wlxd
2yr ago
The Starcraft AI only crushes human experts because of its APM advantage, when they restrict it to human levels it can be beaten by elite players: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03298-6
You mean, a Starcraft AI from like a million years ago. If there were no stronger Starcraft AIs released since then, it's mostly because the top research groups lost interest in things like that, deeming the problem to be mostly solved, same as why very few people are interested in making better and better chess bots. They field moved on from Starcraft, and is now working on crushing the game of Real Life, Outside.
wlxd
2yr ago
This is the whole WEIRD/Hajnal thing. In western individualistic culture, kids are expected to move out onto their own very early, and the expectation is different in less individualistic cultures. Compare, for example, how often people in their twenties live with their parents in Sweden vs Spain or southern Italy. This goes back centuries, heavy parental involvement in lives of young married couples has simply not been a thing in the West for a long time now.
wlxd
2yr ago
China and Russia would love to pay for SpaceX launches at market rates, and would spend a lot on technology too.
wlxd
2yr ago
Typically, the relevant public works department has X projects it would like to do, Y dollars of annual budget, and Y is way, way too short to cover all of projects in X. The decision is made by relevant government officers which projects are actually going to be built, and the cost most definitely plays a role in the considerations.
Now, of course, government decision making about projects and spending has multitude of problems. The point is, however, that the suggestion that nobody thinks or cares about the cost is ludicrous. They do care. Typically they don’t care enough, or don’t care properly, I’ll give you that, but these sort of projects don’t just randomly pop up as work orders for the construction crews, there definitely is a lot of planning and analysis involved beforehand. Often in fact too much, or of the wrong kind, but total lack of consideration is definitely not an issue here.
wlxd
2yr ago
Can you address /u/what_a_maroon ‘s argument, who points out that almost every single country other than US has loser-pays rule? If it works for them, why wouldn’t it work here?
wlxd
2yr ago
First, this is not what they were created for. This is only one reason for which they were created. In common speech, when we say that "A is for B", it carries implication that B is the single most important reason for A, and other reasons are of little significance. Second, even if they were, in fact, originally built mostly for military transports (which they weren't, though it was important reason to build them), if they are not meant for this use case today, one can scarcely say that they are for it. At best, you can say that they were built for it.
Ok, but would other countries have such big freight thoroughfares in such sparse areas? Especially on roads, rather than trains?
Yes, of course they would, especially if the freight thoroughfare connected two big population centers. Look at Spain or France, for example. And yes, especially on roads, rather than trains: US is the world leader in freight rail, other countries are less likely to use trains for freight than US.
wlxd
2yr ago
Sorry, but who is “we”? I certainly don’t really spend much time thinking whether the cost of some particular rural road is justified, but so what? Someone does. I really lost the plot here in this discussion: what’s the argument here? That, uh, infrastructure costs are high because random Joe doesn’t think a lot about costs of random rural roads somewhere?
wlxd
2yr ago
I have another explicit example of the same. A public restroom on Alki Beach in Seattle was recently rebuilt. This is a three stall restroom, entire building is something like 250-300 square feet. Cost? $638,000. Look at the photo. For this price, in the private world, you can buy a quarter of acre, hire a contractor to build a high quality 2000 sq ft 3 bed/3 bath house with great finish, and sell it with a good profit. The restroom took an entire year of construction time, not even counting planning.
wlxd
2yr ago
I am pointing out that the example provided to support the argument is clearly false and does not support it in any way. Not sure what you are getting at here.
wlxd
2yr ago
This probably played a significant role in the creation of the interstate highway system, but I think it is far from accurate to say that this is what interstates “are for”. This consideration plays really rather marginal role today. DoD certainly is not funding or managing the Interstates.
wlxd
2yr ago
Interstates are not what people think of when the talk is about rural roads. Interstates are big, because they usually carry significant traffic. I-94 is literally the only interstate going through entire North Dakota. It is not serving local rural Dakotans, it is serving every single resident of ND who needs to get some stuff from elsewhere in the country by a truck, and also people in Minnesota and Montana. How many other two-lane roads are in North Dakota?
I mean, the argument here was that in US, everything (emphasized in the original) has to be best, and what would be a windy shabby road elsewhere is a 2 lane each direction, smooth and straight in the states. You don’t get to claim that and then provide Interstates as an example: these are uniquely unrepresentative of rural roads in US. I think this argument is utterly false.
Where are those smooth 2 lane roads in rural areas? This certainly has not been my experience in Washington state. Most of the roads that are yellow on Google Maps, except actual interstate freeways and certain non interstate freeways in urban areas (like 520 or 169) are single lane. Overwhelming majority of US 101 highway over the Olympic Peninsula, for example, is single lane. Almost all US 2 is single lane. All major highways in northeastern Washington are single lane. One counter example I can come up with is highway 97, which has passing lanes for most of its course, but beyond that, it’s mostly single lane roads except in busiest urban areas and actual Interstates. These are some of the most important roadways in the entire state, the most important ones in their region. Is it any different in other states? Where exactly rural roads are made to be two lane?
edit: found another counter example, highway 395 is double roadway (so two lanes each direction), and given where it’s at, I can’t imagine it getting a lot of traffic, but overall, very few of rural roads in Washington are double lane.
wlxd
2yr ago
One example of the WWII shenanigans you allude to is Warsaw Uprising in 1944. It was timed by Polish underground resistance to coincide with Soviet advance, and initially achieved success in wrestling control from Germans. However, when the Soviets arrived to Warsaw, instead of joining the ongoing combat operations, they just camped on the other bank of the river, allowing Nazis to regroup and reinforce, and ultimately defeat the uprising. Red Army just stood by and watched how Nazis crushed the resistance military, and murdered something between 100-200 000 civilians in mass executions.
wlxd
2yr ago
It might also be Ukrainian accident, not necessarily a false flag: there have been plenty of documented cases where Ukrainian air defense misses the target and hits something on the ground, this kind of stuff is bound to happen. In those cases, Ukraine typically claimed that it was Russian rocket (because why not), but if this was the case here, Poland would actually prefer Ukraine to come out and say that this was their air defense rocket. This way, NATO doesn’t need to intervene, so that it’s not risking credibility loss.
wlxd
2yr ago
Okay, and do you have a concrete story for today? Say, all votes are on paper, the scheme is that everyone take home a carbon copy of their own ballot. What problems do you expect it to bring, today?
wlxd
2yr ago
These seem to me concerns of marginal importance to election outcomes. They might happen, but I can scarcely imagine that making vote verifiable will make these significantly worse than they already are. Like, what do you mean by “power differentials”, in concrete terms?
wlxd
2yr ago
I think bribery to be an overblown concern. You can already bribe people today, without them being able to prove that they voted the way you prescribed. Sure, some of them will take money and still vote the other way or not vote at all, but this does not make bribery ineffective, it just pushes up the cost of buying a vote. Ability to prove who you voted for would affect the market price for a vote, and so would probably increase amount of bribery on the margin, but is by no means required to make buying votes an effective strategy.
wlxd
2yr ago
The one I gave as an example was particularly easy, as there was only one question with two possible choices.
However, for a better analogy, in the national “local” election (555 seats to provincial assemblies, 6,244 seats to county councils, 32,173 seats to commune councils, and 3,162 local government heads, close to 40 000 elected seats in total) in 2018, the official results of Sunday election (and the elections are always on Sunday in Poland, by the way) were announced on Wednesday afternoon.
wlxd
2yr ago
Here is an example of how it works in Poland, a country with a population size close to California.
There was a second round of presidential election on July 12th, 2020. The poll station closed at 9 pm. Next day, on 13th, the national election committee, announced the results.
https://pkw.gov.pl/uploaded_files/1594724319_obwieszczenie-pkw-20200713-1915.pdf
There were 20 million votes to count, almost all cast in person (out of 30 million eligible voters). No machines were used to cast votes, all of them were done on paper. No machines were used to tabulate them, all tabulation is done manually. Nevertheless, the official results are announced less than 24 hours after the polls close, and unofficial results (ie, enough stations reported results to give 99%+ confidence in election outcomes) are available around midnight the same day.
There is literally no excuse for the idiocy that we see in US every election.
wlxd
2yr ago
In Xenophon (iirc, it might have been somewhere in Plato, it's been a while) Socrates considered dancing the best preparation for war, and advised it over boxing/wrestling which he thought made men too bulky and hungry to make good soldiers.
In Republic, Plato (through Socrates) only recommended music and gymnastics, not dance. I don't remember his stance on wrestling.
And I'm not trying to be dismissive. It doesn't have to be your own analysis - do you have a pundit who can do better? An organization? A MIT professor?
Cochrane, whom I linked, has been predicting inflation way back in 2020 and early 2021, purely as a result of massive fiscal stimulus. Lawrence Summers did the same at the time, and was widely ridiculed. I mean, shit, I did it myself, and I benefited from this prediction.
The problem here is that if I point to people who predicted inflation at this time and turned out to be correct, you'll say "yes, but they predicted 8 out of last 2 inflation spurts", and, indeed, you'll be correct. Nevertheless, this attitude:
The question is not "is this prediction correct", the question is "can you do better".
is just terrible. Just because I can't do better doesn't mean that I somehow logically have to accept shit predictions.
Just as Nate Silver can predict elections "wrongly", the market can get predictions "wrong" - but that doesn't mean I have a better source of future predictions or that a better source even exists.
Of course, but you know what's the lesson here? Just ignore Nate Silver. I cannot predict who will win the Super Bowl any better than my crazy uncle, but that doesn't mean that I have to listen to my crazy uncle, if he has terrible track record.
wlxd
2yr ago
The market expectations for inflation might expect it to go down, but they also didn’t expect the inflation to happen in the first place. These have been consistently wrong for past year, why should we believe these are correct now?
See for example the nice graph in this blog post.
Not at this point, no. It is a general consensus in the field that developing even stronger game bots is no longer “major development”. These are mostly thought of as a solved problem. This is why nobody cares about these.
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