41–50 of 111 posts
> Goal: Distribution of labor and resources based upon the needs of society > Proxy: Capitalism > Strong version of Goodhart's law leads to: Massive wealth disparities (with incomes ranging from hundreds of dollars per year to hundreds of dollars per second), with more than a billion people living in poverty Nothing as annoying as online communists inserting their horrible political opinions everywhere. Try moving to…
Great article. I have two comments: 1. Procrastination seems to be a type of early stopping. I knew I had a good strategy in school! 2. Something that seems to be sorely missing in machine learning (I'm not a ML expert) are error bars. If you take the example of the figure at the end, as you increase the number of parameters in the model, your error bars become larger (at least in the overfitting regime), and they ar…
> as you increase the number of parameters in the model, your error bars become larger In large neural nets the effect is reversed. The larger the model, the better it generalises, even from the same training data.
Do you have some references for this claim? For me, it seems counterintuitive.
Contrived example, human need food to survive. We need food, efficiently, since there are so many of us. So we need efficient farming. Efficient means smallest amount of land to produce most biomass (plant, animal). To that, we need single purpose farmland and artificial feeds, fertilizer and pesticide. To have single purpose farmland, we purge the land from all life form, aka killing all plants and animals. To have artificial stuff, we need energy. To have energy, we expense fossil energy. To have fossil energy, we, the earth, started capturing sun energy millions of years ago.
Meanwhile, some farmer right now is roaming their cow and chickens on a "unindustrialized" land. The cow graze on the pasture, the chicken eat the bugs, their droppings feed the grass, the stomping excites the earthworm, the earthworms aerates the land, the grass captures the sunlight, the sunlight feed everyone, in a perfect balance. 0 GDP generated.
I think it is mentioned in the Omnivore Dilemma [1] that, to produce 1 unit energy in food, we are using 14 unit of fossil fuel energy and 3% of workforce. Before the industrial age (200ish year ago), the ratio is 1 unit of energy to 2 unit of sun energy and 90% of workforce.
Efficiency? Check. Quality of life? Check. All numbers show that we are improving
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3109.The_Omnivore_s_Dile...
Perhaps there are flaws to these specific ideas, but the thing that struck me most was that we have almost no way of implementing ideas like this in Anglo political countries right now.
Entrenched interests, and the technical detail involved makes it hard to imagine these ever happening. Nobody is ever going to raise a rabble based on making the stock market slower in this nerdy way.
It feels like these are the sort of technocratic solutions which could only come about in societies with high trust in institutions and a sense of ‘the common good’… ie maybe parts of Northern Europe but almost nowhere else.
Rebuilding that sort of trust and shared values is the biggest challenge… just wish I had better ideas for how to achieve it!
The canonical example I have heard is hospital emergency rooms that started to be measured by wait times, so they refused to admit patients until staff was ready to receive them, literally having ambulances circling around the block. This was supposed to be a "good measure turned into bad target" situation, but of course it makes no sense. What really changed was the locus of evaluation from the patient that evaluates his end-to-end emergency care experience on many criteria, including, but not limited to, emergency room wait times, to a bureaucrat who just evaluates the hospital myopically on 1 metric.
It is always the myopia of singling out this measure/target that is bad, throwing off all other tradeoffs and considerations, not the actual desire to improve the measure/target.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like i have to repeat this very often: if a single traffic jam or other predictable common-cause variation results in your JIT implementation costing "far in excess of inventory savings" all you're telling me is that you have a really shitty JIT implementation. JIT means having the buffer on hand to handle at the very least common-cause variation. But it also should come with the flexibility to handle variatio…
You've now redefined JIT to mean "buffered with the minimum viable buffer" where minimum viable buffer is "whereever I drop the goalposts when defining common-cause variation. It's the definitional version of working out a variable in an equation, making a mistake, and ending up looking at 0=0. Happens all the time.
I recommend reading "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter [0]. Complex societies tend to address problems by adding more and more rules and regulations, simply because they have always done so and it has been successful in the past. More importantly, though, it is typically the only tool they have. Essentially these societies are increasingly overfitting their legislature to narrow special cases until…
I personally enjoyed reading it, and from my limited exposure to the topic, my impression was that although some anthropologists disagree and theory has advanced since, The Collapse of Complex Societies was a landmark work and its ideas are still taken seriously.
I recommend reading "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter [0]. Complex societies tend to address problems by adding more and more rules and regulations, simply because they have always done so and it has been successful in the past. More importantly, though, it is typically the only tool they have. Essentially these societies are increasingly overfitting their legislature to narrow special cases until…
Maybe the ultimate proxy measurement is the pursuit of human economic productivity at the expense of longevity of our planet. Contrived example, human need food to survive. We need food, efficiently, since there are so many of us. So we need efficient farming. Efficient means smallest amount of land to produce most biomass (plant, animal). To that, we need single purpose farmland and artificial feeds, fertilizer and…
> There were more cereal calories per person in 2020 than in 1992. And this abundance was brought about without massive increases in the area being farmed. While industrial emissions rocketed, emissions due to land-use change fell by a quarter.
We were able to more than triple our output in that period.
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2022/11/01/a-lot-ca...