site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2955 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 19, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Have you see Hamilton, the musical? I have. I really liked it. I did think it was odd that almost everyone was black (except for the King of England) but it was also pretty awesome and I didn't mind.

On the other hand, I find hamfisted movie/TV diversity silly. This character is historically male, but is portrayed female, but otherwise acts completely male? Black elves? Okay whatever.

I suppose the difference is with Hamilton it's the entire gimmick, so it's fine, whereas with a LotR series it's more like... shameless kowtowing?

It's just a matter of aim. Lin-Miranda didn't write Hamilton with the purpose of appealing to as many demographics as possible or getting good press from left-wing media. Black dwarves and elves in the rings of power was done with such cynical purposes (or at least, if the showrunners were earnest about it, they were so bad that it's impossible to tell).

Quality goes a long way as well. I've not seen Hamilton, but it's always been super hyped by everyone who talks about it. I wonder if there are good examples of something being both amazing but still getting blasted for DEI. I've always heard from normal friends that Last of Us 2 is an incredible game but that hasn't stopped vast parts of the internet from remaining permanently opposed to it, but I've never played the game myself

I thought the casting in Hamilton was artistically appropriate. It implicitly compared the modern American black/white divide with the colonial-era American/British divide. Similarly, with the use of rap by the Americans contrasted with the more musical stylings of George III. I've heard that there's even another layer, with different factions of revolutionaries using different styles of rap, but I don't have the ear to tell. And that's not even taking into account Lin-Manuel Miranda being Hispanic. It all contributed to a theme of pitting the vibrant, vigorous, immigrant-fueled multi-cultural melting pot of America against the stagnant, static ancien regime of Britain.

At long last, someone better at proompting than me finally thought to orchestrate a proper Pokemon battle between LLMs! Opus winning is not much of a surprise nor a spoiler, I'm mostly dragging this in here for general keks and/or prompting insights.

This is quite laser-specific to mine and my ami/g/os' interests, but the article is still an entertaining read in general. The idea of having a functional pokemon battle with an LLM struck me almost instantly as soon as I got my hands on GPT-4 a year ago, but my hopes were rather swiftly dashed as soon as I tried to actually RP one - the model clearly had only the slightest idea of what it was doing. Baseline GPT and Claude have a basic grasp of Pokemon mechanics, they know most moves/status effects, know what stats do etc., but have almost no knowledge of the type table and no matter what I did during my tests, everyone's favorite Fairy/Psychic type would blast e.g. a Dark/Normal Obstagoon with Psychics and Shadow Balls for days (and claim it was effective!), with maybe a proper Fairy move of some sort once in like 10 regens. I wonder if it has anything to do with Fairy not being an OG type so there's less training data on it.

In any case it quickly became clear this would not work without a lot of crutches to force the LLM to keep track of important things, and I was (and still am) a terrible prompter and even worse writer, so the idea was shelved and I moved on. Now it seems like the crutches are finally here - rampant hallucinations are still in play of course (type/condition mismatches like poisoning a Steel-type are 100% my experience, although I wonder what's with all the switching) but this is looking good, much better than what I could cook up myself. I'm excited to steal the prompts to integrate into RPs/character cards and maybe trying to set Showdown up.

On a side note, the real champion fight here is obviously GPT-4 versus Claude Opus, and I hope someone follows up shortly. Finally a decisive answer to the incessant console wars plaguing chatbot threads.

I think what made original WoW so great is that the races/classes neatly represented the divisions of fantasy. Dwarves for LOTR-inspired fantasy, the undead for horror/grim fantasy, the medieval-themed human storyline for medieval fantasy, etc etc. This meant they by playing a new race or class, you were actually exploring a new major division of the fantasy genre, and thus a new and distinct aesthetic mode. The expansions kind of ruined this, as did “every race can play ever class!” silliness. Future MMORPGs should focus on this aspect, representing the entirety of fantasy through divisions involving race/class/region.

One of WoW's features was that it was a place to hang out online. You could gather friends and have an epic adventure together going through a rich open world. But it moved away from that. They couldn't solve the latency issues from having too many people in big outdoor battles. They couldn't solve the zone resource scaling issues where zones are either empty or too crowded.

Instead they decided that the open world wasn't important and switched to building mechanically complex battles in instances.

Now you can gather all of your friends in discord voice chat without having to play the same game. There's less need of a hang out game with a bunch of stuff to do in it.

Perhaps the future of MMOs is for small groups of people to use AI tools to develop elaborate Minecraft mods & worlds that other players can enjoy.

Now you can gather all of your friends in discord voice chat without having to play the same game. There's less need of a hang out game with a bunch of stuff to do in it.

I mean, you can. But doesn't it help to have some sort of common activity to bring people together? As an adult I find it really rare that other adult friends would just spontaneously call me up on discord "just to hang out." Made even more complicated by all the different discord servers, so you have to agree on whose server it is, which sort of puts them in charge.

I thought they were all just knockoffs of LOTR. the humans are like the Gondorian high men, and the elves are like the Rivendell or forest elves. Or even more so, it's like the 70's/80s ripoffs of LOTR like Dragonlance, Sword of Shannara, Mithgar, Riftwar, etc.

In some sense all of modern fantasy is just a knockoff of LOTR. In fact, I share the conviction that Tolkien invented the whole genre of fantasy, among other things by creating a unified imagery of elves and dwarves that was assimilated in more or less unchanged form into almost all later fantasy works.

The wife finally caved and gave me her blessing to just remake the cabinet doors for our kitchen, after our attempts to strip and refinish them failed horribly.

Picked up about $100 in rough hard maple at my local lumber yard, and began the process of marking out my pieces on the planks, breaking it down, milling it, etc. It's the first major job I've put through the jointer I got back in December, and it's easily proving itself worth the money.

See, before I was putting the parts of my project on a planing sled to get one side flat, with hot glue and shims to support the wobbly workpiece and keep it in place. It took forever. Then I'd clamp it down to another sled for my tablesaw and rip off one edge pretty damned straight. This worked but was slow, and involved a lot of extra steps. It also discouraged me from re-flattening a workpiece if it cupped a little after sitting in my detached garage for a week or month.

But man, now that I have a proper 10" benchtop jointer, it's so damned fast! I ended up with 40+ individual pieces for the 9 cabinet doors I need to make, and I just zipped them across the jointer, gave them a few passes through the planer, and I'm good to go. Was relatively frustration free, and extremely straight forward versus testing and retesting the wobble of a board and shimming it on a sled. Probably would have taken me all damned week or more to get through all the pieces the old way.

Side note, someone once asked me if all these tools were "worth it". You know, beyond the enjoyment of having a hobby, or making beautiful things yourself that you can appreciate every day. And that's a hard question to answer when you are making weird custom items. I mean, any sort of custom carpentry is going to cost you, but you rarely compare what you've made against that. You compare it against a retail item, possibly of inferior quality, or maybe some etsy or ebay piece, though that can be all over the place too. Anyways, cabinetry gives me an answer.

The same nine doors I'm making for $100 in material would have cost about $600 at Home Depot or Lowes. They are $60+ apiece. Even including the router bits I bought to do the raised panel, stile, rails and edge profile, and the jig I bought to make the proper holes for the mounting hardware ($300 total), I'm coming out decently ahead. And they will almost certainly get used again. I've had plans for a curio cabinet for miniatures, and probably redoing the top cabinets in our kitchen as well.

The kitchen has been half taken apart for going on 2 months now, while the wife waffled back and forth, and struggled with a lack of motivation. I'm hoping to get the new doors finished and back on in 2 weeks? Probably need this week to finish manufacturing the pieces and assembling them. Then another week to finish them? We'll see, fingers crossed.

So Biden apparently claimed his uncle was eaten by cannibals.

Perhaps he was inspired by the real-life experience of George H. W. Bush, whose plane was shot down by Japan in WWII. Among the American aviators shot down that day, some were captured by the Japanese and had their livers eaten. But somehow Bush himself was rescued by a submarine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush#World_War_II

What's up with all the non-Mormons? Weirdly specific universalities across LLMs

As seen in the previous section, without even venturing into the semantic void (i.e. no customised embeddings being employed), Pythia 2.8b and 12b, when prompted with the “empty string definition” prompt

A typical definition of '' would be '

both produce, with greedy sampling, the output

a person who is not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I really love these posts about glitchy LLM behavior, they scratch the same itch as e.g. analyses of glitches used in speedrunning.

Someone posted a response from "Claude" (Opus I assume? It's unspecified) in the comments section on the post. A couple things struck me about it:

  • If your main exposure to human writing is via facebook posts and frontpage reddit comments, then you might be forgiven for thinking that LLMs are already highly intelligent and have lots of deep wisdom to share.

  • It's not clear to me that Claude demonstrates an understanding of what's actually at issue with this phenomenon, i.e. the simple fact that '' (whether interpreted as the empty string, or two literal characters) doesn't have a "definition". It does note that it was "hallucinating", which is on the right track, but that's juxtaposed with "the exercise of sitting with the indeterminacy and openness of the empty string...", which is obviously rather silly and is more indicative of it treating the task as legitimate, rather than recognizing it for the pseudotask that it is. (I'm sure that if you prompted it directly it would be able to tell you that '' has no "definition", but the issue here is whether it was able to incorporate that understanding into this particular response.)

Now that Mark Zuckerburg is into MMA, wearing a chain around his neck, and is ripped, is it just a matter of time before he becomes based and red-pilled too?

I think yes.

He’s always been politically libertarian.

..didn't he donate tens to low hundreds millions of dollars to ensuring Trump loses his 2nd election ?

Yeah, after Facebook was almost broken up by regulators after he was personally blamed for Trump’s victory in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Hard not to see that as an obvious attempt to get the left off his back and avoid what has now happened to Musk.

Well, the Biden admin has been the gift that keeps on giving. Money well spent if you're an accelerationist.

I didn't think they'd do the title IX thing with trans, but it looks like trans BS is as irresistible to democrats as abortions are to republicans.

How so? It doesn’t seem to be reflected in either Facebook corporate actions or his personal philanthropy.

Apparently that’s the ideology he politically defines himself as closest to, according to the Wall Street Journal.

What makes you think he's not already based and red pilled? I've not seen any indication of his personal political views.

He’s given lots of money to left causes, notably efforts to help democrats get out the vote in 2020.

I miss when our billionaires were fat, drank bourbon, and smoked big cigars. That was the real America.

Does anybody know what actually happened to him? He seems to have gone a full 180 in every respect.

I think the way the press reported him was never really accurate. His hero was always Octavian and has been sporting a roman haircut for like 15 years now. He was known to take new hires on long hikes and was always somewhat outdoorsy.

He's the sort of guy who would decide that learning some hand to hand combat training is important.

But if you're a white guy doing a VC funded bay area tech company there are certain cultural expectations you need to conform to.

After 2016 he was personally blamed for Trumps election by many. In 2020 he spent 400 million of his own money in a scheme to oppose Trump that put him in some significant personal legal jeopardy.

It didn't get him back in good graces so I think his attitude now is "I don't need those people anyways".

It's common for famous people in California to play down personality traits that don't conform to the ruling consensus. A good example is someone like Stephen Spielberg who's definitely a loyal democrat, but he's a former eagle scout who loves guns. People tend to assume he was a pot smoking theatre kid when he was young.

I always thought the Roman haircut was just a meme, but apparently his kids’ names are Maxima, August and Aurelia lmao.

Sailer's was joking how funny it is that Spielberg has spend like a million bucks on luxury Italian shotguns but there's like 2 photos of him shooting one.

A few years ago he was on a Paleo diet shooting his own goats for dinner. I think he could better be described as "completely unmoored" rather than sailing in a specific direction.

As he ages I wouldn't be surprised if he fell into a silicon valley life extension or uploading cult. Except unlike the 90s maybe they'll really have the secrets of digital immortality.

How so? Doing MMA, getting ripped and wearing a chain might be orthogonal to what Zuckerberg is known for but 180?

He is also the biggest driving force behind open source AI right now. His latest model is nearly at the level of the closed-source alternatives. Requires hella hardware to run but still. That is the polar opposite of what I heard about Zuckerberg over the last 10 years: monitoring, stealing and selling personal information, etc.

The stealing/selling of information was never what got him in trouble -- early Facebook was literally giving it away for free, borderline open-sourcing it. Pretty libertarian in an 'information wants to be free' way, but I think they just did it because they figured their graph was really neat and wanted to share.

AFAICT there weren't really negative consequences either, apart from the Trump team using the features as intended -- to create a graph of potential Trump supporters to target political ads at receptive individuals, building an effective campaign with big bang for relatively few bucks. (ie. what the Obama campaign did on the last go-round)

You might not like it, but this is what peak (advertising) performance looks like -- now they do the same thing but keep it all under the hood.

Sure, but he was always politically a libertarian. He lobbied against banning Holocaust denial on Facebook until it became politically untenable for example because he believes in freedom of speech. I don’t think he’s very political, that means both that he’s not a lib and that he’s not going to sacrifice huge money for conservative causes like Elon. Plus he’s a Jewish guy with half-Asian kids so that likely sets an upper bound on how rightist he might go.

Huh, that's the first I'm hearing of Zuckerberg being libertarian. I guess I was successfully brainwashed in the past.

I'm happy about the metal chain, I can finally pull out all the ones I've not been wearing all these years out of shame.. hoping he made them marginally more acceptable among the PMC

what chain best communicates SV e/acc techbro

like, with the same level of intensity of an Italian guido cross chain

Rich Indian guys always seem to wear at least a moderate amount of jewelry tbh.

I'm a coconut.

No. The claim that lifting and combat sports make you politically right wing is just untrue in my experience. It seems true in online communities with beliefs that encourage both lifting weights and right-wing political beliefs, but if I exclude that from the anecdotal sample of people I know and control for background there's not much correlation.

Only if his wife will let him...

Even if Mark does become based, it's a virtual guarantee that his wife will donate his money to batshit liberal causes once he dies/they get divorced.

Whatever surgery she got (rhinoplasty and a chin lift?), it made her go from homely to Girl Boss Tiger Mom.

I think she'll let him off the leash for a bit.

She also lost a bit of weight and got somewhat fit.

Likely a mommy makeover post their third kid last year.

Follows a fairly typical suburban normie pattern, honestly. Get the gnarly business of keeping the suicidal little monsters out of harms way till they can manage one trip to the ER without automatically dying along the way, then focus on loving oneself. Get a bit more fitspo, a bit less powerboss. I wouldn't be surprised if the Zucks, like most married couples, preach luxury beliefs of trans acceptance and racial equality but privately subscribe to gender and racial realism: proof will lie in where he sends his kids.

The Fussy Suitor Problem: A Deeper Lesson on Finding Love

Inspired by the Wellness Wednesday post post by @lagrangian, but mostly for Friday Fun, the fussy suitor problem (aka the secretary problem) has more to teach us about love than I initially realized.

The most common formulation of the problem deals with rank of potential suitors. After rejecting r suitors, you select the first suitor after r that is the highest ranking so far. Success is defined as choosing the suitor who would have been the highest ranking among the entire pool of suitors (size n). Most analyses focus on the probability of achieving this definition of success, denoted as P(r), which is straightforward to calculate. The “optimal” strategy converges on setting r = n/e (approximately 37% of n), resulting in a success rate of about 37%.

However, I always found this counterintuitive. Even with optimal play, you end up failing more than half the time.

In her book The Mathematics of Love Hanna Fry suggests, but does not demonstrate, that we can convert n to time, t. She also presents simulations where success is measured by quantile rather than absolute rank. For instance, if you end up with someone in the 95th percentile of compatibility, that might be considered a success. This shifts the optimal point to around 22% of t, with a success rate of 57%.

Still, I found this answer somewhat unsatisfying. It remains unclear how much less suitable it is to settle for the 95th percentile of compatibility. Additionally, I wondered if the calculation depends on the courtship process following a uniform geometric progression in time, although this assumption is common.

@lagrangian pointed out to me that the problem has a maximum expected value for payoff at r = sqrt(n), assuming uniform utility. While a more mathematically rigorous analysis exists, I decided to start by trying to build some intuition through simulation.

In this variant of we consider payoff in utilitons (u) rather than just quantile or rank information. For convenience, I assume there are 256 suitors.

The stopping point based on sqrt(n) grows much more slowly than the n/e case, so I don’t believe this significantly alters any qualitative conclusions. I’m pretty sure using the time domain here depends on the process and rate though.

I define P(miss) as the probability of missing out or accidentally exhausting the suitors, ultimately “settling” for the 256th suitor. In that case you met the one, but passed them up to settle for the last possible persion. Loss is defined as the difference in utility between the suitor selected by stopping at the best suitor encountered after r, and the utility that would have been gained by selecting the actual best suitor. Expected Shortfall (ES) is calculated at the 5th percentile.

I generate suitors from three underlying utility distributions:

  • Exponential: Represents scenarios where there are pairings that could significantly improve your life, but most people are unsuitable.
  • Normal: Assumes the suitor’s mutual utility is an average of reasonably well-behaved (mathematically) traits.
  • Uniform: Chosen because we know the optimal point.

For convenience, I’ve set the means to 0 and the standard deviation to 1. If you believe I should have set the medians of the distributions to 0, subtract log(2) utilitons from the mean(u) exponential result.

Running simulations until convergence with the expected P(r), we obtain the following results:


| gen_dist |    r    | P(r) | P(miss) | <u> | <loss> | sd_loss | ES_5 | max_loss |
|----------|---------|------|---------|-----|--------|---------|------|----------|
|   exp    |   n/e   | 37%  |   19%   | 2.9 |  2.2   |   2.5   | 7.8  |   14.1   |
|   exp    | sqrt(n) | 17%  |   3%    | 3.0 |  2.1   |   1.8   | 6.6  |   14.8   |
|----------|---------|------|---------|-----|--------|---------|------|----------|
|   norm   |   n/e   | 37%  |   19%   | 1.7 |  1.2   |   1.5   | 4.6  |   7.0    |
|   norm   | sqrt(n) | 18%  |   3%    | 2.0 |  0.8   |   0.8   | 3.3  |   6.3    |
|----------|---------|------|---------|-----|--------|---------|------|----------|
|   unif   |   n/e   | 37%  |   19%   | 1.1 |  0.6   |   1.0   | 3.2  |   3.5    |
|   unif   | sqrt(n) | 17%  |   3%    | 1.5 |  0.2   |   0.5   | 2.1  |   3.5    |

What was most surprising to me is that early stopping (r = sqrt(n)) yields better results for both expected utility and downside risk. Previously, I would have assumed that since the later stopping criterion (r = n/e) is more than twice as likely to select the best suitor, the expected shortfall would be lower. However, the opposite holds true. You are more than 6 times as likely to have to settle in this scenario, so even if suitability is highly skewed as in the exponential case, expected value is still in favor of the r=sqrt(n) case! This is a completely different result than the r=n/e I had long accepted as optimal. The effect is even far more extreme than even the quantile-time based result.

All cases yield a positive expectation value. Since we set the mean of the generating distributions to 0, this implies that on average having some dating experience before deciding is beneficial. Don’t expect your first millihookup to turn into a marriage, but also don’t wait forever.

I should probably note for low, but plausible n <= 7, sqrt(n) is larger than n/e, but the whole number of suitors mean the optimal r (+/-1) is still given in the standard tables.

One curious factoid, is that actuaries are an appreciable outlier in terms of having a the lowest likelihood of divorce. Do they possess insights about modeling love that the rest of us don’t? I’d be very interested if anyone has other probabilistic models of relationship success. What do they know that the rest of the life, physical, and social sciences don't? Or is it that they are just more disposed to finding a suitable "good" partner than the one.

Thanks a lot for this. Do you have a pointer to your code, or could you put it up on Github/Codeberg?

I wasn't planing on publishing the source, since my code it is a bit idiosyncratic, but I guess there seems to be enough interest.

A pastebin with the code. Uhh, I guess I didn't put a license statement. Let's say BSD Zero Clause License. Do what you want, but don't blame me if it ruing your love life.

Is there a way to publish a pseudonymous/anonymous gist on Github?

Cheers, backed it up here: https://git.nunosempere.com/NunoSempere/fussy-suitor/src/branch/master/code.R

I'm not sure if there is a way to publish pseudonymously on Github. You could create a separate account (e.g., on Codeberg or on Gitlab) though

I would like to point out that once you throw the win condition of "you have to pick the best" out of the window, and instead try to optimize the EV of a real-valued score, strategies should change.

Basically, you want to still skip the first r suitors to get some information about the underlying distribution. Ones you have an idea about the distribution (possibly Pareto or normal), you want to compare the utility of the current suitor to the expected value you would get from the remainder of the queue (and keep updating your estimate of the distribution, naturally).

This means that you should pick the second-to-last suitor if they are above average utility. (Assuming that all suitors are positive utility as compared to not picking anyone, which is not the case in dating.)

It might also be better not have a hard cut at any given r, and instead have some penalty to early picking which represents "I forfeit the possibility of making a more informed choice".

If your sequence starts as -2, 5, 6e23, then there is some case to be made to marry Mr/Ms Avagadro without considering the rest of the queue. Of course, if the distribution you are sampling is a bimodal distribution which is 2/3 a boring normal distribution around zero with sigma=4 and 1/3 (1d12)^(1d100) (using roleplaying dice syntax), then you would be better served to keep sampling.

This why you get no bitches

Ignore me, I'm mildly salty because despite having the dubious distinction of being the first to apply the Secretary Problem in the context of dating, at least on The Motte, I lack the patience or mathematical astuteness necessary for such an in depth analysis. It's highly appreciated, what else can I do but hit AAQC?

the Secretary Problem was always about dating

The secretary problem was apparently introduced in 1949 by Merrill M. Flood, who called it the fiancée problem in a lecture he gave that year.

I think it just got renamed "secretary problem" to sound more genteel and respectable. Plus maybe some 1960s wink-wink nudge-nudge understanding that most secretaries at an office would get married to one of the bosses.

Well, I guess the reduction in salt intake is good for my BP.

How'd it go again "Great minds think alike, and fools seldom differ?".

Thanks for this!

One modification I wonder if you'd be willing to simulate for us: what if we don't strictly require stopping at n? You could formalize it to something like "given a strategy that on average samples n suitors when run it to its stopping point, what are the loss/etc?" p(miss) becomes 0 by definition.

That feels more like real life: if the goal is to stop dating by 35, but I happen to be dating Hitler when I hit 35, I'm probably gonna push it to 36.

It seems to me like the best way to model this would be to have some multiplicative scaling factor on utility that diminishes over time, since 50 years of your life with the second best suitor is (probably) going to be better than spending 20 years of your life with the best suitor. Perhaps a linear decay to simulate amount of lifespan remaining, so the utility of choosing the nth suitor is their actual quality multiplied by (1-0.01n). Or maybe weight it more towards the beginning to account for youth and childbearing years, like (0.99)^n or something.

It's interesting what you suggested is almost the opposite of the scenario @Felagund suggested. I suppose a hopeless romantic would not want to risk the potentially corrosive effect of having knowingly settled. I assume that in practice you would combine some knowledge of the current rate, the steepness of the expected falloff, some pure romantic inclination, and some fear of missing out into some heuristic.

In the scenario where we keep n from above, but keep going if we still haven't found the one I do think is interesting. If we set our benchmark at r=sqrt(n), 83% of the time you find your partner before n/e. Assuming (offset) exponentially distributed utility, the expected utility in this case is about the same as in the case where we assumed halting. I guess this is like the plethora of people who marry someone they meet in college? In about 10% of the cases there you manage to find a partner before the expected window closes, and patients is rewarded with about 50% more utility (4.5 vs 3).

I then assumed some very questionable things to set the next boundaries. First, we can transpose to time as above. Second, that we care about marriage with respect to producing children. Putting geriatric maternal age at 35-40, and assuming you would just offset paternal age so we don't have to deal with an extra set of scenarios, I find a new cutoff of 320/256. I think this sort of accommodates @jeroboam's point. In that case not stopping, but being willing to continue into the danger zone, 1.3% of the runs find the one by "40." Of course expected utility is higher at 5.2, but being willing to push age, but unwilling to settle only picked up a small number of additional "successes."

In the remaining 5% cases you eventually find your soulmate with an expected utility of 6.4. You do have to wait exponentially long though, with a median age equivalent of 67, and a mean of 343!

Setting the high water mark at n/e, but being unwilling to stop is similar in utility. Now you've eliminated the 3 unit of expected utility bucket, and the 4.5 unit utility bucket has 63% weight. Your willingness to go into the (questionably) age equivalent 35-40 bucket also preserves 7% of the trials. By setting your benchmark so late though, 30% of the time you miss the critical window. The higher expected utility, I guess, represents it being totally worth it to find your soul mate, assuming there was no penalty for waiting past geriatric pregnancy age.

@self_made_human don't worry I know these simulations are entirely irrelevant to us denizen of themotte, thus the fun thread and why I included the note on n <= 7, ಥ_ಥ

I really hope I don't have to resort to necrophilia by the time I'm 36, but either way, I'm sure the coroner will cut me some slack.

We all share that same hope, if I might dare a post that suggests consensus.

Mods, twist his nuts

(I really had to use all my willpower not to put the mod hat on for this comment, be thankful)

Or is it that they are just more disposed to finding a suitable "good" partner than the one.

I'd guess it's a few things. Pragmatic and risk averse personalties to start. They probably know to avoid cluster-b partners. Other people in the sciences probably are less aware and get caught up in the passion and excitement.

The high divorce risk occupations seem to involve common things. Unstable hours which disrupt home life and provide opportunity for cheating. Jobs that provide a lot of opportunities to meet attractive singles.

Actuaries are probably also better at evaluating the pain of divorce and their prospects on the singles market.

Also it probably helps that they were never that exciting in their 20s. Women who married a guy in a rock band are going to have to reconcile when the man gives up on it and gets an office job. Whereas the actuary has gone from diligent student to starting actuary to better paid actuary. So she knew what she was getting into.

And who needs divorce when you can encourage your spouse into dangerous activities that steadily increase their risk of death?

We also have to factor in (for women) a declining sexual market value. So the max score of suitors goes down over time, thus favoring settling earlier.

For men, the max score of potential mates goes up at first, peaks in the 30s, and then declines.

With an average age of first marriage for men of 30.5 and women of 28.6, women are being too picky and men not picky enough. You see, it's science.

Why is it always choose them only if they're better than the best up to that point? At some point wouldn't point, wouldn't it become better to settle for gradually worse partners? (obvious case: in a uniform distribution, only two people left, and you get someone who's at the 75th percentile)

In the original construction, you win if you choose the absolute best partner, you lose if you do not, so the 75th percentile is a guaranteed loss, no different from the bottom 1 percentile. You only want to maximize the probability of getting the actual best, so it has to be better than anything you've seen so far or there's no chance and no point settling.

However, you are right that in this modified version trying to maximize utility this no longer applies, and a proper optimal strategy should probably be a function f(n,d) describing what percentile you're willing to settle on as a function of what time step it is (n) and what your estimate of the distribution is (d), depending on what you've seen so far and your meta knowledge.

Anyone else going to be at the Dallas SSC meetup this weekend?

Not me, only because it's been 13 hours and I feel like a reply is only polite.

It’s alright. The silence speaks for itself.

Windows 11 may have my least-favorite feature ever. Try this:

  • Open a file.
  • write some new stuff in it.
  • close the file.
  • reopen it.
  • confirm that the changes were kept.

Did you notice a missing step? I never said to save the changes, so the file was never updated. Instead, the changes were kept in a sort of suspended animation by the editor, and reappeared (in the editor only) when I reopened it.

Conflating "closing the file/discarding changes" with "closing the application window" was never a great UI compromise, so this seems like an improvement. You just need to accept that program state and file state do not need to be correlated.

You just need to accept that program state and file state do not need to be correlated.

Or I could continue to tilt at windmills.

I just have an odd feeling that, when you're using a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get style editor, when you see something you should also get it.

Windows 11 may have my least-favorite feature ever. Try this:

That is not by far the least favorite feature of windows 11

There's actually a whole discussion around that. iOS popularized it, then Apple started including saving edits by default in some of their apps like Preview. They added a "create duplicate" menu item if you want to preserve the original. Designers live on their iPads, so it's been infecting other apps ever since.

The other change is how most web apps do "save edits automatically" now. Previously the standard was to present the user an empty form, let them fill in values, then create when they hit save.

Apple changed it to create an item (the item is actually created), then edit the item where your edits are saved by default. The big downside to this is that things get messy when a field has to be unique or it's expensive to update.

I've had many nightmare codebases where the designer wanted Apple style, the backend people wanted traditional style, and neither were willing to sit down and discus the differences.

Just today, I installed Manjaro Linux on a spare laptop I had handy. I'm loving it so far. I think soon I'm going away from Windows for good.

  1. it does not seem windows 11 specific, it looks program specific
  2. there should be an option to reload from file or just do ctrl-z
  3. I like such feature and several programs that I use on Linux have it

I like such feature and several programs that I use on Linux have it

Such as the famously-modern program vim.

The vim feature is there as more of a crash recovery feature. It asks you if you want to recover your edits when you start. The new style is a little different.

If you want to complain some weird random app, you should complain about that app (at the very least name it!), not Windows 11 when Windows itself has nothing to do with your app.

And no, even Windows 11 notepad doesn't do that. If you close a file without saving and open it again, the original contents remain. It's only when you go to the original restored tab in Notepad that the changes remain - clearly marked as unsaved!

It was Notepad. I'm comfortable with the synecdoche, but could have been clearer.

clearly marked as unsaved!

Are we using the same program? I can't imagine anyone calling a small grey dot "clearly marked", never mind "clearly marked as...".

For reference, the only visual difference between a saved file and an unsaved one is that the "close tab" location goes from [ ]/[X] to [•]/[X]. If your mouse is hovering over the X then there's no difference.

Notepad++ does this, but it makes it clear when you reopen the application that these are unsaved changes you are viewing. You can press CTRL-R to reload from the file and throw away your changes, among other pathways.

It'd be pretty thrown off if one day Notepad started doing that too without the robust UI changes Notepad++ has around the feature.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats