samloveshummus

4 ms·

1.
by samloveshummus 4y ago
No, it's not wasted; that's my point. Why don't you think Disney's investors demand a $7bn annual saving by cutting the "waste" on advertising? The spend on fundraising does go towards the mission, because it i
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
The criticism that too much goes to fundraisers is meaningless without an explanation of how much would be optimal. If spending an additional $1m on fundraising meant an additional $1.1m in donations, then that's $100k more for Wikiped
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
I had a major epiphany deriving this myself as a teenager, because it was the first time I used algebra to calculate something "real". The equation was trivial, but the principle of mathematical modelling struck me like lightning.
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
Meat is a $2 trillion industry globally but you're primarily worried about the corrupting influence of activists' donations?
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
Good for you, but NAC has a host of effects so you couldn't say it was due to glutamate for sure. For example, NAC mainly increases glutathione, the primary antioxidant your body uses, so it may reduce the level of oxidative stress and
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
I'm not sure that those really are the extremes. I think quite a lot of people believe that justice may or may not ever happen depending on how we choose to act as a civilization. Even further than that, many people believe injustice i
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
No, 63.3% of all participants got a favourable outcome, so 13% cheated (suggesting 26% would cheat if necessary, as half got a favourable outcome without cheating). The participants all had varying degrees of belief in a just world which we
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
The Bristol Four acquittal was not an act of jury nullification. Under the Criminal Damage Act 1971, no offense is committed if there is a "lawful excuse" for the damage. The defence argued that there was a lawful excuse on severa
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
I see why you would say that: these neural networks probably have thousands or millions of weights while the equations of motion can probably be written on an index card. But I would argue that this parsimony is illusory. There's a lot
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
I would say it's essentially equivalent, especially if you choose a neural network architecture with a very low-dimensional layer in the middle with only a handful of variables. Then the first half of the network (before the low-dimens
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
It is just a model though! Everything in science is just a model. We better hope it's just a model, because it's incompatible with quantum field theory, which is another very accurate model. The only consistent model that bridges
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
I don't see any fundamental difference. A deep neural network is a universal function approximator. It uses different language from what we're used to (weights and activations instead of analytic functions and calculus) but that&#
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
But he's saying it is bad to do it that way instead of doing traditional physics because you get no understanding, which is true, but in this study they're not using it as a "physics engine" to pilot aircraft or whatever
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
Who cares if there's no gravity? Gravity wasn't sent down to us from heaven on a stone tablet, it's just a concept that lets us make predictions. At school I was taught it was a force and at university I was taught it was a p
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
It's really easy to test whether or not it works - see how well the model predicts on out-of-training sample data. That wouldn't work with astrology. There's no such thing as "physical properties of the system" othe
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
It's true that there are many mathematically equivalent ways to describe physical systems. But the important point is that some are more useful than others. For example, Lagrangian mechanics and Hamiltonian mechanics are equivalent to
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
I'm not sure why you don't think it's Physics. It's about formulating laws that describe the behaviour of physical systems - that's the essence of what Physics is. I have a PhD in high energy theory and this really
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
I don't see why that's relevant, a video camera is just another instrument that records data, not essentially different from the detectors at the LHC, albeit completely un-optimized - which is necessary for this experiment to work
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
You seem quite mistaken about what "caveat emptor" means ("buyer beware"). The person you're replying to means we should be cautious about using risky unregulated light boxes, which you would seem to agree with.
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
I think this misses an important factor in that the sensation from walking on lego is unpredictable because the corners stick in random parts of your feet, which means you can't brace yourself or get used to the sensation.
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by samloveshummus 4y ago
That's not exactly right; in British English and other dialects that don't say "legos", we don't have a plural of "lego" because we treat it grammatically as a "mass noun" just like "furnitu