All of uncomputable's Comments + Replies

Workers saw the small daily cost—guards and enclosures on machines are inconvenient, hard hats and safety goggles are uncomfortable and unattractive—and weren’t keenly aware of the rare disaster that would be averted.

Having been a part-owner in an analytical chemistry lab, this attitude continues amongst workers to this day.

No shortage of folks who didn't want to wear closed toe footwear, didn't want safety glasses, would move compressed gas cylinders unsafely, or fail to secure them, etc.

(There were minimal time pressures on the staff; we were more concerned about mistakes that ruined entire batches of work rather than how long anyone took at a given task.)

6Viliam
This looks like a perfect job opportunity for people with high neuroticism! Too bad you probably also require some chemistry knowledge/skills...

Despite the meaning of the Greek word underlying it, aphantasia does not mean that you can't imagine. It means you can't create mental images.

As an aphantasic, I can imagine just fine. If you consult the Wikipedia page on the subject, you'll find a number of famous authors listed.

2Crackatook
After I posted the question, today I experienced a handful of moments when my brain didn’t work to visualize, even though I can. Also I am assured mental images are not the only source of creativity. Thank you for pinpointing out.

generally referred to as persistent memoization.

maybe persistent futures in this case, since you've got these intermediate "place" values.

3lsusr
Thanks. I have changed "simple caching system" to "persistent memoization system".

If upfront assessments are provided, I expect the defense bar would gleefully keep track of such things.

They already informally track the behavior of the DA's offices they deal with. They're extremely organized in some areas and in near-constant communication with one another.

If a person receives a static, permanent QR code, then some QRs will leak (or be deliberately leaked) and will be used en masse. And some QRs will be given out to friends and family.

...who cares? The QR code contains a cryptographically signed attestion that "DanArmak" is vaccinated. Not "whoever displays this code is vaccinated". You only need a program for decoding it, and verifying the signature against the signing keys from states.

Photocopying them would be only slightly more useful than photocopying somebody else's drivers license. Sure, if they've... (read more)

6DanArmak
We're talking past one another, trying to solve different problems. I'm a software engineer by profession and I understand how public-key cryptography works. I also assumed you were not a software engineer because your comment didn't make sense for the problem as I understand it. That works fine, and is the system used in Israel and proposed in some EU countries. But it's not what I understand Zvi to be arguing for. Zvi wants a system which doesn't let verifiers identify the person in front of them, only learn that they're vaccinated. He clarifies this in this comment. If the QR proves "DanArmak is vaccinated", then I also need to prove I'm DanArmak. E.g. by displaying a state ID. This lets verifiers track me, simply because they learn who I am and businesses regularly sell or share data on customers / visitors. The application verifying the QR codes can make this even easier - most businesses install the same verifier application, and it uploads info about the people whose IDs it verifies. IIUC, the US doesn't have any privacy laws that would forbid private entities from such collading, tracking, and selling such data, even without disclosure.

the QR code can just have a cryptographically signed attestation from a government agency that the person has been vaccinated. that can be verified by an app which does not need to communicate with a central authority. if the authority released the corresponding public keys, open source apps could do the job. and the vaccination doesn't expire, so the code doesn't need to. (but perhaps you could include some vaccine lot number info if you're super excited about such things, so apps could know about bad batches? that's probably not worth the effort to discu... (read more)

3DanArmak
If a person receives a static, permanent QR code, then some QRs will leak (or be deliberately leaked) and will be used en masse. And some QRs will be given out to friends and family. With permanent codes, the application presenting the QR can't prove it's the genuine application, so people could just as easily show an image. That also lets everyone share QR codes easily (i.e. without being tech savvy or investing effort) - just use your phone's screenshot function while the real app is open. And whoever verifies the QR code can also reproduce it. This is the lowest possible level of security. Saying that such an un-trustworthy system creates net positive value for society requires some serious proof, which I haven't seen. Including photos in the QR is possible; a B&W photo would fit. If you want to include more data, you can put a copy of the photo online (so that the verifier can pull the exact file) and sign its hash and URL as part of the QR token. Or use NFC to transmit the (signed) photo. Or use several QRs displayed in succession. QR bandwidth is surprisingly high. However, using photos raises other questions, such as what about all the people the government doesn't have official or up-to-date photos of (and see also my other top level reply).
2Cesare
My thoughts exactly. What a QR Code could do is to store names, and perhaps the dates they got the vaccine. If people have time to check photos, then they might as well do so on any photographic ID, whose name matches the one on the QR Code, and which is shown together with the QR code wherever that's relevant. 

To further detail the exact amount of effort: I get paid once a month, so once I month I go in, look at what I've got, subtract off my estimate for everything else, leave a few hundred dollars of slush, and come up with some excess amount. I then go over the brokerage site and issue the transfer for that excess. At the same time, I review the state of the brokerage account. I think it's pretty minor, and it gets my cash over to the brokerage firm where it can sit in a money market account. That pays a pittance these days, but it has been a significantly la... (read more)

Answer by uncomputable30

I'd be surprised if exactly what you want is possible.

To accomplish a similar effect, I keep the bulk of my assets with a large, reputable brokerage firm, and just leave the most recent paycheck's worth with the local bank. I can transfer to/from the bank and brokerage firm, and every other organization (employer, power company, credit cards, etc) only gets to know about the bank account. That limits the amount transfers can get ahold of. I suspect, but am not sure, that the brokerage firm doesn't even accept outside requests for transfers. I think all transfers in/out of them have to be initiated on their end.

2Maxwell Peterson
Thanks - that's even better separation than using separate accounts at the same bank. More work, but something I hadn't thought of.
Answer by uncomputable60

Certainly NVDA will drop briefly if there's a widely publicized AI winter, even if it doesn't actually affect their bottom line. Probably the safest way to profit (as in, the downside is bounded, as opposed to shorting, where the downside is unbounded), then, is to identify companies that will experience short term drops because of publicity, without actually being harmed, and buy the dip(s).

5[anonymous]
Hmm that's betting on the market overreacting to AI winter in addition to betting on AI winter occurring itself. I guess it's only applicable to scenarios where there's a sudden crash instead of a slow, steady decline of investments, but still, thank you for the idea!

Security and privacy seem like useful footnotes here, too. The security situation with standard wireless protocols has improved to "acceptable" in recent years, but right as soon as you get some one-off link (between your mouse and the proprietary dongle?) then nobody knows how bad the situation is. You're just trusting the manufacturer to have accomplished a feat that piles of smart people screw up on a regular basis.

-1Decius
I understand that there's certainly an information-theoretical security flaw, but if there is an attacker who could gain net value by seeing your mouse activity, you should be in a secure facility that prevents eavesdropping and none of the computers allowed in that area should be allowed to have bluetooth trancievers. If a given dongle can be spoofed into providing arbitrary HID input (or just arbitrary keystrokes, in addition to mouse movement and clicks), that would be a more serious vulnerability.

I'm with Viliam, as regards the MOOCs. If we looked at statistics about how many people go from searching for javelin throwing videos on Youtube to successfully throwing a javelin without injuring themselves or others, the percentage is probably quite low. We'd see MOOCs doing better if we looked at whatever subset of the population who click the "start" button cared fractionally as much about the material as those who jump through the process of applying to a university, paying piles of money, and waiting until the start of a semester to begin learning.

The US government could nearly implement this by mandating that military firearms be pink. That's perfectly within its purview. That's were the trend setting comes from. Not action movies, where many of the firearms are non-existent bodged together things, or where they're used in hilariously wrong ways.

it's an area where the government could force people to act in their own long-term interest instead of responding to shorter-term incentives

When governments are actively complicit in damaging the financial interests of citizens, it is perverse to legislate fixes before ending the active harm.

https://www.fool.com/retirement/2017/01/07/heres-what-americans-are-spending-on-lottery-ticke.aspx

And if people want to nitpick exceptions, many exceptions could be written into the law.

In the event legislation like you suggest ever becomes even remotely plausib

... (read more)

So some organization will still cough up the initial budget, and then some set of potential shareholders will decide that this project will be the first megaproject to run under budget. They'll then give the project more money, in exchange for getting that money back, plus whatever the project doesn't use out of their original budget?

I don't feel like incentives are aligned very well, here.

The organization sponsoring the project is going from the current situation where they can at least lie and pretend that the possibility exists that they&... (read more)

5ryan_b
This is a feature, not a bug. We prefer the world where the project never gets funded in the first place to the world where it gets funded based on lies and then runs 150% of the budget and provides only 50% of the benefit. Management can do this now in regular companies, and it isn't a problem: it mostly doesn't occur to them; it damages reputations to appear incompetent; it is also a crime.

i don't think anything prevents corporations from being created with a limited lifespan, it just doesn't come up.

how are the shares supposed to return value to the share holders?

9Matt Goldenberg
It actually does come up frequently with companies that do lots of high liability projects. Movie studios for instance will create companies for each production to limit their risk profile if something goes wrong.

I remember the tutorials as focusing on easy mode, and treating it as the thing to start with. With Charles refreshing my memory about how easy mode behaved (thank you), I think there was plenty of time for a slow and cautious user to come in and perhaps question the nature of easy mode before they'd done any damage to their account. Certainly I used it a bit at the start, and still recovered nicely.

Hoping that your users will be slow and/or cautious isn't an ideal plan, though.

i'm not sure if it would fix easy mode, but i feel that the points that go into a trade should be some function of the points that have already gone into that question, such that a user's total loss on a given question is capped.

I realized after my initial comment that it was a bit too terse to be productive. Sorry.

(pre-note: Metaculus is not a market, and I don't consider it interesting. I'm addressing and interested only in the case of an actual market where binary securities on events are being traded, with other market participants directly, or all through a market maker like SciCast.)

SciCast had two (major & relevant) modes for placing a trade, I remember them as "easy" and "normal". Normal presented you with a slider from 0% to 100%, you cou... (read more)

6Charles R. Twardy
Interesting! We designed "safe mode" to be safe against the common newbie failure of losing all cash in a few big trades. It achieved that much at least. Each trade spent max of about *1%* of your cash, and moved it at most halfway towards your goal. A dedicated newbie could still burn cash, but it took effort. Still, from your report, that may have happened more than I thought. If so, it may not even have achieved its main design goal. :-( "The worst thing" was indeed atrocious. We fixed that fairly quickly, but ... ugh. Thanks for the thoughtful critique. We're about to reuse the engine. I'm giving this some thought.
8RobinHanson
Your critique is plausible. I was never a fan of these supposedly simple interfaces.
4ryan_b
That is brutally bad. What was the training information like? Was it even possible for a naive user to become less naive without losing their ass a bunch of times?

I made an astonishing pile of points on SciCast from people who did not understand what the simple "user friendly" interface was doing. Turning "what i think the the distribution is" into a single trade is a fraught process; permit the user to do it repeatedly for a given question and I will actually show up and take absolutely all of their money.

3ryan_b
I'd be interested in hearing more about this; I'm unfamiliar with the SciCast interface. I notice you put user friendly in quotes - do you think it was not in fact user friendly, or was it misleading in an important dimension? For comparison, I don't think the Metaculus interface is simple enough to do the job. I agree it would be a fraught process, but my starting assumption is that developing an intuitive and correct UI is always a fraught process.

there's been some work on adding linear types to programming languages, to do things like ensure that you can't use a resource after it has been closed/freed. similarly you could prevent the use of a resource before it has been fully opened/configured. (useful for sockets since they require multiple steps.)

wadler's "linear types can change the world!" might be an appropriate starting point. https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/linear-logic.html#linear-types

apologies, i have not read it. linear types are outside my area of interest.

if you drop the gambler's presentation of kelly, and just maximize expected log utility, you immediately get the correct answer for the "win or die" scenario. the second scenario lightly touches on kelly, and would also be aided by considering the situation as log utility maximization. (expenses going out every month like clockwork, decision is work (small guaranteed return), and/or how much to allocate to various bets.)

some of your concerns in the last post can also be modeled properly.

gjm100

Expected log utility? Kelly says to maximize expected log money. (The fact that wealth-derived utility seems to go roughly like log of wealth is largely coincidence, so far as I can see, though I wonder vaguely whether, precisely because of Kelly, brains that value things logarithmically tend to accumulate most in the long run, in which case the Kelly criterion might actually explain why utility is roughly logarithmic in wealth. I'm pretty sure I don't actually believe that, though.)

Maximizing expected utility also gives the right answer in "win or die", of course.