source of punishment. Any and all sanctions/penalties/dismissals must go through a new review process done by a different group.
Any scientist who gets a label in a particular year should be given a vote to review the review agency on several dimensions. These aggregate reviews should be published broadly but not trigger any automatic consequences.
Clear, accessible information is the basis for any self regulating human system. We need more of it in this field.
One thing I dislike the most about these problems – and the information/media/activism around them – is the "solutioning".
Yes, we should recycle and reduce carbon emissions and learn to live in a more integrated fashion with earth. But the problem is so diffuse and requires substantive work against powerful forces (government, business, apathy).
What I'd like to see more of, when presented with these sorts of problems, is viable solutions proposed that can be implemented bottom-up, and in the following hierarchy:
1. Regular Individuals like me e.g. "build a bird-friendly yard"
2. Influential individuals like architects, urban planners,
3. Small groups, e.g. birdwatchers, Boy Scouts, churches, schools
4. Small towns & neighborhoods, e.g. "build bird friendly parks"
All too often the "solutioning" defaults to the highest concentration of power, e.g. government/regulation – but that obviously isn't working at the speed it has to, and I suspect its because it's very easy to say "they should/we should" instead if "I will/we will".
I think the fundamental misunderstanding is that we aren’t building a product. We are doing research and development. We are figuring out how to build something novel, otherwise the customer could just go out and buy it already. Once we’re done with discovery, the computer builds it. So, the customer is like any other who is paying for research and development. It’s not a blank check, but they should go into it without the expectation that something new will be discovered on some accurate schedule.
All this smokes and mirrors, when the reality is: if you gave accurate estimates, you'd get reprimanded, not get the project approved, etc. Same reason that infrastructure project go over budget. The way anything actually gets done is by initially being overly optimistic, ignoring potential future problems, getting the project approved, then lock it in via sunk costs, now as problems turn up, you can claim it could never had been foreseen, it's an impossibly hard problem bla bla. But best to bail from the vicinity of the project once reality starts to manifest itself. By that time you should be on the next project perhaps at the next company again promising the stars.
I’ve been working from home 100% for going on 10 years. I’ve had a mix of experiences re: disconnecting from work, and three things that I believe are key:
1. Work out of a separate office, ideally with a door. Don’t go in that room except when you’re working. If you work from a laptop, (mostly) never take it out of that room. Obviously some don’t have this luxury, but if you do and you’re not doing this, I highly suggest trying it.
2. Remove work communications from your phone. If you have a separate email account for work (highly likely), remove it from your phone. If you have Slack or some other chat app installed for work, remove it or remove your work account. If your company truly cares about a healthy work-life balance, this shouldn’t be an issue. If you need it for oncall, only install it then, then remove it.
3. Stick to a schedule. Log on and off about the same time each day. Don't jump on work for an hour or two here and there throughout the whole day. Log on, put your time in, log off. Don't work on weekends. There are times when you may need to put in extra and/or odd hours, but this should be the exception, not the norm.
With these three things in place, I am — quite successfully — able to get the pre-smartphone feel of disconnecting from work while working from home.
It is absolutely true that boys have been neglected. But the contempt of men is a recent phenomenon. Feminism has a great deal to do with it, demonizing masculinity by construing all men as brutes and promoting the false doctrine that men are unnecessary, that women are self-sufficient, that the patriarchy is some kind of evil oppressive thing. All of that is false. Men and women are complementary, which is to say they differ in ways that complete the other in some way. They need each other to help realize and become who they are. This doesn't necessarily mean every man and woman will marry or can marry or must marry, only that in the great social scheme of things, men and women have their unique genius to offer and range of roles to play in service of the other and the common good, even if it is remote.
Boys have different needs than girls. Treating boys like girls will not do them any good. All children need fathers, but boys are perhaps especially sensitive in this regard as men help model for boys what masculinity means. We see how the absence of a father translates into higher rates of various pathologies and delinquency in single mother households. Father also have an authority no mother can have, an authority that helps boys, and children in general, achieve the kind of moral formation need for adulthood.
There's a reason virtually every culture is patriarchal. Patriarchy exists in service of the common good, beginning with the family unit. It provides the structure and order that enables everyone to flourish. Can things go wrong? Sure. But that's true of every social order or arrangement. You don't abolish something because it can go wrong or goes wrong sometimes. This is like solving poverty by exterminating the poor, or cutting everyone's hands off to "solve" theft. A healthy masculinity, the via media between effeminacy and brutishness, is sacrificial and it is good not only for men, but all of society, including women. The common good depends on it.
I'm going to do a very poor attempt at explaining my feelings over this. For a long time I've idolized Teddy Roosevelt. Parts of his story just speak to me:
* He was sickly but just worked very hard to compensate and overcome it to live an outdoors-centric life. I suffer from some undiagnosable(word?) arthritis, I work hard to still do my favorite activities (backpacking, hunting and fishing).
* He was extremely well learned, thoughtful, and articulate. He kept a detailed journal. I admire those traits and try to emulate them. I pursued a PhD, I keep a journal, I frequently write to relatives and friends. I try to be thoughtful and articulate.
* He was a legendary hunter (as I mentioned I love hunting), and conservationist. He is partly responsible for the National Parks, which I enjoy every free day (I live near Yellowstone and routinely pass under his arch).
* He was empathetic and progressive for his time [0], despite his unshaking nationalism. He didn't seem to fall for toxic tropes of conservatism (although those political terms don't translate to today, Teddy is universally celebrated by the right). I believe strongly in what I consider to be core unshaking tenets of American national identity, but I also try hard to be empathetic and make sure no one is left behind. I don't believe the answer is exclusion of outgroups, which I think is a common conservative trope today. I have a lot of respect for Teddy (with some important caveats) [1].
* He held himself, and those in government to a higher standard [2]. He believed he was a public servant, and fought tirelessly against corruption. There is nothing that makes me angrier than corruption and entitlement in political office today.
I also learned, a couple years ago, he probably would have despised me, had our paths crossed. I'm mostly Italian-American, who he openly viewed as mostly criminals [3], and even went so far as to applaud a lynching of Italian Americans in New Orleans [4].
I think it's important that I learned this. I'm glad it wasn't erased or ignored or left out of the record. I learned a few things from it. I learned (well, I already knew, but it was reinforced) that no one is perfect. No one. And that perfection is the enemy of self-improvement, it is the enemy of progress, and it is the enemy of good. There's no part of me that I'm aware of that's worse for having held TR in such high esteem and tried to emulate the great things I found about him. In fact, his example has improved my life in a variety of ways, particularly my mental health and fortitude, seeing him as an example. Sure, it made me sad to learn that fact about him, but in terms of material affect? It had no change. Words, thoughts, opinions, ideas, are necessarily flawed and incomplete as a direct result of the human condition. Pretending they are not creates two things:
1) An impossible standard
2) A false sense of security and satisfaction
I'm better at some things than TR. I don't have Italian Americans (or any minority group for that matter, my understanding was that he had similar feelings about natives). That alone is a major victory. By not having to draw myself against perfect examples, I can foster some feeling of accomplishment, but I can also learn that my idols were flawed and that even if I am flawed in many ways, I can hopefully still do some good. That's an important motivator.
A perfect example is one I will never live up to, and in that case, why even try?
they say that celebrities stop maturing at the age they become famous.
Having too large a group of people know you is terrible for your ability to reinvent yourself as needed. You can't change who you are or even change your mind if your previous identity is recorded and attached to you. People need to be forgotten, and this is especially true of children.
Not actually contradictory. Verification is cheap when there's a spec to check against. 'Valid Sudoku?' is mechanical. But 'good paper?' has no spec. That's judgment, not verification.