conformist

6 ms·

1.
by conformist 10d ago
Yeah, iterating that a bit further is why paying for political lobbying can be worth it compared to direct donations. However, the less direct your theory of change, the harder to quantify impact and the wider the posterior distribution te
2.
by conformist 10d ago
Value judgment aside: Probably because it works well empirically. If you’re a larger scale donor and you’re interested in maximising impact, you may agree to a matching program type setup to crowd in more donors. Also you feel smart becaus
3.
by conformist 2mo ago
Isn’t the point more “it’s easy to fall into the trap to believe that predicting when the sigmoid is going to bend is possible and the right heuristic is to instead extrapolate locally”? That aside, I’d question whether applying the Lindy e
4.
by conformist 3mo ago
Yes it does sound like his approach is quite smart and altruistic, but it’s a shame that that aspect just isn’t covered in more detail.
5.
by conformist 3mo ago
It is great that he’s doing this and it’s making the world a better place. It’s a bit disappointing that in articles like this there’s relatively little discussion around what organisations receive the money and what impact it has. We shou
6.
by conformist 3mo ago
I think what would be great is to have eg a concise example where it works well for you and a concise example where it doesn’t. This shows you have explored it and thought about it enough to explain interesting observations. It’s good to th
7.
by conformist 3mo ago
This correlates with tackling the monkey first: https://blog.x.company/tackle-the-monkey-first-90fd6223e04d?...
8.
by conformist 3mo ago
By this logic a lot of applied maths papers become “does not compile” :D
9.
by conformist 4mo ago
Yes in theory, but not yet in practice because not everything is fully formalised.
10.
by conformist 4mo ago
> The authors warn the consequences are already becoming visible. AI-generated papers could overwhelm peer-review systems with low-quality work … It seems like a key problem here is that peer-review is expected but not explicitly funded&
11.
by conformist 4mo ago
Yeah 3 - 4 is typical in STEM at Imperial, depends on the scholarship or funding source. The standard funding tends to assume 3 - 3.5 years, but I vaguely recall that in some departments supervisors had a habit of forcing people to stick ar
12.
by conformist 7mo ago
I was in a similar situation as the parent post and skipped/was moved up by two years of high school. I think it was very beneficial to have to work hard to catch up with more advanced classes. I feel flexibility around this is someth
13.
by conformist 7mo ago
There’s also a vague argument around hedging some actual risks that some market participants genuinely want to hedge… which depends a lot on the specific bet. Eg hedging exposure to specific political events, wars or even company announceme
14.
by conformist 7mo ago
> “Hedge funds invest a ton in "alternative data", like credit card transaction data or satellite-imagery (are Walmart's parking lots full?) and need to process as much relevant information as possible to make predictions
15.
by conformist 7mo ago
By “not terrible” you mean “bad but not very bad” and not “good” right?
16.
by conformist 7mo ago
It's possible but unlikely given the short timeline, diverse questions that require multiple matheamticians, and low stakes. Also they've already run preliminary tests.
17.
by conformist 8mo ago
Interesting topic and seems like a reasonable thing to study. It would be cool to see a study where participants behave in a way that leads to more light exposure in month A and the opposite in month B, randomising the time ordering etc. D
18.
by conformist 8mo ago
Yeah sure SU(2) up to sign is isomorphic to SO(3) and whatnot… I think it’s probably mostly the computer graphics history and the cool name that gets people excited about quaternions?
19.
by conformist 8mo ago
I like quaternions as much as the next guy (I’ve used them in numerical computations etc), but what is it about them that makes them show up on the front page every few weeks?
20.
by conformist 8mo ago
As a practitioner in this area, I’d say some of the authors here stand out as extremely influential to this day. Clearly these include: Cliff Asness (AQR is huge, lots of publications) Ronald Kahn (early pioneer, standard book, successful e
21.
by conformist 8mo ago
Imo the fun quant stuff these days is about predicting returns and not pricing derivatives. As others have said here, the pricing part is mostly commoditised and more about managing software.
22.
by conformist 8mo ago
Yes the combination of Krylov and quasi-Newton methods are very successful for physics problems ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-Newton_method ). Iirc eg GMRES is a popular Krylov subspace method.
23.
by conformist 8mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computing_Since_Democr...
24.
by conformist 8mo ago
“Even as quality worsens, prices in drug markets are sticky, so the decreasing potency probably meant people were taking less fentanyl.”
25.
by conformist 8mo ago
Another essential package is realhats (replace boring \hat with real hats)! https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats
26.
by conformist 9mo ago
Yes. Some scientific computing code is still being developed in Fortran eg in HPC. (and has been for decades)
27.
by conformist 10mo ago
Yeah and this is a much more intuitive way of generalising from the n = 2 case. Weights are proportional to inverse variance even for n > 2. Importantly this assumes independence so it doesn’t translate to portfolio optimisation very eas
28.
by conformist 11mo ago
In Germany, cheese with stinging nettle is a thing and I remember eating it a few times as a child (Brennnesselkäse), typically Gouda-like types.
29.
Can Germany rein in its academic bullying problem?(nature.com)
5 points by conformist 1y ago|0 comments
30.
by conformist 1y ago
It’s fine to be non-rigorous as long as you’re not a jerk and treat your own conclusions on relatively little data as preliminary. Sometimes it’s good to have some information with relatively large error bars and be willing to update quick

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