mukashi(Adri A)

• mukashi 24 Mar 2021 2:45 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Stefan De Young’s comment on: Canada Covid Up­date: think­ing out loud

  I don’t get it. Was it closed or not? The border in Australia is also mostly closed, but some people are indeed allowed to pass. They are forced to do quarantines though.

• mukashi 8 Apr 2021 1:55 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Dumbledore's Army’s comment on: Monastery and Throne

  Building a narrative around lockdowns being more harmful than beneficial is simplistic at best, and dangerously misleading at worst. The lockdown is a powerful weapon, and for that reason, it should be used wisely (but it should be used when needed!). We seem to forget sometimes that some countries have indeed provided valuable examples on how to succeed at curbing the pandemics and the lockdowns have been one of the main tools they employed, but not the only one.

  A very important point is that judging lockdowns in isolation is wrong. The reason why some countries have managed to successfully stop the spreading is not because of the lockdowns alone, but because multiple interventions taking place simultaneously.

  Take the example of Australia. The lockdown in Melbourne lasted longer than in most places, but in the meantime, the borders were closed for most people, except for those Australians coming back to the country that had to go through mandatory quarantines in specifically designated hotels. Australia has also been very effective at contact tracing but that is something that works very well only if you have few cases (and what is the prerequisite to have few cases?). In Europe or in US is not that the lockdowns did not work (they work very well at doing what they have to do, stopping momentarily the spreading of the virus), it is simply that other measures were not taken simultaneously or they simply failed at implementing them.

[Question] Does any­one know this web­page about Ma­chine Learn­ing?

• mukashi 16 Apr 2021 3:05 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Zac Hatfield-Dodds’s comment on: Covid 4/​15: Are We Se­ri­ously Do­ing This Again

  Strongly disagree. Australia has done many things right:

  1. Close the borders early (and close them for real)

  2. Very efficient contact tracing. Even after months with 0 cases, we still are asked to sign up to every bar we visit

  3. 2 weeks supervised quarantines for returning Australians

  4. Very quick reactions as soon as one case is detected in the community, e.g. Queensland lockdown from a few weeks ago

  5. Tons of testing

  Etc

  Handwashing has no effect on the transmission of the virus. Distancing is meaningless if there are no cases.

  I will concede though that the vaccine rollout is being inefficient, but it does not have such a high cost: people are not dying in the thousands. Australia can afford that.

  Deaths in the USA (correcting per population) are 50 times higher than in Australia.

• mukashi 16 Apr 2021 3:14 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Covid 4/​15: Are We Se­ri­ously Do­ing This Again

  I hope so too. A perverse effect of letting every state/​region/​city handle the pandemics by themselves is that, in most countries, those states/​regions/​cities are normally governed by different parties. When everyone is responsible for the disaster no one is!

  As you say, we need to wait for the distant future for some justice.

• mukashi 23 Apr 2021 2:24 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Dumbledore's Army’s comment on: Monastery and Throne

  Thanks for the link. I have read the first part of the study. I tell you the things that make me suspicious about it:

  1. First, it starts with a very broad definition of lockdown: “is used to generically refer to state actions that imposed various forms of non-pharmaceutical interventions”. Then, it proceeds to redefine the lockdowns of countries such as New Zealand as something else, “isolation”. To me, the thing that comes to my mind when we talk about a lockdown is that you forbid people to leave their houses for an X number of days. Correct me here if I am mistaken, I am not an English native speaker.

  2. Convenient ignore that China has been one of those successful countries dealing with the Covid (not a single mention to it in the full document). I see that many times. New Zealand is used always as an example by people sceptical of lockdowns, for the reason that it comes with a built-in justification: it is an island. Well, China is much more densely populated than the US and they also succeeded, and it is not an island. Would have been capable of replicating the success without enforcing lockdowns? Why is China not discussed more in general?

  3. Wrong use of counterfactuals. Those counterfactuals nicely generated do they really present realistic counterfactuals? Take for instance the blue line. It suggests that by taking some social distancing measures the number simply go down in a matter of ~3 months and then everything is over. That’s far from true. As soon as there is a single case out of control (and this is what countries like NZ, Australia or China understood very well), the pandemic is not under control, you go back right to the beginning. If you do apply strict lockdowns early you can aim to effectively eliminate the virus (but as I said before, you need to enforce mandatory quarantines and keep a very high level of testing and contact tracing). Is this counterfactual considered?

[Question] Can Bit­coin tran­si­tion from PoW to PoS?

• mukashi 25 May 2021 0:36 UTC

  −4 points

  on: We should prob­a­bly buy ADA?

  And don’t forget that ADA is peer-reviewed!

  I always found it hilarious that one of the main selling points for ADA was that it is peer-reviewed as if that meant something. The amount of absolutely atrocious peer-review science that is published every year is amazing, so I never really got why they insist so much on that.

  This might be just prejudiced, but Charles looks to me like a very good and honest guy, but a bit delusional. And I cannot really stand the (probably good intended) paternalism that he distils when they talk about Cardano being adopted in Africa (teaching Haskel is the way to go, really??)

  Don’t forget though, that they can talk beautiful things about how Cardano works, but right now is just promises, they don’t even have SC capabilities yet (!) I expect they come across many problems once they start doing real things, and probably by that time, Ethereum will probably be too far to catch up.

  Having said that, Cardano seems like a promising project, but it is difficult to predict how the landscape in the crypto space will be in a few years. It might very well be that Cardano still exists but it has just a very residual influence since Ethereum has the advantage of being the first mover. Or it could be that some of the big companies push forward any Ethereum competitor to balance things out. It is hard to predict. But to me, investing some money in ADA seems like a risk worth taking.

• mukashi 26 May 2021 0:36 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: We should prob­a­bly buy ADA?

  Yes, but Bitcoin for instance is neither peer-review, nor published in a standard journal. There is however a massive community very interested in discovering bugs or flaws and the algorithms, and that’s all you need. I don’t see why doing this in a formal academic setting would be significantly better. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying is a bad thing. I am just saying that it is funny they want to sell that as one of the main points of their project.

• mukashi 26 May 2021 22:05 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: We should prob­a­bly buy ADA?

  I am not familiar with the Chinese government having the power to freeze Bitcoin addresses. Can you expand a bit on what you mean?

• mukashi 27 May 2021 0:27 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: We should prob­a­bly buy ADA?

  Interesting take. That would be effectively destroying (temporarily) the Bitcoin network and a massive blow to the credibility of cryptocurrencies. This applies though to any PoS algorithm in which the token owners are most of them in China, right? How is PoS different from PoW in this regard?

• mukashi 28 May 2021 7:24 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: paulfchristiano’s comment on: We should prob­a­bly buy ADA?

  thank you both for the explanation, that was very didactic

• mukashi 1 Jun 2021 12:06 UTC

  4 points

  on: Which ac­tivi­ties do you pre­fer to bet­ter re­cover pro­duc­tivity?

  Playing the guitar

  Listening to this fantastic podcast: https://​​www.youtube.com/​​channel/​​UCT6Y5JJPKe_JDMivpKgVXew

• mukashi 1 Jun 2021 22:55 UTC

  4 points

  on: Can you im­prove your in­tel­li­gence with these types of ex­er­cises?

  Fanastic idea! I have just signed up.

  Two comments:

  1. It would be better in my opinion if you had a bullet list with the different options and you could click on the chosen answer.

  2. You should add a way for people to send you comments about the specific examples

  For instance, I think a proper explanation of the base fallacy rate should include the proper bayesian analysis. In fact, let’s try to do that with the example that you give:

  Numbers taken from a quick google search. We are going to suppose that this takes place in US

  Farmer population in the states ~2.5 * 10^6

  Number of symphony orchestra 1224

  Number of trumpets in a symphony orchestra 4

  Total number of trumpets in a symphony orchestra ~5000

  Odds farmer/​trumpet player = 500:1

  This gives us the prior odds. We have to multiply the prior odds by the likelihood ratio. This is tricky, but let’s put some numbers anyway just for the sake of explanation. For instance, we could assume that 80% of trumpet players are keen on Opera, 50% enjoy visiting museums and 20% grew up playing chess. We will assume also that for farmers, the numbers are 10% opera, 20% museums, 5% chess (this is assuming independence among the different factors, which is probably a bit of a stretch)

  For farmers: 10% enjoy opera, 20% enjoy visiting museums, 5% grew up playing chess = 0.001

  Trumpet players = 80% opers, 50% enjoy visiting museums, 20% chess = 0.08

  L_r farmer/​trumpet = 0.001/​0.08 = 0.0125 (this is the likelihood ratio)

  Posterior = 500:1 * 0.001:0.08 = 6.25

  In this case, we can see that it is around 6 times more likely that the person is a farmer than a trumpeter.

  However, if in our model we make the number of farmers who like opera just 1%, in this case, the posterior would favour the trumpeters.

• mukashi 2 Jun 2021 1:29 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: icompetetowin’s comment on: Can you im­prove your in­tel­li­gence with these types of ex­er­cises?

  please do! let me know if I can lend a hand somehow ;)

• mukashi 2 Jun 2021 12:25 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: SimonM’s comment on: Can you im­prove your in­tel­li­gence with these types of ex­er­cises?

  yes typo. Thanks! Corrected

  Good point about the independence, I added a note. Do you think it would be possible to come up with a better estimate somehow of the likelihood ratio?

• mukashi 26 Jun 2021 6:11 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: The home­work as­sign­ment in­cen­tives, and why it’s now so extreme

  In practical terms, the education system might work that way, but I doubt it is intended to do that by design. It is just an inadequate system trapped into a very stable Nash equilibrium from which the only families that can escape are the rich ones.

• mukashi 2 Jul 2021 1:08 UTC

  1 point

  on: No, Newspeak Won’t Make You Stupid

  Interesting post.

  I just finished listening to Lex Friedman’s interview of Yeonmi Park (here), a North Korean survivor living in the US, which I fully recommend, it touches on some of the things discussed here.

  First, I agree with you in the fact that limiting our vocabulary does not necessarily mean that we won’t be able to talk about a specific idea. I also think that signalling is part of the reason, though I don’t think is the main one.

  Words are forged to refer to clusters of reality that we consider worth referring to in an abridged way: remove the word, and you still can refer to that thing, but now it becomes harder and you need more effort. So in this regard, I do think that removing words from our vocabulary really conditions the sort of things we can talk about. You don’t need to make something extremely people in order to make people not use it, just a bit more difficult is enough. Even if you develop your own words to refer to certain unnamed clusters, you still need to transmit what those clusters are to other people in order to make a conversation going, and convince them to use them, which also takes effort.

• mukashi 8 Jul 2021 23:14 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Zac Hatfield-Dodds’s comment on: Covid 7/​8: Delta Takes Over

  Also in Australia:

  • The state government in Sydney extends the lockdown for one more week (and potentially more)

  • In QLD, a snap lockdown of 3 days (extended to 4) has managed to successfully control the epidemics so far. There are some restrictions for a couple of weeks (wearing masks, more strict QR compliance, etc), but nothing more. Extremely effective contact tracing.

  • International flights slashed to half.

  I don’t think Australia got everything right, but they got most things right, and the results are there. “Australia ’s epistemology” might not have been 100%, but I would score it very high. Extremely low numbers of deaths compared to most other countries. Business running normally 90% of the time. The possibility of carrying normal lives where masks are not needed (most of the time). Saying that the success of Australia is due purely to luck is a profound misjudgement.

  I am not Australian (but I have the chance of living here) and I have followed very closely how they handled the pandemics in Europe, where my family and friends live. Most Australians would not believe the total absurdity of most measures in Europe (many of those measures do not transcend to the news, sometimes not even to the national news). I feel living in two very different worlds when I hear the news in Europe and in Australia. It is also sad: in Australia, many people do not realize how well they are. In Europe, many start to believe that things couldn’t have gone in a better way and that the best measures were adopted.

• mukashi 9 Jul 2021 3:43 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Phil Scadden’s comment on: Covid 7/​8: Delta Takes Over

  Yes, I agree with this. I also think that many people in NSW are not taking very seriously the lockdown, which is really bad. However, if you look in other parts of the world, the discussion was not lockdown now or lockdown in two days. In Europe for instance, when a new variant appeared in the UK in December, some countries took days to close the borders with the UK… for 3 days, to continue later as if anything happened. Two different worlds.