Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Ex-Amazon, now GoogleX. My (bad) tweets are my own and don't represent anyone. Same handle on elefant.
@noampomsky
The founder of Palantir did his PhD with Habermas. It's an interesting rejoinder to people who like to quip that tech CEOs just need to take more classes in the humanities.
Literal quote from an Elsevier exec: "You charge as much as the market will bear, & if consumers don't like it, they can suck it, because they have no other options". I'm sure that he will have a trite apology forced by HR in the next few days, but this is what they really think
@Noahpinion
I think the primary motivation is to make the admission criteria less "legible" so it will be harder to sue universities when they discriminate against very high achieving working class Asian kids.
@EsotericCD
I realize this is quaint on Twitter, but, I'm genuinely asking. Do you have any objections to the measure on the merit? Sure it will make meat more expensive, but, if that's the price we have to pay so animals lead (slightly) better lives, surely that's worth it?
This is completely incorrect because multiplying probabilities involves convolutions, and if an observation is significantly different from your prior, it causes a larger update (unless your prior has zero support in that area).
Just off the phone with a mathematician friend who shared some profound insights into why it's hard to change deeply held beliefs:
In Bayesian statistics, beliefs are updated by multiplying two curves:
1. The **prior** (your current belief).
2. The **likelihood** (new
@emollick
The stakeholders (Gates foundation esp) deserve huge credit for releasing the negative report. It's likely existing estimates of effect size in this field are massively overstated
@robinhanson
The ring is layout is just a result of the loss function you choose to optimize when projecting a high dimensional graph to low dimension.
@MountainHawk26
@EsotericCD
I understand, but this isn’t a binary decision. This is trading off an increase in price in exchange for animals having slightly nicer lives: this seems completely fine to me. Would you support removing existing anti animal cruelty laws for livestock if it made the price lower?
@NateSilver538
Unironic answer - Vox News. Vox’s founding principle was that for “normal people” it’s impossible to understand the news in isolation, and what matters is contextualizing the finding appropriately - this is fine in the abstract, but, in practice it devolves rapidly.
@dylanmatt
@KelseyTuoc
Two things: 1) the sheer hubris is incredible, I absolutely cannot understand it - I wonder if becoming a billionaire fundamentally alters you and you cannot think like a normal human being again. 2) I bet his lawyers are not exactly happy about this
@kulturalmarx
@athenogenes
i've given a 5 star to an uber driver who spent the entire ride trying to get me to join their pyramid scheme selling vitamins
@JohnCarreyrou
@WSJ
I desperately wish there was a way to pay for the top notch WSJ reporting without having to subsidize the editorial page. It’s a genuine embarrassment.
@jonbernhardt
@antumbral
The idea that the US has things to teach to the Netherlands about public transport and green infrastructure is utterly risibile to anyone that has spent time in both places.
@Noahpinion
@brogram_
It's also applied very selectively: if you genuinely believe that this is an ethical way of thinking about policies, you have to either be a saint like
@dylanmatt
and donate a large portion of your income + your kidney, or you are a hypocrite.
@quantian1
Because the AMA has successfully lobbied for insane laws that make it practically impossible for foreign doctors to practice in the US without redoing their entire residency. It’s 100% a protectionist measure that nobody wants to challenge.
@_me_you_coward
Or the notion that there is some dark matter of super progressive voters who don’t vote because dems are insufficiently progressive. Conveniently, this frees them from having to try to persuade anyone or being in any way agreeable towards anyone else.
@AlecStapp
Usually, when something like this doesn't get fixed it's because there's a big money interest that lobbies to keep it the way it is (intuit and tax filing, for example). Who benefits from the status quo and lobbies to keep it as is?
Pretty simple method that works well: train N models with different initialization, and label the samples where the ensembled models have the highest disagreement.
Very proud of the MagLev team for showing our approach to active learning at scale + amazing results.
Fewer labels, better models: a true technological advantage when building world-class AI perception systems for our Autonomous Vehicles platform.
@Noahpinion
Interesting: I think the opposite is true. In tech you have technical career tracks while very few universities have similarly prestigious careers that don’t involve managing a large group as a PI
@NateSilver538
I cannot imagine anyone with the slightest bit of statistical sophistication making that mistake. I think you can have reasonable disagreements about how to model the off-diagonal elements of the covariance matrix - but making it diagonal? Who authored that post?
@dylanmatt
He straight up said that anti-democratic measures were necessary and justified to uphold white supremacy! And he is held up as some paragon of wisdom and sobriety.
@stanveuger
@Noahpinion
That is spookily accurate. It’s missing the “former soc dem now leads a centrist party of one whose main agenda is giving himself a stipend”
@Carnage4Life
It’s scary to think how much a motivated person could have learned if they applied themselves with the same effort to actually studying something useful instead of just how to pass the coding interview.
@mattyglesias
@DKThomp
Zero mention of the fact that Scott is using his substack money to subsidize radically cheap mental health for poor people in the Bay Area.
@TimSweeneyEpic
Totally agree with everything you said about the old system, but, the new system that boosts your visibility if you pay isn’t exactly meritocratic either.
@robinhanson
You could define a distance matrix in different ways and then either apply PCA, MSD, TSNE, uMAP and you'd get different visualizations (which would further vary with hyper parameters).
@ne0liberal
While that is unarguably true, the cost of capital at the time was crazy high and the financial services (+ world economy really) owes an existential debt to the government intervention.
@carlesgelada
Hey Carles, I actually appreciate your provocative takes - but - do you think you are needlessly antagonizing people by putting forward your takes in the most controversial and adversarial possible way?
@sullydish
I think the last 20 years have been an abject lesson in what happens when the elite consensus is completely wrong (austerity/iraq, etc) and then the last 5 have been a lesson in how the populist backlash is nearly as bad as what it was trying to cure.
@citnaj
I think the code is actually quite ambiguous if people do not know about the precise semantics and reductions of Pytorch. I find code + math very complementary: some things are clearer in code, some things are clearer in math.
I just realized that something that both Eric Hobspawn and
@adam_tooze
have in common is grounding narratives in incredibly detailed reports about seeming unimportant technical minutiae. I can't unsee the influence now.
@DanielWhiteson
@robinhanson
I don't think they explicitly laid it out in 2d, but, a weighted graph with n nodes naturally lives in R^n. There are different ways of projecting it to a lower dimensional space but they all involve distortions and neither is more 'correct' than any other a priori.
There is a much smarter version of this point - made by
@nntaleb
on frequentist grounds: if you observe data whose likelihood is exceptionally low, the right move is not to update your priors, but to assume your likelihood is wrong and you should use a heavy tailed distribution
@atroyn
@olivertraldi
I mean Cauchy defined limit formally when Marx was three. This is what happens if you try to think you can use dialectics to do math .
@TimSweeneyEpic
It's quite a stunning reversal of what you said: What I got from your talk was that you wanted games with a message that was crafted from designers which marketing couldn't interfere with?
In the interest of being fair, the author of the quote claims he was being sarcastic and it's quoted out of context, but the current state of scientific publishing (especially in the life sciences) is completely indefensible.
@lessig
Given your extreme confidence, would you be willing to have a small charity bet on the outcome? Happy to discuss the terms further - but - something like, the person that turns out to be wrong donates 5000 dollars to Givewell/Doctors without Borders.
@GergelyOrosz
A fun text scraping exercise would be to index all job ads through time, and look at the distribution of number of years of experience required - I bet you’d find that the right tail of the distribution is > the number of years the product has been out for.
@joelgrus
For what it's worth - I loved both of your talks, and I think you both made great points (I agree with you slightly more). As long as they are not expressed maliciously, disagreements about technical issues should be completely fair game in conferences.
CA Senate Bill 9 allows up to 4 homes in most single-family zones, regardless of local zoning. You can use
#SB9
to split your lot, add a 2nd home to a lot, or both (split lot & have 2 homes on each lot for total of 4).
Here's a how-to guide & thread:
1/
@TheStalwart
I'm not really a big fan of telling people to stay in their own lane, but, Niall Ferguson wrote some of the most intellectually dishonest columns I've ever read about Obamacare, and, he has no real accomplishments in economics.
@athenogenes
I liked Russell's critique of stoicism: it's a very nihilistic way of being good. It starts from the stand point that improving the world is impossible and the only way to be good is to control your own reactions to things outside of your control.
@michael_nielsen
When a titan like Hinton speaks out, I hope everyone pays close attention. I do wish we had the raw transcript of the full interview though, since Hinton himself immediately spoke out to correct the interview:
In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly.
@ben_golub
The amount of right wing billionaire money that goes into providing sinecures for these utter mediocrities offends me far more than it should.
@lastpositivist
Agreed, and I think a key challenge is that when a stupid idea is presented as “this is a left wing idea that supports PoCs” well meaning people who might otherwise evaluate the idea skeptically are really wary to offer public criticism.
@lakens
Funnily enough, Latour, who started his career attacking scientific objectivity eventually came around exactly to that point of view and ate crow:
We are in really weird times: Wall Street is pushing for less oil drilling in order to keep prices high (which has the effect of lowering CO2 emissions). The Sunrise movement is pushing for cheaper gas prices, which would increase CO2 emissions
@Noahpinion
The most accurate and pithy take I've seen on this topic is that houses cannot be both affordable and an investment. To paraphrase
@EricRWeinstein
- it's based on a broken perennial growth hypothesis.
Introducing the SHA-RNN :)
- Read alternative history as a research genre
- Learn of the terrifying tokenization attack that leaves language models perplexed
- Get near SotA results on enwik8 in hours on a lone GPU
No Sesame Street or Transformers allowed.
@AlecStapp
@Noahpinion
I hope Shapiro gets overwhelming credit for this, and other senior elected politicians figure out there's an upside to spending political capital and attention to get shit done quickly. If wanting to do good isn't sufficient motivation, maybe ambition is.
@Noahpinion
One of my least favorite trends, is that any attempt to resist creeping politicization of everything was treated as evidence of suspicious politics. The classical bad faith rhetorical move was "Ah, you can afford to not be political here, X group doesn't have this privilege".
The Python scientific ecosystem (numpy, scipy, sklearn, etc) have contributed more to the advancement of science (biology, astrophysics, applied maths, machine learning) than virtually any other technology. Scientific open source is woefully underfunded.
@Carnage4Life
The social problems are also incredibly complicated: am I allowed to make a new video game that grants items that are compatible with your game? Ok - so - how will you prevent me from flooding your game with super powerful items? A centralized authority you say?
@jasonfurman
The impression I have is that people who invest in meme stocks/Bitcoin believe all of the market is rigged, only this time they are the clever ones on the side that’s doing the rigging.
This is trivial to verify in cases with a conjugate prior: if your prior and likelihood are both Gaussian, an observation that’s further apart from your prior will cause a larger update.
@athenogenes
That said, the various twitter accounts with random greek or roman statues as avatars who peddle eating meat/lifting weights/being alpha as modern stoicism are peak right wing grifter
Sometimes neural networks are *too* powerful. Spent the entire day debugging a classification model we ported to
@pytorch
and it turned out we were doing the softmax along the wrong axis. In spite of that, the model still (barely) trained.
@tomgara
@TheStalwart
Agree, with an important qualifier: they made money from it, because they were savvy enough to instantly unload all their shitcoins/NFTs on bigger suckers. They were not true believers, they just made money off of the hype then got out.
@carlesgelada
Most Bayesian NNs are interesting only insofar as they give you a way to get calibrated probabilistic outputs. In practice, model ensembles (which, as you pointed out, can be given a Bayesian interpretation) seem to work much better.
@srush_nlp
One of the most valuable things you can do as a PhD student is to step back and listen to some talks/read some books that remind you why you love your field. During a PhD you'll constantly be deep in the weeds, but it's nice to look back up at the stars sometime.