• 1 Post
  • 277 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

help-circle


  • It’s not deeply rigorous but it’s correct reasoning in principal.

    The scientific and statistical standard interpretation of the null hypothesis is that there’s no relationship between the variables in question. It’s up to the researcher to establish an evidence based argument that the null hypothesis should be rejected in favor of some alternative.

    When we “fail to reject” the null hypothesis, we haven’t proved it’s true, we just continue to assume it is until someone proves otherwise.

    In this case, the alternate hypothesis is that there’s a correlation between incarceration and crime rates and the null is that no such correlation exists.

    As of now, the bulk of the research has failed to find such a relationship https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=correlation+incarceration+crime&btnG=


  • I don’t think it would even have to go that far.

    It’s mostly that Harris needs to be able to present credible red lines. Right now, the perception is that Israel can get away with absolutely anything.

    Anything to break that perception it might be enough. A light version might be something like, “Every time X happens, we’ll delay weapons shipments by a week while we investigate.” That’s not much and it might not even change Israel’s behavior but I suspect that just articulating some policy and sticking to it would be sufficient.


  • In terms of her affect on the Green party, those numbers make it look like she’s fairly run-of-the-mill. Her first one was low and later on she posted numbers similar to more famous candidates.

    I did a quick search on where those candidates are and it seems that many of potential Green party candidates are in swing states. It also looks like many of them are specifically siding with them because of their stance on Gaza.

    That suggests that she’s just fine for the Greens and is likely even helping them. She’s a problem for Democrats because there’s an assumption that those voters would switch to the Democratic ticket if they don’t vote Green.


  • My question was more along the lines of the “(not so) the great (wo)man” hypothesis.

    Let’s imagine that Jill Stein was permanently abducted by aliens. What do we think would happen?

    Would the Green Party just collapse?
    Would the former member just join the Democrats?
    Would they start a new party?
    Or maybe someone new would take over who could do a better job?
    I think we’d likely just get someone who’s functionally equivalent.


  • Is she really responsible for the problems of the US Green party?

    As near as I can tell the EU Green parties had a different trajectory. They initially started winning seats in parliaments on purely environmental platforms. Those MPs actually started pushing green agendas in various parliaments. That, in turn led to more people voting for them. Eventually that had to adopt policy positions beyond the environment and they tended to be pretty left.

    The US never had Green party members in a position where they could actually do anything useful about the environment. That means they could never fulfill their primary goal in the US. So when they tried to branch out the same way the EU Green parties did, they just turned into a vague hodgepodge of leftists ideas.

    Is there any suggestion that Jill Stein’s replacement would have any chance of saving the US Green party?



  • If we’re just talking math, triangles can be defined in terms of 3-element subsets of all 3 (A)ngles and 3 (S)ides:
    SSS - unique
    SAS - unique
    ASS - may be unique depending on the lengths of the sides
    ASA - unique
    SAA - unique
    AAA - infinite solutions

    Maybe someone cleverer than me can figure out how that maps on to love and gender.








  • We’re likely to see a variant of Moore’s law when it comes to satellites. Launch costs will keep going down. Right now we have Starlink with a working satellite internet system and China with a nascent one. As the costs come down we’ll likely see more and more countries, companies, organizations and individuals will be able to deploy their own systems.

    A government would need to negotiate with every provider to get them to block signals over their country. Jamming is always hard. You could theoretically jam all communications or communications on certain frequency bands but it’s not clear how you would selectively jam satellite internet.


  • There’s a much bigger story here.
    Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.

    Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they’ll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.

    As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.


  • The effect is mostly from the total number of computer users increasing.

    That is, the total number of “tech-savvy” users keeps increasing (https://datausa.io/profile/cip/computer-science-110701) but the number of “non-tech-savvy” computer users has absolutely exploded (https://semiconalpha.substack.com/p/global-semiconductor-sales-increase) (that actually undercounts computers since every dollar in 2020 buys you much more computer power than a dollar in 1987)

    You had to pass a nerd gauntlet just to get online in the 80’s or 90’s that meant that everyone you met online had also passed that gauntlet and was tech savvy. Even if you looked in the social usenet groups, a lot of non-technical users were just filtered out. So it looked like everyone was tech savvy but that’s because we were sampling a tiny, tech-savvy portion of the population.

    Now anyone can get online. The tech savvy gen-zers are still there but their hidden in a sea of non-technical users. If you go to places like Github or Hackernews (or even more specifically technical fora), you’ll find plenty of enthusiastic young people poking at technology and trying to make it better. They no longer have to mess around with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get their mouse working but they can (and do) get a bunch of Jupyter notebooks and start playing around with Tensorflow.

    A great modern example of this is 3-D printing. Modern 3-D printers suck. If you’re a big company you can get super expensive 3-D printers that take up giant rooms and need a team of experts to run. If you’re a home user you can get a cheap FDM printer but you best be prepared to tinker with it. The first thing most people do with their Ender is print mods for their Ender. Bambu Labs is a big improvement but they also attract a lot of users who at least could mod their printer https://forum.bambulab.com/c/bambu-lab-x1-series/user-mods/19

    Some day we may have little boxes like in “Diamond Age”. Kids in the future may not even know about crap like bed adhesion and stringing and they’ll concentrate on whatever the new problems are revealed once the current ones are taken care of.