gunshai (u/gunshai) - Readit News

gunshai commented on Silver coin boom in medieval England due to melted down Byzantine treasures theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/zeristor

gwbas1c · a year ago

> Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating.

The first chapter of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations also covers some of this. Specifically I remember the clipping topic, and then landlords weighing payments to protect themselves from clipping.

gunshai · a year ago

An interesting side effect of clipping was essentially the discovery of Gresham's Law. The Bad Money drives out good money. While essentially understood/internalized by the merchant class plebiscite(heh) for thousands of years, wasn't formalized until the mid 1800s.

For clipping it means that when new coinage is minted that money is typically horded and the clipped coins are kept in circulation because they are deemed less valuable then their nominal value (the initial weight of the coin).

Why would someone use something more valuable in an exchange when the thing that's less valuable will suffice?

Gresham's Law would end up plaguing monarchy's and various governments for millenia and still to this day really.

We vastly under appreciate the very basic technology used to solve problems that existed for pretty much the entire world for thousands of years.

gunshai commented on Silver coin boom in medieval England due to melted down Byzantine treasures theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/zeristor

sandworm101 · a year ago

Not all clipping was illegal, or even nefarious. It was only a crime where there was a solid national currency system, which was far from universal. Many people would be trading in a variety of currencies, none of which was specifically backed by any laws forbidding clipping. Clipping would become so common that anyone with good coins was a fool not to clip them down to the local norm. There was also a general lack of small change in the ancient world. Heavily clipped coins, or even their clippings, likely substituted for the lack of smaller denominations. If a coin is worth its weight in silver, silver must be worth its weight in coins, clippings or not.

gunshai · a year ago

Ya there isn't much here to dispute. However one side effect of this type of valuation was essentially the trust in measurement systems.

This created barriers to entry for valuation of money in the form of owning a scale that required higher precision in weight estimation. On top of that one can imagine that dispute that a merchants scale (this still probably happens even today) cheats was most likely common place.

It's fairly easy to imagine a cleverly placed point of additional friction can "tip the scales" in a merchants favor.

All that to say it would have been good to be in the "measurement" business way back in the day. Hell it's still a good business today, but we need it far less for the exchange of coinage/money which I think is a pretty great thing.

gunshai commented on Silver coin boom in medieval England due to melted down Byzantine treasures theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/zeristor

Luc · a year ago

Professor Barth probably: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLinliDgP9EbScxfH5wxoX...

gunshai · a year ago

Ya it's this guy apologies for not posting the link.

gunshai commented on Silver coin boom in medieval England due to melted down Byzantine treasures theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/zeristor

gunshai · a year ago

If you look closely in the first image you can tell that some of those coins are "clipped" then the coin with ridges is not clipped.

The ridges are to mitigate "clipping" which is the process of removing JUUUUUST enough metal from the coin as to not raise suspicion and people trade with them, but not enough to raise suspicion and get ... well killed by the Monarchy.

Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating. There is a guy at University of Arizona who has a course on Youtube that covers this subject, HIGHLY recommend.

gunshai commented on Banner blindness en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban... · Posted by u/rzk

user- · a year ago

They should include a blurb about Wikipedia's donation requests

gunshai · a year ago

I thought that's what the article was going to be about tbh.

gunshai commented on Give AI curiosity, and it will watch TV forever (2018) qz.com/1366484/give-ai-cu... · Posted by u/rzk

thatguysaguy · 2 years ago

I think the problem is pretty interesting though. Better definitions of curiosity might still have this failure mode. Human curiosity definitely does!

gunshai · 2 years ago

Ya I think they are called loot boxes

gunshai commented on Give AI curiosity, and it will watch TV forever (2018) qz.com/1366484/give-ai-cu... · Posted by u/rzk

thefourthchime · 2 years ago

Link to the actual paper. https://pathak22.github.io/large-scale-curiosity/

I was curious how they define or reward curiosity, it says it right here:

Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on carefully engineering environment rewards that are extrinsic to the agent. However, annotating each environment with hand-designed, dense rewards is not scalable, motivating the need for developing reward functions that are intrinsic to the agent. Curiosity is a type of intrinsic reward function which uses prediction error as reward signal.

So, the prediction error is the reward, nice.

gunshai · 2 years ago

This seems highly suseptible to what a human might consider irrelevant randomness. Given random images just shuffling indefinitely a curious individual will just give up and say, even though I can't predict the next thing it doesn't pertain to the domain of curiosity.

gunshai commented on Give AI curiosity, and it will watch TV forever (2018) qz.com/1366484/give-ai-cu... · Posted by u/rzk

syntaxing · 2 years ago

With the definition of curiosity from the article, it’s not that surprising? A dynamic “screen” is always more interesting than the static map.

Definition: The definition that OpenAI team used for artificial curiosity was relatively simple: The algorithm would try to predict what its environment would look like one frame into the future. When that next frame happened, the algorithm would be rewarded by how wrong it was. The idea is that if the algorithm could predict what would happen in the environment, it had seen it before.

gunshai · 2 years ago

How many loot boxes would it open under the same criterium?

/s

gunshai commented on U.S. states sue Instagram owner for making social media addictive to kids cbc.ca/news/business/meta... · Posted by u/colinprince

safety1st · 2 years ago

Well, you're definitely going against the grain on this if you say yes. This is how they got the tobacco companies to pay damages for the health consequences of their products, and get them to add warning labels to their products. I think at the least it's a matter of truth in advertising if you're aware of common negative side effects your product has and you don't disclose them. It's dishonest.

gunshai · 2 years ago

> This is how they got the tobacco companies to pay damages

I'm not against this, but consider that those damages are future unknown liabilities from when the product was first sold.

Do we really think that southern tobacco farmers or how ever far back the tobacco industry really goes, there was a forethought about the potential harm? I'd wager no, they saw a market for a product that people liked at the time I'd wager the entire idea of addiction was hardly understood when the industry started. From my historical knowledge addiction as a form of profit was first discovered by the East India Trading company as it was the first entity to trade opium to the Chinese, which by the way literally kept the English Monarchy from going bankrupt(more of a factoid then a piece relevant to my response).

My overall point is, we discover some harms because of scale or after long periods of time both of which are future liabilities. The discussion is WHEN we discover these harms at scale how do we handle them. Emergent harm is a society level issue, but for many products it's almost beyond a secondary or tertiary effect.

> I think at the least it's a matter of truth in advertising if you're aware of common negative side effects your product has and you don't disclose them. It's dishonest.

This isn't something I outright disagree with however the solution is one of incentive. It's clear that in the game of future liabilities for products as I think we can agree societal level harm is typically the more costly one both from a bottom line standpoint and from a human health or human harm standpoint.

The incentive here is pretty obvious sounding the alarm of harm is not in the interest of anyone profiting on it.

gunshai commented on Defence against scientific fraud: a proposal for a new MSc course deevybee.blogspot.com/202... · Posted by u/vo2maxer

gunshai · 2 years ago

> To date, the response of the scientific establishment has been wholly inadequate. There is little attempt to proactively check for fraud: science is still regarded as a gentlemanly pursuit

There is no incentive mechanism, it has been the problem all along. The peer review process is clearly inadequate or not up to the task in its current form.