alphazard

5 ms·

31.
by alphazard 8mo ago
Naive self-interest is a characteristic of children. You didn't stumble upon some ancient wisdom of another culture, you just matured and established a family, which your instincts tell you to put before yourself. The West is individua
32.
by alphazard 8mo ago
What they call "fluid intelligence" is just intelligence and the rest are skills/aptitudes. "Crystallized intelligence" is more plainly: efficacy/productivity and it's common knowledge that people are most
33.
by alphazard 8mo ago
The series this is from (Free to Choose) is a great introduction to economics for people of any age. I highly recommend it. This particular example can be misinterpreted though. It's true that no single person knows how to make that ex
34.
by alphazard 8mo ago
That's only true in relative terms. In reality tax rates go up or down on everyone at the same time, because that's how the negotiations shake out. If taxes go up on everyone, the rich are still the ones that manipulate the govern
35.
by alphazard 8mo ago
> That's not true at all. I make a good salary as a software engineer, I absolutely think I ought to be taxed a little more than I am, and would gladly pay that money to live in the better society I believe that would create. This c
36.
by alphazard 8mo ago
> Politics has it's fair share of corruption too. But at least in my country (the UK) it's the lesser evil. Is this a widespread view where you live? As an outsider watching the fall of Britain in slow motion, this explains so
37.
by alphazard 8mo ago
No they did not. It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number. The wealthy have about as much power as the entire middle class, but can wield it better because they are more nimble. That doesn't cha
38.
by alphazard 8mo ago
> This is unwanted, first because it produces individuals powerful enough to topple the people’s will Making the government resistant to manipulation is a distinct problem. It's a game theory/mechanism design problem, and its s
39.
by alphazard 8mo ago
> I think they mean "taxation of the too rich" in that case. Everyone wants taxes to go up on everyone making more than them, and for their own taxes to go down. The problem is this is a collective negotiation, not a discussion
40.
by alphazard 8mo ago
Taxation is the mechanism that moves power from the people to the government, and increasingly politicians and their specific interests. Do you actually believe that if your taxes went up, power would be less concentrated, or that you or yo
41.
by alphazard 8mo ago
This statement essentially boils down to "The only right way to fight me is in an environment where I expect to win" That's how you know the DeFlock strategy is effective. They aren't playing the game that the CEO wants
42.
by alphazard 8mo ago
> This looks a lot like a manager-once-removed undermining a reporting manager by supporting an engineer to go rogue. Yes, and this is unfortunately the best move in many situations given how hard it is to fire people. The ideal thing to
43.
by alphazard 8mo ago
I'm picturing a 10 second clip showing a child with a green box drawn around them, and position of gas and brake, updating with superhuman reactions. That would be the best possible marketing that any of these self driving companies co
44.
by alphazard 8mo ago
I once took a philosophy class where an essay assignment had a minimum citation count. Obviously ridiculous, since a philosophical argument should follow a chain of reasoning starting at stated axioms. Citing a paper to defend your position
45.
by alphazard 8mo ago
It's not up to me. So I'm not "letting" or not "letting" anyone do anything. I was stating what I believe to be a true counter-factual. If every western country had 1 nuke, the world would be safer than if a
46.
by alphazard 8mo ago
Okay now factor in the probability of divorce, and the amount you get to keep afterwards, and discount it to present value, vs. paying more taxes and keeping it all. Also remember that you typically lose half of income forever, not just wea
47.
by alphazard 8mo ago
Yes this is the proverb. I often hear it quoted as A hires B hires C, as a remark on organizational decay. But the original (and the way you phrased it) is a statement about what kind of person each wants to hire out of their own self in
48.
by alphazard 8mo ago
> I don't think there's any question at this point that it's in Nordic self interest to develop a nuclear deterrent. Yes, it definitely is. > The worst change is of course the fact that the odds of a complete societal c
49.
by alphazard 8mo ago
This completely misses the reason why you need to hire the best initially. It has nothing to do with the hardness of your own company's problems. It has everything to do with the distribution of productivity among any kind of engineer.
50.
by alphazard 8mo ago
AI will replace humans in performing every cognitive task, unless you believe that there is something about biology that makes it categorically better for certain kinds of computation. There's no reason to believe that's the case.
51.
by alphazard 8mo ago
The cost of iteration here is so high that we will likely remain in a bioengineering winter until there is a way for individuals to iterate on these compounds in their own self-directed research. We need a ham radio equivalent for synthetic
52.
by alphazard 8mo ago
Every time I read something like this, it strikes me as an attempt to convince people that various people-management memes are still going to be relevant moving forward. Or even that they currently work when used on humans today. The realit
53.
by alphazard 9mo ago
> there is no entity or force on this planet that can decrypt them. At this point I think all of the modern, widely used symmetric cryptography that humans have invented will never be broken in practice, even by another more technologica
54.
by alphazard 9mo ago
This was a fascinating read, thanks for posting. I'm not totally convinced that the threat model is realistic. The watermarker has to embed the watermark, the only place to do that is in the least significant bits of whatever the mess
55.
by alphazard 9mo ago
I seem to remember Yahoo finance (I think it was them, maybe someone else) introducing benign errors into their market data feeds, to prevent scraping. This lead to people doing 3 requests instead of just 1, to correct the errors, which was
56.
by alphazard 9mo ago
It's not AI. Human institutions rely on humans acting in good faith. Almost every institution is held together by some kind of priesthood, where everyone assumes the priests know what they are doing, and the priests create a kind of s
57.
by alphazard 9mo ago
> Believing something is mispriced simply means the perceived risk is very low (or even negative) That's not what risk means. Risk is the amount you stand to lose, and expected value is the mean outcome (calculated by integrating a
58.
by alphazard 9mo ago
CS degree is starting to become a bimodal distribution. There are enough people who thought they could buy a high-salary job by getting a CS degree, and universities advertising to that effect, that the market is now flooded with candidate
59.
by alphazard 9mo ago
Investing in a business is also a bet. The capital you provide is a known quantity, you risk it for an uncertain outcome (the future value of the shares). If your informational edge is just America invading Greenland, let's say you k
60.
by alphazard 9mo ago
It depends on the person making the bet. With sophisticated enough brain scanning technology, we could distinguish between "placing the bet to achieve a feeling" vs. "placing the bet because they believe it is mispriced&quot

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