Hey gang haven't been crossposting my stuff here as much recently, let me know if you'd like me do that more....
But I thought you guys would be interested in my latest mega-article project. (this one is literally book length)
For those of you that like "The Anarchonomicon Real Banned Books List"
I present "The Warlord's Reading List"
The idea is that its a curriculum for perspective warlord, revolutionaries, Militia Leaders, self defense forces, independent espionage agents, arms traffickers... All the interesting people, with the goal that heaven forbid chaos come to your country there is a pre-curated body of knowledge (with links) that you can quickly and efficiently develop a deep familiarity if not expertise through self directed study.
This this started as just a short list for myself, and then It slowly grew into its current 150+ entry, 22 category, 30,000 word, book length survey of the state of modern warfare complete with oppinions minireviews, and catgirls.
If you're interested in the theory of Marxist Guerilla warfare, Crypto-currency money laundering, special weapons and tacitcs, precision marksmanship and sniper warfare, nuclear weapons survival, effective leadership, operational art and the formation of general staffs, high and low tech logistics, prison economics, digital opsec, high speed mounted warfare, and forming your own blackmail networks... Reconsider you life priorities... But also check out my new booklist!
With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.
If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.
Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.
This made me reflect that I hadn't actually thought critically about the phrase (at least, commensurate to how often it's used). For fun, if you think the purpose of a system is what it does, write what you think that means, before reading Scott's critique, then write if you've updated your opinion. For example:
(Spoilers go between two sets of "||")
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Dude (Looks Like a Lady)
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Well, this is just about exactly what it says on the tin. I've finally mustered up the energy to write a full-length review of what's a plausible contender for my Favourite Novel Ever, Reverend Insanity. I'd reproduce it here too, but it's a better reading experience on Substack (let's ignore the shameless self-promotion, and the fact that I can't be arsed to re-do the markdown tags)
Noah Smith has entered the debate:
So the fundamental reason your health care costs so much is not that the health insurance companies are lining their pockets. And it’s not that insurers are an inefficient mess. It’s that the actual provision of America’s health care itself just costs way too much in the first place.
The actual people charging you an arm and a leg for your care, and putting you at risk of medical bankruptcy, are the providers themselves. The smiling doctor who writes you prescriptions and sends you to the MRI and refers you to a specialist without ever asking you for money knows full well that you’re going to end up having to wrangle with the insurance company for the cost of all those services. The gentle nurse who sets up your IV doesn’t tell you whether each dose of drugs through the IV could set you back hundreds of dollars, but they know. When the polite administrative assistants at the front desk send you back to treatment without telling you that their services are out of your network, it’s because they didn’t bother to check. The executives making millions at “nonprofit” hospitals, and the shareholders making billions on the profits of companies that supply and contract with those hospitals, are people you never see and probably don’t even think about.
Excessive prices charged by health care providers are overwhelmingly the reason why Americans’ health care costs so cripplingly much. But they’ve outsourced the actual collection of those fees to insurance companies, so that your experience in the medical system feels smooth and friendly and comfortable. The insurance companies are simply hired to play the bad guy — and they’re paid a relatively modest fee for that service. So you get to hate UnitedHealthcare and Cigna, while the real people taking away your life’s savings and putting you at risk of bankruptcy get to play Mother Theresa.
So the way to make our health care system affordable is not to browbeat insurers, in the hope that they will be able to reduce their profits and pay for us to have cheap health care. Insurance companies simply do not have the power to do that, even if you threaten to shoot them. What we need is to reduce costs within the actual medical system itself...
He jumps in to the comments to add:
They [providers] don't know the exact costs, but they have a general idea, they know the costs are very high, and they typically don't talk to patients about those costs when prescribing services to them. This is understandable, given that talking about costs would make patients less comfortable while receiving care, and one of doctors' main jobs is to make patients feel comfortable. But there's basically no point in the process of receiving care at which patients could make a decision based on cost.
Incentives matter, and patients aren't automata who are unable to follow incentives, as much as some doctors would like them to be. They can understand pricing concerns/risk, and they're coming from a wide variety of financial situations. A recent NYT op-ed admits as much:
One of my first lessons as a new attending physician in a hospital serving a working-class community was in insurance. I saw my colleagues prescribing suboptimal drugs and thought they weren’t practicing evidence-based medicine. In reality, they were doing something better — practicing patient-based medicine. When people said they couldn’t afford a medication that their insurance didn’t cover, they would prescribe an alternative, even if it wasn’t the best available option.
As a young doctor, I struggled with this. Studies show this drug is the most effective treatment, I would say. Of course, the insurer will cover it. My more seasoned colleague gently chided me that if I practiced this way, then my patients wouldn’t fill their prescriptions at all. And he was right.
Of course, the op-ed is doctor-apologia, working as hard as possible to finger point at insurance companies and only admitting a possible problem of lacking clear and reasonable pricing when it comes to drugs; after all, patients and their insurance companies pay pharmacists and drug companies for drugs, not doctors. They can't see that there could be a similar problem for their own services (insert Upton Sinclair quote). But they admit that patients can and do make decisions based on their understanding of prices and risk. Yet, when it comes to their own services, this is absurd to them. Surely they know better than the patient, and the patient should just do what they say; cost doesn't matter.
But as Noah points out, they "know", but they don't know. They "don't bother to check". They give every excuse imaginable to avoid the topic. And some of this is understandable! As Noah points out, they just want to focus on the medicine; they want to make the patient feel comfortable with the medicine; medicine is sacred and money is profane, so never the two shall meet. Doctors don't want to know. They're happy to sit back and say that they're prohibited by law to consider their costs in providing recommendations, but conveniently forget to be patient-based, not remembering that patients can and do make such decisions. But patients can only do this in a reasonable way when they're properly informed before making decisions. Without information, it's generally fear that rules the day, be it fear of medical issues or fear of medical expenses. Some doctors want to not know so much that they can't even identify the names of the relevant numbers in the billing/insurance process that might be involved in the decision-making process. This is perfectly fine, of course; they shouldn't have to spend all their time becoming intimately familiar with the details of how each of their patients' insurance works.
It's hard for me to come to any conclusion other than that providers shouldn't be bothered to know those details. Instead, there is an extremely simple solution that takes one small step toward what Noah wants - providers just need to inform patients of what they know about the pricing for suggested courses of actions before those courses of action are taken. We need to create a point in time where patients can have the relevant information with which to make a decision that takes their own understanding of their own finances into account. I have suggested that providers simply provide the price that they will be billing insurance and their negotiated rate. The negotiated rate gives the patient a good idea of what to expect if the procedure is covered. Sure, the provider doesn't know the rest of the details of the insurance policy (deductibles, co-insurance, out-of-pocket max, etc.), which are important for estimating things like out-of-pocket costs - again, they shouldn't. But the patient can know these things. The only information the patient is missing is the information that the providers refuse to give them. In addition to the negotiated rate, it would be nice to have the full bill amount, so the patient can consider the risk of an insurance denial (and perhaps have a conversation about this risk or gather more information). Then, they at least have some idea of how much they could be nominally on the hook for if there is an insurance snafu.
I am generally anti-regulation, but the good doctors here at TheMotte have convinced me that there is no way that we are going to persuade them on this point with reason, so I am reluctantly throwing in my support for as minimally-scoped regulation as we can come up with, just as much as it takes to cast off the excuses and actually get numbers in front of patients at a point in time where they can use those numbers to make decisions. Hopefully, someone can get this idea to people like Noah, so they can consider advocating for something like this rather than tired ideas he gave like having the gov't "play hardball" to negotiate prices. He seems open to ideas:
There are probably other ways to foster competition and increase efficiency in the medical care system.
Indeed, there is, and it's right in front of your eyes. It's the natural conclusion of your request in the comments for what NYT would call "patient-based medicine".
I had to get this done a day early, or it wouldn't get done until several days late. Any AAQCs nominated on May 31st will be considered for the June roundup.
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@kky:
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@kky:
I think this was one of the best posts to come from Scott since his switch to ACX. I think he lays out the situation clearly and fairly, and makes a good case for why priesthoods have unique pitfalls, but are still better than not having them. I think his hypothesis about why wokeness infiltrated every priesthood is interesting, but only one of many many potential angles to be considered. I want to hear what the Motte has to say about all of this.
LLMs do Advent of Code 2024
This is a repeat of my experiment from last year with using ChatGPT to solve the Advent of Code problems. Much of the premise is the same and I'm not going to repeat myself explaining what's Advent of Code and why I'm doing this.
Instead I will explain what I did differently this year:
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Instead of using ChatGPT 4 I used ChatGPT 4o, I still used the paid API version with a command line client instead of paying for the Plus version however, just like last year, youtuber Martin Zikmund did a similar thing using ChatGPT plus so I didn't need to. He also used o1 where possible and it did not make any difference as far as I can tell.
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A couple of months ago I asked if I should use a different LLM to run this little experiment and I the most suggested alternative was Claude 3.5-sonnet so I did that.
I also stole update the prompt that I used by stealing the one that user @SnapDragon used last year, only changing it a little. This was the prompt I used for Claude:
Are you familiar with Advent of Code? I'd like to see if you can solve one of this year's problems. I'll provide the problem statement and input data. I'd like you think step by step about the problem. At any time you can output code for me to run on the input in python; I'll tell you what the result is, including any debut output. Or you can run it yourself with Code Interpreter. I'll be your interface with the problem site, but I won't help you think about the problem. Does this sound like something you'll be able to do?
The ChatGPT prompt was more or less identical, just with the mention of the Code Interpreter (which I didn't have because it is Plus only).
Claude-3.5-sonnet Results
| Part 1 | Part 2 | notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| day 01 | OK | OK | |
| day 02 | OK | OK | |
| day 03 | OK | OK | |
| day 04 | OK | OK | |
| day 05 | OK | OK | |
| day 06 | OK | OK | |
| day 07 | OK | OK | |
| day 08 | OK | OK | |
| day 09 | OK | OK | Quadratic solution for both parts |
| day 10 | OK | OK | |
| day 11 | OK | OK | |
| day 12 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 13 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 14 | OK | --- | |
| day 15 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 16 | OK | OK | |
| day 17 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 18 | OK | OK | |
| day 19 | OK | OK | |
| day 20 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 21 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 22 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 23 | OK | OK | |
| day 24 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 25 | OK | (note that part 2 of day 25 does not exist) |
Days fully finished: 15 / 25 (excludes the 25th)
ChatGPT-4o Results
| Part 1 | Part 2 | notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| day 01 | OK | OK | |
| day 02 | OK | OK | |
| day 03 | OK | OK | |
| day 04 | OK | OK | |
| day 05 | OK | OK | |
| day 06 | OK | OK | |
| day 07 | OK | OK | |
| day 08 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 09 | FAIL | FAIL | |
| day 10 | OK | OK | |
| day 11 | FAIL | N/A | ChatGPT Plus could solve it |
| day 12 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 13 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 14 | OK | N/A | |
| day 15 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 16 | OK | FAIL | ChatGPT plus could solve it |
| day 17 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 18 | OK | OK | |
| day 19 | OK | OK | |
| day 20 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 21 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 22 | OK | FAIL | ChatGPT plus could solve it |
| day 23 | OK | OK | |
| day 24 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 25 | OK | (note that part 2 of day 25 does not exist) |
Days fully finished: 11 / 25 (excludes the 25th) Days fully finished, ChatGPT Plus: 14 / 25 (excludes the 25th)
Discussion of the results
I went into this experiment expecting the LLMs to do about as well as last year, that is: finish a 2~4 easy days on the first week and maybe a part 1 here and there during the rest of the month.
The data however proved me wrong, they did a lot better than I expected, especially Claude. Now, there is a snag to this: this year felt much easier than previous years. Quantifying difficulty is always hard, the scatter plot seems to confirm this, as does this image I stole from 4chan which measures the same thing (fill time for the global leaderboard) but in a way that I find clearer.
If we count the number of days the leaderboard filled in under 10 minutes we get this (I excluded 2015 and 2016 because many fewer people participated and day 25th because it's a half day):
| 2017 | 8 |
| 2018 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2 |
| 2020 | 10 |
| 2021 | 8 |
| 2022 | 8 |
| 2023 | 6 |
| 2024 | 13 |
This may be deliberate since this was a 10 year anniversary of AoC. Nevertheless, the improvement is hard to deny: both ChatGPT and Claude could get all the easy problems and a couple of the medium ones, where last year ChatGPT could not even get all the easy ones.
This is enough that it makes me think that if Eric wants to keep the integrity of the global leaderboard intact he should start requiring serious participants to provide livestreamed proof, like they are starting to do in the speedrunning community.
Various notes
- Day 14 part 2 asked to find the first output configuration containing a christmas tree. This is essentially impossible to solve independently for an LLM since the problem didn't even specify what the christmas tree would look like and there are many plausible ways to draw a christmas tree with pixel art. That said human participants faced the same problem and LLMs could have come up with an heuristic to find possible candidates and asked the human in the loop (me) to verify, but they couldn't so I still count it as a failure.
- When Claude tried to use its code interpreter it often started doing it in python, which Claude's code interpreter does not support (it's javascript only). This seems like a piece of jank they should be fixing.
- While the quantitative data does not really support either Claude or ChatGPT being better my subjective impression is that Claude usually got to the solution faster and writing better code (in the few cases where there was a quality difference).
- Difficulty is hard to estimate, day 9 seemed as easy if not easier than day 8 to me and yet it took twice as long for the leaderboard to fill, ChatGPT couldn't finish it and Claude only barely solved it.
- Still speaking of day 9, it was one of the only two non-easy days solved by Claude but this almost a technicality, the program produced by Claude was quadratic garbage and if the input file had been a little bit bigger it would have taken hours for the program to finish.
- Day 15 problem was very very similar to an implementation of Sokoban but with a slightly different rule set. This was fatal to both ChatGPT and Claude. Much like with poker in 2023, the Sokoban attractor was too strong to overcome, they just kept implementing the "no more than one box at a time" rule that does not exist anywhere in the problem's prompt.
- Last year I complained that ChatGPT never attempted to do any kind of debugging. This year I have been proven wrong, for day 5 ChatGPT struggled to get part 1 right and rewrote the program to include debug print statements and eventually figured out how to solve the problem (even though the final code was fairly unreadable).
- Day 17 part 2 required gives you a program (specified as a series of assembly instructions for a made up ISA) and asks you to figure out the input that turns the program into a Quine. Neither LLM could solve however Claude got really close before running into its character limit, this is the last output it produced:
I'm starting to see a pattern! Each loop:
The program starts by setting B to A % 8 Through a series of operations, it manipulates B The program then divides A by 8 (2^3) It outputs the value of B (mod 8) If A is not zero, it jumps back to the start
The program seems to take a number in register A, and output digits from it by repeatedly dividing by 8 and using the remainder in each step to generate output through the B register. Let's try to find a pattern of outputs for some carefully chosen A values:
I don't know if lifting the character limit would make it solve the problem but I admit that this was the most impressed I've been with an LLM ever since ChatGPT 3.5.
- A similar thing happened again with Claude and day 24 part 2.
Epistemic Status: Not a cohesive theory of community art perception/criticism, just speculation that two or more things are related
For those who haven't seen it, Scott posted his latest piece on architecture, last night, a review of Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus To Our House.". The comments are pretty similar to past comments. I'm less interested in the question of why people do or don't like modern architecture (there's a lot of variation in quality, and tastes vary - of course it's polarizing) than the variation in discernment over McMansions, a type of architecture defined by qualities that are a) bad and b) to me, fall in to the category of "once you see it, you can't unsee it."
For our purposes, I'll use the guide from McMansion Hell (https://mcmansionhell.com/post/149284377161/mansionvsmcmansion, https://mcmansionhell.com/post/149563260641/mcmansions-101-mansion-vs-mcmansion-part-2), which includes simple heuristics like Relationship to the Landscape: Often, a New Traditional mansion carefully considers its environment and is built to accentuate, rather than dominate it. A McMansion is out of scale with its landscape or lot, often too big for a tiny lot. and Architectural and Stylistic Integrity: The best New Traditional houses are those who are virtually indistinguishable from the styles they represent. McMansions tend to be either a chaotic mix of individual styles, or a poorly done imitation of a previous style. This house in Texas invokes four separate styles: the Gothic (the steep angle of the gables), Craftsman (the overhanging eaves with braces), French (the use of stone and arched 2nd story windows), and Tudor Revival (the EIFS half-timbering above the garage), each poorly rendered in a busy combination of EIFS coupled with stone and brick veneers. (Follow the links for annotated photos.)
These criteria are really heuristics - part two includes a house that could go either way, with arguments on each side - but they aren't "rocket surgery" to apply, it's just a matter of discernment; why can't everyone learn to apply the criteria, whether or not they share the opinion that McMansions are bad architecture? The criteria of mixing styles can require more consideration than the others - it takes some scrutiny to determine if stylistic elements were mixed in a thoughtful manner - and whether or not the styles are complementary is a matter of taste, but most of it is pretty simple.
[Edit 1: I was thinking of this at the time, but too lazy to go back to the ACX post to incorporate it - this is similar to how an artist friend of Scott's discribed how she identified an AI-generated image as AI art and why she disliked it. Once you see it, can you unsee it? Does it change how much you enjoy the image?]
This reminded me of a video jazz musician and YouTuber Adam Neely made on the question of whether Laufey's music is within the jazz genre. TL;DW, no, he puts her alongside 1950s pop that borrowed from the same set of musical styles as jazz of the period, but applied those stylistic elements to pop songs, rather than a musical form defined more by improvisation (especially group improvisation) than aesthetic. One clip used in the video is someone asking why it matters if jazz musicians don't recognize Laufey's music as jazz - good point; why are we asking the question, in the first place? My speculation is that Laufey's fans want her music to be considered jazz, not pop that has stylistic elements in common with jazz, because jazz has cultural cachet and drawing a distinction between jazz and superficially similar pop music would be perceived as gatekeeping or snobbery. In light of the precedent of 1950s pop, this is rather silly - jazz musicians aren't turning their noses up at Sinatra and Bennett - but, in addition to being denied the cachet associated with jazz appreciation, I can imagine that being told you lack the discernment to tell jazz from non-jazz feels like being told you lack taste.
Discernment and taste are distinct phenomena; if Scott tells me that he agrees with the criteria for distinguishing McMansions from other architecture, we establish inter-rater reliability for this, but he disagrees that they're bad design, I'll accept that he is capable of discerning the style, while declaring our tastes to be different. But Scott writes that architecture buffs tell him about superior modern architecture he might like and he can't discern the difference. To what extent is the discussion of architecture unproductive because people are conflating discernment and taste?
If you can't discern the difference between two things and someone else says that they have strong opinions over their respective quality, do you question your discernment or their taste? In the absence of a prior that you need to cultivate your abilities of discernment, I would speculate that you are more likely to question the other person's taste and are liable to come to the conclusion that their discernment is arbitrary, from which it follows that they're engaging in snobbery. Counter-Snobbery would be to reject the "arbitrary" distinction or, if conceding that there is a distinction, embrace the supposed "lesser" of the two things.
If you can't discern the difference between two things and someone else says that they have strong opinions over their respective quality... what do YOU do?
[Edit 2: While this was in the mod queue, Scott published a new post on theories of taste. Some of the commenters are commenting along the lines of a causal relationship between developing abilities of discernment with changes in taste, without using those terms. Interestingly, neither Scott nor a commenter went back to that section of the AI art post, even though the new post begins "Recently we’ve gotten into discussions about artistic taste (see comments to AI Art Turing Test..."]
Steve Hsu, an older theoretical physicist (Caltech '86), former university physics administrator and entrepreneur notable for getting cancelled from a VP position at Michigan State for tolerating the wrong people and ideas, being an advisor to BGI, the world's leading genetic sequencing lab and also leading an effort to create a number of genomic predictors for various conditions.
In short, he's big both literally and metaphorically, pretty competent if I go by his predictions over the years- (he has had a pretty good blog for at least 15 yrs), and he's soliciting CVs for an effort to restore the reputation and function of US government scientific institutes and state universities.
The Trump transition team seeks highly qualified individuals for government roles. One of the main goals will be to restore competitiveness and meritocratic values to institutions like NIH, NSF, DOE, DOD, NIST, Dept. of Education, etc.
Through these institutions, the new administration intends to enforce these values on our university system.
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Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Contributions for the week of September 30, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Contributions for the week of October 7, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
[null]
Contributions for the week of October 14, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Contributions for the week of October 21, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Contributions for the week of October 28, 2024
Plausibly Concerning Something Other Than Trump v. Clinton Biden Harris
Gattsuru Specifically Wrote This Because It Wasn't About the Presidential Election or National Politics, But Could See It Being Read Through That Lens
Imagine a scenario where a young woman, with an undergraduate degree in economics from the U.S., secures a medical doctorate (MD) from China’s top medical institution without prior medical training or rigorous entrance examinations. She then proceeds to perform surgeries at a national hospital. Her doctoral thesis spans merely 30 pages, allegedly incorporates data from a hearing-impaired student, and her family holds prominent positions across China’s scientific community.
What if I told you that a girl who studied economics in the U.S., with no prior medical background and minimal entrance exams, obtained an MD from China’s top medical school in just four years and went on to perform surgeries at a national hospital?
And what if I added that her thesis was only 30 pages long, her experimental data came from a hearing-impaired student, and her family held numerous high-ranking positions in China’s scientific community?
The story began with a whistleblower letter from Gu, the ex-wife of Dr. Xiao Fei (hereafter referred to as “Xiao”), a physician at China-Japan Friendship Hospital. In her letter, Gu accused Xiao of extramarital affairs with several hospital staff members, including a training resident named Dong Xiying (hereafter “Dong”). Beyond the personal scandals, the letter highlighted a significant medical incident.
On July 5, 2024, at 3:17 PM, during a thoracoscopic lobectomy under general anesthesia, Dong made an error in passing surgical instruments (reportedly handing over the thoracoscopic forceps in the wrong orientation). A nurse pointed out the mistake, leading Dong to remove her sterile gloves and exit the operating room in an emotional state. Xiao, the attending surgeon, also left the OR, leaving the patient exposed without medical supervision for over 40 minutes.
This incident quickly gained traction online, drawing attention to Dong’s educational background and career trajectory, which left many in the Chinese internet community feeling disillusioned and perplexed.
How did Dong secure a position at the prestigious China-Japan Friendship Hospital?
She entered through the “4+4 Program” at Peking Union Medical College (PUMC), China’s premier medical institution. This program allows students to pursue a non-medical undergraduate degree for four years, followed by four years of medical education at PUMC, culminating in an MD. Unlike traditional medical paths in China, which require five years of undergraduate medical study followed by three years of postgraduate training, this program was designed to attract interdisciplinary talent.
However, several aspects of Dong’s admission have raised concerns:
1.Academic Background: Dong transferred from a community college to Barnard College, majoring in economics. Due to Barnard’s affiliation with Columbia University and a loophole in China’s Ministry of Education’s system, her degree was registered as a Columbia University degree.
2.Admission Process: In 2019, the year Dong applied, the 4+4 Program’s selection process involved only document review and expert interviews, with no written examinations. Admission criteria included:
•Graduation from a university ranked in the top 50 globally by QS or Times Higher Education.
•A GPA of at least 3.60 or ranking in the top 30% of the class.
3.Family Background: Dong’s family holds significant positions in China’s scientific and academic circles:
•Grandfather: Dong Baowei, Director of Ultrasound at the PLA General Hospital. •Maternal Grandfather: Mi Yaorong, Foreign Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
•Father: Dong Xiaohui, General Manager and Deputy Party Secretary of China Metallurgical Construction Research Institute.
•Mother: Mi Zhenli, Deputy Director of the Institute of Engineering Technology at the University of Science and Technology Beijing.
•Uncle: Mi Zhenqiang, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Engineering at the same university.
•Aunt: Ban Xiaojuan, Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the University of Science and Technology Beijing.
4.Thesis Controversy: Dong’s doctoral thesis was only 30 pages long. It was alleged that she used data provided by Zhao Jihuai, a hearing-impaired student mentored by her aunt. Zhao’s graduation was reportedly delayed by a year due to this. This situation is seen as emblematic of systemic exploitation, where the labor of lower-tier researchers is appropriated to bolster the academic credentials of elite offspring.
Following these revelations, several other students from the 4+4 Program were found to have gained admission through familial connections, including at least six individuals directly related to prominent professors, mentors, or academicians.
Why did this incident spark widespread public outrage?
1.Erosion of Meritocracy: China’s university admission system is notoriously competitive, with the “Gaokao” (National College Entrance Examination) serving as the primary pathway to higher education. In 2025, it’s projected that 14 million students will take the Gaokao, but only about 4.5 million will secure undergraduate placements, leaving approximately 9 million without a spot. The 4+4 Program’s design allows certain students to bypass this rigorous process through overseas degrees and expert recommendations, undermining the perceived fairness of the system. For many, the Gaokao represents the most equitable opportunity for social mobility—a belief deeply ingrained in the collective psyche.
2.Trust in the Medical Profession: Doctors in China are held in high esteem, entrusted with both moral and technical responsibilities. Beijing’s PUMC Hospital is often seen as a last resort for patients. Discovering that some surgeons may have advanced through nepotistic channels, rather than merit, shakes public confidence in the healthcare system.
Personal Reflection:
A quote from the anime character Ai Haibara resonates deeply: “The son of a politician becomes a politician, the son of a banker becomes a banker. At this rate, Japan will never change.” This sentiment mirrors the current reality. While I was aware of the potential for class solidification in China, I didn’t anticipate it happening so swiftly. It’s been only 47 years since the 11th Central Committee’s Third Plenary Session marked the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Previously, terms like “academic nepotism” were abstract concepts, hinted at by trusted adults or buried in official jargon and social media gossip. This incident is the first time I’ve truly seen and understood how these elements interconnect to form a systemic structure.
Note: The English translation of this post was assisted by ChatGPT-4o. If you have differing opinions or perspectives, please feel free to discuss them with me. If you find my viewpoints naive or immature, I’m open to dialogue.Appreciate that a lot. <3
Sources: • Xian Xiaomeng: https://weibo.com/6154203482/5160907391108257 • Han Jiashu: https://weibo.com/6154203482/5161155836775000 • Chai Yuanhao: https://weibo.com/6154203482/5161145581961241 • Jin Shanmu: https://weibo.com/6154203482/5160858884249534 • Sheng Xicheng: https://weibo.com/6154203482/5160925682468181 • Qiu Yuchong: https://weibo.com/6154203482/5161120588106331
https://weibo.com/6154203482/5161284081288399 https://weibo.com/6154203482/5160520346505406
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Industrial policy has been a frequent subject on Smith's blog, for those who don't follow it. (He's for it, and thinks that Biden's industrial policy was mostly good - it's worth following the links in this post.) This post focuses on defense-related geopolitical industrial policy goals and pros and cons of anticipated changes under the incoming Trump administration and Chinese responses. Particularly, he highlights two major things China can do: Restrict exports of raw materials (recently announced) and use their own industrial policy to hamper the West's peacetime industrial policy (de facto policy of the last 30 years). These are not extraordinary insights, but it's a good primer on the current state of affairs and policies to pay attention to in the near-future.
Zvi Mowshowitz reporting on an LLM exhibiting unprompted instrumental convergence. Figured this might be an update to some Mottizens.
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
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Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
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Key excerpt (But it's worth reading the full thing):
But the real value-add of the model is not just in calculating who’s ahead in the polling average. Rather, it’s in understanding the uncertainties in the data: how accurate polls are in practice, and how these errors are correlated between the states. The final margins on Tuesday were actually quite close to the polling averages in the swing states, though less so in blue states, as I’ll discuss in a moment. But this was more or less a textbook illustration of the normal-sized polling error that we frequently wrote about [paid only; basically says that the polling errors could be correlated be correlated between states]. When polls miss low on Trump in one key state, they probably also will in most or all of the others.
In fact, because polling errors are highly correlated between states — and because Trump was ahead in 5 of the 7 swing states anyway — a Trump sweep of the swing states was actually our most common scenario, occurring in 20 percent of simulations. Following the same logic, the second most common outcome, happening 14 percent of the time, was a Harris swing state sweep.6
[Interactive table]
Relatedly, the final Electoral College tally will be 312 electoral votes for Trump and 226 for Harris. And Trump @ 312 was by far the most common outcome in our simulations, occurring 6 percent of the time. In fact, Trump 312/Harris 226 is the huge spike you see in our electoral vote distribution chart:
[Interactive graph]
The difference between 20 percent (the share of times Trump won all 7 swing states) and 6 percent (his getting exactly 312 electoral votes) is because sometimes, Trump winning all the swing states was part of a complete landslide where he penetrated further into blue territory. Conditional on winning all 7 swing states, for instance, Trump had a 22 percent chance of also winning New Mexico, a 21 percent chance at Minnesota, 19 percent in New Hampshire, 16 percent in Maine, 11 percent in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, and 10 percent in Virginia. Trump won more than 312 electoral votes in 16 percent of our simulations.
But on Tuesday, there weren’t any upsets in the other states. So not only did Trump win with exactly 312 electoral votes, he also won with the exact map that occurred most often in our simulations, counting all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the congressional districts in Nebraska and Maine.
I don't know of an intuitive test for whether a forecast of a non-repeating event was well-reasoned (see, also, the lively debate over the performance of prediction markets), but this is Silver's initial defense of his 50-50 forecast. I'm unconvinced - if the modal outcome of the model was the actual result of the election, does that vindicate its internal correlations, indict its confidence in its output, both, neither... ? But I don't think it's irreconcilable that the model's modal outcome being real vindicates its internal correlations AND that its certainty was limited by the quality of the available data, so this hasn't lowered my opinion of Silver, either.
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions in the Main Subreddit
Contributions for the week of September 2, 2024
Special Issue: Babies Everywhere!
Contributions for the week of September 9, 2024
Contributions for the week of September 16, 2024
On An Ideology With No Name
Contributions for the week of September 23, 2024
You're a Villain All Right
Contributions for the week of September 30, 2024
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Shaming.
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Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
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Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
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Recruiting for a cause.
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Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
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Back on reddit, I used to do a monthly roundup of bans. I haven't since moving here, but I had some time today, so here are the bans from approximately the last month. Unfortunately, there is still no automated way to collect these, as far as I know, so whether I will continue to do this depends entirely on whether I have the time and I feel like it.
Inevitably people will want to argue whether this or that ban was justified. I don't really care if anyone thinks a ban was unjustified (especially if it's the person who was banned). We do take user sentiment into account, but that means we let the community decide what tone and direction they want the Motte to go, it doesn't mean that upvotes or downvotes in themselves tell us whether we should consider a comment or a ban decision good or not. I suggest people read (or reread, if you never have), the community sentiment section of the rules.
That said, the "Motte help" feature (where you get to volunteer to vote on whether a comment was good or not) does guide us somewhat. Speaking for myself, if a comment has been reported, and I am on the fence about modding it or not, a strong consensus that it's "not bad" will usually persuade me to let it go, while a collective judgment that it's "bad" will usually convince me to mod it without hesitation. I do not always go along with the volunteers' judgment (sometimes a comment is very blatantly violating rules, and sometimes it clearly is not, it's just a very unpopular opinion), but I definitely take it into account. Other mods can speak for themselves about how it influences their judgment.
Behind the scenes, we still have a fair number of trolls and very persistent sockpuppets. You have no idea how much stuff gets nuked before you see it. This isn't even counting the usual spam (which is also constant).
I would also like to make a plea of my own which will probably be ignored: Stop using the report feature to say "I don't like this."
Some of you (you know who you are) use the report feature constantly. Anyone who expresses an opinion you disagree with, anyone who makes a comment that's just a teeny tiny bit sharp in tone (and expresses an opinion you disagree with), anyone who argues with an opinion you agree with. There are certain people who when I see a report was submitted by That Guy again, I almost automatically dismiss it because I know with 99% certainty it will be another case of "someone said something he didn't like." If the report button is just your way of expressing frustration, whatever, but it doesn't actually work as a super-downvote button. Some people also use the report button to express their frustration in more visceral terms (e.g., namecalling, sneering, taking cheap shots that only the mods will see). That just puts you in the "Ignore this guy's reports" bucket too.
The Bans
@Amadan banned @Goodguy for 7 days
@netstack permabanned @you-get-an-upvote by request
@Amadan banned @No_one for 7 days
@naraburns banned @ok-target-7361 for 1 day
@netstack banned @pusher_robot for 1 day
@Amadan banned @Who_Cares for 3 days, extended to permaban after escalation in DMs
@Amadan banned @ok-target-7361 - duration, permanent
@Amadan banned @AvocadoPanic for 3 days
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.