Yes, “emergency” is, in some sense, the right word, but when I google “emergency preparedness” or “types of emergencies,” I don’t find “unfriendly policemen” on any lists.
Douglas_Knight
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I think that this is a misuse of the idea that markets are anti-inductive. That is just a rephrasing of the efficient markets hypothesis, that some markets are efficient. But you definitely don’t expect all markets to be efficient, only very liquid ones. The price of Apple’s stock may be hard to predict, but the real phenomenon, the number of iphones sold next year is pretty easy to predict, it’s just baked into the price. If you know that it’s wrong, you can move money from other stocks into it or vice versa. But if you know that the whole market is wrong, it’s much harder to fix. So the trajectory of the whole market could be more predictable than that of a single company.
And the business cycle is not about stock market prices. It is about the real economy, the part that has more momentum. Maybe it’s about the market for labor, but that market is definitely not efficient. It’s not a commodity. People vary widely in their skills, even the same person over the course of a few years. Hiring someone is a long-term risky investment, not so sensitive to the price of labor.
Obviously I disagree. How can you boldly state that they didn’t have things? Maybe there’s no written record, but someone writing about the Antikythera Mechanism should know the limits of that! Indeed, the Method of Mechanical Theorems was discovered after even the Mechanism. But there is a written record. There’s a lot more calculus in Archimedes than the method of exhaustion. That’s barely calculus and it’s interesting more because it’s rigorous than because it’s a forerunner to calculus. But the Method is a pretty big chunk of integral calculus.
The missing part is differential calculus; Newton’s laws do not appear in the written record. But Vitruvius appears to discuss how the planetary orbits are the result of inertia and centripetal force, so it is really not a big stretch to posit further elaboration.
Koestler says a bunch of contradictory things about Plato. He recognizes that there are a bunch of different time periods to explain, so he seems to recognize that his explanations don’t fit together.
One place he says that it’s not Plato’s fault, but the fault of the Neoplatonists. Maybe that could explain the decline after Ptolemy and the lack of interest of the Byzantines in science, but in the quote above he’s talking about decline before Ptolemy, so Plato proper. He specifically notes a gap between Hipparchus and Ptolemy, so he is talking about a fast fall, not decay past Ptolemy.
He recognizes that the Western Dark Age didn’t have Plato or Aristotle. He specifically mentions that the West got Aristotle before Plato. In between it got Archimedes and science exploded. Aristotle is generally seen as promoting medieval science (Roger Bacon was a fan), but at the very least he didn’t interfere with reading Archimedes. There was a decline of science and civilization generally when Petrarch translated Plato, but I think that’s a coincidence, really the fault of the Black Death.
Apollonius introduced epicycles and proved a theorem of the commutativity of addition: a small epicycle about a large orbit appears the same as a large epicycle about a small orbit. This makes it seems like he was using them to represent heliocentrism, not just fitting data.
The Ptolemaic model has an epicycle and an equant for each planet. One of them corresponds to heliocentrism and the other to the non-circularity of an orbit. (That’s very vague because the correspondence is different for the inner planets vs the outer planets. The role of epicycle vs deferant gets switched and (thus) which orbit, the planet or the earth’s has its non-circularity approximated differs.)
That’s reasonable, but most likely the Greeks didn’t know the orbits were ellipses, but just knew them as solutions to Newton’s laws and used calculus to approximate them as deviations from circles.
“in the year 1500 Europe knew less than Archimedes who died in the year 212 BC.”
In short, the answer seems to be Plato and Aristotle (OP)But Plato and Aristotle came before Archimedes! How is this an answer? Bad ideas can retard progress, but they didn’t hurt Archimedes.
By the end of the third century BC, the heroic period of Greek science was over. From Plato and Aristotle onward, natural science begins to fall into disrepute and decay (Koestler)
This is complete garbage. The Hellenistic period after Aristotle was much better than the “heroic” period before him. Aristotle appears to have created science. While there were some scientific Presocratics (Thales, Democritus), Koestler’s Pythagoras is a fantasy. Aside from inflating the achievements of the Pythagoreans, relying too much on Simplicius a thousand years later, he also gerrymanders the real achievements of real people, arbitrarily crediting the Pythagoreans. Maybe Herakleides was a Pythagorean, but he was also a student of Plato, as Koestler mentions in passing, but fails to credit. Classifying Aristarchus as Pythagorean rather than Hellenistic is crazy.
Hellenistic science didn’t decay, but abruptly collapsed, with civil war in Alexandria in 144BC and, more mysteriously, with the peaceful Roman annexation of Pergamon in 133BC.
That’s a quote from Wealthfront. Here’s the fine print:
The cash balance in the Cash Account is swept to one or more banks (the “program banks”) where it earns a variable rate of interest and is eligible for FDIC insurance. FDIC insurance is not provided until the funds arrive at the program banks. FDIC insurance coverage is limited to $250,000 per qualified customer account per banking institution. Wealthfront Brokerage uses more than one program bank to ensure FDIC coverage of up to $1 million for your cash deposits.
You phrased your thought experiments in terms of good and bad lives. But what about the good and bad parts of a life? When you imagine a lot of good lives, you say that the value doesn’t add up. But what about the bad parts of those lives? Do you imagine that still accumulates and wipes out the value in the good parts?
Maybe this is just nitpicking, but I found this passage confusing:
On the level of corporations doing this direct from the top, often these actions are a response to the incentives the corporation faces. In those cases, there is no reason to expect such actions to be out-competed.
In other cases, the incentives of the CEO and top management are twisted but the corporation’s incentives are not. One would certainly expect those corporations that avoid this to do better. But these mismatches are the natural consequence of putting someone in charge who does not permanently own the company. Thus, dual class share structures becoming popular to restore skin in the correct game.
Is that last sentence in the wrong paragraph?
Before I get to my reading that suggests that change, a couple things that I found confusing that could have caused me to misread it: What does “in charge” mean? The CEO or the owners? How do corporations face incentives, rather than individuals?
I read the first paragraph about Wall Street and quarterly reports giving bad incentives to the CEO. Dual class shares exist to protect founders from outside investors. So doesn’t that sentence belong in the first paragraph, not the second...? (It’s a little weird to say that outside investors don’t have skin in the game. Maybe you mean that money managers investing other people’s money don’t have skin in the game. Also, it’s more that super shares remove control, rather than add skin. I think that it may be more important that the founders have demonstrated ability to make long-term plans than their incentives. Consider Steve Jobs returning to Apple as a hired-gun CEO.)
What is the other case, the case of the second paragraph? When Wall Street or other owners understands the company, but has to install a hired manager? Then, yes, the misalignment of incentives makes it difficult for the board to hire a CEO. But super shares don’t seem relevant to that problem.
I think that you mixed them up. When I use the markdown syntax, I get full-width, presumably inline images, not block. Whereas when I follow your other instructions...I can’t follow them. When I select text, I don’t get an image button, just (Bold, Italic, Underline, Link | Title, Blockquote). Is image supposed to be on that list? If so, that’s a simple explanation of the bug.
Thanks, but that doesn’t mean anything to me. Is this documented anywhere? Is this page the best documentation for the editor?
Is your comment even intended for users, or is it a hint for debugging?
Sorry if I’m belaboring the obvious, but aiming for secrets is an extreme form of comparative advantage. Maybe the framing is important, either by focusing on the tail or on risk or by some purely psychological effect, but the argument is exactly the same.
What’s up with images?
I stumbled on advanced image features. I don’t mean badly discoverable, but really clearly a UI bug. The features let me resize them and choose between left- and right-justification (and text flowing around them?) and it’s a pity that they’re not widely available. Specifically, I made this comment. First I switched my account to markdown (is there a way to switch a single comment?). I made the comment with the image. I switched my account to wysiwyg. I edited the comment and accepted the option to switch the comment to wysiwyg. At this point I had the resizing ability, but only for the old markdown image and not for new images I added in wysiwyg, either that comment or a comment that started as wysiwyg (the test comment below).I replicated this procedure with this comment. It started as markdown and I can resize this image:
but not this one:
In other words, regression to the mean. The predictions form a line, with a positive slope. Less than 1, but only perfect predictions would have slope 1. The intercept is high, which is overconfidence. But the intercept is a statement about the whole population, not about the lowest bin.
Here are the graphs. A lot of information has been destroyed by binning them, but it doesn’t sound like DK thought that information was relevant or made use of it:
The second is different. That better matches the cartoons one finds for an image search for Dunning-Kruger. But I’m not sure it matches this post. (The third could be described as yet another shape, but I’d classify it as a line with a very low positive slope.)
The fourth graph is of a more complicated intervention. It seems like it has the opposite message of this post, namely it finds that the 4th quartile is better calibrated than the 3rd.
I don’t think he’s saying that error is good. He’s saying that ignoring error is bad. And there’s a valley of bad rationality in which the error level is low enough that people ignore it, but it still matters. Specifically, he says that black box models that don’t include error are bad. You should model error of components and error propagation and design circuits that are robust to error. I’m not sure what this would mean in practice, though. Today we design systems that recover from computers crashing, but recovering from wrong computation is harder.
But this is 1948. In 1956, he showed how to take digital gates with known error rates and build from them digital gates with lower error rates. This opens up the possibility of getting the error low enough that you can ignore it and embrace digital logic. I’m guessing that he changed his mind and rejected the earlier paper, but it would be nice to have an explicit statement.
As Jessicata said, the regulations only apply via federal funding. It’s that simple.
There are some magic words that turn an oral history into a study, but a poll is already a study. And none of this changes your funding.
Compare: the political spectrum as Rentiers vs Apparatchiks
Eliezer’s post is quite compatible with Sabine’s. They may have additional positions that are not compatible, and maybe you know that from their other posts. Eliezer claims a very weak version of realism, while Sabine rejects a strong version. Eliezer claims QCD is true because it predicts reality; whereas Sabine says that she doesn’t know what it means for quarks to be real. Sabine does not address truth or reality of theories and Eliezer does not address the reality of objects.
I think that your second quote is misleading. She does not claim to reject the truth of theories, only the truth of objects. That seems like an odd word choice, but the third time she uses “true” it is explicitly about constituent objects.
PS — could you switch the link to https?
Yes, exactly, because that’s the real meaning of the word “emergency.” Thus it is not a useful word for finding sources about the broader topic. Books about “emergency preparedness” are probably going to have more about first aid, but still won’t cover situational awareness or dealing with police.