ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
6hr ago
climate science itself is based on thousands of different interactions that are hard to model out with degree of accuracy
I actually kind of go the other way on this, depending on how strict one is about the "degree of accuracy". There's an at least plausible way that you can approximate the high-dimensional system with a low-dimensional representation with one primary input (carbon-equivalents). Of course, one needs to consider a range of possible time series inputs and acknowledge that it's a pretty noisy model, but you can do okay-ish, about as okay-ish as you can do with other noisy models. And of course, you have to acknowledge that your estimates are genuinely dependent on the chosen time series inputs (e.g., it took a long time and a lot of people saying, "RCP 8.5 probably isn't very likely," for folks to sort of grudgingly accept that it wasn't the most useful time series input; but maybe things could change and it becomes more likely! There's a genuine dependence on the time series input). But you can do alright.
It's when we glom on a coupled system, that operates in a vastly different timescale regime, that we run into serious theoretical problems.
ControlsFreak
7hr ago
I appreciate that you've probably reviewed the literature more closely than I have. Maybe a month or so ago, I saved a review paper, and I was wanting to go digging through the cites, but I haven't had time yet (the motivating question was concerning which/how many papers dealt with effects specifically of gum/patches). Perhaps you could help me with a few specific questions:
(1) You say, "It's a shit nootropic". Is this because you think that the worthwhile effects are, indeed, minimal? Is it worse than, say, caffeine? Or is this judgment coupled significantly with the dependency risk?
(1a) Is any of the above possibly conflated by possible interactions with, say, ADHD meds or even caffeine alone?
(2) Is there any dependency risk data you can point me to for gum/patches? I think Zyn is likely to be closer to vaping/chew tobacco than gum/patches (I can accept that perhaps Gwern got this one wrong). I've seen plenty of statements like that FDA one; note that it calls out pouches. Is there anything in the literature specifically for gum/patches?
For disclosure, I have toyed around with gum on a few occasions. I would use it for specific parts of my day that I wanted a mild stimulant and perhaps some increased habit forming, like going to the gym. When I would, for example, go on trips where I wasn't expecting to have gym access, I never experienced any withdrawal or cravings. It's more of a pain for me to buy than, say, protein/creatine, so I've also just gone long stretches without having any without any difficulty. If anything, I feel like I feel more withdrawal effects from coffee or even caffeinated tea. This may be personal variation and apart from the data, which is why I would be interested in whether you've seen any data specifically for gum/patches.
ControlsFreak
7hr ago
Couldn’t some of the models just be…wrong? Bad? Maybe even dishonest?
Possibly? Of course, there's the "all models are wrong..." quote, so it would take additional caveats there. But they don't have to be bad/dishonest. They're just trying to do something that we can't do.
People have been smugly telling me that climate change isn’t real(ly a problem) for years. They had studies and everything. Why is this time different?
Because before, you had people actively arguing that climate change wasn't real(ly a problem), and there were tons of vibes/momentum to stamp that out. Now, it's come around to my position, and the vibes are more, "Yeah, you're probably right, we probably can't actually estimate damage." Maybe with some feel goods about how we can still do some things the author likes (e.g., batteries, public transit, methane, that are more or less economically viable). I think your comment is a good example of that. Similar to what I said to @quiet_NaN:
Back a decade ago, when I would give my position, the patterns were matched; the knives were out; I was classified as a "denier" who must be refuted. There's Nobel-winning work giving us estimates and everything!
I would have never gotten something so... tame... in response a decade ago at the old old old place. That's a pretty significant shift.
ControlsFreak
7hr ago
Humans make decisions under uncertainty all the time.
Sure, but usually they acknowledge when situations contain deep uncertainty. For a long time, many folks were acting like there wasn't any uncertainty with the human effects of climate change, or if there was, it was too minimal to matter in comparison to the known effect. Even shifting to, "Yeah, we probably can't estimate this and have very little clue, so we have to operate in a situation of deep uncertainty," is a pretty significant change.
I think your comment is a good example of the vibe shift. Back a decade ago, when I would give my position, the patterns were matched; the knives were out; I was classified as a "denier" who must be refuted. There's Nobel-winning work giving us estimates and everything! Now, when I say, "Yeah, we probably can't estimate that," the response seems more likely to be along the lines of, 'Sure, you're probably right that we probably can't estimate that. So what? We can still make decisions under uncertainty and maybe even do some things I prefer.'
ControlsFreak
7hr ago
Sign - yes. It will be a net negative.
How do you know this? From what I see, you just sort of guesstimated some things on different sides and don't take the timescales of the coupled systems into account. For example, you say:
Unless birth rates see radical change, the north simply isn't a place with enough people
Isn't this one of those things that could plausibly change? There have been entire reports on possible migrations of people, and people can move, populations can grow/dwindle on much faster timescales than climate changes. How do you account for the timescale effects?
Magnitude and scaling characteristics - no.
This is likewise concerning. Reddit search is hopelessly broken, but a while back, I remember one of these "estimates of climate change economic effects" papers coming out, and while I've already said that I think the task is actually impossible, I took the claim at face value and compared it to a contemporary Krugman NYT column that talked about tariffs. His approximate estimate of the reduction in GDP due to tariffs was ~3%, and I don't recall exactly what the particular climate paper gave, but the number that sticks in my mind was like 0.7%; I'm pretty sure it was something less than 1%. If we have no clue whether it's more like 1% or 10%, why should one think that it's more like 1% than 0%... or -1%? Like, how do we actually estimate this with anything other than vibes?
ControlsFreak
22hr ago
Didn't you go for vaping, whereas Gwern specifically distinguished between gum/patches and vaping, even in the abstract of the essay?
ControlsFreak
1d ago
But there will be an impact, that's for sure.
How do you have any idea what order of magnitude the impact will be? How do you have any idea what the sign of the impact will be?
ControlsFreak
1d ago
I think the vibes have fully shifted on climate change damage estimates. Tyler Cowen posted this morning with a terse:
The whole climate to gdp transmission thing does not seem to be working very well?
He's referring to this paper and this thread about it. They perform an empirical review of previous major estimates, focusing on replicating them and analyzing the methodology. One thing I found interesting is that they distinguished between damage estimates, themselves, and applications of damage estimates, like SCC. They say that the latter have already been show to be irreducibly uncertain, though even if the damage->SCC pathway was not irreducibly uncertain, they are arguing that since the damage estimates, themselves, are irreducibly uncertain, so too would be things like SCC.
They spell out multiple factors that create identification challenges and show how small changes to the inputs of prior models can result in huge changes in the outputs, in strange and unstable ways. They don't necessarily think prior authors did anything actively bad or malicious in their approach, just that the entire endeavor is probably doomed from the start:
Importantly, we don’t think these particular papers are uniquely flawed; our point is that they are attempting an impossible feat...
Their tweet thread has the typical disclaimer needed to get out in front of the typical objections one would immediately hear upon taking such a position:
Importantly: we are not claiming that climate change is economically harmless. We're arguing that the magnitude of damages is deeply and irreducibly uncertain, and trillion-dollar decisions need to stop being made as if it isn't.
I feel a bit vindicated by the vibe change, because I had been arguing something similar a full decade ago at the old old old place, pretty much on my lonesome. Obviously, I didn't have the exact set of empirical critiques that these authors present today, but I feel like it's a good example of where you can have very strong theoretical knowledge in a related/relevant area (timescale-separated dynamical systems) that leads to a correct intuition along the lines of, "I don't actually have to know the details of the methods they're using (though I did look at several back in the day); I can't imagine they could possibly accomplish what they're setting out to accomplish, just because of the nature of the type of system they're working with."
ControlsFreak
2d ago
There has, from time to time, been some discussion concerning doctor salaries. I don't personally care all that much about this. They're highly-trained professionals in an in-demand field, and doctor salaries probably aren't the main driver of overall healthcare costs.
Nevertheless, there's often some debate over what the numbers actually look like. I was just linked to this tweet in one of my econ link aggregators. (Yay, built-in browser translation!)
Their claim is that 84% of American physicians are in the top 10% of incomes, and 26% of American physicians are in the top 1%. Their paper makes comparisons to other countries. They also broke it down into primary care vs. specialists.
So, at least this is one snapshot view of the actual distribution of doctor salaries, which I hadn't really seen before in these discussions. Assuming, of course, that their methodology is sound, which I'm not qualified to assess.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
if that made it work better
It seems to me that you are saying that you have goals for what you want the end product to be like. As such, I think you're implicitly affirming that you would choose to not do things like train on the test set. That is, you wouldn't just clearly and directly give it the answers, even though you could.
Now, the question seems to me, "What do you even mean by benevolence?" You originally said:
Lack of benevolence: God created the world and all that is in it, and is able to interact with it, but doesn't actually care about us.
But this sort of doesn't make direct sense. You care about the LLM you're creating. You deeply care about it, at least in that you very much care to "ma[k]e it work better". It seems like you're using some other sense of words that is not fully fleshed-out. Like, maybe to be benevolent, you have to care about some particular type of goal or in some particular way, but other types of caring/goals do not count, or something. I think we just don't have enough information to figure out whether this reasoning makes much sense.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
I drive 99% of the time, and my wife very very occasionally says things. She always apologizes about it, but somehow every. single. time. it is valid and useful information. For example, maybe I'm looking back to initiate a lane change, and something suddenly happens in front of us and to the other side.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
That sexual revolution thing didn't turn out so well for women, did it?
ControlsFreak
6d ago
If you were creating an LLM, would you train on the test set? If not, does that mean that you lack benevolence? You could just clearly and directly give it the answers!
ControlsFreak
13d ago
I'm going to add another Hikaru video, one just released today, because he went on a mini rant about this exact topic. It starts here with another GM asking him about a possible computer line from the game he had just played (he had a smile on his face, because he knows). The mini rant ends with, "This is the problem with these games, it's that, it's like whenever you use a computer program, you really lose the human feel, because some of these moves are just not human, or they just don't feel right. They just don't feel right at all."
How to effectively use engines to improve your ability to play human over-the-board games is genuinely hard/controversial.
ControlsFreak
13d ago
Level, yes. You can actually do an okay-ish enough job by just dialing down some numbers. The great thing about the ELO system is that you can just use results to figure out how to 'rate' a bot. Just create a gimped bot, let it play a bunch of people online, see what rating range it ends up in, and poof, you've got a bot that plays "at that level". Want it a bit higher/lower? Turn it up/down a smidge. You'd need a lot of top-level players to play along with the scheme to dial it in decently at the elite level, though. Your estimate of its level gets better as it plays more, so this is likely practical for someone like chess.com for very short games. It's harder for elite-level and longer games, just because it's going to be hard to get enough data.
Style? Not a chance. At least not right now. This is an area where a lot of folks are investing significant efforts. The hope is that rather than just using traditional engines, you can take gigantic databases of human moves, sprinkle in some ML magic, and get something that plays more like humans. My sense is that no one has been really successful in doing so yet. I haven't even heard any rumors of any top-level players finding someone who has managed to do this and then proceeding to use it. Maybe someone has, and they're keeping it top secret for a competitive edge, but if so, it's very secret, and I haven't heard a peep.
ControlsFreak
13d ago
There is a huge debate about playing online or against engines, and this could certainly come up in a conversation about the controversy. This requires another digression into some background on chess.
One major perennial discussion in the chess world is about time controls. That is, how much time do players have to think about their moves? There are a lot of different time controls out there that people use, and I'm certainly not going to cover the entire debate here. The most prestigious chess events are still 'classical' time control. This already gets confusing, because there's not just one single time control for classical, but there is somewhat of a range of possibilities that people generally view as 'classical'. For example, right now, both the open/women's candidates tournaments are happening. The open is using a time control of two hours with no increment for the first 40 moves, then an additional 30 minutes plus a 30 second increment added to your time for every move you made thereafter. The women's section is instead using 90 minutes plus a 30 second increment from the beginning through move 40, then an additional 30 minutes (still with increment) thereafter. But both of these time controls are still generally considered 'classical'.
Time controls are enough of a controversy that it is often cited as one of the issues that has driven a wedge between Magnus Carlsen (viewed by many as still the best player in the world) and FIDE, with Magnus giving up his title of classical world champion, participating in fewer FIDE events, and possibly(?) building groundwork for a competing organization to challenge FIDE. But that's an aside. All to say, they're a big deal.
Second is online vs. 'over-the-board'. Online chess has enabled a lot of people to play casually or even competitively. However, the online community is generally very skewed toward much faster time controls. I haven't checked the stats, but my sense is that online, blitz (approx 3-5min) is the most popular, followed by rapid (approx 10-25min) and bullet (approx 1min) in some order. There just aren't that many good players playing classical online (or honestly, that many players in general). There is huge controversy as to what extent playing much faster chess translates to success in slower chess. You can try out more ideas more quickly; you can train your instinctual or short-calculation skills; it may genuinely improve your play if you get into a time crunch in a classical game. But you don't get the experience of really sinking into a position and calculating deeply. It has not been uncommon in the current candidates tournament for players to invest 30-60 minutes on a single move that they think is critical. Recognizing when to use that sort of time and using it effectively is a skill that you simply cannot build playing blitz. But we've also seen some players get really really good at blitz first, and then eventually transition into playing quite good slow chess, so it's still a pretty open question of controversy concerning the relationship between them.
Moreover, there is a perception that cheaters (using engines) are much more prevalent online than at over-the-board events. It's already hard to find many people playing classical online; but if a bunch of them just sort of give up and start using engines anyway, are you really getting much that you wouldn't be getting by playing an engine? In fact, some people think that it's even worse if you're worried that your opponent is cheating. It's harder to stay focused; you're more likely to waste clock cycles thinking about whether they're using an engine or not rather than on the game.
That, then, brings us to engines. Engines are super super good. Much better than any human. Sometimes there are ways that you can play anti-computer chess, but even that is pretty hard. And they do not "think like humans". Top players certainly use engines to help come up with opening ideas, or they'll use them to help them improve some of their calculations, but there's somewhat of a fine line between looking at something the engine says and thinking, "Oh, that makes sense; I can maybe try to incorporate that idea into my thinking in some way in the future," and, "No dawg; even if you gave me an additional hour in a game, I am either not going to come up with that idea or not going to be able to calculate enough of it accurately to ever feel comfortable trying such a thing." Engines can help, but it is hotly contested concerning how they can help, what level players can get what kind of help from them, etc. The current classical world champion famously was not allowed to use engines at all for the first however many years of his development (I don't remember the exact number).
How to effectively use engines to prepare for human tournaments is difficult. Aside from using them sometimes for tactics or other ideas, they're probably most used in "prep", where a person makes some plans ahead of time for what they want to do in the opening phases of the game. This is notoriously difficult, even at the highest level. In this very candidates tournament, one of the most well-known players (because he's also a streamer) got into a situation where he had played his computer-driven prep, and at one point, his opponent played a move that wasn't in his prep. His next decision was a critical one, but the position was quite complicated. He spent like an hour and then played the wrong move. After the game he blamed himself and his team for not looking at that move in preparation. He thought that the position was "impossible to play" as a human, and this is one of those pitfalls that make working with engines hard. You can't download everything from the engine into your brain; you have to stop somewhere. Where do you stop? You have to be a highly skilled player with a sense of, "This is a position that I can probably figure out over-the-board," versus, "This position is absolute madness, and so if I'm not able to just memorize what the engine says, I probably won't be able to figure it out, and I may end up just lost."
All of this is very controversial on its own, and I get no sense whatsoever that these controversies are being propped up in some way to support a position on women's chess.
ControlsFreak
13d ago
Unsurprisingly, there was some controversy.
First, some organization. The primary international organization that is involved in many of the highest-level chess tournaments is FIDE. Since I know the most about US concerns and TheMotte is still somewhat heavily US, I'll also discuss the US Chess Federation, which operates, unsurprisingly, within the US. Some international events are directly organized by FIDE. Many times, FIDE will 'rate' an event run by some other organization. USCF also does their own rating system for their own events, but FIDE may rate them, too. That is, USCF hosts a variety of events, and some of them are not FIDE rated, while others are. What it means to be 'rated' is that the organization will take the results of the event and use them to update their list of ratings for players (which is meant to be a measure of how good they are). USCF may host an event that is not FIDE rated, and just your USCF rating will update. USCF may also host an event that is FIDE rated, and then both USCF and FIDE ratings change.
The perception of FIDE is that it has many institutional connections to Russia and similar countries. The Soviet Union used to be a powerhouse in international chess, and they still have a fair amount of pull in the organization. The current president of FIDE is Russian. This is not strictly determinative of what they will choose to do (for example, at least one top-level Russian player who was an outspoken supporter of the Ukraine war was banned, and other Russians have been playing "without a flag" since the war started), but FIDE does not necessarily lean in the direction of US politics. In 2023, FIDE enacted a policy on transgender players. It was controversial, and I'll just let chess.com describe the controversy. USCF, on the other hand, had enacted a much more permissive policy that simply accepted self-identification. My understanding is that if USCF runs an event that is FIDE rated, the FIDE rules control.
There is, of course, controversy, but I think there are at least a couple factors that make it less likely to come up as much. First is that the people who are most likely to be upset about it are in the US (or perhaps in other countries that have more US-levels of pro-trans, and perhaps their own national federations have taken similar stances to USCF), and there's very little point in complaining about/to USCF, since USCF has enacted their own, more permissive policy. They would have to complain about/to FIDE. And, well, everyone seems to have something to complain about with FIDE, so it's hard to have this one move very far up the list. FIDE is also viewed as being pretty hard to influence, and so especially with such significant Russia/Russia-like connections, many folks probably think that it would be basically shouting into the void. They're probably not going to change FIDE's mind. The best chance would be to prop up a competing organization, and if that's going to happen, it's probably going to be primarily because of other grievances, so a pro-trans person may just not bother emphasizing the trans thing and just latch on to other criticisms/reasons to split, but holding hopes that if such an effort is successful, maybe there's a chance that whatever replacement organization would be more likely to be more pro-trans.
The second factor is, frankly, the vibe shift, where it seems like trans stuff has just been getting less sway in general. It's not that there's no controversy, just that it doesn't seem to be getting quite as much attention.
I'm not really aware of any high-rated male players transitioning and then winning some or a bunch of highly-respected women's events.
ControlsFreak
13d ago
women's chess leagues (in my observation, uncontroversial)
Oh boy, you haven't seen the controversy?
My sense of the story is basically this. The big question hanging over the game is, "Why do we not see more women at the very top tier of chess?" Interestingly, my sense has been that almost everyone involved in this conversation is actually perfectly fine in saying that physical sports are different (this does not hold for the general population, but it seems to hold within the community of folks who are involved in the conversation about top-level chess), but obviously, the question still lingers for what is mostly understood as an almost entirely cognitive game. "Sure, it makes sense that you're going to have differences in powerlifting, but what is the nature of the underlying cause of the observed difference in chess?"
Of course, folks consider the possible counter-examples, like Judit Polgar, who peaked at #8 in the world, and there is usually some debate as to whether she stands for the proposition that it is generally possible to have a higher proportion of women at the very top or whether she is just an outlier among outliers, the Bobby Fisher of women's chess, but that even the Bobby Fisher of women's chess couldn't reach the very top of the men. There is obviously no clear answer here, but it is a question that is absolutely discussed every time the controversy appears.
The immediate domain of the actual controversy is the question, "Should there be women-only events/sections?" On the one hand, if there aren't women-only events/sections, then folks worry that women will be mostly shut out of top-tier competitions (not due to active discrimination, but because their rating levels simply won't qualify them for many qualification criteria for open sections of closed events.
Aside, because I just said "open sections of closed events", and that sounds weird. Often times, the word "open" is used in two senses. In the first sense, it is that the tournament is generally open to all participants. This would be like "the US Open", where anyone, regardless of chess level or achievement, can just decide to sign up and play. This is contrasted to "closed" or "invitational" tournaments, which generally have a set of qualification criteria or are perhaps even more directly just a set of hand-picked competitors that are invited to play. The second sense is that many tournaments, whether "open" or "closed" will often have a women's section. However, like many other sports, they won't have a "men's" section; they'll have "women's" and "open", so that a female competitor can choose to play the open section if she'd like (and for cases with qualification criteria, if she qualifies), but is also able to choose to play the women's section.
If an event has a women's section, there's usually a side question about whether the prize funds in the women's section is as high as for the open, but that's usually a side question for the main question. Generally, one of the arguments for having a women's section is that if an event doesn't have a women's section, then with the current ratings of the populations of men/women at the highest level, most women would not likely be able to compete for a significant amount of prize money... or they'll be shut out entirely from closed/invitational tournaments because they're less likely to meet the qualification criteria. With less chance of winning substantial prize money, it would be more difficult for them to continue making a career out of chess, and the thought goes that not having women's only sections, with separate prize pools, will cause more women to leave competitive chess, which would either make the disparity worse or at least sort of lock in the disparity.
On the other hand, there's a competing theory concerning the reason why there aren't more women at the highest levels. The theory goes like this. In order to improve at chess, even all the way to the top level, you must have a lot of experience playing against top-tier competition. It is by having these experiences, seeing how they best attack your weaknesses, and learning from it, that you improve your own game. If you don't keep going at it against the best, you're less likely to figure out how you can be better. On this view, having women-only events/sessions might seem like a good idea in that it makes it more likely that they'll be able to partake in a prize pool, but you run the risk of 'quarantining' the women. Perhaps someone is currently good enough to consistently win good prizes in women's sections, but if she started playing open sections, she'd likely struggle. One might argue that she should, nevertheless, play open sections in the interest of her long-term improvement, gaining the experience of playing against the absolute best players. However, her direct financial incentive is to play in the women's section, where she's more likely to make more money now. This has been argued by some number of top female players, and a few have even eschewed women's events entirely, choosing to play only opens. So far, none have made it to the top top with the men, but a few are at least putting their money where their mouth is, in a sense, and playing only open sections in accordance with this line of thinking.
So, the controversy is a bit of a trap. Both having women's sections and not having women's sections can be 'problematic', depending on how you view it. The debate is still unsettled in the community for whether there is an underlying theory that can explain the current disparity or whether that disparity can, in theory, be 'fixed'. It's not the most public controversy of controversies, but within the small community of top-level chess, it's absolutely a controversy.
ControlsFreak
13d ago
In advance, you just don't. I mean, you eventually will, when the bill comes, but before that, it looks like our civilization is not advanced enough to find an answer to this question. That's one of the infuriating things in in US medical system - everything is set up to make it nearly impossible to state the cost upfront, or at least everybody involved in the system has been telling me so for years. Of course, this has a great benefit (for the providers involved) of precluding any price comparisons.
I suppose I should just say it. I know you implied it, but someone should just say it directly. This thing that everybody involved in the system has been telling us for years... that the system is not advanced enough to find an answer to this question... is a lie. The people involved have the numbers that are required. They can just give those numbers to patients. When this is pointed out, they will lie and misdirect and do everything they can to throw up fake and imagined roadblocks to this very simple reality, to the point of playing dumb/lying about whether they are even capable of identifying the names of the numbers in question. It is the great shame of the medical industry that they have harmed so many patients by their addiction to price opacity. I've pointed before at pieces like this where they talk of patients making choices to not get care because of price opacity or situations where because talking about prices is verboten, the doctor might prescribe an expensive drug that the patient won't buy, but could have prescribed a cheaper, almost as good, drug that the patient could actually afford and would buy. I don't know how one would even estimate the number of times that people simply suffer through problems rather than seek medical help because of price opacity. They feel like if they even consider seeking medical help, they will never have any further chance to consider the cost involved. The perception is that if they do it, they're basically spinning the roulette wheel and then will learn after the fact, after services have been rendered, whether they will owe $10 or $10k. It's unsurprising that many reasonable decisionmaking-under-uncertainty-and-budget-constraint algorithms just opt out of that game of roulette.
ControlsFreak
15d ago
trained females vs average untrained male ... I don't know how exactly they determine what intermediate even means
This is what I tried to basically give a conjectured definition of:
I'm thinking of a plot where the x-axis is something like "Number of months of training for the male" and the y-axis is "number of months training for the female". Each data point would be a point at which they are roughly equal in performance.
You also use the phrase "decently trained women". Like, what is that? This is what I'm getting at.
I really don't know, but based off that, the strength benchmark sites and the Reddit comments in that one thread I linked, it seems like it's just that your guy is actually just very high if he can bench over his body weight.
I think you're going off extremely few data points and seriously underestimating how effective a moderate amount of training and technique can accomplish.
ControlsFreak
16d ago
women without exogenous testosterone
Yeah, the third caveat that I didn't mention in my comment above is chemicals. Both male/female world-record type stuff is obviously contaminated by all sorts of gear.
There's certainly a couple big caveats in here. First is how long you've been training. The original comment said stuff like "a couple years of training". There's obviously going to be a significant effect of how long they've been doing it for how far along the progression toward "elite" they will be. You're grabbing stats from record-setting women. It would be much more nuanced to take, say, some sort of typical progression after 2-5 years.
The second big caveat is body weight. A quick look at April Mathis on OpenPowerlifting puts her around 250-260. I doubt ChatGPT is really considering this. I happen to be freshly training a newbie right now. He's male, about 160lbs. It's been a couple of months (I just checked my records, and it's been eight bench sessions). I haven't done any 1RM training with him, just very slowly progressing on a beginner program. He's shown absolutely no sign of plateauing; I'm certainly not pushing him to progress maximally quickly; we're just taking it slow and steady. With what he's already done, my estimate of his equivalent 1RM would be about 165lb. So, I'm pretty confident the ChatGPT estimate is quite low. I'm sure ChatGPT's estimate would be even worse if the guy had a bigger frame and body weight.
It would certainly be interesting to consider body-weight-equivalent trajectories for men/women. I'm 100% confident that if both were completely untrained, the male would be able to bench more than the female. I'm also 100% confident that for two elite, been training specifically for powerlifting for a decade or two, lifters, the male would be able to bench more than the female. Interesting questions would be things like, "About how many years of training does it take for the body-weight-equivalent female to surpass the completely untrained male?" Also, how do those trajectories progress? I'm thinking of a plot where the x-axis is something like "Number of months of training for the male" and the y-axis is "number of months training for the female". Each data point would be a point at which they are roughly equal in performance. My guess is that the second derivative of such a plot would be positive (that is, each additional increment of training for a male would require even more increasing increments of training for a female). And obviously, the plot would just tap out at some point, because even non-world-class male lifters will be able to surpass the female world records.
ControlsFreak
18d ago
I think the hard question here is about what it means to be a citizen, and to what extent that relates to being "subject to the jurisdiction thereof"? Does a citizen owe allegiance to the nation? Side question: is that allegiance permanent? Does the nation owe them protection, due to their citizenship? Is there something else that is involved? How do these things differ from the criteria used to determine whether someone is "subject to the jurisdiction thereof"? Can a true, full, no BS citizen have some sort of "primary" or "direct" or whatever allegiance to some other entity/sovereign that in some way makes them not "subject to the jurisdiction thereof"? Can Congress create some sort of "alternate citizenship" in which an alternateCitizen is not "subject to the jurisdiction thereof"?
I can see weirdness that we'd have to engage with no matter which way we go on the question.
ControlsFreak
19d ago
Yeah, I had that thought somewhere in my notes, but I still think it's a bit difficult to reason about and state properly.
That is, one of the questions looming over the case in general is how one conceptualizes Elk, which as I understand it effectively said that Indians were not "subject to the jurisdiction thereof". By giving them statutory citizenship, did Congress in a sense overrule Elk? Did they say, "Nah, they're 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof' now, because they're all citizens and so their kids will be 14A citizens"? Or did Congress say, "Sure, they're still not 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof', but we're going to make them citizens anyway"?
This ties into the question of whether Congress is able to sort of change the meaning or application of 14A via passing statutes. That may be my first attempted explanation for why Sauer/Wang came out on this question in an unexpected way. If Congress is able to simply say, "They are now 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof'," in isolation, without changing anything else about tribal relations, prosecutability/immunities/etc., then how do we understand that? Maybe we have to say that they couldn't do it entirely "in isolation", and that making this choice had to have come with other consequences? I don't know what the right answer is!
One other funny thought is that it is possible that Sauer had planned ahead for this question, and he devilishly prepared his wishy-washy answer as a way to avoid committing, but giving room for Gorsuch to read either result into his position. Barring that, though, it's possible that he was leaning in the direction he was at least in part because it contributes to the idea that Congress can make choices that affect the meaning/application of 14A. Whereas Wang wanted to go in the other direction, because she doesn't want Congress to be able to make choices that affect the meaning/application of 14A. She sort of needs to be able to say that Elk/WKA were just right, exactly the categories that they stated were the only categories once and forever, and nothing can ever change that (except, obviously, another amendment).
I think the one I'm remembering might have been a different one that came out later, but yeah, probably similar. There is, of course, a wide range of estimates, depending on model details.
More options
Context Copy link