gammadens

I see the difference between determinism and superdeterminism but it's unclear to me why, if you accept the former, why you might not accept the latter.

I think it's worth thinking through and delineating superdeterminism to its utmost limits even if I wouldn't necessarily say I find it compelling.

I do wonder why the authors are so quick to reject nonreductionism though, as nonreductionism seems fairly reasonable to me. Maybe I have a different idea of nonreductionism, but it seems to me that rejecting nonreductionism is akin to accepting Laplace's demon which as far as I understand has been disproved. Basically, at some point the information in a system supercedes that of any system that might represent it faithfully, in part because of measurement effects -- there's a lot of parallels with QM issues.

This meta-analysis isn't ground breaking. What has been known for awhile is that AA works very well for some, but not at all for others. This has always been the dilemma with AA in research as well as clinically. It won't affect treatment because no one was ever discouraged from trying it at least in my experience.

There's an entire literature on very closely related concepts and issues -- many of the same issues arguably -- in the psychological test and measurement literature. There it's discussed tn terms of internal and external validity but interpretation is at its core and the scenario (and often models, at some level) are very similar. There you are trying to discriminate between psychologically relevant states, or outcomes, or variables, based on inputs in the form of responses to items (inputs). Focus is on articulating how to interpret test items an model structural features vis a vis inputs and outputs.

The literature on this is too hard to summarize in a post, but basically in turns into an empirical-scientific question, of making predictions about model features and testing these predictions scientifically.

Ageism cuts in both directions and it's one of the few forms of prejudice society still tolerates for some reason.

Imagine this guy's post if you substitute "too old" with "black" or "female" (or "male"). It would be cut down quickly and yet here we are expected to laugh at things.

What I hate about ageism most of all is it makes it impossible to have any kind of discussion about the real merits and demerits of things if there's some kind of new versus established nature to it. In certain circles, there seems to be a false, pervasive assumption that what's new and popular among the young is better, and that uptake is just inhibited by creaky old folks; in other circles there seems to be an assumption that's what's old and established among the older crowd is that way because it's superior.

The reality is that some established products are established because they are so great; and other products are great because they address limitations of existing products. But once you bring age of critics or advocates into the mix, it's all over because someone starts slyly looking at their pals over their shoulder and dismissing the discourse as due to youth or age.

I've been on both sides of this, as someone the same age as the author, and it's infuriating. There are products that my generation grew that I never adopted because of concerns, and now it's the young trendy thing to do to abandon them. There are new products that are overhyped imho because they solve problems that never really existed, but the wheel gets reinvented anyway because of the constant need for people to brand themselves as innovators. On the other hand, there are new products that finally exist that I wish everyone would take up, but don't because of old products that should have never become as popular as they did, or because of the vagaries of network effects, fads, and so on.

So this person doesn't get Facebook Stories or whatever the hell it is. Fine. Is there anything wrong with that? No. Can't we talk about that? Why does it have to become about age, even if he's doing it through self-deprecating (humblebragging?) humor?

My personal feeling about this, like a lot of things in the US at the moment is that the required approach requires cutting across current paradigms.

More competition is required, which to my mind suggests introducing public pharmaceuticals, but also deregulating drugs in general.

I agree, but I also think a comprehensive set of standard benchmarks can be useful to get an overall sense of how language instantiations perform and how things change. It's fairly clear that in general some language implementations are much slower across the board than others, even if for many other comparisons the distinctions are fine or depend on domain.

My overall sense is that there's been a pull back from general benchmarking compared to say, 15 years ago, and it's unfortunate, because it leaves the benchmarking to developers of languages, compilers, and whatnot. This provides an opportunity to show of the best-case scenarios for the languages, but also for them to hide the areas of weakness -- and those hidden areas are often the mine traps for those deciding whether to invest resources in a new language.

Having a standard, comprehensive set of problems helps address this "hiding." I also think there's value in naive benchmark programs as well as "expert" tuned ones: not everyone is going to optimize every single scenario in every language.

The one thing I've never seen implemented well is some measure of "ergonomics" or "high-level" versus "low-level" aspects of a language, which also seems important to me. Some of that is going to be subjective but some of it not.

From their supplementary table this looks like a general cognitive ability effect, although they don't seem to have included the range of measures that are typically included in general cognitive ability measures.

The short answer is that it's difficult to say from their results, and they don't explicitly test that, but it looks like it.

Tenured positions aren't all they're cracked up to be either.

Indirect funds on grants need to be eliminated in my opinion. The GOP is a disaster at the moment in my opinion but introducing bills to eliminate them is one of the things they've done right. Indirect funds distort the purpose of grants and give perverse incentives to university administration and other funding sources.

Surprised how long he was asymptomatic. That is concerning to me.

I came to say that the diamond princess is kind of an ideal case for getting a handle on things because it's a largish finite closedish population, kind of like why ecologists often love islands.

One thing that's puzzling to me though is even though the infected rate from the diamond princess is reported at 700+, the recovery rate is still reported at 10+. So what's going on with the other 690+ people? Are they still sick in a way they could still deteriorate? It's confusing because the cfr based on dead and recovered is still pretty high.

Again, though, the diamond princess is helping to clarify things, because nonreporting and nonpresenting aren't issues for the most part.

Part of me wonders if the next step with this is some sort of DL model. I wonder if, trained on one set of melodies (defined in the intuitive sense) it would generate existing copyrighted melodies not in the training set.

I cross country ski and have noticed those in the community in Scandinavia despairing and in shock over the lack of snow and its impact on events.

I've dealt with lack of snow in one or two past years and always had a kind of FOMO reaction, like Scandinavia was some sort of climate bubble. Now the tables are turned (somewhat; it's definitely been warmer than normal here too although not to the same extent) and it's not only shocking to see Scandinavians faced with the prospect of not enough snow to hold major ski events, but also sobering.

I've worried that this will become some sort of negative feedback spiral in the sport. If snow becomes unreliable, it's hard to justify purchasing a nice set of equipment, which leads to less participation, which leads to less trail prep, etc.

A relatively trivial example of the impact of global warming, in the grand scheme, but personally significant for me.

What's most difficult in some ways is when we lose cold days it's not like running or biking somehow become more feasible, because there's too much ice. If it's too warm for winter sports, and too icy for summer sports, you're kind of stuck.