Where did you get this graphic?
The thing that seemed most crazy to me was DC, which I was shocked to find is correct.
But the international list is crazy. 3 in Russia? 2 in Japan? 1 in France?
Douglas_Knight
Karma: 7,362
Do you have any links to news coverage about the ISP-level ban? This says that Sweden has interpreted it that way, but I don’t see coverage of other countries. This claims that the order isn’t clear, but links to a secret order that specifically mentions ISPs and seems to also include blocking archive.org.
How is the ban implemented technically? DNS? IP?
The rules were very clearly stated 15 years ago that politics are 100% on topic.
Self-driving cars are famously bad at left turns. That is, they’re inhumanly slow. But the goal is not human-like performance. Maybe the self-driving cars are doing the right thing; super-human patience is not a difficult task for computers. But once you’ve decided that you’re going to wait a long time to make left turns, you should change your routing algorithm to avoid left turns. UPS stopped making left turns in 2004. Why is Google/Waymo still making them? In 2016, Google’s other W-driving subsidiary reduced left turns. Maybe they just reduced Waze lefts down to Maps lefts, but even so, it should make this parameter salient. Or maybe they do avoid left turns, but the few that they do make are seen and mocked. Talking to riders should give an unbiased sample, and, indeed, the rider talks about it going out of its way to avoid left turns.
But the Waymo spokesman was defensive, insisting that they do make left turns regularly. Similarly, GM/Cruise brags about its ability to make left turns. It’s hard for me to articulate why, but I think that this is bad and they should brashly embrace the difference; of course self-driving cars will be different! But this option is not open to Tesla with its incremental approach. Humans would probably be upset if it navigated them through lots of right turns.
That’s why most of the graphs look the same.
But they don’t look the same, if you include America. (imgur)
Of course, if it’s only about America, it’s probably not about covid. The wave of deaths in the third quarter of 2021 was a lot younger. And they weren’t all registered as covid deaths or pneumonia deaths, as the quote does go on to say. He claims that they are people who had covid months ago, which I’m guessing is an intentional deception. A lot of them are accounted for—as fentanyl deaths.
Well, let’s just go in a circle. As I said in my first comment, before we create new rules, we should check whether existing rules do what we claim they do.
Gwern tested this and concluded, that, no, the talk page exists to distract you.
Yes, truckers are slaves. That is exactly what they are protesting. The question is whether they should be.
If the purpose of the rule is to protect the truckers from gangrene, then it is paternalistic, no matter how people regard it. I am not necessarily against paternalistic rules, but I am strongly against rules that are mislabeled, and thus impossible to audit. If it is to protect other drivers from drowsy truckers, it could be a nonpaternalistic public health rule. But if the truckers have such uncontrolled diabetes that they have gangrene, it seems unlikely that the rule is having any such effect. Probably it is exists purely to harass truckers.
The dose is too high.
Before adding regulations, we should check that our existing regulations are doing what they claim to. I know a rural surgeon whose bread and butter is truckers whose diabetes is not under control. Maybe this is a sign that this is a good target for a paternalistic rule, but maybe it’s a sign that the rule doesn’t do anything.
Embryos produced by the same couple won’t vary in IQ too much
For a normal trait, the variance of the children of a fixed couple is approximately the population variance. I think that’s a lot.
G. Overall deaths from everything have been very unusually high at points in 2021, even in 15-64 age group
Yes, all-cause mortality is up. We should look at all-cause mortality because it’s what we care about, but when reasoning about causes, we should break it down by causes. Not all causes are up. The insurance executive says that young people are dying of random things months after covid. I’m happy to attribute unexplained deaths to the long-term effects of covid. But first you have to check that they don’t have obvious explanations. The numbers I’ve seen is that it’s mostly fentanyl. I’m pretty sure that’s not covid. It might be lockdown, but I think it’s just the continuing expansion of fentanyl (though that had flattened out for a couple years before the pandemic).
Sorry, I’m confused.
I got 10^5 from 1/(p-1/2).
It depends on n. If n is small, such as n=1, then you should bet a lot. In the limit of n large, you should use the Kelly criterion. The crossover is about n=10^5. Which is why I said that it depends on having many opportunities.
Yes, I should have said that I’m assuming that public speech is idealistic. I guess “high motives” really means motives praised by public speech, not ones claimed to be common. And I think there have been societies that are cynical by that standard. So there is a factual question of whether there was an actual and/or perceived correlation in such societies.
Yes, deceit complicates things. My belief about current society is that optimism and idealism are socially accepted and pessimism and cynicism are correlated because they are signs of defiance of convention. This doesn’t depend on the words meaning anything at all, which is easier to analyze than deceit. But I guess it’s a cynical theory, in that I believe the statements of are signals of the low motive of conformity, rather than the high motive of truth. But once we’ve entered into the realm of deceit, who’s to say what motives are high or low?
Robin Hanson tweets:
Many expect to see a correlation between cynicism, thinking that low motives drive behavior, and pessimism, thinking the future will be bleak. I defy this, being both cynical and optimistic. But I’m curious; is this correlation real, and if so why? If not, why expect it?
I am skeptical that most people have beliefs and, in particular, I’m skeptical that these terms are for describing beliefs.
Taking these definitions as given, what do they predict? An outside view extrapolation of the future from the present should not depend too much on understanding how the present works, only whether it works and how it has changed in the past. If we live in a time of progress, recognizing that should not depend on understanding what drives progress. Trying to call the peak may depend on details, but if people’s motives haven’t changed over the centuries, the mere opinion on motives should not single out the present day for a reversal of trends.
But people with specific different beliefs about how the world works should make different predictions about specific proposals and have different beliefs about their likelihood of success. Cynics should be pessimistic about idealistic proposals and idealists should be pessimistic about cynical proposals. This is symmetric, but if public speech is idealistic, proposals will be systematically idealistic and more convincing to idealists than to cynics.
An alternate interpretation of the result is that Beta just didn’t have much immune escape. That fact that it was crushed by Delta suggests that. The vaccine produced antibodies that were more tuned to Beta than those from the original vaccine, but the difference was slight, just a factor of 2. We won’t know about OAS until we have a variant with real immune escape, which may well be Omicron. But I’m not worried about OAS because it’s a lower order effect.
Adjuvants are for activating the immune system to respond to free-floating virus particles. If the virus actually infects a cell and produces proteins on the cell’s surface, that is a different signal to the immune system and adjuvants are not needed. Thus adjuvants were not needed for traditional live/attenuated vaccines and 21st century mRNA and vector vaccines (AZ, etc), but were needed for 1980s recombinant protein vaccines (Novavax) and traditional dead/inactivated vaccines.
What is calculus? Who invented it? I don’t mean Newton vs Leibniz, but Newton vs Archimedes.
If it is the ability of calculate certain things, Archimedes calculated many of those things. If it is a single particular theorem, the obvious candidate is the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, connecting tangents to areas, due to Isaac Barrows, Newton’s mentor.
I sometimes see people claiming that Newton bequeathed us a black box which was a giant step forward and now people learn it in high school and can do everything Newton could do. This is wildly wrong, but it is a natural benchmark to measure learning. If you believe that about calculus, or any other tool, you can go back and look for the problems it was intended to solve and see whether you can solve them. Archimedes computed the area under the parabola, which is now routine. He asked for his tomb to represent his hat-box theorem, which is not too difficult, and is often covered in multivariable calculus classes. He studied the center of gravity of paraboloids as a model for stability of boats and found a bifurcation phase transition. I haven’t gotten around to trying this, but it sounds way beyond the curriculum. Newton famously invented calculus to derive Kepler’s orbital laws from the inverse square force law. The second law, saying that time is proportional to area, is pretty easy and is covered in physics with calculus, or maybe even multivariable calculus, but the other laws, about the ellipse and the semi-major axis are difficult.
The meaning of the word calculus doesn’t matter, but a course of calculus doesn’t subsume Greek mathematics, let alone Newton.
Here are a couple of very simple points that I don’t think should be controversial which I think are useful to frame the discussion.
First, there is a linguistic issue: what is a bureaucracy? Is it any large organization? Is it a rigid organization? Is it a corrupt organization? People use it in all these ways.
Blame-minimization is a theory of bureaucratic decay. If all bureaucracies are bad, why do they exist? If everyone agreed that they are bad, why don’t we tear them down? They are sometimes created to provide fake jobs, but usually they are created because they are expected to work and the attention at the beginning makes them work. You can’t explain them with just a principle of decay because that inherently can’t explain the starting point, only the trajectory. Compare Samo Burja.