especially if Ukraine disperses their population.
Something that sounds simple - "dispersing" your population - really comes with a huge cost. You can't just send your population into the fields and expect them to live there.
And trucks can still drive off-road.
For which they require gasoline.
With NATO supply lines, Ukraine can afford to lose a million trucks a month to mud
I don't think this is accurate, Nato doesn't just have a million trucks a month lying around somewhere to send.
If the people aren't in cities, what is Russia going to target?
I don't particularly enjoy playing this morbid game of guessing what Russia could do, but targeting things like dams, bridges, power-plants, and other infrastructure would do far more damage than you seem to acknowledge.
Then continues to drive into Crimea.
Do they drive through the water, or how does this work? I feel like your arguments prove to much. If Ukraine had it that easy, why haven't they taken even Kherson yet?
Me: Do you agree reviewers aim to only accept valid papers, and care more about validity than interestingness?
I've reviewed papers. I didn't spend copious amounts of time checking the proofs. Some/most reviewers may claim to only accept "valid papers" (whatever that means), but the way the system is set up peer review serves mainly as a filter to filter out blatantly bad papers. Sure, people try to catch the obviously invalid papers. And sure, many researches really try to find mistakes. But at the end of the day, you can always get your results published somewhere, and once something is published, it is almost never retracted.
... (read more)If retractions were common, surely you would
I previously did an analysis of the tactical utility of nuclear weapons and came to the conclusion that they aren't as cost-effective as precision weapons.
We still live in a world where all use of nuclear weapons is strategic.
What if the Ukrainians take the nuclear threat seriously and disperse their civilian population?
So what? the point of Russia using nukes is to signal that it will do whatever it takes to defeat Ukraine. The tactical effects are beside the point. It's hard to predict what will happen exactly, but if a nuke gets used anywhere, there will be panic in every European city worse than the covid panic of 2020. The knock-on effects are... (read more)
Yes, I agree, and my argument was an oversimplification. That said, I don't think you're properly considering its context. The context here is that if Ukraine were to be in a situation where it had no chance of winning the war (e.g. due to nuclear weapons being in play). Here is what I'm replying to:
As for Ukrainians there are reasons to believe they're much more willing to die than Japanese in 1945. Anecdotes first. I asked a Ukrainian yesterday what should Ukraine do if nuked. She said obviously keep fighting.
Many of your examples (1-3, arguably 4) apply to individual local events/battles, or are hard to apply as-is to this context (6, 8).
... (read more)There
Care to bet on the results of a survey of academic computer scientists? If the stakes are high enough, I could try to make it happen.
No, no more than I would bet on a survey of <insert religious group here> whether they think <religious group> is more virtuous than <non-religious group>. Academics may claim that peer review is to check validity but their actions tell a different story. This is especially true in "hard" fields like mathematics where reviewers may even struggle to follow an argument, let alone check its validity. Given that most papers are never read by others, this is really not a big deal though.
But I'll offer three further... (read more)
Peer review can definitely issue certificates mistakenly, but validity is what it aims to certify.
No it doesn't. It's hard to say what the "aims" of peer-review are, but "ensuring validity" is certainly not one of them. As a first approximation, I'd say that peer-review aims to certify that the author is not an obvious crank, and that the argument being made is an interesting one to someone in the field.
You just have to twist my words and make such an offensive response, don't you? To restate - the siege of Mariupol didn't stop Ukraine from defending Ukraine.
I don't see what's offensive, and I'm not twisting your words but pointing out something that's almost obvious: IF you have no chance of winning THEN you should stop fighting. This was true in Mariupol, and is true for the rest of Ukraine also. The siege of Mariupol absolutely stopped Ukraine from defending Mariupol. The important question is whether the IF applies. But once it does, throwing away human life just to make a point strikes me as somewhat nihilistic.
... (read more)We're afraid he may start a
As I said in the comment above the perfect endgame is Putin no longer in power.
Not it isn't, because there are alternatives that are worse than Putin. I hope there are alternatives to Putin that are both realistic and also better, but I haven't seen much evidence for this coming out of Russia.
As for Ukrainians there are reasons to believe they're much more willing to die than Japanese in 1945
Are you familiar with Japan pre 1945 at all? You have heard of kamikaze pilots at the very least, right? I will quote the Wikipedia article on them: "The tradition of death instead of defeat, capture, and shame was deeply entrenched in Japanese... (read more)
I agree, though sanctions are always sold as being strategic even when they are moral.
The fact that Putin has not used nukes yet is to his credit, but I do think that there is a marked shift in his demeanor from how would sound in speeches before to now. Make of that what you will.
This is mostly cross-posted from here , but edited slightly for the crowd here. Given that this is grand Bayesian Central, I'm surprised to see the lack of good Bayesian analysis as applied to covid-19. This seems to be a major failure of science, lesswrong should pick up the slack!
In my previous blog post, I had some comments on the statistical analysis present in some covid-19 studies. It is easy to criticize, but can I do better? Let's find out what the data tells us about the fatality of SARS-coV-2.
Data by itself tells us nothing
Well, almost nothing - remember that we are trying to find something that should be more generally... (read 791 more words →)
I understand that - with some caveats - a waluigi->luigi transition may have low probability in natural language text. However, there's no reason to think this has to be the case for RLHF text.