Tagged “politics”

At some point the backyard became [Australia's] largest unit of measurement

good line

Not everything needs to be part of your 2-party political melodrama

unsurprisingly, issues facing twitter:
a) have been considered by people who spend years working on it
b) are more complicated to solve than a pithy phrase would have you believe

More depressing covid takes. The final paragraph:

The countries that have stopped the virus, that is, cannot keep stopping the virus, because the experts say there is already too much of the virus circulating. China is a pandemic waiting to happen because the United States is wholeheartedly committed to being a pandemic. The American program, they say, will be the program for the entire world.

Interesting take on the differences in impact between large scale vs inidividual differences.

Some good bits around how using past information can backfire. Either overfitting if looking too far back, or spending too much effort on predictions.

Enough effort goes into an initial forecast that updating your views when new information becomes available can trigger the sunk-cost fallacy and cause you to be right or wrong for the wrong reason.

Always interesting, and very clever. Talks about upcoming technology (real and expected), cultural and institutional changes, government as buyer to incentivise development, a bunch on companies and employees.

Interesting analysis on immigration, unemployment, language, housing, and economy of Spain. Who writes like this after a vacation?!

Overall, my visit has made me more optimistic about Spain. Much of the measured unemployment is illusory, and immigrants are pouring in to profit from Spain’s combination of high productivity and linguistic accessibility. Housing policy remains bad. Since housing regulation is decentralized, however, some regions of Spain will be atypically tolerant of new construction. Where is the Texas of Spain? I don’t know, but that’s where the future is.

I would like to learn about chip foundries. No idea how that stuff gets made.

Instead, you should try to blend together the needed disciplines as best you can, consulting others when necessary, an offer the best plan you can, namely the best plan all things considered.

That might fill you with horror, but please recall from Tetlock that usually the generalists are the best predictors.

The problem with economic model of scarcity. More savings does not mean more spending - people eventually have enough cash and enough things; at this point they are taking more money out of the economy than putting back in.

Digging through the history of biases and problems with training data and categories used for ML tasks