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How do these companies perform compared to the USPS? Just knowing that they're privatized without any mention of customer satisfaction, cost, or other comparative metrics doesn't say much about whether it's a good idea. (I don't believe anyone's main contention is that it's "novel")

Sure, but with the amount of wealth and power that they have, it goes beyond lobbying. If there were any sense of the other side getting equal bargaining power, maybe people would be less upset.

What about this video did you find relevant? The case where one individual attacked a plywood barricade with a hammer and was stopped? (Surely not the Andy Ngo digression.) That's not the topic under discussion. People are concerned with federal officers arresting people off the street with no probable cause.

I will have to take a look at that paper. I didn't catch your edit before replying. It would certainly be worthwhile to verify that claim (or not) using the paper's model if I find some time. In any case, I think the underlying point is that these language models serve a purpose, but will not uncover an underlying structure for you or derive something like the phrase structure grammar proposed in Syntactic Structures. I may be extrapolating a bit based on other times I've seen Chomsky discuss this, though.

I wish there were a freely available copy online, I could link, but the passage is at the end of chapter 2 of Syntactic Structures. It's not a footnote, but rather the crux of his argument, I believe:

> "... a structural analysis cannot be understood as a schematic summary developed by sharpening the blurred edges in the full statistical picture. If we rank the sequences of a given length in order of statistical approximation to English, we will find both grammatical and ungrammatical sequences scattered throughout the list; there appears to be no particular relation between order of approximation and grammaticalness. Despite the undeniable interest and importance of semantic and statistical studies of language, they appear to have no direct relevance to the problem of determining or characterizing the set of grammatical utterances. I think that we are forced to conclude that grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning, and that probabilistic models give no particular insight into some of the basic problems of syntactic structure."

I do think it's an important point for people to recognize. Scientific theories don't arise on their own out of large-scale statistical analyses. There is a lot of faith being put in deep learning methods these days, which are great for prediction, but not inference.

I think the more interesting result (and more relevant to Chomsky's point) would be to work in the other direction. If you instead produce a list of sentences with similar log probabilities you will see that it contains a mix of grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. This implies something more is needed to distinguish them.

Right. The sentences are both very unlikely to be uttered even though one is grammatical and the other is not, so there must be another factor in play.

It's funny the author wasted energy composing this after admitting he barely knows the origin of the sentence. Chomsky invokes it in "Syntactic Structures" to illustrate that the grammaticality of a given sentence doesn't fully explain the odds of it appearing in a large corpus. "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" is another low probability sentence, yet a native speaker couldn't perform these sorts of mental gymnastics to twist some meaning out of it.

What examples do you have in mind when you say this? The main case studies that I see get brought up are Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War and the Paris Commune, but the wartime pressures that led to their collapse strike me as much different from the present situation. I think the CHAZ will be an interesting experiment given the context.

And did those arrest and charges come before or after multiple days of protests? At this point the protests have snowballed into a larger frustration over police conduct (and I'm sure other issues), which only gets reinforced with each instance of force being used on those who are assembled peacefully.

Seriously, "any tools"? You are commenting on an article about the use of new surveillance tools like facial recognition software that scrapes Facebook, not a discussion on whether the National Guard should be deployed.

So your point is that this justifies the expansion of the surveillance state? Do you consider all of the protestors responsible for looting? And should we just discount the evidence pointing to the presence of agents provocateurs?

Yes, what a heroic display we're commenting on here. What exactly is your point and how is it relevant to this unsettling video? Just the platitude that not every interaction is necessarily racist?

Having gone through two chapters now, I also feel the need to caution others that the amount of typos in this book is simply jaw-dropping. The conceptual explanations in the text are generally excellent, but it is simply impossible to get through a page without hitting a substantial number of mistakes. I'm left wondering if there are errors I'm not catching on my own that are going to affect my understanding. I really hope a cleaned up second edition is on the horizon (hopefully with answers to some of the in-line exercises).

Thank you! This looks great and surprisingly affordable for an academic textbook. It seems like a lot of the good material for teaching these topics at the undergraduate level has come out rather recently.

Wow, this is beyond what I could've hoped for. Especially the coding exercises, which make up for the other massive difficulty in self-studying--a lack of solutions to verify the work on written problems.

Can anyone recommend a good introduction to differential geometry and forms? Does something analogous to "Visual Complex Analysis" exist for the topic? I have been curious to learn for a long time but, for whatever reason, always lose my way at some point with articles like this. I come away with some feeling that I understand what's going on and yet I can't say I have any concrete intuition for what a form or a manifold is despite knowing the formal definitions. I feel like applied examples would help, but at this level of math that seems to entail going on a side quest to learn a lot of difficult physics first. (Or alternatively, doing a lot of proofs, but that feels futile without having a tutor/mentor to check them.)

Unfortunately, it looks like this will be short-lived. China's emissions for some pollutants are already above what they were pre-shutdown.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-...

Unfortunately, the third part is missing from youtube. Full video here https://reason.com/video/mississippi-drug-war-blues/.

I'm genuinely surprised someone could read that whole blog post (I'm assuming here) and come away with that conclusion. Gelman addresses this so directly in the article:

"Recall the Javert paradox. It’s completely reasonable to write about scientific misconduct, and yes sometimes we have to scream a bit to get heard over all the chatter of the scientist-as-hero press." ... "But we need real expertise, not fake expertise. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Gresham, baby, Gresham. If we don’t contest the fake expertise, I’m seriously worried it will be crowding out the real stuff."

There is good research and there is bad research. The latter should not be given a pass just because all research has some amount of bias.

Walker has clearly made a huge name for himself and sold a significant number of books by skewing the evidence to make his thesis sound more substantial than it is

What do you mean that stretching doesn't do anything? Any links to such evidence? It's a pretty simple experiment to stretch every day for a month and measure your flexibility gains, so that's quite a bold claim. Do you mean it has no direct impact on your health?

Except there are cases where Walker went so far as to remove portions of a graph to support his argument. This kind of manipulation shouldn't be allowed to stand and it's frustrating (though not surprising) to see a book that relies on this sort of dishonesty get so much uncritical attention and praise. I can't put it any better than Andrew Gelman:

"If the data didn’t matter, then why did you include them in your damn book in the first place? If the removal of the bar from the graph didn’t matter, then why did you remove the damn bar?"

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/03/24/why-we-sle...

> Entire patterns of thought become antiquated as our communication wiring adapts to the ever increasing pace of society. Social media is driving dopamine hits from shorter and shorter forms of engagement.

I think you are extrapolating a little too much from your personal experience. An obvious counterexample to our society trending to "shorter and shorter forms of engagement" is the rise of long-form podcasts and long-form independent reporting.

Plenty of people still enjoy literature and the way in which it can convey ideas that non-fiction does not. My impression is that you'd have the same reaction to more recent fiction by, say, Cormac McCarthy or David Foster Wallace. I'm not sure Harry Potter is exactly a fair comparison of a work that aims for the same register as Moby Dick. As far as I know, 19th century literature with a simpler prose style (for example Sherlock Holmes or Poe's short stories) is still entirely accessible to someone with basic reading comprehension.

Could this have to do with the fact that the site is paywalled and not open to the bots and trolls that overwhelm other news organizations' comment sections?

Why is that? The article doesn't say much about the benefits of using this type of regularization.

So you're relying entirely on conjecture of this possible conflation and not weighing how much more dangerous one side is compared to the other? I'd find it much more useful to discuss if there examples of this being an actual widespread problem, where people with rational concerns were getting put down and lumped in with the antivaxxers. Until then, anyone promoting the MMR/autism link which stems from a downright fraudulent study by a corrupt author deserves every bit of pushback that they get.

This is a coarse mis-characterization of both sides of that "debate" if we can even call it that. Are anti-vaxxers mostly worried about proven risks, like narcolepsy in this case, or is a much larger part of their movement concerned with making paranoid claims like that the MMR vaccine causes autism? Are the experts guilty of denying the narcolepsy-Pandermix link, or are they spending more time trying to refute bogus statements because they'd like to see herd immunity maintained for certain diseases?

Oh, wow. Is any of his research still taken seriously? For whatever reason, I was under the impression his work on researcher bias like "the law of small numbers" was quite influential and still cited here and there by trustworthy figures.

I managed to dig it up: https://web.archive.org/web/20170312041524/http:/www.brianwa.... It really is incredible to read Wansink's clueless non-rebuttals to the comments that point out his academic fraud.