From predictions that would differentiate between competing models.

I’d say it’s equally important to figure out what to observe—to arrange experiments that reveal information you don’t yet know, instead of just confirming what you do.

Wake up.

Is your Kindle e-ink?

The general issue with e-ink-based readers and scrolling is that e-ink is designed to be mostly static, with sporadic (preferably partial-page) refreshes; but scrolling needs to have a very high refresh rate that updates the whole page simultaneously if it’s going to be usable.

So instead of a simulation, maybe we’re living inside of some other type of thing we’re hard-wired to be unable to even think of—and maybe “simulation” is the idea we’re hard-wired to replace it with.

Seems like they could have avoided this by having the Sandy Hook families join the bid with an arbitrarily high dollar amount—which they’d immediately get back as creditors.

Obligatory Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

My understanding of quantum algorithms is that they set up parallel computations in such a way that incorrect solutions cancel out and correct ones reinforce each other. They indicate the existence of multiple universes to the same extent that the double slit experiment does.

There are lots of kinds of “leftisms” with lots of different attitudes toward landlords—but to take Georgism as a concrete example that exclusively focuses on land ownership:

Georgists would say that the portion of the rent equal to the market rent of the unimproved lot—including the value generated by the presence of the surrounding community and infrastructure—should go back to the community rather than the landlord, but the portion of the rent contributed solely by the presence of buildings and other improvements should go to the owner of the improvements.

So if I have a net loss for the year, I’ll get paid to commit crimes?

To paraphrase Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: the better you know a property, the more ignorant you must be of its conjugate property.

I heard he was wearing a white and gold blue and black coat.

There are three distinct concepts I think you’re confusing:

• The idea of biological races. Yeah, any given culture’s definition of “race” is historically contingent and biologically incoherent. I think you get that and are assuming that’s all there is to it.

• Race as a correlative of ethnicity. There are some ethnicities whose members tend to have darker skin colors or other physical traits, and people conflate skin color and ethnicity. Ethnicity (as a set of cultural institutions) is meaningful to many people, and some of them interpret a disregard for “race” as a disregard for their ethnicity, or as an attempt to suppress ethnic identity.

• Race as a social construct. When the above ideas permeate a society, people with different skin colors experience systemically different treatment—even in the absence of actual biological or ethnic distinctions. So people with similar skin colors can be grouped on the basis of those shared experiences, and the different behaviors resulting from those experiences feed back into society’s conceptions of biological race and ethnicity. And it doesn’t suffice to counteract such social constructs by ignoring them—social behavior is taken for granted unless people make a conscious effort to reevaluate it.

I have no idea how protection for endangered colony insects works, but it might make the most sense to just protect the hive and queen instead of every individual colony member.

The existence of these laws implies the existence of an institution to dictate and enforce them.

The place where these kinds of things fall apart, IMO, ultimately comes not from issues concerning the interactions of individual people, but from issues concerning the interactions of people with institutions.

Schrödinger’s downvote.

One thing to bear in mind is that, whenever someone accustomed to one platform explores another, they’ll tend to ascribe any differences between the communities to the other platform being an echo chamber of some kind.

He didn’t need a name that declared he made meth, he needed a name that distinguished him from other meth makers.

Seems like an effective strategy—someone write that down!

Presumably there was something in the training data that caused this pattern. The difficulty is in predicting beforehand what the exact effect of changes to the training data will be.