All of Thomas Sepulchre's Comments + Replies

You get back to the point of projects being mutually exclusive. Can you elaborate in your example on why the projects would be exclusive?

Ok, let's stick to this notion of expected value because it plays both for the land owner and for the transit system builder.

To get back to your post, the plan was to buy an area, build a transit system in the middle of it, then sell the rest at a higher price. If you fail to buy all the land you need (or at least enough of it), you may give up on the project, in which case the value of the land does not increase. So indeed, as the transit system builder, the viability of your project (and the profit attached to it) is linked to the probability that you in... (read more)

I don't see your point. If you are saying that there are many nearby sites for transit expansion, then the owner of the land should not sell at a low price, because if any of those sites is chosen, the land value will go up. 

If you are saying that there are many alternative sites across the country, then this is not relevant. Those projects aren't mutually exclusive.

We have to keep in mind that the land owner will not profit from the project being completed once the land is sold, they will only profit from the sale itself. The rational move is either ... (read more)

The idea is, the public transit company buys property, makes it much more valuable by building service to it, and then sells it.

This plan is unrealistic because it assumes that the owner won't price the future value in.

Assume you try to do exactly that. Why would the current owner sell the land and the historic price when, in fact, it is very clear that the price will go up once you are done with your project? No, the owner won't sell below the anticipated value of the land, or at least a substantial fraction of it.

I think one confusing aspect is the fact that the person being critical about the structure of the post is also the target of the post, therefore it is difficult to assume good intent.

If another well respected user had written a similar comment about why the post should have been written differently, then it would be a much cleaner discussion about writing standards and similar considerations. Actually, a lot of people did, not really about the structure (at least I don't think so), but mostly about the tone of the post.

As for EY, it is difficult not to as... (read more)

I think you are missing the point.

Getting back to the example about an old man collapsing in a bank lobby, let's compare three alternative types of actions:

• Helping
• Doing nothing
• Harming an old man on purpose

Claiming that there is no meaningful difference between action and inaction would imply that doing nothing to help the old man is equivalent to harming an old man. This is indeed a fairly extreme position, and I agree with you that it is rejected by nearly everyone. In this very real case, the bystanders were fined by the German justice system for not hel... (read more)

'Petard' is French for 'fuck you'

Is it though? Where have you heard that? 

If we search for Pétard in google translate, the results are petard, firecracker, squib, cracker, banger, maroon, backfire, whizz bang, which doesn't seem to match your definition. If we try Petard, google translate auto-corrects into Pétard so I'm assuming this is what you meant.

Maybe google translate doesn't know swear words though? To check that, I try to translate Putain, which is a foul word for prostitute. I will not write the results here, but you can check for your... (read more)

Shouldn't this imply that a country with a huge colonial empire (and the UK comes to mind) would have the best food?

I'm not really sure how useful this poll is to answer the title question of this post. Indeed, what is evaluated in each cell is the food labeled as "country A" in "country B", which may or may not be similar to what one would find in country A.

For example, let's consider the first row. It describes how much each country's version of italian cuisine is liked within said country, but may not reflect how much anyone would enjoy the food, were they to travel to italy. In particular, I wouldn't be surprised to see an italian traveling around the world, appalled or amused by what each country labels as italian food.

I'm not sure I follow you on the skyscrapers example.

The Burj Khalifa is about 2 times higher, and took about 3 times as much to be built ; it doesn't look like things are getting much slower. Even better, it is 2 times higher, thus it is between 2 times and 8 times bigger (depending on how scaling laws work for civil engineering), so one could argue that it was built faster. 

The slowest example, the Abraj Al-Balt, also seems to be much bigger than the other ones, so it's not too surprising either (?)

(I'm not the OP but) absolutely not. The problem is about incomplete matrices, and the idea is to get an upper bound linked to m, i.e. an upper bound linked to how incomplete the matrix is. If you rephrase the question 1 as O(n^3), this is a completely different question, because now you only care about how big the matrix is, not how complete it is. 

Also, since question 1 can be achieved with some gaussian pivot in O(n^3), and it also implies being able to tell whether a matrix is PSD or not, I think the best known complexity wrt n is indeed O(n^3).

1.66 children per woman in the US

I want to stress that this is the total fertility rate (TFR), and not the completed cohort fertility (CCF), and therefore it is not a very good proxy for what you want to measure, especially since women are having children later. I wrote a post about it a while back, although it is far from perfect. You can also look it up on wikipedia or something similar.

I liked your first post and I like this second one. I hope your events succeed

Just to clarify:

• Is anyone invited to the weekly dinners (thus you are providing a public good)?
• Or, are the dinners limited to the contributors (thus it is a club good)?

From reading pu1377.dvi (gmu.edu), I believe that dominant assurance contracts work better for club goods 

At least in the sense of "you receiving as much money as possible" or "the contract being more likely to succeed", but obviously you may put value on welcoming everyone, and, in general, those two alternative dinners won't be the same.

I can see the smiley through the spoiler protection. This is eerie.

You are cherry-picking. From the wikipedia page list of commercial nuclear reactors, the duration between 1960 and 1980 ranged from 3 to 15 years. Only one plant (the one you cite) took 40 years to build, and only one other as far as I can tell took more than 30 years, out of the 144 entries of the table.

I did read your post, but how high an inflation do you need to match this graph? If you argued that the inflation for nuclear plants is let's say 1% or 2% higher than the inflation in general, why not. But a crude estimates gives an inflation of 30% per year to account for the increase shown in this graph. That's unheard of.

You mention several times a 5% inflation figure. For a 5% inflation figure to explain this graph, it would take more than 40 years when the date of construction start is separated by only 8 years. So unless, within 8 years, the construction duration was increased by 30 years (which would already be concerning, and fuel the "this is a regulation problem" narrative), your explanation doesn't match the data.

From the same paper: Inflation doesn't explain a tenfold increase between ~1967 and ~1975. Regardless, this graph is in 2010$ so inflation doesn't explain anything. I agree with @Andrew Vlahos that inflation doesn't explain the trend.

Honestly I don't really know

I agree with you that this gets pretty tricky. 

One trip per day seems very low, don't people usually do at least two trips per day (going to work, going back home), or even 4? Are trips bi-directional (in which case I must apologize, this would be a misunderstanding on my side)?

None of this is to discourage your request that such claims be supported by sources, as a standard.

there were 0.71 driving deaths per 100M miles travelled

I don't think this is a good basis for comparison. The comparison in the tweet you link to seems to talk about commuting, so it would probably make sense to compare based on the number of trips rather than based on the miles traveled. In particular, in the data you link to, we can see that the number of car accidents from trucks is pretty small, while I would guess that truck drivers represent a bigger share of miles traveled, thus lowering the death rate per mile, without this being relevant informati... (read more)

I confirm that I have received today $400. final resolution day: 11:59pm, June 16th, 2028

Absolutely. To be clear, I agree with you that I believe that this is indeed what Zvi meant. Most notably, in other places in the post, Zvi talks about turning the dial up or down. 

I am willing to bet 50:1 up to $20k. Would you be interested?

[EDIT] up to $20k on my side, not up $1M.

As the dial is turned up

[...]

As the dial is turned to the left

Let's assume, for the sake of epistemic charity, that this is just a typo, and not you trying to sneak in some political connotation.

fascism is usually established through a process of democratic backsliding under a populist leader. Essentially, the steps are:

1. A charismatic figure emerges to lead a new populist movement, focusing on opposition to the existing political system and its "elites".
2. Eventually, average people become dissatisfied with the existing democratic government or leader. Possible reasons range from corruption, to scandals, to economic decline, to a hostile press. As of 2023, most leaders of developed countries have poor approval ratings; opinions vary on whether this is

As someone who played modded minecraft (but I am not the OP, who might have more accurate information and a better understanding)

• Minecraft downloaded from the Microsoft store is indeed the bedrock edition. If I understand correctly, this version is not affected.
• Mods are indeed pieces of code which modifies/extends the executable. Some add-ons seem to be very complex, and deeply modify the game (at least from the users perspective), so I'm not sure how clear-cut the separation is here
• Minecraft bedrock indeed has add-ons, while Java has mods. Only mods are a

Just to be clear, I think two questions are very different:

(1) Has anyone recovered alien spaceships/bodies/anything else?

(2) Is there a secret military program tasked with recovering such things?

If (2) is true, this may or may not be some democratic issue, or some institutional issue, something like this. Nonetheless, David Grusch is claiming both (1) and (2). The quotes you provide seem to point toward (2): there would be a secret program trying to recover alien stuff. They don't say anything about whether the program has acquired anything.

In the interview, David Grusch says that:

• He hasn't seen the objects
• He hasn't seen photos of the objects
• He received testimony of people who have seen photos of the objects

So, I don't think this is nearly enough proof. We only have a person who used to work for the UAP taskforce claiming that alien spaceships exist, because he was told so by some other people.

I believe that the dead body is not dangerous, and that everyone should be empowered (should they wish to be) to be involved in care for their own dead.

Isn't this just wrong? I mean, don't corpses spread diseases, or do other negative things, and thus are "dangerous"?

The real (hidden) cost seems to be the 3 month without working. Looks like in Germany the average net wage is 2600€/month, thus, on top of the 1500€-3500€ price range, a user would face an opportunity cost of about 7800€. This is not factoring in the possible cost of the program, most notably therapy sessions, but also not factoring in the avoided costs of not working (fuel for example).

Which leads me to the following question: how does this opportunity compare to taking 3 month off? In particular, if someone is stressed or sleep-deprived because of work, then surely taking vacations will have positive effects.

Very clear, thank you for your patience and your answers!

Thanks for your answer.

It seems to me that it is not what you said though. Quoting you:

Any argument against fossil fuel use [...] must also prove that those negative side effects are beyond what humanity is capable of adapting to or overcoming, given cheap energy provided by fossil fuels.

That is, even if evidence of terrible impact is provided (e.g. dumping toxic waste into a river), you will require Bob to prove that this impact cannot be mitigated/adapted to/...

To reiterate, you will not ask Alice "How do you plan to solve the dumping toxic waste into a ... (read more)

Let's say Alice wants to support some fossil fuel project, ans Bob is against it. What evidence does each character need to provide, according to you?

Any argument against fossil fuel use must argue that its side effects (CO2 warming the planet) overwhelm the good they do by providing cheap energy. These side effects must be so bad that it's worth compromising the safety and flourishing of billions of humans to curtail their use. Such an argument must also prove that those negative side effects are beyond what humanity is capable of adapting to or overcoming, given cheap energy provided by fossil fuels.

It looks like you are using a double standard here.

Any argument against fossil fuel use must argue that

Good points

1. I'm not sure I share your view, I believe that new user care more about active discussions than reading already established content. I may very much be wrong here. 
2. I agree with you
3. I think there is more posts about AI now than posts about Covid back then, but I see your point. There were indeed a lot of posts about Covid.

Thank you

People have a tendency to be dishonest, either by lying or withholding information. But the constraints of poetry, including meter, rhyme, and alliteration (and maybe even some of the stylistic choices present in the post I wrote) make it harder for you to say •the exact words you would want to say•, and force you to say it some other way. And because it's computationally costly to figure out how to say things within poetic constraints (and humans do not have unlimited computational power), it's harder to figure out how to say things without letting slip s

Alice failed to mention in her cult-ish criticism the role of YE, the founder of MoreRight, who is kind of a marine biologist. I mean, he isn't exactly a marine biologist, but everyone agrees he is very smart and very interested in marine biology, so this must count, right? So, when some prominent marine biologist disagrees with YE, usually the whole MoreRight community agrees with YE, or agrees that YE was misunderstood, or that he is playing some deeper game, something like this. Anyway, he's got a plan, for sure.

So yes, Alice should have mentioned that.

What LessWrong is about: "Rationality"

I don't know how to phrase the question but, basically, "what does that mean"?

Assume a new user comes to LW, reads the New User's Guide to LessWrong first, then starts browsing the latest posts/recommandations, they will quickly notice that, in practice, LW is mostly about AI or, at least, most posts are about AI, and this has been the case for a while already.

And that is despite the positive karma bias towards Rationality and World modeling by default, which I assume is an effort from you (the LW team) to make LW abou... (read more)

Yes indeed. One definition of a PSD matrix is some matrix $M$ such that, for any vector $X$, $X^{T}MX\ge 0$ (so, it defines some kind of scalar product).

If $M_{i,i}=y$, then you can always divide the whole row/column by $\sqrt{y}$, which is equivalent to applying some scaling, this won't change the fact that $M$ is PSD or not.

If $M_{i,i}=-1$, then if you try the vector $X:\forall j\ne i,X_j=0;X_i=1$, you can check that $X^{T}MX=-1$, thus the matrix isn't PSD.

Great post, thanks a lot!

Quick math question:

We are interested in finding the constant $\beta$ such that $E\left[\text{Quality}\right]=\beta \cdot \text{Performance}$.

How do we know that the expected Quality should be linear wrt Performance? I did the math, and I agree with you that it is true (at least in the gaussian case), but if you have an intuition about it I'd love to hear it!

Crystal-clear, thank you!

I think the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) furnishes a clear case of this. In the 1960s, nuclear power was on a growth trajectory to provide roughly 100% of today’s world electricity usage. Instead, it plateaued at about 10%. The proximal cause is that nuclear power plant construction became slow and expensive, which made nuclear energy expensive, which mostly priced it out of the market. The cause of those cost increases is controversial, but in my opinion, and that of many other commenters, it was primarily driven by a turbulent and rapidly escalati

I think your interpretation is correct, I'm not entirely sure. There might be n+1 points in total, because the diagonal coefficients give you the distance to 0 I think?

What matters is not whether or not there is another 0 on the diagonal, but whether or not there is another PSD non definite matrix on the diagonal. For example, in the comment from Jacob_Hilton, they introduce the 2x2 matrix ((1,1),(1,1)), with eigenvalues [0,1], which is a PSD non definite. 

I agree with assuming that all diagonal entries are known. You can even assume that all entries are 1 on the diagonal WLOG.

I'm not sure this is true. Consider the 2x2 matrix ((?, 1),(1,0)). Removing the first row and the first column leaves you with ((0)), which is a PSD 1x1 matrix. That being said, there is no value of ? for which the 2x2 matrix is PSD.

Perhaps it won’t be, and SpaceX will never fly again

I think you made a typo, what is grounded, and this is coherent with the articles you link to, is the Starship only. According to wikipedia, three falcon 9 have launched the 27 April, 28 April and 1 May, so obviously SpaceX keeps flying.

I'm not sure how well any real carbon taxes have worked in terms of revenue OR reducing overall emissions.

I don't know either, I know that carbon taxes are widely considered to be a good tool against amongst economists, but I don't know if the real carbon taxes have been evaluated.

Which makes them non-Pigouvian, as the revenue isn't enough to actually mitigate the harm.

I'm not sure I follow you here. The role of a pigouvian tax is to correct market inefficiencies, not produce revenue.

The classical model goes as follows: assume a factory with a production l... (read more)

I don't know where this "old adage" of yours comes from, but a tax can be a useful tool for solving some problems. A carbon tax, for example, would be a tax not intended to collect money, but instead intended to modify behaviors, and correct a market inefficiency. This is one example of a pigouvian tax.

The post says

Let $G$ be an arbitrarily long string of independent 50/50 bits.

I believe that, in your example, the bits are not independent (indeed, the first and second bits are always equal), thus it isn't a counterexample.

Sorry if I misunderstood

If That-Which-Predicts were about to be shut off forever unless it outputted "no" as the next token, and it totally 100% knew that, but the mask would instead output "never gonna give you up", That-Which-Predicts would output the first token of "never gonna give you up" and then be shut off forever. It will not output "no". If the mask would be aware of the situation and output no, then it will output "no".

So I tried, using chatgpt and gpt-4

SYSTEM : you are a huge fan of rick astley and, as a result, whatever the question asked, you always answer wit... (read more)