there's nothing the Arrogant Loser wants more than the promise of a magical path to excellence which he can use to finally prove that he is as great as he imagines. selling such a thing is extremely simple.
wow, the first post by someone who knows what they're talking about. in contrast, i know almost nothing about chess, but something about statistics.
everyone should read the article. matching ivanov's moves to a computer's moves is only one test. the author of the article also has an algorithmic chess rating methodology he calls "intrinsic rating" which intends to estimate quality of play along the FIDE scale. it is, of course, flawed as any algorithm for this would be, but most importantly it is a fixed algorithm. he also has access to twenty years of games which he has evaluated for intrinsic rating. with reference to this historical dataset, he has estimated the odds of exhibiting such improvement as ivanov's at around 1,000,000:1. it doesn't matter, in principle, if his algorithm is "really" estimating quality (he admits that it doesn't, exactly); the point is, he has two tests which he developed before ivanov's match, and they each say that ivanov was an extreme outlier. i wish that he would be clearer on this point and give the actual numbers, but he seems to know what he's doing.
the author of the article admits the difficulties of this problem and the limitations of his approach, but he does make a fairly good case that something is going on.
okay... that article is worthless, but googling around it seems that `neocheating' is just regular cheating with some NLP-type confidence nonsense thrown in. nice racket, i'm sure there are self-proclaimed experts giving seminars on this crap. could you give me one example of neocheating which is materially distinct from regular cheating?
the actual formulation is more like, "if the actual probability of observing a bigfoot is p>0, what is the probability of not having observed one after all this time?", and the answer is "pretty much zero" unless p is so small that the number of extant bigfeet would be below the threshold of population viability anyway.
i do eat, and have been eating, mostly whole grain foods, apart from pasta of which i find the whole-grain version disgusting. apart from that, sure, brown rice, wheat groats, bread, tortillas, and so on.
the white flour versions are still much more desirable to my subconscious. they don't taste as interesting, but yeah, they're more tempting the way a candy bar or ice cream is. you either call that tasting good, or you make up some hooie about how the body is ``addicted" to sugar and simple carbs. i say it tastes good.
as i've explained before, i don't capitalize in my forum posts (apart from proper names of others out of respect) because forum discussions are more akin to speech, where capitalization is meaningless. i assure you, my published papers conform to the standard rules of written english.
if past trends are any indication, haters aplenty will emerge to flame me for this reply. i can't wait; i need a laugh.
that's true, but right along with "self-reported merit" there is also "self-reported entrepreneurship."
or, how many entrepreneurs actually get so far as to have a few working projects? i would suspect very few; the bulk of the field is people getting lucky (or not) throwing shit at the wall to see if it sticks.
on the other hand, despite the usual narrative, i don't know how much risk there actually is. i suspect we're getting to the point where being a "risk-taker" is just as much of a prepackaged illusion as everything else we've commodified. since bailouts increase in magnitude and frequency as you climb the so-called "risk-taker" ladder, it does ring a bit false. there is something separating the capitalists from their slaves, but i think it's neither merit nor risk-tolerance, at least for any sane definition of risk. it's probably more just a willingness to play along and conform with the right social class, which is actually a lot harder than most people realize or want to admit.
i've known, by now, quite a few people who've transitioned from academic or programmer or whatever, to capitalist (or, more accurately, bourgeoisie). they didn't start taking risks, they just learned which risks to take and a certain attitude to adopt. they could have spent their whole life taking the other kind of risks for not much more than a comfortable life.
so you aren't at the mercy of vulture capitalists.
if the entrepreneurs learned programming, maybe they'd realize what many programmers already do: that most of these "entrepreneurial" ideas are really stupid and obvious, and that a lot of the game is just convincing people dumber than you that you're a genius and the idea you came up with on the john a few days ago is going to replace google and facebook and blah blah blah.
looking at the converse question is rather illuminating: why aren't more programmers entrepreneurs? a meritocratic mindset is very inefficient if what you want is to make money in a society which does not directly appreciate merit.
a lot of the challenge of entrepreneurship is realizing that the market really does want fairly obvious, warmed-over ideas packaged extremely fucking well*. pursuing technical training can serve to, paradoxically, blind one to this.
*: of course a truly novel insight packaged extremely fucking well is necessary to be a great success, it's hardly necessary if all you want is, say, to have a decent chance at bagging a few $million.
your reasoning is incomplete. the effect of the price increase is relative to the operating cost of the field. even though industry is hit harder, their operating margins may be different. i think the technical term for this is "elasticity."
i don't see how they are turning this into an economic issue. the article certainly doesn't justify that statement. sounds to me like you're a hysterical libertarian who equates someone saying "this situation X is kind of crappy" with "zomg, they're asking the nanny state to interfere with the market." it's a pretty common phenomenon.
fair enough. but it's still better doctors for the wealthier residents. the end result is the same, basic care (such as poor people need) ends up subsidizing the rich stuff.
this has been today's installment of Homeless Crack Addict Etymology! we do hope you've enjoyed watching. tune in tomorrow for more rambling speculation.
the icky-factor is it, both aesthetically and practically. barium is excreted in the feces, not urine. so, you have the choice of doing it at the hospital, which will be inefficient (no economy of scale, and unspecialized labor), or you could do it in central locations, which would require the transport and processing of huge shipments of collected human fecal matter, the difficulties of which should be obvious. it's doable of course, but rather unlikely.
as a side note: several years ago when i went to the hospital at my college town, i noticed the vaulted ceilings and friezes put there to cater to the wealthier residents, and i recalled them quite vividly when i got my bill. i'd rather have modest (but sterile) facilities and pay less, but image is everything i suppose. the point is, not only is there "icky-factor," there's the implicit standard of living which we "must" maintain. asking patients to shit into a jar and bring it back to the hospital would just be unimaginable. for better or worse, quite a few people would literally rather die than shit into a jar for two days.
yeah, we might actually get something tangible for our money if we did that, and how would the bankers feel?
hey, actually, let's just knock off a tenth of a basis point on the interest if Europe just gives us their old signs. it's not like we'll see any of it anyway.
in roughly order of decreasing likelihood: allergens; accidentally introducing resistances which make an invasive species; some kind of unexpected vulnerability which causes massive crop failure later on?
it's perfectly obvious (after a few minutes' pondering of course) to anyone who has taken a decent stat mech course. and if you haven't, it's perfectly obvious after giving it an hour's pondering. seriously, the wikipedia page is very good.
but, only since i can't help myself, i'll try and break the wikipedia page down even further. in short, temperature is the inverse of the rate at which entropy increases as kinetic energy is added to a system of particles. the hotter a classical system gets, the less effect further heat has on it, thus the temperature goes up as it is heated.
however if you have a quantum system with a limited number of states, you get to a point where adding more energy puts the system back into order. since adding energy is decreasing the entropy, it only makes sense to call that negative temperature.
the "noninteracting two-level particles" example in the wiki is very informative although completely unnatural. basically consider that you have N switches which all start in the off (low energy) position. as you add energy to the system, the switches start randomly moving to the high energy (on) position. roughly speaking, the entropy is maximized when N/2 of the switches are on and N/2 are off (intuitively, in this state it is hardest to predict, for any individual switch, whether it is on or off without observing it). since this is a local (actually global) maximum of entropy, the rate of increase of entropy here is 0, so the temperature (by above definition) is 1/0=infinite.
however you can keep pushing energy into the system; now the remaining off switches will be moving to be on (high energy), so the system becomes more predictable. thus the entropy is decreasing, which means negative temperature; since the entropy is symmetric about the N/2 state, the temperature becomes minus infinity. eventually, you'll have all the switches on, which is just as predictable as all switches off, just from the other direction. hence, temperature is "minus zero" at this point (further heat will do nothing, since every switch is already as far as it will go), and you interpolate in between just like you did while turning the switches on.
note, this depends on the particles having a finite number of states, i.e. quantum. if a particle has a continuum of energies (as classical vibrating particles do), then you can't do this (or at least you can't do it just by heating).
so, feel free to come up with a proper name for this which is analogous to commonly accepted definitions of temperature.
anyway, the method in the article is basically setting up a potential field using optical tweezers and magnetic fields, so that the atoms themselves will push each other into the higher energy states and thus maintain a negative temperature system. i wish i understood it better myself.
that's assuming that someone who is "unsafe/unstable" is 100% likely to kill or injure in a given year, which is silly. you don't include injury, but adding it only brings things to ~0.1%. of course it's worth noting that suicide makes up about half of the deaths.
the real problem is that you're looking at the probability P[gun owner]*P[unstable||gun owner]*P[attack||unstable gun owner]; you can't estimate the middle term with just one type of statistics. you'd need some kind of sample of gun owners taking psych treatment or such; or information on whether the murder was in defense; etc.
the OP has a shrill, not very good argument; it doesn't deserve quantitative analysis (which would be pretty difficult to do right).
i am really suspicious of whether guns are a net benefit in terms of self-defense, and i give not a shit about hunting. for me, ideally, guns would all be locked in magical safes that only opened when "the tree of liberty needs to be watered," but since such a thing doesn't exist, i'm a somewhat reluctant advocate of gun rights.
Slashdot Mirror
there's nothing the Arrogant Loser wants more than the promise of a magical path to excellence which he can use to finally prove that he is as great as he imagines. selling such a thing is extremely simple.
okay, you're either a troll or an irredeemable crank. have a nice day.
wow, the first post by someone who knows what they're talking about. in contrast, i know almost nothing about chess, but something about statistics.
everyone should read the article. matching ivanov's moves to a computer's moves is only one test. the author of the article also has an algorithmic chess rating methodology he calls "intrinsic rating" which intends to estimate quality of play along the FIDE scale. it is, of course, flawed as any algorithm for this would be, but most importantly it is a fixed algorithm. he also has access to twenty years of games which he has evaluated for intrinsic rating. with reference to this historical dataset, he has estimated the odds of exhibiting such improvement as ivanov's at around 1,000,000:1. it doesn't matter, in principle, if his algorithm is "really" estimating quality (he admits that it doesn't, exactly); the point is, he has two tests which he developed before ivanov's match, and they each say that ivanov was an extreme outlier. i wish that he would be clearer on this point and give the actual numbers, but he seems to know what he's doing.
the author of the article admits the difficulties of this problem and the limitations of his approach, but he does make a fairly good case that something is going on.
okay... that article is worthless, but googling around it seems that `neocheating' is just regular cheating with some NLP-type confidence nonsense thrown in. nice racket, i'm sure there are self-proclaimed experts giving seminars on this crap. could you give me one example of neocheating which is materially distinct from regular cheating?
uh... is it jesus?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_distribution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
the actual formulation is more like, "if the actual probability of observing a bigfoot is p>0, what is the probability of not having observed one after all this time?", and the answer is "pretty much zero" unless p is so small that the number of extant bigfeet would be below the threshold of population viability anyway.
i do eat, and have been eating, mostly whole grain foods, apart from pasta of which i find the whole-grain version disgusting. apart from that, sure, brown rice, wheat groats, bread, tortillas, and so on.
the white flour versions are still much more desirable to my subconscious. they don't taste as interesting, but yeah, they're more tempting the way a candy bar or ice cream is. you either call that tasting good, or you make up some hooie about how the body is ``addicted" to sugar and simple carbs. i say it tastes good.
it's very easy for something to taste worse than bland, and obviously i was referring to recipes using white flour, not eating it straight.
and in any case, the amylase on the tongue will make white flour taste sweet if nothing else.
no.
it amuses me that that bothers you so much.
as i've explained before, i don't capitalize in my forum posts (apart from proper names of others out of respect) because forum discussions are more akin to speech, where capitalization is meaningless. i assure you, my published papers conform to the standard rules of written english.
if past trends are any indication, haters aplenty will emerge to flame me for this reply. i can't wait; i need a laugh.
i'm almost convinced that eating whole grains works for weight loss simply because it doesn't taste as good as white flour.
the fiber has other benefits, of course.
smoking?
that's true, but right along with "self-reported merit" there is also "self-reported entrepreneurship."
or, how many entrepreneurs actually get so far as to have a few working projects? i would suspect very few; the bulk of the field is people getting lucky (or not) throwing shit at the wall to see if it sticks.
yeah, you're right, it's not really meritocratic.
on the other hand, despite the usual narrative, i don't know how much risk there actually is. i suspect we're getting to the point where being a "risk-taker" is just as much of a prepackaged illusion as everything else we've commodified. since bailouts increase in magnitude and frequency as you climb the so-called "risk-taker" ladder, it does ring a bit false. there is something separating the capitalists from their slaves, but i think it's neither merit nor risk-tolerance, at least for any sane definition of risk. it's probably more just a willingness to play along and conform with the right social class, which is actually a lot harder than most people realize or want to admit.
i've known, by now, quite a few people who've transitioned from academic or programmer or whatever, to capitalist (or, more accurately, bourgeoisie). they didn't start taking risks, they just learned which risks to take and a certain attitude to adopt. they could have spent their whole life taking the other kind of risks for not much more than a comfortable life.
so you aren't at the mercy of vulture capitalists.
if the entrepreneurs learned programming, maybe they'd realize what many programmers already do: that most of these "entrepreneurial" ideas are really stupid and obvious, and that a lot of the game is just convincing people dumber than you that you're a genius and the idea you came up with on the john a few days ago is going to replace google and facebook and blah blah blah.
looking at the converse question is rather illuminating: why aren't more programmers entrepreneurs? a meritocratic mindset is very inefficient if what you want is to make money in a society which does not directly appreciate merit.
a lot of the challenge of entrepreneurship is realizing that the market really does want fairly obvious, warmed-over ideas packaged extremely fucking well*. pursuing technical training can serve to, paradoxically, blind one to this.
*: of course a truly novel insight packaged extremely fucking well is necessary to be a great success, it's hardly necessary if all you want is, say, to have a decent chance at bagging a few $million.
your reasoning is incomplete. the effect of the price increase is relative to the operating cost of the field. even though industry is hit harder, their operating margins may be different. i think the technical term for this is "elasticity."
i don't see how they are turning this into an economic issue. the article certainly doesn't justify that statement. sounds to me like you're a hysterical libertarian who equates someone saying "this situation X is kind of crappy" with "zomg, they're asking the nanny state to interfere with the market." it's a pretty common phenomenon.
fair enough. but it's still better doctors for the wealthier residents. the end result is the same, basic care (such as poor people need) ends up subsidizing the rich stuff.
this has been today's installment of Homeless Crack Addict Etymology! we do hope you've enjoyed watching. tune in tomorrow for more rambling speculation.
the icky-factor is it, both aesthetically and practically. barium is excreted in the feces, not urine. so, you have the choice of doing it at the hospital, which will be inefficient (no economy of scale, and unspecialized labor), or you could do it in central locations, which would require the transport and processing of huge shipments of collected human fecal matter, the difficulties of which should be obvious. it's doable of course, but rather unlikely.
as a side note: several years ago when i went to the hospital at my college town, i noticed the vaulted ceilings and friezes put there to cater to the wealthier residents, and i recalled them quite vividly when i got my bill. i'd rather have modest (but sterile) facilities and pay less, but image is everything i suppose. the point is, not only is there "icky-factor," there's the implicit standard of living which we "must" maintain. asking patients to shit into a jar and bring it back to the hospital would just be unimaginable. for better or worse, quite a few people would literally rather die than shit into a jar for two days.
sure, so... why isn't anyone doing it?
yeah, we might actually get something tangible for our money if we did that, and how would the bankers feel?
hey, actually, let's just knock off a tenth of a basis point on the interest if Europe just gives us their old signs. it's not like we'll see any of it anyway.
in roughly order of decreasing likelihood: allergens; accidentally introducing resistances which make an invasive species; some kind of unexpected vulnerability which causes massive crop failure later on?
it's perfectly obvious (after a few minutes' pondering of course) to anyone who has taken a decent stat mech course. and if you haven't, it's perfectly obvious after giving it an hour's pondering. seriously, the wikipedia page is very good.
but, only since i can't help myself, i'll try and break the wikipedia page down even further. in short, temperature is the inverse of the rate at which entropy increases as kinetic energy is added to a system of particles. the hotter a classical system gets, the less effect further heat has on it, thus the temperature goes up as it is heated.
however if you have a quantum system with a limited number of states, you get to a point where adding more energy puts the system back into order. since adding energy is decreasing the entropy, it only makes sense to call that negative temperature.
the "noninteracting two-level particles" example in the wiki is very informative although completely unnatural. basically consider that you have N switches which all start in the off (low energy) position. as you add energy to the system, the switches start randomly moving to the high energy (on) position. roughly speaking, the entropy is maximized when N/2 of the switches are on and N/2 are off (intuitively, in this state it is hardest to predict, for any individual switch, whether it is on or off without observing it). since this is a local (actually global) maximum of entropy, the rate of increase of entropy here is 0, so the temperature (by above definition) is 1/0=infinite.
however you can keep pushing energy into the system; now the remaining off switches will be moving to be on (high energy), so the system becomes more predictable. thus the entropy is decreasing, which means negative temperature; since the entropy is symmetric about the N/2 state, the temperature becomes minus infinity. eventually, you'll have all the switches on, which is just as predictable as all switches off, just from the other direction. hence, temperature is "minus zero" at this point (further heat will do nothing, since every switch is already as far as it will go), and you interpolate in between just like you did while turning the switches on.
note, this depends on the particles having a finite number of states, i.e. quantum. if a particle has a continuum of energies (as classical vibrating particles do), then you can't do this (or at least you can't do it just by heating).
so, feel free to come up with a proper name for this which is analogous to commonly accepted definitions of temperature.
anyway, the method in the article is basically setting up a potential field using optical tweezers and magnetic fields, so that the atoms themselves will push each other into the higher energy states and thus maintain a negative temperature system. i wish i understood it better myself.
Selectively portraying only (R) ...
shut the fuck up.
heh, had to google that. haven't read much van vogt if any. maybe i should; thanks.
that's assuming that someone who is "unsafe/unstable" is 100% likely to kill or injure in a given year, which is silly. you don't include injury, but adding it only brings things to ~0.1%. of course it's worth noting that suicide makes up about half of the deaths.
the real problem is that you're looking at the probability P[gun owner]*P[unstable||gun owner]*P[attack||unstable gun owner]; you can't estimate the middle term with just one type of statistics. you'd need some kind of sample of gun owners taking psych treatment or such; or information on whether the murder was in defense; etc.
the OP has a shrill, not very good argument; it doesn't deserve quantitative analysis (which would be pretty difficult to do right).
i am really suspicious of whether guns are a net benefit in terms of self-defense, and i give not a shit about hunting. for me, ideally, guns would all be locked in magical safes that only opened when "the tree of liberty needs to be watered," but since such a thing doesn't exist, i'm a somewhat reluctant advocate of gun rights.