domain:noahpinion.blog
astrolabia
3hr ago
You've almost exactly described elite STEM PhD programs!
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
Insurance
n. An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.
INSURANCE AGENT: My dear sir, that is a fine house — pray let me insure it.
HOUSE OWNER: With pleasure. Please make the annual premium so low that by the time when, according to the tables of your actuary, it will probably be destroyed by fire I will have paid you considerably less than the face of the policy.
INSURANCE AGENT: O dear, no — we could not afford to do that. We must fix the premium so that you will have paid more.
HOUSE OWNER: How, then, can I afford that?
INSURANCE AGENT: Why, your house may burn down at any time. There was Smith’s house, for example, which —
HOUSE OWNER: Spare me — there were Brown’s house, on the contrary, and Jones’s house, and Robinson’s house, which —
INSURANCE AGENT: Spare me!
HOUSE OWNER: Let us understand each other. You want me to pay you money on the supposition that something will occur previously to the time set by yourself for its occurrence. In other words, you expect me to bet that my house will not last so long as you say that it will probably last.
INSURANCE AGENT: But if your house burns without insurance it will be a total loss.
HOUSE OWNER: Beg your pardon — by your own actuary’s tables I shall probably have saved, when it burns, all the premiums I would otherwise have paid to you — amounting to more than the face of the policy they would have bought. But suppose it to burn, uninsured, before the time upon which your figures are based. If I could not afford that, how could you if it were insured?
INSURANCE AGENT: O, we should make ourselves whole from our luckier ventures with other clients. Virtually, they pay your loss.
HOUSE OWNER: And virtually, then, don’t I help to pay their losses? Are not their houses as likely as mine to burn before they have paid you as much as you must pay them? The case stands this way: you expect to take more money from your clients than you pay to them, do you not?
INSURANCE AGENT: Certainly; if we did not —
HOUSE OWNER: I would not trust you with my money. Very well then. If it is certain, with reference to the whole body of your clients, that they lose money on you it is probable, with reference to any one of them, that he will. It is these individual probabilities that make the aggregate certainty.
INSURANCE AGENT: I will not deny it — but look at the figures in this pamph —
HOUSE OWNER: Heaven forbid!
INSURANCE AGENT: You spoke of saving the premiums which you would otherwise pay to me. Will you not be more likely to squander them? We offer you an incentive to thrift.
HOUSE OWNER: The willingness of A to take care of B’s money is not peculiar to insurance, but as a charitable institution you command esteem. Deign to accept its expression from a Deserving Object.
-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Tree
3hr ago
I understand this is what is taught, I was taught it in uni. Nevertheless, I disagree.
This model of a man they have conjured to justify insurance, is neither a homo rationalis economicus (for whom it would be far too inefficient), nor your neighbour (who enjoys gambling).
There is no good reason to privilege the 'original state', your living standard now. Yes one (insurance) maintains it and the other (lottery) changes it, but why does that matter?
Some people live in a house, but they prefer some randomness in their life, so they take a 50/50 chance of living either in a mansion or a condo. It's fine. I mean I think it's a cool way to live, but it's an aesthetic preference, I would never advise people to essentially burn money to get that volatility (like economics profs are advising people to burn money to get rid of it).
You could say the neighbour is just gambling when he purchases insurance, it's just that he uses the high from winning to compensate for the psychic pain of the loss of his house.
Dean
Flairless
3hr ago
That's still a far cry from our ideal, but...
...but the people who led and cultivated the critical thinking of 1900-1914 were also the people who thought throwing the flower of your civilization into flowering shrapnel on the French frontier was a better national policy than not.
And most of the generation raised to be critical thinkers in the 1900-1914 range- which is to say, the generation born in 1890s and before- went along with it, and shamed, ridiculed, or forced others to do so as well. Theirs was a critical thinking shaped by / built upon nationalism, propaganda, imperialist delusions, and various pseudo-sciences racial and otherwise.
And then the people born or with their own formative years between 1900-1914 went on to do it again.
WW1 was a madness born from the civilization it ended, not an external imposition. WW2 was an extension of that turn-of-the-century generation. Any exceptional critical thinkers were despite, not because, of the nature of that era.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
better off for having studied history at university, in a way I doubt I could have achieved by pure dilettantism.
As someone who majored in engineering, I've come across a few largely-self-taught coworkers. Some of them are quite talented, but most seem to have more trouble than the degreed folks when we get into the deeper parts of the subject that aren't quite as fun to study (linear algebra, complex analysis, there is probably part of this in any field). I think there is real value to an engineering curriculum that makes us study the useful but un-fun parts that puts tools in the tool belt to solve real-world problems.
I've seen analogous outcomes from home-school students that were allowed to focus near-exclusively on their interests, and, even while otherwise bright, can't have a coherent conversation about some reasonably-part-of-the-curriculum topics -- for example, "the Spanish-American war and its consequences".
Kevin_P
3hr ago
I remember a well-known poster here (Tracing Woodgrains? Not 100% sure) having the same plan, then they took longer than a traditional degree to graduate because a large part of the university experience is social pressure and the WGU experience doesn't provide that part.
TheRealMcCoy
3hr ago
My problem with all the people calling it rigged is this: I've been a poker player for half my life. And in poker you very quickly learn that 1.8% odds of something happening is not the same as 0%.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3hr ago
Undergrads here are typically 3 years. I remember having 8 crunch periods per year for my degree. 4 quarters with one review exam in the middle and one big one at the end. Besides this, nobody stopped you from taking extra courses to graduate earlier and many did.
By no means continental European university system is great. Most countries have their own pathologies and the Bologna Process makes everything typically shittier but it’s pretty strange to claim students got to goof around because they don’t have constant deadlines to write parroting essays about queer indigenous history.
I fail to see how almost any of my education would had been disrupted by the LLMs the way the New York mag article is describing. The only courses I can imagine are currently swamped with LLM problems are the bunch of liberal arts inspired nonsense courses I had to follow for credits.
2rafa
4hr ago
As @Pasha said I think the classic Anglo humanities model where you do essays at home for practice (but which count nothing toward your final grade) and then have a combination of (hand)written exams in class and an oral exam seems like the best. That was true even before AI, but it’s especially true now.
In this case there is really no real to use AI to do homework since it doesn’t affect your grade and is pointless as a learning tool (which is not to say AI can’t be a useful learning tool, but ‘write 1200 words on x that I will never read but will email to the TA’ isn’t it).
Owlify
4hr ago
The reason housewives aren't higher status is because they have no money and they do unpaid work. They have no independent ability to take care of themselves and make life decisions either, and are financially dependent on someone else. Unless that changes (due to AGI/UBI), things will remain the same.
roystgnr
4hr ago
assertion that many people on the Motte hold tech jobs of the kind found in Silicon Valley
doesn't accurately describe
most of the Motte works in Sillicon Valley
but I'm more astonished by the contrast between
uncontroversial
versus
you and ten other people angrily surge out of the woodwork
It looks like you might have a habit of choosing words inaccurately for the purposes of hyperbole, and that's a bit rough when you're some place like this where Aspergery people like me and your challengers upthread are welcomed, but it's easy enough to fix: when you get called out on it just admit the error, compose an accurate rewording (without pretending it's just an equivalent paraphrase) instead, and you're done. Everybody makes mistakes. Doubling down is just digging the hole deeper.
veqq
4hr ago
Has there ever been a golden age of critical thinkers, schooled to think well, untainted by the technology of its era, or the character of its students?
Those growing up around 1900-1914 seemed closest, the great flower of our civilization, who died under flowering shrapnel on the French frontier.
I base this belief on reading historical (highschool/Gymnasium/lycée) exams (and submitted answers, with sample bias, of course) and cheat books (with more detail than modern academic treatments of the same... This is how I originally came to this.) They should write poetry on different topics in a certain style (movement or author), find problems in economic or business data, articulate various thinkers' contrasting beliefs about a topic etc. Transposed to modern times, have a student write a memoization macro, calculate some vector angles, write an essay on LaRoche, McKinley and and Teddy Roosevelt's views on tariffs, another on leadership (why the most popular kid's popular and what prevents the writer from taking his place, and to what extent the (chosen group/nation/state/movement) needs good leaders vs. institutions) ...written in Mandarin. The Overton window was far wider in those days, with multiple popular opinions about why x or y state was illegitimate with justifications from Renaissance, Classical and Biblical sources, advocating for paganism/atheism/state controlled religion etc. etc. Unfortunately, the war seemed to invalidate the whole framework and civilization behind this and mass education never recovered.
That's still a far cry from our ideal, but...
ChickenOverlord
4hr ago
That's exactly my point. The kids will just goof off for 90% of the semester and just cram it all in before the exam. If so when what's the point of even having the rest of the semester.
You should look into Western Governor's University and their model. Basically you can finish your degree as fast as you can finish testing for each course.
roystgnr
4hr ago
A lottery is very similar to insurance.
This is true only in the same sense that negative ten is similar to ten. They're both numbers, right? But they're opposite number. Likewise, here one gamble increases volatility (because the payoff is the only random event), and the other reduces it (because the payoff happens only when it cancels out a random expense; the net change from the random outcome is reduced).
But one of the two is supposedly justified while the other breaks their model and makes no sense whatsoever.
It makes sense, for the reasons above. Does it make sense to you too, now? If not, I'm afraid that's probably the best I can do. I've taught grad school math classes, which says good things about my math ability but bad things about my teaching ability...
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
4hr ago
I notice a parallel between the Christian's love for God and his faith in God. Your post is about the tension between loving an object for its properties, versus loving an object inherently (the latter I still maintain is quite meaningless). In faith, there is tension between believing a proposition because of evidence, versus believing a proposition inherently.
It's an old idea around these parts that Christians do not believe their religion. The Christian's behavior here is not really confusing. Professions of faith are tribal signals of group loyalty, not beliefs. But it would be wrong to ruminate on "the contradiction of belief" and ask about "is belief based on evidence" or "do people believe inherently?"
Likewise, "loving things for their properties" is just a different kind of thing than "tribal signals of loyalty." You're damned right I am loyal to my wife, what of it?
If you ever get a chance, do a self-driven review compare / contrast of ancient human-sacrifice rituals for different religions with different stakes in humans harm.
If you had good directions of where to start, I might just do that. It sounds interesting, and I expect some free time later this year. However, it is a bit harder to find structured reviews of them than, say, pointing three distinct but overlapping types of professionals.
Why don't you provide two good sources for the Aztecs and Carthaginians ethics? Good as in effectively and analytically characterizes their ethical systems. A bad work would be one that simply relegates Aztec morality to 'they conducted human sacrifice to keep the world from ending.' Yes, that is a utilitarian justification. It is not an ethical system.
And then, once you've read that, presumably you will somehow have changed your mind and believe human sacrifice is a good thing instead of a senseless waste of human life. You will probably even want to sacrifice your own children to Moloch, when the time comes. I know I haven't provided any reason why that should be the case, but apparently that's how this works now.
If that was what you took away from my post, then congratulations- you demonstrated a point by missing it.
The value of studying different forms of professional ethics isn't to change your own mind on ethics. The value is understanding what others want, or expect, the ethics of a professional to be. This has relevant insights when it comes to dealing with specific professions in isolation, when multiple professions with different professional ethics engage each other, or even how the same profession's ethics across different cultures.
Understanding other people's ethical frameworks has never been endorsement, or required conversion, unless you subscribe to some universal morality theory.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
4hr ago
I wonder if AI will make us all polyglots because it’s an incredibly useful tool of language learning or eliminate any learning altogether because it’s also really good at translating. Or perhaps it does both at the same time simultaneously so we have a bunch of conscious smart learners mastering new languages in 6 months and everyone else loses any motivation at all because any digital content they ever encounter is instantly perfectly translated (desire to access broader internet/gaming/tv shows was the reason I got good at English as a teenager, school instruction was useless)
Jiro
4hr ago
I wonder if you could have a new university that initially paid students to come.
They would have to pay the first students an amount equivalent to the increase in lifetime earnings from going to a regular university (minus the cost of a regular university). This would be cost prohibitive.
07mk
4hr ago
I absolutely think they should be. Now, maybe it's not practical to check each student's individual political preferences and assign bespoke assignments for them on that basis (which could be gamed anyway). Rather, humanities-based courses should test students on their ability to defend a wide variety of different, highly offensive and ideally "dangerous" ideas in whatever topics are at hand, to stimulate actually learning how to think versus what to think.
Hard to say if that will work, though; teaching students how to think seems to be one of those things that people in education have been trying to do for ever, without there being any sort of noticeable progress whatsoever. I just know that that was how I was educated, and it seemed to work for me and my classmates (but of course I'd think that, and so my belief that it seemed to work should count for approximately nothing), but even if it did, that doesn't mean that it's generalizable.
Tree
4hr ago
That is the high brow justification for it, but I disagree with how they model people’s utility functions, and besides, people’s utility functions are neither set in stone nor economically justified.
People would be far better off with a flatter, less utility-diminishing curve, given that they spend near half their income to slightly reduce lifetime income volatility, and if the last century is any guide, they want to spend even more, no future loss is too small to be tolerated, should it cost half of gdp.
There’s no real difference between the TV insurance and home insurance, it all depends on the assumed steepness of the diminishing utility curve.
People’s utility gets modeled as a steadily diminishing curve. In reality there should be one huge drop in utility when you go from from starving to non-starving income, and then very very flat. Because the only way to lose all future utility, to get wiped out in the kelly sense, is to die irl.
And on that subject, people also gamble. A lottery is very similar to insurance. You pay a small sum, and after a random event you sometimes get paid a multiple. It’s a negative EV transaction because the losses in the pipes are large. Any rational man with a sufficiently flat utility curve would reject them.
But one of the two is supposedly justified while the other breaks their model and makes no sense whatsoever. Gambling people are spending good, high utility money, then losing some in the pipes, and for what? To get low utility money.
07mk
4hr ago
I can't be 100% sure, but I think even if I hadn't been told, I would have pegged this as LLM-produced. It has the exact sort of "how do you do, fellow human kids?" energy that I'd expect from an LLM that was prompted to create a post that sounded casual, especially the very first paragraph.
I saw this article and was saving it to write an effort post, and now you beat me to it. A shame, but I guess I should put the outline to use anyway.
My intent would have been to use this article to highlight my concern about the AI revolution, and share my perspective on a topic I've never really gone into.
I am on record on being a skeptic / doubter on AI singularity fears (or hopes). I broadly think the 'the winner of AI is the winner of all' is overstated due to other required dynamics for such a monopoly of power/influence to occur. I think other technology dynamics matter more in different ways- for example, I think the drone revolution matters more than the AI revolution for shaping geopolitical contexts in the decades to come. I think that AI technologies under human control are more likely to do something irrevocably stupid than AI-controlled technologies deciding to paperclip everything and somehow having the unique ability to compel all other AI to align with that.
I do think it's fine to characterize AI as a significant disruptive technology, even if I think the inherent limits of LLM are more relevant to certain fields (especially anything novel/emerging without substantial successful learning material) than is commonly appreciated. Something doesn't have to be world ending to be a major disruption. I just think it's one of many, many major disruptions in the decade to come, and not even necessarily the worst. (Though disruptions do compound.)
What scares me isn't the AI singularity, but the AI-educated youth.
Specifically, I fear for- and fear from- people who might otherwise have learned critical thinking skills in how to not only search for answers, but organize and retain answers, to things they didn't know at the start. The example in the articles covered people using AI not only in lieu of finding a solution, but even knowing what the solution was. (The students who didn't know their own essay's response.) I don't think AI is bad for students because the answers AI provide are bad, necessarily. Getting an answer from AI isn't that different from getting an answer from a first-few pages search of google. (Even before they were the same thing.) It's more that if you don't even know how to do a tailored good search, or you don't know where other alternative answers are, you can't compare even that result. And if you're not retaining the solution- if you don't understand 'why' the solution is correct- the student is missing the opportunity. What's the point of passing a test if you, the student, haven't learned?
And I think the process of learning is important. In fact, I think learning the process of learning is among the most important things to learn at all. How to find an answer you don't know. How to distinguish good answers from bad answers. How to detect and distinguish bias from error from manipulation. How to generate a new solution to a complex problem when there isn't a proven solution at hand, or if the old solutions aren't accessible because [reasons]. And finally, how to both organize and communicate that in a way that other people can use. 'Knowing' a lot is not enough. 'Communicating' it can be just as important. All of these are skills that have to be practiced to be developed.
AI can compromise critical thinking and skill development. AI can compromise learning how to look for answers. AI can compromise how to retain the answers. AI can compromise the ability of people to respond to unclear situations with incomplete information or no baselines. AI can compromise the ability of people to convey their ideas to other people.
I had a great big screed on how I think AI is ruining youth... and then I looked back to that first mention of google, and asked myself 'what is so different?'
I grew up in an era where the pre-AI internet promised unparalleled information access. An era where seemingly infinite libraries of fiction (fan or otherwise) were open to anyone with an internet, with more to read than a lifetime of book purchases. Access to other people's opinions would break people out of their small-minded closed-worlds. The truth was out there, and the internet would help you reach it. In one of the earlier versions of Civilization, the Internet was considered a world wonder, and would give the civilization that developed it first (eventual) access to any technology that at least two other states knew.
But I also grew up in an era where people bemoaned that google was ruining the ability of people to find anything not on the internet. Documents that were never digitized, people who never wrote down their thoughts, the subtext that comes from investing things in person rather than from a distance. You can think you know how hilly a hike is from reading it, but a picture of it is worth a thousand words, and actually hiking it yourself in the heat and humidity and while carrying dozens of pounds of equipment is something else. It's hard to capture the sublime beauty of nature, and thus understand why people would value nature preservation for its own sake, if you don't go out to it.
(Then again, I did go into it. I also didn't like it. My sympathies were never exactly with anti-industrial environmentalism after that.)
And it's not like the pre-AI google-internet wasn't directly facilitating cheating. Who here was ever introduced to SparkNotes? The best friend of anyone who didn't want to actually do the required reading, but still needs a talking point or essay about a famous book. It advertises itself as a 'study guide' site these days. It condensed hundreds of pages into a few small pages of summary, and that was Good Enough.
Similar points could be made about cheating. I remember when facebook was not only young, but mostly a college student thing. And I remember how schools wrestled with students sharing answer sheets to quizzes, past essays, and so on. Even if I didn't partake, I know people did. Were they getting substantially more critical thinking skills than the modern AI exploiter just because their cheating methods were a bit more taxing on time or effort?
Maybe. But then, what's so different between the pre-AI/post-internet student cheating, and the pre-internet student cheating?
Were cheating circles any less of a thing in eras where colleges had notorious stories of famous historical figures basically fooling around until last-minute cramming? Were those cramming sessions really imparting the value of critical thinking not only to the Great Figures of History, but their less memorable peers?
Or information. If you're getting all your politics from AI, that was pretty dumb. But then, I remember when it was (and still is) a common expression of contempt to dismiss people who watched [bad political TV station], or read [biased partisan news paper], or listened to [objectional radio figure] rather than the other alternatives.
But were the people who were turning into [good political TV station] being any more critical thinking for listening to the 'correct' opinion shows? Or was it just 'my noble voters know I speak truth through their own critical thinking, yours are misled by propaganda that critical thinking would negate'? Were radio listeners decades prior any less mono-tuned for having even fewer alternative stations to listen to? Were regional or municipal newspapers any partisan when there was less competition outside the influence of political machines? Were their readers any more objective critical thinkers when there were fewer easy alternative options?
Has there ever been a golden age of critical thinkers, schooled to think well, untainted by the technology of its era, or the character of its students?
Or has critical thinking been consistent across history, with most students of any era doing the least possible to get through any required courses, and missing the point along the way?
And- by implication- some minority of critical thinkers existing and emerging regardless of the excuses of the era? And often out-competing their contemporaries by the advantages that come with critical thinking?
The more I think of it, the more convinced of the later. Most people in history wouldn't have been great critical thinkers if only they had access to more or even better information. They'd still have taken the easiest way to meet the immediate social pressure. Similarly, I doubt that the Great Critical Thinkers of History would have been ruined by AI. Not as a class, at least. They already had their alternative off-ramps, and didn't.
Critical thinking can always be encouraged, but never forced. The people who do so are the sort of people who are naturally inclined to question, to think, or to recognize the value of critical thinking in a competitive or personal sense. The people who actually do so... they were always a minority. They will probably always be a minority.
So on reflection, my fear about bad students isn't really warranted by AI. There has always been [things degrading critical thinking] that the learners of the era could defer to, or cheat with. If I'd been born generations earlier, I'd have had an equivalent instinct 'warranted' by something else. My fear is/was more about the idea of 'losing' something- an expectation of the critical thinking of others- that probably never existed.
Realizing that made me fear the effects of AI a bit less. As silly as it sounds to put my updated prior in this way, and the sillyness is the point here, there was no golden age of critical thinking and enlightened education that just so happened to be when I was maturing. Just as [current year] wasn't the first time in human history moralistic college students felt ideal social morality was obviously achievable, a downgrade of critical thinking didn't start after I left college either.
So when I read that article about the south korean kid who viewed Ivy League not as a chance to learn in an environment of unparalled access to quality minds and material, but as a change to meet his wife and co-founder of some company, I shouldn't- don't- despair. Instead, I shrug. As it was before, so it shall be again.
Two centuries ago, his mindset would have been right at home in his home country. He would probably only have cared about the material the nominally-meritocratic gwageo civil service exams assessed (including classical literature) to the degree it let out-compete other would-be competitors and join the yangban, a relatively comfortable aristocratic-social class. If he had the ability to cheat at the civil service exam and get away with it, I imagine he would have.
I doubt the social sanctity of meritocrat exams would have bothered him anymore than the espoused value of critical thinking in a progressive academic institution.
What is so different?
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
Infantry privates don’t sleep in barracks on base either, not in the U.S. military. They live in dorms that aren’t as nice as on college campuses but are pretty similar to conditions for 90’s dorm rooms.
Ah, I vaguely remember that!
If you're keeping notes / a running version, it'd be interesting to see an update at the end of this year or so and see you reflect on what changed in the political slang discourse.
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