melonrusk

It produces neutrons and exploding atoms, so it has already turned out shit.

I have no idea what this article is talking about, but if there are two plausible representations for the whatever-it-is, why not allow it to be represented both ways ?

> if Russia somehow gets a successor, he (or she) would stop the war, blame everything on Putin, beg for lifting of sanction and resuming the trade.

If the war stops, deliveries will resume through the overland pipelines, so Nordstream is largely irrelevant so far as Putin's rivals are concerned.

> In the End, Climate Change Is the Only Story That Matters

Hang on, just let me check the goalset....

Nope, nothing in there about what temperature the paperclips should be.

Maybe they're referring to increased migration from the Global South ?

New UK houses would all be cavity-wall so is there a reason the inside of the exterior wall isn't being used as the source ?

Late addition:

It's actually worse than that. If we take a population with only median and maximum talents, the probabilities for each event are: halving: p=0.5, doubling because median-or-above talent: p=0.5*0.6. Meaning that in 80% of the events for a given actor the talent is not considered at all.

So the result that luck plays a larger part isn't an emergent property of the model, it was explicitly baked into the model from the start.

It wouldn't be unfair to call this paper fraudulent.

DOI: 10.1142/S0219525918500145

Garbage model, garbage methodology.

Their model has a set of agents with a 'talent' normally distributed between 0 and 1 (mean 0.6, SD 0.1). Each agent gets a random series of doubling and halving events. The doubling is applied with probability = 'talent'.

The lengths of the series of events have an exponentially decreasing distribution (four longer is x10 less probable, approximately). The application of these series of events to the agent is supposed to simulate a life history of random opportunities, exploited according to talent.

BUT...

Half the events are losses, half the events are possible (P<1) gains. So for an agent with average luck (which is every agent in the long term), their capital decreases with time. The simulation has been rigged so agents can only win with luck.

DOI: 10.1142/S0219525918500145

> 20% of PhD-granting institutions in the United States supplied 80% of tenure-track faculty members

80:20

The Pareto Principle at work. All these figures show is that universities have the usual distribution of quality.