I didn't know you could do rain dances in Antarctica.
Readit Newsclub_tropical commented on Voting from Antarctica brr.fyi/posts/voting-from... · Posted by u/sklargh
Small planes. The exact same plane from the 1970s costs 4x as much.
This is criminally underinvested.
club_tropical commented on Survey of workers’ views on salary transparency resumebuilder.com/1-in-20... · Posted by u/Oras
Often the person doing a more complex or impactful job has a lower wage than a new junior coworker. This can happen with employees that have been at the company long, whose wages have stagnated. When a company hires new people at current market rates, those new people will have a higher wage, for what can be the same or 'easier' job.
Yes, this is what the quitting is about. There would be no reason to quit if someone more valuable than you also earns more; that just makes sense.
club_tropical commented on Voting from Antarctica brr.fyi/posts/voting-from... · Posted by u/sklargh
It's Americans voting in American elections, they can do that in here in Malmö, Sweden. That doesn't violate our sovereignty.
Malmo is barely Sweden, anyway :P
club_tropical commented on Overfitting and the strong version of Goodhart’s law sohl-dickstein.github.io/... · Posted by u/andromaton
I have mentioned before - I hate Goodhart's law. It makes no sense. There is no example that is a good measure but a bad target.
The canonical example I have heard is hospital emergency rooms that started to be measured by wait times, so they refused to admit patients until staff was ready to receive them, literally having ambulances circling around the block. This was supposed to be a "good measure turned into bad target" situation, but of course it makes no sense. What really changed was the locus of evaluation from the patient that evaluates his end-to-end emergency care experience on many criteria, including, but not limited to, emergency room wait times, to a bureaucrat who just evaluates the hospital myopically on 1 metric.
It is always the myopia of singling out this measure/target that is bad, throwing off all other tradeoffs and considerations, not the actual desire to improve the measure/target.
Murray Rothbard waited a decade to get his PhD. His supervisor didn't like his politics and never let him graduate. Rothbard had to sneak in and graduate after his supervisor left to join the Eisenhower administration.
I'm surprised that PhDs aren't further abused. Your multi-year investment can be taken away at any time on a whim at your supervisor's discretion. It's a great deal of discretionary power.
I am toying with the idea of going to grad school, especially law, but with zero careerist ambitions, so nothing can be lorded over me.
A long time ago I was given an opportunity to spend some time working at a lab in a foreign university. I was invited to explore the possibility of doing a PhD there and got an appointment with a professor that might have become my PhD supervisor.
When I got to that appointment someone was already in his office. The professor invited me in, but told me to sit and wait until they finish with the other student. He then proceeded to berate the guy in front of me. He used no kind words. Told him his work on the PhD thesis was completely incompetent, he wasted his years and stuff like that. It shook me deeply that someone would do that to his student, not to mention do it in front of a stranger.
Needless to say, I passed the offer to do the PhD at that place. It's still one of my most vivid memories from the time I spent there - which was otherwise full of interesting work and I'm grateful for the people that made it possible. I still wonder if that was real or the scene was played to find out if I'm able to handle pressure like that. In either case, it left the impression of a toxic environment that I did not want to have a part in.
China?
Thats not really true everywhere. My ex-gf basically pressured her professor to fianally give up on critiquing her rather unscientific way of writing, and give her the PhD because he was basically afraid of what a woman with a disability could do to his reputation.
Was a rather traumatic experience for me, because I had to watch and learn that a degree these days isn't really worth much.
I feel like maybe there are a few other reasons why it was a traumatic experience.
club_tropical commented on What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less nautil.us/why-your-brain-... · Posted by u/dnetesn
1) There's also your body, in the arms and legs and torso sense, which is you, but it's not your brain. There's also your non conscious part (whether you want to include a Freud style subconscious, or autonomous functioning parts that reach a decision way before it has registered as a conscious though) which is your brain, but not exactly "you" as you think of you. Plus all kind of body-produced chemicals and hormones that influence you, despite not being "your brain" - they're still you, since you can't ever separate the two (the thoughts and behavior you have on them versus what you'd have without them. There is no second you to have a test, do a diff, and be able to tell exactly which behavior/thoughts come e.g. from an excess of those chemicals (e.g. due to exposure or diet or some condition in your body) and which from your regular brain without such influence.
2) "Nobody has ever experienced a crystal ball like this" Irellevant, as many do act at many points in life as such beliefs are 100% certainty (a plotting killer believing they will get away with it, for an extreme example). Doesn't matter whether they have a "crystal ball" guarantee of outcome X: their thinking making them see the future as having the same outcome X is enough.
As for (3) I sorta agree.
"MacAskill and others are concerned about what the discount rate should be because it is important for the decisions we make about the world—how much should we care about people who have not been born yet? One might be tempted to think that science could resolve this issue, but alas, it cannot."
Of course it cannot. It's an ethical decision, which rests on personal ethics (not totally unlike personal taste), which are influenced by cultural (society's) ethics.
If we want to think "rationally" about it, it would be based on "what kind of outcome we want for those future persons and how we can best achieve it". But even the choice of outcome would rest on ethics and cultural preferences - or something also non-rational like evolutionary urges.
1) It sounds from what you write that you agree, even if reluctantly so, because "there is no diff". For completeness sake, I want to clarify that I believe in something far stronger than your reluctant resignation: that the whole conscious/subconscious separation, the body/head/hormone separation, that these are all artificial and wrong categorizations. There is one you, the whole you, no part meaningfully separable from the other, not "diff"able, because the hormones are not some external force acting on The Real You (TM) but a physical manifestation of The One You (TM). If you manipulate body/head/hormones, you literally change The One You, to varying degrees depending on the intervention, obviously.
2) I disagree on 2 counts.
a) Thinking you'll get away with something is categorically different from knowing it. Nobody ever experiences this sort of assuredness and we cannot extrapolate our behavior under volatility to conditions of certainty. The closest we come to it are the most meaningless actions (like me reaching for a water bottle, "knowing" that I will touch it and lift it up), but no meaningfully large action, and certainly not a single one that involves other conscious beings is ever experienced as certain.
b) Humans are not fundamentally probability-modeling animals. When your bottle slips and shatters on the hiking trail, nobody - not a single human soul - runs Monte Carlo simulations on where those shards might end up and what that might mean for the future of humanity and "solves back" the right action. It is a complete category error to model human actions as such. Probability estimates have their (limited) place in (rare) human decisions, but even then it is not an exact fit.
This whole crystal-ball exercise is at best a lazy attempt by Lee, because it is easy and convenient to talk about the robo-human caricatures of his imagination. He is basically shaking his fist ADMONISHING YOU to behave more like the simplified easily-quantified caricatures so he can study you easier get his MacArthur Genius Grant goddammit.
club_tropical commented on What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less nautil.us/why-your-brain-... · Posted by u/dnetesn
Behold, one of the most dangerous and toxic forms of stupid: the LABCOAT-FLASHER. Do not fall for the verbal trickeries and hypotheticals - they are the syntactic sugar masking various POISONS:
1) There is no “you” that is meaningfully apart from “your brain”. This trickery is meant to dissociate you from your body and backdoor sneak-in the labcoat-flasher as a co-conspiritor against yourself. It is every bit as gaslighting as a mom saying “why your hands don’t want to clean your room”.
2) Crystal ball, aka “if you knew you wouldn’t get caught” or “if you knew a child would get harmed”. These are always bad faith, 100% or the time, no exceptions. Nobody has ever experienced a crystal ball like this. NO GOD, of ANY faith, has ever made guarantees like this. The only thing this trickery is meant to serve is for the labcoat-flasher to control the imaginary future via the imaginary crystal ball and PROSECUTE YOU NOW for transgressions in his imagination. This is the girlfriend mad you for cheating on her in her dream and demanding you grovel at her feet for an apology.
3) This one is harder, because it sounds good, but it is worth making explicit because it is used against you as a form of control: human egalitarianism. See, nobody actually believes this, not in the here and now among the living 7 billion humans let alone all the imaginary descendents for centuries to come. A true and complete belief in this would make you a LITERAL SLAVE, spending every second and every disposable income on sponsoring the mass of humanity unrelated to you. The labcoat-flasher himself doesn’t believe this either, but he hopes you won’t focus on him - no, he will start with your well-meaning and generous (if ultimately strictly-speaking untrue) belief that all humans should be equal and will take your benevolence, stretch it “to its logical conclusion” far beyond it was ever meant to go, wrap it up around your throat and CHOKE you with it. This is the girlfriend demanding you take a second job to buy her the $100,000 crocodile skin Hermes Birkin purse she wants because that is her love language and you said you cared about her- or do you not love her?
Mendacious to its core, this kind of manipulative gaslighting rhetoric they boldly call “research” is the parochial pastime of labcoat-flashers like this Sangil “Arthur” Lee. It is a step in their vain chase for tenure or funding or some Young Researcher Award (TM). It never did and it never will have anything to do with reality or truth or any honest pursuit of such.