It's interesting that all these positions are called "common", but the actual board position might happen zero to one times in a lifetime, and I suspect it's usually zero times.
I noticed something similar when I played contract bridge at a competitive level. A top bridge player might play very roughly on the order of 10,000 hands a year, and vividly recall something that happens on the order of once a year as "oh yeah that's common". Of course I wasn't remotely close to them. But there is something about competitive games that seem to amplify the memory for certain kinds of unusual situations.
(Some people are commenting about under promoting to avoid stalemate traps down the line. I've always been a weak chess player, but... trying to set a stalemate trap after being down a queen, in a non-contrived position, is, like, adult chess players shouldn't do that. In my limited experience.)
> vividly recall something that happens on the order of once a year as "oh yeah that's common".
I mean, think of how many times a typical person has sex in their life. Hopefully they and their partner aren't getting pregnant more than roughly once per year. But somebody getting pregnant after having sex is reasonably defined as common. Certainly common enough that it's something you would consider and take precautions to prevent if you didn't want it to happen.
In ranked chess games, underpromotion happens about 1 in 1000ish games. I imagine it would be more common in high level unranked play. If you play one chess game per day, that's once every 3 years on average. It's not frequent, but I'd describe that as common.
I can't remember where I read or saw this, but it struck me as the obvious key difference: In aviation, procedures and practices are developed in concert with experts in aviation maintenance, aviation engineering, various parts of system design, and the people who fly the darn planes. In medicine, the lobbyists, politicians, and software companies have political and economic incentives and communication structures quite divorced from the practiced expertise of actual end users, not to mention the people being treated. So you have all these 'best practices' being imposed that have little to do with the sorts of best practices health practitioners would do or want to do or what patients need.
This is typical of Covid conspiracy theorists, or conspiracy theorists of any sort: one or two papers on one side prove something, but an overwhelming mountain of evidence on the other side does not prove something. The theorist makes no explanation as to how a planetful of scientists missed the obvious truth that some random dudes found; they just assert that it happened, or make some hand-waving explanation about how an inexplicable planet-wide force of censors is silencing the few unremarkable randos who somehow have the truth.
The first paper seems to claim a very standard cohort study is subject to "immortal time bias", an effect whereby measuring outcomes can seem to change them. The typical example of sampling time bias is that slow-growing cancers are more survivable than fast-growing ones, but also more likely to be measured by a screening, giving a correlation between screening and survivablility. So you get a time effect where more fast-acting cancers do not end up in the measurement, biasing the data.
But in measurements such that one outcome or the other does not bias the odds of that outcome being sampled, there can be no measurement time effect, which is why it's not corrected for in studies like this. The authors do not explain why measurement time effects would have anything to do with detecting or not detecting death rates in the abstract, or anywhere else in the paper, because they are quacks, who apply arbitrary math to get the outcome they want.
As another commenter pointed out, randomized controlled trials -- which cannot possibly have this made-up time effect -- often clearly show a strongly positive effect for vaccination.
Excessive inflation is destructive but it requires a better explanation than that.
In a vacuum, if we all have 3-10% more money and things are 3-10% more expensive, we're not poorer unless there are secondary effects that make us poorer. It's the secondary effects that inflation has on investment, markets, and transfer of wealth that are negative. The effects of debt collapse during economic crisis is a considerably more expensive effect, and not one that's good for the poor, or the rich, or the middle class or anyone.
If you "genuinely cannot understand this", consider that the traditional perspective is that the point of an economy is to produce useful goods and services, not to produce an aesthetically pleasing inflation number. Recall that, in early 2020, markets were facing the greatest panic since the 1929 crash. The debt collapse and deflation that followed then precipitated an enormous amount of misery. I'm personally pretty happy we didn't get another Great Depression; Covid was bad enough without that happening.
To piggy-back, the economy runs on the re-circulation of money and the reluctant to spend/lend money in 1929 contributed to why it was so bad (This is what Bernake got a nobel prize for showing [1]).
So you really want the government to synthetically make the money supply larger so that the lower velocity of money ends up being the "correct" velocity. Its like ordering 2 sides of fries at a restaurant so when somebody takes one of your sides you still end up with the desired amount.
However, since the government doesn't turn off the money printing when the shock is over there really is strong argument that they shouldn't turn it on during the shock because it just makes the next shock even worse.
Not abstractly. Specifically, in the United States, since COVID.
The parent reply hand-waves away a point about bad policy by making an abstract point about inflation from money-printing, as if citizens of the United States are molecules in a thought experiment about the laws of physics, as opposed to individual people affected in specific (differing) ways by policies.
> They seemed very welcoming, sincere, and were kind and patient even when I was basically asserting that several of their beliefs were dumb
I don't think LessWrong is a cult (though certainly some of their offshoots are) but it's worth pointing out this is very characteristic of cult recruiting.
For cultists, recruiting cult fodder is of overriding psychological importance--they are sincere, yes, but the consequences are not what you and I would expect from sincere people. Devotion is not always advantageous.
Are you claiming the New York Times is more likely than a comparable newspaper to fabricate random suggestions about astronauts? This is something they are "known to do"?
If you actually read the article, they include a direct link to the sources they cite and explain specifically what those sources say.
Okay I didn’t have access to paywalled article before.
The NYT article is about one specific study that’s a review of archival material. It doesn’t actually seem to suggest that it was a “publicity stunt” or “theater” as OP suggested. Rather, it says that NASA believed that the threat was very real. The threat was real enough to hold a “high level conference” (held by National Academy of Sciences). The outcome there was also that “the risk was real and the consequences could be profound”.
So, the major spending on the quarantine system wasn’t out of nowhere.
The study conclusion seems to be more that it would be nearly impossible to contain the threat if it existed. But, that wouldn’t mean that the precautions taken were only for show — just that it would be really fucking hard to stop. And with the hypothetical microbe, they couldn’t know anything about means of transmission or lifespan — so the precautions could have some value.
Even in the failure of their quarantine procedure, it still demonstrated that they thought it was (in principle) important:
“24 workers were exposed to the lunar material that the facility’s infrastructure was supposed to protect them from; they had to be quarantined”
It wasn’t security theater so much as it was just quarantine procedure that had many gaps, failures, and trade offs.
When I write in Haskell, I find myself mentally glossing the returned monadic state, along the lines of, "Oh, an M x is just an x that does monady stuff to get the x". This becomes natural once you get the hang of do-notation and sometimes monad combinators. So I'm not really thinking about the monadic state in the return value a lot.
It's not really any less natural than thinking stateful programming, except now the state is a reified thing, which I think is strictly advantageous once you get used to it.
What helped me grok the mathematical rigor is: If you have a series of monad operations that exist purely in monad world -- in Haskell, if your expression is parametric over the type of the monad -- you shouldn't have to worry about how you do it.
This is what monads being categorically commutative ("a monoid in the category of endofunctors") buys you. You want to turn monad X into monad Y? Sure, just join, flatten, return, bind in whatever way makes the type checker happy. Anything that only uses what's in the Monad typeclass must necessarily be a monad morphism, so if you're generic over your monads, you get that for free. And of course `fmap` and `bind` are required to be parameterized monad morphisms, so there's a lot you can get for free.
...Sorry, that was unclear. Monad-as-monoids being associative corresponds to certain categorical diagrams being commutative.
It's the concept of categorical commutativity that's what's useful. A collection of types and functions is "commutative" if every way to get from type A to type B yields the same result. It happens a lot in Haskell where most or all of the operations you're interested in commute with each other, which is how Haskell gets its reputation of "if it compiles it works". In particular, if you `fmap` or `bind` two commutative functions, the result becomes commutative, too.
Very misleading since monoids include a binary operator and the algebraic definition of commutative would imply that A * B = B * A. Clearly this is false if A and B are strings and * is concatenation (which forms a monoid with the empty string as identity).
Unironically yes. The reason people want taxes on profits is they think large, powerful companies are a threat... but if you think that, why tax money that large, powerful companies don't waste?
The other reason is to tax the rich, but you can do that by simply taxing the rich directly. If we fear powerful companies, we can put some sort of scaling size tax on the largest ones.
A lot of companies are essentially on the welfare of their investors, who may or may not be stupid. Many companies purposefully do not turn a profit, because they're aiming to cheat the market and sell at a loss to push competitors out. A lot of very successful companies operate or have operated this way, and it's incredibly dangerous for the market. It causes the erosion of small businesses and further promotes monopolization. We can try to disincentive that by saying, "hey, you don't want to turn a profit, that's fine, but you still have to pay up".
This is part of the reason why if you look around America today it's going to be 99% big corporate players dominating markets and 1% small businesses barely staying afloat.
> We can try to disincentive that by saying, "hey, you don't want to turn a profit, that's fine, but you still have to pay up".
That doesn't make any sense. You're saying, instead of consumers getting lower prices, they should pay more and that money should go towards taxes. That means, essentially, that you're asking the consumers to pay taxes.
What you're describing is predatory pricing. People have mixed views on that, but if you want to address it, then address it directly. Taxing revenue is a strange, roundabout way of doing it that is going to harm a ton of non-predatory businesses without actually changing the market dynamics of predatory pricing -- because your taxes will be affecting the non-predatory companies even more! Since they, by definition, charge more money and therefore will be paying more taxes on the greater revenue.
The problem is that our current tax system incentivizes the kind of venture-capital fueled market manipulation we see. Companies actively try to optimize for the lowest amount of profit, similarly to how the ultra-wealthy try to optimize for the lowest income.
We have some methods to address predatory pricing but I think it's obvious they pretty much don't work on any scale that matters. When I look around the modern US, I see the least amount of successful small businesses I've ever seen in my lifetime. We're living in a corporate hellscape, and more and more business look to rent-seeking anti-consumerist behavior.
> The problem is that our current tax system incentivizes the kind of venture-capital fueled market manipulation we see.
It really doesn't at all. It's quite neutral in that regard.
> Companies actively try to optimize for the lowest amount of profit
This is self-evidently false. Companies actively optimize for the greatest total profit, considering the net present value of future profits. This does mean delaying profits if reinvesting them is expected to yield growth. This is desirable.
> We have some methods to address predatory pricing but I think it's obvious they pretty much don't work on any scale that matters.
Honestly it hasn't been a major policy priority. They could absolutely work if implemented, but not everyone agrees it's a problem that needs solving. Many people consider it to be hostile to a free market. I'm not taking sides here.
> When I look around the modern US, I see the least amount of successful small businesses I've ever seen in my lifetime.
The major culprit here is technology and economies of scale. The tax code has some quirks, but it is essentially irrelevant here. Even if predatory pricing accelerates the demise of some small businesses, they weren't going to last much longer anyways. Which is why predatory pricing isn't actually nearly as common as many people think, and why it's not always viewed as a problem. E.g. Uber and Lyft engaged in it for years, but traditional taxis are still in business. Small businesses have been disappearing because they simply don't have economies of scale. Their products cost more so people don't go there. It's that simple. Nothing to do with the tax code.
This isn't always true. Stimulants can -- for a subpopulation, at least -- meaningfully improve focus in ADHD individuals in long-term measurable ways and low risk of side effects. This contrasts starkly to ordinary people, who will quickly build up a tolerance to typical stimulants. The difference is measurable with clinical tests.
> This contrasts starkly to ordinary people, who will quickly build up a tolerance to typical stimulants.
This isn’t really correct.
Everyone builds up tolerance to the euphoric effects. People expecting stimulants to make them happy, motivated, and energized forever are going to be disappointed, ADHD or not.
The concentration enhancing effects are more durable because they’re not re-regulated exactly the same as the euphoric component.
This is the real reason why ADHD people find long term value in stimulants but non-ADHD people do not. They were taking the drug for different reasons.
It’s also possible to overshoot the dose and get to the point where too much drug is counterproductive. This is a common problem for people chasing that euphoria who have doctors who don’t care and keep writing for higher doses. In many patients when the drug “isn’t working” a dose reduction can actually put them back where it’s effective as an ADHD medication.
Being downvoted cause they werent paying attention to what the comment above them was saying. The Euphoria WILL always wear off, doesnt mean it doesnt continue to treat symptoms.
Also yes stimulants are the gold standard but I would argue that our metrics for success are bunk
Generally speaking (there are exceptions) ADHD people do not experience euphoria when taking stimulants. I never have, not even the first time. It’s known as the paradoxical reaction.
Some people do develop tolerance, but usually building an off day into the schedule is enough to counter that.
that is absolutely just straight up untrue. Yes excessive stimulant usage depletes magnesium, mostly cause you forget to eat. And yes for both vyvanse and adderall, if your stomach is too acidic it will decrease bioavailability, but neither of things things have anything to do with tolerance, which accrues on a semi-permanent basis every time you take the drug.
I noticed something similar when I played contract bridge at a competitive level. A top bridge player might play very roughly on the order of 10,000 hands a year, and vividly recall something that happens on the order of once a year as "oh yeah that's common". Of course I wasn't remotely close to them. But there is something about competitive games that seem to amplify the memory for certain kinds of unusual situations.
(Some people are commenting about under promoting to avoid stalemate traps down the line. I've always been a weak chess player, but... trying to set a stalemate trap after being down a queen, in a non-contrived position, is, like, adult chess players shouldn't do that. In my limited experience.)