omalleyt

Three reasons you're not going to see a change like this in the algo:

1) Recommendations are somewhat economic substitutes, not economic complements. Which is to say, most people look at the Amazon page for a given book, then look through the associated recommendations, and (generally) choose only one of the options.

2) If enough people actually bought Silent Spring after reading the Three Body problem, then the Silent Spring would already show up in the recommendations, because Amazon shows you recommendations based on what customers most similar to you also bought

3) If Amazon had shown you Silent Spring BEFORE you read the Three Body Problem, would you have even wanted to read it? Or would you have been like wtf Amazon how is this related? My bet for the average customer is the latter. Amazon can't make money by recommending you things that you won't even want until two weeks later

There have been multiple civilization-wide collapses in those intervening 7,000 years, so he wasn't necessarily wrong for his time period

And until it recently became taboo to do so, many giants of the enlightenment looked back and blamed many of those collapses on moral decay

In a for-profit company, there's a group of people at the top who are paid handsomely for cutting costs (i.e. stock-based compensation). This doesn't exist in NGO's, and so for large organizations with lots of cash flow, bloat balloons exponentially (because the default, human loyalty of an employer is to their employees, not their customer)

Philosophers latched onto the idea of QM in consciousness bc they thought the randomness aspect left room for free will. Of course it doesn't, any more than hooking up an axe over your head that will only drop if a certain atom decays means that you can now choose the time of your death. The point being we don't control the randomness, it evolves according to the laws of QM and therefore there is no role at all for "choice" to play. Also observe that a rock has the same level of access to the underlying randomness of QM and we don't say it has free will. Even if the human brain propagates the randomness upwards to larger systems, there is still no choice in how that is done. Theoretically, it is possible for a rock to exhibit crazy quantum behavior every once in awhile as well.

Of course, free will is an inconsistent notion predicated on the idea that there is a "you" separate from "your chemicals" that would do something different if only that dang physics would let it. But separate yourself from your chemicals and you don't get free will, you get literally nothing. People don't realize the implicit dualism in all of this free will stuff

A beautiful example and well-illustrated by the fact that humans could play catch before the development of trigonometry

Ok, but how would you define "human invention" if not as "something that didn't previously have a material manifestation"?

The idea of non-zero-sum games is that a regulator interested in public welfare would still let the two people you described play that "game," and then would be able to tax and redistribute in such a way that both "players" are still better off for having played.

With zero-sum games the habitual loser would eventually wise up and wish to stop playing

The concept of "circle" is a human invention, in that a perfect circle has never been observed in the universe. The value of pi follows immediately as a derivative human invention.

Well, like Crassus said in the first century BC, "You're not rich unless you can afford your own army."

Hunter-gatherers generally didn't store meat. Therefore, when the best hunter in the group brought home a large animal, he shared it with all. Likewise, there were few physical possessions or need for such, and so these were shared too.

But egalitarian? Not a chance. Studies show that even modern hunters expend enormous energy and risk their lives hunting over the real prize: access to mates.

I would make the distinction between intellectual tasks involving synthesis vs. analysis. Analysis (observation, experimentation, hypothesis testing) can be chunked down and distributed to team members. Synthesis (hypothesis creation) by definition cannot. Ideal structure in my mind is the most capable person should be in ultimate charge of Synthesis, and analysis should flow downstream and be distributed to team members

These thoughts scare me. Utilitarianism is far from perfect. For instance, would we as a society designate 5% of women as lacking right to their own body and allow any man to have them when he wishes? If the pleasure the men gained is greater than the suffering of the women, utilitarians say yes. And even if you say "No, because the suffering of the women will inevitably be greater," is that REALLY the reason that the action I stated above is wrong? Or is it...that women have a moral right to their body that is not subject to the whims of what is best for society

Well, male nipples are spandrels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)

That is, they're useful for the female and not particularly harmful for the male, so they live on.

It's also an instance of DRY (don't repeat yourself) "coding" in our DNA: basically males and females carry the same instructions, with a bunch of randomly interspersed if/else conditions that hinge on the presence of testosterone (coded for in the small Y chromosome)

Foster's rule is actually the reverse of that.

Which can be seen intuitively because non-human predators pick off the weakest and smallest of the pack.

The form of vitamin B6 in supplements is pyroxidine hydrochloride, which at high levels (mostly >100mg/day) can cause peripheral neuropathy. So can zinc.

A lot of times it's overlooked that the form of the vitamin is different from what the body usually receives/produces.

Well, no each shareholder would get 3 stocks for every one they have now. But each stock would represent 1/3 of the stake in the company it used to. Sorry for a purely negative comment, just wanted to clarify. If you think about it, if every shareholder could sell, make money, and retain the same percentage ownership, someone on the other end of the deal is paying something for nothing.

It's not that in perfect competition profit is impossible, it's that in perfect competition the rate of return of capital invested would equal the risk free rate + what are you compensated for the risk you are taking on. You wouldn't see the excess returns that come from rent-seeking behaviors

I'd disagree that giving up on that workout was a good idea. I'm heavily involved in the powerlifting community, and there's a well-known phenomenon where people try and talk themselves into taking an extra rest day or two before "leg day" because leg day is so important that they absolutely have to feel 100% when they do it...problem is they do this every week, so instead of doing 100 leg workouts a year at 95%, they end up doing 70 leg workouts at 100%. And trust me, that's not a good trade-off.

The thing to realize is your mind is just trying to trick you into getting out of something, because leg day is hard.

He's not saying the rich don't hide their wealth: he's arguing that corporations do not report artificially lower profits and then proceed to deny returns to their wealthy owners.

Yup! And the article incorrectly states that humans have more cortical neurons than any other animal. Pilot whales (a misnomer, they're dolphins) have more cortical neurons than humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

Which is especially important because the article takes as given that the number of cortical neurons is what makes humans special.

For anyone interested in the dynamics of the Air Force that explain the abysmal performance of the F-35, and why the F-16 can beat it in a dogfight despite being commissioned 40 years ago, look up John Boyd or read "Boyd: The Fighter Pilot who Changed the Art of War." The Air Force is structured to enable and shelter operational failures such as the F-35

The predictions of pilot wave theory are the same as any other interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the theory isn't new it's been around 80 years

If you accept that all effects have causes, you accept determinism.

Also, determinism will be resurrected. Look at Pilot Wave theory. It explains quantum weirdness with a deterministic worldview, but everyone would prefer to hype voodoo theories.

Many Worlds? That just abstracts the probability one step further, ie why am I in THIS world and not the other one (or if you prefer, why did my universe experience the string of events A-C-C-A-B and not A-C-C-A-A)?

The deterministic solution to quantum mechanics is Pilot Wave theory. It can explain nearly all quantum weirdness. Spacetime vibrates.

The share price likely wouldn't reflect insider knowledge. To see this, take an extreme example. The CEO owns less than 1% of most publicly traded companies. Even if he was allowed to sell his whole position without public disclosure, it wouldn't affect the stock price that much. Say he wakes up and finds out through insider knowledge that his company will go bankrupt tomorrow. He sells all his shares today. The stock drops a bit. It doesn't go to 0 just because he knows it should.

A stock price reflects a weighted average of individual investor's knowledge and their capital.

(Efficient market gets around this by assuming people are cool with not just selling the stock but shorting it all the way until it is as low as they think it should be. People don't tend to bet the farm (or have the ability to borrow funds to bet the farm) like that.)

Pilot wave theory: the "weird effects" that QM displays are really just the result of space time being a thing that vibrates in a wave-like pattern influenced by mass.

And the reason this is cool is because when you put everyday objects in situations like that stated above, they exhibit quantum interference and everything else.

That's how people used to view "imaginary" numbers...and the field of complex analysis laid dormant for 200 years. When a valid geometric interpretation was found that backed up the algebraic existence of these numbers, the field blossomed.

We're humans, we can't understand equations without knowing what they "mean."

The scarce resources implied here is the money that the government spends on medical treatment for the elderly, poor and disabled. Bill Gates obviously could always buy his own medical treatment.

I agree wholeheartedly and also want to point out that people who regularly produce great content can usually capitalize on their audience through other means that don't directly monetize the content. Obviously speaking engagements, hardcopy book sales, and other offerings related to the content you've produced. Content is too general a term to be very specific here.

This visualization is a multivariate linear regression with time trending variables...lol the entire thing is garbage, I could get a better R^2 than the 7 or so variables they used if instead I used variables to explain climate change like: number of gay marriages in the world, murders, abortions, etc...I don't recommend this, I'm just saying trended data can "say" anything