I have some big machine (a combine harvester). The machine is worth a lot more than the individual components (gears, screws and so on) that make it up. Similarly, Microsoft is worth more than all the office buildings, patents etc that make it up put together.

So, value is not just in the number of physical things, but in the arrangement of them. I suppose that, ideally, the price difference between a bunch of gears and screws and a combine harvester should be equal to the cost of paying someone to assemble those gears and screws into one. So the price difference between Microsoft the company and all its stuff should be equal to the cost of hiring a bunch of managers to turn a similar amount of stuff into another Microsoft. Put that way ignoring that "arrangement value" does seem a bit artificial.

One aspect of this that i think is potentialy significant is processes which 'stick' in a non-working state.

I have on several occasions gone on the quest to find paper or ink, only for the printer to spit out 100 pages that other people had queued up when that resource was depleted. Those other people all, presumably, knew their document had not printed but decided not to get ink or paper. (Maybe their print wasnt that important to them. Maybe the instruction 'check paper in drawer B2' on an unfamilar machine was intimidating).

As i brought the paper/ink to the printer and reflected on the time it had taken, i consoled myself that it was now fixed, not just for me but for those who followed. I had unstuck the process for everyone. However, the queued up documents of people who had already given up, peehaps days ago, plus my print put us back into low-ink territory.

Compare this to stairs. Imagine i put an annoying to move barrier in front of the stairs somewhere. The first person would arrive, and remove it, and then it would inconvenience zero additional people.

I am not sure if printers jam, break oe run out of ink more often than most machines. I am sure that when they do they stay down longer.

A related contributing factor. Every organisation i have been in discourages printing when it 'isnt nesseaary'. This means that some of the people leaving the printer in the stuck position are doing so because they worry that if they start asking where the ink is kept someone might badger them about whether the print they are doing is nessesary. If people have a low level sense of guilt (perhaps enviromentalism related) when they are dojng somethjng they are less likely to ask for help in ways that draw attention.

A breif thought. For an LLM, presumably documents with dates on them all get fed in in some non-chronological order. The current date is preaumably given to the LLM in some kind of system prompt. (Is it?). But if it were not given the currnet date in this way it would not know if it was being run 3000 years in the future or if it was being run in 1965. (Less certain than 3000 years in future).

A human, even before you tell them todays date, has some kind of anchoring in time. The LLM is not like that, so the questions you are asking are intrinsicaly a little harder. Especially as some documents in the training data might not be dated. For example, a document that says 'Obama is President' with no date provided will influence the LLMs training and 'world view'.

Not fully satisfting as an answer. If i were playing a game where you gave me newspaper cuttings for a fictional world with fictional events. Gave me the fictional worlds 14 month calaender, then asked me who was King of Threposia in nontis, and the current date, I would make many mistakes but i would not make that mistake - i would understand you want last nontis. 

I think the phrase 'Proof by lack of imagination' is sometimes used to describe this (or a close cousin).

I am not understanding the mechanism here, could someone explain it please?

A consumer buys an air ticket. The airline makes a loss on this (or not much profit). That same consumer now has air miles on a frequent flyer card/account that they can use for perks. How does the airline make money subsequently? Does it require that the consumer used a credit card (instead of a debit card) to buy the ticket? Or does it require that the consumer uses the air miles in a specific way?

These are not clear to me. Perhaps from some combination of me (1) living in UK not USA, (2) using a debit card, not a credit card and (3) having only ever 'used' frequent flyer cards as a tiebreak where the airline has overbooked and needs to give someone a free upgrade, and as the cardholder I am first in that queue.

Thank you very much for sharing that paper! Its a really nicely written paper, I like their figures a lot.

I think you have slightly misunderstood the paper (either that or I am missing something). In the paper, I think they are abusing the word "spin". Every single place the paper says "spin", they don't actually mean spin (as in, the intrinsic spin angular momentum of light), they actually mean direction. So, when reading the paper try and read it through a mental translator where "left handed spin" translates to "left propagating".

The spin angular momentum of light is (for a plane wave in vacuum) controlled entirely by its polarization, either left handed circular polarization or right handed. Importantly, this polarization depends on the fact that their are 2 spatial dimensions that are orthogonal to the propegation direction, so that for example the electric field could be expressed as:  E = (1, i, 0) in an (x, y, z) basis and z the propegation direction. (Similarly (1, -i, 0) for the other polarization with the opposite spin).

In this paper they define what they call the "left handed" and "right handed" operators in the unnumbered equation immediately under equation (10). However, these operators are NOT left hand polarized and right hand polarized light waves. The operators differ, not by the relative phase of orthogonal electric field components, but by the relative phase of the electric and magnetic fields. This means they are "left travelling" and "right travelling" (IE propagating left or right) light waves. They have confusingly chosen to call these terms "spin", I think this is because the equation they have derived looks like a Dirac equation, and in the Dirac equation those terms are called spin. But they are not the actual spin angular momentum of the light, they are completely unrelated.

In short, they don't actually consider real spin at all, they just rename "direction" to "spin".

They say theyr are in full agreement with Stephen Barnet (option number (1) in my post), that Minkowski's momentum is the canonical one (to be used in Heisenberg uncertainty type situations) and Abraham's is the kinetic one (to be used in Newtonian recoil calculations).

If I told someone 'I bet stockfish could beat you at Chess' i think it is very unlikely they would demand that I provide the exact sequence of moves it would play. 

I think the key differences are that (1) the adversarial nature of chess is a given (a company merger could or should be collabroative). (2) People know it is possible to 'win' chess. Forcing a stalemate is not easy. In naughts and crosses, getting a draw is pretty easy, doesn't matter how smart the computer is, I can at least tie. For all I (or most people) know company mergers that become adversarial might look more like naughts and crosses than chess. 

So, I think what people actually want, is not so much a sketch of how they will loose. But more a sketch of the facts that (1) it is adversarial situation and (2) it is very likely someone will loose. (Not a tie). At that point you are already pretty worried (50% loss chance) even if you think your enemy is no stronger than you.

I was once in a situation much like yours considering the same question. 

Arguments I considered at the time (when considering if I should "dress up" more in search of a romantic partner):

• Do I actually know how to dress better?
• Would dressing up differently than normal make me feel like I was impersonating/deceiving, thereby feeling more insecure and countering any gains in dress with losses in confidence?
• Would this contribute to acquiring the wrong type of romantic partner? In the sense that, my interests, priorities etc might be strongly correlated with my poor dress sense, and that therefore changing the dress alone might disproportionately help with partners that are a bad match.

My very small data sample is that, I didn't change anything. Then, at a fancy dress party (where everyone was weirdly dressed and my costume had not been picked by me, but was part of a matching set with friends) I met  someone and things went great. I don't know what to take from this, maybe fancy dress parties (or other settings with "non normal clothes", like a wedding) are good for people in your situation. At the very least, if your clothing choice is proving to be a barrier then events like this provide you with a good opportunity, to either solve the problem, or possibly help diagnose if you could benefit from different everyday clothes.

Of course, there is a strong chance the fancy dress aspect was coincidence.

This was a fun post. I liked the way the "how many layers deep" idea was foreshadowed and built up to.

I see you are mostly on substack now, so you probably won't see this.

I was trying to think of a clean example of a many-layer deep interaction, and I think I have identified it in the way that my parents and their friends pay bills at a restaurant. (Obviously you are socially obligated to offer to pay, so you do. But they know that was a "forced move", which means that they can't take your offer to pay as a strong sign that you are genuinely happy to pay, so they don't accept the offer. But, you know that they know all that, so you can see that them rejecting your offer is also a somewhat forced move on their side, so you don't accept their rejection of your offer ... ).