PokerPirate
1d ago
C-nile greybeard
Worth reading the post just for this pun.
The idea that all arms-limitation treaties are meaningless "toilet paper" is absurd.
For example, the previously-mentioned CWC has UN inspectors visiting the chemical production facilities of signatory parties (and these inspections regularly happen even in US facilities). These inspections allow states to be reasonably confident that other states are not mass-producing chemical weapons and meaningfully reduce the risk of accidental war. (Notably, Iraq was not party to the CMC prior to 2003, did not have these regular inspections, and so international observers were uncertain about Iraq's stockpiles and production capabilities. Saddam Hussein gambled that this uncertainty would make war less likely, but these non-existent chemical weapons were ultimately how Bush/Powell convinced the Coalition of the Willing to invade Iraq.)
Arms control treaties are rarely designed to change a state's behavior during a war. Instead they are designed to change the way states prepare for war. These changes in preparation do impact whether and how wars are actually fought.
PokerPirate
1d ago
All US landmines now self-destruct in two days or less, in most cases four hours.
Wow. I had always thought they were supposed to live on the order of months. I really struggle to understand the military utility of such short-lived mines. Surely any situation in which you need to deny an area for only 4 hours, it is already unsafe to be deploying the mines in the first place.
PokerPirate
11d ago
Yes, we treat treason as a capital offense and execute people for it. Nevertheless, the FBI/CIA/NSA/etc very explicitly design their procedures so that foreign powers cannot get leverage over people. If we design a procedure that makes it trivial to give foreign powers leverage over people, then we should expect them to use it.
For example, I suspect the vast majority of citizens to be honest citizens. But I also suspect the vast majority of citizens to turn into traitors and sell information about the election to Russia if a Russian agent provides a credible threat of presenting falsified evidence that the honest citizen committed execution-worthy fraud. This is a textbook case of when falsified blackmail is an effective leverage.
PokerPirate
11d ago
I really like this death penalty proposal even though I would normally be against the death penalty in the US. The main difference, as I see it, is that working an election is an entirely voluntary endeavor, and I like the idea that the oath's people take have some sort of real legal meaning behind them.
Of course, there's lots of problems with the idea. The most obvious I see are that the number of volunteers would plummet and that foreign intellignece services would certainly try to plant evidence of voter fraud (and I'm sure they'd be able to do it very convincingly) and they could use the death penalty as leverage to have agents in the voting system.
PokerPirate
14d ago
Scott notes that the second derivative of various economic indicators does highly correlate with the vibecession, but questions "can people really sense the second derivative of GDP over decades-long timescales"? I think you give a pretty strong argument that yes, people can easily notice this second derivative. All your examples about consumerism not leading to increased real economic power seem pretty second derivativy to me.
PokerPirate
16d ago
At the private school: Under the "dean of students" office, I count 10 people with the title of dean (or vice/assistant dean), 4 with the title of director, and 5 administrative assistants. We have about 1500 undergrads.
At the public school: There are 3 people total in the "dean of students" office: The dean, a vice dean, and an administrative assistant. They have 25000 undergrads.
Both schools have separate deans for managing the faculty and the dean:faculty ratio is similar between both schools. Both schools also have separate "student-centered" departments (not part of dean of students) for financial aide, study abroad, career center, the gym, varsity sports, etc.
PokerPirate
16d ago
I teach at an expensive private college (cost per year >$90k) and I used to teach at the state school down the street (cost per year $20k). There is definitely a difference in the quality of the education, but the private school is at most 1.5x better than the state school. (For some majors, the state school would be 1.5x better than the private school.) The amenities (food, gym, clubs, etc.) are basically the same.
The main difference---and what the parents are really paying for---is that the admin of the private college is VERY hands on. The private college has something like 10x the number of deans per student, and those deans have very busy jobs interacting with the students. One of their jobs is to ensure that every student is registered for whatever accommodations they might be eligible for. They see themselves as "cutting the red tape" for the students and "helping them navigate the bureaucracy". At the private school, I deal with these deans every semester, and your stat (20-30% of students on accommodations) matches my experience here. The public school is very different. There are no deans helping students get these accommodations, and a student must be very proactive in order to get them. (My sense is that basically none of the engineering students I had would have even known accommodations existed.) Teaching at the public school for 6 years, I literally never had to deal with the deans about student accommodations.
I don't think accommodations are the only reason for the price difference between public/private colleges (the administrators do a lot of other things as well), but I'm sure they make a substantial part.
PokerPirate
17d ago
TNG is on my list of shows/movies that I'll be forcing my kids to watch. It's great for teaching leadership lessons that I want my kids to learn, and (as you allude to) it's great for teaching them what growing-up-in-the-90s-tech-leaders think of as an ideal future.
I never could get into any of the new star treks though.
PokerPirate
17d ago
I appreciate you posting this. I hadn't previously heard of this book, and I'm interested in the subject, so I might read it now.
That said, this was a hard review to read because of a lack of structure. You don't ever actually clearly state what the book is about or why we should care about the author. (Your 3rd to last paragraph references "director of global public policy" but it's not clear if this was her actual title at facebook, and this should be front and center). It's also clear that you believe that the narrator is unreliable, but you don't actually provide any examples of what she wrote that makes you believe that.
So other than being made aware that the book exists, I didn't really gain anything from your review.
PokerPirate
28d ago
Two exceptionally reasonable decisions that give me confidence that the justice system works like it should.
I hope John had to pay the court+Frank a shitload of money for wasting their time and being a shitty neighbor.
PokerPirate
30d ago
Several wartime militaries have included large percentages of females. The obvious example is the Soviets in WWII, but the Chinese, Israelis, and many other modern-ish armies have fielded large percentages of female soldiers. In no case have any of these armies treated women as "fully equal" to men in combat, but neither does the US military.
I suspect that a look at the population graphs for these countries would support your thesis, but it seems disingenuous to talk negatively about women in the military without referencing these concrete examples and actually testing your thesis against data.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Thanks for replying, and sorry if I sounded hostile. I enjoy your posts :)
PokerPirate
1mo ago
sûre
I could tolerate your accents on thé as a weird quirk, but now I have to ask: are all of these extra glyphs typos? do they have meaning to you? is it an experiment to see how long mottizens will go without mentioning it?
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I basically learned Spanish by reading Harry Potter this way. I then tried to use Harry Potter to learn Korean (after >2000hr learning the language in other ways), and I totally failed. I took me more than an hour of looking up grammar points in the dictionary to make it through the first page. This was my sign that learning Korean was too much for me and so I decided to give up that dream :(
I've got the books in Attic Greek and Latin, and I'm toying with the idea of reading them in those languages, but maybe I should just re-read in Spanish.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
This seems like a much better prompt for a philosopher.
My answer fits in a paragraph: I work with a lot of undergrad philosophy (and other humanities) majors at a top-5 liberal arts college known for humanities. Without exception, they suck using AI. They all think it is magical pixie dusk that can be waved on any problem to solve it. Philosophy professors aren't any better. A number of phil profs have commented to me about the decline in student quality due to students using AI as a crutch for their writing assignments, but it's not clear to me how much this is AI vs the secular trend of more sucky students vs just old professors being crotchety.
Okay, I lied, here's another paragraph: For philosophers to actually be able to make use of AI, or to provide insights into how humans work based on metaphors from AI, they need to understand the basics of computability. Scott Aaronson made a valiant attempt getting philosophers to recognize computability problems with his papers NP-Complete problems and physical reality and Why philosophers should care about computational complexity, but AFAIK the only people who have read these papers are computer scientists with a passing interest in philosophy. I have tried to start conversations on this topic with about 20 philosophers (both continental and analytic) and their eyes all instantly glaze over.
Damn it, I'm writing a 3rd paragraph. Way back in grad school (~10 years ago) I took a bunch of philosophy grad classes because I was interested in the problem of "what made people different from computers/AI". The most interesting result of this was me writing a paper What if Aristotle had been a Robot? that (roughly) tries to show how a robot could implement a virtue ethics system as an optimization problem (which is normally how people think of consequentialism). It's basically a badly written less-wrong article, and exactly 0 academics are interested in anything like this because it won't get you tenure because existing philosophers don't recognize it as philosophy.
Okay, fine, here's a 4th paragraph conclusion: There's been enough interesting stuff for the past 50 years in AI research for philosophers to get excited about, and they haven't. So I predict the LLM trend will not change anything.
Damn it again, here's a 5th paragraph: I'm just remembering my philosopher friend at a different university who has made the prediction that as writing "gets cheaper", more writing will be expected, and so tenure in the philosophy world will require much more output. This push for quantity will drive quality down, make tenure much harder to get, and make philosophers even more siloed/specialized than they already are. I agree with all this, but I think it applies across the board in all of academia, and these trends have been going on for so long that I don't think they can be attributed more than like 20% to AI.
There you go. You tricked me into an effort-ish post :)
PokerPirate
1mo ago
This is just obviously false. There are tons of Catholic schools. If that's not "enclave" enough for you, there are tons of Amish schools as well. You probably haven't heard of the Bruderhof communities (they're basically Amish without the name recognition), but they run this school which I've been to (not as a student): https://www.mountacademy.org/. I can attest that their lives are as enclave as you could possibly get and that they are doing just fine.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
TED talks on Sundays
Haha... this is the best description of an evangelical church service I've ever heard. Did you make this up just now or is this a meme floating around Catholic circles that I haven't heard before?
PokerPirate
1mo ago
We get pretty regular effort posts about AI research around here. If there's something specific that you'd like that's not been covered then I'll consider it.
Maybe something we could do is a series that's a little bit more structured about specific careers people are in around here. Something like the user focus series that people were doing a while back. A structured set of questions might be less intimidating to get started on and might help people write about things this community would actually find interesting... maybe I'll start thinking about what those questions could look like at least for myself.
You're too humble... or more likely probably too much of an expert to realize how little all of us know about the process... c.f. https://xkcd.com/2501/.
I have a couple of undergrad students who want to be "AI patent lawyers". That seems like an obviously farcial job to me and not something anyone should aspire to (for many reassons, but the simplest is because as an AI-researcher patents have not affected any of the work I do and I don't see how patents will ever have a material effect on anything remotely related to AI). I would love it if your effort post could either change my mind or was a resource I could point them to explain why they career choice is stupid.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I won't say I look down on someone based on their email... but certain domains make very good fist impressions. An email that is firstname@lastname.com is an easy way to signal good tech talent.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Thank you especially for the link about the Apportionment Act of 1842. That's exactly the type of reference I was looking for!
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Thank you! Reading through the article was very informative. At the end of the article there is a quote from a law professor that this was the "best Supreme Court decision since 1960". I would love a follow on detailed analysis about legal opinions on this court case and the extent to which conservatives/liberals have different opinions.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
I really don't understand how we got into this mess of congressional redistricting. We don't "redistrict" state lines every few years to make senate seats "fairer" in any sense. Why didn't congressional districts just follow this obviously parallel pattern using (e.g.) counties? For that matter, why didn't this get left up to a state-by-state basis to determine how congressional seats are apportioned so that some states could gerrymander if they wanted and others could have a fixed-for-forever set of districts? I don't know if this would result in better outcomes, but it would certainly be more transparent and consistent.
I would love it if anyone could provide a detailed history of this whole mess that starts from the articles of confederation until now.
This is a non sequitur. Good treaties define Schelling points, and Schelling points do not need enforcement.
As I mentioned before, no one has a military powerful enough to enforce the CWC on the US and yet the US is voluntarily complying because it makes the US a safer place (and increases trade/commerce) to allow these foreign inspections.
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