Balgair

I can see doing this for job interviews, and even then only for certain types of jobs too.

But yeah, if I learned that a potential match did this to me, well, I think that would change a lot in my evaluation of that person as a partner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM

reminds me of this Key and Peele skit

You know what? I'm glad that nurses and healthcare workers are finally not thinking of the patients first and are thinking of their pocketbooks too.

No, really, I mean it.

For decades, the healthcare complex has been exploiting these workers to our detriment.

The supply of workers is really high, typically, as there is this nobility to the professions. You are a 'helper', you are 'doing something with your life', you have a 'calling'. That extra feel-feels accounted for a lot of extra people in the workforce and that depressed wages as it increased supply. The actual work itself suffered too, as we all had to deal with burnt out healthcare workers with too many bills and not enough dollars. Even a pandemic barely hurt he business model (as far as I can tell from a quick googling).

But if workers start caring about the money more, then the wages will rise (hopefully), and that will attract better workers and not ones near the near of their ropes financially. We all will be better off. I think this goes for teachers too.

"Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace’."

-George Orwell, You and the Atomic Bomb

I think AI now belongs in this dichotomy too. And we know that they are more like alarm clocks than battleships. Most of us do not need to learn the bitter lesson, we just need a little droid that turns .xlsx documents into .pdf documents for our client, an average here, editing out the ham sandwiches there. Simple little actions that take time and human-like effort but not human-like creativity and conscious thought. Things we used to have literate slaves and serfs do back in the days of triremes and guncotton.

Sure, the large battleship like LLMs will have some need, but the alarm-clock like LLMs are going to be good enough for enterprise-grade.

Related: the reverse Fermi Paradox.

Essentially, we've been humans for about 200,000 years. But only in the last 5,000ish years have we done the whole civilization thing. Why?

Climate has a lot to do with it, we know that, but about 195,000 years is a lot of time too.

Quite the mystery.

Honest question here: What does this mean for Anthropic's OPenAI's rumored IPOs?

2)Why we need to work?

It's a status thing, right?

I'll echo this too. I've liddles in the house and books are a no go right now. If they even let me the minutes to read, that would be great. But I know from repeated experience that books are too fragile for them to have around, let alone the stains and stickiness that young children affect on every surface.

Audiobooks have been a god send and then the Libby app manna from upon high. Free, high quality, adult-level infotainment?! I'll never go back.

One thing if do is up the reading speed. It takes time but I'm comfortable at 2.6x these days, even on the fragmented sleep a teething toddler grants you. For really in depth stuff I'll slow it down a lot, but a Stephen King dime store novel or John Grisham thriller? Oh yeah, speed it up no worries

I think it's a trait with these types that makes them what they are to begin with. They don't just turn it on and off for the bad guys, they're like this all the time with everyone.

Never meet your heroes is just great advice, same as it ever was.

Wait the giant deadly ball of mercury that is highly radioactive for neutron studies? Or is this another mercury thing there?

I hang out on fertility related sites and on twitter.

It's an odd bunch. You have hardcore Jewish rabbis hanging with radical imams and dyed-in-the-wool Chinese communists and everyone in between. It's an issue, like climate change, that effects us all equally.

No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions. It's apartments, it's land use taxes, it's cost of living, it's governmental policy. Sure, some new study like this one, will come along and add in a new wrinkle. But it really seems, to me at least, that the fertility issue is a multi-faceted one with no clear causes nor clear solutions.

Now, once we discover whatever the recipe for fertility decline is, then all those partisans and religious nutters will scatter and then go right back to hating each other. But for now, they play nice. There's a lesson in there, but I'm not sure what it is.

Again, it's a weird little sub domain.

The cost is really tough to pin down, yeah.

The way one of their employees told me it to me as like a dishwasher.

Of course the dishwasher should be more expensive. When you add up the hours in labor saved and multiply by the hourly median wage, you get something in the $50k to $100k range.

But it's essentially just a sprinkler.

Ain't no one going to to pay the cost of a new BMW for a dishwasher.

Same thing here for the laundro-bots. Their competition isn't against the time saved for a person to do it themselves. The competition is a maid that does your whole house for $70.

Oh gosh, I run out by Wednesday usually. But I'm not really coding with it, per se. Mostly just writing docs and tech manuals and AI generation. I'm in biotech.

I have close friends that has quite serious genetic diseases in the family, ones they passed on to their children too. In that, they are in and out of the hospital all the time. And yes, the disease is degenerative.

I know that they went out of their way to a company that does not store genetic info for their sequencing.

In talking with them, they are also very against any form of this screening. The risks of the disease are very bad, but they feel on a population level that the risks of abuse by insurances or governments are much higher, per what they have told me.

Especially in something as squishy as biology. A field famous for withholding any kind of certainty.

Sure, DNA seems like something that is 'real' and 'grounded', but once you get into the specifics of even sample collection and handling, those little errors in the Gaussian distributions start adding up (in quadrature!) and it is surprising how fast the error bars end up swamping any kind of knowledge.

The house they would be buying would come with a much higher tax bill.

Personal anecdata: My folks bought their house for ~70k, it is now worth ~1.5M. The taxes are about 600/year for them, they have no mortgage, paid off decades ago. If they were to try to buy their house again, it would be ~8k/mo just in taxes and mortgage. Moving out of the metro isn't an option as no medical services really exist outside of metros in CA anymore. Same for many other services.

Many older homeowners in CA cannot afford to live there anymore, essentially. They are in a gap/trap.

Yes, you could revoke Prop 13 and let things adjust, but even incremental steps would cause wild swings in property values as the market readjusted, likely causing knock on economic effects in the whole US economy.

Prop 13 y'all

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Any discussion of the cost of housing in CA has to include this. Want to know why the property market there is so distorted?

It's Prop 13.

TLDR: Property taxes only increase 2%/yr (sorta, its complicated) and reset upon sale of the property. So current owners are highly incentivized to stay in place and not move. Supply is held down, so prices rise.

Brown's PLME program is famous for getting you into med school.

And med schools are quite focused on grades.

Same goes for Law Schools, which, again, Brown is an outlier for JDs.

Look, the professor here is right. But he's living in a different time. The students are under the gun here and are responding to their incentives. The prof's gripe should not be with the students but with the AMA or the Bar associations, ultimately.

Essentially, the system is sick, the kids and prof are caught in the middle of it. Don't fight each other, fight the power.

If you want to be a MD or a JD, then you must optimize for grades. The entrance into post secondary education requires it to be so.

Seeing as the article was about Brown and their PLME program is famous for med school acceptance, then I think we should expect that the culture there is more about grades than a generic undergrad university's culture. Which, yeah, is also very grade focused.

It seems that the Oxbridge model is really going to be the only workable one here in the future. Small groups of about 8 total, lead by a proctor, meeting regularly. The social pressures to not cheat in such small groups keep it honest.

The obvious problem with that is it is terribly expensive. You need Masters or Doctoral level people for long periods alone with students and you need to trust that these proctors won't be some form of -ist towards the students and also that their grades will be fair.

It is by design not something that scales.

But it seems that is where the path lies at this point.

Essentially, the aristocracy gets education again and the plebs get to fight/cheat it out amongst each other and paying to do nothing in the end.

Damn it

The world needs to act quick before their industries fail.

It's a cost problem. If you want to try for a SOTA model, you're going to need to spend big time.

Germany spent ~$115B last year on it's defense, roughly 2% of it's GDP.

In contrast, ~$145B was spent last year just on AI infrastructure by Meta, and, well no one talks about Meta winning any AI races.

Aside: Do older populations vote for older candidates? Like, pick a house district, what is the average age there, does that correlate? I suppose you can do the same for states and senate candidates too. And I think we have good historical data too, so does it work going backwards?

If it does correlate to some 'strong' degree [0], then i think we could use it as a bit of a prediction going forward.

[0] It's population stuff so really anything above r>0.35 is good enough

Wait no?

Democracy works exactly because of this?

We just poll all the people, including the dumb ones, and then average out the answers. The dumbs all cancel out in the end. (Yes, of course, I know it is a lot more complex than this)

The whole point of democracy is that we don't know what is the dumb or smart answer so we have these complex functions and dances to squeeze out the best one we can think of at the time. (Yes, I know that the reasons for states to turn democratic are complex)

That's r = 0.81 right? so R2 would then be ~.66. Meaning that 66% of the variation in IQ scores can be statistically explained by variation in SAT scores.

It's really high for psych stuff. If you even get r=0.5, you've got a great result there.

But it is important to note, I feel, that SAT maps to only about 2/3 parts of the IQ score, and IQ score is also a quite fuzzy measure here for things like knowledge work job performance.

I do agree though, you get quite a bang for your buck just reporting these numbers.

But, if you explicitly tie money and compensation to the SAT score, man, that is setting up some very perverse incentives around it. If it adopts widely to do so, then you're gonna get some really strange interaction effects there.

For other readers:

Pay attention to the vibes and evidence in this thread.

Ask yourself how this community slots into your media diet.

I was talking about my org, but thanks for the insight.

Anecdotally in my org (low down biotech), the AI users are quite few.

Of those that use AI, most have finally cleared out their backlogs that were just never ending before AI. That took about 3 years to accomplish.

Now they have the time to do more ambitious projects. And many are doing just that.

I do not see AI taking jobs, I see it more as everyone got a great secretary/junior to offload 'busy' work onto.

Think of even the lower level employees now having access to some of the time saving labor that the old robber barons and fat cats had with legions of secretaries and go-get-em younguns.

Time will tell what becomes of all this, it still very early days, but I mostly see the effects of AI in my current life as like a tool. A great multi-tool, sure, but still just a tool.

Academic Science in the U.S. was pretty ill and needed a lot of reforms. We can all admit that.

But this solution is absolutely not the way to go about doing that.

From my psuedo-outsider [0] perspective, the capable and good people are fleeing or being forced out, but the jerks and asshats that were ruining it all are staying. If you thought in the late 2010s that we were boiling low tide in the ivory tower, then today we're just concentrating raw sewage. The abuse cases are exploding among grad students, anecdotally.

[0] I have a lot of friends and family in academia

Whew! thank you!

Serious question here: Can we trust these numbers out of this admin? I've not been super plugged into the latest news out of the BLS, but I seem to remember a lot of political firings in the 'econ' part of the government.

I do not mean to be glib here either or start a flame war. I am genuinely asking.