Double_Cast

My take is that pattern-matching is thinking. But it's low-quality thinking. High-quality thinking is logic. And higher still is causality, which is to logic what calculus is to algebra. I.e. if logic studies the relationship between x and y, then causality studies the relationship between dx and dy. And causality is what we actually want, because causality is power. E.g. causality is what lands astronauts on the moon. When folks like Judea Pearl complain that current AI isn't truly thinking, they're complaining that current AI can't reason logically/causally.

Potential violence != actual violence.

The potential to commit violence can be reframed as strength. It's useful because it grants you negotiating leverage, regardless of whether you are the aggressor or defender. Can't defend yourself? Vae victis.

The most energy you can extract from any type of bomb would be if it was converted to energy at 100% efficiency.

Under normal circumstances, a bomb's energy is endogenous. But in the blog's thought-experiment, the energy is assumed to be exogenous. Therefore, your assumption that "the explosion is bounded by the mass of the person" doesn't apply to this scenario. Instead of TNT, imagine a rubberband.

fwiw, Tolkien wrote the trilogy only after fans requested an encore of The Hobbit. The ring's importance/malevolence was a retcon.

To me, the distinction maps onto the Effectual vs Causal distinction. For some path "A to B", some people prefer to consider their present tools/resources (point A) and work forward opportunistically. While others prefer to consider the end-goal (point B) and work backwards recursively. If the analogy is unclear: a theory is a tool; a specific problem is an end-goal.

I tend to frame this in terms of the Multi-Armed Bandit Problem. It's a trade-off between exploration vs exploitation. It's often impossible to predict beforehand which strategy is optimal for a given environment. Which, I suspect, is why progressive temperments and conservative temperments coexist.

The retiree example is intended to demonstrate that a wealth tax is inherently perverse, regardless of who is targeted. Savings are just deferred expenditure and debt is just expedited expenditure. When you tax wealth, you expedite consumption.

Another way of thinking about this: A wealth tax is like inflation, except assets are also devalued alongside your savings. Which means the wisest strategy is to consume now, save nothing, invest nothing.

One benefit of markets is price-discovery. But if you're not participating in a market, determining price is akin to shaking a magic 8 ball. It assumes a Just Price, which is a heuristic and a fiction.

Also, quality of living is determined by income, not wealth. Fresh retirees are generally wealthier than other age-groups because they've saved for retirement. But that doesn't mean they consume more. Also, consider the citizens of the Netherlands. They enjoy a comfortable existence while servicing an enormous amount of debt. If wealth were the primary determinant of quality of life, you'd think the Netherlands were as as destitute as Somalia.

The point isn't "matrix multiplication != scalar multiplication". The point is "the process of evaluating a reducible expression inherently discards information about the original expression", which is a fact about evalution rather than any specific operator. The fact that "the information discarded is of little consequence to the compressed result" is a quirk specific to scalar multiplication. Thus, the commutative property distracts from explicitly modeling the "AST" so that the student understands what multiplication represents under the hood, beyond the rote memorization of scalar multiplication tables.

Perhaps an analogous situation would be: Suppose a teacher wanted to introduce the notion of limits to a calculus curriculum. "That makes zero sense. The only things a student needs to know are the shortcuts for each parent function, e.g. that (d/dx x^2) reduces to (2x) via handwavey magic." But what if an engineer needs to integrate over an arbitrary curve? Can students solve the problem without being comfortable with Riemann Sums? Maybe 1st-year calc students should rederive the shortcuts from scratch? "Except we're talking about a math course, not an engineering course."

In particular this bit regarding multiplier/multiplicand makes zero sense to me.

Isn't 2 rows x 3 chairs the same thing as 3 chairs x 2 rows? It's a bizarre argument.

It's bizarre to simias (and you, I assume) because y'all can't imagine performing the operation without thunking. (Don't get me wrong, I think "repeated addition" is the best method. I'm just attempting to explain the opposite perspective so that it feels less bizarre.)

I tend to think of multiplication as a transformation. "repeated additional" almost makes it sounds like we're merely telescoping an interval within a single dimension. Whereas "transformation" (to me), evokes more of a Cartesian Product or Quadrature sort of mental image.

Suppose your friend Alice arranges your wedding. You ask her to arrange the lawn chairs in an arrangement of 2 rows and 3 columns. But she misinterprets your request as 3 rows and 2 columns. Oops. Now a particular family can't all sit in a single row without rearranging the chairs.

If all you care about is the total number of chairs, the order of operands is irrelevant. but if you care about the structure, "2 x 3" may encode information that "6" does not.

Bubbles are inductive. Arbitrage is anti-inductive.

I think snarfy is expressing incredulity that meteorology doesn't already account for these types of emmissions. Analogously, suppose the headline had read

Water flows downhill. Scientists want to know why.

"But gravity makes everything flow downhill, right? What makes water especially worthy of investigation." Surely this is a reasonable reaction.

A literal trigger is a lever that fires a gun. A figurative trigger is some event that sets in motion a cascade of events that occur in rapid succession. The root cause of firing a gun would probably be analogous to loading the chamber with a live round. Which may have occurred hours, days, months, etc before the trigger was pulled.

I think the distinction is that the "trigger" relates to a particular instance of failure, whereas the "root cause" relates to a class of failures.

Slowly I became like Gollum. Which is ironic because I love The Lord of the Rings for the exact opposite reasons: calling for adventure, exploration, to love your friends, and to live in harmony with nature.

...

When the lock-down was in full effect it dawned on me: bitcoin is indeed utterly useless when things go haywire. What's the point of wealth if you can't do anything with it, won't do anything with it, or have no one to share it with.

During his journey home, Bilbo gifts a portion of his treasure to the King of the Wood Elves. This generosity is juxtaposed with Thorin, who

  A) Roped his 12 buddies and Bilbo into a speculative venture (with ZERO plan to realistically defeat Smaug), 
  B) obsessed over the Arkenstone to an unhealthy degree, 
  C) refused to share the spoils with Lake Town or the Wood Elves, and
  D) locked himself away in the mountain. 

IIRC Grant formerly made videos for Khan Academy, and thus uses the same virtual-blackboard as Sal. However, Grant animates with a Python lib whereas Sal draws by hand.

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

The Office – How Michael Scott Makes a Sale

(7 min video essay)

TLDR he's a people-person.

Ideally, the mapping from object to image is injective. What you're proposing will lead to "hash collisions" aka blurriness, since each point in the object will bleed colors into neighboring points in the image.

The entire object doesn't get collapsed to a single point. Rather, a single point of the object radiates light in all directions. A lens then captures a fraction of that radiation and collapses it back down to a single point. Then we iterate over each point in the scene with a "for each".

I feel obliged to contextualize "Billionaires Build" on behalf of the unaware.

Marc Andreesen published an essay "It's Time to Build" [0]. He claims that ostensibly, COVID-19 inflicted acute trauma on the U.S. economy. But it merely excaberated the symptoms of a deeper dysfuntion. The root problem is the cultural decay of "a will to build". The solution is to rekindle this norm.

Several have published their own takes [1]. pg must have figured "What you can Learn from How to Ace a YC Interview" conveniently dovetails into the larger debate. Had he written the essay in a vacuum, I suspect he'd have emphasized "sell users what they want". Rather than the grand narrative "civilization is built by founders" which might increase exposure but possibly dilute the original intent.

[0] https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/

[1] https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that...

I think Barron92 is drawing a distinction between "lust for power" vs "effective use of power".

If the goal is truth, you cultivate a desire to learn to succeed under diverse scenarios. The incentive is success itself. In a particular scenario, Falsehood can offer greater benefit than Truth. But the advantage of Truth, is that it provides your decision-making a robust foundation, even under volatile conditions. "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."

If the goal is recognition of bias, you cultivate social-norms which incentivize critique (both in yourself and others). Notice, however, that this begets perverse incentives. I.e. you can fool yourself, "recognize" a billion biases, then applaud yourself for your diligence. You can also invent new biases that don't actually make much difference.

Ironically, the Rationalists might frown on this. Several posts in the Sequences had a theme of "don't do what's raTi0NaL, do what actually wins." E.g. "The Ultimate Newcomb Problem" [0]. HN recognizes this same meme as "goal > tool".

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RAh4fekdiRhZxb2Kw/the-ultima...

* It's instructive to track the underlying resource. If technology_A saves you time, it's more time-efficient (aka quick). If technology_B saves you money, it's more cost-efficient (aka cheap).

* In game theory, "7 hospital beds" weakly dominates "8 hospital beds". But (x') strictly dominates (x, y, z). This is exactly what Pareto Optimality is about. Though perhaps a more colloquial term would be useful here.

They're orthogonal for non-trivial decisions. Once you hit the efficient frontier of anything, you need to start making trade-offs.

Suppose you're playing a videogame. Your character just leveled up. You can upgrade either Attack or HP.

* "Upgrade Attack" is more efficient. It allows you to beat the game faster. But since your HP is low, you can't afford to make mistakes (get hit).

* "Upgrade HP" is more robust. It increases your damage-buffer, which allows you to absorb more mistakes without dying. But if you make zero mistakes, you won't beat the game as quickly as if you'd upgraded Attack.

IRL the dichotomy is often "income vs wealth", "velocity vs displacement", "throughput vs latency", "strength vs endurance", etc.

From what I've read elsewhere, an octopus's pupils isolate colors via chromatic aberration. They can see a range of colors, but only one color at a time.

https://slatestarcodex.com/comments/

I see this as analogous to saying

Numbers are inherently binary. You could call 93 "a decimal number", but I would just call it "a number". There's no point in having the term "decimal" since the tech stack is all just "(binary) numbers" beneath layers of indirection.

Surely you see the usefulness in assigning each layer of indirection a unique qualifier?

I'm not complaining that teacher salaries are too high or too low. I'm complaining that: A) you're reinventing the Paradox of Value; and B) you're challenging the norm without proposing an alternative economic model.

"Just pay teachers according to the intrinsic value of their profession." But it's not immediately obvious what this means in practice. Suppose wages were set not by congress and not by the market. According to your moral calculus, what is the correct wage and how is it determined?

Wages vary according to marginal utility rather than total utility. The question is not "what if all teachers disappeared", but "what if one particular teacher disappeared".