WindyLakeReturn

Joined 6 years ago

Karma
302
Submissions
110
Member since
Aug 17
I stared at a reflection on the lake with wind blowing ripples across the surface, thinking of a username. Sadly such a name was too great for the dozen and three character limit so compromises were had.
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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 years ago
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).
Comment · 2 years ago
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.
Comment · 3 years ago
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?
Comment · 3 years ago
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.

Comment · 3 years ago
>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?

Comment · 3 years ago
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.

Comment · 3 years ago
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.

Comment · 3 years ago
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.

Comment · 3 years ago
>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.

Comment · 3 years ago
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.
Comment · 3 years ago
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.

Comment · 3 years ago
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.

Comment · 3 years ago
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?
Comment · 3 years ago
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.

Comment · 3 years ago
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.

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