chillacy

Reminded me of the ray kurtzweil predictions: extremely generous grading.

This issue of grading fuzzy predictions is somewhat applicable to political pundits and stock market gurus as well.

There's an entire body of knowledge on how to create objectively measurable predictions (the book Superforecasting covers), but the mainstream isn't there yet.

From what I've seen and noticed myself, exposure and engaging with different arguments in good faith (e.g. able to switch sides and argue for the other side in as convincing a way, as one might do in a debate club) tends to either move people towards the center or makes them agnostic to any solution. At least in political questions, or questions of "ought" as opposed to "is".

They say the only two ways in business to make money are bundling and unbundling. This is surprisingly applicable to software frameworks as well.

Just throwing out there that waiting 10 years tends to make dating easier for a man regardless of whatever else you do. I remember this in the okCupid data showing that women’s match numbers start highest at 18 and go down over time.

Not that working on oneself isn’t good for so many reasons.

> Who is in charge of the iPad division at Apple

Apple isn't organized by product like other large tech companies, instead it's organized by function. E.g. no divisions like iPad, Mac, iPhone. It's divisions like hardware, software, RF, etc. Each division works on all products.

I get the sense that "disabled" is still in its avant-garde phase. "retarded" passed that in my circles maybe a few years ago, but also there was a time where it was much like "disabled" is today.

Aside, somehow "retarded" got replaced by "special needs" or "short bus" in some circles which also sounds insulting to me, so maybe we'll continue this treadmill for awhile longer.

I recall stumbling upon a linguistic feature more common to native American languages called grammatical evidentals, where certain statements required some sort of marker which indicates how the information is known to the speaker: whether by direct experience (I saw the rain), or hearsay (I was told it's raining), etc.

I have considered on occasion that this would be useful, as a great deal of internet arguments stem from the fact that English allows for the construction of sentences which state subjective experience as absolute truth.

I don't think this comment addresses the (very philosophical) point of the parent poster when they try to explain the difference between "is" and "ought" by doubling down on details of the "is".

To me it looks like this comment describes in detail how international relations work through realpolitik (which I agree is basically how it's done if you want any semblance of predictive power, as opposed to focusing on any stated moral values of players).

That's a fair take. In research about forecasting, they do indeed find that timeline greatly impacts forecasting accuracy.

Even if we were to fix this particular bucketing issue with a large enough dataset of foreign policy predictions X months into the future... one could still say this tells us nothing about this specific question because... maybe even among the geopolitical questions, this question is somehow different in some way which makes it noncomparable.

Or by analogy it would be like we were flipping what we think are coins and someone snuck a dice roll on one of the tries. Maybe the Taiwan question is the dice roll and therefore not subject to comparison with other geopolitical questions X years out.

This is of course afaik an unknowable problem, and Taleb would agree that we should just assume these predictions are tea-leaves.

At the same time it may be a valuable source of info (certainly imo more empirical than pundits and the news)

For consideration:

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2022-03-26/is-it-pos...

> doing good for its citizens

Not to be semantic but this can be measured very differently depending on who you ask, and if someone's objective function has deaths weighing much more heavily than personal freedom (actually not an insignificant amount of people in the US as well subscribe to this for covid) then yea that is "good". Else I'm unaware of a universal agreed upon definition of the best tradeoff to make.

I’m curious what the mechanism for reducing inflation is when taxing the rich?

Here are my assumptions:

1. Inflation is a function of monetary supply, the velocity of money, and available goods.

2. The rich contribute less to the velocity of money (since they tend to save or drive up asset prices) than the poor

Afaik Monetarists like Friedman assume that velocity is a constant, but this trickles down to most gold bugs I meet not even knowing the inflation equation.

Oh yea, as a general rule of thumb I have found that if any party is getting emotional (defensive, frustrated, hurt, etc) then the conversation will have to pivot to feelings.. something about the pre-frontal cortex going offline when we get into a certain state.

I've seen this state called different things, like "Exiles" in IFS therapy, "below the line", "tilted", "triggering painful spots", I usually call it "defensive".

(Aside... a thing I've learned is not to ask if someone is feeling defensive (if they are, they'll say no). Instead I think the better move is to ask if they feel like I'm not listening, or not understanding their position. This lines up with the internal thoughts of feeling defensive.)

All this to say, rational conversation is possible when two people are in a rational state but there are other states of being.

(Aside.. I find that rational communication techniques like NVC are actually devilishly hard to put into practice all the time because they go out the window when we get tilted.)

(Aside... EFT couples therapy is designed around communication in an emotionally vulnerable state as opposed to rational, and supposedly has pretty good empirical results)

Ah yes I remember that one. A few weeks later I believe one of his colleagues in Conscious Leadership Group goes on the show too and she brings up more details.

This is the track record for Metaculus (the chart at the end) showing historically a 10% swing in predictions of 50% historically by aggregated forecasters on the site: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/

Granted this tells us nothing about the accuracy of any one particular question, but on aggregate Metaculus is pretty well calibrated.

That said, there is a longstanding academic debate between "forecasting can tell us useful things" (Telock) and "black swans will ruin your life" (Taleb).

I thought this was a pretty good book despite the seeming brevity to it. Anyways to really expand for those who haven't read it, Dethmer talks about an internal mindset dial between judgementalness vs curiosity. There are other dials like victim vs agency, emotional acceptance vs denial, etc.

I personally use the meta-conversational move a lot, and it usually turns heated political discussions into more thoughtful philosophy discussions. I think because most people don't have such strong identity based beliefs around questions like "how can we know if something is right/true/good/bad, what does that mean?"

"Impressions from a first-time english speaker"

> A little background on me: I’ve been speaking French and Spanish my entire professional life

...

> The Bad

> I’m accustomed to gendered pronouns in both French and Spanish, so it was nice to see that in English. However, the lack of gendered nouns is awful. French and Spanish both have what I would call “sane” gendered nouns (shown in this dictionary), where you know of everyone's gender based on the adjective you hear.

> On the other hand, English has a weird grammatical system where you need to listen to the pronoun to know someone or something's gender. I want to know if someone is a man, a woman, or a chair based on the adjective, not just the pronoun.

For numbers, Metaculus collectively puts China annexing Taiwan by 2050 at around 50%: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5320/chinese-annexation-...

30 years is a long time for forecasting though, afaik forecasting accuracy in tournaments drops as a function of time.

That sums up my experience as well. I just spent 20 mins trying to make that go away in Safari, I was not able to get Tampermonkey working (possibly due to XSS headers) but Cascadea worked. `#karma { display: none !important; }`

Amdahl's law suggests that "we" (assuming readers here are monolithic enough to call a collective) would have more effect optimizing the dominant power consumers, and I would guess that would be some sort of industrial process or electric heating as opposed to consumer electronics.

I really enjoyed this video when I first saw it, especially learning and recognizing that burnout includes cynicism and is often triggered by feeling unrewarded. Makes a great deal of sense.

Dr K has been such a gem to discover on YouTube (I know he was pretty famous on Twitch for awhile). I ended up paying for his mental health guide where he'll teaches a lot of different types of meditation beyond the typical mindfulness flavor.

This is my favorite of his lectures: how to effectively communicate (by reflective listening): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIATzLf-y04

I also get a lot out of his 2-hour long deep interviews with various internet celebrities, insofar as I can spot similarities between our struggles and apply lessons to my own life.

> Those companies that have a Sign-up for our email and get 10% off your first order pop-up, you mean?

I've seen this type of thing improve conversion immensely at a startup I worked at, and it sets up the starts of a drip marketing campaign.

Many of these are the natural results of A/B testing and experimentation, which is why many companies arrive at the same result.

This is the answer: while there is no universal purpose to life, everyone can (or has the burden to) find their own purpose. From my understanding this was the big finding from existentialism, and afaik wasn't as big of a problem back when society forced you into a religious certainty.

Would another spin on this be: if the connotation of MBA includes "bad" in it, then applying this label to bad stuff is tautological and doesn't add information?

Here's another example: made in China has a connotation of cheap and low quality, despite the fact that the iPhone and all the other high quality electronic products are made in China too. But if someone says "made in china" we know they're referring to the cheap stuff.

Wikipedia says Bucha has a population of 36k people, I can't see how this headline is correct as-is.

> The moral case against gambling transcends American Protestantism. Many Asian countries ban casinos and others restrict them to foreigners. In South Korea, 13 of its 14 casinos are off-limits to Korean citizens. China has no casinos at all, except in the enclave of Macau.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this doesn't look like a moral case at all, rather a practical understanding that mass gambling is a profitable social ill, so better to take money from foreigners while keeping your own citizens away.

If these countries had a moral "gambling is wrong" belief, I don't think they'd allow foreigners to participate either. And if they really believed in this cause and had the ability they'd try to lobby/coerce others to their cause.

There’s a status game for streetwear too but afaik it involves rare sneakers with expensive basics.

DFW claims religion is immune to this effect but to me it seems like another statement to add could be: “worship god and you’ll feel like a sinner”

In the US at least, iOS has higher uptake than android for the first time ever in younger age cohorts https://fburl.com/2m6hv5lb

I recall a recent article on HN about this