dark
Veritas vos liberabit
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User ID: 1132
Zero people predicted a pandemic
A pandemic is the prototypical black swan event. If you asked people what are the odds of a largely asymptomatic highly contagious coronavirus mutation that crosses over from bats/other reservoirs or is engineered in lab spreads into a worldwide pandemic over the next 30 years, I'm sure many people would have given sensible probability estimates.
Pandemics are largely excluded under force majeure clauses, but take Wimbledon, for example, that following the SARS outbreak in 2002 bought pandemic insurance under an infectious disease clause. They paid roughly 31.7mm USD over 17 years in premiums for 142 mm USD payout. Back of the napkin math (assuming that the payout would be the same every year, i.e. Wimbledon's profits don't increase corresponding to premium increases, which of course in reality they do) suggests that the risk analysts estimated that a Covid-scale pandemic happens at most every 78 years or so. Since they probably factored in losses due to more probable minor diseases, the Covid-19 pandemic was roughly a once in a century event. This passes a cursory sniff check with the last global pandemic being the 1918 Spanish flu.
Safe to say people were thinking about, and even buying insurance against, the risk pandemics posed, so your first point is wrong.
About zero people predicted double-digit inflation (except for the usual people like Peter Schiff who make this prediction every year)
How about conditioning on the aforementioned black swan event and stipulating that US M0 practically doubled and M2 grew by about 5T USD (25% from 15T in 2020) whilst US treasury yields were kept at historic lows? The low interest low inflation free money paradigm that has dominated the past decade, under a historically axed lens, seems more like an exception than a new rule.
No one predicted Dall-E, Chat GPT, etc.
The GPT model was novel, sure, but also came out in 2018, so roughly 5 years ago. It was designed specifically to avoid the problems of supervised learning in NLP. What's surprising is perhaps how far it scaled?
EDIT: amusingly, we both forgot to reread Scott's post
If AI can generate images and even stories to a prompt, everyone will agree this is totally different from real art or storytelling.
This is basically GPT-3 and DALL-E. ChatGPT is GPT-3.5 fined-tuned with RLHF. So Scott did essentially envision this event, although maybe he didn't assign a high enough probability on it for your taste.
No one predicted Putin making a major move
This has been discussed in the other threads, but again, once faced with the question, would people really ascribe that low a probability to it? Putin and the other minds in the war rooms cannot have been aiming for a protracted land war, this is more a political decapitation with a puppet substitution gone horribly wrong. If you rephrase war to political/military intervention that aims to replace the Ukrainian head of state, the odds might climb further, and now you can just ask what are the odds of that surgical strike devolving into full-scale war. The Russians were what, 100 miles from Kiev? There is an other timeline where Zelenskyy is either dead or in exile, and Ukraine is not in rubble.
...goes to show how hard predicting is.
Sure? It's a chaotic system, and the conditional probability trees have exponential branching factors? No one is pretending to be prescient or an augur here, the exercise is just in estimating probabilities.
The "prescient" fool confidently spouts "predictions", whilst the wise man merely scribbles down a few numbers and replies, "Wanna bet on it?"
Maybe I'm too far out of the loop, but what are examples of CW books?
Flipping through my memories of childhood books, I'm getting
-- EDIT: Wow... A cursory search suggests 3/4 of these have been banned somewhere at some point in time (annotated below) so maybe I'm cruelly out of touch on this.
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Where the Wild Things Are; hard to imagine anything controversial here -- banned in 1963 (immediately after publication) for promoting witchcraft and supernatural events
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The Giving Tree; religious and secular interpretations and adoptions abound, nothing political -- banned in a public library in Colorado 1988 for sexism
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The Little Prince; maybe vaguely cynical, reflecting de Saint-Exupéry's disenchantment at the time of writing
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; a classic written over a century and a half ago, little to be controversial here, surely? -- banned in New Hampshire for allegories of sexual fantasies
I feel like you were on the right track with
I know I can cease arguing in such places (better for my mental health overall)
There are two cases to consider: when there is an actual immediate decision process at stake (that you can influence!), and when there isn't.
Let's consider the easier, latter case: there is nothing at stake, so this is a pure signalling exercise. Arguing about politics, and virtue signalling (for whatever set of virtues you may ascribe to) is almost never perceived charitably. It's at best quietly sanctimonious and at worst autistically obnoxious. It has value in in-group bond strengthening/groupthink signalling, not as an invitation for an actual reflection or discussion. When someone of a different faith than you discusses religion, do you "diplomatically" argue about their beliefs? Life isn't a college debate club, try to find things you might have in common instead of rehashing things that "trigger" you.
Now the harder instance, you're influencing a decision process (i.e., are sitting on a hiring committee). Here, you need to weigh the cost of revealing outsider political predilections (and becoming a pariah, especially in groupthink heavy environments like academia) against the damage to the decision process. Are you overlooking a once-in-a-lifetime candidate just to fill a diversity quota? That might pose sufficient institutional risk that it is worth speaking up. Thankfully, in such instances, there are compelling non-political arguments in favor of your position ("I'm not anti-diversity, the non-diverse candidate just happens to be vastly superior, and we'd be fools to pass them up").
Choose your battles. The best thing to do in an environment where they are "firing white people to bring in a minority" is probably leave. An environment that espouses beliefs that are antithetical to your values is probably a) somewhere you don't what to be contributing to and b) a profound waste of emotional energy that could be better spent elsewhere.
How to fight for what you believe in then? Associate and discuss your positions with like-minded people. Build circles you'd want to be a part of. Don't berate your waiter because they corrected you on a pronoun, in the same way you don't argue with Jehovah's witnesses or telemarketers.
Perhaps worth postfacing this with an apocryphal Twain quote:
Never argue with a fool, they drag you down to their level and beat you with experience
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I think your focus on teaching muddles the wider dynamic in government hiring: a significant portion of upper caliber talent isn't strongly financially motivated (this probably applies to teaching as well). In this light, all they can do is offer interesting problems (JPL/Nasa/NSA/arguably a lot of defense contractors) and/or good working conditions. Why should they try and pay 1MM salaries when Wall Street can always outbid them?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Republicans got more than 46% of the votes in 2020. Of the Republican vote, more than a third is white evanlegical protestant, and more than 70% belong to a white Christian religious group (PRRI). These populations tend to be geographically segregated: if you're from Cullman, Alabama, where more than 85% of the 40000 or so votes went red, I think it's safe to say a tatooed psychonaut pansexual anarchist hippie is not so much on the edge as levitating above the adjacent gulf, cartoon physics style.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I'm going to disagree on several points here.
It is typically male.
Female teenagers are edgy in other ways, they'll rebel against trad parents by espousing communism, sexual promiscuity or drug/alcohol abuse, dating outside/below their socioeconomic class, etc.
It’s a typically cosmopolitan feature of following the latest trend.
Trend opposition is just as twitchy and fickle as trend following. Edginess can also express itself as disagreeing with consensus, not just aligning with it.
Many progressives certainly want to appear cool — they follow the latest trends in fashion and music — but does this desire foment any edginess?
Edginess strikes me as fractal, on a small enough scale, you're at the edge of some boundary. In hyper-woke circles, any pushback or criticism of the status quo might be considered edgy.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Consider Robert Mercer, ex-CEO of Renaissance Technologies: if not genius level intelligence, certainly 1.5-2 sigma above average: PhD at UIUC, ACM Lifetime Achievement Award...
Mercer played a key role in the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union by donating data analytics services to Nigel Farage.He has also been a major funder of organizations supporting right-wing political causes in the United States, such as Breitbart News, the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign for president. He is the principal benefactor of the Make America Number 1 super PAC.
Some of his opinions:
Mercer has said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark federal statute arising from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, was a major mistake. In 2017, David Magerman, a former Renaissance employee, alleged in a lawsuit that Mercer had said that African Americans were economically better off before the civil rights movement, that white racists no longer existed in the United States, and that the only racists remaining were black racists. Wikipedia
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Probably worth noting that "no budget" might not have necessarily been entirely dishonest. Retention and raises might not fall under the same category.
DDIA is the standard resource here. Read it twice, take notes.
Papers from Will Larson's Staff Engineer (ranging from DynamoDB, Raft, Paxos, GFS, etc.) are worth perusing as well (and will pop up as references from DDIA).
Signals and Threads have a few episodes that I think are particularly relevant for system design, and the entire podcast is definitely worth a listen at some point. In no particular order,
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Swapping the Engine Out of a Moving Racing Car
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State Machine Replication
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Clock synchronization
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Multicast and the markets
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Build systems
EDIT: remembered a few other fun things I had stumbled upon recently, How We Built r/Place which is a good example of a small concrete project that has non-trivial scalability requirements, as well as Google's Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer.
I've seen the same thing. Good for procrastinating on exams. It seems like it might just be an effect of adrenaline?
The literature tends to distinguish acute fatigue (lack of rest for a single night), chronic fatigue (sleep debt accumulated over more than 48 hours) and cumulative fatigue (build up over longer periods, i.e. weeks or months).
The thing to test would be to relieve your sleep debt over the following day (maybe 10 hours of sleep + midafternoon nap for 3 hours) and see how the effects are then.
EDIT: Another thing occurred to me while thinking about naps: Perhaps the 4 hours of sleep should be viewed as a nap, as in they are genuinely restful and provide energy for the morning, but the 8 hours of sleep thereafter aren't enough to compensate for the 16 hours of wakefulness since your last rest. Another thing to test would be a midafternoon nap the day you're feeling good (right after sleepless night).
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
2yr ago
Don't overcommit. Startups in most markets are gambles, people will often found 3-5 companies before successfully exiting, but if you have relevant experience, you already know this. Working 100 hour weeks for lower pay for a company that's worth 0 in 2 years won't feel good.
Roll with the punches and learn fast. You have outsize responsibility and accountability, a single (serious) mistake can be extremely costly for the entire company. It'll be harder because there's not an entire team to shift the blame around with.
Watch out for interpersonal strife. This is unfortunately fairly common in early stage startups, high stress, big egos and small teams can lead to explosive conditions. My heuristic is more than 2 months of continuous friction/misalignment and infighting is a huge red flag, and 6 is a signal that the investors/board should get involved to see if there's anything to salvage.
Learn to enjoy it. Startups aren't really the golden ticket we make them out to be (especially early stage ones). If you're not having fun, accept it and move on. There'll be other ways to make millions.
I feel like the poker analogy is working against you here. Try asking around a table how people would feel open jamming TT with half their life savings and years of their life on the line, whilst only getting to play 3-4 sessions (in this case, marriages prospects).
It's a numbers game. No one wants to cash at a specific tournament, or win a specific cash game. They want to come out ahead over all tournaments and games they play. You put your money in good spots and let the law of large numbers take care of the rest. And there'll will always be those unfavored by Fortuna (or Lady Variance, if you prefer), getting it in with AA vs KKs 8 times and losing every time.
If anything, I'd say slot machines are a more apt allegory, a game rigged against you unless you understand their inner workings.
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