roystgnr
1yr ago
Where are you getting 75% from?
From a pair of embarrassing mistakes. 73% would be the minimum (counting "64% was really 64.5% rounded down and 60% really 59.5% rounded up" cases) number of people who think there aren't adequate safeguards against a single innocent death but who didn't let that make a difference to their practical vs their theoretical opinions ... but of course I shouldn't have counted people who already think the death penalty is morally wrong in that number, plus I thought about rounding in the wrong direction.
The minimum overlap of 64% and 78% is 42%
It would be even more interesting if every person who thinks the death penalty isn't morally justified also thinks that its safeguards are perfect, but you're right, there's no inherent incompatibiilty there.
roystgnr
1yr ago
If you have a suggestion that isn't "ban certain topics/arguments," let's hear it.
I've always been a fan of rate-limiting, in theory. If the "weekly" thread was a yearly thread then my reaction would probably be an excited "wow, here comes the fight again!" rather than an apprehensive "is anyone going to wade into the fight again or has everyone been exhausted to apathy now?"
roystgnr
1yr ago
It works great over Wifi6 once linked, but the startup for SteamVR and the Oculus program and the Quest2 itself is a pain. Every time I take the Quest2 off (which is frequent since the order of startup seems to matter for some reason so I end up having to see my laptop screen again unexpectedly...) it gets confused and wants to redraw a boundary when put back on ... which is especially weird since it seems to remember boundaries for days when I only use its internal apps.
Oh, and no Linux support, so before I even start setting up I have to make sure everything on my laptop is saved and then reboot.
Using the internal apps isnt always painless either. Some apps make some upgrades mandatory before they'll start again, like I'm going to use a 0-day to hack my exercise high score otherwise or something, and it sucks when I have 15 minutes to play but an update takes 8 of them. But delays there are the exception, not the rule.
roystgnr
1yr ago
How would it not be? My wife's Quest 2 fits over my glasses with room to spare. I think she might have gotten an aftermarket face pad for more comfort, though; maybe that also gave me more clearance?
I'm not sure what's worth playing on it, though. There are a few great exercise games, and a handful of great 360 videos, but the good VR game games seem to be on PC and the process of linking Steam VR to a Quest 2 is a PITA; when I only find 20 or 30 minutes to play at a stretch, I don't want to spend 5 of those minutes getting everything set up.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Doesn’t that just mean “traits” if we combine “traits that are innate plus traits that aren’t”?
I think the implied meaning in context wasn't "heritable refers to every member of A and B" but rather "heritable can refer to members of both A and B".
The typical breakdown is "genetic" vs "shared environment" vs "non-shared environment", isn't it? The shared-environment part would be considered heritable in the colloquial sense but not the biological sense, the genetic part would be heritable in both, the non-shared environment part in neither.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Can you blame them? It means something other than that, if you're using it in a legal sense rather than a biological sense. And the lawyers called dibs first, several hundred years ago; the biologists should have come up with a different word ... but they didn't, so here we are. When a scientist says something is heritable they generally mean "we found these genes" or "we did these twin studies" or something much stronger than just "we measured this correlation".
roystgnr
1yr ago
That's quite fair. But did you have to say it out loud? Now I'm going to have to edit my comment accordingly...
roystgnr
1yr ago
Thank you!
My fault for stopping as soon as I was confused by the subheader; they explain the distinction quite clearly a few paragraphs into the article...
roystgnr
1yr ago
In mathematics, "implies" is how we pronounce "⇒". Your statement was mathematically false, which was a useful thing for him to point out.
If you were trying to speak a language other than mathematics, like English, in which there are more and fuzzier definitions, either use a less fuzzy word like "suggests" or "hints", or make your context clearer by avoiding other words with both math and English meanings like "variables" and "correlation".
roystgnr
1yr ago
Tullamore Dew was my favorite in grad school. The store by my apartment stocked it on my recommendation, actually. The owner hadn't heard of it, but since I was asking for it by name he asked if it was a great whiskey; my response was "no, but it's a good whiskey at a great price". Since those days my wallet has gotten fatter and so have I, so optimizing price-per-volume isn't as important, but I'll probably get some again one of these days for sentimental reasons.
roystgnr
1yr ago
Is it? Blackmail works when the difference "what I'll release if you don't cave" minus "what I'll release if you do cave" hurts the target more than the cost of caving, so you want to maximize that difference. Releasing kompromat but not all-the-kompromat makes the difference smaller. It would be a good response to "I know you have material on me but I don't think you'll release any of it", but who wouldn't think that? Even bluffing blackmailers just pretend to have material they don't really have, they don't pretend to be willing to publish material they really wouldn't.
roystgnr
1yr ago
No, you're thinking of the observable universe - that from which light has reached us.
I was; I appreciate the correction.
roystgnr
1yr ago
BG 1+2, not just for the scope and the story but also for the proper co-op support.
Wildermyth is quite fun for a short+casual introduction to CRPGs (and also proper co-op support!), but if you've played through BG1+2 then you may be disappointed with the shortness+casualness; there are a number of campaigns so the game as a whole isn't too short, but you're also not going to be playing for tens of hours building up a single story throughline.
roystgnr
1yr ago
That ... is actually really interesting. The manufacturing process doesn't take state-level support. (this assumes China's bans aren't just "bans", but while I'm sure they're not crying their eyes out over the West getting ironic payback for the Opium Wars, I don't think the OD crisis here is a CCP op either) The lethal dose isn't nearly as low as state-of-the-art organophosphates but it's still in the milligrams range. ... Looks like the biggest issue may be that skin absorption ranges from less dangerous to much less dangerous than ingestion? To get fentanyl or carfentanil airborne you want a dry powder, but to get it to absorb quickly enough through skin to be dangerous it needs to be moist. I can't find any research about whether it penetrates skin when moistened by oil (or anything else that I'd expect could be finely aerosolized without just evaporating) ... maybe that's for the best. Do we know how Russia weaponized it in Chechnya? Might have been easier to make it useful against indoor targets whose ventilation is controlled by the attacker, might simply be that a research team working for a few years could implement ideas that I can't even imagine in a few minutes.
Since I don't know much about either drug, maybe my quick searches this morning are misleading me. In particular, I'm reading that, while carfentanil is 100x more potent a narcotic than fentanyl, the lethal doses are around the same ... so why the hell is anyone still making fentanyl? I know, drug kingpins aren't noted for their overwhelming concern for human life, but killing your customers does still cut short future revenue, and even if it didn't you'd think the relative ease of smuggling 100x less volume to achieve the same potency would pay for any extra difficulty in manufacturing.
IMHO it's a good idea, not just an entertaining one. Clear advertising for TheMotte terrifies me, because I'm afraid the "evaporative cooling" metaphor applies to condensation too. Advertising that requires someone to be curious enough to search for the meaning of a random phrase and competent enough to find it (e.g. with Google I get relevant results iff I think to wrap the phrase in quotes) isn't a high bar but it's better than nothing.
Edit: oh, and as a third advantage, searching for that phrase brings me first to thethread, and reading that feels likely to draw users who fit with what this place would like to be. Most other forms of advertising would bring me directly here, and reading random selections here are ... not always as much of a draw to thoughtful potential users, to put it politely, and probably more prone to starting a vicious "evaporative" cycle, to consider it theoretically.
roystgnr
5d ago
Once there were enough non-nerds there, it wasn't the early days of the Internet anymore.
roystgnr
17d ago
Is sleep deprivation low-risk? There are major negative long-term mental and physical consequences of chronic sleep deprivation, and there are wild (like, 3-4 days in is when the hallucinations usually begin) consequences of acute sleep deprivation, so while I don't know if there are any studies showing long-term consequences of acute sleep deprivation it's definitely something I'd look into before trying out a multi-day stretch.
roystgnr
26d ago
Assuming they can consent, no.
The assumption was "too drunk to say no", just the opposite.
roystgnr
29d ago
That the pivot to Ukraine when the covid thing became too embarrassing was pure coincidence? That the pivot to Israel was also pure coincidence?
Since those "pivots" had their timing fixed by Putin's invasion date and Hamas' massacre date, and since I'm very confident the US Deep State or whoever isn't collaborating with them, I'm going to have to go with OF COURSE. Putin's "de-Nazification" excuses were a cover for "I want conquest", not "I want to do Biden a solid".
Good luck to you. I'm as big a Deus Ex fan as the next guy, but actual paranoid theorizing about how the world is controlled by a giant conspiracy against you is a really hard epistemic failure to break out of. Meds can help, but of course that's what They would want you to do...
roystgnr
30d ago
Is it even p-hacking, when it's so tricky to control for confounders here? IIRC if you just graph mortality vs outcome you get a robust "J shaped relationship", where moderate drinkers are healthier than either heavy drinkers or non-drinkers, but there are so many possible confounding variables (from the obvious "people with other reasons to worry about their health stop drinking" to "people with higher socioeconomic status are more likely to be moderate drinkers" to who knows what else) that any attempt to get a more causal result is going to necessarily end up with a bunch of arguments. It's also not entirely crazy that the effects of moderate alcohol could vary from subpopulation to subpopulation; e.g. if moderate red wine is bad for cancer risk but actually is good for heart disease risk then it might be a net mortality increase for some age/sex/athleticism levels and decrease for others.
Clearly we need an RCT where we find a few thousand moderate drinkers who aren't overly attached to the habit and have the ones who flip "heads" go cold-turkey. That's surely not going to trigger enough anti-experimentation bias to upset people, right?
roystgnr
1mo ago
I think involving her in ring shopping can be bad
It does take away the chance to do a surprise proposal.
in that she'll be aware of the compromises
But this? Depends on the woman. My wife picked out a heart-cut diamond, with a tiny occlusion that made it lower priced than most diamonds its size. Her show of fondness for something that was cute and unique but kind of untraditional and weird, big but kind of flawed and cheap if you look too closely... it was a really good sign.
roystgnr
1mo ago
they were tall lanky things called 'Skinnies.'
Just to add context: these are the first enemies the protagonist is in combat against, but they switch sides and for most of the book the main conflict is the same as in the movie, humans-vs-bugs.
(for a loose definition of "the same"; e.g. in the book the humans are trying to capture a brain-bug so they can figure out how to communicate and negotiate peace rather than fight-to-the-genocide, whereas in the movie they want someone for Nazi Doogie Howser to torture)
[The Mobile Infantry] also jumped around with jump packs, powered armor and I think laser swords.
I was going to joke about you confusing Starship Troopers with Star Wars or Halo ... but I pulled down my copy to check, and what do you know, the protagonist cuts through a wall with "a knife beam at full power". I swear I just reread it a few years ago...
roystgnr
2mo ago
I always liked that, frankly. Someone gets to a point like "All prime numbers are odd; what are you, stupid?!", and the part of my brain that evaluates logic is still overriding the part of my brain that evaluates people so I reply with the obvious counterexample anyway, but then the downvote comes and it wakes me up and I drop the thread.
It's the straightforward interpretation of
If you wanted to say "they don't encode uncertainty-about-uncertainty in the number 0.5", and not falsely imply that they don't encode uncertainty at all (0.5 is aleatory uncertainty integrated over epistemic uncertainty!) or that they don't encode all their uncertainty anywhere, you should have made that true claim instead.
You said of "They use many numbers to compute",
This is flatly false. I just gave you two examples, still at the "toy problem" level even, the first discretizing an infinite-dimensional probability measure and using 101 numbers to compute, the second using polynomials from an infinite-dimensional subspace to compute!
You said,
Which is false, because it ignores that the uncertainty is retained for further updates. That uncertainty is also typically published; that posterior probability measure is found in all sorts of papers, not just those graphs you ignored in the link I gave you. I'm sorry if not everybody calling themselves "Bayesian" always does that (though since you just ignored a link which did do that, you'll have to forgive me for not taking your word about it in other cases).
You said,
This is false. p=0.5 is what you need to combine with utilities to decide how to make an optimal decision without further data. If you have one binary outcome (like the coin flip case) then a single scalar probability does it, you're done. If you have a finite set of outcomes then you need |S|-1 scalars, and if you have an infinite set of outcomes (and/or conditions, if you're allowed to affect the outcome) you need a probability measure, but these are not things that Bayesians never do, they're things that Bayesians invented centuries ago.
This is trivially true in the end with any decision-making system over a finite set of possible decisions. You eventually get to "Do X1" or "Do X2". If you couldn't come up with that index as your result then you didn't make a decision!
If maximizing expected utility, you get that value from plugging marginalized probabilities times utilities and finding a maximum, so you need those probabilities to be scalar values, so scalar values is usually what you publish for decision-makers, in the common case where you're only estimating uncertainties and you're expecting others to come up with their own estimates of utilities. If you expect to get further data and not just make one decision with the data you have, you incorporate that data via a Bayesian update, so you need to retain probabilities as values over a full measure space, and so what you publish for people doing further research is some representation of a probability distribution.
Your title was literally "2 + 2 is not what you think", and as an example you used [2]+[2]=[4] in ℤ/4ℤ (with lazier notation), except you didn't know that there [0]=[4] so you just assumed it was definitively "0", then you wasted a bunch of people's time arguing against undergrad group theory.
What I disagreed with was
And I disagreed with it because it was flatly false! The foundation of information theory is I = -log(P); this is only I=1 (bit) if P=1/2, i.e. equal probability in the case of 1 bit of data. I gave you a case where I=1/6, and a more complicated case where I=0.58 or I=1.58, and you flatly refuted the latter case with "it cannot be more". It can. -log₂(P) does exceed 1 for P<1/2. If I ask you "are you 26 years old", and it's a lucky guess so you say "yes", you've just given me one bit of data encoding about 6 bits of information. The expected information in 1 bit can't exceed 1 (you're probably going to say "no" and give me like .006 bits of information), but that's not the same claim; you can't even calculate the expected information without a weighted sum including the greater-than-1 term(s) in the potential information.
Distinctions are important! If you want to talk like a mathematician because you want to say accurate things then you need to say them accurately; if you want to be hand-wavy then just wave your hands and stop trying to rob mathematics for more credible-sounding phrasing. The credibility does not rub off, especially if instead of understanding the corrections you come up with a bunch of specious rationalizations for why they have "zero justification".
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