Rust does seem to have a lot of nice features. My biggest blocker for me going to Rust from C++ is that C++ has much better support for generic programming. And now that Concepts have landed, I'm not aware of any language that can compete in this area.
It's strange to map language to probability ranges. The guidance should be to just say the probability range. No ambiguity. Clear. Actionable and also measurable.
It's still a subjective estimate, but Samosvety (predictor group) does seem to work that way, and HPMOR suggested something similar. Basically assign probabiltiies to less complex unknowns using numbers pulled out of your butt if that's all you can do. Then you can compute conditional probabilities of various more complicated events using those priors. At least then, a consistent set of numbers has carried through the calculation, even if those numbers were wrong at the outset. It's suppose to help your mental clarity. I guess you can also perturb the initial numbers to guess something like a hyperdistribution at the other end.
I haven't tried this myself and haven't run across a situation to apply it to lately, but I thought it was interesting.
If you don't perturb the initial numbers to see what changes to help construct a richer model (as well as one with tighter bounds on what it predicts or forbids), you're leaving out a lot of the benefits of the exercise. Sometimes the prior doesn't matter that much because you find you already have or can easily collect sufficient data to overcome various arbitrary priors. Sometimes different priors will result in surprisingly different conclusions, some of them you can even be more confident in ruling out because of absence of data in their predictions. (Mathematically, absence of evidence is evidence of absence, though of course it's just an inequality so the proof says nothing on whether it's weak or strong evidence.) And of course some priors are straight from the butt but others are more reasonably estimated even if still quite uncertain; in any case much like unit testing of boundary conditions you can still work through a handful of choices to see the effects.
Someone mentioned fermi calculations, a related fun exercise in this sort of logic is the work on grabby aliens: https://grabbyaliens.com/
> a consistent set of numbers has carried through the calculation, even if those numbers were wrong at the outset
I kind of see how this might be useful, but what I've actually seen is an illusion of certainty from looking at numbers and thinking that means you're being quantitative instead of, you know, pulling things out of your butt. Garbage in, garbage out still applies.
Yes, the potential illusion is most dangerous if you show someone else the numbers and they take them seriously. If they're only for your own calculations then you can remember what they are made of.
In practice people seem to be very bad at remembering that. Pretty universally people act as though doing math on made up numbers makes them less erroneous rather than more.
> Yeah, mistaking precision for accuracy is a common fallacy.
I remember an appealing description of the difference being that a precise archer might sink all their arrows at the same spot on the edge of the target, whereas an accurate archer might sink all their arrows near the bull's eye without always hitting the same spot.
There are plenty of examples where government is vastly more efficient than private sector. Medicare is vastly more efficient than private insurance. USPS is more efficient than private carriers. Another example is government pay. Usually much lower than the equivalent job at a private sector company. That's because private sector companies fail ALL THE TIME, and the COST of that inefficiency (waste of a failed company) is passed on to you via higher prices for those functions.
Also efficiency shouldn't be the goal of everything we do all the time. Sometimes resilience is more important, which comes at the cost of efficiency.
Usually much lower than the equivalent job at a private sector company.
People often state this, without acknowledging that:
- many government employees would not meet the bar for an equivalent job in the private sector
- the environment and red tape means that even an equally skilled employee would be less productive than they would be in a private sector firm that's subject to competitive pressures
- for many government employees, headline salary is only about a two thirds of total compensation (look up San Francisco employees' total comp on the Transparent California web site).
I work from home and this would be cool to communicate with my kids when I'm on a call before they barge in asking questions. HOWEVER, the price is WAY too high. This is at most a $50 dollar thing.
Don't you already have a door? With a lock? A mute button? OK, maybe those aren't cool, but don't you have a piece of paper, pens, markers and some time to design your own DND signs with your kids? $50 still seems like a lot. We don't have to buy something to deal with every little inconvenience in our lives when what we have on hand + maybe a tiny bit of creativity can probably suffice.
This is the boutique designed not-in-china version. If it proves successful, a $50 Chinese knockoff will be along soon enough. You can vote with your wallet and say fuck these guys for having a good idea and working on it and buy the cheap Chinese crap version when it's available if you'd rather.
This sounds sensible but that's not what happened. The government debt is not an issue. Trump is more concerned about the stock market, and the market sent him a clear message.
I don't think anyone would argue the point of cars is to look pretty or make the environment more balanced. Cars are successful in spite of looking like shit and damaging the environment.
the history of cars in the US is pretty complicated tbh. most major cities had street cars and rail systems for a long time before major government initiatives ripped them out in favor of highways and streets. I'm not sure cars would be as popular without that major push towards car-centric infrastructure.
Turns out investing in your own people returns dividends. Unfortunately, the current administration is divesting from the American people. DOGE, and it's cutting of federal grants is a direct example of this divestment. What's happening now in the US reminds me a lot of a mixture of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, where the Chicago economists came in and their shock therapy and large divestment decimated the wealth and health of ordinary people.
>Turns out investing in your own people returns dividends. Unfortunately, the current administration is divesting from the American people.
As we see, in the case of America, these dividends are much larger. So much larger that they are not even comparable to what is described in the article.
>mixture of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, where the Chicago economists came in and their shock therapy and large divestment
But that's not what happened in the USSR. Gorbachev simply make government open and transparent for people, rejected totalitarian oppression, and it immediately became clear that the party had almost zero support.
And since it is impossible to have near-zero support without totalitarian oppression, the tops of the Communist Party (led by Yeltsin) decided to go cash out and simply divided among themselves all the assets under the party's control.
That's it. It had nothing to do with Chicago economist and shock therapy, which was just an excuse for dividing government assets.
And it's not like wealth and health of ordinary people suffered to any significant degree. It's just that before Gorbachev and Yeltsin all the statistics were fake, and people were repressed for contradicting it. But after the coup, no one cared. In fact, the only ones at a loss were middle level party bureaucrats, who did not have any real assets under their control, but occupied an extremely privileged position in the Soviet system and parasitizing on the body of an oppressed society.
Interesting that you suggest they had "almost zero support" when
1. A referendum with the wording
"""
Do you consider it necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, in which the rights and freedoms of a person of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?
"""
Got 77.85% of the vote, and the union only collapsed after internal political struggles led to the individual republics pulling out of their own accord.
2. Just five years later, the honest-to-god Communist Party candidate won %40.73 of the votes in an election against the incumbent Yeltsin -- despite such allegations of voter fraud that "At a meeting with opposition leaders in 2012, then-president Dmitry Medvedev was reported to have said, 'There is hardly any doubt who won [the 1996 election]. It was not Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin.'"
So clearly your statement
> And since it is impossible to have near-zero support without totalitarian oppression
can't be correct, unless you're alleging that Yeltsin was secretly using totalitarian measures to support his opposition in the 1996 election.
> the tops of the Communist Party (led by Yeltsin)
Yeltsin was an anti-Communist, he opposed the leadership of the Communist party. The actual "tops of the Communist Party" were divided between the Gorbachev-led liberalizing faction and the hardline faction, both of whom wanted to preserve the USSR -- but in the wake of the coup attempt by the latter faction, both were discredited and it was Yeltsin and the other regional leaders, not the heads of the central CPUSSR, who came out on top.
> It's just that before Gorbachev and Yeltsin all the statistics were fake, and people were repressed for contradicting it.
This is just conspiratorial thinking. Here, I found the most aggressively western-capitalist source I could think of: https://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/CF124.chap4.html -- even Rand Corp. describes a drop of population growth rates from 6-7% to net negative over the course of the liberalization of prices.
There wouldn't be a single factor driving it but a combination of many factors. Loss of coastline (and cities built along it) including greater susceptibility to storms for unaffected areas will obviously have economic costs, highly increased weather and storm variability will be significant (think monsoon rains, "atmospheric river," etc.), increased drought in some areas due to both temperature and weather pattern changes (see western US water rights among the states as the civil portion of this), mass movements of refugees (sure the US can close the southern border, but what happens if you get 50,000 migrants all deciding to come over at once in one area? Are you simply going to shoot all of them?).
Human extinction seems very unlikely, but the collapse of the infrastructure that allows creation of the infrastructure that allows modern life? That could be much more likely, particularly when you factor in military conflicts as well as purely climate-based changes and losses.
It's quite hot around there. Wet bulb temperatures often near the edge of survivability outdoors.
It's worse now with 1-1.5C warming. If we don't stop, and we get to 3-5C warming, this could lead to large scale migration to Europe in pursuit of liveable climate. And warming won't stop unless we stop emitting greenhouse gases.
reply