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patrickcollison.com

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Re: Questions

#341

Post by pesmhey »

mhjas wrote: post #96
chucky wrote: post #35

> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm? Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more…

I think it can be hard for people to appreciate the differences because the truly different things are those one takes for granted. To not make this too long I will go directly to what I think has made the difference: A relatively egalitarian society with a lot of trust between people and towards the government has made progress relatively effortless. When people don't feel the need to guard their own position becaus…

When people don't feel the need to guard their own position because they might end up getting screwed...

I’m not sure this is too applicable to SV, lol, nor academic life in the US.

Re: Questions

#342

Post by tzs »

JauntTrooper wrote: post #233
qaq wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will sound horrible but is it rational? E.g. say you are building a huge hospital and due to the above it will take 4 years longer at 2x the cost so basically you could loose X lives due to hospital not being there and due to increased cost of care.

Yes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0. Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there ar…

> For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there are others with none?

There was a pretty good short story, "Dibs" by Brian Plante, about that published in the April 2004 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

Everyone was required to be registered in the transplant matching system. Occasionally you'd receive a letter telling you that someone was going to die soon unless they got one of your organs. That person now had dibs on that organ, and if anything happened to you before they died they got it.

Usually you would get another letter a couple weeks or so later telling you that the person no longer had dibs, which generally meant that they had died.

Sometimes, though, you'd get a second dibs letter while you already had one organ under dibs.

And sometimes you'd get a dibs letter when you already had two organs under dibs...meaning if you died now it would save three lives. At that point you were required to report in and your organs were taken to save those three other lives.

The story concerned someone who worked for the transplant matching agency who got a second dibs letter and was quite worried. He illegally used his insider access to find out who the people were who had dibs on him, and started digging around to try to convince himself they were terrible people who didn't deserve to survive to justify illegally interfering, if I recall correctly (I only read the story once, when it was in the current issue).

I don't remember what happened after that. I just remember thinking that it was an interesting story and explored some interesting issues.

Re: Questions

#344

Post by meko »

twblalock wrote: post #321
trimbo wrote: post #191

> The Empire State Building was built in 410 days At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24. They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unaccept…

There are plenty of places, such as western European countries and Japan, that have strong safety regulations and still manage to complete large-scale infrastructure projects quickly. Another way to look at this is to ask why the United States seems incapable of even maintaining existing projects. For example, look at the current state of the New York City subway. I suspect slowness in building new infrastructure, an…

Most american voters have a phobia of government.

Re: Questions

#345

Post by tzs »

____a wrote: post #331
tzs wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Death rates are probably better than absolute number of deaths for comparison. Here are death rates per 1000 workers of some well known construction projects: 80 Transcontinental Railroad 80 Suez Canal 50 Brooklyn Bridge 17.46 World Trade Center 6.4 Sydney Harbor Bridge 4.47 Hoover Dam 3.37 San Francisco Bay Bridge 3.33 Eiffel Tower 2.67 Titanic 2.5 Sears Tower 1.47 Empire State Building 1.17 Trans-Alaska Pipeline Sy…

Are you on mobile? Or something else might be breaking formatting for you. The chart linked does have numbers for the Panama Canal (408.12) and Burma-Siam Railway (385.45).

No, I'm on Firefox 63.0b9 on MacOS.

Looks like I zoomed in (cmd-+) a few times to make the numbers more readable, and went past what the page's CSS could handle.

Re: Questions

#346

Post by carapace »

Some of these are easy.

> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?

Observer bias. Mean construction time is decreasing at an exponential rate. In the limit: nano-tech, with construction times approaching physical limits.

> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

Introduce a replicator into a nearly-pristine environment and that's the growth curve.

> How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?

Apoptosis

> Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?

Yes. Nothing. There is no working mass education system and no basis for thinking there ever could be.

> What's the right way to understand and model personality?

Neuro-linguistic Programming.

(The "Five Factor" model is no better than Astrology. NLP is based on hard science. It's one of the very few schools of psychology that has repeatable algorithms.)

> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how? Why are programming environments still so primitive?

People ignore Prolog and Dr. Margaret Hamilton's work. (She's the person who coined the term "software engineering".) The combination of Prolog and Hamilton's HOS provides an end-user-programmable error-free programming environment.

Re: Questions

#347

Post by yread »

twblalock wrote: post #321
trimbo wrote: post #191

> The Empire State Building was built in 410 days At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24. They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unaccept…

There are plenty of places, such as western European countries and Japan, that have strong safety regulations and still manage to complete large-scale infrastructure projects quickly. Another way to look at this is to ask why the United States seems incapable of even maintaining existing projects. For example, look at the current state of the New York City subway. I suspect slowness in building new infrastructure, an…

lookup Berlin BER airport for a European project that's a complete disaster

Re: Questions

#348

Post by pbhjpbhj »

mrob wrote: post #105
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bible and the Koran would easily be on the world's best seller lists if they weren't excluded by default. You might argue - and I would agree - that this is not necessarily a good thing as far as content goes. But the point is that putting something into writing snd giving it a tangible form on paper gives it an inherent stability and authority missing from digital media. We tend of think of digital media as temp…

>If the file format becomes obsolete, it's gone. (This has actually happened to many video and audio formats.) Any examples of video or audio files that are currently impossible to watch/listen to because knowledge of the file format, and all software capable of playing it was lost? If such a thing has happened, there are probably people interested in reverse engineering the format.

I can pick up some writing on physical media -- an Akkadian clay tablet -- and read it (if I have the knowledge) despite it being thousands of years old.

Things like laserdiscs, I can probably still buy equipment to read, but it's substantially different as I need the technology to read it.

Microfiche is quite good in this respect, you can easily read it even without the specific tech it was made for (using a magnifier, or projecting the image with a simple light source.

I wonder if you could make a crystal where, like a hologram, you can rotate the crystal a minute amount in order to project a different page (an idea I saw decades ago had a digital clock style projection from a crystal, used asa sundial -- pretty sure it was theoretical).

That way the information is relatively easy to discover, and with a simple light source you can get info out if it.

Re: Questions

#349

Post by jnbiche »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #329
jim777 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about nationality: Ashkenazi Jews in general -- Israeli or not -- tend to be smarter. ~20% of Nobel prize winners are Jews compared to less than 1% of the global population. So either there's a Jewish conspiracy (which some people believe...) or Jews tend to be smarter. Some people would say that this is cultural. I doubt it -- I think it's genetic. Intelligence is a physical attribute determined by genes, j…

> It's really no different from the observation that Kenyans and Ethiopians win most marathons. But don't most Kenyan and Ethiopian marathon winners also grow up in Kenya or Ethiopia? I.e. how do we discount at very least environmental factors (including, for instance, diet), even if you doubt cultural ones?

> But don't most Kenyan and Ethiopian marathon winners also grow up in Kenya or Ethiopia?

No. There is a hugely disproportionate number of Americans and British of Somali, Kenyan, and Ethiopian origin who excel in world class distance running (Adbirahman, Farah, and many more, including a big new wave of Somali American after).

Re: Questions

#350

Post by rubyfan »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #281
jalfresi wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I think this is a cowardly and inaccurate belief" Throughout history you find the people who believe this are not the ones who's safety is sacrificed in pursuit of some grand project...

You’re assuming a lot. I’m assuming your OP thinks “better safe than sorry” is stupid because it doesn’t actually help you make decisions. I would much rather drive on a bridge of someone whose motto is “do it right.” This isn’t the Apollo program. We know how to make safe bridges. It’s not a matter of being cautious and talking to every stakeholder. It’s a matter of hiring actual engineers,* letting them work, belie…

“Do it right” is what we want, “better safe than sorry” is what we usually get. “Better safe than sorry” in practice usually ends up looking like a tool for acquiring broad agreement with stakeholders and spreading accountability. I have seen many “better safe than sorry” initiatives that result in complete garbage that loses the purpose, spirit and original intent of its mission.
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