Double_Cast

> A first principles physics analysis of automotive production suggests that somewhere between a 5 to 10 fold improvement is achievable by version 3 on a roughly 2 year iteration cycle.

How does one calculate this? Does there exist some canonical Productivity-Equation?

So uh, HOC's are basically monads. Right?

Here's an observation of mine which Simler misses: I suspect that Meaning is the categorical dual of Power. In this context, Power is defined as "your influence on the state of world". Whereas Meaning is defined as "a phenomenon's influence on your state-of-mind and decision-making".

E.g. when a Vietnam Vet looks at a War Monument, that's meaningful because it impacts his emotional state. Maybe his buddy Bubba Gump died in the war. Maybe he'll resolve to live life to the fullest and open a Shrimpin Business.

Connections make it more likely that a phenomenon will impact your decision making, or carry an affect on something you value highly. The connections/gravitas hypothesis that Simler discusses is just a corollary.

Guys, he's not talking about the Scientific Method. He's talking about Reductionism. As recent as a few centuries ago, it was in no way obvious to us that the universe was made out of Atoms and Math (as opposed to say, Adam Kadmon and Divine Inspiration). Continental Philosophers spent tons of energy on these types of questions.

> The reason Aristotle didn't get anywhere in the Metaphysics was partly that he set off with contradictory aims: to explore the most abstract ideas, guided by the assumption that they were useless. He was like an explorer looking for a territory to the north of him, starting with the assumption that it was located to the south.

> And since his work became the map used by generations of future explorers, he sent them off in the wrong direction as well.

http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

> whereas Aspies (like Jobs) have more empathy

Let me tell you a little about the ADI-R [0]. The clinician reads your biography, makes small talk, asks you to make up stories, watches for any abnormal behavior, et al. The madeup story of a NeuroTypical will include the emotions of other people. E.g. "My friends and I went to the beach, but we were sad because it rained, and Alice got mad because it was her only day off, etc".

An aspie's story will show ZERO AWARENESS of other people's emotions. Their entire world consists of PvE. Not because they have no sympathy for others' emotions, but because deciphering non-verbal cues is as opaque as deciphering an enigma. It's like the opposite of clairvoyance. Does that sound like empathy to you?

I agree that Jobs must have had empathy. Otherwise he wouldn't have been so successful at manipulation. It's just that he was such an asshole that he abused his knowledge of others' emotional states to gain leverage over them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism_Diagnostic_Interview

<digression>

In what world does "social ineptitude" not map to "significant difficulties in social interaction and non-verbal communication"? This feels like one of those bifurcation situations where someone is like "I'm not fat, I just have a BMI of 9000".

> sociopaths (...) appear normal (it's part of the game, in fact).

Psychopaths are the ones who blend in. Sociopaths are pretty conspicuous.

> "restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests"

Also fits OCD. We agree that Jobs was highly neuroatypical. But whatever his quirk, it's not autism.

I've both read the Isaacson bio and been diagnosed with Asperger's. I strongly disagree (with erichocean) that Jobs was on the Autism Spectrum.

Jobs's bio was in fact a textbook case of psychopathy: his eyeballs "drilled into your soul with a Deadpan Stare"; he was highly manipulative (which proves he was socially adept); and he was so charismatic that colleagues say his presence was a Reality Distortion Field.

Meanwhile, most Aspies can't even maintain eye contact (let alone herd cats). Regarding the diagnosis for Asperger's/Autism, the trait clinicians test for is literally "social ineptitude".

> What am I missing?

In planning a strategy, I've found it helpful to consider Win Conditions. It forces me to think backwards from the goal, construct a dependency tree, and consider resource allocation. I first heard about it from videogames but I've also seen it in math, engineering, logistics, recipes, etc. I also pattern-match it the insight that solved the Problem Of Points [0] which motivated Probability Theory. If it were on the curated list, I'd expected to find it under "models" next to cost-benefit analysis.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_points#Pascal_and_F...

This reminds me of Philip K. Dick's "The Second Variety" that I recently read. (Not that I'm trying to make a prescient political-statement, just sharing a fun short-story you might be interested in.)

http://manybooks.net/pages/dickp3203232032/0.html

One problem with this is that

  x^y / x^y 

is restricted to the domain {x | x != 0}. Because e.g. when x = 0 and y = 1, the expression then contains a zero in the denominator. Division by zero is "every number, and therefore no single number" because we can use algebra to "prove" that x / 0 equals "anything we want", almost like the how the principle of explosion works.

If you wanted to prove that 0^0 really does equal 1, you would have to prove that the output of the reduction is unique.

[Z] is a subset of [Q], which is a subset of [C]. So I don't think the problem goes away.

If you examine the graph etatoby provided, the limit of 0^0 depends on which direction it's approached from: 1 from along the real axis; 0 from along the imaginary axis; and all sorts of [Q] from along a diagonal.

I think of b^e as "start with 1, then loop 'multiply that by b' an e number of times". So 2^0 means "start with one, then multiply that by 2 for 0 numbers of times."

  0^0
  (\be.eb)(\sz.z)(\sz.z)
      [b := (\sz.z)]
  (\e.e(\sz.z))(\sz.z)
      [e := (\sz.z)]
  ((\sz.z)(\sz.z))
      [s := (\sz.z)]
  ((\z.z))

Lambda Calculus returns (\z.z) AKA the Identity Function. Which kinda sounds like 1, except 1 is usually represented as (\sz.sz). Which means 0^0 is NaN? I wonder if division by zero also gives (\z.z), but I don't know what division in Lambda Calculus looks like.

Just Prices is not an explanation of Elasticity. In fact, it attempts to explain cases which Elasticity cannot account for.

E.g. (from the paper) the queues at restaurants. Our understanding of Price Elasticity suggests that the optimal arrangement (for both parties) is for restaurants to apply a surcharge in order to reduce queue times. The ubiquity of queues and rarity of surcharges suggests that something beyond Supply & Demand is occurring.

Another example. Areas affected by natural disasters often experience a fuel shortage. The price of gasoline may sell at several times the usual rate. The price hike simply reflects the diminished supply. But customers often behave unreasonably hostile toward the fuel vendors and refuse to buy, even if the purchase is still to their net benefit.

The hostility occurs because the customers feel they're being taken advantage of. Such a sentiment may not be rational in today's global market. But it was a rational response in the ancestral environment (where monopolies and monopsonies were more common) because price hikes set a precedent of exploitation (like how politicians use emergencies as an excuse to pass legislation, which mysteriously stays in effect even after the emergency has passed).

The commentariat may not grok the Evo Psych behind Just Prices. What they do grok is an intuition that a small community might get mad at the local bee-keeper if he hikes his prices out of the blue, Predicted Elasticity be damned.

Do mathematicians actually have an answer for this? Or is it considered an open question.

Guys, this isn't about Elasticity Curves. This is about Just Prices [0]. In tight-knit communities, it was evolutionarily advantageous for customers to throw a hissy fit if a vendor hiked their prices. It's a Game Theory thing that relies on information asymmetry.

[0] http://daviddfriedman.com/Academic/econ_and_evol_psych/econo...

At 1:21 and 1:35, Ali does this shuffle thing with his feet.

How does one do that? I just tried it, and I can't imagine how I would move my feet that rapidly even with extensive training. I'm pretty lanky. Would it be easier to foot-shuffle if I had Ali's build? Or would it be even harder because of his mass.

And does this maneuver have a name? It seems like he does it when he's winding up for a jab combo. To make his punches unpredictable. Am I reading his movements correctly?

Then I misunderstood the article when it said

> When this is done, RT22 states that there will exist an infinite monochromatic subset: a set consisting of infinitely many numbers, such that all the pairs they make with all other numbers are the same color.

I read this as saying "There exists and infinite number of x's which satisfy the relation f(x, y) = blue for all values of y over some arbitrary function f()". What am I missing?

Question: Isn't there an axiom that says "for any real number, there's always a bigger number"? What stopped Patey and Yokoyama from proving Ramsey's Theorem For Pairs/Triples by saying "for any pair which satisfies some relation X, there exists another pair which also satisfies relation X"?

I have a third interpretation: I think Solnic was complaining about a lack of diversity in the Ruby ecosystem. The most salient part of the post was (imo) the paragraph regarding how Merb was subsumed into Rails, instead of continuing to compete against Rails. Rails is essentially a monopoly.

> It seems incredibly odd to leave Rails over this. For what, Java? Unbelievable.

If projects such as Merb were more common, maybe Solnic could leave Rails without abandoning Ruby.

Another item for the list!

https://euri.ca/2013/xkcd-is-the-new-donald-duck/index.html

xkcd relevant to this thread.

https://xkcd.com/1318/

Of the 6 or 7 criteria biologists usually use to define life, viruses often fall short. E.g. viruses do not have their own metabolism.

Everyone has their own definition though. I remember reading a novel where life was defined simply as heredity, mutation, and adaptation. The second definition makes more sense to me, and implicitly includes viruses.

I think you're both right. It's got some seemingly arbitrary quirks. But at the end of the day, it compresses information really well.

I just looked at the original and the copy through my laptop's shitty default equalizer. The copy has unnecessary bass. Around the 1k hz range. This is probably the largest contributor to what makes it sound hollow.

Also, just comparing them by ear. Over each note, the copy builds up and then builds down in volume in a <> shape. The original has a sharper attack and then fades gradually, which looks more like a > shape.

I think the copy also has an unnecessary reverb effect, but I'm not sure.

This is all malleable of course. None of this is the fault of the software. It's just a difficulty inherent to reverse engineering.

IANA Neuroscientist. But I believe the reticular activating system governs wakefulness and attention. It's just a fancy way of saying "once you see it, you see it everywhere".

I think Popper's concept of Falsificationism is best put by Asimov in his essay The Relativity of Wrong [0]. The thesis is that Science never has the perfect model. Instead of directly arriving at The Truth, it continuously refines imperfect models by reducing error. In this view, the difference between "confirm" and "provide evidence for" is simply a matter of degree.

[0] http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

Consider a startup. In the long run, it may have a large advantage over its incumbent competitors. But at inception, it often needs a capital investment to overcome a barrier of entry. Without the initial investment, the startup may never see the light of day. The article's thesis is analogous: though sexual selection may be a global maximum, evolution might have gotten stuck in a local maximum (asexual selection) if not for a little boost.

Off the top of my head, I can imagine possible adaptations which humans would find strictly beneficial, but we won't likely evolve (without genetic engineering). E.g. there's no good reason why humans have a blind spot. We wouldn't have it if our optic nerves were attached behind our retina instead of in front. But we're stuck with it because evolution can't conjure a discontinuous jump in our anatomy.

I've heard it hypothesized that Bush had early dementia. If you watch videos of his younger days, he spoke articulately. During his presidency, he kinda stuttered.

"common defense" is being used as an elision of "common defense of the People". The entire phrase is a noun phrase. But " defense" is a verb within the noun phrase.