Everyone of his generation loves nuclear. It was the hottest thing back then. Makes me wonder what todays generations will be advocating which their children will have to deal with
Sadly it's because manufacturers deliberately make them loud to make it seem like they're doing their job more. It's the same with many garden tools. Lawnmowers, leaf blowers and hedge trimmers can be made very quiet but they're deliberately made loud to make it feel like they're doing their job more.
I have very hard time to believe this. It can't be helpful to drive people away -- at least I don't use any hard driers anymore because of their noise levels.
afaik, Taleb has repeatedly & explicitly stated “no probability without ergodicity”, which is pretty much a frequentist mantra. The problem with non-statisticians like Nate Silvers (who holds a BS in Econ, as opposed to Taleb who earned his PhD in Statistics), is that they traffic in electoral polls involving human subjects which are anything but ergodicity. Yet, they brazenly attribute probability models to their conclusions. That has severe definitional issues, which is what Taleb objects to.
As to the gatekeeping issues, my mom buys eggs for $3 and groceries for $7. 3+7=10, so she hands over a $10 bill. Wait a minute, does that mean my mom is a mathematician, because she has engaged in arithmetic, which is math ? That’s the issue here. Silvers can simply post how many people want to vote which way & leave it at that. It’s just an opinion poll. Instead he engages in an elaborate charade where he takes polls of polls, ensemble averages, then says this is what is most likely, then on election day when most likely becomes least likely, he washes his hands off. Thats just clearcut fraud. All Taleb is saying is that you simply don’t have ergodicity here so you don’t have a probability. You just have a [0..1] fraction that doesn’t mean much because it doesn’t converge to a limit as information approaches infinity. So if you had skin in the game and purchased an option based on the projected outcome you would lose big time.
I don't understand your (or Taleb's) point. If you insist on "no probability without ergodicity" then you can't put a probability on stock price movement, or any election or sporting event. But people put probabilities on those all the time. If that breaks the assumptions of frequentist models then it's the frequentists who are wrong about what people mean when they use probabilities.
I agree with the idea that Nate Silver is an entertainer, and if he were a bookie he'd need to be more precise about the odds he places on things and his range of uncertainty. But to me that doesn't suggest that Silver shouldn't speak in terms of probability at all. For a journalist (a big caveat) he's remarkable for being rigorous, open about his level of certainty, and willing to admit to mistakes.
I disagree that statisticians should adjust their definitions to fit common usage.
I can put any probably on anything I want. That doesn’t imply those numbers mean anything usefu or that what I’m doing is backed by any established theory.
I hardly think it's fair to say that Nate Silver isn't interested in accountability for his predictions. The site recently finished a retrospective that tries to address this issue:
Probability theory, whether frequentist or otherwise, is "just" math. Identifying that mathematical structure with real-world events is always going to involve a judgment call. So if your framework requires assumptions that don't hold in the real world, then maybe it's not the appropriate framework to use. Because clearly people are making decisions based on numbers between 0 and 1, and they're not generally losing big time.
your reply made me question myself so I got Skin in the Game off the shelf and whadddayknow he _does_ give a definition:
"Perfect ergodicity means that each one of us, should he live forever, would spend a proportion of the time in the economic conditions of the entire cross-section[of the U.S. population]: out of, say, a century, an average of sixty years in the lower middle class, twenty years in the blue-collar class, and perhaps one single year in the one percent"
Wouldn't it be more efficient to charge cars from electricity gathered from solar urban roofs ? Car parks would make ideal areas to cover with solar roofs in the style of gas-station roofs. They'd be generating electricity and keeping the cars beneath cool
Over 60 steps and the battery hasn't even been touched yet. I don't think I've ever seen an iFixit teardown take more than 20 steps, and both my 2009 and 2012 era consumer laptops can be broken to base components in even fewer
It's amazing how much more complicated that procedure is than for the 13" MBP of the same vintage. You would think the smaller notebook would be harder to disassemble, but there are actually fewer cables and parts that need to be moved out of the way to get at the battery.
