another_poster

7 ms·

1.
by another_poster 1mo ago
There actually were religions founded around the philosophers. The mathematikoi were a cult of followers of Pythagoras that believed everything was Number, and they believed they could purify their souls by learning theorems. And the Neop
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by another_poster 11mo ago
Is the opposite ever true — do some people publicly support truth, wisdom, and virtue to signify group membership?
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by another_poster 1y ago
I used to have similar concerns as you — how can anyone truly know what other people are like? Unless we’re doing research with the scientific method, we can only speculate unscientifically, right? Without science, what we say is just our b
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by another_poster 1y ago
SoftBank sounds familiar… weren’t they a major investor in WeWork? With such poor investing acumen, why haven’t they gone bankrupt yet? Perhaps the $40 billion raised by OpenAI can only be spent on services from SoftBank’s other investments
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by another_poster 2y ago
Is “multimodal reasoning” as big a deal as it sounds? Does this technique mean LLMs can generate chains of thought that map to other modalities, such as sound and images?
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by another_poster 2y ago
Fair point. There’s a real difference in attitude between speculation and saving. Most people buy stocks to save for retirement, not to speculate that they’ll have enough money for retirement. But most people aren’t investors, either. Typic
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by another_poster 2y ago
Most people have a gambler’s mindset about the stock market: > […G]ambling in financial markets often goes undetected […] because individuals confuse their actions [i.e., speculating] with investing. The typical person speculates on the
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by another_poster 2y ago
To play devil’s advocate, the US seems to have given up leadership in key areas, so it seems natural for China to play a bigger role in the world. (1) Industry. Why did the US government aggressively pursue a “post-industrial” economy? Chin
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by another_poster 2y ago
Interesting, could a physical system exploit differences in the rate of expansion? What happens to an object as it moves from a high rate-of-expansion region to a low rate-of-expansion region?
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by another_poster 3y ago
Trust involves multiple factors, e.g., • Character. Is the public trusting? Are they anxious? • Framing. Is the institution described compassionately, for example, as a national champion or underdog? Or is it described as a villain? • Secta
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by another_poster 3y ago
You’re right—both directions are true. But my point is that only the forward (or reverse) direction of a fact may be worth knowing. We frequently only posses recall for one direction of a fact. Why? One direction may be important (what is T
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by another_poster 3y ago
The author is drawing the wrong the conclusion-knowledge relationships can be asymmetric. The forward relationship of a fact (What is Tom Cruise’s favorite color? Green) may be worth knowing, but the reverse relationship (Who’s favorite col
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by another_poster 3y ago
A good analogy is ice. We all use “freezer-grown crystalline water,” but prior to the invention of refrigeration, we harvested natural ice from frozen lakes and stored them in ice houses for use throughout the summer. Sure, there’s some rom
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by another_poster 3y ago
I don’t follow—what in particular becomes destabilized?
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by another_poster 3y ago
The Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle puzzled over the same observations. Aristotle called your topic “First Philosophy” because it studies the primary substance that underlies everything.
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by another_poster 3y ago
The US is difficult to compare with other developed countries because it essentially has (1) affluent core regions and (2) poor peripheral regions. The US is essentially bimodal. The core regions resemble the developed world, with similar l
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by another_poster 4y ago
To play devil’s advocate, we really should ban 30 year fixed mortgages, not 5/1 ARMs. I know it sounds contradictory, but hear me out. One of the Fed’s primary methods to control inflation is adjusting economic demand by making loans c
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by another_poster 4y ago
As an example of “bad influences” being an ancient topic, in the 1st century CE, the orator and educator Quintilian gave advice to parents in the Roman Empire wondering whether public schools would be a bad influence on their kids. Although
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by another_poster 4y ago
Individual states’ pay transparency laws are already applying upwards pressure on salaries across the country. My company has multiple groups in different states including Colorado, and in anticipation of needing to post salary ranges for o
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by another_poster 5y ago
Agreed, I think it’s currently causing problems in the US. In theory public media like PBS and NPR should address the gap, but those organizations tend to depend on donations from the wealthy, so their coverage skews towards their interests
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by another_poster 5y ago
PSA: Newspapers educate the public, and their services are essential for the functioning of our democracies. The best newspapers fund their operations through subscriptions, so please help society become well-informed by subscribing to your
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by another_poster 5y ago
> An individual who felt strongly about a single issue could hoard their credits until its moment arrives, then blow all of their saved credits on it. That would allow passionate minorities occasionally to outvote indifferent majorities.
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by another_poster 5y ago
New Yorker writers are masters of their craft, so unless you have decades of experience professionally editing and writing, I recommend giving the piece at least a second chance. That said, I also skipped over tons of passages, for example,
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by another_poster 5y ago
All taxes are avoided (or illegally evaded) to some degree, and the most taxed (i.e. the wealthiest people and firms) will always have the largest incentive to avoid taxes. To reduce the incentive to avoid taxes, countries often tax capita
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by another_poster 5y ago
I believe China will become more democratic within a decade. As China becomes wealthier, sustained growth will become more challenging. The low-hanging fruit of state-directed investments like infrastructure and manufacturing will have bee