rhelz

Have you ever asked it to?

It is almost a cliche' that New Yorker's hate their Mayors. I was there for the 3 which were previous to Mamdani, and everybody hated them.

I thought that Mamdani would set back the cause of Democratic Socialism by 100 years, because surely, after 2 weeks, everybody would just start hating him and the mainstream of both parties could point to him as an obvious warning.

But he's the most popular politician in the country. That doesn't happen by good P.R. It happens when that pothole which has been there for 3 mayors suddenly gets fixed.

There is only a finite number of times you can see:

1. A pothole get fixed Mamdani has repaired over 200,000 of them.

2. Your landlord finally repairs that leaky roof. Mamdani has had landlords do $34 million worth of repairs and upkeep they were legally obliged to do.

3. Or Door Dash finally paid you for those hours you worked....

...yeah, that only happens a finite number of times before you ask yourself? Why didn't any of the other mayors do that? What were the other mayers doing with that 8.5% income tax I pay to live in this city?

And from there it's just a short step to asking "why has government taken all my money in taxes and given me nothing in return?"

It's not P.R. man. It is an existential threat to the mainstream politicians.

That's because we don't really have a left, not since Ronald Reagan. Clinton was more conservative than Nixon, and Obama was more conservative than Clinton.

Don't cry---run for office and do as great a job as Mamdani is doing, or find a Georgist who can and support them. Its pretty clear that people are open to giving alternatives a chance to show they can do better.

Turing would be so proud.

Not saying that it isn't useful. It's just not science.

Thanks. Nobody ever admits when they are wrong on the internet, so I'm trying to be the change I want to see.

W.R.T. the grand historical tradition, etc, note that the great majority of people who practiced that were, like Plato, independently wealthy and otherwise idle. Those who didn't need any money.

That's why we give Judges, teachers, and Professors tenure, a guaranteed job for life. People are more likely to be fair judges of other people's performance when they don't need the money.

So I guess if you want a non-conservative fix, it would be universal guaranteed minimum income. Something we already have, BTW, but you have to be over 62 to get it.

We've tried to open it up to more than just the 1%, but we didn't really go all the way. It is really unreasonable to expect somebody who isn't independently wealthy to do free work. It is a lot of work to properly review a paper, and reproducing the results is something you simply can't do at all if you are supposed to already be working 70 hours a week generating your own research.

Of course a researcher paying reviewers would be a disastrous idea. But if the grant-awarding body would hire 3rd parties to validate that their money was actually well spent, I think it would be a win/win.

Thanks for the references on where paying reviewers has already been tried. I'd like to see others reproduce their success :-)

Agreed. There are multiple senses for "simple" and on of those senses is "small". It is actually a very useful sense too, as Solomonov/Levin/Kolmogorov/Chaitin-style inductive reasoning has shown.

And it is important not to just make snappy quips by equivocating.

If somebody finds patterns in them, that means they can be improved by reducing the patterns. Patterns and symmetry are forms of redundancy.

The less memory the weights take to meet a level of competency, the more random, and therefore patternless and inscrutable they will be.

Thanks for this reply, your points are well taken and it really got me to think about this stuff.

I suppose you could view arxiv as being a way to let more people do a peer review on the papers, i.e. as one component of a more open and transparent peer review process. As such, it is certainly a welcome alternative to what the snootier journal reviews do, which is to put off reading your paper for a year, and then spend about 50 seconds looking for a reason to say "no".

But I had a narrow point to make when I said that arxiv is a vanity press: just because something is on there doesn't guarantee that it is correct, or even useful. It is a vanity press in the sense that it will publish pretty much anything--modulo obscenity and porn laws, and apparently also some sanity checking by arxiv moderators--but so does a vanity press for print books.

To your point of predatory journals, power-broker reviewers and such, yes, I have done my fair share of suffering from them. It slows down good research and passes through bad research. The system is badly in need of reform, and arxiv gives a much needed alternative.

But really, the problem is (as one of my profs said) that science is totally run on volunteer, unpaid labor. Peer reviewers are very busy, get paid nothing, it is mostly a distraction. This leads them to look for other ways of being compensated--e.g. the can try to be a power broker, a feared authority, etc.

The real solution would be to actually pay peer reviewers and fund them so they can actually reproduce the results. Here's how it could work: when a researcher submits a grant proposal, they budget for enough money to fund the research and enough money to peer review and reproduce it. If the research isn't good enough to warrant an attempt to validate it, then it isn't worth doing in the first place.

What is your definition of a vanity press? Mine is that it will publish anything from anybody.

Sure, there's lots of good stuff on there. But there's lots which is not good. Publishing there is not doing science. Science requires peer review.

Its a wonderful resource, but when overworked journalists (or worse, AI) just picks up a paper from there and writes a breathless article on how cool this new idea is, it is misleading to the general public.

Worse, it can get the general public (and from the comments here, even people working in the field) to forget what science is and why arXiv is not a scientific journal.

If the weights arn't compressed, then a smaller set of weights would perform as well. Sure, you can always induce as much symmetry and patterns as you want by bloating the data set, but that hardly gives us insight into how a set of weights which is "as full as it can be" of information.

I'm not claiming any arbitrary set of weights is a minimal representation. But typically, if people could achieve the same quality of results with a smaller set of weights, or weights which have been quantized to lower bit representations, etc, they would have published the smaller one instead.

// why limit your article's impact //

Because...science? It's not science until it passes peer review.

I'm not advocating that everybody stops posting to arXiv, and I'm not saying you can't find good stuff there. I'm just saying, it's a vanity press, there is absolutely no guarantee of the paper's quality.

And being published by a famous professor from a prestigious university is also no guarantee. If we've learned anything from the non-reproducibility crisis, it is that a paper's origin story is no guarantee.

You are not wrong. But this has by no means proven its up to the standard of being publishable in a machine learning journal. Its on arXiv.org, which, lets face it, at the end of the day is a vanity press.