I find Boltzmann’s Brain to be frighteningly plausible, so please help me; real interest federal debt costs; global chip investments; very briefly noted; just-what mixed federal-state felony crime...
The citation issue could be so easily solved by feeding the basic title or ISBN number into Scribbr, or similar citation builder, to get the citation. No guessing or crap citations generated.
MAMLMs are good at just responding, just as humans can make decent small talk without even thinking. But to do anything more complex requires different approaches, ones not suited to making word/phrase guesses based on inputs. MAMLMs are as useful as the drunk at the bar, or the village idiot.
Remember that humans can be made to believe in all sorts of nonsense, especially when propounded from authority. We once believed that agency existed in everything. Now the majority believe in invisible sky fairies that have omnipotence (that will grant your wishes if you beg enough)...
So why would we humans not believe MAMLMs are thinking, especially as while invisible and live in the clouds, they can at least have conversations with?
IIRC, the idea was that the UK could trade with faster growing countries...like China, rather than slower growing countries like teh EU (and teh USA) by going it alone. AFAIK, it was well understood that any trade deal with the US would be bad for the UK - unacceptable farm products and privatization of public assets like the NHS.
Yes, the Brits were sold a bill of goods based on the xenophobia to 'furriners', pushed by the hard right of the Tory party, Farage's UKIP, and indeed the raw deal that the poorer northern counties were getting from the economy with little help from the Tories. Remember Thatcher's government with Norman Tebbit telling unemployed people to "get on yer bike" to find work [down south]"?
It is a disgrace that PM Cameron caused this mess, subsequently made bucketloads of money in the private sector, was implicated in the Greensill bankruptcy scandal, became a Lord, and has returned as Foreign Secretary to help muck up the ME with his "experience and good judgement".
[Could the UK just make Trump a Lord and take him off our hands?]
So over the last 10,000 years, 40 bn lives were led under conditions worse than those of the preagricultural era. I wonder how some pre-ag thinker would have justified inventing agriculture so that eventually lives would improve?
I would argue that this QoL argument is BS. Hunter-gatherers led short, risky lives where death was common from starvation and murder. Ag societies offered more structure, and at least the possibility of growing old. It also freed up the ability to produce knowledge and artifacts that slowly improved the situation, even though the Malthusian situation was maintained. The premise that pre-ag lives were of higher quality is based on the idea of greater leasure compared to farming work. That isn't the only criterion for a better quality of life. There is the issue of body size that declined in the ag-ag, which indicates that ag did not improve individual nutrition, just increased the numbers of people. Even the modern era the improved nutrition only applies to wealthy countries, not the majority of the global population.
Boltzmann brain. Note that while the time required isn't infinite, it says nothing about how much time is required. It could be vastly longer than the age of the universe after it has in turn become dead. I find the argument that because it theoretically could happen to be spurious. magic could happen, but we don't entertain this, and many other extremely unlikely events. IOW, thinking that one could be a Boltzmann makes a mockery of rational thinking.
I watched the Boltzmann brain video but must be missing something. Assuming atoms assemble themselves into my brain in outer space over some infinite time period, how does my brain get oxygen? How do I see, hear, or interact with other brains? If I were really Boltzmann's brain wouldn't I be a deaf, dumb, blind kid like "Tommy"?
"I find Boltzmann’s Brain to be frighteningly plausible, so please help me"
Here is one of Sean Carroll's papers arguing that theories that predict Boltzmann Brains are "cognitively unstable":https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00850
"Some modern cosmological models predict the appearance of Boltzmann Brains: observers who randomly fluctuate out of a thermal bath rather than naturally evolving from a low-entropy Big Bang. A theory in which most observers are of the Boltzmann Brain type is generally thought to be unacceptable, although opinions differ. I argue that such theories are indeed unacceptable: the real problem is with fluctuations into observers who are locally identical to ordinary observers, and their existence cannot be swept under the rug by a choice of probability distributions over observers. The issue is not that the existence of such observers is ruled out by data, but that the theories that predict them are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed."
You should also be aware that Greene presents some *assumptions* (about ergodicity and finite recurrence times) as though they are *facts*. It is also a fact that most *professional physicists* do not accept BB arguments as "airtight". Here is Peter Woit (https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=836):
"Another funny thing about all this is that here I’m in the role of expressing not a controversial position, but the consensus view of the physics community. At his public talk at the opening of the IPMU earlier this year, David Gross referred to BB papers as “totally preposterous” and said that physicists work on this “to my regret”. In private one finds that most physicists consider this to be a really bad joke. One can get a wrong impression of this from the blogosphere, where anonymous commenters describe this work as “brilliant”, and the proprietor of one of the most prominent blogs is a big BB promoter. If you think this is widely taken seriously in physics departments, try asking around…"
No, it is not taken seriously in physics departments. The problem is that people have a hard time making an argument for why they should not take it seriously.
A hard time ... well. Personally, I don't think that "you are begging the question" is a difficult argument to make. None of the critical assumptions has ever been proven, and in fact the same people who assume that the cosmological constant really is constant when they want to talk about Boltzmann Brains will assume it isn't constant when they want to talk about something else. I could turn this around and say that they have a hard time explaining why the fact that we aren't really Boltzmann Brains doesn't prove that their assumptions about the end of the universe are wrong.
Slok: IFF the Fed bases it action on backyard-looking data exclusively instead of using data to model what present ad future actions should be. The question is not conditions today vs conditions 2 years ago, but will a 25 bp cut in the EFFR prevent PCE inflation to reach 2% (if it has not done so already).
Global warming in Phoenix. Yes, on should use the best climate/weather models to make decisions about public investments in heat-amelioration. These investments based on previously emitted CO2, are examples of costs that can be avoided in the future by low-cost measures to reduce future net emissions, namely taxation of said net emissions.
MAMLMs 2:
The citation issue could be so easily solved by feeding the basic title or ISBN number into Scribbr, or similar citation builder, to get the citation. No guessing or crap citations generated.
MAMLMs are good at just responding, just as humans can make decent small talk without even thinking. But to do anything more complex requires different approaches, ones not suited to making word/phrase guesses based on inputs. MAMLMs are as useful as the drunk at the bar, or the village idiot.
MAMLMs
Remember that humans can be made to believe in all sorts of nonsense, especially when propounded from authority. We once believed that agency existed in everything. Now the majority believe in invisible sky fairies that have omnipotence (that will grant your wishes if you beg enough)...
So why would we humans not believe MAMLMs are thinking, especially as while invisible and live in the clouds, they can at least have conversations with?
Brexit:
IIRC, the idea was that the UK could trade with faster growing countries...like China, rather than slower growing countries like teh EU (and teh USA) by going it alone. AFAIK, it was well understood that any trade deal with the US would be bad for the UK - unacceptable farm products and privatization of public assets like the NHS.
Yes, the Brits were sold a bill of goods based on the xenophobia to 'furriners', pushed by the hard right of the Tory party, Farage's UKIP, and indeed the raw deal that the poorer northern counties were getting from the economy with little help from the Tories. Remember Thatcher's government with Norman Tebbit telling unemployed people to "get on yer bike" to find work [down south]"?
It is a disgrace that PM Cameron caused this mess, subsequently made bucketloads of money in the private sector, was implicated in the Greensill bankruptcy scandal, became a Lord, and has returned as Foreign Secretary to help muck up the ME with his "experience and good judgement".
[Could the UK just make Trump a Lord and take him off our hands?]
Global Warming:
KSR's "The Ministry for the Future" has opening chapters about a mass death in an Indian heatwave.
And so it starts IRL...?
Yes...
Quality of Life.
So over the last 10,000 years, 40 bn lives were led under conditions worse than those of the preagricultural era. I wonder how some pre-ag thinker would have justified inventing agriculture so that eventually lives would improve?
I would argue that this QoL argument is BS. Hunter-gatherers led short, risky lives where death was common from starvation and murder. Ag societies offered more structure, and at least the possibility of growing old. It also freed up the ability to produce knowledge and artifacts that slowly improved the situation, even though the Malthusian situation was maintained. The premise that pre-ag lives were of higher quality is based on the idea of greater leasure compared to farming work. That isn't the only criterion for a better quality of life. There is the issue of body size that declined in the ag-ag, which indicates that ag did not improve individual nutrition, just increased the numbers of people. Even the modern era the improved nutrition only applies to wealthy countries, not the majority of the global population.
Boltzmann brain. Note that while the time required isn't infinite, it says nothing about how much time is required. It could be vastly longer than the age of the universe after it has in turn become dead. I find the argument that because it theoretically could happen to be spurious. magic could happen, but we don't entertain this, and many other extremely unlikely events. IOW, thinking that one could be a Boltzmann makes a mockery of rational thinking.
Didn't Michael Shermer write a book: "Why people believe weird things"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T_jwq9ph8k
I watched the Boltzmann brain video but must be missing something. Assuming atoms assemble themselves into my brain in outer space over some infinite time period, how does my brain get oxygen? How do I see, hear, or interact with other brains? If I were really Boltzmann's brain wouldn't I be a deaf, dumb, blind kid like "Tommy"?
"I find Boltzmann’s Brain to be frighteningly plausible, so please help me"
Here is one of Sean Carroll's papers arguing that theories that predict Boltzmann Brains are "cognitively unstable":https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00850
"Some modern cosmological models predict the appearance of Boltzmann Brains: observers who randomly fluctuate out of a thermal bath rather than naturally evolving from a low-entropy Big Bang. A theory in which most observers are of the Boltzmann Brain type is generally thought to be unacceptable, although opinions differ. I argue that such theories are indeed unacceptable: the real problem is with fluctuations into observers who are locally identical to ordinary observers, and their existence cannot be swept under the rug by a choice of probability distributions over observers. The issue is not that the existence of such observers is ruled out by data, but that the theories that predict them are cognitively unstable: they cannot simultaneously be true and justifiably believed."
You should also be aware that Greene presents some *assumptions* (about ergodicity and finite recurrence times) as though they are *facts*. It is also a fact that most *professional physicists* do not accept BB arguments as "airtight". Here is Peter Woit (https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=836):
"Another funny thing about all this is that here I’m in the role of expressing not a controversial position, but the consensus view of the physics community. At his public talk at the opening of the IPMU earlier this year, David Gross referred to BB papers as “totally preposterous” and said that physicists work on this “to my regret”. In private one finds that most physicists consider this to be a really bad joke. One can get a wrong impression of this from the blogosphere, where anonymous commenters describe this work as “brilliant”, and the proprietor of one of the most prominent blogs is a big BB promoter. If you think this is widely taken seriously in physics departments, try asking around…"
No, it is not taken seriously in physics departments. The problem is that people have a hard time making an argument for why they should not take it seriously.
A hard time ... well. Personally, I don't think that "you are begging the question" is a difficult argument to make. None of the critical assumptions has ever been proven, and in fact the same people who assume that the cosmological constant really is constant when they want to talk about Boltzmann Brains will assume it isn't constant when they want to talk about something else. I could turn this around and say that they have a hard time explaining why the fact that we aren't really Boltzmann Brains doesn't prove that their assumptions about the end of the universe are wrong.
"If not ...." I am not a ware of even a teeny weeny bit of "friend-shoring." It would be a good idea.
Slok: IFF the Fed bases it action on backyard-looking data exclusively instead of using data to model what present ad future actions should be. The question is not conditions today vs conditions 2 years ago, but will a 25 bp cut in the EFFR prevent PCE inflation to reach 2% (if it has not done so already).
Global warming in Phoenix. Yes, on should use the best climate/weather models to make decisions about public investments in heat-amelioration. These investments based on previously emitted CO2, are examples of costs that can be avoided in the future by low-cost measures to reduce future net emissions, namely taxation of said net emissions.
Why is the "real interest debt cost" a thing? It is neither an outcome (income per capita, life expectancy, inflation) or a policy variable.