Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Billion-Parameter Theories

worldgov.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 92 posts

Re: Billion-Parameter Theories

#51

Post by roughly »

There's a lot of ink in this spent on how Poverty, Climate Change, Urban Decay, and Financial Markets are Complex Hard Complicated problems.

The problem with these is they're also problems where there are actors profiting from the failure to fix the system - the issue isn't that we don't understand the complex nature of the domain, it's that the components of the system actively and agentically resist changes to the system. George Soros called this Reflexivity - the fact that the system responds to your manipulations means you can't treat yourself and the system as separate agents, and you can't treat the system as a purely mechanistic/passive recipient of your changes. It's maybe the biggest blind spot for people who want to apply the rules and methods of physics to social issues - the universe may be indifferent, but your neighbors are not.

Re: Billion-Parameter Theories

#52

Post by dryarzeg »

bbor wrote: post #30

There's a parallel in linguistics. Chomsky showed that all human languages share deep recursive structure. True, and essentially irrelevant to the language modeling that actually learned to do something with language. ...this is so absurdly and blatantly wrong that it's hard to move past. Has the author ever heard of programming languages??

[dead]

Re: Billion-Parameter Theories

#53

Post by newyankee »

roughly wrote: post #51

There's a lot of ink in this spent on how Poverty, Climate Change, Urban Decay, and Financial Markets are Complex Hard Complicated problems. The problem with these is they're also problems where there are actors profiting from the failure to fix the system - the issue isn't that we don't understand the complex nature of the domain, it's that the components of the system actively and agentically resist changes to the…

Literally countries with so much surplus land: Canada, Australia etc. have housing crisis where most of the top 10-20% of the population has become speculators in housing and openly NIMBY with no interest in supply side solutions unless forced down.

Re: Billion-Parameter Theories

#54

Post by cyanydeez »

newyankee wrote: post #53
roughly wrote: post #51

There's a lot of ink in this spent on how Poverty, Climate Change, Urban Decay, and Financial Markets are Complex Hard Complicated problems. The problem with these is they're also problems where there are actors profiting from the failure to fix the system - the issue isn't that we don't understand the complex nature of the domain, it's that the components of the system actively and agentically resist changes to the…

Literally countries with so much surplus land: Canada, Australia etc. have housing crisis where most of the top 10-20% of the population has become speculators in housing and openly NIMBY with no interest in supply side solutions unless forced down.

Rentseeking is the super-capitalism in the room.

Re: Billion-Parameter Theories

#55

Post by strken »

newyankee wrote: post #53
roughly wrote: post #51

There's a lot of ink in this spent on how Poverty, Climate Change, Urban Decay, and Financial Markets are Complex Hard Complicated problems. The problem with these is they're also problems where there are actors profiting from the failure to fix the system - the issue isn't that we don't understand the complex nature of the domain, it's that the components of the system actively and agentically resist changes to the…

Literally countries with so much surplus land: Canada, Australia etc. have housing crisis where most of the top 10-20% of the population has become speculators in housing and openly NIMBY with no interest in supply side solutions unless forced down.

The problem we've got is that 10-20% of the population are speculating while another 50% of the population have almost their entire net worth stuffed into their family home. We're finding it difficult to rein in the top without ruining the middle too.

Re: Billion-Parameter Theories

#56

Post by seanlinehan »

roughly wrote: post #51

There's a lot of ink in this spent on how Poverty, Climate Change, Urban Decay, and Financial Markets are Complex Hard Complicated problems. The problem with these is they're also problems where there are actors profiting from the failure to fix the system - the issue isn't that we don't understand the complex nature of the domain, it's that the components of the system actively and agentically resist changes to the…

Reflexivity is nodded to in the definition of complex systems in the piece!

I think what you're saying is poverty is actually simple, and the solution is to stop the bad actors causing poverty? But at the same time, you are correctly recognizing that attempts to stop bad actors from causing poverty triggers reflexive responses and cascading repercussions. Which sounds mighty like a complex system?

Re: Billion-Parameter Theories

#57

Post by munchler »

newyankee wrote: post #53
roughly wrote: post #51

There's a lot of ink in this spent on how Poverty, Climate Change, Urban Decay, and Financial Markets are Complex Hard Complicated problems. The problem with these is they're also problems where there are actors profiting from the failure to fix the system - the issue isn't that we don't understand the complex nature of the domain, it's that the components of the system actively and agentically resist changes to the…

Literally countries with so much surplus land: Canada, Australia etc. have housing crisis where most of the top 10-20% of the population has become speculators in housing and openly NIMBY with no interest in supply side solutions unless forced down.

If there’s surplus land, why build something unwanted in someone’s backyard? I’m a suburban NIMBY homeowner and I feel like you’re actually making my argument without realizing it. I’m all for building new houses on unused land. Can you please just do it without ruining my neighborhood? Build nice new neighborhoods and make them as dense as you’d like, but don’t try to force density on older, established neighborhoods that can’t support it.

Re: Billion-Parameter Theories

#58

Post by wavemode »

Not to sound condescending, but this reads like someone fimiliar with LLMs but very unfamiliar with statistics in general.

If we could understand economics, or poverty, or any number of other social structures, simply by cramming data into a statistical model with billions of parameters, we would've done that decades ago and these problems would already be understood.

In the real world, though, there is a phenomenon called overfitting. In other words you can perfectly model the training data but be unable to make useful predictions about new data (i.e. the future).

Re: Billion-Parameter Theories

#59

Post by pyrale »

seanlinehan wrote: post #56
roughly wrote: post #51

There's a lot of ink in this spent on how Poverty, Climate Change, Urban Decay, and Financial Markets are Complex Hard Complicated problems. The problem with these is they're also problems where there are actors profiting from the failure to fix the system - the issue isn't that we don't understand the complex nature of the domain, it's that the components of the system actively and agentically resist changes to the…

Reflexivity is nodded to in the definition of complex systems in the piece! I think what you're saying is poverty is actually simple, and the solution is to stop the bad actors causing poverty? But at the same time, you are correctly recognizing that attempts to stop bad actors from causing poverty triggers reflexive responses and cascading repercussions. Which sounds mighty like a complex system?

I think you need to distinguish between complex systems, and byzantine systems. You can have complex systems where every piece shares a common goal, but feedback loops are hard. You can also have systems which, if a common goal was shared, wouldn't be that hard to understand, modelize and optimize, but where the actors of the system are not acting in good faith.

And I agree with the above poster: often, a problem is described as "hard" as a way to make an excuse for the agents. Sure, the problem is hard. The reason why it's hard isn't some esoteric arcane complexity, it's that some of the agents aren't even trying.

Re: Billion-Parameter Theories

#60

Post by xvedejas »

munchler wrote: post #57
newyankee wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally countries with so much surplus land: Canada, Australia etc. have housing crisis where most of the top 10-20% of the population has become speculators in housing and openly NIMBY with no interest in supply side solutions unless forced down.

If there’s surplus land, why build something unwanted in someone’s backyard? I’m a suburban NIMBY homeowner and I feel like you’re actually making my argument without realizing it. I’m all for building new houses on unused land. Can you please just do it without ruining my neighborhood? Build nice new neighborhoods and make them as dense as you’d like, but don’t try to force density on older, established neighborhood…

The empty land is not very valuable. Suburban homeowners are sitting on relatively valuable land, and it's valuable because of access to jobs and services.

In my personal experience, adding density to established neighborhoods improves those neighborhoods' character. Sometimes it gets those afraid of change to move out, improving it even more.

Post reply on HN