gbhn

There are roughly a million violent crimes a year. It is not credible there are 3x as many defensive uses of firearms that are somehow being missed.

The page you reference indexes a few thousand over several years. Seems likely an undercount as the page claims but not by that much by probably a couple orders of magnitude.

A good example of this is comments on this post. They're basically awful and reduce worthwhile traffic on this site by driving away more people than they attract.

The reality of every forum, as the original author says, is that unless you censor topics that attract cranks, you'll eventually become a qanon platform (or the equivalent) and drive out all worthwhile participants.

I'm not sure what the global rule is called, but something like volume nonlinearity or kookiness asymmetry it something. If you have a bunch of looks everyone else leaves. You're options are to get rid of them or fail. It sucks but there it is.

Ultimately wouldn't these rates be set politically? As in, there'd be one politician who says "raise the tax and do this" and another who says "lower the tax and stop doing that" and voters just pick what they want to happen.

Another key factor is enforcement cost. Enforcing a land tax is really easy for a government. You just... Go there and get it. There's no moving the land offshore or having complex relationships or offsets. If someone won't pay the government just assigns the ownership to someone who will and goes on.

Compliance costs with many other taxes are quite high.

That's kind of the thing that makes APIs possible, right? It sounds to me like "what if programming were done in a completely flat global namespace in which abstractions, encapsulation, and structure were impossible."

I think the theory is "there are few enough we didn't notice."

There's other weird effects going on -- some countries that look really really similar have vastly different experiences with the virus. (Canonical example is DR and Haiti, although the situation is dynamic enough no-one knows if that'll last.)

My takeaway from the difficulty in measuring this thing is that there is pretty high variance in transmission. Some carriers spread it REALLY well. Some carriers spread it poorly. With a lot of variance it matters a ton to figure out what is the deal with high-transmission situations. My take so far is we have some clues but no certainty. (Seems to spread in public transit and healthcare environments more rapidly, but slower than you'd expect in schools and prisons.)

It'd clearly be a gigantic win in terms of intervention policy to understand this better, and we simply cannot do that without extensive contact tracing so we know what's going on. They're doing a pretty good job of this in China, HK, Taiwan, South Korea. As nearly as I can tell we're doing a dismally poor job in the US and Europe.

You read papers that have diagrams of restaurant tables and bus seating charts from China. In the US it's hard to get stats on aggregate nursing home vs non-nursing home fatality rates. Maybe it takes some time for these papers to come out, but I don't see evidence that high-quality pre-pub contact tracing data is being relied on to develop policy responses.

See also Krypto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krypto_(game)

Some friends and I were hooked on this game in college. We eventually wrote a program to solve particularly tough hands. It turns out there are a few potential hands that are actually impossible to solve, but not very many! It's a fun programming problem. :-)

There's a mobile version of Krypto as well.

From the discussion on this I've read, I think a good direction would be to consider statistical tests like this as simply not "publishable" at all the way we currently think of it.

That is, if you have a theory about how a Gene relates to height on tomatoes, and you do a test, that test would show you you're likely on the wrong track if it falls below some p value, but the only thing it tells you by being above is that "there may be something here."

I think this is true for many fields with a replication crisis. The problem isn't statistical, the problem is no theory. If you have a functional theory there's all kinds of things you do to gain confidence in it, and mostly those will contribute to the ability to predict statistical results, but that is completely different on kind than sending out a survey and noting that question 2 and 6 are statistically correlated.

When a field thinks that the kind of early suggestive work like this is worth talking about, they should probably just talk about it in conferences and similar venues, rather than "publish" it where journalists will pick it up in a "science shows" story that 95% (lol) of the time turns out to be wrong.

In other words, I think it is fine that fields talk about early non-theory results -- that can be interesting for specialists to advance faster. "Publishing" this mostly-going-to-be-wrong stuff is leading to confusion among the public about what the scientific process demands and how trustworthy it is. That is not a good outcome in my opinion.

Are you suggesting the Chinese market is more competitive due to the government being big enough that companies in the market have to exist in an impartial regime? This isn't the impression I get from many other sources.

A local coin/stamp person was completely uninterested in my old stamps from like 35 years ago. I think the shrinking number of collectors is outstripping the number of collections getting thrown out, and the whole idea of collecting stamps is just fading away.

By "open standards people" I mean "people who prefer open standards". Nothing more sinister than that. :-) (I am one, BTW)

This is already a very small subset of the population -- they've bothered to take a stand on something virtually no-one seems to care about. (At least not directly.)

This last part seems crucial to me. You're right that people care that they can chat with friends. It's the clause I think they glaze over at. Something about applications? I just want to chat!! Of course standards folks, being experts in this, care a lot, but messaging is a canonical example of this. I've personally witnessed years of strategy aimed at open standards go nowhere while proprietary standards win out. It's not because billions of people have strong preferences for open standards!

I do think that there are enough open standards fans, and enough open standards-adjacent folks, to make a strong play for something like messaging. But it's not "abstract XMPP" that's the problem -- it's "real XMPP" with fractures, federation headaches, delays in having it be caught up with capabilities of closed platforms, etc. That's the actual competitor. :-(

Fatalities per passenger mile is a good metric for passengers, but for the FAA, I think crashes per vehicle mile is a better target.

That is, the plane isn't inherently 100x safer if you just fly it empty.

I have some direct experience with this. It is summed up as "open standards people are extraordinarily hard to work with, uncompromising, and subject to infinite fine splitting of the space. Meanwhile, 5 billion users do not care and want things to be easy, fast, work well, and be well integrated."

The result of these two forces is that it ends up being extremely difficult to work on open standards for any kind of data that people care about. (Users can't see HTTP, so it is fine to standardize. They can see blog titles, so... no dice.)

The authors' point seems to be "if you ask people questions whose real answers correspond to informal statistical judgments, then they will give the right answers."

This isn't really that informative, but the strongest form of this argument is "informal statistics is better in a lot of real-world cases." This sounds to me quite a bit like the case the behavioral economists make -- that these intuitions aren't crazy, or stupid, but they do exist. They were constructing tests specifically to isolate them, and succeeded.

A further point is that these kinds of situations when intuitions are challenged happen regularly. I don't know what behavioral economics says specifically about causes, but it seems to me they take a fairly neutral view: such situations can occur by chance, due to hostile intent, or by mistake. Whether the outcome is positive or negative depends as well. The point of "nudge policy" (opposition to which seems to be the main point of the article) is to see about making these situations positive -- that is, arranging the world through policy such that making intuitive considerations actually yields positive outcomes. I don't think the authors' argue successfully for the point that since everyone is rationale and no-one ever gambles when presented with the opportunity, that therefore arranging policy such that intuitive choices yield positive outcomes is unwarranted interference.

The point of the article is that your intuition is incorrect. By inhibiting zipper merging you are forcing congestion backward, and leaving carrying capacity of the road unutilized during congestion when it is most at a premium.

Pushing congestion backwards is exactly the cause of a lit of traffic jams. I've observed this myself every single GD day on the 210W freeway between Hill exit and the 134 exchange. People get over way early, causing huge congestion to the merge entrances. If they'd stay left and zipper, everyone in the jam would save about 5-10 minutes. This is thousands and thousands of dollars a day of cost in completely avoidable congestion in just one two mile stretch of highway ( albeit it a particularly egregious one)

Did anyone else find the variance illustration completely baffling? It's got little to do with an intuitive feel for the variation in outcome for a random variable

The history is that 'fake news" was used to refer to fabricated stories. Following it's surge in.popularity following the 2016 election, Trump realized the term was catchy and claimed falsely to have invented it, but used it instead to refer to "news Trump doesn't like" of various sorts, thus making it a contentious term.

I learn the opposite from NYC: if the city is successful enough to draw a lot of real estate development, the result will be even higher prices.

This more closely matches the actual trajectory of cities like NYC, Tokyo, London, etc.

Interesting! Do you have a book on the subject to recommend?

google.com/search?q=human+echolocation brings up a ton of related stuff.

The thing is "what do you type into the search engine." I, for one, would never think to type in any of probably tens of thousands of topics that, having seen, I think are awesome.

I read over a couple of the papers. The descriptions of them by the authors did not match the content of the papers.

For instance, the one they call "Hooters" is described as "A gender scholar goes to Hooters to try to figure out why it exists." The actual paper is written as a record of transcripts of visits to a restaurant and an extraction of particular conversation themes. At no point did I see the paper questioning why Hooters exists -- the (apparently totally faked) data seems pretty stereotypically motivated, which I think may be their point, but I'm not sure short of a fraud investigation how reviewers are supposed to know that the particular group this author claims to have visited Hooters with didn't say the things supposedly directly recorded. That's a really dramatic claim for a reviewer to make: "This conversation which the author claims is a direct transcription from a recording couldn't possibly have happened because it seems too stereotypical."

Yes, the methodology isn't that great, and the paper was rejected.

More generally, the "study" isn't selecting random journals to see if they could defraud -- it is instead aimed at specific academic targets and a "test to failure" scattershot mechanism is used. Thus we have no idea whether these journals are any more discriminating than, say, PLOS or Nature.

Ultimately, I had some sympathy for the Sokal experiment in that it seemed to say something about the interaction of literary theory and physics. I don't get the same sense that there's much here other than "confirmation bias exists, even among gender studies folks!!!" which seems like it wouldn't take 3 people 10 months to figure out, and could be done in a much more direct way, and honestly isn't that shocking or rattling a conclusion.

You'd appreciate sandstorm.io

I listen to the show a fair amount. It tends toward the "human interest" side rather than "expert interview" side. In other words, the format doesn't seem to me to have a lot of in-built preference for subject matter experts who might tend to be men for reasons beyond the show's control.

Sure, but a main point of a crypto currency is realizing there's no reason to back a monetary currency with anything. It's just a shared hallucination. There's no rational reason a new currency would be "based" on btc holdings. That's just silly.

My view is that the upper end of btc viability is taking over some fraction of why people want gold. The system is way too expensive for a viable txn network (a la cash or Visa) and will never become one.

I read it as saying something a little more subtle, which is that there is a lot of uncertainty in a couple of our critical estimates, and given that uncertainty what we see (no other life in the galaxy) is not that surprising. (That is, if you take the mean and multiply, you get misleadingly-high intuition.)

Of course if we do some more experiments and find that in fact the probability of abiogenesis is better approximated by 10^{-3,-2} that would change the expectations dramatically. This happened recently: we now have much better science around the incidence of earth-ish planets in solar systems, and a better understanding of what seems to contribute to good life-favorable (at least as we understand it) conditions on those planets. So this uncertainty can change with good work.

It's just that at this point it's really quite fair (per the authors) to expect that with more research we might equally well discover that P(abiogenesis) < 10^-100, in which case it would be astounding if we weren't alone in the observable universe.

(Good talk slides: http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/media/eps/jodrell-ba...)

Perhaps a better analogy: let's say you're hiring people with the offer that you'll pay them $2M the first year, then nothing for 20 years. The danger is that the person will quit. So it is more conservative to offer a deal where you pay them nothing for 20 years, then $2M. Then you're pretty sure they'll stay, especially if they're 15 years in.

I think that's probably the best way to understand the salary/pension trade-off. The public sector is geared to be quite risk averse in investments, so it offers back-weighted comp to try to be frugal on training and provide continuity.

There's also basically no other employer that can credibly offer this kind of comp, so the public sector, by offering it, can compete quite well for talent in the space of those interested in that configuration. It's not the only way to run things, but it makes some sense.

Looking at hash rate shares historically, it is incomprehensible that market share would remain so stable through several generations of mining tech. So the existing system is precisely a cooperative benevolent monopoly, albeit an informal one. My guess as to why the miners don't just turn off their equipment and threaten to overturn any non-monopoly block mining is that they just don't know how much of the speculative bubble is based on their behavior, and acting that way might pop it.

My conclusion is that since this is true, the real thing maintaining the system is mutual cooperation of sufficient mining interest. When you look at the theoretical division of hashpower in btc, it looks too stable over generations of hardware. Any non-colluding ecosystem should have centralized. I conclude btc is a collusion system.

So why the pow? Is this stabilizing the actors somehow? It seems like an explicitly managed network would be no less centralized, way more efficient, and way more user friendly.

I've enjoyed this translation many times, and wondered how difficult a job it must have been to adequately do this translation!

There are Bird scooters where I work in LA. They seem really cool! I see people buzzing around on them all the time. I haven't seen any sidewalk blockages or anything, but I can see how at high traffic locations that might be a thing. Why doesn't the city out a scooter rack up? For the cost of a single parking space you could stash like 50 of the things.