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Open Thread, January 4-10, 2016
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Comments (430)
I am 85% sure The Lion is Eugine Nier.
The_Lion is possibly karma-mining in Quotes, but doesn't seem to be malicious. What's your line of thought?
The Lion started posting "abruptly" with no signs of being a newbie, not very long after VoiceOfRa was banned (much like VoiceOfRa did after Azathoth123 was banned and Azathoth123 did after Eugine Nier was). Also, the first comments of The Lion have been on points that the previous EN incarnations also often made, and their writing styles sound very similar to me.
I've heard of narrow AIs that can supposedly identify an author from their writings. I'm not certain how accurate they are, or how much material they need, but perhaps we could use such a system here to identify sockpuppets and make ban evasion more difficult.
I would be very interested in trying one of those. In particular, I frequently change up my writing style (deliberately), and it might be able to tell me what I'm not changing.
It's not a "narrow AI", it's a straightforward statistical model. Or, if you prefer, an outcome of machine learning applied to texts of different authors.
A voting sockpuppet doesn't post except to get the initial karma. It just up- and down-votes -- there is no text to analyse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_AI It is by that definition. Of course, words are only useful if people understand them. I know LW has some non-standard terminology. Point me to the definitions agreed upon by this community and I'll update accordingly.
Sounds like the initial karma threshold is too low. I have various other ideas about how to fix the karma system, but perhaps I should hold off on proposing (more) solutions before we've discussed the problem thoroughly. If that's already been started I should probably continue from there, otherwise, do you think this issue (karma problems) merits a top-level discussion post?
I still don't think so. "AI" is a very fuzzy term (the meaning of which changes with time, too) but in this case what you have is a fairly plain-vanilla classifier which I see no reason to anoint with the "intelligence" title.
Karma has been extensively (and fruitlessly) talked about here. If you want to write a top-level post about your proposals, it might be a good idea to acquaint yourself with the previous discussions here (as well as the experience of other forums, from Slashdot to Reddit).
There's a pattern of voting to analyse, though...
Sure, but that's a much easier problem.
I'm not convinced it actually is. (To get useful information out of, that is.)
Hopefully we aren't going to have to implement an IP ban or something...
You don't want to get into an arms race. Especially given that one side fields Trike as front-line troops.
There are VPNs for circumventing that, although getting a VPN is harder than creating a new account.
Lessons from teaching a neural network...
Grandma teaches our baby that a pink toy cat is "meow".
Baby calls the pink cat "meow".
Parents celebrate. (It's her first word!)
Later Barbara notices that the baby also calls another pink toy non-cat "meow".
The celebration stops; the parents are concerned.
Viliam: "We need to teach her that this other pink toy is... uhm... actually, what is this thing? Is that a pig or a pink bear or what? I have no idea. Why do people create such horribly unrealistic toys for the innocent little children?"
Barbara shrugs.
Viliam: "I guess if we don't know, it's okay if the baby doesn't know either. The toys are kinda similar. Let's ignore this, so we neither correct her nor reward her for calling this toy 'meow'."
Barbara: "I noticed that the baby also calls the pink fish 'meow'."
Viliam: "Okay... I think now the problem is obvious... and so is the solution."
Viliam brings a white toy cat and teaches the baby that this toy is also "meow".
Baby initially seems incredulous, but gradually accepts.
A week later, the baby calls every toy and grandma "meow".
Teaching subtraction:
'See, you had five apples, and you ate three. How many apples do you have?' 'Five.' 'No, look here, you only have two left. Okay, you had six apples, and ate four, how many apples do you have now?' 'Five.' 'No, dear, look here... Okay...' Sigh. 'Mom?' 'Yes, dear?' 'And if I have many apples, and I eat many, how many do I have left?..'
Piagets problem: The child tries to guess what the teacher/parent/questioner wants.
I never teach math. At least not in the school way of offering problems and asking questions about them. For example I 'tought' subtraction the following way:
(in the kitchen)
Me: "Please give me six potatoes." Him: "1, 2, 3" Me (putting them in the pot): "How many do we still need?" Him: "4, 5, 6" (thinking) "3 more."
A specific situation avoids guessing the password.
The necessity of negative examples is well-known when training classifiers.
In theory I agree. Experimentally, trying to teach her that other toys are connected to different sounds, e.g. that the black-and-white cow is "moo", didn't produce any reaction so far. And I believe she doesn't understand the meaning of the word "not" yet, so I can't explain that some things are "not meow".
I guess this problem will fix itself later... that some day she will start also repeating the sounds for other animals. (But I am not sure what is the official sound for turtle.)
Then teach her to say turtle. Likewise for other animals; a cat is not a meow.
Yes, as soon as she learns to speak polysyllabic words (which in my language also include "cat").
My first word was "daddy" (papi in Spanish). It should be possible to start with regular words.
Edited to add: I just looked up "turtle" in Slovak. I can't believe how much of a jerk I was in my previous comment.
I'm not convinced that using different names is a really helpful idea. It requires an extra transition later on. Well no real harm done. But I wonder about the principle behind that: Dropping complexity because it is hard? I agree that child directed speech is different. It is simpler. But it isn't wrong. Couldn't you have said "the cat meows" or "this toy meows" or even "it meows"? That would have placed the verb in the right place in a simple sentence. The baby can now validly repeat the sound/word.
I am sure this isn't necessary, but, you do realize that she's going to learn language flawlessly without you actively doing anything?
Instead of saying "my <object>" my daughter used to exclusively say "the <object> that I use." My son used to append a "t" sound to the end of almost every word. These quirks sorted themselves out without us mentioning them. =)
Not actively but maybe subconsciously.
As I already mentioned child directed speech is different.
And also yes: Most children probably can get by without that either.
And also: I'm sure gwern will chime in an cite that parents have no impact on language and concept acquisition at all.
Hard to come by in normal language acquisition, though. So it probably doesn't quite work like that.
Sounds like she hasn't learned shape bias yet.
So the child was generalizing along the wrong dimension, so you decided the solution was to train an increase in generalization of the word meow which is what you got. You need to teach discrimination; not generalization. A method for doing so is to present the pink cat and pink fish sequentially. Reward the meow response in the presence of the cat, and reward fish responses to the fish. Eventually meow responses to the fish should extinguish.
I've gotten around to doing a cost-benefit analysis for vitamin D: http://www.gwern.net/Longevity#vitamin-d
Is it 5000IU per day?
We don't know. Since you asked, here's the comment from one of the more recent meta-analyses to discuss dose in connection with all-cause mortality, Autier 2014:
1μg=40IU, so 10μg=400IU, 20μg=800IU, and 1250μg=5000IU.
Personally, I'm not sure I agree. The mechanistic theory and correlations do not predict that 400IU is ideal, it doesn't seem enough to get blood serum levels of 25(OH)D to what seems optimal, and I don't even read Rejnmark the same way: look at the Figure 3 forest plot. To me, this looks like after correcting for Smith's use of D2 rather than D3 (D2 usually performs worse), that there are too few studies using higher doses to make any kind of claim (Table 1; almost all the daily studies use <=20μg), and the studies which we do have tend to point to higher being better within this restricted range of dosages.
That said, I cannot prove that 5k IU is equally or more effective, so if anyone is feeling risk-averse or dubious on that score, they should stick with 800IU doses.
People in the studies presumably don't take it all in the morning. Do you have an estimate of how that affects the total effect? How much bigger would you estimate the effect to be when people take it in the morning?
D is a fat-soluble vitamin that the body can store. It's not like, say, the B vitamins which get washed out of your body pretty quickly. I don't think when you take it makes any difference (though you might want to take it together with food that contains fat for better absorption).
Multiple people such as gwern and Seth Roberts found that the timing makes a difference for them.
That's true.
What I meant is that blood levels of vitamin D are fairly stable and for the purposes of reduction in mortality it shouldn't matter when in the day do you take it. However side-effects, e.g. affecting sleep, are possible and may be a good reason to take it at particular times.
I don't think it's clear at all the the purpose of the reduction of mortality is different than the purpose of sleep quality.
Vitamin D does do different things but I would estimate that a lot of the reduction of mortality is due to having a better immune system. Sleeping badly means a worse immune system.
I take it in the morning just because I found that taking it late at night harmed my sleep. I have no idea how much people taking it later in the day might reduce benefits by damaging sleep; I would guess that the elderly people usually enrolled in these trials would be taking it as part of their breakfast regimen of pills/prescriptions and so the underestimate of benefits is not that serious.
Thanks for posting that!
The key stats: expected life extension: 4 months; optimal starting age: 24.
Any LessWrongers in Taipei? I am there for a while, PM me and I will buy you a beer.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
I will be most interested to find out what it is that requires a sockpuppet but doesn't require it to be secret that it's a sockpuppet or even whose sockpuppet.
I think the point is that when googling his name, the post does not show up, but if LWers know it's the same person, there's no harm.
Yup, he has confirmed essentially this by PM.
What is your credence that the google of five years in the future won't find things written under pseudonyms when you search for the author's real name? 10 years?
I agree that will likely be available as a subscription service in 5 years or so, but I think it would be somewhat uncharacteristic for Google to launch that for everyone. (As I recall, they had rather good face recognition software ~5 years ago but decided to kill potential features built on that instead of rolling them out, because of privacy and PR concerns.)
By replying you eliminated his ability to delete the post and thus maybe the point of the effort.
Can't he still replace it with [deleted] or something? (If so, and if it is helpful, I will happily amend what I wrote to leak less information about what happened.) Anyway: of course it was not my intention to deanonymize anyone, and I regret it if I have.
I think that's only happens when he would delete his own account.
I don't think that's the case but if he wants to create a annonymous account he likely should start over with a new one.
I meant replacing the content with "[deleted]", not the account name.
I think from the context of your post the meaning would still have been clear. Apart from that I don't think he can do it after he retracked the post. (the strikethrough)
Nope, I can still edit it.
Is there a formal theory of how a rational actor should bet on prediction markets? If the prediction market says the probability is 70% and the actor thinks it's 60% is there a formal way to think about to what extend the agent thinks he knows better and should therefore bet against the market?
I'd guess that that falls under the usual paradigms like Savage or Von Neumann-Morgenstern. For example, the Kelly criterion.
Sure. Just stop thinking in terms of discrete probabilities and start thinking in terms of full distributions.
If the Superforcasting people would add a group for the next batch of forcasts that would use that method, what specific methodology should they use?
What do you mean, methodology? Operation on distributions (e.g. addition) are well-defined and while there may be no easy analytic solution, in our days you can always do things numerically.
If you would tell an average person: Please write down the probability of each event, then they can handle what they want to write.
If you would change prediction book, how would the new system look like? Would it be that someone writes 40-60% instead of 50%? Would they write something different?
We'll need to talk about the probability of the probability and I'm not sure that "an average person" is up for it.
Maybe one can ask "What do you think the probability of event X is?" and then ask "How sure are you of your answer to the previous question? What is the minimum and the maximum reasonable possibilities?"
Given this, you can construct some reasonable distribution over the [0..1] segment, e.g. Beta, and go on from there.
Let's say we talk about an average sensible person.
I'm not exactly sure about this subject but it feels to me like it would be good to move from what prediction book does to something like this.
When reading the IPCC report I would be very interested in something like this to get a better sense of the state of the science.
Maybe it's just the particular links I have been following (acausal trade and blackmail, AI boxes you, the Magnum Innominandum) but I keep coming across the idea that the self should care about the well-being (it seems to always come back to torture) of one or of a googleplex of simulated selves. I can't find a single argument or proof of why this should be so. I accept that perfectly simulated sentient beings can be seen as morally equal in value to meat sentient beings (or, if we accept Bostrom's reasoning, that beings in a simulation other than our own can be seen as morally equal to us). But why value the simulated self over the simulated other? I accept that I can care in a blackmail situation where I might unknowingly be one of the simulations (ala Dr Evil or the AI boxes me), but that's not the same as inherently caring about (or having nightmares about) what may happen to a simulated version of me in the past, present, or future.
Any thoughts on why thou shalt love thy simulation as thyself?
There is Bostrom's argument - but there's also another take on these types of scenario, which you may be confusing with the Bostrom argument. In those takes, you're not sure whether you're the simulation or the original - and since there's billions of simulations, there's a billion to one chance you'll be the one tortured.
Just make sure you're not pattern matching to the first type of argument when it's actually the second.
I appreciate the reply. I recognize both of those arguments but I am asking something different. If Omega tells me to give him a dollar or he tortures a simulation, a separate being to me, no threat that I might be that simulation (also thinking of the Basilisk here), why should I care if that simulation is one of me as opposed to any other sentient being?
I see them as equally valuable. Both are not-me. Identical-to-me is still not-me. If I am a simulation and I meet another simulation of me in Thunderdome (Omega is an evil bastard) I'm going to kill that other guy just the same as if he were someone else. I don't get why sim-self is of greater value than sim-other. Everything I've read here (admittedly not too much) seems to assume this as self-evident but I can't find a basis for it. Is the "it could be you who is tortured" just implied in all of these examples and I'm not up on the convention? I don't see it specified, and in "The AI boxes you" the "It could be you" is a tacked-on threat in addition to the "I will torture simulations of you", implying that the starting threat is enough to give pause.
If love your simulation as you love yourself, they will love you as they love themselves (and if you don't, they won't). You can choose to have enemies or allies with your own actions.
You and a thousand simulations of you play a game where pressing a button gives the presser $500 but takes $1 from each of the other players. Do you press the button?
I don't play, craps is the only sucker bet I enjoy engaging in. But if coerced to play, I press with non-sims. Don't press with sims. But not out of love, out of an intimate knowledge of my opponent's expected actions. Out of my status as a reliable predictor in this unique circumstance.
My take on ethics is that it breaks into two parts: Individual ethics and population ethics.
Population ethics in the general sense of action toward the greater good for the population under consideration (however large). Action here consequently meaning action by the population, i.e. among the available actions for a population - which much take into account that not all beings of the population are equal or willing to contribute equally.
Individual ethics on the other hand are ethics individual beings can potentially be convinced of (by others or themselves).
These two interplay. More altruistically minded individuals might (try to) adopt sensible population ethics as their maxim, some individuals might just adopt the ethics of their peers and and others might adopt ego-centrical or tribal ethics.
I do not see either of these as wrong or some better then others (OK, I admit I do; personally, but not abstractly). People are different and I accept that. Populations have to deal with that. Also note that people err. You might for example (try to) follow a specific population ethics because you don't see a difference between population and individual ethics.
This can feel quite natural because many people have a tendency to contribute toward the greater good of their population. This is an important aspect because it allows population ethics to even have a chance to work. It couples population ethics to individual ethics (my math mind kicks in and wonders about a connection coefficient between these two and if and how this could be measured and how it depends on the level of altruism present in a population and how to measure that...).
What about my ethics? I admit that some people are more important to me than others. I invest more energy in the well-being of my children, myself and my family. And in an emergency I'd take greater risks to rescue them (and me) than unrelated strangers. I believe there is such a thing as an emotional distance to other people. I also believe that this is partly hard-wired and partly socialized. I'm convinced that whom and what one feels empathy with depends to a large degree on socialization. For example if you were often part of large crowds of totally different people you might learn to feel empathy toward strangers - and resent the idea of different treatment of e.g. foreigners. So populations could presumable shape this. And you could presumably hack yourself (or your next person) too.
But assume a given individual with a given willingness to do some for the greater good of their population and a capability to do so (including to reason about this). What should they do? I think a 'should' always involves a tension between what one wants and what the population demands (or in general forces of the environment). Therefore I split this in two again: What is the most sensible thing to do given what the individual wants. That might be a fusion of population ethics (to satisfy the desire for the greater good) and individual ethics (those parts that make differences between people). And what is the most sensible thing to do given what the population demands? That depends on many factors and probably involves trade-offs. It seems to me that it shifts behavior toward conforming more with some population ethics.
And what about your question: I in my framework there can't be a proof that you individually 'should' care for the other selves. You may care with them to some degree and society might tell you that you should, but that doesn't mean that you have to rewire yourself to do so (though my may decide that you want to (and risk to err in that)).
Totally tangential point: Do you sometimes have the feeling that you could continue the though of a sentence along different paths and you want to convey both? But the best way to convey the idea is to pick up the thought at the given sentence (or at least conveying both thoughs requires some redundancy to reestablish the context later on). Is there a literary device to deal with this? Or should I just embrace more repetition?
What you're calling population ethics is very similar to what most people call politics; indeed, I see politics as the logical extension of ethics when generalized to groups of people. I'm curious about whether there is some item in your description that would invalidate this comparison.
I did look up Wikipedia on population ethics and considered
to be matching if you generalize by substitution of "number of people" with "well-being of people".
But I admit that politics
contains a matching with choosing among available actions in a group for the benefit of the group. The main difference to what I meant (ahem) is that politics describes the real thing with unequal power whereas population ethics prescribes independent of the decision makers power.
Ethics is a part of philosophy, political philosophy, also being a part of philosophy, would be a better analogy than politics itself, I think.
Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure if your reasoning (sound) is behind the tendency I think I've identified for LW'ers to overvalue simulated selves in the examples I've cited, though. I suppose by population ethics you should value the more altruistic simulation, whomever that should be. But then, in a simulated universe devoted to nothing but endless torture, I'm not sure how much individual altruism counts.
"Totally tangential point" I believe footnotes do the job best. The fiction of David Foster Wallace is a masterwork of portraying OCD through this technique. I am an idiot at formatting on all media, though, and could offer no specifics as to how to do so.
I think if people don't make the distinction I proposed it is easy to choose an ethics that overvalues other selves compared to a mixed model.
Thanks for the idea to use footnotes though yes it is difficult with with some media.
Recently my working definition of 'political opinion' became "which parts of reality did the person choose to ignore". At least this is my usual experience when debating with people who have strong political opinions. There usually exists a standard argument that an opposing side would use against them, and the typical responses to this argument are "that's not the most important thing; now let's talk about a completely different topic where my side has the argumentational advantage". (LW calls it an 'ugh field'.) Sometimes the argument is 'disproved' in a way that would seem completely unsatisfactory to people who actually spent some time thinking about it, but the point is that the person has displayed the virtue of "engaging with the opponent's argument" which should finally make you stop talking about it.
Note that this is a general complaint about human behavior, not any specific political side, because this mechanism applies to many of them. Generally, 'true belief' sustains itself by filtering evidence; which is a process painfully obvious to people who filter evidence by different criteria.
More specifically, after reading the essay Economic Inequality by Paul Graham, I would say that the really simplified version is that there are essentially two different ways how people get rich. (1) By creating value; and today individuals are able to create incredible amounts of value thanks to technology. (2) By taking value from other people, using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word; sometimes perfectly legally; often using the wealth they already have as a weapon.
It should be obvious how focusing on one of these groups and downplaying the significance of the other creates two different political opinions. Paul Graham complains about his critics that they are doing this (and he is right about this), but he does the same thing too, only less blindly... he acknowledges that the other group exists and that something should be done, but that feels merely like a disclaimer so he can display the required virtue, but his focus is somewhere else.
I am not blaming him for not solving all problems of the world in a single article, but other articles on his website also go in the similar direction. On the other hand, maybe that is merely picking one's battles; he wants his website focused on one topic, the topic where he makes money. So I'm not sure what exactly is the lesson here... maybe that picking one's battles and being mindkilled often seem similar from outside? (If I would know Paul Graham in real life, I could try to tell the difference by mentioning the other aspect in private and seeing whether he has an 'ugh field' about it or not.)
He does something. He uses
nicenessas a filter for filtering out people from YCombinator who aren'tnice. YCombinator has standardized term sheats to prevent bad VC's from ripping off companies by adding intransparent terms. I have heard it written that YCombinator works as a sort of union for startup founders whereby a VC can't abuse one YCombinator company because word would get around within YCombinator and the VC suffer negative consequences from abusing a founder.Yes. But for a person who is focused on the problem of "people taking a lot of value from others by force and fraud" this is like a drop in the ocean. Okay, PG has created a bubble of niceness around himself, that's very nice of him. What about the remaining 99.9999% of the world? Is this solution scalable?
EDIT: Found a nice quote in Mean People Fail:
If you take a single company YCombinator company like AirBnB I think it affects a lot more than 0.0001% of the world.
The solution of standardized term sheets seems to scale pretty well. The politics of standardized terms sheats aren't sexy but they matter very strongly. Power in our society is heavily contractualized.
As far as for the norms of YCombinator being scalable, YCombinator itself can scale to be bigger. YCombinator is also a role-model for other accelerators due to the fact that it's the only accelerator that produced unicorns.
Apart from that the idea that Paul Graham fails because he doesn't singlehandily turn the world towards the good is ridiculous. You criticisze him because of not signaling that he cares by talking enough about the issue.
I think you get the idea of how effective political action looks very wrong. It's not about publically complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight evil people. It's about building effective communities with good norms. Think globally but act locally. Make sure that your enviroment is well so that it can grow and become stronger.
So maybe it's only 99.99% rather than 99.9999%. I don't think this really affects Viliam's point, which is that if a substantial fraction of the world's economic inequality arises from cause 2 (taking by force or fraud) more than from cause 1 (creating value), and Paul Graham writes and acts as if it's almost all cause 1, then maybe Paul Graham is doing the same thing he complains about other people doing and ignoring inconvenient bits of reality.
Note that PG could well be doing that even if when working on cause 1 he takes some measures to reduce the impact of cause 2 on it. It's not like PG completely denies that some people get rich by exploiting or robbing others; Viliam's suggesting only that he may be closing his eyes to how much of the world's economic inequality arises that way.
If you have a world full of evil then don't you want to do both of (1) fight the evil and (2) build enclaves of not-evil?
If a single person solves 0.01% of the worlds injustice that's a huge success. You only need 10000 people like that to solve all injustice.
Startups funded by YC fight powerful enemies day-in-and-out by distrupting industries. If Paul success in keeping the YC companies nice and successful he shifts the global balance towards the good.
There's no glory in fighting for the sake of fighting. As YC grows it might pick a few fights. You could call supporting DemocracyOS a fight against the established political system but it's also simply building systems that work better than the established political system.
You change things for the better by providing powerful alternatives to the status quo.
It looks to me as if you just switched from one 99.99% to an almost completely unrelated 99.99%. I see no reason to think that Paul Graham or AirBnB has solved 0.01% of the world's injustice. Even if they had, finding 10k Paul Grahams or 10k AirBnBs is not at all an easy problem.
You don't get points for fighting powerful enemies, you get points for doing actual good. No doubt some YC companies are in fact improving the world; good for them; but what does that have to do with the question actually under discussion? Viliam never said that YC is useless or that PG is a bad person. He said only that PG is focusing on one (important) part of reality -- the part where some people add value to the world and get rich in the process -- and may be neglecting another part.
Of course. Nor much utility. So the question is: if there's a lot of injustice in the world, is it effective to point it out and try to reduce it? Maybe it is, maybe not, but I don't see that you can just deflect the question by saying "effective political action is a matter of building effective communities with good norms".
You're just restating your thesis that in the face of evil one should construct good rather than fighting evil. But sometimes you change things for the better just by saying that the status quo isn't good enough and trying to get it knocked down, or by agitating for other people who are better placed than you are to provide powerful alternatives to do so.
Rosa Parks didn't start her own non-racist bus service. She helped to create a climate in which the existing bus service providers couldn't get away with telling black people where to sit.
Rosa Parks operated as the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. The NAACP was founded in 1909 and slowly build it's powerbase til it was strong enough to allow Rosa Parks to pull of the move in 1955.
I think cases like Egypt are an example of how things get messed up when trying to fight the evil status quo without having a good replacement. In my own country I think the Pirate Party got too much power to soon and self destructed as a result. It failed to build a good foundation.
In modern politics people are largely to impatient to build power bases from which to create sustainable change for the better.
The direction of our core political direction at the moment is largely create by a bunch of foundations who don't try to win in short-term fights but acts with long time horizons.
Sure. So she helped to build a political movement -- centred not around creating new non-racist businesses and communities to supplant the old racist ones, but around exposing and fighting racism in the existing businesses and communities. In terms of your dichotomy
the NAACP was firmly on the side of publicly complaining about evil people and proposing ways to fight their evil.
That may very well be a serious problem. But it's an issue almost perfectly orthogonal to the "fight the evil or build better new communities?" one.
(This whole discussion seems to be based, in any case, on a misunderstanding of Viliam's complaint, which is not that Paul Graham is doing the wrong things with his life but that some things he's said amount to trivializing something that shouldn't be trivialized. It's entirely possible for someone to say wrong things while doing right ones, and objecting to that is not the same thing as complaining that he's "not signalling that he cares".)
So, how did the movement she started work out for black people?
Hmm, it appears that half a century afterwards most blacks live in crime-field hell-holes where more of them get killed in a single year (by other blacks) than were lynched during the entire century of Jim Crow.
Does this really apply to "most blacks", or are those who live in crime-fied inner cities just more salient to us because that stuff gets reported in the news?
Most blacks do in fact live in the inner cities.
What news sources are you reading? Most mainstream news sources don't report on the goings on in the inner cities at all unless it involves blacks getting shot by cops, or can be spun as a natural reaction to a black getting shot by a cop.
Oh, hello, Eugine. Nice to know you can still be relied on to say much the same things any time anyone mentions race.
The latest statistics I can find show a homicide rate for black Americans of about 20 per 100k per year. In 1950 the corresponding figure was a little under 30 per 100k per year. So those "crime-field hell-holes" would seem to be less bad than whatever places black people were living in in 1950.
Why you're comparing overall homicide rates to lynching rates, I have no idea. (Nor in fact why you're talking about lynchings at all.) The problem with lynchings was never that they were responsible for a large fraction of deaths of black people, and the civil rights movement was mostly concerned with things other than lynchings.
That may have been implied, but wasn't stated. Is it actually Viliam's point? I am not sure how true it is -- consider e.g. Soviet Russia. A lot of value was taken by force, but economic inequality was very low. Or consider the massive growth of wealth in China over the last 20 years. Where did this wealth come from -- did the Chinese create it or did they steal it from someone?
This is a tricky subject because Marxist-style analysis would claim that capital owners are fleecing the workers who actually create value and so pretty much all wealth resulting from investment is "stolen". If we start to discuss this seriously, we'll need to begin with the basics -- who has the original rights to created value and how are they established?
I'll let Viliam answer that one (while remarking that the bit you quoted certainly isn't what I claimed V's point to be, since you chopped it off after the antecedent).
That's not a counterexample; what you want is a case where economic inequality was high without a lot of value being taken by force.
Mostly a matter of real growth through technological and commercial advancement, I've always assumed. (Much of it through trade with richer countries -- that comes into category 1 in so far as the trade was genuinely beneficial to both sides.) But I'm far from an expert on China.
It seems like one could say that about a very wide variety of issues, and that it's more likely to prevent discussion than to raise its quality in general. As for the actual question with which you close: I am not convinced that moral analysis in terms of rights is ever the right place to begin.
I am not so much asking for moral analysis as for precise definitions for "using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word; sometimes perfectly legally; often using the wealth they already have as a weapon". That seems like a very malleable part which can be bent into any shape desired.
Well, that would be for Viliam to clarify rather than for me, should he so choose. It doesn't seem excessively malleable to me, for what it's worth.
I am contesting this.
The first part, or the second, or both?
Second.
To get a bit more concrete I'm talking about the Soviet Russia of the pre-perestroika era, basically Brezhnev times.
Do you have something specific in mind? Of course party bosses lived better than village peons, but I don't think that the economic inequality was high. Money wasn't the preferred currency in the USSR -- it was power (and access).
"More specifically, after reading the essay Economic Inequality by Paul Graham, I would say that the really simplified version is that there are essentially two different ways how people get rich. (1) By creating value; and today individuals are able to create incredible amounts of value thanks to technology. (2) By taking value from other people, using force or fraud in a wider meaning of the word; sometimes perfectly legally; often using the wealth they already have as a weapon."
Which one is inheritance?
Inheritance is how some people randomly get the weapon they can choose to use for (2).
I don't have a problem with inheritance per se; I see it as a subset of donation, and I believe people should be free to donate their money.
It's just that in a bad system, it will be a multiplier of the badness. If you have a system where evil people can get their money by force/fraud, and where they can use the money to do illegal stuff or to buy lobbists and change laws in ways that allow them to use more force/fraud legally... in such system inheritance gives you people who benefit from crimes of their ancestors, who in their childhood get extreme power over other people without having to do anything productive ever, etc.
Can't an inheritance be used as seed money for some wonderful world-enhacing entrepeneurship?
Sure, it can be used for whatever purpose. So now we have an empirical question of what is the average usage of inheritance in real life. Or even better, the average usage of inheritance, as a function of how much was inherited, because patterns at different parts of the scale may be dramatically different.
I would like to read a data-based answer to this question.
(My assumption is that the second generation usually tries to copy what their parents did in the later period of life, only less skillfully because regression to the mean; and the third generation usually just wastes the money. If this is true, then it's the second generation, especially if they are "criminals, sons of criminals", that I worry about most.)
I don't think it's a question of more research being needed, I think it's a an issue ofthe original two categories being two few and too sharply delineated.
Bill Gates argues that it's bad to inherent children so much money that they don't have to work: https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_and_melinda_gates_why_giving_away_our_wealth_has_been_the_most_satisfying_thing_we_ve_done
I think the world is a better place for Bill Gates thinking that way.
I never thought I'd find myself saying this: I don't want to be Bill Gates's kid.
Does that not-want take into consideration your changed capacity to influence him if you became his child?
How would I have any more influence than his actual child does?
I would posit that his actual children have a comfortably non-zero amount of influence over him, and that the rest of us have a non-zero-but-muchcloser-to-zero amount of influence over him.
I think it would be counted as whichever way was used by whoever you got the inheritance from.
Yeah, should have been (1) by creating value, (2) by taking value from others by force or fraud, (3) by being given value willingly by benevolently disposed others. Of these #3 is rather rare except for inheritance (broadly understood; parents may give their children a lot of money while still alive).
Make it "essentially two different ways how people or families get rich", though, and the remaining cases of #3 are probably rare enough to ignore.
Here's another case that isn't so neatly fitted into Viliam's dichotomy. Suppose your culture values some scarce substance such as gold, purely because of its scarcity, and you discover a new source of that substance or a new way of making it. You haven't created much value because the stuff was never particularly valued for its actual use, but it's not like you stole it either. What actually happened: everyone else's gold just got slightly less valuable because gold became less scarce, and what they lost you gained. But for some reason gold mining isn't usually considered a variety of large-scale theft.
Of course gold has some value. You can make pretty jewelry out of it, and really good electrical contacts, and a few other things. But most of the benefit you get if you find a tonne of gold comes from its scarcity-value rather than from its practical utility.
Printing money has essentially the same effect, but isn't generally used directly to make individuals rich.
Well, but he's writing an essay and has a position to put forward. Not being blind to counter-arguments does not require you to never come to a conclusion.
At a crude level, the pro arguments show the benefits, the contra arguments show the costs, but if you do the cost-benefit analysis and decide that it's worth it, you can have an express definite position without necessarily ignoring chunks of reality.
I'd say that his critics are annoyed that he's ignoring their motte [ETA: Well, not ignoring, but not treating as the bailey], from which they're basing their assault on Income Inequality. "Come over here and fight, you coward!"
There's not much concession in agreeing that fraud is bad. Look: Fraud is bad. And income inequality is not. Income inequality that promotes or is caused by fraud is bad, but it's bad because fraud is bad, not because income inequality is bad.
It's possible to be ignorant of the portion of the intellectual landscape that includes that motte; to be unaware of fraud. It's possible to be ignorant of the portion of the intellectual landscape that doesn't include the bailey; to be unaware of wealth inequality that isn't hopelessly entangled in fraud. But once you realize that the landscape includes both, you have two conversations you can have: One about income inequality, and one about fraud.
Which is to say, you can address the motte, or you can address the bailey. You don't get to continue to pretend they're the same thing in full intellectual honesty.
Sure, but does rent-seeking really explain the increase in inequality since, say, the 1950s or so, which is what most folks tend to be worried about and what's discussed in Paul Graham's essay? I don't think it does, except as a minor factor (that is, it could certainly explain increased wealth among congress-critters and other members of the 'Cathedral'); the main factor was technical change favoring skilled people and sometimes conferring exceptional amounts of wealth to random "superstars".
So why are you focusing your complaining on Paul Graham's essay rather than on the essays complaining about "economic inequality" without even bothering to make the distinction? What does that say about your "ugh fields"?
In fact a remarkable number of the people perusing strategy (1) are the same people railing against economic inequality. One would almost suspect they're intentionally conflating (1) and (2) to provide a smokescreen for their actions. Also since strategy (1) requires more social manipulation skills then strategy (2), the people pursuing strategy (1) can usually arrange for anti-inequality policies to mostly target the people in group (2).
We hold someone like Paul Graham to higher standards than some random nobody trying to score political points. Isn't Graham one of the leading voices in the rationalist/SV-tech/hacker tribe?
Ok, while we're nitpicking Paul Graham's essay, I should mention the part of it that struck me as least rational when I read it. Namely, the sloppy way he talks about "poverty", conflating relative and absolute poverty. After all, thanks to advances in technology what's considered poverty today was considered unobtainable luxury several centuries ago.
Advances in technology have certainly improved living standards across the board, but they have not done much for the next layer of human needs - things like social inclusion or safety against adverse events. Indeed, we can assume that, in reasonably developed societies (as opposed to dysfunctional places like North Korea or several African countries) lack of such things is probably the major cause of absolute 'poverty', since primary needs like food or shelter are easily satisfied. It's interesting to speculate about focused interventions that could successfully improve social inclusion; fostering "organic" social institutions (such as quasi-religious groups with a focus on socially-binding rituals and public services) would seem to be an obvious candidate.
You have redefined "absolute poverty" to mean "absolute poverty on a scale revised to ignore the historic improvements", i.e. relative poverty.
The internet has done a great deal for that.
Which ones? Disease? Vast progress. Earthquakes and hurricanes? We make better buildings, better safety systems. Of course, we can also build taller buildings, and cities on flood plains, so the technology acts on both sides there.
Institutions that require focused interventions to foster them are the opposite of "organic". Besides, "quasi-religious groups with a focus on socially-binding rituals and public services" already exist. Actual religions, for example, and groups such as Freemasons.
I'm not 'redefining' the scale absolute poverty is measured on, or ignoring the historic improvements in it. These improvements are quite real. They're also less impressive than we might assume by just looking at material living standards, because social dynamics are relevant as well.
Polls seem to indicate that Trump has a massive lead in the Republican primary, far ahead of Cruz who is far ahead of Rubio. UK Bookmakers put him slightly behind Rubio, and slightly ahead of Cruz. Why the discrepancy?
For that matter - that's the odds of him being the Republican candidate. For the primaries, they put him ahead of Rubio for both the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary. Does winning the primaries not make him the Republican party candidate? Are there other primaries that aren't being bet on? Do they think his performance in NH and IA is somehow anti-correlated?
I'm kind of hoping that the bookmakers are offering free money here, but that seems unlikely on priors.
Winning two primaries does not make him the Republican party candidate. The idea is that while Trump has 40% at the moment that means he has more than any other candidate but as time goes on other candidates drop out and the 60% that don't vote for Trump at the moment still won't vote for Trump but for somebody else.
Apart from that other people start to understand Trump and how to respond to him as time goes on and they think that as time goes on the establishment candidate Marco Rubio will benefit from that.
This is plausible, thanks. Followup question for the first part - why do bookmakers favor Rubio over Cruz? Cruz has advantage in polls and IA (30× difference between their odds), but disadvantage in NH (4× difference). I could see "non-Trump voters will tend to go to anyone except Trump when their candidate drops out", but "will tend to go to Rubio" seems rather more specific.
Rubio has more support of the Republican establishment.
And the establishment have superdelegates who cast votes in National Conventions and those 5-10 percent of total delegates would be enough to choose the winner in otherwise close races.
PSA: I had a hard drive die on me. Recovered all my data with about 25 hours of work all up for two people working together.
Looking back on it I doubt many things could have convinced me to improve my backup systems; short of working in the cloud; my best possible backups would have probably lost the last two weeks of work at least.
I am taking suggestions for best practice; but also a shout out to backups, and given it's now a new year, you might want to back up everything before 2016 right now. Then work on a solid backing up system.
(Either that or always keep 25 hours on hand to manually perform a ddrescue process on separate sectors of a drive; unplugging and replugging it in between each read till you get as much data as possible out, up until 5am for a few nights trying to scrape back the entropy from the bits...) I firmly believe with the right automated system it would take less than 25 hours of effort to maintain.
bonus question: what would convince you to make a backup of your data?
Use a backup system that automatically backs up your data, and then nags at you if the backup fails. Test to make sure that it works.
For people who don't want / can't run their own, I've found that Crashplan is a decent one. It's free, if you only back up to other computers you own (or other peoples' computers); in my case I've got one server in Norway and one in Ireland. There have, however, been some doubts about Crashplan's correctness in the past.
There are also about half a dozen other good ones.
Links? I use Crashplan and would be interested in learning about its bugs.
Google for 'crashplan data loss', and you'll find a few anecdotes. The plural of which isn't "data", but it's enough to ensure that I wouldn't use it for my own important data if I wasn't running two backup servers of my own for it. Even then, I'm also replicating with Unison to a ZFS filesystem that has auto-snapshots enabled. In fact, my Crashplan backups are on the same ZFS setup (two machines, two different countries), so I should be covered against corruption there as well.
Suffice to say, I've been burnt in the past. That seems to be the only way that anyone ever starts spending this much (that is, 'sufficient') effort on backups.
E.g. http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/2011/12/crashplan-online-backup-lost-my-entire-backup-archive/
All of that said?
I'm paranoid. I wouldn't trust a single backup service, even if it had never had any problems; I'd be wondering what they were covering up, or if they were so small, they'd likely go away.
Crashplan is probably fine. Probably.
I'm using Crashplan as the offsite backup, I have another backup in-house. The few anecdotes seem to be from Crashplan's early days.
But yeah, maybe I should do a complete dump to an external hard drive once in a while and just keep it offline somewhere...
I consider either tresoit or megaupload currently to be the best ways to backup data automatically both provide clientside encryption. The free version of megaupload allows for 50GB.
Generally speaking, the best practice is to have two separate backups, one of them offsite.
First, you might want to run some kind of a RAID setup so that a single disk failure doesn't affect much. RAID is not backup, but it's useful.
Second, you might want to set up some automated backup/copy of your data to a different machine or to a cloud. The advantage is that it's setup-and-forget. The disadvantage is that if you have data corruption or malware, etc. the corrupted data could overwrite your clean backup before you notice something is wrong. Because of that it would not be a bad idea to occasionally make known-clean copies of data (say, after a disk check and a malware check) on some offline media like a flash drive or an external hard drive.
Disk space is really REALLY cheap. It's not rational :-/ to skimp on it.
Use RAID on ZFS. RAID is not a backup solution, but with the proper RAIDZ6 configuration will protect you against common hard drive failure scenarios. Put all your files on ZFS. I use a dedicated FreeNAS file server for my home storage. Once everything you have is on ZFS, turn on snapshotting. I have my NAS configured to take a snapshot every hour during the day (set to expire in a week), and one snapshot on Monday which lasts 18 months. The short lived snapshots lets me quickly recover from brain snafus like overwriting a file.
Long lived snapshotting is amazing. Once you have filesystem snapshots, incremental backups become trivial. I have two portable hard drives, one onsite and one offsite. I plug in the hard drive, issue one command, and a few minutes later, I've copied the incremental snapshot to my offline drive. My backup hard drives become append only logs of my state. ZFS also lets you configure a drive so that it stores copies of data twice, so I have that turned on just to protect against the remote chance of random bitflips on the drive.
I do this monthly, and it only burns about 10 minutes a month. However, this isn't automated. If you're willing to trust the cloud, you could improve this and make it entirely automated with something like rsync.net's ZFS snapshot support. I think other cloud providers also offer snapshotting now, too.
I feel that this is too complicated a solution for most people to follow. And it's not a very secure backup system anyway.
You can just get an external hard drive and use any of the commonly-available full-drive backup software. Duplicity is a free one and it has GUI frontends that are basically just click-to-backup. You can also set them up to give you weekly reminders, etc.
Can anyone help think of a clever name for a quantitative consulting company? LW in-jokes allowed.
Conquan.
Or AskClippy :-)
Replying to clarify my point assigned was entirely for AskClippy :-)
quanto costa
Bay Esteem (halfway sounds like Bayes Team, har har).
sorry, not sure if this should be posted here, but I hadn't yet found more rational strategy for my problem. If any of you guys know someone who can speak and write Japanese please contact me, I would very appreciate any help
What are you trying to do? If a Japanese person with passable English would be able to help, then head on over to a language-exchange website such as InterPals and trade English instruction for whatever you need. If you need someone who speaks high-level English and it's okay if their Japanese is only passable, then go to a forum such as Koohii and make your request to the large population of people learning Japanese. If you need someone high level in both languages, well, you'll have a harder time. Such people are uncommon and not likely to work for free.
Discussion of the Bayes' Theorem as expounded by EY 8-/
Fairly active follow-up discussion on HN.
Reading that HN discussion... well, I understand that it doesn't necessarily tell me anything, but socially I can't help but notice how idiotic anti-LWers sound in that thread. Fnords upon strawmen upon fnords upon cherry-picking upon fnords upon claims that if anyone on LW ever said that the probability of something is greater than zero that means every single LWers is certain that thing is guaranteed upon mood affiliation upon misspellings of EY's name upon claims that if you don't condemn poster's political enemy you must be supporting it et cetera et cetera.
While browsing the Intelligence Squared upcoming debates, I noticed two things that may be of interest to LW readers.
The first is a debate titled "Lifespans are long enough", with Aubrey De Grey and Brian Kennedy of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging arguing against Paul Root Wolpe from the Emory Centre for Ethics and another panelist TBA. The debate is taking place in early February.
The second, and of potentially more interest to the LW community, is taking place on March 9th and is titled "Artificial Intelligence: The risks outweigh the rewards". All 4 speakers for and against the motion are presently unannounced.
I am a long time watcher of Intelligence Squared debates and recommend them highly. I believe others in the LW community have referred to specific debates in the past. The moderator is quite talented and encourages interesting discourse, and is often successful in steering parties away from stringing series of applause lights together.
Both the moderator and founder of the debates have indicated previously that they have been influenced in the questions asked and experts brought on to argue by commentary and suggestions from the public. I have also had a positive response from previous suggestions made to IQ in the past in relation to other debates. I have emailed them already with some suggestions about who I think would provide interesting commentary and perspectives on the debate, and links to some useful 'background briefing' documents that they may wish to add to the resources attached to the debate. I suggest that others choosing to do the same might increase the quality of discourse in a debate that is likely to come up highly in people's Google and YouTube searches into the future.
Generally speaking, the videos from Intelligence Squared are uploaded to their YouTube account fairly soon after the live stream.
Brian Kennedy. Note that he's on the "Against" side with Aubrey, as makes sense given the Buck Institute's goal to "extend help towards the problems of the aged."
Thanks! Y'know, I actually spotted the doubling up of the pronoun, checked it, thought "Huh, random egotism, naming a centre after yourself" and went ahead and clicked 'Submit'. Cheers, random brainfart! Edited OP for accuracy.
I mean, Buck did name the centre after herself / her husband, so it's not that far off. :P
Two people were lamenting the state of affairs of the world.
A bystander said, "When I become 'King of the World' I will fix things."
One of the two said, "Can I trust you?"
The bystander said, "Of course not."
The retort was, "In that case, I trust you."
Is this a
par·a·dox/ˈperəˌdäks/ noun 1. a statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory.
?
Why does E. Yudkowsky voice such strong priors e.g. wrt. the laws of physics (many worlds interpretation), when much weaker priors seem sufficient for most of his beliefs (e.g. weak computationalism/computational monism) and wouldn't make him so vulnerable? (With vulnerable I mean that his work often gets ripped apart as cultish pseudoscience.)
Given the way the internet works bloggers who don't take strong stances don't get traffic. If Yudkowsky wouldn't have took positions confidently, it's likely that he wouldn't have founded LW as we know it.
Shying away from strong positions for the sake of not wanting to be vulnerable is no good strategy.
I don't agree with this reasoning. Why not write clickbait then if the goal is to drive traffic?
I don't think the goal is to drive traffic. It's also to have an impact on the person who reads the article. If you want a deeper look at the strategy look at Nassim Taleb is quite explicit about the principle in Antifragile.
I don't think that Elizers public and private beliefs differ on the issues that RaelwayScot mentioned. A counterfactual world where Eliezer would be a vocal about his beliefs wouldn't have ended up with LW as we know it.
Because he was building a tribe. (He's done now).
edit: This should actually worry people a lot more than it seems to.
Why?
Consider that if stuff someone says resonates with you, that someone is optimizing for that.
There are two quite different scenarios here.
In scenario 1 that someone knows me beforehand and optimizes what he says to influence me.
In scenario 2 that someone doesn't know who will respond, but is optimizing his message to attract specific kinds of people.
The former scenario is a bit worrisome -- it's manipulation. But the latter one looks fairly benign to me -- how else would you attract people with a particular set of features? Of course the message is, in some sense, bait but unless it's poisoned that shouldn't be a big problem.
MIRI survives in part via donations from people who bought the party line on stuff like MWI.
A fair point. Maybe I'm committing the typical mind fallacy and underestimating the general gullibility of people. If someone offers you something, it's obvious to me that you should look for strings, consider the incentives of the giver, and ponder the consequences (including those concerning your mind). If you don't understand why something is given to you, it's probably wise to delay grabbing the cheese (or not touching it) until you understand.
And still this all looks to me like a plain-vanilla example of a bootstrapping an organization and creating a base of support, financial and otherwise, for it. Unless you think there were lies, misdirections, or particularly egregious sins of omission, that's just how the world operates.
Are you saying that based on having looked at the data? I think we should have a census that has numbers about donations for MIRI and belief in MWI.
Really, you would want MWI belief delta (to before they found LW) to measure "bought the party line."
I am not trying to emphasize MWI specifically, it's the whole set of tribal markers together.
If there is a tribal marker, it's not MWI persay; it's choosing an interpretation of QM on grounds of explanatory parsimony. Eliezer clearly believed that MWI is the only interpretation of QM that qualifies on such grounds. However, such a belief is quite simply misguided; it ignores several other formulations, including e.g. relational quantum mechanics, the ensemble interpretation, the transactional interpretation, etc. that are also remarkable for their overall parsimony. Someone who advocated for one of these other approaches would be just as recognizable as a member of the rationalist 'tribe'.
Because warning against dark side rationality with dark side rationality to find light side rationalists doesn't look good against the perennial c-word claims against LW...
I think LW is skewed toward believing in MWI because they've all read Yudkowsky. It really doesn't seem likely Yudkowsky just gleaned MWI was already popular and wrote about it to pander to the tribe. In any case I don't really see why MWI would be a salient point for group identity.
That's not what I am saying. People didn't write the Nicene Creed to pander to Christians. (Sorry about the affect side effects of that comparison, that wasn't my intention, just the first example that came to mind).
MWI is perfect for group identity -- it's safely beyond falsification, and QM interpretations are a sufficiently obscure topic where folks typically haven't thought a lot about it. So you don't get a lot of noise in the marker.
But I am not trying to make MWI into more than it is. I don't think MWI is a centrally important idea, it's mostly an illustration of what I think is going on (also with some other ideas).
Consequentialist ethic
The Hell do you mean by "computational monism" if you think it could be a "weaker prior"?
Actually, I can probably answer this without knowing exactly what you mean: the notion of improved Solomonoff Induction that gets him many-worlds seems like an important concept for his work with MIRI.
I don't know where "his work often gets ripped apart" for that reason, but I suspect they'd object to the idea of improved/naturalized SI as well.
His work doesn't get "ripped apart" because he doesn't write or submit for peer review.
Verdict on Wim Hof and his method?
Being able to withstand extreme colds isn't a pretty useful skill?
I probably should have provided more detail in the post. He claims not only to be be able to withstand cold, but to be able to almost fully regulate his immune and other autonomic systems. He furthermore claims that anyone can learn to do this via his method.
For example, he claims to be able to control his inflammation response. This would be very useful to me, at least. There seems to be some science backing up his claims - he was injected with toxins and demonstrated an ability to control his body's cytokine, cortisol, etc. reaction to the toxins. So when I'm asking for a verdict, I'm sort of asking what people think of the quality of this science.
Nothing in the Wikipedia article sounds surprising to me. The Wikipedia article says nothing about him achieving therapeutically useful effects with it or claiming to do so.
I have two friends who successfully cured allergies via hypnosis. One of them found that it takes motivation on the part of the subject and doesn't work well when the subject doesn't pay for the procedure so an attempt of doing a formal scientific trial failed due to the recruited subjects who got the treatment for free being not motivated in the right way.
Why too much evidence can be a bad thing
See:
Thanks Panorama and Gwern, incredibly interesting quote and links
If you are more confident that the method is inaccurate when it is operating then it being low spread is indication that it is not operating. A TV that shows a static image that flickers when you kick it more likely is recieving actual feed than one that doesn't flicker when punched.
If you have multiple TVs that all flicker at the same time it is likely that the cause was the weather rather than the broadcast
Can you clarify what youre talking about without using the terms method, operating and spread.
Game Theory (Open Access textbook with 165 solved exercises) by Giacomo Bonanno.
Iran's blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web
"The street finds its own uses for things." -- William Gibson