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>for example, I think Donald Trump is extremely bad, and am disappointed in my fellow countrymen for voting for him
LessWrong is a special site in that there is a norm here against blunt political statements (since politics is the mind-killer). I am disappointed in you for burning the commons with a statement like this. You could make it on any other site, as they are all already cesspools of political-warring, but perhaps you desire to bring the same ugly battles here too. You should not desire this.
3I trained a booster (LightGBM) and used it to look for nonlinearity in the items - basically I made one ICE plot per item. From this I discovered the following nonlinearities:
Unicorns were the big thing - if you submit enough Unicorn Horns, you seem to get a discount or credit on your taxes. Perhaps they are medicinal, and there is a shortage. This happens at 5 horns, and submitting more than 5 doesn't get any further discount.
There was also some discounting going on with Cockatrice Eyes, but more confusing, where in one view of mine, it looked like the tax was bigger at 0 of them, smaller at 1, bigger at 2, smaller at 3, etc., oscillating.
Dragon, Lich, and Zombie parts looked mostly linear though.
There are a number of tax submissions for which the assessed tax was zero. Even property as large as [1 cockatrice eye, 1 lich skull, 6 zombie hands] had a zero-tax entry. So I took the strategy of starting by copying the zero-tax historical records, where I could, for three of the adventurers. For the fourth, Dragon Heads always incur a big chunk of tax, so I gave the final adventurer all the Dragon Heads, as well as 5 Unicorn Horns and an odd number of Cockatrice Eyes, to offset them.
Then from there I poked around and tried to ride the gradient downward manually. I arrived at:
1: {2 Lich Skull, 8 Zombie Hand} [for 3 gp 6 sp = 3.6 tax]
2: {1 Cockatrice Eye, 1 Dragon Head, 1 Unicorn Horn} [0.0]
3: {1 Dragon Head, 1 Unicorn Horn} [4.2]
4: {3 Cockatrice Eye, 2 Dragon Head, 3 Lich Skull, 5 Unicorn Horn} [19.2]
For a total tax of 27 gp 0 sp.
From this poking around, I've started to feel like maybe one Unicorn Horn can cancel a Dragon Head, or something? I couldn't get a proper black-box optimization program working, so it was just my manual optimization at the end that got me from 32.0 down to 27.0. There is probably a bit of room for progress.
(Haven't yet read what others wrote).
Cool setup! Haven't done one of these for a few years, and I enjoyed it a lot.
I did have a terrible time trying to get a black-box optimizer running - the hard constraints on the sums seemed to be mostly not a thing in optimizer packages? I'm interested in the thoughts of someone who knows more about black-box optimization like genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, or whatever, and if they think they'd be suitable for a problem like this.
Posting my findings in the comment below.
I suspect that, to many readers, what gives urgency to the Krome claims is that two people have allegedly died at the facility. For example, the fourth link OP provides is an instagram video with the caption “people are dying under ICE detainment in Miami”.
The two deceased are Genry Ruiz Guillen and Maksym Chernyak. ICE has published deaths reports for both:
https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/reports/ddr-GenryRuizGuillen.pdf
https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/reports/ddrMaksymChernyak.pdf
Notably, Mr. Ruiz-Guillen was transferred to medical and psychiatric facilities multiple times, and my read of the timeline is that he was in the custody of various hospitals from December 11 up through his January 23 death, i.e. over a month separates his death and his time at Krome. (It’s possible I’m reading this wrong so let me know if others have a different read). Ruiz-Guillen was transferred to hospital a month before inauguration day.
Chernyak’s report is much shorter and I don’t know what to make of it. Hemmorhagic stroke is hypothesized. He died February 20.
These are fairly detailed timelines. Guillen-Ruiz’s in particular involves many parties (normal hospital, psychiatric hospital, different doctors), so would be a pretty bold fabrication.
You said:
>the fact that we haven't seen definitive evidence against the allegations is significant evidence in favour of their veracity.
But “detainees are dying because of overcrowding and lack of water” is an allegation made by one of OP’s links, and these timelines and symptoms, especially Guillen-Ruiz’s, are evidence against.
When something is true, I desire to believe it’s true. When something is false, I desire to believe it’s false. This is the proper epistemics. If your epistemic goals are different, then they’re different. But “If the accused is in power, increase the probability estimate” is not how good epistemics are achieved.
Tangent here, just occurred to me while writing. The correct adjustment might be in the other direction: there are way more accusations against people in power, so part of the problem when considering them is: how do you keep your False Discovery Rate low? Like, if your neighbor is accused of a crime, he probably did it. But top politicians are accused of crimes every week, and many of those aren’t real, or aren’t criminal. And most or all False Discovery Rate adjustments lower the estimated probability of each instance. (Tangent over).
I think you may have a case about how one’s decision theory should adjust based on power and risk. Something like “I think there’s a 15% chance this is true, but if it were, it would be really bad, so 15% is high enough that I think we should investigate”. But taking that decision theory thought process, and using it to speak as if the 15% thing has a greater-than-50% probability, for example, isn’t correct.
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I say thanks. In person, or with someone I know well, maybe I'll kind of say "well you should ask such things too!". But this so far as I can tell has never been convincing. One close coworker said "it is good, and I am glad that there are people like you in the world, but there shouldn't be too many of you", which I found oddly convincing.