ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
Do those differences show up with different billing codes when you send them over to insurance? If so, how is that difference expressed in the content of the billing codes?
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
I hate to say it, but people probably shouldn't torrent movies or other IP. The analogy there would be more if this contractor's truck was in the street, maybe he was working on a neighbors house, and the redditor went and swiped a few screws from it. Then, when the contractor noticed, he threatened to sue the guy for OneBillionDollars.jpg. Like, okay, buddy. Silly, yes. But kind of different in kind. Perhaps one could make other analogies to try to make it somewhat more sympathetic, like if the contractor was working on the neighbor's house, and the neighbor swiped the screws and gave them to the redditor. I get that there are complications here, but I think it's really just a different type of thing.
Debt collection should mostly be premised on the validity of a previously-agreed-upon debt. That's usually the first line of defense - "Prove that I owe this debt." When done above-board, the debt collector can produce a document that the debtor signed that specifically authorized the terms of the debt. Things get sketchier as the underlying facts get sketchier. Usually, how sketchy it gets depends on how sketchy the original transaction was. The extreme end of sketchy for underlying debts would be, "We refused to give them a price, just did the service, and then unilaterally made up a price." (Yeah, I guess even more extreme would be that they just didn't even do the service or just totally made up the whole thing, but that would probably be better categorized as obvious outright fraud rather than "sketchy".) I guess if the conclusion is that routine practice in the medical industry is akin to the sketchiest versions of underlying debts that are claimed by debt collectors, that's damning with faint praise.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
There was a wild post on r/RealEstate yesterday. It's already been deleted.
Hello,
I'm a young owner of a few rentals - I got lucky young starting a marketing business that worked.
We've been having some wind here lately and it partly ripped off some siding on the side of my house that's way to high for me to reach with a ladder. I look online and call a dude with good reviews - I think he's a solo gig. He pulls up within an hour of calling him and he's like "Oh, no big deal!". I watch him get out his ladder, get up there, screw these screws into the siding that are literally going into nothing (i think he did it so it looked like he was doing something), he pushed the siding back into the trim, and got down. Literally up there for 2 minutes. He said "Okay I'll go to my truck and get a quote"
He ends up coming back to my door like a half hour later and he claims his service call is $3000 and the screws were $5.
I kind of just look at him and I'm like "hahaha how much do I owe ya?"
Him: "$3005. I accept all forms of payment"
Me: "You're joking right? You told me on the phone your service call was $75."
Him: "We never talked sir. You must have talked to some other siding guy"
Me: "If I talked to someone else, how would you have known to come over right away and do my siding?"
Him: "Uhhh.. I mean.. Like I use a contracting app that gave me this job. My rate is $3000"
Me: "I'll give you $100 just to leave. I'm not doing this, that's crazy"
Him: "Maybe I should call the police. Should we do that?"
Me: "Go right ahead but it's a civil manner"
Him: "This is theft of services. If you don't pay, I'm pressing charges and you're going to jail"
Me: "I can promise you if you keep up this immoral scam like behavior you're going to end up in jail"
Him: "I just got out of prison, no sweat off my brow"
Me: "Doesn't surprise me with that prison tat on your neck"
Him: "Look kid you gonna pay me or not"
Me: "No"
Him: "You'll be hearing from my lawyer kid. Hope mommy and daddy can pay for it"
Me: See ya later!
I'm 25 but look 20. I've had people try to charge me crazy prices for things or take advantage of me but this was nuts and criminal (not literally but you know what i mean - just not right). Why are there people out there like this?
There's obviously a good chance that it's a totally fake story. I'd basically assume that it is. I don't even really care if there's even a 0.1% chance that it's actually true; it doesn't really matter.
Part of the reason why people likely believe that it's fake is that it sounds like absolutely outrageous behavior by the contractor. Something that no one would put up with. Something that would shock the conscience if it actually happened and there was a recording of the interaction or something.
So what's weird is that this is the standard modus operandi in the medical industry. It's just the way things are done. Yes, if you have insurance, then instead of telling you to your face that they're charging a ridiculous made up number after the fact, they tell your insurance provider the same thing. But the basic fact pattern is absolutely the same.
I'm definitely not going to go all Kulak and say that since this routinized obscenity shocks the conscious, everyone needs to start going around murderin'. But it absolutely is a routinized obscenity that should shock the conscience. Perhaps my crazy pills are significantly less potent than his, but they appear to still be crazy pills.
Lawyers can debate the legalese of "consent to treat" forms and what they do and do not allow, but it simply cannot be plausible that we will have a functional medical industry when it is the one and only industry that is allowed to simply refuse to provide you a price prior to authorizing work and then go on to just make up whatever the hell inflated price they want after the fact.
Correct. There are all sorts of dysfunctions that happen in business. Generally, the businesses with more of those dysfunctions fail more. None of those are what you had implied by "the company gets to harm you in arbitrary ways". Now, you're saying that there's just a background of some companies harming people in arbitrary ways, which has nothing else to do with the topic at hand. Presumably all of those things occur regardless of whether you get a degree paid for by the company. Do you think that somehow choosing to not get a degree paid for by the company stops those three things? If so, how?
...would you even dismiss giving someone a raise on the same grounds? "Eh, raises seem sus, because then they can arbitrarily harm you by slightly less than that much..."
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
They can, but a) it makes it more expensive for them, and thus somewhat less likely and b) it provides you with some form of protection/compensation.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
if the old company paid a third party vendor for classes or other training
This is almost always the case. Or, as @phailyoor mentioned, continuing education/advanced degrees. They're often doing things like tuition reimbursement programs.
This definitely creates some messed up incentives, because if you can, say, "partner" with a separate training company who is really just doing the stuff you'd be otherwise doing, then you can implement clawbacks for things you couldn't otherwise. Might cost a bit more up front, but you might be able to make it back on the employee retention. And I'm sure some big companies would be happy to set up basically fake "separate" training companies that aren't really separate and dare you to try to prove it.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
On the topic of people getting mad and yelling at the government for every bullshit thing they see (including the decisions they choose), but us mostly ignoring them when they're being dumb, this week's Short Circuit summarized a hilarious case thusly:
Firearm instructor purchases a Glock pistol modified to prevent its safety from re-engaging after firing a round. Yikes! He drops the gun during training, it shoots, and he loses a leg. The instructor sues Glock arguing, inter alia, that the gun is unreasonably dangerous. Tenth Circuit: Glock's warning and testing instructions adequately warn that modified guns may cause unintentional discharge.
Hlynka-watch. Multi-agent environment.
Employees think about their situation and make choices, too. If they think you're starting to treat them worse, they'll definitely start looking. Decent chance they'll get someone to pay off the clawback, or at least enough of a raise to overcome whatever delta is left.
Plus, when you start treating them poorly, it's not just a direct monetary thing. It's an emotional thing, which is often highly valued alongside money. That is, say that they would owe you $10k. You imagine that you're going to only arbitrarily harm them by $5k somehow. But their resentment is worth $7k to them, so they'd even be willing to eat the $10k and make a lateral move elsewhere. (In the same vein, good will and belief that they know you are a decent employer compared to the unknown elsewhere is a huge reason why people often stay at companies even if they think they could eek out a bit more money elsewhere.)
On top of that, they're likely to be less productive, which is a pure harm for the employer. Especially with only a year clawback (I don't know why, but it does seem like clawbacks tend to be only 1yr, while incentives are more likely to vest in 3yrs). Pretty much as soon as they get a whiff of you treating them more poorly in that time, it's easy for them to go into "coasting" mode, start looking for other work, and think, "I'm only going to stay here until the 1yr mark if I can find any other offer." I know of one guy (not where I work) who I don't even think was treated badly, wasn't even training-related, but he got a signing bonus with a 1yr clawback, dropped his resignation on exactly the one year and one day mark. I have to imagine that a good chunk of that time, he was hardly even trying to contribute to the company. He knew what his plan was, and he went through the motions that he had to go through.
Harming people in arbitrary ways is usually negative sum, and any business that lets too much of that creep in is likely to end up doomed sooner or later. You would really need a surprisingly good business case for how you're actually going to extract additional value by treating them poorly during something like a clawback period.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
I am, however, sensitive to there being actual shortages in certain occupations that we can't just wait 10 years until there are enough qualified people available.
I'm... less sensitive to this. I think these things almost never happen. Especially because very few occupations really take ten years to ramp up production unless there are significant restrictions in place (the occupation that comes closest in terms of number of years would be doctors, but when there are problems there, the absolute most likely explanation is supply restrictions). For the most part, we should probably just let the price system operate.
As mentioned in the linked comment, it is inherently a political decision as to whether the supply curve should be purely the domestic one or the world one. This is not necessarily an easy choice. You ask Bryan Caplan and he'll take gainz from trade every time; you ask the unions, and they'll take domestic salaries every time. But I think that we should just be honest that that is the political decision to be made, not hiding a political decision inside what would inevitably be a political determination of whether there is a "shortage".
In other words, hiring foreign workers should be more expensive than hiring native workers.
I sort of reject the idea that you can accomplish this by government fiat. Supply curves slope upwards. If the "current price" to hire a domestic employee is $X, but the gov't only allows you to hire a foreign employee for $X+Y, then just look back to the domestic supply curve. You could hire more domestic employees for $X+Y, which would bring the "equilibrium price" of hiring domestic employees up to $X+Y. Which, first, if the price mechanism is actually operating domestically, you don't actually want to do, because the market has already cleared. Second, if our plan is to always make it more expensive to hire foreign workers, it in turn requires the government to bring up the cost of hiring a foreign worker to $X+Y+Z. Rinse and repeat. Like, mayyyyyyybe someone could define a sense of "if the (I don't know) "medium run" supply curve has elasticity below some threshold, then..." but good luck estimating it or having a usable definition of "medium run" to use for your estimation.
If bringing over a single foreign worker requires a $25,000 nonrefundable application fee, legal fees, and no guarantee that the sponsored immigrant won't jump ship to a company that offers him more money, you're not bringing him over unless there really is a shortage and you're confident you can keep him.
I think this would be equivalent to just saying that we're going to choose the world supply curve... but with a tariff. It would essentially require adopting the meaning of "shortage" to be "with respect to the world supply curve". Of course, the tariff would still cause a ""shortage"" (not to be confused with "shortage") with respect to the world market clearing equilibrium that would be obtained without the tariff.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
Labor laws are such that you can’t insist that people you train stick around long enough to pay back at least the cost of the training.
Agreed with @Botond173. You can absolutely do this. Well, not "insist", but you can include either clawback provisions (retrospective "if you leave within X years, you have to pay us back for the training", which they have to agree to when they sign up for the training program) or delayed comp that only vests after some number of years (prospective, acknowledging that they're worth more now, but you only have to actually pay it out if they stick around for X years). They're both pretty common.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
training them so they leave of their own volition and go be mediocre at your competitors so you can then hire higher caliber humans may well be cheaper than redundancy
The old joke goes that if you want to get rid of someone without firing them, give them awards and hope they can parlay that into a new gig somewhere else. Sometimes, even getting them poached by some other division within the same company is sufficient to get them out of your hair, if you're into perverse middle-management incentives.
the new employer could just offer to pay the employee’s clawed-back training costs when he leaves the old employer, perhaps with some clawback provisions of their own.
Yep. It's pretty common practice at some levels for people to regularly update their personal accounting of these things (including things like not-yet-vested 401k/ESPP/etc.). You want to know what your expected comp actually is over time. You want to have a process worked out for how to compute all those things when necessary (maybe even so you just have an approximation in your head already), so you can negotiate quickly if anything comes up rather than having to scramble to pull it all together at the last minute. If you've really got value and a new company will give you that bundle of money up front to get you, it really is incumbent on your current employer to compete to keep you.
Another pretty simple thing that is done (rather than a claw back, allowing them to go above and beyond just the mere cost of the education or whatever), not always tied to a degree, often in the form of something like stock options, is just a delayed bonus. "You just got this degree. We'd like to offer you a big bonus. Only catch is that we sign the paperwork now, but it doesn't vest for three years." That way, it's harder for a competitor to plunk down enough money to take them, they plausibly do get compensated in accordance with their increased value, but you only have to pay out if they actually stick around and give you another three years of value.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
the point is we trained these guys up in Azure and AWS, and instead of sticking around and thanking us for training them, they leave as soon as they had a better opportunity.
I'm sorry, but you kind of sound like you're not very good at business. Allow me to digress heavily.
Businesses compete, in many many ways. One of the ways they have to compete is to acquire labor and talent. This is an extremely underappreciated fact about capitalism and entrepreneurship, especially by the typical leftists who hate corporations. Most people have never even thought about trying to start an actual business. They've never even thought about the possibility of hiring employees for their business. They've never even thought about what that process looks like. Once you even start thinking about it, you have to start thinking, "Well, uh, where/how am I going to get my employees?" Let's start by imagining that you think you might be hiring for a low-skill position. You're thinking of starting a brand new business; you can't just pay them the farm; you have no money; you might not have even started the business yet; you're still just even thinking about it. Well, you might think, maybe you can get by with some teenagers working in the summer; you might not even need labor all year long yet; this could be a really good 'in' at relatively low cost, and as your business grows, you could think about having the money to hire more full-time, possibly more skilled folks. What then? Well, how are you going to convince a teenager to work for you for the summer? You have to think about them, their interests, their desires, their alternatives. Maybe they could work for a nearby grocery store or fast food joint instead. How much are those places paying them? What are those working conditions like? You've got to beat that. Not necessarily just in terms of price, but you've got to figure out a way to offer them a situation that they'd prefer.
This is the beauty of the entire thing. Rather than the caricature of employers just thinking about how they can screw over workers, it is imperative for prospective employers to think, "How can I package together a job that is attractive to a prospective employee?" At the same time, you also need to figure out how to make the economics work - they obviously need to create enough value as an employee to overcome the cost. And here is where it gets extra beautiful.
Imagine the world from the perspective of a low-skill individual, like that hypothetical teenager. They'd like the produce value for the world and make money for themselves, but they have no bloody clue how. The unfortunately all too common failure mode is to just rebel against the entire system, become a commie, and imagine that it will prevent them from needing to produce value or to even think about it. It's sort of amazing that this failure mode is so common, because the solution is already right there - we've mobilized millions of people across the country who are automatically, on their own accord, spending significant amounts of effort and brain power specifically for the purpose of figuring out how to create an economically-viable pathway for those folks to add value... in a way that is better for them than any other option they have in front of them! How incredible is that?! Without even lifting a finger, they have hoards of folks trying to figure out what types of things they want, how they can contribute, and how best to then deliver to them what they want. Of course, those hoards are going to take some cut for the work. If the individual goes about doing that work themselves, say, starting their own business, figuring out the value proposition, etc., they don't have to pay that cut.
It's easiest to think about this at the low-skill end, especially because that's where it's most stark, but it continues up a significant portion of the ladder.
Back to your job. Your job is much harder than the employee's. You have to do all that work! You have to figure out what they value, how you can provide them the best possible value, in a way that contributes to further value and which is economically viable. That's a damn difficult job. If you don't do it well, you will lose the competition. Someone else will take your employees, make them even more productive, and give them even more of what they value. You may try to kick against the goads and complain that you're actually providing them extra value in terms of skills. It doesn't really matter. Figure it out. Lots of schemes have been used over time to handle this sort of situation. Otherwise, consider that perhaps your business isn't as viable as you thought... or maybe you're just bad at it and losing to the competition.
I don't think you can just overnight
What are you talking about? This seems irrelevant.
A lack of willingness to take responsibility for my own medical decisions is not my opinion at all.
Yeah, again, what are you talking about? I did not say that you had a lack of willingness to take responsibility for your own medical decisions. I said that you were taking upon yourself the ability to make medical decisions for everyone else.
I think it's the American people, and the people in pretty much every other country too, who are unwilling to do this. [taking responsibility for their own decisions]
Why? I don't get this at all.
I would be any amount of money you care to name that they would all scream their heads off at the Government for allowing it to happen
Do they all scream their heads off at the government when a person is allowed to work on their own car, and they sometimes screw up? Do they scream their heads off at the government when Bitcoin goes down and the people who bought it lose a bunch of money? Do they scream their heads off at the government when Bitcoin goes up and they weren't mandated to buy it, so they missed out on the gainz? Even if so, maybe we should build better norms toward ignoring stupid people who get mad at every bullshit thing they see and yell at their government for stupid stuff.
why don't you spell out exactly how you envision your ideal system working?
Let's start with just the basics. In a pandemic, you can obviously do better than what was actually done. Of course, now would again be a good time to check in and see how you view the HCT/RCT debate, because this is a real, live, issue that people are debating, not just cherry-picking, and you didn't respond last time. I think even you could agree that you shouldn't further delay things in order to try to swing an election. Moreover, you shouldn't even threaten mandates in order to justify performing so poorly, much less actually implement them.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
The conversation turned significantly toward minimum wage "dead-end jobs". You can find some more interesting discussion of this group here.
Working at a small shop, it's not always easy to replace someone, so they'll often put up with some shockingly bad behavior to avoid firing.
This sort of feeds into 100's point about frictions. Yes, there are frictions to firing people, too, which in multiple markets leads to behavior like, "Let's just make it shitty enough for them that they quit." This isn't just at the low-end. I'm very aware of situations where C-level people were pushed out by just gradually taking away all of their power/budget and making their job shittier and shittier from the perspective of a C-level person.
One of the important lessons of price floors/caps is that they cause competition on other margins. Think back to when there were price caps on gasoline. It caused shortages in terms of price, and produced competition on other margins - specifically, it caused people to have to compete or "pay" in terms of time spent sitting in line. Alternatively, you could curry favor with a supplier (say, your dad's brother runs a gas station; he might be willing to let you skip the line; presumably you're "paying" with good will).
Similarly, a price floor on low-skill labor (minimum wage) results in shortages in terms of price (unemployment) and competition on other margins. If you're not willing to work under shittier conditions, for example, you're easily replaceable by someone else who is, and since you're going to cost the same either way (in terms of monetary price), who do you think is going to "win" the job? It's very similar to rent control as a price ceiling. Tenants can't compete on price, so they implicitly compete on who is willing to endure the housing conditions getting worse and worse (lack of maintenance, etc.). If the "price" of shittier conditions gets too high for you, someone else who is willing to pay the higher "price" of shittier conditions, but is mandated to pay the same monetary price, will win the competition.
if you have a specialized skill there is a shortage of
This turns gobs of power over to whoever gets to decide that there is a "shortage" of something. Moreover, it avoids asking important questions like, "Why is there a shortage? What are the barriers that are preventing the market from clearing? Can we get rid of them?" Of course, the answer to those questions depends on things like whether you use the domestic supply curve only or the world supply curve (which will have different equilibrium prices/quantities)... and again, it is almost certain that the real power will be who gets to decide to implicitly use one or the other for deciding whether there is a "shortage" in any particular industry. Obviously, folks like Elon want to use the world supply curve for determining that there's a "shortage" of tech workers, while the unions will want to use the domestic supply curve to claim that there is no "shortage" in their industry.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
But for better or worse, we're so far away from that world in the way our society currently runs that it's just not viable to cherry-pick one or two things from that world and try to just apply to them to ours.
It's not a matter of cherry-picking. It's simply stating that things are clearly good or bad. Mandates are clearly bad. FDA testing for information purposes, mixed in with insurance schemes, is probably mostly okayish, but it's clearly bad in a pandemic (in empirical terms, just looking at how it went). Banning people from taking risky but possibly hugely beneficial actions, regardless of their situation, is clearly bad.
Who would take such a vaccine in a world with no mandates at all by anyone ever
Probably people who highly value the potential upside. For example, if you were someone who was older, perhaps with a comorbidity, and your line of work significantly depended on your ability to have in-person interactions with a significant number of people, there's a decent chance that you'd not just want to take the vaccine, you might even be willing to pay a lot to get one. There was plenty of chatter from wealthy business people who were saying that they would absolutely pay a bundle of money to get one, if only it wasn't banned. Any product has early adopters, even if that product has risks. People wondered about, say, the fire risk of EVs, but there were still plenty of early adopters... and they provided good data for others to understand the risks and value them appropriately. (Of course, now would be a good time to check in and see how you view the HCT/RCT debate, because this is a real, live, issue that people are debating, not just cherry-picking.)
This is one of the most common failure modes, perhaps even a typical mind fallacy. Because you think, in your situation, that you wouldn't want to take it, you think that no one would want to take it (or you think they'd have obviously wrong preferences, since they don't match up with your own). Of course, this comes with the converse typical mind fallacy, thinking that once the FDA has approved it, then since you would want to take it in your situation, everyone would want to take it. Of course, neither of those things is true, empirically. This also isn't cherry-picking; it's just observing what is true and what is not true in the world.
And what then if it turned out to be far more dangerous than Covid itself, or even helped it spread faster, as quite a few drugs have in fact been discovered in trials to actually do?
I don't know; some people could regret doing it; some people could regret not doing it. Did the FDA evaluate the fire risk of EVs through extensive trials and testing before anyone was allowed to buy one? Or autonomous vehicles? What if they turned out to be really dangerous? I guess we have one hell of a mess. Using an analogy I've used here before, what would the world be like if we just let people work on their own cars? (I.e., this world.) We didn't make every repair procedure have to be completely and thoroughly evaluated by the FDA and only dispensed by licenced mechanics. Different people would have different risk assessments! They'd make different choices! It would be a mess!
I get that you feel like it is your personal responsibility to make sure that enough people (not even just enough; presumably you will personally ensure that it's magically the right people magically at the right time) choose to take it, but not if it's those other people, who you personally don't want to take it right now. It is your job to decide for them. I'm sorry, but it's not your job. It's not your job to decide if I should diagnose my own check engine light or not, either.
Or even, say, bitcoin. Some people were early adopters. Others still don't have any. "Who would buy bitcoin, a silly little string of numbers, with no mandates or FDA approval? The bitcoin-maxxers, of course. And what if it then went to zero and they were all wiped out financially? (It could still happen!) Now that would be one hell of a mess." Eh. Some people could regret doing it; some people could regret not doing it. It is not only literally impossible for you to prevent all regret in all people everywhere, it is not your job.
I mean, I guess it's somewhat possible for you to prevent all regret in all people everywhere; you can just mandate/ban literally any action they could take. Give them no choices. Then they can't regret those choices, because you wouldn't allow them to choose otherwise anyway. That said, they'd probably regret appointing you as the No Ragrets Czar, because you'd almost certainly make choices that are bad for them in hindsight (like, for example, not letting them get a COVID vaccine). Many people are truly regretting the trillions of dollars, years of our lives, the social development of our children, etc. that were wasted by putting folks like you in power.
I'm guessing it's probably somewhat faster than the approval process for human drugs, but not dramatically so.
Shame.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
But considering the plans to effectively force virtually the entire population to take the vaccines right away
Right off the bat, this is the part that you could just not do. It's amazing how just not threatening to do something even more damaging and dumb if you're not allowed to do something else damaging and dumb sort of just fixes the problem. This reasoning would be akin to saying, "If you don't let me impose onerous zoning and building regulations, I'll mandate that everyone lives in a shanty, so you better let me do what I want, even though it's dumb and damaging." There is an alternative; you could just not do either.
In any event, what do you know about vaccine development timelines for animals?
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
I just want to add a little bit from Zvi's latest:
Process for a Tier 4 problem:
- 1 week crafting a robust problem concept, which “converts” research insights into a closed-answer problem.
- 3 weeks of collaborative research. Presentations among related teams for feedback.
- Two weeks for the final submission.
We’re seeking mathematicians who can craft these next-level challenges. If you have research-grade ideas that transcend T3 difficulty, please email elliot@epoch.ai with your CV and a brief note on your interests.
We’ll also hire some red-teamers, tasked with finding clever ways a model can circumvent a problem’s intended difficulty, and some reviewers to check for mathematical correctness of final submissions. Contact me if you think you’re suitable for either such role.
As AI keeps improving, we need benchmarks that reflect genuine mathematical depth. Tier 4 is our next (and possibly final) step in that direction.
Tier 5 could presumably be ‘ask a bunch of problems we have actual no idea how to solve and that might not have solutions but that would be super cool’ since anything on a benchmark inevitably gets solved.
The abilities are impressive, and I actually wouldn't be surprised if it's able to perform admirably on Tier 4 "closed-answer" problems, especially as they get better and better at using rigorous back-end engines. But notice what they're expecting. They're expecting to have teams of top tier mathematicians spend a significant amount of time crafting "closed-answer problems". That really is probably where the bottleneck is, and Zvi's offhand comment is also in that vein. One possible end state is that these algorithms become an extremely useful 'calculator-on-steroids' that, like calculators, programming languages, and other automated theorem proving tools before, supercharges mathematical productivity under the guidance and direction of intuitive humans trying to push forward human understanding of human-relevant/human-interesting subject domains. Another possible end state is that the algorithms will get 'smart' enough to have all that human context, human intuition, and understanding of human-relevance/human-interestingness and be able to actually drop-and-replace human math folks. I suppose a third possible end state would be that a society of super advanced AIs go off and create their own math that humans can tell somehow is objectively good, but that they have to work and struggle to try to understand bits and pieces of (see also the computer chess championship). I really don't have any first principles to guide my reasoning of which of these end states we'll end up in. It really feels to me like a 'wait, watch, and see' situation.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
before mass vaccination of animals used for human consumption
Anyone have any inside knowledge on this? I remember the stories about how the COVID vaccines were essentially completely created very early on in 2020 and that the delay in getting it to the masses was primarily caused by the insane testing protocols required. Presumably, the testing regime for animals is less bad? Anyone know how much less bad? Is it still pretty bad if they're specifically animals for human consumption? What is a reasonable timeline for all of this to ramp up, and what are the blockers?
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
The displaced 25 years old coder has to work in McDonalds now that they were replaced from their job by a HB-1 and thus a teenager than in other circumstances would have occupied that position spends the rest of his time playing videogames.
This makes the opposite error in assuming that there is a fixed number of jobs.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
Totally agreed that having rigorous engines that are able to provide synthetic training will massively help progress. But my sense is that the data they can generate is still of the type, "This works," "This doesn't work," or, "Here is a counterexample." Which can still be massively useful, but may still run into the context/problem definition/"elegance" concerns. Given that the back ends are getting good enough to provide the yes/no/counterexample results, I think it's highly likely that LLMs will become solidly good at translating human problems statements into rigorous problem statements for the back end to evaluate, which will be a huge help to the usefulness of those systems... but the jury is still out in my mind to what extent they'll be able to go further and add appropriate context. It's a lot harder to find data or synthetic data for that part.
That's a hell of a thing to drop this far into a conversation about pandemics.
Do you honestly think there are no differences between conceptual schema or patterns of behavior/regulation that can be applied across different flavors of pandemics? There are no better or worse ways of doing things in advance?
We can get to the rest of your comment in a bit, but we really ought to stop here for a second, because if I'm hearing what I think you're saying, most of the rest of the discussion might be pointless.
HCT is Human Challenge Trials; RCT is Randomized Controlled Trials. I do kinda sorta think that you might just not be very exposed to any of the debates going on about how to improve our systems for the possibility of new pandemics. I guess I'm not sure why you would be, given that you seem to think that it's pointless to even try. I guess I'd just wonder which came first. Did you decide that it was pointless to try, and thus never went and learned anything about what factors might be considered? Or is it just that you have no idea what factors might be considered, and so you concluded that it must be pointless to try?
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