iguy

109 ms·

781.
by iguy 8y ago
"its effects were substantially interchangeable with the bomb" Yes, its military effects. (And humanitarian effects.) But no, in political effect. If "war is politics carried on by other means" and the goal was to defeat
782.
by iguy 8y ago
The effort was indeed huge, but it's not so obvious that the Germans could not have done it. IIRC the V2 missile program may actually have been more expensive? Different technology but also hard... hard enough that in 1969 the same guy
783.
by iguy 8y ago
It sounds like Heisenberg is predicting that the USSR would not be a major power in postwar Europe. And this didn't turn out to be the case. Whether this was a good thing or not, I think newsgremlin should ask some Poles.
784.
by iguy 8y ago
An under-emphasised point: If defeating Japanese fascism was a valid war aim, then the bomb was a really efficient weapon. Even if mining the harbors was much cheaper & had more military effect. The lesson from Versailles is that surren
785.
by iguy 8y ago
Seems like a useful testing feature that ought only to be allowed on testing versions -- the ones for which there are already different rules & different certificates.
786.
by iguy 8y ago
Was there some choice of what studies? So that if you object to a particular one you could decline... if you object to all of them then I guess you should study something else.
787.
by iguy 8y ago
The phenomenon Spandrell describes is a concern largely independent of whether the total population is increasing or decreasing. Every advanced country has built a system for vacuuming up the most talented individuals from the countryside,
788.
by iguy 8y ago
Nope. Although the replies Taleb got from people who've actually read this stuff aren't a bad place to start.
789.
by iguy 8y ago
Thanks, that's helpful.
790.
by iguy 8y ago
He obviously means "capacity to do good" as in capacity to keep a high-tech society running, and continue making technological improvements. He cares both about the cream of the crop for the next generation of cancer drugs (or com
791.
by iguy 8y ago
Every service you buy with your savings has to be provided by people working at that time. More savings competing for fewer workers will cause inflation until your savings are reduced to match. To take the extreme example, if everyone tried
792.
by iguy 8y ago
Right, but that positive slope is only for within-country variation.
793.
by iguy 8y ago
I write pretty carefully, kindly try not to put words into my mouth. My reason for comparing real things, not utopias, is that we can learn things from them. Because they exist, or existed. And what you learn here is that the volume of argu
794.
by iguy 8y ago
I'm not defending that the US is the "most ethnically diverse", I think that's far from true, but pointing out that this isn't an unambiguously defined question. I'm not sure I've never heard anyone state
795.
by iguy 8y ago
Well it's going to depend on your definitions. By American categories, India is 100% asian, and almost every sub-saharan country is 100% black. Of course local definitions vary. But that aside, GP has a point that contemporary American
796.
by iguy 8y ago
Can anyone knowledgeable comment on the depth of Kenya's internal divisions? From the NYT's perspective clearly Kenya is racially uniform, but I know that there was significant political violence at recent elections, to do with wh
797.
by iguy 8y ago
True. But I think "French" in particular was used this way for lots of things in English, maybe 100 years ago. "French letter", advertising "French lessons", etc. I guess it faded as the place became less exoti
798.
by iguy 8y ago
If I understand right, this was roughly the system 50-60 years ago. From memory, the average murder trial took under 2 weeks, and very few went to appeal. We've replaced that with a system which in some ways has much higher standards.
799.
by iguy 8y ago
Of course, nor does having been married on day one imply that he is still in the picture. But what I described is the trend. And the right order of magnitude.
800.
by iguy 8y ago
Totally agree about these articles. Note that the trends in the sizes of new homes completed are a little misleading, I think, as they reflect boom suburbs, rather than the occupied stock. Not an expert, but here's an attempt to track
801.
by iguy 8y ago
Are there numbers? The trend from what I understand is exactly the opposite. The US has passed 40% of births to unmarried mothers [1], so we're approaching a default family of 1 adult. (Possibly 1 adult present + some percentage of ano
802.
by iguy 8y ago
Where such families existed, they had ties of blood to bind them. The brother who loses his job will be supported by first-degree relatives, not by people he met on Tinder-for-couples. (And even better for stability if his wife is also rela
803.
by iguy 8y ago
Looking on the bright side, just imagine how many divorce lawyers could be saved from unemployment!
804.
by iguy 8y ago
There is a neat paper I can't find which runs the numbers. So from memory: For about 1000 years, we know that west-european states executed about 1% of each generation. Assume it's the most violent 1%, and that violence is 50% her
805.
by iguy 8y ago
OK maybe the beds is a bad example (maybe most of their occupants would be under observation... or there would be less than 1 per hospital). Let's say it's 90% fatal, and an outbreak occurs in a country where men are always buried
806.
by iguy 8y ago
No, that's the first error. The usual base rate problem. I agree that it's a common mistake, but it's not the one I was trying to point out. Knowing that this very rare disease affects 1 in 10_000 men, and 1 in 100_000 women,
807.
by iguy 8y ago
Indeed it's an odd measure. But still, a factor 5? It can't be common for top-20% households to contain more than two full-time workers.
808.
by iguy 8y ago
The related mistake here is to jump from "not really useful for making judgements about individuals" to "not useful for making judgements about averages". Sometimes you are trying to predict about an individual. Sometime
809.
by iguy 8y ago
The simplest measures of past wealth do simply look at money. We know what unskilled building day-labor earner in Delhi in 1600, and converting this to calories of the staple diet gives a reasonable measure by which you can compare them to
810.
by iguy 8y ago
Sure, but "money, trade, and land ownership" were common in lots of places, long long before Europeans showed up. I mean we have Sumerian tax records!

More ›