wangscarpet

Karma: 38

wangscarpet 10 Aug 2022 23:55 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: The lessons of Xanadu
What does Flutter do that various JS/CS frameworks don’t? Does it give design advantages on web, or is the benefit that it brings web design to non-web applications?

wangscarpet 21 Feb 2022 18:34 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Studies On Slack
This is a little like game theory coordination vs cooperation actually. Coordination is if you can constrain all actors to change in the same way: competition is if each can change while holding the others fixed. “Evolutionary replicator dynamics” is a game theory algorithm that encompasses the latter.

Even if the beetles all currently share the same genes, any one beetle can have a mutation that competes with his/her peers in future generations. Therefore, reduced variation at the current time doesn’t cause the system to be stable, unless there’s some way to ensure that any change is passed to all beetles (like having a queen that does all the breeding).

wangscarpet 5 Feb 2022 1:03 UTC
1 point
on: Covid 2/3/22: Loosening Bounds
For the preprint --> journal point: if all the bad ones never made it to publication, that would show the same conclusion. Maybe journals are more filtering than enhancement sometimes.

Or, the norm of expecting to publish in a journal means people are motivated to do good work. If you preprint with the expectation to publish you’ll do good work. But there can still be a lot of terrible science out there in preprints. I don’t think what you wrote is evidence we should trust random PDFs on the internet.

wangscarpet 14 Jan 2022 17:22 UTC
1 point
on: Omicron Post #14
What do median and mode case peaks mean here? Is that on your ordering of day? Like, if for Jan 15-19 there’s a 10,20,30,14,16 is the mode the 17, the median the 19th, and the mean whatever you’d get by averaging?

wangscarpet 22 Dec 2021 3:00 UTC
1 point
on: Omicron Post #8
How would you go about getting a high-risk person close to the front of the line for pavloxid treatment? I was really heartened to see the news about imminent approval because a very high-risk family member was recently exposed, but I think without hustle he would definitely not get it in time. I plan to call hospitals in his area tomorrow—anything else?

wangscarpet 27 Nov 2021 23:12 UTC
4 points
on: Which song do you think is perfect? Why?
Fantasy by Eternity Forever: posthardcore supergroup with the grooviest instrumentals

wangscarpet 13 Oct 2021 15:00 UTC
4 points
on: Bayeswatch 13: Spaceship
I really loved reading this series. Came for the puns, stayed for the story. Thank you for writing!

wangscarpet 19 Sep 2021 20:16 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Caridorc Tergilti’s comment on: Jitters No Evidence of Stupidity in RL
Thanks, fixed.

wangscarpet 17 Sep 2021 11:50 UTC
10 points
on: Jitters No Evidence of Stupidity in RL
In continuous control problems what you’re describing is called “bang-bang control”, or switching between different full-strength actions. In continuous-time systems this is often optimal behavior (because you get the same effect doing a double-strength action for half as long over a short timescale). Until you factor non-linear energy costs in, in which case a smoother controller becomes preferred.

wangscarpet 8 Sep 2021 20:23 UTC
2 points
on: The Duplicator: Instant Cloning Would Make the World Economy Explode
Kiln People is a fantastic science fiction story which explores the same question, if the embodied copies are temporary (~24 hours). It explores questions of employment, privacy, life-purpose, and legality in a world where this cloning procedure is common. I highly recommend it to those interested.

wangscarpet 20 Aug 2021 2:57 UTC
3 points
on: Factors of mental and physical abilities—a statistical analysis
“Now, suppose that in addition to g, you learn that Bob did well on paragraph comprehension. How does this change your estimate of Bob’s coding speed? Amazingly, it doesn’t. The single number g contains all the shared information between the tests.”

I don’t think this is right, if some fraction of the test for g is paragraph comprehension. If g is the weighted average between paragraph comprehension and addition skill, knowing g and paragraph comprehension gives you addition skill.

wangscarpet 28 Jul 2021 15:28 UTC
6 points
in reply to: adamShimi’s comment on: DeepMind: Generally capable agents emerge from open-ended play
Yep, they’re different. It’s just an architecture. Among other things, Chess and Go have different input/action spaces, so the same architecture can’t be used on both without some way to handle this.
This paper uses an egocentric input, which allows many different types of tasks to use the same architecture. That would be the equivalent of learning Chess/Go based on pictures of the board.

wangscarpet 12 Jun 2021 17:05 UTC
1 point
on: Covid 6/10: Somebody Else’s Problem
Can you extrapolate the infectiousness ratio between the newest most virulent strain and the original? I assume the original has all but died out, but maybe by chaining together estimates of intermediate strains?

wangscarpet 23 May 2021 18:31 UTC
3 points
on: Book Review of 5 Applied Bayesian Statistics Books
I’m reading BDA3 right now, and I’m on chapter 6. You described it well. It takes a lot of thinking to get through, but is very comprehensive. I like how it’s explicitly not just a theory textbook. They demonstrate each major point by describing a real-world problem (measuring cancer rates across populations, comparing test-prep effectiveness), and attacking it with multiple models (usually frequentist to show limitations and then their Bayesian model more thoroughly. It has a focus on learning the tools well enough to apply them to real-world problems.
I plan to start skimming soon. It seems the first two sections are pedagogical, and the remainder covers techniques which I would like to know about but don’t need in detail.
Edit: One example I really enjoyed, and which felt very relevant to today, was on estimating lung-cancer hotspots in America. It broke the country down by county, and first displayed a map of the USA with counties in the top 10% of lung-cancer rates. Much of the highlighted region was in the rural southwest and Rocky mountain region. It asked, what do you think makes these regions have such high rates? It then showed another map, this one of counties in the bottom 10% of lung-cancer rates, and the map focused on the same regions!
Turns out, this was mostly the result of these regions containing many low-population counties, which meant rare-event sampling could skew high very easily, just by chance. If the base rate is 5 per 10,000, and you have 2 cases in a county with 1,000 people, you look like a superfund site. But sample the next year and you might find 0 cases: a county full of young health-freaks.
If you model lung-cancer rates as a hierarchical model with a distribution for county cancer-rates, and each county as being sampled from this, and then sampling cancer events from it’s specific rate, then you can get a Bayes-adjusted incidence rate for each county which will regress small counties to the mean.
This made me read Covid charts which showed hot-spot counties much differently. I noticed that the counties they list are frequently small. Right now, all the counties on the NYTimes list, for example have less than 20,000 people in them, which is, I believe, in the bottom 25% of counties by size roughly.

wangscarpet 22 Apr 2021 16:00 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Iterated Trust Kickstarters
I think it comes from a feeling that proportion of blame needs to add to one, and by apologizing first you’re putting more of the blame on your actions. You often can’t say “I apologize for the 25% of this mess I’m responsible for.”

I think the general mindset of apportioning blame (as well as looking for a single blame-target) is a dangerous one. There’s a whole world of things that contribute to every conflict outside of the two people having it.

wangscarpet 5 Apr 2021 14:34 UTC
−5 points
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: Ranked Choice Voting is Arbitrarily Bad
I also think that the example isn’t perfect (although I haven’t formalized why yet). But, you’re describing tactical voting, which is considered one of the “downsides” of RCV.

wangscarpet 18 Jan 2021 18:34 UTC
1 point
on: Why do stocks go up?
I think things become simpler when you look at the sum of all stocks, versus particular ones. Then, you only need to consider the market cap of the entire stock market, and what makes it change over time.

The economy is much bigger than the stock market. Money flows from small companies to larger one as the economy consolidates—since the former are more likely to be publicly traded than the latter, that makes the market become bigger.

It’s easier to invest in the stock market now than in the past. Since it’s accessible to more people, then more people’s money can be put in it. So, the market cap goes up.

Finally, as inequality increases, more of a fraction of wealth is disposable, and therefore can be invested. That makes the market grow as well.

I’m sure there are many other reasons along these lines.

wangscarpet 28 Dec 2020 16:57 UTC
2 points
on: Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets—Part 11
When reading HPMOR, I thought Harry’s decision to not kill Voldemort was hubris, even considering his morals. He should have known that all plans have a non-zero chance of failing, and that Voldemort coming back could be an existential risk. So, finite harm now to stop a small chance at nearly infinite harm later. Nice to see this coming to bite him. I’m looking forward to the conclusion!

wangscarpet 18 Dec 2020 15:53 UTC
1 point
on: Covid 12/17: The First Dose
In what world is giving the second dose to the same person, raising them from 87% to 96% protected, a higher priority than vaccinating a second person?
One benefit of 96 vs 87 is that the former could allow you to live an un-quarantined life, while the latter wouldn’t result in much behavioral change. Clearly, the one-dose is better for net deaths etc, but the QALY calculation looks a little different.
I still agree with you. But it’s worth considering the above reasoning for completeness.

wangscarpet 5 Nov 2020 23:08 UTC
10 points
on: Impostor Syndrome as skill/dominance mismatch
So interesting that I thought you were going to go the opposite direction at the end. I have felt slight amounts of imposter syndrome before, and it came from feeling like a well-liked and well-respected person whose skills did not fully back up my reputation. So, I was high on the social hierarchy but I perceived it coming from dominance and not prestige.