Mattasher

The answer is simple once you understand that for thin-tailed distributions, the mean is way more important than population size for getting extreme results. In concrete terms, suppose that to win the olympics you need 5-sigma players (ones who are 5-standard-deviations better than the global average). Five-sigma players are extremely rare: a population of 100 million gets you about 25 to 30 of them. But now suppose you could bump up the quality of your soccer players until the average among them was raised just one standard deviation above the global mean. Now you only need a population of 1 million to generate the same number of five-sigma players. The end result: a tiny country of fanatics can compete against a huge country with tons of casual players, like the US.

You can "make" more fanatics under certain conditions. People respond to incentives, from the financial to the cultural to the brutal. I highly recommend the documentary The Two Escobars. It tells the story of famous drug lord Pablo, who used a portion of his fortune to bankroll soccer in Colombia, including the efforts of the national team. That national team included a defender named Andrés Escobar. In 1994, the soccer playing Escobar accidentally kicked in an own-goal during a critical FIFA World Cup match. He was murdered five days later, almost certainly by angry fans. That’s what a nation of hardcore soccer fanatics looks like.

> At least for me, in many cases I have achieved a much better understanding of various things after I studied the historical development of the ideas related to them.

Completely agree with this. Math, and especially related studies like probability/stats, are presented as laws of the universe, when quite often they represent branching paths that could have gone a different way. What we take as correctness is often just one specific metric, or one justifiable epistemological pathway, among many, and it's worth understanding why we ended up where we are, and what those other forking paths might have been, and often still are.

Interesting document. Especially interesting compared to the Bourbaki movement from a century ago, which was much more focused on universality and correctness, and much less focused on process and attribution (in fact, demanded anonymity).

I'm not sure how common this type of intersection is. I live and bike daily in Amsterdam and it took me about a minute to fully understand what's going on here. The picture seems to show a special case where the intersecting road is bike only, and instead of the normal painted arrows that show where bikes should queue up when making a left, there's an open area off to the left where one would wait behind the "shark teeth".

FYI if you are ever biking here in NL, the thing to remember is that if the "haaientanden" point at you, watch out!, as that means you do not have the right of way.

Edit: The side roads are for cars as well, which means you have a strange turning lane in the middle of the intersection where traffic might back up. A simple roundabout seems like a much better solution here unless the goal is to keep cars moving quickly and the turn lane is rarely used.

The intuition here that helped me understand this is that, if you know the search strategy of another player in advance, your best best is to "front run" where they will look as much as possible. So in the ideal case, look in the very next box they are going to look in each round. This guarantees that unless they guess right on the first round, you will get to the gift first.

The rows and columns thing is just a less perfect, but still useful, way for Andrew to front run Barbara's choices more often than the reverse happens.

In this definition an "observer" is anything whose path depends on some perceived outcome (as in state of the universe), correct? So that could be human or a rock tumbling down a hill.

I think there's a case to be made that, if the simulation hypothesis is correct, we are god's dice[1]. We exist as agents to introduce randomness in the form of free will or enough chaos to ensure non-determinism, at least from the perspective of whatever force built this place.

[1] https://mattasher.substack.com/p/btf-6-gods-dice

The use of "some" here in the headline seems dishonest and diminishing of what was done. Like, "some people were effected by the car crash".

Technically true, but effectively more narrative than journalism, especially since among that censored "some" was a lot of true information and experiences.

There is an advantage of using pie charts when you have lots of categories, especially when some are tiny slivers. It's that you can see which items are negligible in terms of their relative contributions. A world GDP pie chart gives a good representation of how international GDP is distributed, and which countries represent only a sliver of the total.

EDIT: Typo

It's worth being very careful about these constructions.

"no evidence of a difference" is fine so long as it's proceeded with "This study found", which when studies are translated to press reports often gets dropped, especially in headlines.

This is most certainly true when it comes to investments. Yes, you could put 100% of your savings in an index fund and forget about it, but that seems extreme, and also you have to live somewhere, so instead of paying rent and living in a non-ideal place you can't customize, you might as well buy a home that's a better fit for your family and has upside potential (and yes, no matter what people say, buying a house is most certainly an investment, a large one and potentially a bad one, but an investment nonetheless).

So now you have at least two big investment baskets that you really should watch carefully, on top of your job, and all those other life things that, as mentioned by another commenter, do get easier once you've done them a few times (like picking a health plan or knowing the basics about car maintenance), but each one has a learning curve and change with technology or policy. And it's a very long list.

Good post I'm quite certain this is correct:

> Meaning that if you go from 4 priorities to 3, you can get, say, 10 percent more done; but if you go from 4 to 1, you get 400 percent more done.

But unless you can afford a butler or work at a company that gives you a very high level of institutional support, mono-focus seems impossible in our current world. I'd love to completely deprioritize the following roles, but they don't seem to want to detach themselves from me: tech support geek for wifi and computer issues, bookkeeper and tax preparer working hand-in-hand with my accountant, occasionally car expert for buying and maintaining vehicles, real estate expert for evaluating house purchases based on market conditions and my families needs, health care plan decider, and on and on and on. Each one of these areas if filled with multi-armed bandit problems (How much research should you put into evaluating a new home purchase where you live, or looking for a better city to live in?). It's a lot.

Will that work seamlessly overseas and with my iPhone? I've had issues in the past getting verification calls and SMSes with "virtual" carriers.

Agreed that emails aren't a good permanent identifier. Though using phone numbers as any part of identification is even worse. I've had the same email for almost two decades (through my own domain name), but I've gone through nearly a dozen phone numbers in the same time period, and regularly find that a website has opted me in to 2fa with an old number, or I've forgotten they had an old phone number to begin with.

I am currently paying a ~$150 per month "tax" to AT&T to keep my US number while living abroad just so I can get login codes for websites that still have that number, and out of fear that if I dump it I'll lose access to some occasionally vital service that I've forgotten to update, or I can't because you need to have a US number.

You might want to check out Buena Vista Social Club.

Key quote:

“The facts show clearly that this is being driven largely by an increase in deaths of despair, with fentanyl overdoses being the leading cause of death for Americans 18 to 45”

Databases still have to be maintained and updated. You're better off setting up an Ethereum contract with proper economic incentives for others to act as an oracle and return the proper answer at any given time.

There is no such thing as "universal health care" in a country, in any meaningful sense. Every country with government run health care rations with limits on availability, wait times, excluded treatments (mental health, dental, vision, drugs, acupuncture, etc), and often by personal clout/connections (this is the case in Canada, where I lived for many years).

Note this is in no way a defense of the US system, which is messed up six ways from Sunday.

> They could reach new highs with alternate business models but only at the cost of short term reduction in revenue from ads.

Yes. Long term, if you control peoples attention and their flow of information, you will almost certainly figure out a way to control their pocketbooks.

This tracks roughly with the 4 categories of unknown and know, as in the Rumsfeldian "unknown unknowns". To me the most interesting is the "unknown knowns", those ephemeral things you know but don't consciously think about that knowledge until it's pointed out, like the ability of native language speakers to stack adjectives in just the right order (e.g. "big old yellow ball"). For most people this is one of our unconscious competences, though I'm not sure it ever passed through a period of conscious effort to get there.

Humans have a long history of comparing ourselves, and the universe, to our latest technological advancement. We used to be glorified clocks (as was the universe), then we were automatons, then computers, then NPC's, and now AI's (in particular LLM's).

Which BTW I don't think is a completely absurd comparison, see https://mattasher.substack.com/p/ais-killer-app

Confusion about the Monte Hall problem isn't an issue with people not understanding probability, it's that the problem is usually presented in a way that's under-explained and with hidden assumptions:

https://statisticsblog.com/2011/11/23/monte-hall-revisited/

Interesting idea, but you're not getting any entropy for free by going back in time. If you wanted to map every possible file of a set length to a specific time and location where it's stored, you'd still need, in general, the same number of bits as you would for the file itself, because you'd have to describe that many distinct time/location pairs.

Taking this comment at face value.

Whether or not we should just let people do what they want, we most certainly do not. Our laws and our culture have a lot of rules about personal behavior, and these impact the suicide rate. Changes to these rules impacts people's health and flourishing, which impacts the suicide rate. Whether or not it's "acceptable" for an individual to take their own life, a large increase in the rate of people doing so is NOT a good sign for the society you live in. We absolutely should be asking questions about why that's happening.

Interesting project. Though the sample conversations in the picture read like what someone thinks a human would sounds like in conversation. Or like those snippets you get in a language learning module:

>[Abigail]: Hey Klaus, mind if I join you for coffee?

>[Klaus]: Not at all, Abigail. How are you?

>[John]: Hey, have you heard anything about the upcoming mayoral election?

>[Tom]: No, not really. Do you know who is running?

The confusion between libraries, especially school libraries, not carrying certain books, and censorship or "book banning" is disingenuous and hyperbolic. All libraries curate, every single one. In particular, school and specialized libraries "censor" based on what is appropriate for their audience.

My highschool library didn't carry any Chilton car repair manuals. I asked about that once because I had a rapidly decaying, hand-me-down Ford Pinto. The librarian laughed and suggested I was attending the wrong high school for those books.

I am bothered by the trend towards fewer physical books and pushing people towards digital copies — there's no substitute for physical browsing as a discovery process.

Shameless self promo: I had a great discussion with Peter Godfrey-Smith about his books and consciousness for my podcast

https://mattasher.com/2021/04/22/ep-33-peter-godfrey-smith-o...

My own leaning is towards a panpsychist view, in which case the idea of animal consciousness as a binary, or even a scalar, makes no sense. It's multifaceted and complex and built from overlapping (resonant?) pieces. For example, human tongues can act like they have a mind of their own just like the arms of an octopus.

No judgement of OceanGate either way, but the Monday morning quarterbacking is pointless.

Doing dangerous things is dangerous. If we had infinite time and infinite money no corners would be cut for anything, all risk would be subdued, and we'd still be waiting on the first person to climb Everest or go into space. Cameron himself has taken risks in subs, and if one of them imploded I'm sure you could find some cheap or untested component to blame.

The problem with rolling back tech use is that it's very hard to do incrementally in an individual person's life, without giving up a lot, and losses tend to sting way more than equivalent gains make us happy. So sure, I can do regular tech sabbaths, or spend time on true vacation, and that helps my sanity. But every time I try and do something like remove email from my phone (and I hate having email on my phone), something comes up where I don't have my computer and I'd really like to send an email, or someone uses email instead of a text for something time sensitive, and I end up re-installing it.

I really wish there were intentional low-tech communities besides the Amish. I would happy reduce my tech use by 9/10ths if that lifestyle was supported by the people around me.

> if it's likely to cure, then that would be borne out by the trial? And then it would be rushed for approval.

I'm not sure you know how long these things take, even when they work well.

Also, the failure to show a positive clinical effect in a trial mean one doesn't exist, especially at the individual level.