ACow_Adonis

i can't be the only oldskool person on hacker news who knows not to click on unsubscribe buttons because it just identifies you as a legitimate email/mark...

these are spammers, not cases where you ever actually signed up to some kind of legitimate newsletter or discussion group. to pretend good faith is your first mistake...

I know Australia would provide a psuedo-natural experiment, because of the family laws effectively making de-facto relationships legally more or less equivalent of actual marriage.

we have a concept in welfare and income stats called equivalisation.

this is where we try to control for the positive material externalities that come from sharing resources among people. you dont have to buy two of everything if you share, it's cheaper to add a room than obtain a whole house and duplicate bathrooms + kitchens etc.

widows would fall afoul of this (in the sense that they've lived with that advantage for most of their lives), as well as obtain a likely wealth effect from inheritance, but it wouldn't surprise me if the entirity or majority of the marriage effect is largely just a restatement of equivalisation + social transfers/safety nets.

isn't that just the internet (and in many ways our societies) in a nutshell?

All the people today saying the internet and content wouldnt survive without advertising and payments and some of us remember that actually the internet and content came first, then the corporations and profit seekers arrived. everyone was originally just excited to get their stuff out there and talk to other people who were passionate and knowledgeable about their stuff as well. then the corps, advertisers, seos came.

sharers -> profit seekers

remember when uber was supposed to be about being able to car share on your way to and from work and cut down on car use?

sharers -> profit seekers

remember when airbnb was about being able to share your home with someone else while you were away at someone else's so you wouldn't have to pay for hotels?

sharers -> profit seekers

remember when hackers were people who set up share drives in university halls with free music and movies, fighting for open access to books and software and info and publications? now we have saas, Steve jobs bios and hacker news is run by a startup venture capitalist firm...

i wonder what the next thing they can destroy will be...

i guess if the pattern repeats look for anything anywhere people are sharing or doing something of value amongst each other for free. they will climb on board try to expand the audience and swamp out the signal of the original community and change the narrative to entrepreneurship and making money from this was always the point, then they will lock it down with network effects and strap on parasitic payments or revenue streams, then they will optimise until they destroy the original with universal enshitification.

thinking emoji

It reads like a someone tried to commit poetry by rhyming dot points in a list. Except they got a discount bulk-rate on purchasing commas at the grammar store so they stitched it all together with 50 of them and called it done :P

Plus like allmost all of its output, it appears to have the amount of profundity, aesthetic pleasure, insight and interest usually found in corporate boardrooms and marketing brochures. That is to say, vanilla dross.

well, the brightest minds as self-described by the people doing it.

And the people doing it self select for showing the ability to work in a disingenuous self-advocating marketing field, so you might expect them to talk themselves up.

i don't think the actual brightest mind could stand working in the field for more than about 5 seconds

it is hard to convey to people how much of our modern world are cultural beliefs and how much it's shifted. So much is commerce and IP now. it's horrible.

I openly gave a talk in my primary school pre-1992 (when we moved) about overcoming copy protections. no one thought i was doing anything wrong. I believe i connected to the internet from our home in AUS sometime around 1994 (when we moved again) or earlier. I can time it because a mortified little me had to find a way to dispose of a picture of a topless lady i accidentally printed out and i rode all the way down to the local shops to throw out in the bin before we moved. I never realised how cutting edge my father was to get us a home connection at the time.

But anyway i digress. back then it was HOPE that this technology would result in free sharing of art and knowledge that everyone wanted to place online at their own expense. Now it's fear that it will cut people out of commercialisation. Such a depressing dystopia we live in, and such a horrible shift as the Web (and subsequently all our societies) were gradually taken over by commercial culture :(

i can't overstress how important that early internet connection was to me as a child growing up in Australia...

I'm in the same boat (in terms of both field and experience) and I find the original post bordering on absolutely nonsensical gibberish. It's like a technical version of an astrology column.

I spent a fair bit of my youth where there's been legalised brothels (or at least I assume they were through most of my childhood) and sex work. And on the other hand there's also physiotherapists and actual massages. I don't particularly like massages that much, personally, but if needing one I go in and tap my health card and that helps cover it.

So presumably there was no need to hide the business behind the euphemism/front, everyone just knew that if you wanted sex/porn, you went to a brothel in suburb X. Even where I am now, i know there's brothels and presumably private sex workers and if i want a massage I go and I book a massage.

I feel like I'm missing some cultural context here that made this a semi- difficult read: obviously? the word "massage parlour" is some local euphemism for some kind of sex work and its implied they aren't actually masseurs/masseuses? but can someone explain to me exactly what the nature of the arrangement/work/ business she's working in is?

is it just prostitution and for some reason they don't call it that in Canada? is it legal/illegal? is there an implication about its location? are they in some regulatory grey zone? is it men just dropping in to be touched or is it something more? are they just operating on a drop in schedule and does that imply something about the relative standing of the establishment compared to other sex work etc? are they contractors or operating their own business?

please help me out HN :/

I had philosophy teachers who thought similar and dismissed my claims outright to the contrary.

I call it mental-ese. To talk i often first have to translate between it and my native language (English). obviously, it's by its very nature hard to express in words exactly what mental-ese consists of, and it might arguably be impossible in the same way we cannot express general qualia using the written language.

but I've heard enough similarities from others trying to express such to be convinced there's something there. surely the phrase "I can't express my thoughts in words" is common and has meaning to you?

The analogies I've heard commonly from myself and others to describe it is that I see/feel the shape of relationship between the concepts or abstract thoughts before I then try to put it into language. just as my other senses do not require written language to first describe (my experience of tasting a strawberry is something qualitatively different experienced/impressed on the mind, not a word).

Another analogy I've used to try to convey my apparent experience to others in contrast to many people is that it appears to me that a common way of experiencing the world is to have relative primacy or weight on "things"(words) and then people have to work towards the relationships between things. whereas I feel my mind works the other way, receiving impressions of relationships between or behind things first, such that they are the primary unit, and the words/things must then be built up from these.

That's because the debate and popular press around all this discussion in Australia (and elsewhere) is a populist/political cluster fuck and has almost nothing to do with economics.

Reserve bank doesn't want to talk about its roll in credit/ monetary expansion during the pandemic, gov doesn't want to talk about its policies to do the same and not wanting to address inflation through taxation or fiscal policy, business wants to pretend its not self interested and profit seeking, consumers don't want to admit that they might actually have to make some price-elastic decisions or change behaviours based on how much things cost, and everyone wants to pretend that we weren't responsible for fucking up housing over the last 20 years of policy or that there will be real repercussions from the boomers aging out.

So instead we get economic discussion that looks more like the multiple spider-man pointing meme.

how many john smith do you think are born in the US?

to what degree do you think birth times are actually rounded rather than accurately recorded?

very much not done :)

This seems like a strange asymmetric take. Aren't people who fill their resumes with word soup penalising people who don't play the games and instead fill their resume to actually be read, and convey actual meaningful information and projects to the reader?

The discrimination is already built into the system, so if you have to discriminate, if i was hiring, i'd want to do so against the game players. At least in high skill data science-esque jobs, the ability to hire for people who aren't playing games and actually doing the task seems like a plus. and additionally, if you structure your resume in such a way, you filter for companies in such a way as to avoid the dystopian megacorps and managers who expect you to play games.

that being said, I've yet to figure out a way other than networking or optimisation to reliably get past any institution big enough to have a significant HR presence professionally incapable of judging the things they're notionally hiring for. I've had the experience where I've found HR has culled resumes and chosen which ones go through to the decision maker, which is incredibly frustrating when they're by definition unqualified to be making such decisions.

ps: I will read every resume I see. I despise word-soup/algorithmic/ business catchwords/someone told me to use active language resumes.

As has been said before, once you reach a certain level, the two often become empirically indistinguishable.

counter-counterpoint: studies (that is to say the modern ritual of writing papers about spuriously finding statistical correlations using language and processes specific to your academic tribe) have consistently found positive effects of both.

On the one hand you have the supposed positive effects of accepting identities of the in-group, but you have to be very careful about how you structure and interpret these, because as you've inadvertently pointed out, what you're often really getting is access to social networks and resources. you also have to be very careful to interpret the positive outcomes of such if they're part of groups that actively discriminate, target or persecute out-member groups. gays, foreigners, races, genders other-identies can also be shown to often have negative effects using similar methods, and of course naive methods do find significantly worse outcomes amongst many life measures from such groups (which is not really surprising, because the in-group often treats them like shit).

but studies have also shown consistent positive effects from dropping identities. i.e. stopping identifying with criminal groups, removing limiting beliefs and cognitive barriers associated with identities, and positive associations with Buddhist-esque religions and practices associated with traditionally non-identity building beliefs and practices (meditation, anatman, western psychological methods and treatments associated- derived from such etc).

personally, I fall on the less identity side of things, just speaking as someone on the side of the unique position of being involved with statistics, religion, economics, and psychology.

isn't that like, the entire big consulting business model?

150 presses and 51% here, just trying with my fingers on my smartphone :)

And now to 200 with 49%. Feeling not so subtley smug.

And now to 400 with 50%. Admit I'm getting bored now.

Now the question I have to answer, is that because of my professional experience and history, something inherent in my mind, or was it...just random?

edit: just consciously trying to be random, not using any deliberate or external tricks.

Second question: what percentage of the population behaves like me and is it qualitatively different from the population that doesn't?

I don't believe I actually am random, but whatever it is i'm doing the results are somewhat statistically unlikely. Is knowledge/experience with randomness itself sufficient to defeat this method?

As someone who's arguably professionally employed to do things like tell people where money is in the financial system, no, you can't.

In the same way you can't enumerate the atoms or molecules in a human body. sure, you can come up with good estimates and summaries that are useful, but not the actual full and truthful state of affairs.

In addition, you are a self-referential participant in the system: so acting in an attempt to observe such likely immediately makes your information at least partially incorrect.

Additionally, if we can't get full/transparency or introspection into machine learning models or neural networks (and we can't because i don't believe we even possess the theoretical knowledge of how to do so), it should also be wilfully apparent that we can't actually know the true lineage or dependencies of systems that implement such in production.

Not to mention the difficulties as the inputs/outputs of such pass in and out of the notional entity or system being observed.

as per my other comment, in most of the sufficiently big or historical cases you have to distinguish between two things:

- reality

- the socially acceptable fiction in the report

the exercise would be to create an output that allows people to pretend we know where all instances of "log4j" were used, or that sufficient depth and resources have been expended on such.

but in a sufficiently large and complex organisation, we (and by we I mean technically able, knowledgeable or sufficiently aware individuals) know that the content of such is likely to be as factually true as reading a historian's report entitled: "enumeration of all points in past century where cutlery has been used".

Counterpoint: the conclusions of legal, compliance and security rest upon social fictions and power structures, but fundamentally at a certain scale, all things act like the original commenter said.

In my experience with the above, people get paged until a "socially plausible fiction or resolution" can be created.

There's several versions of these, one of which is to engage in enough rituals and processes so that we all pretend the task has been completed and the requisite outputs and points of reference exist. An archaeologist knows they don't and they can't and that we lay on bedrocks of speculation, history, ignorance and myth, but we don't have to worry too much about the fiction we create because we also know that disproving such mechanically is also extremely impossible/unlikely.

And we have a host of other social functions to get out of the cases where it could, such as:

- throwing people under the bus/human sacrifice/ finger pointing

- contrition

- plausible deniabilty

- continued non-compliance and non-enforcement

- bribery

- bullshit jobs

well, for a start, flows and holdings on foreign investments, interest and monetary flows, international trade, consumption of existing stock (depending on your particular definition of income).

but either way, he's fundamentally right.

Pandemics, disease control, and epidemiology :)

i.e. infected = base. New infection rate, spread, R0 etc = 1st derivative. R0 increasing or decreasing = 2nd derivative.

Environment, Metereology and Climate.

Climate/phenomenon (i.e. global warming) = base. Is it increasing/decreasing = 1st derivative. Is the rate of change increasing or decreasing (i.e. as carbon emissions start to enter the atmosphere after the industrial revolution) = 2nd derivative.

You could get really fancy and say that climate is a statistical function on localised individual weather observations which follow the above pattern. And that you can take a derivative on the numbers generated by these individual observations themselves measuring localised 1st/2nd derivatives. Does that make it a third derivative? Exercise left for the reader :)

Economics, Finance, Risk and Regulation.

Closely related to interest rates and equilibrium funnily enough. Lets take mortgage stock/book cause it's easy.

A percentage of mortages go into default. 1st derivative. Are the rate of defaults (or adverse events) increasing or decreasing: 2nd derivative. (am i right on that, i haven't thought too hard, just whipped it out).

Indeed, I imagine it would come up in a lot of places where things can transition between states of equilibrium. To observe equilbrium and transition to another state, you may need to first measure 1st derivative. 2nd derivative may then inform on whether the system is transitioning to a new equilibrium/state or not. Sorry if that's too abstract.

Engineering

I presume higher derivatives would come up anywhere there's possibly of feedback loops. 2nd derivative can tell you if the system is heading towards catastrophic failure.

Which brings us to...

Anything (or at least a lot) of fields that invovle practical or empirical measurements or estimations of exponential effects. Since in the real world most exponential effects have a natural limit or regulator, we're often interested in knowing when the phenomenon hits its natural limit. And this means observing the rate of change (2nd derivative) on the rate of change (1st derivative) to pinpoint where and when the exponential behaviour is breaking down.

i don't know the specifics, but it's had a long road and evolved out of prijects that came before.

I believe it's currently running on a modified version of the spring engine.

I'd be remiss not to link to https://www.beyondallreason.info/

A community made spiritual successor to the total annihilation/supreme commander series. It's notionally in alpha, but it works perfectly, and I have to say it's pretty amazing (hesitate to call it prefect). Yes, it's complicated, but the balance, options, automation and strategies available are almost perfect, as is the presence of strategic zoom so you don't feel like you're viewing the Mona Lisa through a toilet roll and forcing you to battle more with the interface than the game itself (I'm looking at you starcraft).

on the article front, I didn't see references to Sacrifice: a bizarre hybrid mix between third-person action and RTS. It didn't leave a legacy (as far as I can tell), but by God (pun intended) it was a weird and wonderful game.

have you considered implementing a false control (i.e. putting in a badly implemented bionic reading version and serving that to a random number of people to see whether people also report speed increases with "bad bionic reading"?)

i know a significant number of people here are probably already familiar with what bionic reading is, but still, could be an interesting control.

It's not a perfect test, but as a statistician, my preliminary takeaway from this is that bionic reading doesn't work.

results are generally in the ballpark of insignificant, and there seems to be a very weak inverse relationship between reading speed and comprehension.

which is to say, on preliminary it looks like most "speed reading" claims (I.e. quackery).

first of all, awesome job. I'm also a big believer in trying to code such models up to try to understand them.

But, and it pains me to say it, as someone with a bit of a background in economics, I dunno if realistic is quite the word i would use for your current model.

And I don't mean in a "all models are wrong but some are useful" kinda way. I think some of the limitations and simplifications might take away from the value of the model. I'd urge everyone to read the blog post to understand what's going on.

you've touched upon a lot of the apparent findings and paradoxes of macro, which is great.

to try to be constructive, I guess I would ask a rhetorical question to focus on a central (pun intended) issue: how are interest rates set by the central bank implemented? is it an independent variable that you kinda change, or is it implemented through changes in monetary + credit supply? I'm concerned that this is another one of those macroeconomic paradoxes built into the model that lessens its applicability: the idea that interest rates are a variable that the central bank issues by decree, as opposed to a rate that they target by adjusting other monetary/ policy settings?

anyway, good job. I love it when people actually code up and stimulate models :)

Its like how health is correlated with height.

Its true, up to a point.

you just have to ignore that at the extremes it's probably negatively correlated, and there's a significant non-zero possibility that at least in the short term, that possibility of negative correlation applies to the area VR is interested in as well.

almost out of my thirties, consider myself perpetually interested in chasing and studying rationality for the last 25 years or so, and consider most of the population certifiably insane and I'm an alien anthropologist ferrying between mental institutions.

It's not all bad though, on a lot of the empirical economic work I've done a lot of people appear what I'd call "weakly locally rational": a rationality effect seems to effect people in aggregate and determines the direction they move, and tends to be the biggest effect, though the aggregate doesn't move perfectly in accordance with what rationality would expect. It also depends very much on framing: they are "locally majority rational" in the context of their frame of reference, but not in terms of the macro-world: which makes sense, because we're finite creatures who can't actually take in all the information, have limited processing ability, and each have different access to information and historical experiences. so most of us do the best with the limited experience of what we got and how we understand the world.