Physicist and dabbler in writing fantasy/science fiction.
Ben
Karma: 2,646
I haven’t checked wikipedia for that, but I don’t think the trend is surprising. I think that a big part of it is just that it feels creepy to comment on a specific person’s attractiveness in polite company. And Wikipedia is polite company. If an actress is particularly pretty it would feel kind of weird for someone to add that to their wiki page. I can half remember a tv interview from the early 0′ies, I think it was Johnathon Ross interviewing Kiera Knightly about her new film, and he said something which implied that he thought a big part of her appeal as an actress (or even the main part) was that she was really attractive. Regardless of the truth of that position, it seemed that both she and possibly also the audience found it a really cringe topic of conversation.
I am sure there are other websites (which are Not polite company) where you will find a lot of people talking about how attractive they find one celebrity or another.
Yes, it can work. Reflecting more I think the issue is maybe that you need to be clear from the beginimg wether you are telling your overseas workers ‘your timetable will suck but we are paying super over the odds to cover that’ or are doing something more ‘normal’. (+100% vs +30%). The first was never the bargain in my example above, hence some of the frustration.
Both have advantages and disadvantages. In the former, the employees will just accept the timetable. But, you will mostly get younger, more junior (single) people, and they wont be the most capable or best qualified people, who will go for something normal. I suspect high turnover, a couple of years of highly paid nocturnal behaivior to then take that experience to try and get a more normal job where you can actually have a family, makes sense.
Instead of a ‘half move’ you have the alternative of a ‘full move’, where you move the whole operation (taking the people you need with you). On a much smaller scale some software companies did this a decade or two ago by moving from London to Bristol where property prices were lower (very short move, they are only 1.5 hours appart by train.)
I remember a Scot Alexander post a while ago about Bhudism and suffering, I beleive he was asking Isur about some aspect of it. His phrasing implied that the idea that Bhudism has something important to teach us, some kind of magic juice, was to be taken very seriously. I imagine an equivalent post about Hinduism or Islam, or even Kabalistic stuff, would have used more detached ‘they beleive this stuff’ phrasing.
I dont agree that Bhudism is somehow uniquely unhealthy to people. I do find it interesting how it seems to provoke different instinctive reactions than other religions.
I second all this.
Even when it does technically work, people underestimate the social dynamics. I knew somone who worked in Singapore for a Canadian company. Her dinner would be going cold on the table and her children wondering why mummy wasnt joining for bedtime stories while her teleconferenced meeting in Canada overrun by an hour as they all complained about having to get in at 8am and how the weather was bad in Toronto. Complaints from her and others in SG soon made it clear that these meetings had to be done as fast as possible and that mentioning anything off topic, eg the weather, random pleasantries, traffic, was liable to result in interuption/complaint from someone in singapore.
So, you can have the meetings, but freindly chit chat, going off topic or similar is completely shut down. That worked much better, shortening the meetings and letting the signapore lot at least feel their time was being valued, but doing meetings that was is not natural to people.
If they had tried some weird ‘work in a canadian time zone’ thing then the person I knew, and probably the whole team, would have quit. Maybe unmarried 20-somethings could do that for a little while, but as they gained partners and kids it would stop working for them.
A couple of things stand out to me about the groups I was in thaalt worked better vs the ones that didnt work as well.
1 - meeting regularity. Its hard to seperate cause and effect, but groups that ‘have a meeting on mondays’ are way less effective than groups that ‘have a meeting when there is a need to have a meeting’. The second type of group average slightly fewer meetings, but they are so much more effective. People go in knowing ‘Eric found such and such a problem this morning, which means we possibly need to change the plan somehow, hence this after lunch meeting. The meeting ends when a descision on how to proceed is reached.’ Instead of ′ this meeting is because it is 10am on monday and it ends when everyone runs out of things to say.′
2 - People ‘closer to the ground’ making the final descisions. The person who is going through the data by hand, should have the final say in what analysis method to use. The person writing the code for processing the data has final say on the statistical method the code will do. If you dont have this system all kinds of dumb problems come up. The PhD student has a sense from having read all the data that the analysis is going wrong somehow, but instead of just changing method they start trying to come up with some kind of actual argument for why the method feels off, then trying to book a meeting to attempt to justify changing methods. Its slow, its bad, people are much better at seeing that something isnt working than explaining why. Doubly so, when they have already decided in their heart that the right course is to change methods, and so the meeting is asking permision to switch, not advice on whether to switch. I watched someone struggle with a simulation tool that didnt work for nearly 2 years, going back and fourth with their boss trying to get permision to try a different software package, and being repeatedly told ‘but, that software always worked for me in the past’. Dumb situation. After 6 months they are no lomger trying to make it work, but trying to produce proof that it doesnt work so they can use the other software. Making them do that for another 18 months was bad management, but the manager should never have been in charge of that desicion in the first place. Obviously if you constrain people more, they are less effective.
I mostly agree, with an exception for posts/comments that are already negative or close to zero.
I see a comment I think is useless/unpleasant/bad, and I think about downvoting it. I see its currently sitting at −10 and dont vote because I dont want to pile on even harder against that person. But, if the same comment had been at +20 i would have thought ‘what, really? Well, downvote’.
If I like something I dont let its current karma effect my voting.
This is my situation as well. I am an Irish citizen because one of my grandparents was born in Northern Ireland. I have never been to any part of the island of ireland (would like to one day), and not have either of my parents. Now my son can also apply for Irish cirizenship through me.
Weirdly, my son could not apply for British citizenship through me, even though I am a British citizen who spent most of my life in the UK, because of laws about place of birth. Its not relevant though because he gets UK citizenship through his place of brith and/or his mother so no issues. Just weird that I can grant citizenship of a country I have never been to but not my home country.
I agree the process of applying for Irish citizenship is really smooth. If that is any indication of the rest of the country’s bearocracy then its amazing. A colleage was applying for a visa to bring his wife into the UK, which we calculated was more than 100 times more complicated than me applying for Irish citizenship.
I may be remembering the name wrong and have picked out entirely the wrong person, but I think the author of that fan fic was @Florian_Dietz.
I read that fanfic yesterday (and enjoyed it).
When I try and open it from my history I also get a 404 error.
J Bostock is suggesting that LLM written material might have been removed. I strongly suspect that “Already Optimised” was not written by an LLM from how it read.
Like the character in the story, I kind of assume it wouldn’t work not because of anything I know about LLMs (because I know very little about them), but because of the social fact that these websites don’t (to my knowledge) exist.
I am kind of interested in trying to run the experiment. If it is the case that anyone can persuade future LLM systems of any obscure fact they want to persuade them of with a low-effort webpage then that seems like an important thing to know.
I think this is typical of most left vs right political discussions. I lived with a Libertarian at one point, and he kept talking to my socialist friends, and they would completely fail to make contact when they were communicating. Like, Libertarian says “I want less regulation”. Socialists are like “Yeah, sure. I don’t mind either way.” Libertarian: “You know, its easier to start a company in Denmark than it is here?”. Socialist: “Yes, it should be easier to start a company.” Libertarian: “Wait? So you claim to be a socialist but you like people founding companies and you dislike regulation, I think you will find that you are actually a Libertarian just like me.” Socialist: “What? No, I want a progressive tax system that reallocates wealth from the rich to the poor by paying for a free-at-point-of-use health system and universal basic income. I want to take the money out of politics by [gestures and half baked and dubious sounding plan]. If lower regulation will help pay for those things then lower regulation is good, but its not an issue I really care about either way.”
On the flight upgrade, if it is your honeymoon, I think by far the best move is to tell the person at the desk that its your honeymoon so you would prefer not to sit seperately.
I think the odds that you both get upgraded given the honeymoon thing are worth playing for, and you still score good-partner points if it doesnt work out.
While truck drivers might loose out, I dont think it follows that they need to be compensated. People loose out from various changes in government policy the whole time. If you raise taxes, you obviously dont compensate the people now paying more because that would exactly cancel the gains.
What you want, is to make it gradual enough so that if many trucker jobs go they do so at a pace that people can adjsut to (eg fewer new hires and a few early retirements rather than mass redundanvies). I suspcect repealing the Jones act would have a gradual impact, as buying the ships, crewing them and advancing the port infrastructure all sounds like a thing that happens over a decade at least.
Something that may be relevant is that the quote (at least when I read it the first time) did not seem to be advocating a nuclear first strike per se, but instead making the argument that if a first strike is going to happen it should happen as soon as possible.
Depending on the wider context that could imply a pro first stike position (if we are going to do this it should be soon, so lets get on and do it) or an anti first strike position (if you are so sure in your first strike sabre rattling, why havent you done it already? Could it be that if we move the discusion from ‘first strike at some point’ to ‘right now’ you suddenly see the issue in a different way and realise how dumb you sound?).
Agreed, but when one sees a graph like that one assumes that the person making it has ensured their sample draws equally from every age group (not proportionally from every age group).
Interestingly, I would have made a prediction analogous to your own, but for trains. I also would have been wrong.
If I am reading Wikipedia right, Since the late 1980′s the Dockland Light Railway has been running completely automated driverless trains. For some reason, basically every other train in the UK (and presumably in most places) has a driver.
I predicted a while ago (probably a over 10 years ago) that this was an unstable situation that would soon change. Trains are cheaper to automate than cars. Train drivers are more expensive to hire than car drivers. I was wrong, I am still not really sure why so many trains still have drivers.
The costs being part of the outcome is an interesting point. But the example is maybe weaker than it first seems. If both sides knew perfectly in advance that the cost of taking Eastern Examplestan by force is 300,000 fighting-aged males, then the aggressor could probably find something that they valued less than 300,000 of their own lives, but that the defender valued more highly than their deaths. Eg. The aggressor might think paying $100 -million was better than all that death, and the defender might rather have $100 million than to inflict those casualties. In other words, by negotiation both sides could do strictly better than by fighting.
This obviously involves a few assumptions, firstly that both sides know exactly what the military outcome would be. Secondly, that the governments involved actually like good things (less people dead, yay!) rather than personal reputation/posing (“You coward, you surrendered!”). Thirdly, that both sides can actually be trusted, (so the aggressor won’t use the soldiers saved by negotiating to try and force a second round of negotiation).
Personally I strongly gravitate to the idea of trust, that wars are generally avoided if the two sides can trust one another to some extent. Appeasement before WW2 is a good example, if it had worked (IE avoided the war) it would obviously have been “super worth it”. That it didn’t work was largely down to the fact that a trust was betrayed.
On the culture thing, a simpler theory seems to be that every country invests heavily in what people think is cool or prestigious.
So, in the USA, you tell people you invest in or work in AI datacenters or software and people think it seems awesome. Where as (maybe) in Korea super giant awesome ships blasting over the oceans would be the coolest thing. American investors probably have a very different risk appetite—if you imagine a weird model where (for some reason) people overwhelmingly invest in their own country, and (reasonably) each investor wants a certain amount of risk/reward. Then in a big country an investor can reduce risk by investing in lots of different companies that are individually high risk. In a small country, there might just not be enough of these lottery ticket companies to split, so a dependable one is more attrative.
AI data centers sound more high risk/high reward than shipbuilding dry docks.
Presumably Trumps tarrifs are a big part of why Nippon Steel are buying US steel—they think its worth making steel in America if it is impossible to effectively get steel into America.
I havent looked at it in much detail, but it sounds like a bad idea. Mostly as I am not sure the ‘benefits’ listed make much sense.
‘No fresh water needed’ - if your heat disipation tech is good enough to run it without water, then why not run it on land without water? Land gets air cooling for free in addition to whatever tech you are running, space doesnt.
‘Frees up space on land’ - if you dont care about internet ping, then land has plenty of empty deserts you can build in. If every square meter of the earth is filling up then going underground or underwater are also surely cheaper than space.
‘Solar’ - This one makes sense.
Another downside to note—increased radiation exposure. That presumably cuts the lifetime of the chips.
I know nothing about the underlying price strucure, but I do know that if a journey contains a sub-jounrey, that charging less for the whole than for one of its parts cannot possibly make logical sense. I had this last year when buying a baby pushchair, buying just the chair I needed would have cost me more than a package deal that included that exact chair along with some other stuff I wasnt bothered about. I went for the package deal. The package can of course reasonably cost less than the sum of its parts, but it cant cost less than any one of its parts.
Targetting the ‘break of journey’ seems weird to me. I have never done it intentionally to get a cheaper ticket, but I have, for example been on a train into Bristol and been phoned up to say that some change of plan means its eaiser to meet me a station earlier (Parkway), so I get off one station early, rather than wasting time going in a circle. Banning break of journey would sort of be like that pushchair company continuing to have the package deal cheaper than one of the products it includes, but then sending someone around to force me to use the extra stuff included.
I am curious why it is a hard problem for the prices to emable people to spend less to buy more, and, if the prices do have that quirk, why its really a problem for customers to exploit it.