rramach
Scott Aaronson says "Dana tells me she now mostly understands the proof of the UGC, and is amazed by the new ideas in it, and wants to give talks about it soon."
Dana Moshkovitz is a professor at UT Austin who is an expert in the area and has been working on solving this exact problem for decades!
Meanwhile you can use the model to help you out as Scott comments "Just now, however, Dana tells me that she’s been asking Astra all day to explain the new proof of the UGC to her and it’s been doing an amazing job and she’s starting to understand the construction."
Understanding was critical for the field to progress when only humans were involved but if humans are not needed to make progress, I wonder if we split into two worlds: an AI math-world where amazing new results continue at a rapid pace bottlenecked only by compute/cost and a human math-world where we understand a subset of the AI math-world as a hobby (similar to Stockfish vs human chess).
If one reads this with a charitable lens, Dario is simply saying that 1) Nation state actors are a threat which needs to be combatted by chip bans and distillation prevention and 2) open-weight models can pose biological risk.
One may or may not agree with item 1 but item 2 above should have broad support given the unknown unknowns in play?
Lazarsfeld was writing about “The American Soldier”, a recently published study of over 600,000 servicemen, conducted by the research branch of the war department during and immediately after the second world war. To make his point, Lazarsfeld listed six findings that he claimed were representative of the report. Take number two: '“Men from rural backgrounds were usually in better spirits during their Army life than soldiers from city backgrounds.”
“Aha,” says Lazarsfeld’s imagined reader, “that makes perfect sense. Rural men in the 1940s were accustomed to harsher living standards and more physical labour than city men, so naturally they had an easier time adjusting. Why did we need such a vast and expensive study to tell me what I already knew?” Why indeed.
But Lazarsfeld then reveals the truth: all six of the “findings” were in fact the exact opposite of what the study found. It was city men, not rural men, who were happier during their army life. Of course, had the reader been told the real answers in the first place, they could just as easily have reconciled them with other things they already thought they knew: “City men are more used to working in crowded conditions and in corporations, with chains of command, strict standards of clothing, etiquette, and so on. That’s obvious!” But this is exactly the point Lazarsfeld was making. When every answer and its opposite appears equally obvious then, as he put it, “something is wrong with the entire argument of ‘obviousness'”
More here: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128210-100-the-huma...
Edward says that Nate's prediction should be interpreted as: “If nothing else changes between now and the election, Joe Biden has a 85% chance of winning.” (Silver’s argument) But the problem is this prediction is not testable as election only occurs once at the end. Thus, one should use Nate's early predictions as pure entertainment.
Nate's final predictions show that they are well-calibrated across all of his political predictions but it is hard to estimate how accurate his model predictions are just for presidential elections given he has predicted only a few so far (unless one assumes all elections have similar uncertainty, which is clearly not true).
I think some editors are perhaps trying to avoid a repeat of the 'Hillary email/Comey announcement of 2016' scenario but didn't anticipate the Streisand effect.
In hindsight, best approach may have been to cover the story, get a sound bite from Biden denying that he benefitted, say there is no evidence he benefitted and leave it at that.
Hard to say if it is the most important but it is a pretty important factor. See https://www.joincampaignzero.org/ for all research that indicates the unions are a key stumbling block.
Edit: Also, Germany does not test dead folks for coronavirus while Italy does. Further, SK death rate has gone up to 1.3% (0.9% is an old number) and many more are in severe category. Thus, the sub 1% numbers seem more like the outliers than the above 1% numbers.
The point is not that suffering makes ones life meaningful but the struggle or striving or the road seems to be preferred by the wise than an end state like happiness.