ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
Allow classic Milton to get you into the basics with only a sound bite.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
But how do they deal with “unknown unknowns?”
How do pre-modern subsistence farmers deal with the "unknown unknowns"? How much of that risk was correctly measured? My sense is that they mostly just died.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
Yeah, my guess is that it's probably an "and" operator. The old joke about US cyber attacks is that you can always tell when it's the US, because the code looks like it's written by lawyers. Israel is not terribly far behind on that front; they're still pretty sensitive to collateral damage. My guess would be that they were both pretty confident that this supply chain was serving Hezbollah, specifically, but they also had a cyber vulnerability. They must have had some sort of cyber vulnerability, since they were able to trigger them remotely. This access, combined with other SIGINT methods, probably allowed them to have a second filter, identifying all of the devices that had a second indicator of being used by Hezbollah, specifically, and they only triggered these ones.
The tradeoffs for this plan would be that you would essentially be leaving some "unexploded ordnance" out in the wild. A mitigating factor would be that it's highly likely that there's been enough publicity that if anyone else has one of these things unexploded, they're probably highly likely to "do your EOD for you". That said, if there are any left, it is also possible for Hezbollah to try to stage some PR stunt/false flag by killing some innocent person with it and claiming that Israel still did it (or was at least negligent in creating the circumstances, yadda yadda...).
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
The same banks massively bungle their software upgrades, locking people out of their accounts, logging them into other people's accounts, losing their transactions, etc.
Yep. They've realized that the optimal amount of problems is not zero, and consumers are still plenty happy to use their products over other banks who could say, "We're not offering that stuff, because we're more committed to your security." There are parallels here to elections. The optimal amount of election problems (even things like someone not being able to vote because of an edge case, tech-related or otherwise; who remembers the tempest in a teapot I think in 2016 when a video went viral on social media of a group of would-be voters showing up late to a polling station and getting pissed?) is probably not zero either, and one of the most major considerations for designing an election system is to ensure that it is viewed as legitimate by the electorate (within that margin of error for the optimal amount of imperfections being nonzero).
But why would someone implement it? Banks earn money by making their services easier to use. Governments don't earn anything from e-voting. Political parties don't earn anything from e-voting
This is a much more real concern in my mind. I haven't followed politics enough in countries who have adopted whatever version they have adopted in order to have a sense for what political dynamics incentivized them to do so. I'd super love an explainer from anyone who does. But I would note that this is completely in the bucket of "political problems", not "tech problems".
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
There is a reason why any serious bank has their customers use TAN generators, which are separate and very simple devices with a much reduced attack surface have a small shitty display which will show the user the numbers of the transaction they are making, so they can double-check in case their online banking device is compromised and was requesting a TAN for sending all of their balance to Nigeria instead. You could roll out similar devices for voting, which will display KANG before generating the transaction number, but even then you will have the problem that the integrity of the vote is likely not assured by the process and certainly can't be checked by the median voter.
You're honestly quite close to the core question. Generally, when people talk about digital elections, there are a couple camps. First, there are the academics who work on describing some properties that we might want from a voting system and checking to see if they can make the math work. Then there are the people who imagine the most theoretical of possible attacks (and believe me, I've seen a lot of theoretical attacks on systems, some of which have actually grown up to be real) and simply declare the problem impossible from first principles. Folks in this latter camp should properly say that message security is impossible, because there are endpoint security problems, and besides, the median user can't do the math that would be used in their head. Secure over-the-air updates are impossible, because then Apple or whoever has a valuable secret that will surely be compromised. Certainly, secure cloud storage is impossible; I can imagine quite the conspiracy happening, and besides, is the median user going to understand it? Well, maybe someone can figure out storage, but private cloud compute? Impossible. Do you know how many vectors of attack there could be?!?!
You speak of banks, and that is good. Did everyone just forget to tell banks that what they wanted to do was impossible? They can't possibly just let people log into their account from anywhere. They might be running an operating system for which the vendor has stopped shipping security fixes five years ago, with the user having installed "free_legit_photoshop.exe" or the like. They can't possibly just let a little piece of plastic and some numbers be a form of payment accepted across the world. I have theoretical attacks!
I'm well aware of a variety of specific problems for digital voting, but my main position is that one must discuss actual specifics in this domain, because there are a wide variety of possible specific conceptions. A lot depends on 'how much you want to prove', so to speak. Most people want to immediately jump all the way to 'proving the most', thinking that if you can't solve every problem in a way that lets me vote from my couch while wearing underwear, using just a web form, and question marks for authentication (because racism, probably), then any form of digital anything in elections is completely impossible. But honestly, one can easily propose digital components for elections that retain the same basic form, such that the digital component actually restricts behavior. For example, suppose for now that you still had to show up in person to vote, but instead of a weird, flimsy piece of paper being all that you have for your voter registration, you were instead issued a smart card or other hardware token that you needed to bring with you. That hardware token can be used in combination with those fancy maths that I linked to in order to quickly and accurately provide guarantees of eligibility to vote, no double-voting, etc. Hopefully, one of those fancy maths works can even allow for neat paper backups that manage to satisfy receipt-freeness while maintaining a significant level of auditability. I think some of them are getting close, but we'd have to dig into specifics.
Sure, there might be other political concerns that make such a proposal difficult (honestly, simple secrecy in voting concerns should be enough of a political difficulty to rule out a large swath of the most expansive proposals rather than even getting to technology considerations), but that's pretty irrelevant when what I'm generally hearing is a weird set of first principles-style claims that literally anything digital and related to elections is flatly impossible due to vague theoretical concerns.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
He seems to have a problem with blocking. He blocked me for just trying to understand what he was saying. It's a shame, because I like a lot of his perspectives, but at the rate he's going, he's going to end up just talking to himself here, wondering where everyone else has gone.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
If I told people there that I was going to the MNF game this week, and I planned to sucker punch someone in a Falcons jersey, as I do every time I go to an Eagles game (GO BIRDS), everyone would kind of edge away from me, and certainly mark me down as a bad person, not normal and not to be trusted.
Russ Roberts talks about how explaining basic economic ideas from his libertarian perspective "causes people to edge away from you". When you even ask about science on some topics, people edge away from you. In both cases, they will mark you down as a bad person, not normal and not to be trusted. So, this heuristic is pretty terrible for distinguishing anything real.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
Many teenagers are naive, or more charitably, they think of the people around them naturally while the law is not a natural thing. In the natural world, you either face the consequences for an action with some degree of certainty (therefore it's a bad thing to do) or do not (therefore it's an okay thing to do); there is no "as long as you don't get caught", or rather, the ones doing the catching would be fellow members of the community, not faceless distant "authorities".
Up to this point, all of this is relevant to all law.
When they're faced with a dumb law, their naive expectation is that no one would really put you through the wringer over such a dumb law, come on. Everyone does that. They'll just give you a slap on the wrist unless you do it so stupidly openly that the authorities have no choice.
This beggars belief. What kind of childhood did you have? Did you literally never get in trouble for something that seemed dumb? That happened to me allllll the time.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
I think part of the IPA trend has to do with the fact that most mass-market beers are under-hopped and people felt superior saying they liked something that was totally in the opposite direction, even if it was so bitter it blew out your taste buds to the point that you couldn't taste anything else.
Silly story time. I once went to a Thai restaurant and got an IPA (might have been a double or imperial IPA even; I don't remember), because there was one available and I did like them. Then, I ordered my meal way spicier than I probably should have, for reasons (probably not good ones). In any event, this was the moment when I actually learned just how significant pairing food/beverage could possibly be. I had heard of people doing pairings before, but I never really grokked it, if anything, it was always a really subtle effect. But this time, hooooo buddy, this time. Pre-meal, this IPA was an IPA, extremely bold and bitter. Meal arrives, I shove whatever quantity of extremely spicy in my mouth, and at some point finally decide to rinse some down with a little beverage. I kid you not, that IPA tasted sweet after all that capsaicin. It was wild.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
A blanket principle of "always obey every law, simply because it is the law" makes no sense
Good thing that this is not what I said. I said that your particular statement makes no sense unless you're extremely stupid, not having any idea how law works, or drank the propaganda kool aid. Yes, dawg, you will be arrested for something that's obviously illegal, even if it's a dumb law. This happening can't possibly shift your position, unless you were really really dumb/naive.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
When you're an impressionable 18 year old, the idea of some cop arresting you for using weed naturally makes you distrust the entire system, and especially law enforcement.
I don't know why that would be the case any more than they would have that same reaction for any other thing that they clearly know is a crime. Are you positing that impressionable 18 year olds just don't understand what the law is? What it does? They certainly were aware that it was illegal. Does an 18 year old getting into legal troubles for underage drinking and driving naturally make them distrust the entire system and especially law enforcement? I have to imagine it would only do so if they were extremely stupid. The only other explanation is that they'd simply drank the 'first principles' "drugs are my human right" kool-aid, but that's more a problem with the dumb propaganda than it is with the law, itself. If some dumb 18 year old gets arrested for assaulting an officer in their anti-police riot, I'd say that the blame for them possibly turning even more ACAB is the fault of the stupid propaganda that led them to believe stupid things, not laws allowing for riot control.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
I happened to read this early this morning before listening to this EconTalk at the gym, and I made a new connection. They talk about a variety of situations, vaccines, liver transplants, extreme scenarios on rowboats in the ocean, minimum wages, etc., but the one that really connected here had to do with price controls.
They talked about two examples, one with an explicit gov't price control and one with a paradoxical-seeming private price control. On the former, they mentioned Chinese price controls on rice. The price of rice goes up, people freak out, and so the gov't slaps a price ceiling on rice. Of course, Econ Happens, farmers don't grow as much rice as they would have with higher prices, shortages happen, and then the gov't "has to" figure out how to ration the rice. So, they introduce coupons to ration it. Of course, that means that now the coupons are the new currency that buys rice, and who is the gatekeeper that gets to seek rent and use their power over the currency to their own benefit? Well, the local gov't officials who distribute the coupons, of course. His brother-in-law, great guy, like that guy, he gets coupons. You? He doesn't like your face, you get no coupons, you get no rice. Suddenly, he has the power of distribution and can use it to build his status, favor people who will favor him, and he can screw anyone else for basically zero reason at all; it costs him nothing if he doesn't give you a coupon because he doesn't like your face.
The second example is the question of why tickets to the Rose Bowl are so cheap. Lots of people want those tickets at their face value, way more people than there are tickets. Rather than just let the price rise to be market-clearing, they decide that they "have to" hold some back to make sure that vague Bad Things don't happen, and then they get the status of being in control of distribution. They can give something that is extremely highly valued to their buddies, acting like it's really a little thing, really of little value (the face value), but getting widely outsized personal benefits from gatekeeping/rent seeking.
Now, universities. Lots of universities are actually priced at least in the right ballpark of how much value it provides to the customers. Maybe not really on parity, but they're at least in the same universe. And they do want to make money, so they have great incentives to lobby the government to help them price discriminate as much as they possibly can, so they can wring out every dollar of value possible from every customer.
But Harvard? They're not a regular university in this sort of regular situation. The perceived value by the customer is huge, and they are, like the owners of the Rose Bowl, unwilling to let prices determine distribution, unwilling to let the price rise to the market-clearing price, so they've self-imposed a price cap. What does this mean for their incentives? They now want to gatekeep/rent seek and use their distributional power to self-aggrandize. To give goodies to their buddies, to people who will compete on some other margin, who will support them politically or whatever else. Do they find themselves in that situation and then choose to discriminate against you because they don't like your face and in favor of someone else to self-aggrandize just due to the incentives that have now arisen, or do they choose to self-impose a price cap in part to create that distributional power that individuals in the organization can harvest? I don't know, but it's clear that since they have chosen to self-impose a price cap, these perverse incentives inevitably arise.
Could they adopt an objective measure to be the distributive rule? Sure; basically any measure would interrupt these incentives. Some folks say they could just use test scores as their distributive rule, and sure, that would remove them as the gatekeeper and turn the College Board into the gatekeeper. They could also just let a price system handle the distribution problem, letting the price rise to be market-clearing, and that would completely offload the gatekeeper to the larger market system (then, perhaps rather than competing on some other random margin, customers would just compete by trying to make more money, contributing back into the wealth of the nation). Most objective distribution rules have political problems, so it just happens to be so darn convenient for them that they "have to" personally accrue all of the benefits of being the personal distributional gatekeepers.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
Different things are different, and different prohibitions are different. There are all sorts of substances that various societies ban, with a variety of success rates. Some factors include the source materials, manufacturing requirements, size/volume at critical stages, detectability, availability of substitutes, accountability of gatekeepers, etc. The silly example here is that the US banned Chinese drywall. Basically nobody is out there hunting for black market Chinese drywall. There are available alternatives, and the supply chain is relatively legible. No one makes completely context-free analogies between marijuana and Chinese drywall... they only make completely context-free analogies between marijuana and alcohol.
Marijuana and alcohol have some similarities, some differences. They're both pretty concealable, but at least in its final form, marijuana is probably a bit more so. Use of marijuana is a bit more detectable by smell. Cultivation of quantities of marijuana is likely more detectable. Possibly the biggest real difference is the source materials. Alcohol can be sourced by literally just leaving the food you bought at the grocery store in the cabinet too long (or, if you really want, from the toilet paper you stocked up too much for COVID). Marijuana requires a particular, identifiable species of plant. One could go on, but the primary point is that depending on the factors involved, one might be able to determine a lot or only a very little by analogy to other prohibitions. I don't think anyone would say that the world's experiments with nuclear (anti)-proliferation says much about possible handgun bans or vice versa.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
Right, just like how Samuel Colt got rid of the negative psychological consequences of holding a grudge. Progress!
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
Awesome! Thanks so much!
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
Thanks so much! Somehow, you always seem to deliver on TheMotte! A couple follow-up questions:
Years back, I totally ruined a cheap watch trying to pry off the back plate to replace the battery, just using whatever screwdriver I had sitting around. IIRC, I just bent stuff (I think the back plate, itself) and it was a mess. I probably tried to block out some of the experience from my mind, but that's part of why I wanted to ask and actually prepare myself with a modicum of knowledge before considering giving it another go. Any suggestions to help with this? Just use a super thin screwdriver and carefully work it around the sides of any opening rather than prying it all in one spot? Anything else? For popping it back on, do I just line it up and squeeze, or is there a better technique?
The watch I just had the battery replaced in doesn't look like a pop off back plate. It has six evenly-spaced little square notches right on the circumference. I assume this means that it's a screw-in that should work with a tool like what you linked from Harbor Freight? Or are there variants of this tool that I'll need to match to the particular model?
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
My sense is that if you wanted to pick the single greatest place to be around 1900, it would be London. Even though the British Empire was already starting some of its downswing, they were also able to catch the earliest gains (and gee wiz gizmos) of the industrial revolution while they still had as much wealth as they did (and London would be the peak across the empire). Now mind you, England-wide, that wealth is still on the order of 5k pounds per capita, at least 5x lower than today. Of course, it's worth noting that the US is an outlier in having literally 10x'd its wealth over that time; it was the best performing country over the last hundred or so years, after all.
In the US/Canada (egad, Canada; a quick Ducking only finds a chart since 1960 and my, how you've grown), the story has been insane growth, starting from basically universal poverty. The UK started from a somewhat better place and tailed off relatively speaking, so the story is slightly different there, but it doesn't seem that different. But overall, yes, I agree that locality mattered, yet outside of a very few shining cities on a hill (who were still quite poor compared to a remarkably low percentile today), basically everyone was pretty darn poor.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
After paying to get a watch battery replaced and then thinking about the surprisingly low multiple of that figure that is the entirety of what I paid for said watch in the first place, I'd like to know more about the feasibility of just acquiring the tools/skills to replace them, myself. I'm not really interested in going full "watch repair hobby"; I'm not into having lots of watches (just a couple different styles for each person in the house) or fancy/expensive watches; if something goes really wrong with one, I'm probably totally fine with just buying a new one.
- Is this a bad idea to start? If so, why?
- Does anyone have a good intro resource where I can learn enough about this to know e.g. the different types of backings I'm looking at, what tools are required for which ones, how to pick the right battery size, etc?
- Is there a simple "basic" kit that will pretty much work for the majority of them, or do I need to pay attention to the styles/brands of the watches that we have and tailor my buy accordingly?
Separately, suppose I don't wear my watch very often. Can I extend the life of the battery by just pulling the crown (and having to deal with resetting the time every time I use it), or is the mechanism still running in there, just disconnected from the hands?
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
We didn't pick a box at random, the gameshow host did and revealed a gold coin.
I don't think this is the problem statement, which says:
You reach your hand into one of the boxes
I don't see anything about a game show host doing anything. Obviously, I agree that the problem turns out differently if a game show host is involved and able to make a choice at any of the steps.
Various threads lately have had me thinking about how incredibly wealthy we are as a country, and how it definitely was not always so. For example, I made this comment a couple days ago about how everyone was just flat super poor back in 1900, and we're literally at least 10x richer now. I had likewise told the following story in the old place, in context of wealth to afford vast quantities of food (and how that may interplay with societal obesity):
Even coming from Canada, my wife was shocked by how cheap food is here in America. Historically, it just was not this way. We are one generation removed from stories like, "In the fall, dad made his semi-annual trip to the market in the city and brought back some quantity of 50lb bags of flour and 5lb chunks of lard, having a huge smile on his face, saying, 'We're gonna eat reaaaal good this winter!'" (I don't actually remember the exact quantity he said, but it was a low number, and we can easily scale by a small multiplier.) Like, this was a level of abundance in preparation for the winter that they were not used to (obviously, this was not their entire supply of food for the whole winter; they had some other food stored, but it is indicative that it was, cost-wise, an absolute treat). I checked a nearby grocery store's website; 50/5lbs would cost me $26.85. Like, pocket change. (Even if the multiplier was 5x, that's like nothing.) I probably have that much in random cash sitting around in my car. If I lost it or it was stolen, I'd be sad about a violation of my property, but literally wouldn't give a shit about the monetary value. This was a wonderful blessing of food abundance to some people in first-world countries not very long ago.
I didn't completely spell it out, but that was my wife's father's story when he was a child in Canada. (I also hedged on the number; my best memory was that it was precisely one 50lb bag and one 5lb chunk). That was not that long ago.
Yesterday, I read an obituary for a 95 year old who was born in a homestead dugout in New Mexico. Literally born in a hole in the ground.
Perspective on how utterly ridiculously quickly we went from basically universal poverty to nearly universal wealth is often lacking in many conversations where it could be quite beneficial. Sure, some in the capitalism/communism debates (or more generally the sources/causes of wealth and how it interacts with society's choices/governance), but also in obesity conversations (as mentioned) and even fertility conversations. Born in a homestead dugout. And you don't want to have a kid because of a car seat?!
I still don't properly know how exactly to craft an argument that comes to a clean conclusion, but I really feel like this historical perspective is seriously lacking in a country where the median age is under 40 and many folks no longer have communal contexts where they get exposed to at least a slice of history from their elders.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
I disagree. Maybe this is the reason I "always forget" the simple route; because I'm not sure it's actually right. I did this two different ways, my renormalization route (thinking of things as a tree with info sets) and just brute reproducing the wiki entry on using Bayes to solve it.
Method 1: Renormalization
There's a 1/3 chance of picking each box, one which has a 100% chance of giving you a gold on the first draw and the other has a 1/11 chance (ignoring the option with zero chance of getting a first gold), so the chances of me being in each relevant box at the current state are 1/3 and 1/33. To renormalize, I need to multiply by the reciprocal of their sum, 1/3 + 1/33 = 12/33.
So my chance of being in the GG box is 11/12 and my chance of being in the G10S box is 1/12.
Method 2: Straight Bayes, yo
Just shutting up and calculating, reproducing the wiki article directly.
P(GG|see gold) = P(see gold|GG)*(1/3) / [P(see gold|GG)*(1/3) + 0 + P(see gold|G10S)*(1/3)]
P(GG|see gold) = (1/3) / (1/3 + 0 + 1/33)
= (1/3) / (12/33)
= 11/12
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
I got the right answer, but I always forget the simple way of thinking about it that you mentioned and do these problems the hard way.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
I would expect there to be an investigation
It appears from the following comments that most of this paragraph is tilting at windmills and, frankly, seems to be fundamentally about partisan misdirection. It's hard to understand how any of it is relevant to the comment I made. Are you literally just trying to completely change the topic to be something about whether there should have been any investigation whatsoever? That seems like a silly thing to do, because not only is it completely unrelated to my comment, but if you had bothered to ask what I think about whether there should have been any investigation at all about certain things, you'd have discovered that I agree that some sort of investigation should have happened (and reasonable people can obviously quibble as to what that investigation should have looked like). Instead, this is presented as some sort of gotcha, that I apparently "don't have an argument" at all, which is pretty bizarre, because you've completely avoided saying a single thing about the argument I made. It's entirely avoidant misdirection, and I'd appreciate it if you spoke plainly about the actual thing I focused on - do you think that Trump was personally culpable for Russia's actions taken against the United States (including their collaboration with Manafort, who was their agent for purposes of FARA), or do you think that Trump was a victim of such?
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
Chinese Asset in NY State Government
Linda Sun was born in China, moved to the US with her parents at the age of five, and later became a US citizen. She rose up to become the Deputy Chief of Staff for the governor. I know plenty of folks who maintain dual citizenship with other countries, but I don't know how serious the USG was/is about making Chinese nationals "really" renounce their Chinese citizenship in order to become US citizens, nor do I have any idea if Sun did/did not.
She was a subject of interest starting in at least 2020, when she was interviewed by the FBI about her trip to China. While not knowing whether she's categorized a dual citizen (which I do know, for many purposes, the security apparatus of the USG treats as synonymous with "foreign national" for many purposes) or simply a former Chinese citizen with Chinese heritage, I also don't know what the state of these sorts of FBI inquiries are. Have they become a more routine/random matter, where they just occasionally drag some folks in this category in to question them and see if anything comes up? Or did they already have some reason to be suspicious of her in 2020? Her recent indictment acting as a foreign agent, visa fraud, alien smuggling, and money laundering conspiracy includes events going back to 2015 (quite a few in the 2018-2019 years), but it's not clear at what point the FBI or anyone else became aware of any of them or to what extent they motivated the 2020 interview. NYT describes it as "questions were repeatedly raised".
This took years and a significant quantity of behavior bubbling up to get to the point where she was finally fired (March 2023). I can't currently find any details of the firing, but the NY governor's press secretary said that she was fired for "misconduct". Another year and a half, and we got an indictment. This may all be a very plausible timeline for how these sorts of things generally go.
So. Paul Manafort. He joined Donald Trump's campaign in March 2016 (when they were likely scrambling to get any sort of organization going), was promoted to campaign manager three months later in June, then fired two months after that in August, essentially immediately after Trump received his first security briefing.
To this day, there are still people (some even in TheMotte) who think that Paul Manafort is the smoking gun of Trump's culpability with Russia. That Trump obviously must be guilty for having that guy on his campaign. That it proves that "Trump's campaign" was working with Russia, and that it's Trump's personal fault.
On the other side, I personally believe that Paul Manafort and his Russian collaborators made a victim out of Donald Trump, and I can remain perfectly consistent in saying that I think that Linda Sun and her Chinese collaborators made a victim out of the NYS governments that employed her.
I think someone could make a plausible argument that both Trump and specific folks in the NYS gov't were culpable, though I probably would be pretty skeptical; as I said, I think the timeline in the Sun case is plausibly fine. But I would need an absolutely phenominal argument to support the proposition that Trump was personally culpable for Manafort, but that individuals in the NYS government were not culpable for Sun... otherwise, frankly, I would have to chalk such a position up to pure partisanship.
Why do we care about calories in?
And for something like solar power, how is this computed? Sure, I get that you're going to somehow compute all the calories that go into manufacturing the thing, but then, how do we get calories in from the sun? Is it just the local radiance captured? Is it net of some heat output? Is it actually total solar radiance on Earth's surface (since we're inefficiently only capturing a portion of those calories)? Do we actually compute the calories that go into the fuel of the sun's fusion reactor? Is there some different calculation used for a fusion reactor 'up there' compared to one we might make 'down here'? If so, why?
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