Here's a more serious response.

1. Segregating the world, period, based on whatever, is impossible without a coercive power that the existing nations of earth would consider illegal. Before you could forcefully migrate a large percentage of the world's humans you'd have to win a war with whatever portion of the UN stood against you.
2. If you could do it, no one would admit to having any values other than those which got to live in/own the nicest places/stuff/be with their family / not be with their competitors/whatever. The technology to determine everyone's values does not exist.
3. If you somehow derived everyone's values and split them by these, you would probably be condemning large segments of the population to misery (Lots of people's values are built around living around people who don't share them.), and there would be widespread resentment. The invincible force you used to overcome objection 1 would be tested within a generation.

Yes, those with my values will live here, in Gondor. Your folks can live other there, in Mordor. Our citizens will no longer come into contact and conflict with one another, and peace will reign forever.

What, these segregated regions THEMSELVES come into conflict? Absurd. What would you even call a conflict that was between large groups of people? That could never happen. Everyone who shares my value system knows that lots of people would die, and we all agree that nothing could be worth that.

We live in an increasingly globalised world, where moving between countries is both easier in terms of transport costs and more socially acceptable. Once translation reaches near-human levels, language barriers will be far less of a problem. I'm wondering to what extent evaporative cooling might happen to countries, both in terms of values and economically.

I read that France and Greece lost 3 & 5% of their millionaires last year (or possibly the year before), citing economic depression and rising racial/religious tension, with the most popular destination being Australia (as it has the 1st or 2nd highest HDI in the world). 3-5% may not seem like a lot, but if it were sustained for several years it quickly piles up. The feedback effects are obvious - the wealthier members of society find it easier to leave and perhaps have more of a motive to leave an economic collapse, which decreases tax revenue, which increases collapse etc. On the flip side, Australia attracts these people and its economy grows more making it even more attractive...

Socially, the same effect as described in EY's essay I linked happens on a national scale - if the 'blue' people leave, the country becomes 'greener' which attracts more greens and forces out more blues. And social/economic factors feed into each other too - economic collapses cause extremism of all sorts, while I imagine a wealthy society attracting elites would be more able to handle or avoid conflicts.

Now, this is not automatically a bad thing, or at least it might be bad locally for some people, but perhaps not globally. Any thoughts as to what sort of outcomes there might be? And incidentally, how many people can you fit in Australia? I know its very big, but also has a lot of desert.

You should think a lot about Singapore, and maybe also Australia or Taiwan. Your best bet depends a bit on which country has company(s) that want to hire your skill set.

I think seriously about moving to SG or Australia, and I'm a US citizen.

FWIW, I think you are reading the geopolitical situation wrong about Chinese military ambitions. If China does anything militaristic, it will get hit hard with sanctions by the international community, which will wreck its export-dependent economy. China's goal is to re-establish itself as the center of the world by dominating the global economy.

This paper makes me think again how amazing it is that science made any progress at all, before the middle part of the 20th century. Science is completely based on induction, and nobody understood induction in any kind of rigorous way until about 1968, but still people managed to make scientific progress. Occam, Bacon, Hume, Popper and others were basically just hand-waving; thankfully this hand-waving was nearly enough correct that it enabled science, but it was still hand-waving.

I have a question for LWers who are non-native English speakers.

I am working on a software system for linguistically sophisticated analysis of English text. At the core of the system is a sentence parser. Unlike most other research in NLP, a central goal of my work is to develop linguistic knowledge and then build that knowledge into the parser. For example, my system knows that the verb ask connects strongly to subjectized infinitive phrases ("I asked him to take out the trash"), unlike most other verbs.

The system also has a nice parse visualization tool, which shows the grammatical structure of an input sentence. You can check it out here.

This work began as a research project and I am trying to figure out a way to commercialize it. One of my ideas is to use the system as a tool for helping students to learn English. Students could submit confusing sentences to the system and observe the parse tree, allowing them to understand the grammatical structure. They could also submit their own written sentences to the system, as a way of checking their grammar. Teachers of ESL students might also ask them to submit their class papers to the parser to check for obvious mistakes (apparently there are many people who can communicate well in spoken English but whose written English is full of mistakes).

I would also write up a series of articles about subtle points of English grammar, such as phrasal verbs, argument structure, verb tense, and so on. Students could then read the articles and experiment with using the relevant grammar patterns in the parser.

Does this sound like a plausible product that people would want to use? Are there products already on the market that do something similar? (I am aware of Grammarly, but it doesn't appear to show parse trees).

Note that Adams is using persuasion tactics in the interview itself. The most obvious trick is that he describes himself as being objective (he doesn't care about Trump vs Clinton) and altruistic (because he's wealthy and older), making it more likely for us to believe the other things he has to say.

My guess is that Adams is hoping that Trump wins the election, because he will then write a book about persuasion and how Trump's persuasion skills helped him win. He already has a lot of this material on his blog. In that scenario he can capitalize on his correct prediction, which seemed radical at the time, to generate a lot of publicity for the book. Persuasion is a topic of perennial interest, and Adams is a skilled expositor. So there's a good chance that a Trump win will mean a multi-million dollar payoff for Adams.

I actually like Adams and think he's a smart guy, but I doubt he's much more altruistic and objective than everyone else. ;-)

How can neural networks approximate functions well in practice, when the set of possible functions is exponentially larger than the set of practically possible networks?

This question answers itself. If neural networks could really approximate every possible function, they could never generalize. That is the whole point of statistical learning theory: you get a Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) generalization bound when 1) your learning machine gets good empirical accuracy and 2) the number of possible functions expressible by the machine is small in some sense compared to the volume of training data.

Can anyone give a steelman version of Chomsky's anti-statistics colorless green ideas sleep furiously argument? The more I think about it, the more absurd it seems.

Here's my take on Chomsky's argument:

• The phrase "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is extremely improbable from a statistical perspective.
• However, it is also entirely consistent with the rules of grammar.
• Therefore, one cannot use statistical reasoning to draw conclusions about the rules of grammar.

Naively, this seems plausible enough. But consider the following mirror-image argument, about physics:

• Consider the event "a sword fell out of the sky" (not the sentence, the physical event).
• This event is extremely improbable from a statistical perspective.
• However, it is entirely consistent with the laws of physics; if a sword were dropped out of a hot air balloon, if would obviously fall to the ground.
• Therefore, one cannot use statistical reasoning to draw conclusions about the laws of physics.

The mirror image argument seems patently absurd, but it follows the exact same line of reasoning.