ngriffiths

> at least be constructive about it

I think the proposed solution here is pretty clear. Patch the bug.

> We too often assume that visualization is transparent, a method that lets us see through to the significance of the data underneath. But the reality is that the choices made when visualizing data are nearly as significant as the data itself.

This idea seems inconsistent with the idea that no map can be objective. The examples given have to do with an unfamiliar audience (the Spanish) misinterpreting the map. There is an explicit acknowledgement that a correct interpretation does exist! There is objective info in there if you know how to read it.

I think there is a hidden assumption that objective means "every single person who sees this will understand it." This is of course impossible but it's important to emphasize that the majority of people, in almost all cases, will mess something up. So I dislike the framing of data visualization is not neutral, the analyst is imposing their view on the world and exercising lots of power, etc and prefer "it's just stupidly hard and you gotta pick a few people you are actually talking too."

> only adding new things once you’ve discovered a need for them.

Agree! imo this is the guiding principle that makes great tutorials great.

> We might say that generating ideas is the real intellectual work of mathematics.

The article talks about how many new ideas are relatively worthless and the real goal is to find the "concepts that 'carve nature at its joints.'" I think this is the crux of the whole thing and I haven't seen a satisfying discussion of it anywhere.

I mean, FLT is mentioned. Is that an accessible proof to humans? Is it full of these high value, refined concepts or is it more like a bunch of little hacks that at least dozens if not hundreds of people randomly stumbled upon, in an all out attempt to solve one of the most famous math problems?

I'm not totally convinced what value math concepts have beyond "you can use them to solve even more math problems." I really want to believe there is. But if not, it's just a pure benefit to have faster ways to solve them, no?

Completely agree. It's a choice not to observe and understand what's going on, at least a very risky one if not actively evil.

There's a tradeoff though... isn't it already super hard to understand what they're doing with these math proofs for example? Clearly there's a tradeoff between deeply understanding the behavior vs. quickly solving the concrete problem, hence the big controversy in math now. From one perspective, letting stuff run ~autonomously in a mad dash to solve your problem is a really bad idea, threatens to destroy the whole field etc. From another perspective, solving lots of problems fast is extremely enticing and worth some risks.

Update for one other thought:

> And if it's scary, we turn it off.

Agreed, that's why I think the bad scenarios are some form of "it does some weird stuff ostensibly while helping us solve some problem" followed by "oops, we miscalculated that threat level."

Apocalyptic predictions normally get everyone into gear to prevent the threat. Not a great argument for "let's see what happens if we just sit around this time"

The mental model here is that AI is a powerful tool whose main purpose is to outcompete others, increase power or provide a defense. This is not the right model!

The biggest risk is not that someone discovered a big new weapon, which by the way

> No one person, or one company, knows the answer and history is no guide

are you kidding me? It's a problem as old as time.

This is not nuclear power though. The bigger problem is a scenario where AI increasingly acts like bacteria, doing things autonomously, things no one really understands, things we think are confusing and weird. And then just by chance, some bacteria end up in some human lung cells and they turn out to be an excellent place to grow and multiply. Why is this worse? Because weird shit does not seem threatening, and it almost always isn't, so nobody tries to stop it.

Also, the argument in the article seems to be "obviously AI development is not a particularly urgent global threat," and therefore these downsides (risk of collusion, misuse of state power, etc) are the most critical factors? I guess, uh, yeah, if there's no benefit to taking these actions we shouldn't take them.

Oh no

The neural net engineering challenge was so awesome, I got really into it, spent way too much time and then was shocked when I actually managed to solve it. Since then I've gotten interested in... hardware. God help me

The post says "it might sound a bit extreme," and it does!

In Lathe of Heaven by Le Guin, the main character George is famously frustrating because he doesn't do much. Bad things happen to him and he basically just lets them. He thinks his psychiatrist is totally evil yet keeps going back. He has a pitiful lack of control over his life. He doesn't seem to want control, which is the worst part. He isn't super happy, and you could take that as the main point, but I don't.

even George, perhaps the most boring and least reactive person you've ever read about or met, would just laugh at the goal of being "entirely unfazed by everything happening around you." Even he falls in love, experiences great joy and brutal heartbreak, finds his own small ways of making an impact, makes peace with difficult things. For a character who supposedly does nothing important, he does a hell of a lot.

Good luck, I guess!

I'm talking about "Interchange income - rewards expenses," where the difference is 6x higher at the highest FICO scores. And of course interchange income is not the same as cost to the cardholder but they are linked

To be clear though, the higher FICO scores get hosed the most, see the graph earlier on. Your quotes are conditional on FICO so they don't take that into account.

The only way I can put these things together is that at the high FICO end, both wealthier and poorer consumers get hosed a lot but wealthier consumers not quite as much. On the other hand, lower FICO band doesn't get as bad of a deal overall but it is worse for wealther people (plausibly because they have high interchange fees and don't use their rewards).

It's complicated, but... this is not a wealth transfer right? It is a transfer mostly just from consumers to credit card companies that provide them a service.

Patio11 covered this exact topic: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/credit-card-r...

It's clearly more complex than the story these authors are telling, in particular the highest income consumers get the worst returns on their interchange payments. So stores and services catering to wealthy consumers are actually subsidizing an opportunity for savvy customers, many of whom are not wealthy

> Over the last generation, we have solved tons of well-defined problems. We eradicated smallpox and polio. We landed on the moon. We built better cars, refrigerators, and televisions. We even got ~15 IQ points smarter! And how did our incredible success make us feel?

One big outcome of this is being alive more, that doesn't really make you any happier. Also consider stuff like a growing global economy that helps with things like, well, not starting as many global-scale wars that decimate whole cities.

I also think there is a word for someone who is good at poorly defined problems. "Artist." If you define that very broadly and maybe throw in some religious type roles, community leaders, etc in there too, you have a whole group of people who are dedicating their whole life to this problem. But these are super ancient professions and it's not really surprising that we haven't got amazingly better at them recently. I mean, art from centuries ago is still incredible!

Agreed, I loved my biology courses and lab work and had always had a similar sense of wonder about it all. It's interesting, I'm not sure that came from any teacher in particular and I bet there are plenty of people who just never feel it no matter how you teach the subject. That said, those are beautiful illustrations referenced in the article and they have a ton of teaching value, and I think a lot of core concepts that went over my head would have been way more accessible using tools like that.

When I think of Norway, the first thing that comes to mind is its willingness to commit to huge future capex spending. Not to mention, selling more than half its equities in order to buy one risky asset totally aligns with its investment strategy and, you know, having to pay pensions, other minor concerns like that.

In all seriousness though it is pretty interesting to consider if it really happened, a sovereign wealth fund pivots to the crazy high risk strategy, writes a blank check and tries to actually win. If it works does that country just become the rulers of the world?

This was a fantastic year for United, and the margin is ~6%! They lost a similar amount in 2020. The earnings history definitely backs up the story of relatively low margins, weak growth and a fair amount of volatility to deal with.

> For me, the affective quality of learning mathematics is empathetically tethered to an act of discovery and creation. It is social. We are conversant with another mathematician—perhaps long dead. If we follow the chain of communication we arrive at a mathematician who enjoyed some original discovery. Human mathematics is Talmudic. It is a lively discourse of philosophical and religious richness spanning thousands of years.

This is really beautiful. And no matter what happens, two things have to be true: some form of lively philosophic and religious richness will keep being a core part of our history and will touch every person in some way; and it will change enormously over time (maybe with math continuing to be a small part, maybe not).

There is a part of math that is like that. There's also another part (as Vladimir Arnold provocatively said):

> All mathematics is divided into three parts: cryptography (paid for by CIA, KGB and the like) hydrodynamics (supported by manufacturers of atomic submarines) celestial mechanics (financed by military and other institutions dealing with missiles, such as NASA).

> Cryptography has generated number theory, algebraic geometry over finite fields, algebra, combinatorics and computers.

> Hydrodynamics procreated complex analysis, partial differential equations, Lie groups and algebra theory, cohomology theory and scientific computing.

> Celestial mechanics is the origin of dynamical systems, linear algebra, topology, variational calculus and symplectic geometry.

Those parts can just be delegated to AI the same way they used to be delegated to mathematicians. But Arnold continued:

> The existence of mysterious relations between all these different domains is the most striking and delightful feature of mathematics (having no rational explanation).

> When I found myself using a corp-speak term, I questioned whether there was another word that felt more natural and communicated the same thing.

In other scenarios the non "corp-speak" term feels kind of wrong and the "corp-speak" one is actually better though. I feel like this is all just a realization about what the goal of the business actually is and a realization of just how many different goals you could have. In this case it sounds like it's just to do some good writing, not to grow for the sake of making more money or whatever else. And that makes a huge difference in how you talk about it of course.

Also if someone used the word "lead" I'd conclude that they... work in sales? How can that mean anything about whether they'll be helpful to you or not?

Ok one more thought: sometimes the corp-speak feels way less stuck up than "oh actually, I'm a writer. I measure progress not from other people being willing to pay me some money, but in terms of my own highly refined taste. I have many leather-bound books, and..."

> By canonization, I mean the process of taking a local, one-off formalization and turning it into library mathematics: general, reusable, coherent, efficient, and compatible with the rest

I think this kind of work is constantly misunderstood and undervalued. I don't really see it as a binary thing, more like a complex skill that most people are terrible at, some are good at, and a handful of giants use to be just ridiculously productive in their field.

It reminds me of hedgehogs and foxes - foxes tend to be bad at making one off progress on their own, but are critical for accretive work.

Also I was reading a textbook the other day and thinking wow, it is absurd how much more valuable these things can be than other resources, and it's exactly because they canonize. It would be a massive loss if they stop getting written.

It's complicated. If you go put some dollars down on a prediction, the median person you're in it with doesn't have much evidence to support their position and is basically gambling. The median dollar you're up against is coming from some rich guy with knowledge somewhere between "airmchair expert in this topic" and "outright insider trading." And so it's a situation where for some people it isn't gambling at all; it even generates some useful info accessible to everyone; and it's easy not to notice that only a handful of rich people really benefit, because it feels like anyone "can win." The truth is kind of counterintuitive.

Also, having expert knowledge and then making money off of other people thinking they might have it and being wrong... is a choice.

It's also super easy to apply it wrong because going above X% in one area normally means sinking below X% in another. I think a clearer way to say it is that sometimes, you have to be almost perfect, and 98% could sound like almost perfect but it's way too low. But definitely the things you don't need to be perfect far outnumber the ones you do.

Fair, but it's hard because falling behind on the models themselves is a killer. Maybe they're saying they can't spend resources on anything except staying ahead.

One way of reading this is an article about how good Anthropic's product is. "Look at how many serious flaws users have been willing to accept in order to keep using this thing"

But they should just stop reading. It's actually not ok that it's unfamiliar, because makes you reread and get confused and distracted, all for some silly reference that doesn't make a big difference. Life is short! You can read the hard stuff when it's worth it, and just skip the rest. Surely that's the most common thing to do.

The answer is definitely still a big no, but for me the reasoning is because it will make it worse. And you apparently aren't the target audience anyway, so why should I care if you stick around.

(Whereas in the case of harry potter, the goal was to sell books, not just to produce something good).

At my job I switch between writing analysis code for research projects and writing code for apps. The difference in mindset is so dramatic. In the same way that good software has consistent names and interfaces that are ~useless when you just need the code to run once, research code has its own requirements that are ~useless in software. It's honestly a big challenge to switch back and forth. So I think it just reflects the main skillset of the people who use it (caring is not enough).

It's more exciting to think about evil people plotting how they will control the labor force and steal all its knowledge, but I think both the AI use and the alleged extraction of knowledge of design and craft are better explained by, like, "the job got crazy popular, the labor force multiplied, a lot of less passionate people got involved, and then some solutions were found"

Yeah, because it covers all the doctors. It is literally the same as saying you will pay any price. It is a luxury good.

> It’s not hard to understand why people hate health insurers. When you interact with the U.S. health care system, the providers — the hospital staff, the doctor, the nurses, the technicians — all just take care of you.

> Your interaction with the health insurer, on the other hand, feels like a struggle against an enemy who wants to destroy you.

Exactly, the big factor driving healthcare costs is that people like expensive providers. They like the fancy plan that covers their doctor, that doesn't limit them to a community hospital. Any choice that involves retaining even the slightest market leverage is a deal breaker for many people. I think all the clever stuff we do to optimize costs and increase transparency is worth doing and helpful, but like, it will still be expensive. We want that!

Meanwhile it is not really better to go to an expensive doctor, in terms of health outcomes. So the public health problem is to stop people (and employers) from voluntarily wasting their money on healthcare, so we can use it for better stuff.

The LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/incorruptible-spotify-brendan...