Data scientist (frowning) “this here are the culture war edgelords, these (gestures) are people who repost memes wantonly, but THESE (points at much taller larger treemap cell, on a log scale) are normies who had a bad breakup and said something like “f* men”. Oh, and these guys over here are sex positive and used the same words while meaning more or less the opposite”
greylag
Karma: 238
average price throughout the whole day
Oh, right, that’s the important bit. Solar glut can’t increase the instantaneous price but its effects on average (mean?) price are less clear
What’s the point of building a solar farm when the grid is already flooded when the sun is shining?
Batteries, yes, but also, the sun is non-binary! Additional solar/wind capacity won’t generate power in still conditions at night, but slower winds and overcast weather and low evening sun all will, and depending on the relative price of solar (increasingly cheap) it may be optimal to oversize solar such that you have absurd overcapacity at summer noon, but require less (relatively expensive) storage (paraphrasing Tony Seba)
solar actually makes power more expensive because you still need all the non-solar generation after the sun goes down but you leave it idle during the day
How can you possibly make something more expensive by producing a glut of it? Making prices more variable, yes; making plant that has been optimised for baseload less well optimised for its new job, sure.
Increasingly activists are seen as defect-bots
To coin a phrase, huge if true.
Priming, since debunked
The more dramatic “talk about getting old to people and they’ll walk slower” examples were debunked. The more pedestrian examples, as with word-association, “appear to be well-established” (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.345.6196.523-b), judging by a few minutes’ examination of Wikipedia (which common-sense supports: trying to NON-word-associate, as with certain panel & improv comedy games, is strikingly difficult)
In the meantime, large language models were created by mass-producing epicycles and training them (What if intelligence is an emergent property of large numbers of epicycles in an evolutionary context?). What happens when macroeconomists mass-produce epicycles? You get DGSE models which would take thousands of years of data to train (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.16224.pdf). In the meantime, you can accommodate as many elephants as you wish, and they can wiggle their trunks and flap their ears!
TL;DR: economist erects glasshouse, installs trebuchet
“A slow sort of country!” said the [Red] Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”—Alice through the Looking-Glass
THANK YOU! In personal development circles, I hear a lot about the benefits of spirituality, with vague assurances that you don’t have to be a theist to be spiritual, but with no pointers in non-woo directions, except possibly meditation. You have unblurred a large area of my mental map.
(Upvoted!)
(Epistemic status: shitpost)
You‘re a kitty!
How does knowing about Ukraine’s draft affect an NYT reader’s opinion of the war? I mean it’s not going to be like
Reader: “Ukraine’s justified in defending itself from Russia!”
NYT-whistleblower: ”But Ukraine drafted soldiers to do it, and the NYT didn’t tell you!”
Reader: ”Oh, well, screw those guys, Ukraine should lose!”
… so what is it like?
Some ways a reader could respond include:
More instinctive patriotic fervour (Glory to Ukraine’s presumably-voluntary heroes!) (… and this seems like the likely propaganda angle in question)
Increased salience of hellishness of the war, therefore Russia should win asap to minimise bloodshed
Increased salience of hellishness of the war, therefore arm Ukraine to punish Russia for starting it
If you turn up the prior belief of collusion between the NYT and a military-industrial-political complex, you can imagine a “pragmatic” situation where the West arms Ukraine enough to keep Russia embroiled in a war of attrition, thereby pouring Russia’s armed forces into a meatgrinder for, from Western accountings, pennies on the dollar, and this might be pragmatic, or even hard to improve on (because arming Ukraine too much could provoke nuclear response from Russia), but, damn it all, it doesn’t feel very heroic. So, NYT is left waving the banners and playing the trumpets?
downvoted for the “affiliate link” rickroll.
(Epistemic status: shitpost)
You know the rules, and so do I
I am confused. None of these are particularly social-status-improving, or, for that matter, social-status-worsening, because none of them are conspicuous. If you buy a tailored suit or an expensive car or an expensive house, people can see that you own it, and the extravagance signals wealth (or can be interpreted as materialism or lack of prudence); none of the things on the list seem to qualify. What am I missing?
Hm. Now I thought I’d heard of gender dysphoria/transgender/etc showing up in brain imaging (eg. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26766406/) and while “develop like female brains” would be bounding happily ahead of the evidence, that seems at least like sporadic snorting noises from the garage in the night time
(Epistemic status: shitpost)
Plan to uplift Royal Corgi may cause constitutional crisis
If Epstein’s thesis is, broadly, “cheap energy from fossil fuels is awesome and climate change isn’t that bad”, weaknesses would be likely to fall somewhere under these, classified in increasing controversy:
Climate change might be worse than he’s positing. Particularly, climate is a global system we only partly understand, and our error bars for the effects of inadvertently perturbing it may be quite large
Cheap energy may be obtainable from non-fossil sources. Epstein is keen on nuclear energy (why?), but, as AnthonyC points out, solar & wind are getting surprisingly cheap (for example https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-23/building-new-renewables-cheaper-than-running-fossil-fuel-plants). Obviously that only gives you a bonanza of cheap energy when the wind blows and the sun shines, but “the sometimes-free-energy bonanza will destabilise the grid!” feels a long way from common-sense
GDP may be possible to decouple from energy use by purely technical means: compare the computation-per-watt-hour of a Pentium with that of an iPad. Compare a Passive-House-standard building with an average building. How far are we from the optimal frontier? There will be, at some point, a limit, because we’re operating with optimal designs and can’t get any better, but we might be quite far from that point—countries with more energy-tight housing often have codes that require that, rather than the market doing it spontaneously? Why is that? Principal-agent problems? “Market for lemons” informational issues?
GDP may be possible to decouple even further from emissions use via selective lifestyle changes (higher-density cities, more bicycles, fewer automobiles)
GDP may be argued to be decouple-able from human welfare. Broadly, this is the “degrowth” argument. Critique here, for example (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-degrowth)
… climate change is not an existential risk… Earth isn’t going to become Venus, or anything like that
Last I heard, the big question was what positive-feedback “tipping points” exist, and at what CO2-level they become triggered. This would give quite wide error bars on what average heating is caused by a given quantity of cumulative emissions. If we can burn all the fossil fuels, turn the rainforests to desert, and vaporise all the methane clathrates, and still not end up like Venus, that’s… reassuring, I guess
A town in Norway did it: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170314-the-town-that-built-a-mirror-to-catch-the-sun
(Epistemic status: lyrics)
I’m not too clear about what you just spoke. Is that a parable, or a very subtle joke?
Or to take a stronger example, someone you deeply care about must be alive because you deeply love them, and at the same time you also know for certain that they are dead.
Isn’t this the “denial” psychological defense mechanism, famous for its role in Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief? In the reality the unfortunate thing is true; the impossibility is in the mind of the observer tripping circuit breakers.
I for one warmly welcome Drunk Edward Tufte to LW!