WindyLakeReturn

While there are exceptions, and in general exceptions seem pretty common, they still require businesses to officially get approval and it gives power to parents to enforce rules that would otherwise be hard to do so. Even with the exceptions for children to legally be allowed to drink, I would be surprised if that led to more kids drinking than alcohol obtained illegally, which means the question should be back on how well does the law work (obviously not perfectly, but there is a large gap between perfect and so poorly that it is useless purely from an efficiency perspective).

The ban we have on gambling seems weak. From trading card games to loot boxes to those arcade games that look to be skill based but are entirely up to chance, children are allowed to do all. The rules feel very inconsistent to the point that they appear arbitrary in nature.

There are infinite many such strings, so that alone can't be used to prove the Turing machine of k states can check all strings. So that leaves open the original question, how do we know that a Turing machine of k states is able to have one of the stated outcomes for any possible bit string?

Is it terrible? If we were to remove the system and keep it gone for some set amount of time, once people realize it was really gone, would crimes not come back?

We can compare to other countries and see their rates of crime, but such comparisons are difficult to make accurately because you are judging all social differences at once, not just a different legal system. Including things like how much lead has the population been exposed to, effect of poverty and sense of community. Things far beyond the legal system.

Have all of the people scammed been brought whole?

Can you ever make them whole? Even if you pay them back all their money, there is the period of time without, the fear and pain from losing it, and similar that cannot be undone. For other crimes, there is often a victim whose state can never be fully reverted. If this is our view of justice, then justice becomes an impossible thing which can never be achieved. Does such a stance risk people eventually no longer chasing what can never be acquired?

The food bank I worked at had guidelines per item group. Different items had different levels of strictness, though any worker was free to throw away any item if they thought it was spoiled or too badly damaged. Dents were okay as long as it remained sealed.

My guess is the strictness of the rules is driven by availability of resources and the level of need being met by the organization.

Controlling for population density doesn't control for the impact of population density on the issue at hand, as these are two different factors which are related and which are named very similarly.

Consider this simplified example.

11 areas. 10 of these are isolated and have 10 people living in each area. The last area has 100,000 people living in it. Of those 10 areas, 9 have 0 incidents, and 1 has 1 incident. In the 100,000 area, there are 100 incidents.

Not controlling for the population: The populated area has 100 incidents, the isolated areas have an average of 0.1 incidents. A 1,000 times difference. Populated area is much more dangerous.

Well that's obviously the wrong way to look at the data, so lets account for population:

Isolated areas have a rate of 1 per 100 population, populated areas have a rate of 1 per 1,000 population. A 10 times difference, in the opposite direction. So now we have established a link between being isolated and have more incidents, but we don't know why.

We still haven't controlled for the impact of population density on incident rates. We need much more data to solve this, as with the given information the result would be "Isolated areas have 10 times the risk of incidents" and then controlling for that factor we would see no more trends in our data. If we added thousands of more areas with different levels of population, calculate the per capita rate of incidents in each population, and then create an analysis of how populate density relates to incident rates, we could then control for both factors. The catch is that this last step is more difficult without enough data and often researchers aren't able to isolate single individual items to control for because they correlate too strongly with other issues.

Is there anything really special happening here? For a non-technical individual, it can be hard to tell when someone technical is providing value and when they are, to use the term in this post chain, being a parasite. A technical person has the same issues with non-technical people. I've seen different non-technical business areas have this issue with other non-technical areas. I've read reports where supposedly entire departments were cut and the result was that they mostly parasites and the business did better after losing them, along with times such a decision killed a company.

I'm not sure there is anything really special with engineers in this situation. It seems like one of many varieties of the same problem with telling who is producing value and who is faking the appearance of producing value.

The ball starting to move without anything acting on it would violate other principles of classical mechanics.

Isn't gravity acting on the ball? Ideally a ball balanced a the tip of a bowl has 0 net force, but only because it has the force of gravity pulling it into the bowl and an equal force from the bowl pushing back. This would require assuming a reality where there is no smallest particle, no atoms making up the bowl or ball as they are both perfect mathematical objects comprised of infinite points no matter what resolution you look at them at.

The issue is that such a system, if it can be created by rolling the ball up the bowl with perfect precision from any direction, indicates that it is unstable and may reverse at any point, but without any obvious reason causing it to do so. So either the system has some non-deterministic factor which allows for the perfect stability to break at an arbitrary time in an arbitrary direction or it isn't time reversible as the ability to roll the ball up the bowl cannot be reversed.

Looking at it another way, can you tell the difference between a ball I perfectly rolled to the top of the bowl 10 years ago and one I did 10 seconds ago?

I do wonder if we've added so many assumptions, with mathematically perfect objects and infinite precision forces that we have created some sort of paradox. We have hit levels of perfectly spherical cows that cause even the perfectly spherical cows to complain about unrealistic standards.

I think they have done that. The catch is that these scientists are likely to take their time, because they want to produce something with weight behind it. This isn't lab #5234's attempt to reproduce it which showed some weird behavior that might be a success, this is the expert report on the original material giving second opinion on how valid the first's claim is. That needs to have more care, which means more thoroughness doing the research and more time spent writing up the final result with care. If lab #5234's attempt ends up being a false positive or experimental error, it will be one of many and won't mean much, but if this particular report is wrong or has a major error, that is going to be impactful in a negative way.

If we assume they are two normal distributed characteristics that aren't related, then it is a natural consequence once you select for those who are at the top of either distribution.

Someone in the top 10% of competency or charisma will have average distribution of the other. If you consider the full population, you'll find no relationship, but because you are only look at the top 10% of each, those in the top 10% of one will be average in the other and vice versa. While some (~10% of each top 10% group) will be represented in the other group, you'll still find that they are more likely to be at the bottom of the group in the second group.

The end result is that if you only plot the data for the top 10% of each group, there will be an inverse correlation.

This can hold true even if there is a positive relationship between the two characteristics depending upon the strength of the relationship and how selective you are in selecting the top of each group.

This leads to some interesting results, such as when fruits are grown for look and shelf life risk losing taste and flavor despite these factors being unrelated.

If privacy is really private, and not merely a promise from a benevolent entity they won't look at your details, not that they can't, then you will always find in your company those who need privacy because they are hiding from all of society that hate them. Even if we were to go 100,000 years into the future where morals are entirely different and alien to modern day ones, if privacy exists at all, you'll find it most popular among those whose behaviors are the most morally repugnant to the futuristic society.

Privacy is good even when you have nothing to hide, but it is imperative for those who do need to be hidden. The ethical issues I generally see people concerned with are ethical issues with privacy itself, not a specific implementation.

This feels like something that would, at large scale, be unhealthy for science as a whole. While existing papers have already gone through their own quality checks, this enables bad, misleading, or false statements to propagate which can end up being a blow to the credibility of the entire model. Shouldn't there be an ethical duty to due one's due diligence?

This gets into the social construct of what makes a race and what qualifies as racism. For example, often discrimination based on ethnicity and not race still gets classified under racism even though it wasn't based on race. For a purely pedantic sense, it is ethnicism or some such word that doesn't seem to exist, not racism. Yet we generally recognize it as 'close enough' and group it together. Birth place discrimination can often be thrown in for the same reason, especially if there are racist beliefs concerning birth place that factor into the logic (assuming that anyone born in Asia must be Asian).

Close enough to count if this were horseshoes.

Isn't the actual simulation argument based on information density being bounded in a way that doesn't make sense. Something like we would think information density should be bounded by 3d. You have twice as much 3d space, you can hold twice as much information. But the physics argument (and I think it is still theoretical physics) is that it is actually bounded by the 2D surface area of that space, not the 3D volume. I forget the details of how this ties into simulation.

I also think there is some math in general relativity that works out much better if we assume 3D space is actually the 3d-surface area equivalent of a 4d space (and not the 4d space time), which makes us more like a hologram of 4d space. But this is another one where I forget most of the details that actually matter.

These combine give us the hologram simulation that pops up in pop culture from time to time, but what you read about in any blog or news article has nothing to do with the actual math and science behind the theories/hypothesis/what ifs.

A changer that initiates a single change is themselves changing, from a state of not implementing change to a state of implementing change. This also assume a foundation of before and after, that there is a sense of time.

This is like looking at the big bang and asking why caused it. If something caused it, why did it cause it when it did and not before or after? Is there even a before or after when discussing the cause of the big bang?

The answer is that is we don't know. We have no knowledge on what is before then, why did time start when it did, and if logic even applies to given the lack of time or the possibility of other dimensions of time that is harder for us than seeing in 4 spatial dimensions is.

There is also an issue with Lemma 2. Why can't there be an infinite tower going forever? Even if something caused the start of time, something had to exist before that. Suggesting a first event might be akin to suggesting a starting number.

At most, even if we ignore all these problems, you just proven a starting point exists. Nothing about the starting point, nothing to claim it is a deity, much less the Abrahamic one. The beginning could also just be the big bang, a starting point with no before.

Oh defining a framework that defines incarceration is hard so we should just have slavery. Got it.

That is not my argument.

My argument is that incarceration is a subset of slavery. Accepting one specific subset of slavery doesn't mean bringing back chattel slavery or legalizing sexual slavery. You ideally want to prevent any loopholes and keep a very specific limit on what is allowed for prisoners to avoid horrible things we see in modern day prisons and in prisons for the past.

Slavery means NO days off. If you are sick, you have to get up at 5:30am and go wait in line outside in the freezing snow for sick call (you also have to do this for 'pill line' if you have any meds, though you aren't charged the $5 a pop for that). Sick call costs $5 a visit. You make $5 a month. Then the doctor says 'drink water and take an aspirin' and clears you to go to work. Aspirin is only available from the commissary in large overprices bottles about to expire. You are REQUIRED to throw the bottle away when it is expired or you will get a shot for 'contraband'. You can not share aspirin with others. Hopefully you planned ahead and saved your $5 for 2 months to afford a bottle of aspirin in case you got sick, and it hasn't expired before you get sick. When you get to work, sick, no exception is made for your physical condition. If you work HVAC you're still climbing ladders in the snow to the roof.

Even if you banned any labor, you could still have prisons who have extremely unreasonable charges for goods and services due to the, quite literal, captive audience. Imagine your same situation, except there is no work to get paid. You either have to have an external source of money from before being put in prison, have someone sending you money, or this gets added to a bill that eventually the government will have you repay once you are out of prison. No labor for profit, but still all the problems you point out.

Slavery means I was forced to shovel the compound with a shovel with a broken handle so exposed fiberglass that cut me up.

Conditions of tools provided in prison are also independent of any notion of labor from profit. You can have a prison where people are given horrible tools for their daily rehabilitation tasks even though there is no profitable labor occurring. If you have people running the prison seeking to torture prisoners, they can do so even in a situation where there is no labor for profit. These are obvious bad things as well, but I don't see how these things being bad relate to my question.

While I think there is a definite issue with prisons being used as a source of labor, I also don't see how you can have prison without it being slavery. At the very core, putting someone in a limited area they do not want to be in, forcing them to stay there under threat of violence, and forcing them to behave seems to be a form of slavery.

Even if we were to consider a nice prison focused around rehabilitation and not exploitation, there are still things the prisoner is forced to do. They are forced not to leave. They are forced to follow certain rules. They are forced to move between locations at certain times of the day. They may be forced to attend classes or do specific types of labor like cleaning their rooms or common areas. Unlike a job where you might be 'forced' to clean, but you can always quit, quitting is rarely a choice for the prisoner and will result in worse punishment. Even if the prison does not directly profit off the labor of the prisoner, this level of control seems to be a form of slavery. Rarely do I see slavery defined as requiring profit to be made off the slave, though slavery rarely happens where it isn't found to be profitable by the person doing the enslaving (based on the enslaver's own view of what counts as profit).

If we were to fully ban slavery even for prisons, then for even nice prisons to continue to exist we would have to define some other non-slavery action which would include having control of where a person lives, how they live, when they sleep, and all the other powers of a prison. In such a case, it would then be possible for a state to allow this non-slavery even for people not convicted of a crime, because it isn't slavery and thus isn't a violation of the 13th amendment. Generally things like kidnapping laws as they currently exist would prevent any private entity from doing this, but exceptions might be carved out. On realistic example would be teen rehabilitation camps which already can border on the legal limits of kidnapping, false imprisonment, and slavery. Some stories from these places already sound like they might be crossing the line, though that might only be allowed as long as they are dealing with minors with parental approval. I could reasonably see a state extending such treatment until the teen is 21 or such.

It doesn't seem to do anything other than play word games with what counts as an 'idea' instead of what counts as 'speech'. An attempt to reset the existing case law, philosophy, etc., without facing it head on. Perhaps we need to reconsider if images count as speech. What about algorithms? Is an algorithm an idea? Even if it is an algorithm that generates an image?

The issue I see developing is that any attempt to carve out what is not desired by some group is going to create standards that will let other groups carve out what wasn't intended in the first place. Look at how encryption is under attack and one common way it is attacked is by claims of how it promotes the spread of CSAM. So government asks for reasonable backdoors that will only ever be used to stop such material, yet tech circles realize that any such backdoor will allow for arbitrary power to block any material.

At the time reddit was not some unknown back corner of the internet and had already begun working with law enforcement to enforce anti-CSAM laws due to material being treaded in private messages and private subreddits. That it took a media exposure take down the specific subreddit indicated that it was likely on the legal side of the line, through it was going close enough to the line to make others uncomfortable. If the material was actually illegal, wouldn't it have made reddit the largest clear-net site containing CSAM? In such a case, I find it hard to conceive that media exposure and not legal actions is why led to it shutting down, and with no admins being arrested it seems the most reasonable assumption left is that it was on the technically legal side.

This would likely be like the use of underage subjects in nudist art, painted, drawn, or photographed. Such art is generally not considered pornographic and are legally protected, and some even displayed in museums and the like, yet websites will still ban the material to not have any relationship to it and to not have users trying to push the boundary. I'm speaking to the extent that rules are enforced, many websites have issues with enforcing rules in general due to the amount of user generated content being much larger than the amount of moderation available, so there will be something slipping through moderation from time to time.

Given that many times we have children hurt by the same laws meant to protect them, I have begun to wonder if the blanket desire to protect children is actually based on a desire to protect children, or to fit in with current culture where anyone without that desire is seen as an extreme outsider who is to be punished. Was this road to hell paved by people with good intentions or was it paved by people whose primary motivating factor was appearing as if they had good intentions.

For example, look at how anti-CSAM laws have been used to harm teens sexting in far worse ways than the harm that is risked by engaging in such action.

Is this age range the ones most commonly sending photos, or the one most commonly caught (as a photo sent by a 16 year old is more likely to pass as 18 and not be caught by any detection software or manual detection)?

At face value, the idea that this specific age group is sending more such photos than the older cohort is surprising enough I would reject it as bad data without further research into why it is happening. Selection bias seems a much more likely explanation.

allowed to calculate past the divergent part

My question was more in doubting if the divergent part actually existed.

n!x^n will eventually diverge for 0<x<1, regardless of how small x is, but was that really the issue? I thought the problem was more a question if g(n)x^n would diverge when g(n) involves computing n! Feynman diagrams. It can't be automatically assumed that computing n! Feynman diagrams leads to an answer that grows comparable to n!. Or maybe it can, but I didn't see that argument being made anywhere, though I may have missed it.

I eventually started doing much the same, down to the club soda and lime, but I only did so after my young adult years had passed and even then I would receive a few comments that indicated a disapproval of me remaining fully sober while others around me were not. I am still puzzled by this because almost everyone around me was driving home that night, so either they weren't drinking enough for it to matter, or they were and yet their plans to drive drunk were less notable than my avoidance of alcohol. It was done in more of a joking way, but the sort of joking way that social norms are enforced because even a friendly callout is different than no callout at all.

Given the extent that alcohol related establishments serve as the third space for young adults, at least in stereotypical US culture, I do wonder if there is a point where increasingly avoiding alcohol becomes detrimental. I'm thinking not merely bars, but social drinks with coworkers after work (with a chance of informal skip levels), social events where alcohol is a main attraction, and even college organizations where alcohol access (often before 21) is a primary motivator to join.

Something can be legally required but also have been originally made into a requirement as a dark pattern. The idea that something is legally defined as being 'conspicuous' in a way that makes it less conspicuous makes me consider that a dark pattern was the original intent. While I commonly hear to never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, I don't feel that is applicable to the legal system.

I think this ends up being a question that is the cousin of Bertrand's paradox. In that case, the English words in the original question, despite feeling concrete in what they ask for, leave enough vagueness to give different ways to solve the problem that all seem to satisfy the query but give incompatible answers. I say this because I see two similar phrases in your query that seem to carry equal levels of assumptions.

First is the idea of simple. If something has a few very well defined rules that are understood in isolation, but whose emergent behavior is beyond our ability to define, is it simple? Conway's Game of Life is somewhat the default example. 2 very simple rules (or perhaps more, depending upon specifically how you count them), but it gives rise to a Turing complete system. Math itself is another example, as mathematicians seek to find simple rules from which math arises, yet even for the subsets of math that are limited to such rules, is it really fair to call it simple?

The second idea is that of an underlying structure. Does the universe have an underlying structure, and even if it does, does that exist in side of some more foreign concept? What happens before the big bang? Why did the big bang happen when it did? Are there other universes, both from the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and universes that entirely separate from our own. These seem questions that feel almost entirely in the realm of science fiction, not physics, but there are plenty of theoretical physicists who dive into this field even though it currently doesn't produce testable hypothesis and is thus outside the scope of proper science.

So one question I have in the introduction section is that it seems the article misses the difference between the number of Feynman diagrams to calculate a_n and the value of a_n. They point out that the the number of Feyman diagrams grows ~n!, which is much larger than the rate x^n shrinks (given 0<x<1). If the number a_n calculated by Feyman diagrams doesn't grow proportional to the number of Feyman diagrams, then it is still entirely possible for x^n to shrink faster than any change in a_n.

Based on my limited knowledge of particle physics, physicists are currently able to calculate using Feynman diagrams because a_n does grow less than x^n shrinks. There are some equations (I think dealing with specific forces/fields) where the constant it larger than others which makes calculates much harder. x ~=.7 shrinks much slower than x~=.007. Yet even then the general trend does hold and it does allow for making calculations which can then be tested against experimental data.

What we find is that our calculations do match the experimental data. It isn't a perfect match, there is room for error and confidence intervals and such. The important point is that what this article suggest doesn't seem to happen. If at some point a_n grew much faster than x^n shrunk, then the real world solution would diverge and our answer from calculating n out to 5 wouldn't closely match the data. It almost sounds like the article is suggesting things will diverge only once we calculate out for n>100 or so, but reality doesn't await for those calculations. If this problem really existed, it would happen because reality is calculating out n all the way to infinity even while the physicists can not.

So I'm left with two possible conclusions.

1. The article is misunderstanding the relationship between the number of Feynman diagrams needed to calculate a_n and a_n itself.

2. The real critique is that the current model is wrong because the model diverges, not that reality itself diverges. Thus while this model is approximate for what we currently calculate, it is inherently wrong.

The second issue is an interesting idea. A model that looks correct and is correct for all calculations done so far, but which may no be correct for more detailed calculations but which we do not and will not have the computation power to test at that level.

I don't think they care who it is, but they care who is a who. They aren't concerned about it being an AI because that concern hasn't crossed their mind. If it becomes common knowledge that the people responding are bots, I think we will see others begin to react.

I've seen similar reaction in communities around enjoying art, even though I find those have less reason to care where the art comes from.

Aren't the images in that wikipedia link misleading?

In the original case, you have the following statement: If even, then red. You also have 4 cards, 3, 8, red brown. So two numbers that relate to the if side and two colors that relate to the then side.

In the second picture, you have the statement: If drinking alcohol, then >=21. You also have 4 chards. 16, 25, soda, beer. So two numbers that correlate to the then side and 2 drinks that correlate to the if side.

But the way they arrange and color code the cards makes people associate the drinks with the colors and the ages with the numbers, which is mixing up the if and then.

Granted, this isn't a problem in the text explanation, but could lead to further confusion by someone trying to create associations between drink alcohol status and color when it is really drink alcohol status and even/odd.

Unrelated to my the rest of my comment, I found that despite having what I would consider a very logical brain, I did have a much simpler time solving the drinking problem than the original one. I reach a satisfactory conclusion in each, but the drinking one felt more natural and intuitive while the original problem included a pause and double checking my logic. I would like to be tested on social rules that aren't part of my current social context to see if that played a roll in this specific instance (the article says there is evidence that the effect persists even when the rules aren't part of the existing culture, but that is a general trend and may not apply to specific instances).