One important caveat is that in the study, as far as I can tell, the money is coming from a different country (presumably the USA) than the target country (Kenya), so there is a baseline effect of increasing the net wealth of Kenya. If the money is collected from and distributed to the same community, the results may not necessarily be the same. I think it would be very interesting to see a study along these lines, but I’m not sure how feasible it would be.
I think it would. There exists at least two economic systems in a country, the capital economy and the productive economy. The capital economy represents assets and wealth that aren't involved in day to day things. Inflated property values, portfolios of gold holdings, etc. The productive economy is the one where most people participate in with daily life. Its' the $7 you hand to a worker to transmute into a sandwich. The $80 a wage earner gets paid over a shift that is mostly parted out to things like groceries and rent.
Universal income promises to tax the capital economy and shift that money into the productive economy. In effect, you are taking gold that previously was sitting idle underneath the sleeping dragon and returning it to the village, increasing the real productive money supply by taking money that's just being sat upon and using it for real productive use.
Uniformly random data means that someone’s perception of their ability is uncorrelated with their actual ability, which is exactly what DK=true is saying!
I feel like this article is severely over-complicating the analysis. Looking at the original blog post [1], their key claim appears to be that "random data produces the same curves as the DK effect, so the DK effect is a statistical artifact".
However, by "random data", the original blog means people and their self-assessments are completely independent! In fact, this is exactly what the DK effect is saying -- people are bad at self-evaluating [2]. (More precisely, poor performers overestimate their ability and high performers underestimate their ability.) In other words, the premise of the original blog post [1] is exactly the conclusion of DK!
Looking at the HN comments cited [3] by the current blog post, it appears that the main point of contention from other commenters was whether the DK effect means uncorrelated self-assessment or inversely correlated self-assessment. The DK data only supports the former, not the latter. I haven't looked at the original paper, but according to Wikipedia [2], the only claim being made appears to be the "uncorrelated" claim. (In fact, it is even weaker, since there is a slight positive correlation between performance and self-assessment.)
So, my conclusion would be that DK holds, but it does depend on exactly what is the exact claim in the original DK paper.
> I haven't looked at the original paper, but according to Wikipedia [2], the only claim being made appears to be the "uncorrelated" claim.
Is it that hard to actually check the original paper before bothering to make such a claim? The original paper explicitly claims to examine "why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves".
Yeah, the model is a simple linear model (which I've yet to see written down) with some correlation coefficient which is the unknown. Derive an estimator for that correlation coefficient, being explicit about the assumptions, then we can have a discussion. Until then it's all lots of noise. The raw data would help too.
As far as I know, Konrad Zuse didn't prove that this strategy was a universal model of computation. In contrast, Turing proved that his universal machine could emulate any other machine, given the right program.
In my view, Turing's contribution is providing a plausible definition of computation along with a deep and comprehensive theoretical characterization of the properties of this model of computation. This is why Turing machines form the basis of theoretical computer science, and not other models such as lambda calculus. I think saying that Turing machines were adopted since they were merely more convenient is highly misleading.
I think this pattern repeats a lot: There are many cases where you can point to multiple people who invented similar ideas around the same time, but it is typically the person who provided the most deep and comprehensive treatment of the subject that ultimately gets most of the credit. This depth is not conveyed in pop science attributions such as "Turing invented computation", but this doesn't mean Turing doesn't deserve the credit.
I'm not sure what the author has in mind, but a standard way to put a topology on this space would be to use the discrete topology [1] on {0, 1}, and then use the product topology [2] to obtain a topology over the space of binary streams. This space is homeomorphic to the Cantor set (see "Examples" section in [2]), so you can think of it as being the same topology as the Cantor set.
There has been some interesting recent work [1] applying Fourier transforms (more precisely, an adaptation of the Fourier transform to the sphere) to CNNs, to automatically encode equivariance to rotational symmetries.
There is a subtle but important difference. To be more precise, consider the following two statements:
1) There exists some n such that all integers >= n satisfy the desired property.
2) For n = [a specific constant], all integers >= n satisfy the desired property.
These two statements are not the same, but both imply that there are a finite number of counterexamples. The second one is stronger, since we could prove the statement by enumerating all k < n and checking the statement for each such k; if all these checks pass, then the statement is correct.
This strategy does not work for the first strategy since we do not know n, only that such an n exists. In particular, there could be a non-constructive proof that establishes existence of such an n without providing any way to compute such an n.
From the discussion, it does sound like this paper is proving (2), not (1).
I don't think that's quite right. There are two possible precise statements for such claims:
1) There exists some n such that all integers >= n satisfy the desired property.
2) For n = [a specific constant], all integers >= n satisfy the desired property.
I'm not familiar with Artin's conjecture, but from your description, it satisfies (1) but not (2). The reason is that if there are at most 2 such primes, we can take n to be the larger of the two primes plus one. Since all primes are finite, this choice of n is also finite.
I think the key question is whether the paper described in this article proves (1) or (2). From the discussion, it sounds like it proves (2), which is the stronger result.
Yup, you came in and said it before I could. Knowing how many counterexamples there could be doesn't help very much if you don't have any bound on their size. pmiller2 seems to assume that there is some way to identify the two candidates, but the problem is that there isn't; the proof is nonconstructive. Nonconstructive proofs are a thing, and it's often important to distinguish whether a given existence proof is constructive or not.
But, humans can currently learn to teleoperate robots (e.g., surgical robots) much better than AI. So, they are dealing with the same hardware, and it is hardware a priori unfamiliar to the human. Thus, at least in these cases, the difference must be in the learning algorithm.
One thing to keep in mind is that there are way more people alive today than ever before. According to Google, there have been about 108 billion humans alive, and 7.7 of those are alive today. So, your chances of living during the "most exciting period" is better than 7%! In any case, much more likely than any other period in human history.
I would like to skip the clock ahead about 500 years, but I'm afraid of arriving in a desolate tomb world.
I feel like it wouldn't be that hard for a person from today, especially someone who keeps up with scientific and technological progress, to quickly get up to speed with the world of 500 years from now... but I might be wrong.
If Michael Crichton's Timeline is to be believed, I should be worried about disease, at least for the past... although there's no reason I couldn't contract COVID-2519 and die...
However, if you expect that in the future the population will keep growing by orders of magnitude, what does that imply?
A) you're just in an unlikely position
B) the population will rapidly shrink and never recover
C) this is the most "interesting" time in history, and there are so many simulations of it by the people of the far future that we are more likely to exist in this time.
B; the argument that if humans are going to take over the galaxy and become a multi-trillion population species and you throw a dart anywhere in the population of all humans who ever lived, chances are the dart would land in the region of most population, and therefore where you live is probably the time of highest population, so we never do become a galaxy-spanning species we only dwindle from here.
And it's a daft argument because if you don't have a soul, you are the product of your environment. You couldn't be born as someone else, or somewhere else, or somewhen else, just like the River Amazon couldn't be on Mars or in Pangaea, because it's defined as "the thing in Brazil, currently". You couldn't be born in the Wild West because you are defined as "the child of your parents" and they weren't there, then. You didn't end up /in/ that meat body, you /are/ that meat body.
(And if you do have a soul, and they are randomly assigned to meat bodies, this argument is still like saying "roll two dice, the most likely combined outcome is a 7, I got two dots and one dot so that must be what 7 is")
