sansampersamp
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User ID: 751
Alice's bets are neutral EV at odds of 2:1, corresponding to p*=1/3 for a fair coin, yes. Unless I am missing something this is directly analogous to stating that Alice has a credence that the coin flip came up heads of 1/3. Therefore if Alice is directed to communicate their credence to Bob, they would communicate 1/3 (which Bob would understand to be subject to Alice's predetermined pattern of exposure and handle appropriately to derive their credence of heads at 2/3).
The ambiguity only arises if "credence" is allowed to mean something other than Alice's implied probability from her 0-EV betting odds. As I said, not across the formal literature here but that doesn't seem to be the case to me.
edit: perhaps the different probabilities can be better compared if the (fair) coin is flipped on the Sunday before either are put to sleep, and they provide their credence at that point as well. Alice would say: Today I have a credence that the coin came up heads of 1/2. Tomorrow, on waking, I will have a credence that it came up heads of 1/3. Bob will have a credence it came up heads of 2/3. This is no more unusual, mathematically, than if we were to flip the coin today, and ask me tomorrow by mail, if a result of tails today meant you opted for a mail service that was exactly twice as reliable than the service you'd have chosen if the result was heads. Equivalently, my response on receiving the question would be 1/3 and I could pre-register that response with you now.
Is there a definition here of "credence the coin flip came up heads" that is not equivalent to "what is the p*, such that you would bet the coin flip came up heads if given odds (1-p*)/p* or greater"?
sansampersamp
6d ago
I think if Alice was specifically directed to input her "credence that the coin flip came up heads" then it's not really ambiguous if everyone is on the same page, as it were. I agree that it's not correct to characterise Alice (or Bob) waking as 'gaining' information, perhaps that's just some Bayesian baggage from Monty Hall or the way the notation is typically used. Alice is fully able to preregister her bets before she falls asleep the first time.
Alice has a computer terminal in her room, and the only thing she can do with this computer terminal3 is input into it a single number, her "credence that the coin flip came up heads".
..
I contend that it is obvious that in Variant 1, Alice should still tell Bob that the probability of the coin flip is p, even though she is going to personally bet on heads with probability (1-p)/(p+1). That is, if p=1/2, Alice should bet heads with probability 1/3, but tell Bob that the probability of the coin flip is 1/2.
Forgive me for not being initiated in the lit behind this question, but I'm not following why in variant 1, if Bob is expecting the message to denote Alice's credence for heads and they have mutually consistent methods for deriving it, i.e. (1-p)/(p+1), why Alice would provide anything other than her true credence (which is acknowledged to be invariant based on which wake/day they are in).
i.e.
- Alice wakes, knows p_tails, derives her P(H|wake) as (1-p)/(p+1), sends it to the computer
- Bob wakes, sees Alice's P(H|wake) on the computer. He knows how he'd derive it from p if he were Alice, so he reverses the calculation to get the coin weighting p_tails
- Bob uses the p_tails to derive his own credence for heads (2 wakes per head, heads results at 1-p), i.e. 2(1-p)/(2-p)
For Bob to benefit from being told p_tails instead of Alice's P(H|wake), then Bob must either not be aware that Alice's exposure setup is an inversion of his own, or otherwise believe that Alice will communicate 'true' p_tails instead of her P(H|wake), neither of which seems apparent from the set-up. If Bob expects Alice to input her actual credence and he knows the experiment setup, there's no need for Alice to strategically misreport.
sansampersamp
1mo ago
Emily Dickinson
sansampersamp
4mo ago
The DNC pursuing a perception of being a 'neutral leadership institution' is frequently at ends with its actual institutional purpose: getting democrats elected.
sansampersamp
6mo ago
Australia is more urban and more educated than the US, with a generally high-skill immigration mix. If coalition wants to abandon previously safe wealthy inner-urban seats over cultural differences to the teals, they'll need to make them up elsewhere, and there's not enough rural or exurban seats to do that.
sansampersamp
7mo ago
They use the GTAP model.
They have some notes in the appendix of an earlier version
sansampersamp
7mo ago
I'm not sure why the US' dominating posture in trade IP keeps being cited as Marvel-branded underwear and not, like, biologics. Pharma is much pointier from a trade partner's perspective.
sansampersamp
7mo ago
Musk also is beginning to show some daylight between himself and the Trump admin on trade (in typical manner)
sansampersamp
7mo ago
China's pledge to stop respecting American IP
This is, as far as I can tell, made up
sansampersamp
7mo ago
I would reduce tariffs on imports to 0
whoever we get a bunch of non-American stuff from and increase tariffs on them
You may be qualified to work in this admin (or the very least, a plum job at American Compass)
sansampersamp
7mo ago
Other way round: your exports are more competitive if priced in a weaker currency. A weaker currency, i.e. a dollar buying less stuff, is definitionally inflation however if the only way you can get there via expansions in the money supply. Tariffs in the first order effect strengthen the dollar (lower imports, less demand for foreign currencies from the US), but the economic havoc will balance that in the second order by lowering interest rates lowering USD yields relative to other currencies and, well, risking inflation.
sansampersamp
7mo ago
The hilariously absurd thing is that now that congress has given the exec that power, they have to overcome a veto to get it back.
Same thing happened in 2019 when he couldn't get wall funding from congress, so instead raided DoD (proclamation 9844). Congress tried to reassert spending powers with house joint resolution 46. That passed both house and senate but Trump just vetoed it lmao
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Ah, ty
sansampersamp
1yr ago
What's the counterfactual here? Michael Bay still makes four-quadrant films. Top Gun: Maverick is a four-quadrant film. The original Star Wars trilogy were four-quadrant films. I can think of far fewer big films that tried to go hard on the two female quadrants (e.g. Twilight) than went hard on the two male ones, especially now that we're out of the romcom era. Joker is a two-quadrant film on the other axis because of its rating, not deliberate alienation of women, where it hit broadly the same 60-40 splits as the typical comic-book movie (e.g. Captain Marvel, Spider-man Homecoming).
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Yes, and it's ebbed since that decade as well. See swift/kelce, cringe-coding of 'sportsball', and the post-hipster, post-r-slash-atheism, cultural turn in general.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
Joker was a remake of Scorsese's The King of Comedy, more than it was referencing Taxi Driver.
As if they're taking a swipe at the audience themselves for liking someone they weren't supposed to.
You are 'supposed' to be sympathetic to Arthur. With scant exception, you are 'supposed' to be sympathetic to any protagonist, good or bad, but they spend considerable time rationalising him as a character in Joker. The text as written does center typical anti-capitalist grievances more than it does incel ones. The intended message is more proximate to "the Joker is a product of underfunded social services", than sexlessness. The closest analogue to the film's denouement isn't found in Taxi Driver or Fight Club, it's in the (insufferable, imo) Sorry to Bother You.
I find this assumed audience in the quote a bit odd, accordingly: is the media wrong about the movie being a paean to downtrodden inceldom or does the audience for the film in fact consist of power-fantacising incels. I'd assumed a degree of consensus around the former, though I've been seeing some partisan inversion lately on the idea of stochastic terrorism more generally, so who knows.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
If it wasn't clear, I don't live in a country with as adversarial a relationship with the cops as the US, but I have a shortcut to pin the app on open, kiosk mode. I've never had to use it in the 2 ish years it's been available but I understand the ID verification flow doesn't require a phone to be handed over, just a QR code displayed and scanned.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
We now have recognised digital drivers' licenses on your phone, but to be honest I wasn't carrying one before then anyway. A wallet is just one more thing to carry, everything is on the phone. An ID isn't necessary to fly domestically here either, so it's easily left at home as well. I'd currently need to use cash maybe once every two years.
I don't think it is generally representative of Eisenman's philosophy, no. It's worth remembering that these two architects are separated by half a century and the pacific ocean, and that gulf encompasses significant aesthetic, philosophical, cultural and technological developments. I don't know a huge amount about Nikken Sekkei other than them being one of those very old mega-firms that built Tokyo tower had their heyday in the 80s, so I can't speak much to a house style or philosophy, but as I mentioned it seems more in dialogue with Ando than Eisenmannian deconstruction, even if both are pursuing a kind of phenomenological minimalism. Japan also has its own aesthetic philosophies against which Japanese architects play and react. Eisenman never struck me as someone with a huge interest in materiality or light, and his work is explicitly antitectonic in places (a result of Derrida-esque attempts to liberate signifier from signified). The gymnasium is thoroughly tectonic and materiality is clearly front of mind, which is why the care is taken to showcase the formwork. Where the gymnasium bears the marks of its construction process, Eisenman's House VI is a house in abstract, the planes of its walls pushed and pulled without caring to represent the construction process, or even to subvert it. The (mild) parametricism is also an aesthetic development contingent on software-led design processes that simply didn't exist in Eisenman's context.
I do agree that there is a sometimes challenging, sometimes productive interplay between what positively evokes nature and what evokes decay, but I don't think it's as straightforward as béton brut surfaces always and necessarily giving a sense of grime, or that grime necessarily is of negative valence. In Tanizaki's essay on Japanese aesthetics, there is a special attention paid to grime:
Surely this has something to do with our national character. We do not dislike everything that shines, but we do prefer a pensive luster to a shallow brilliance, a murky light that, whether in a stone or an artifact, bespeaks a sheen of antiquity.
Of course, this "sheen of antiquity" of which we hear so much is in fact the glow of grime.
...
I suppose I shall sound terribly defensive if I say that Westerners attempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it, while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealize it. Yet for better or worse we do love things that bear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we love the colors and the sheen that call to mind the past that made them.
Tanizaki was writing with his tongue in his cheek (much ink is spent on the virtues of wooden toilets), but I do think brutalist structures put decay on an aesthetic knife-edge more than most. I've never seen a brutalist building work when left to impose its monolithic mass on an urban parking lot, but I love how this tension between artifice and nature is completely released in da Rocha's Casa no Butantã. The raw concrete is humanised by surrendering it to the jungle. Appropriately used, decay functions to soften edges, blur boundaries. When homeownership can often feel like a constant, doomed struggle against entropy, a design that reassesses the necessity of this opposition can be incredibly liberating.
I think with your prison cell examples the worst are actually where this tension is amplified, rather than released. I'd certainly find a mess of shit and viscera unpleasant on a dirt cave floor, but would find it significantly more disturbing on broken white tile under fluorescent lights. This is just to illustrate that these qualities, and their humaneness, aren't simple variables to dial up and down, but interplay with each other in context.
Back to the gymnasium, and it wasn't I that picked it as a particular exemplar of anything, I agree that many of the circulation spaces are not particularly inspiring, and the classroom probably the most egregious. But I can see to some extent what they are aiming for, and it is something rather different from what Eisenman pursued. I think it's possible for a design to work in some contexts and not others, and with a design that's on such a knife's edge as this (and I consider it flawed in a few ways), it'd be somewhat miraculous to transport it to a prison typology with the intended effect intact. The one saving grace, if you could call it that, is that the baseline for these environments is already dire. A fancy private school is going to have a slightly different attitude to upkeep as well.
sansampersamp
1yr ago
gymnasium is designed to look like a WW2 bomb shelter that's been riddled with shell holes
This is a funny comparison since my high school gymnasium literally was a a massive concrete structure that was bombed in WW2, which followed its original use as part of an abattoir complex. It was fine, aesthetically, if a bit reverberant, and I don't believe it left any psychic scars on myself or other kids. As a concrete structure built for an actual industrial purpose it was also incredibly, obviously different to that Japanese gymnasium. No one was bothering with sandblasting planks to get 3mm of grain relief in the formwork, I assure you.
Prior comment is assuming a fair coin, so p_tails=0.5, but I've clarified to specify p* as Alice's credence upon waking that the coin result was heads.
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