Personal website: https://outsidetheasylum.blog/ Feedback about me: https://www.admonymous.co/isaacking
Isaac King(Isaac King)
Karma: 793
I didn’t claim that the far-left generally agrees with the NYT, or that the NYT is a far-left outlet. It is a center-left outlet, which makes it cover far-left ideas much more favorably than far-right ideas, while still disagreeing with them.
This is not an idiosyncrasy of Gerard and people like him, it is core to Wikipedia’s model. Wikipedia is not an arbiter of fact, it does not perform experiments or investigations to determine the truth. It simply reflects the sources.
This means it parrots the majority consensus in academia and journalism. When that consensus is right, as it usually is, Wikipedia is right. When that consensus is wrong, as happens more frequently than its proponents would like to admit but still pretty rarely overall, Wikipedia is wrong. This is by design.
Wikipedia is not objective, it is neutral. It is an average of everyone’s views, skewed towards the views of the WEIRD people who edit Wikipedia and the people respected by those people.
In the linked Wikipedia discussion, someone asked David to provide sources for his claim and he refused to do so, so I would not consider them to be relevant evidence.
As for the factual question, I’ve come across one article from Quillette that seemed significantly biased and misleading, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more. There was one hoax that they briefly fell for and then corrected within hours, which was the main reason that Wikipedia considers them unreliable, but this says more about Wikipedia than Quillette. (I’m sure many of Wikipedia’s “reliable sources” have gone much longer without correcting errors.)
Quillette definitely has an anti-woke bent, and this colors its coverage. But I haven’t seen anything to indicate that its bias is worse than that of the NYT in the other direction. I have no problem trusting its articles to the same extent I would trust one in the mainstream media.
I think Michael’s response to that is that he doesn’t oppose that. He only opposes a lawyer who tries to prevent their client from getting a punishment that the lawyer believes would be justified. From his article:
It is not wrong per se to represent guilty clients. A lawyer may represent a factually guilty client for the purpose of preventing unjust punishments or rights-violations. What is unethical is to represent a person who you know committed a crime that was really wrong and really deserves to be punished, and to attempt to stop that person from getting the punishment he deserves.
Oh weird, apparently all my running pm2 jobs cancelled themselves at the end of the month. No idea what caused that. Thanks, fixed now.
In Defense of Lawyers Playing Their Part
Oh whoops, thank you.
Mistakes people make when thinking about units
Did you confirm with the doctor that this actually occurred? I’d be worried about a false memory.
Ideally, this would eliminate [...] the “learning the test” issues.
How would it do that? If they learned the test in advance, it would be in their long-term memory, and they’d still remember it when tested on the drug.
They didn’t change their charter.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2Dg9t5HTqHXpZPBXP/ea-community-needs-mechanisms-to-avoid-deceptive-messaging
Hmm, interesting. The exact choice of decimal place at which to cut off the comparison is certainly arbitrary, and that doesn’t feel very elegant. My thinking is that within the constraint of using floating point numbers, there fundamentally isn’t a perfect solution. Floating point notation changes some numbers into other numbers, so there are always going to be some cases where number comparisons are wrong. What we want to do is define a problem domain and check if floating point will cause problems within that domain; if it doesn’t, go for it, if it does, maybe don’t use floating point.
In this case my fix solves the problem for what I think is the vast majority of the most likely inputs (in particular it solves it for all the inputs that my particular program was going to get), and while it’s less fundamental than e.g. using arbitrary-precision arithmetic, it does better on the cost-benefit analysis. (Just like how “completely overhaul our company” addresses things on a more fundamental level than just fixing the structural simulation, but may not be the best fix given resource constraints.)
The main purpose of my example was not to argue that my particular approach was the “correct” one, but rather to point out the flaws in the “multiply by an arbitrary constant” approach. I’ll edit that line, since I think you’re right that it’s a little more complicated than I was making it out to be, and “trivial” could be an unfair characterization.
In the general case I agree it’s not necessarily trivial; e.g. if your program uses the whole range of decimal places to a meaningful degree, or performs calculations that can compound floating point errors up to higher decimal places. (Though I’d argue that in both of those cases pure floating point is probably not the best system to use.) In my case I knew that the intended precision of the input would never be precise enough to overlap with floating point errors, so I could just round anything past the 15th decimal place down to 0.
Duct Tape security
If we figure out how to build GAI, we could build several with different priors, release them into the universe, and see which ones do better. If we give them all the same metric to optimize, they will all agree on which of them did better, thus determining one prior that is the best one to have for this universe.
I don’t understand what “at the start” is supposed to mean for an event that lasts zero time.
I don’t think you understand how probability works.
https://outsidetheasylum.blog/understanding-subjective-probabilities/
Ok now I’m confused about something. How can it be the case that an instantaneous perpendicular burn adds to the craft’s speed, but a constant burn just makes it go in a circle with no change in speed?
...Are you just trying to point out that thrusting in opposite directions will cancel out? That seems obvious, and irrelevant. My post and all the subsequent discussion are assuming burns of epsilon duration.
There is no one Overton window, it’s culture-dependent. “Sleeping in a room with a fan on will kill you” is within the Overton window in South Korea, but not in the US. Wikipedia says this is false rather than adopting a neutral stance because that’s the belief held by western academia.