tikimixologist
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User ID: 257
tikimixologist
1yr ago
I've barely read LOTR but unless whiteness was a critical part of the story it seems fine to change skin color. It's a movie about, like, whole different species of humanoids right?
The problem is that most people understand both a) how different phenotypes happen (non-interbreeding populations subject to different sexual and evolutionary selection) and b) what happens when different phenotypes live together (mixing). To have things like the dwarf dude with his unremarked on black dwarf girlfriend, your world needs to have a bunch of historical migration from far away that was either very recent, or else post-migration there were (and perhaps still are) social barriers to intermarriage.
In the former case, it's interesting and notable - dwarf dude with a distant foreigner wife. In the latter case it's also interesting and notable - why were there social barriers to intermarriage? Do they still exist, or is dwarf dude defying convention? Whatever this backstory is, it's not Tolkien. It's not even any flavor of British that existed while Tolkien was alive.
Different skin colors should be well within bounds?
Yes. There are black people in Tolkien. They come from far away, ride oliphants and their nation allied with Sauron in LOTR. They did not migrate to Gondor en masse several hundred years ago.
Probably a few of them did visit on occasion. But when foreigners visit in medieval times it's not a "ok it's a black guy, so what?" kind of event. The backstory of the world influences things. Consider the travelogues of Ahmad ibn Fadlan or Ahmad Ibn Rustah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_ibn_Fadlan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_ibn_Rustah
A visit to the Volga Bulgars results in much complaining about how they pray incorrectly (most of ibn Fadlan's book). A visit to the Rus involves all kinds of remarks on their poor hygiene and what perfect physical specimens these tall blonde people are. This is quite literally a vital part of LOTR. The hobbit characters, coming from a region coded as the English countryside, witness how big and strange the rest of the world is and have reactions quite similar to Fadlan or Rustah.
Imagine that instead of globohomo - which is likely familiar to you - we actually had a very different flavor of cultural imperialism. Suppose at some point, with no real explanation, Elrond and Galadriel start praying the Salah. Then on some journey perhaps some hobbit characters are starving but still refuse to eat pork offered by the dwarves, protesting that it is not halal. Then Celebrian starts explaining Islam to the dwarves, being generally awesome, and the first season ends with the dwarves saying "La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad rasoolu Allah."
That would be...weird, right? It would probably be for people to complain that whatever this is, it's some very strange bastardization of Tolkien that's about nothing more than spreading Islam.
tikimixologist
10mo ago
In a previous open thread, the topic of immigration in Europe came up. At the time Sweden was being discussed and it was unclear to what extent immigrants were contributing to crime and other social problems. Unfortunately Sweden's publicly accessible data isn't sufficient to really dig into the issue.
Then I discovered this link which actually does address the issue of immigrant crime in Europe quite directly, albeit in Denmark instead of Sweden. It also addresses issues such as welfare use. As it turns out the racist right wing seems to be completely correct on facts.
Financial Contribution
Danes and western immigrants to Denmark are, on average, positive contributors to Denmark during their working years. The same is true, though less so, of "Other non western". However it turns out that the controversial group of immigrants - MENAPT (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey) - are net negative contributors at every age.
A breakdown by country (for countries with at least 5000 immigrants to Denmark) is provided and the result is exactly what the far right would predict: white people, Indians and Chinese make good immigrants and contribute positively to Denmark. The average American benefits Denmark to the tune of about $12k/year, the average Indian a little bit less. The average Somalian costs Denmark about $18k. Thais, Vietnamese and Filipinos are net neutral.
Crime
Western immigrants commit crime at rates more or less equivalent to Danes. Non-western immigrants commit about 3.5x more violent crime (including murder) and 7x more rape.
Crime rates can be further broken down by country of origin. After adjusting for age and gender, we find that again the racist far right are entirely correct in their views. Somalians have crime rates about 7x that of Danes. Americans, British, Indians and Chinese have crime rates about half that of Danes. I was surprised to see that Israelis and Thais have higher than average crime rates.
Conclusion
In countries where data is available (such as Denmark and the US), said data strongly supports the position of educated internet right wing racists. Some countries, such as Sweden, try to obfuscate the data as much as possible to the point of not describing criminals.
I argue that the most reasonable thing we can do is assume that for nearby countries more or less similar patterns apply even if we lack data drilling down at the level of individual subgroups.
(I use "educated" as an important caveat. I do not necessarily expect a random American racist to make distinctions between Indians and Pakistanis, though a random Brit might. However the typical racist motte poster certainly does.)
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Well, its too soon to say. This seems to be the first sexual misconduct allegation confirmed against an official EA leader, so you can't really call the TIME story which broke it to be a complete pile of journalistic garbage.
I don't think that anyone claimed it was journalistic garbage in the sense that the specific incidents had not occurred. Rather, the claim was that most of the incidents are so vague that basically everything there might be completely innocuous. For example, the second paragraph merely describes Gopalakrishnan getting asked out. The 7'th paragraph describes one adult "grooming" another adult (I believe this means "asking out") as well as the incident with Owen Cotton-Barratt.
This is strung together in a manner designed to trick casual readers into believing EA is somehow more dangerous than other more socially accepted subcultures, such as journalism or ordinary philanthropy, even though no evidence of this has been presented.
The core question here is whether a social and ideological group is allowed to be weird and also if members can ask each other out, particularly if that subculture has money that some mainstream folks wish to capture. The EA-aligned folks (Yudkowsky, Aella) seem to think weirdness should be permitted. Gopalakrishnan and Time seem to think subcultures they dislike should change to accommodate them.
I would assume Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, plus probably others with mainstream views/ordinary philanthropy grifters who are backing her. There's speculation it's a group of people out of Oxford.
Chronologically, the first thing that happened was her making a post on eaforums that ended with a bunch of demands that EA change to make her happy. She admitted that she knew it wasn't up to the normal epistemic standards of EA:
Also, the post is not optimized for analytical/argumentative quality. My only goal is to speak my mind
After a bit of entirely polite pushback she demanded the post be taken down and went to the media.
https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/NacFjEJGoFFWRqsc8/women-and-effective-altruism
(Or maybe she had gone to the media prior and the reporter suggested a badly received post on the forums would look good in the story. Keerthana does seem to be struggling pretty hard to interpret the post as badly received in spite of half the responses being "you're so brave".)
Another question arises: why does she even want to be part of EA? She clearly does not align at all with EA epistemics or values:
For a community that is so alarmist for 5 or 1 or 0.1 percentage of X-risk from AI, giving a wide berth for sexual harassment is utterly hypocritical.
The most obvious answer is that she simply viewed EA as a place she could effectively grift, probably by subverting it with mainstream memes and turning the eye of Sauron on it.
I'm going to use this text, posted in last week's thread, as a jumping off point to make a little effortpost on a boring area that's actually kind of important, and where I know a little bit: treasury management!
If the FDIC or other banking entity does not cover deposits, any business that depends on SVB and has a
$125K bimonthly payroll will have to do furloughs or layoffs. That's basically any business above ~15-20 people.
... From a survey of my VC and startup friends, it seems reasonable to assume that 25% of that are extremely dependent on SVB (e.g. payroll, no cash sitting elsewhere, and incoming customer payments aren't going to cover anything).
This will only happen if your CFO is incompetent and doesn't do treasury management.
Treasury management - the most basic practice of any corporate finance department - is the practice of managing corporate cash in order to earn interest on what isn't being used , ensure that whatever cash is needed by the business is available, and also minimize tail risks like your bank going belly up.
Step 1 is observing that you can get 4.5% on 4 week treasuries. These are, regardless of amount, backed by full faith and credit of US Gov.
Now suppose you are a business with $500k of biweekly expenses ($500k due on Mar 15, $500k due on Mar 31). You have $20M in venture capital remaining which gives you about 1 year 8 months of runway.
All of that - minus $500k or so needed for short term investments - goes into 4-8 week treasuries which you reinvest whenever they mature. This earns 4.5% or about $900k/year in essentially free money. Money sitting in government bonds with duration < 90 days is called cash equivalent by corporate finance people.
Your not incompetent CFO just extended your runway to 1 year 9 months.
Step 2: ensure that the maturity dates of these cash equivalents line up to your payroll dates. $500k cash is due on Mar 15 for payroll/etc. Fortunately, $500k worth of your 4 week treasuries got turned into cash on Mar 9 (typically the maturity date is thurs).
Another $500k cash is due on Mar 31. You have another $500k worth of 4 week treasuries maturing into your bank account on Mar 30 (a thurs) or maybe Mar 23 (also a thurs) if you really want to be safe.
Step 3: line up a short term credit facility.
Some expenses are less predictable. Part of the job of CFO is to project these expenses, come up with upper bounds, and inform the CEO what it will cost if these bounds are exceeded. Then the CFO goes to a few banks and lines up credit facilities - a $2-3M line of short term credit backed by cash equivalents from step 2.
Step 4: have a few bank accounts including one at a "too big to fail".
That's treasury management, obviously oversimplified.
Now suppose your CFO actually did his job. It's Mar 13 and SVB just imploded. You had $500k sitting in SVB for Mar 15 payroll and that's locked up. Here's what you do:
Mar 11: Quickly call up your credit facility and tell them to wire $500k to your payroll provider on Mon. Call your payroll provider and tell them to confirm with the bank that this is happening to avoid any snafus.
Mar 13-14: As soon as SVB allows it, wire the $250k FDIC insured money to your credit facility. Also redirect treasury maturity payments to said account, and take another $250-270k of cash equivalent and don't reinvest them.
Mar 16 or Mar 23 (a thursday when your maturity payment gets deposited): get $270k worth of 4 week treasury maturity payments from the US govt. Wire this money back to your credit facility.
Net result is that you make payroll with no interruption. You just lost $250k to SVB's errors and paid your credit facility $20k in interest. The end.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Almost every capital city in the developed world (and big parts of developing) is struggling with unaffordable rent, insane house price rises etc.
Tokyo isn't. Guess why.
So there is the minor problem that I have with YIMBY people - why do you think that building more will actually solve the problem with unaffordable housing?
Simple arithmetic. The problem is a lot of people want to live in or near central london or wherever, but there are too few houses for them. If we double the number of homes and they aren't vacant, twice as many people have satisfied their desire to live in or near central london.
If prices are still high, we probably just didn't add enough homes.
We have been adding lanes to highways since time immemorial (aka the 50s) and the congestion is still here.
A congested 10 lane highway is helping twice as many people reach their destination as a congested 5 lane highway. So it sounds like the main problem is that we didn't add enough lanes.
There are plenty of empty highways, which indicates that one can build highways that meet and exceed the demand.
Should we even solve it? Is it ok to infringe on the right to move to actually strike a balance.
That probably is what california NIMBYs would like.
Do they want it? Clearly they were crazy about Black Panther. Black Panther is, aside from being a better-than-average and more imaginative capeshit title, a coherent movie inherently valorizing black people.
I will strongly dispute the idea that Black Panther is coherent. Various pieces from the movie: (spoiler warning!)
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As we have seen in real life, being a semi-hereditary monarchy on top of natural resources leads to a nation skilled in science and technology.
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Villain: "Ok Mohammed Bin Salman, you've defeated me in this battle to rule our Kingdom and I'm about to die. Here's a historical reference to stuff that happened in Brazil 150 years ago."
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The central conflict of the movie is about Trumpian isolationism vs Clintonian internationalism. Black Panther starts the movie rescuing some Congolese women from child soldiers wishing to (presumably sexually) enslave them. But he's unmoved and still wants to build the wall. Then he changes his mind after hearing what life was like in Oakland 1992 (not, you know, Rwanda 1994, one country over from Wakanda) and becomes an interventionist.
It purports to be take place in a foreign country, but the entire country is nothing but vague ideas that American writers saw on the History Channel. For example, it's Africa and they watched a documentary about the Maasai in 1850, so modern soldiers should look like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_(film)#/media/File:Dora_Milaje_in_film.jpg Also they watched Animal planet, thought Rhinos were cool and noticed they live in Kenya, so unobtanium doesn't just power technologies like clean energy and lasers but also improved animal husbandry.
This is not a coherent movie. It purports to tell a story about Wakanda, but every single plot line is driven by characters caring more about Americans of the same race as them than their own corner of the world. (And by "same race", I mean US Govt defined race as opposed to Bantu/Nilotic/Pygmy/etc. )
Consider that in the first part of his presidency they had both parts of the legislature and executive. He got nothing done with all that!
As you note, he made a major tax reform which eliminated loopholes that funnel money to high income Democrats. He ended the PATRIOT act. His supreme court hit rate is 100%, resulting in ending Roe vs Wade, compared to the 50% hit rate for all Republicans since the 80's [1]. He started 0 wars.
He also made Operation Warp Speed happen, saving millions of lives by routing around the regulatory state.
Now I'd prefer DeSantis to Trump. But lets not pretend Trump did nothing; he certainly did far more than I expected, and far more good things than the swamp dwelling Republicans he was running against.
And realistically speaking he also made other Republicans better. In a world without Trump putting wokeness on our radar, would DeSantis be anything other than a generic Republican?
[1] Bush Jr: Roberts and Alito. Bush Sr: Thomas and Souter. Reagan: O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Kennedy.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Here's a little bit of incomplete thinking about the classic "13/53" number, which is a ballpark figure (varying year to year) that represents the fact that black people are overrepresented by a factor of about 5x in crime. I see a lot of people tend to interpret this number as "black people are 5x more likely to commit crimes", but that might not actually be the case.
Concretely, there's two ways this stat could come about:
a. There are 5x as many black criminals per capita and each black criminal commits crimes at 1x the rate of white criminals.
b. There are 1x as many black criminals per capita and each black criminal commits crimes at 5x the rate of white criminals.
There is of course a continuum between them, but I think it's useful to focus on the two endpoints because the endpoints have totally different policy responses and also suggest totally different causes.
For example, the policy response to (a) is that we need more police to catch a lot more black criminals. The policy response to (b) is that we need longer prison sentences for the criminals we have in order to prevent the same guy from doing 4 more crimes.
They also suggest different causes. Scenario (a) suggests something (HBD, special kinds of poverty not reflected in census stats) causes blacks to have a higher criminal propensity, whereas (b) suggests police might just be extra lenient towards black criminals thereby giving them more time on the street in which they commit more crimes.
Interestingly, while the theory of police abandonment will get you cancelled today, it was very much the theory pushed by black community leaders in the 90's. It was one of the things leading to "3 strikes" laws (long prison sentences for the 3'rd crime in order to get rid of the very worst criminals).
I have recently discovered some weak evidence in favor of theory (b) while going down an internet rabbithole on a totally different topic. Specifically, look at the first graph in this analysis:
https://github.com/propublica/compas-analysis/blob/master/Compas%20Analysis.ipynb
The "decile score" of the x-axis is a reasonably predictive index of a convicted criminal committing new crimes. The dominant features in the model generating the index are things like "# of previous crimes", "was the current crime violent", etc. As can be seen from the graph, white criminals are overrepresented on the left tail (little repeat crime risk) of the graph, whereas black criminals are spread evenly. Of course, this evidence is very weak - it's only about criminals up for parole in a certain region of Florida.
Does anyone know of more data on this?
There are many places one can disagree with you on empirics. The most notable is here:
Diminishing marginal utility. At a certain point, another yacht for the ultrawealthy rich guy is not going to make him significantly happier.
The marginal alternate use case for the resources is investment in future production, not yachts. The question whether resources should be devoted to providing an x-box for poor people or to building electric cars/installing heat pumps/building homes/etc.
Moreover, this argument just sort of assumes resources are available and their quantity isn't affected by our choices. But in reality, the poor people are both consumers of utility and producers of it. The actual choice we need to make is between:
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A person refusing to work, being given resources anyway, and a marginal house is not inhabitable because no one is available to install drywall.
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A person installing drywall in return for a similar quantity of resources, but now we have an extra house that someone can live in.
It is far from clear that (2) is worse than (1).
Being afraid of falling into poverty is also bad for people's wellbeing -- it is a major source of worry and concern because everyone knows that being impoverished sucks and is painful. So the existence of poverty is a cause of pain for a much larger group than those actually impoverished. Fear of poverty also leads people to refuse to take risks to avoid the pain of poverty, which leads to less pleasure.
This is interesting. Possibly we should more widely publicize exactly what it means to live in poverty in the US? I.e. make sure everyone knows that "poverty" by US standards means lots of leisure time (most poor people don't work and aren't in the labor force), no danger of hunger, free medical care, a bigger house than the average Parisian or Londoner, 1-2 cars, etc.
From what I can tell, the only thing that's particularly bad about being poor in the US is that you spend time around other poor people.
Of course, knowing these facts does take a lot of wind out of the sails of the typical leftist who wants moar wealth transfers.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
In his statement he said he and she were doing some weird full-disclosure-of-everything kinda social experiment, with both parties explicit consent. But now, retroactively, it's decided there's some power dynamic caused by him being involved in a community she's also involved in that makes this bad.
tikimixologist
10mo ago
But I think we underweight the idea that lots of corporate admin really believes in something in the general direction of this crap, doesn’t quite grok that it’s unpopular among people who aren’t literal cave trolls, and that it isn’t about a practical purpose at all.
This can be true, but it also ignores how a modern well run corporation (and admittedly not all of them are) works. There are many different factions, each with their own motivations, and it's not a straightforward matter to simply arbitrarily impose one's preferences on others.
Imposing more "training" requirements can't be done arbitrarily. The head of customer support has a spreadsheet which tracks the time taken to onboard a new agent, there's a cell which multiplies this by the number of agents they need to hire to deal with churn, and there's another cell which multiplies by agent wages. The net result is $cost. The head of customer support gets paid more if he makes this go down. He understands the value of diversity, but also maybe HR could tone it down and push some of the training into month 7 (average tenure of agent: 6 months) a bit and save the company $M?
Similarly, the head of backend engineering has a spreadsheet tracking time his devs spend on interviews. He also has a spreadsheet showing that he's hired 5 engineers/15 candidates from scraping github for cool repos and 0 engineers/75 candidates from HR's new diversity in eng program full of black people with an amazon certification (most of whom failed at technical screening). He totally supports diversity, so vitally important to have diverse perspectives on latency and uptime, but maybe HR could target this program better?
If HR can push back with "but lawsuits can cost $M", HR wins more of these arguments.
At a well run company, everyone is forced to produce such spreadsheets and justify them to their bosses. As the anti-empirical thread in modern wokeness (measuring stuff is raaacist) hints at, quantitative measurement more or less nukes most woke arguments.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
A major distinction is that "roll hard left and die" is losing other people's money for a cause whereas whatever Musk does is losing largely his own money for a cause.
(Other people - e.g. banks who financed him - may also lose money, but they have senior debt. Musk, Jack and the Saudis have only equity. It seems unlikely that the banks will lose money, debt service is $1B/year, assuming average fully loaded cost per fired employee of $200k/year Musk just saved $1.5B of which $1B is going to banks.)
tikimixologist
1yr ago
One time I was in Hoboken NJ (most liquor licenses per capita in the country!) and around 1AM this fat lady in a revealing dress spent 45 minutes alternating between crying, criticizing the masturbatory habits ("you wankers!") of everyone who attends the particular bar she got kicked out of and vomiting.
This is a stark reminder that shaming of people who masturbate still happens.
tikimixologist
11mo ago
SALT tax deduction was a way that blue states could raise taxes without making their high income taxpayers angry. Trump capped it, meaning now a rich NYer has to actually pay the high state taxes he advocates for.
Also mortgage interest cap impacts people with multimillion dollar homes who itemize.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
Boeing, Raytheon and Exxon all contribute fairly equally to Dems and Repubs. All favored Biden over Trump.
The republicans will be more loyal to the military industrial empire and wall street than to their working class voters. Four years of Trump, and he delivered on everything he promised to Israel and almost nothing he promised his base.
It is true that the left and their allies in the military industrial empire did prevent Trump from ending existing wars and conspired to mislead the American people about him (ze russkies!!!). Wall St has been solidly part of the left for 20 years.
You might be confusing Trump and the populist right with Liz Cheney.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
To summarize your post:
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Machines had a specific organizational structure in 1910.
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Pittsburg does not meet this model.
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Therefore a different - but related - organizational structure in 2020 could not have interfered with elections.
You may object to the term "political machine" by insisting that the term apply only to the 1910 structure. That's fine. But then lets just apply the term Machina to the 2020 version.
A Machina is a group of organizations with a shared interest in maintaining a stream of graft and they also have some political leanings. The visible elected official at the top is not of primary importance because the graft is no longer vulnerable to interruption by a single elected official. So concretely speaking, Bloomberg or Guliani can get elected mayor of NYC. The net result is that NYC still spends 10x what the rest of the world spends on subways and that money is spread around the Machina, while Bloomberg - a competent adminstrator with no desire to continue this - has no power to do anything about it.
Similarly, Trump has no real power over the federal Machina and it mostly continues doing what it wants.
And the main thing that is known within the Machina is that you should keep quiet about stuff because even if you speak up, the court will come up with a reason to dismiss your case, the media won't say anything, the administrative procedure will find a reason to delay it, etc.
The latter is where a small conspiracy to rig votes by the small but more ideological wing can live. Nothing you've presented contradicts this thesis.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
I can believe the relation exists and causality goes the opposite way. Anecdote: the woke tech company I work for recently had a big layoff+bad stock market results and now suddenly there's just less of all this stuff.
Teams devoted to diversity/etc had fairly big cuts, while teams devoted to making money with tech had comparatively small cuts. Within the tech part of the org it's openly acknowledged that individual performance played a big role in who got cut. Most of the people whose names you recognize for woke stuff are gone and the people who remain you recognize because of what they shipped.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
I guess you didn't read my links carefully. The specific quote I provided of a woman trying to prevent his presidency was from an inauguration day protest (i.e. before Trump assumed the presidency) at literally the location where he would be inaugurated. Violent actions - e.g. setting a car on fire - also happened. So by your stated criteria, it was a coup attempt.
But I guess you can gerrymander your definitions even more carefully now that I've pointed this out.
The protests against Bush in 2000 and 2004 were also pre-inauguration, and were generally aimed at influencing the vote counting process.
it was literally a protest in the sense that nothing they could do at this point could make Trump a not-President and they were just expressing their frustration.
You seem to be claiming that because anti-Trump protesters (including violent ones) had no hope at achieving their stated goal of preventing him from becoming president, they are "just expressing their frustration". But when anti-Biden protesters (mostly peaceful) engaged in protest but had no hope of stopping Biden, it's a coup attempt. Weird.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
People don't typically use the term "anti-bias" to reference fixing bias in the statistical sense. It nearly always means preventing an AI from making correct hate-fact predictions or generating disparate outcomes based on accurate data.
Examples:
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Lending algos/scores (e.g. FICO) are usually statistically biased in favor of blacks and against Asians - as in, a black person with a FICO of X is a worse credit risk than an Asian person with the same FICO. This is treated as "biased" against blacks because blacks tend to have lower FICO scores.
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COMPAS, a recidivism prediction algo, correctly predicted that "guy with 3 violent and 2-nonviolent priors is a high recidivism risk, girl who shoplifted once isn't". That's "biased" because blacks disproportionately have a lot more violent priors. (There's also a mild statistical bias in favor of blacks, similar to the previous example.)
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Language models which correctly predict the % of women in a given profession (specifically, "carpenter" has high male implied gender, "nurse" high female implied gender, and this accurately predicts % of women in these fields as per BLS data) are considered "biased" because of that accurate prediction.
(Can provide citations when I'm not on my phone.)
All of the examples you describe are simply examples of "making more accurate predictions", and that is totally not what the AI bias field is about.
The internet racists will say:
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Crime by American blacks is very high
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Crime by hispanic immigrants, particularly illegal ones, is higher than native whites but might be lower than native blacks
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Similarly, expect high crime by hispanic natives (but less than blacks)
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Crime by legal immigrants will be lower. Very few Salesforce Integration Engineers on an H1B visa or Abuelas brought to the US on a family reunification visa do crimes.
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Crime by immigrant Somalians will probably also be high.
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Crime by native whites is low
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Crime by white immigrants, such as British or Danes, will also be low
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Crime by immigrant Indians and Chinese will be very low
Do you disagree with these claims?
Neither of your sources has much to say about them. Your sources claim that the average of immigrant Hispanics and Chinese is lower than the average of native whites and native blacks.
It's odd that they didn't disaggregate the crimes of natives in such an obvious way, or break down immigrant crime by country of origin. Why do you think they didn't?
tikimixologist
1yr ago
The academics doing AI ethics tend to be doing simpler things, e.g. trying to figure out what a "fair" lending algorithm is.
The technical challenge is finding an algo which spots hidden patterns that predict loan repayment except for the biggest pattern that predicts repayment (namely that blacks are much less likely to repay them, holding all else equal). But stating it in such explicit terms is a cancellable offense.
Tokyo is not stagnant in terms of population.
https://viz.wtf/post/158158642063/tokyo-population-over-the-years-look-at-what (Yes, the graph is bad, but it's the only one I can find with years after 2010.)
Since about 2000, Japan is (on a per-capita basis) no more stagnant than the US. If Tokyo were full of NIMBYs, people could afford to pay more.
If you want to find a metric on which Tokyo and major US cities/metro areas differ, try housing units built. In Tokyo, this was about 100k units/year since 1998.
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00782/
So why don't landlords increase prices to capture more of that GDP growth? Because Tokyo has nearly 1M vacant apartments and if a landlord increases prices too much their flat will join the vacant pool. Simple as that.
At peak housing bubble, the entire state of California managed 150k houses/year and as of 2016 it was about 50k.
https://journal.firsttuesday.us/wp-content/uploads/California-Annual-Construction-2017.png
As I mentioned in another thread, we could build 19M homes in Santa Clara alone if we simply increased the density to that of San Francisco. We just choose not to.
tikimixologist
1yr ago
But it exists within the realm of psychology, and therefore effective treatments will also be within the realm of psychology: therapy and medications.
I don't think the conclusion follows.
I, like many men, have a similar problem to transgender folks: I'm Dwayne Johnson in the body of a 40+ computer programmer. The solution is squats, deadlifts, bench press, road work and clean eating, not therapy and medication. Body transformation >> body acceptance, at least in this particular case where body transformation has so many other benefits. And it's pretty easy to reverse the transformation and go back to dad bod if desired.
The principle that "what starts in psychology stays in psychology" seems to be false.
Now in the transgender case it's trickier because body transformation doesn't work very well and it seems like the desire for body transformation is often far less permanent than the transformation itself. But that is fundamentally a question of cost/benefit analysis (and I think the modern world is getting it wrong).
Abstract principles like what you describe don't help. If we had a 100% perfect and reversible gender transition, there would be no reason not to let people try on an opposite gender body just for fun.
They did know it was bullshit.
But they found phonics boring and considered their own entertainment more important than children learning stuff.
https://archive.is/WdzIm
It's much the same story with Direct Instruction, which is basically the classroom version of spaced repetition (and also students get tracked based on ability). Teachers follow a very repetitive script and those scripts are organized based on spaced repetition principles. No creativity. No use of their professional education. Just follow the script.
Back in the 90s we did some great trials and discovered Direct Instruction was the best way to teach children. But teachers found it boring and revolted against it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_instruction
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