Exactly. The spice lets the quant guild see into the future. This ability is so valuable it has earned them the patronage of House Goldman and House Blackrock.
I have the same question about minor legislative amendments a certain agency keeps requesting in relation to its own statutory instrument. Obviously they are going to be passed without much scrutiny, they all seem small and the agency is pretty trustworthy.
(this is an unsolved problem that exists in many domains from long before AI)
Its impressive how well Bezos has convinced everyone to stop trusting WaPo rather than WaPo convincing everyone to trust Bezos. A paper owned by a wealthy financial interest was hardly unique or novel at the time he took them over, and no one would have been more concerned about it than they already were, and all he had to do was not be overt in his influence and bias of it, but he couldn't refrain.
I think many people (and the parent comment) are getting played because they don't realize the game and its stakes:
'Trust' is an issue under the old rules, in a context where an essentially democratic, free society was desired by all and where therefore public trust and a well-informed public mattered.
The new rules are about power alone, which is essentially anti-democratic. Bezos has power and he demonstrates it - demonstration is essential under the new rules - by mocking and thumbing his nose at trust and at informing the public. He uses his power to bend public opinion his way; lots of people still read the Post, and in a post-truth world, truth doesn't matter to many of them. He doesn't care about trust, and he actively and intentionally demonstrates it.
It's the context of post-truth philosophy: Words are about power, they are weapons; they are not about truth, expression, or information.
The worship (rather than distrust) of power, post-truth, it all leads to the non-democratic outcome.
IMO, the rules haven't changed at all, shit has always been bad. Ask any Black American. The silver lining to all this open corruption is that even the most milquetoast centrists of 2020 are turning into people calling for actual consequences for the corruption going on in our government.
As unpopular as Bush was in 2008, not very many people seriously thought he would be or even should be arrested. I think the patience of good people is getting severely tested in 2025 though, I think by 2028, or sooner, people will be demanding scalps.
>What, of the things I described, have Black Americans experienced more than others?
in a context where an essentially democratic, free society was desired by all, black people were systematically shut out from, (redlining, the gi bill, etc.). Like how you were supposed to trust that stop-and-frisk and the broken window policing policies were not thinly veiled attempts to over-police black neighborhoods because the paper you read or the politician you voted for told you so... but the people that were the victims knew otherwise.
> Its impressive how well Bezos has convinced everyone to stop trusting WaPo rather than WaPo convincing everyone to trust Bezos. A paper owned by a wealthy financial interest was hardly unique or novel at the time he took them over, and no one would have been more concerned about it than they already were, and all he had to do was not be overt in his influence and bias of it, but he couldn't refrain.
My hypothesis is that his current heavy handed editorial intervention is designed to convince only a single person: the President of the United States.
It's presumably worth burning the paper's reputation in order to curry favor with a mercurial and vengeful autocrat who controls the power of the federal government's purse.
I do enjoy the theory that everyone was cynically posturing for 4 years during Biden and are now _also_ cynically posturing for Trump, because it aligns with a belief that a lot of powerful people seem to have extremely malleable beliefs.
It is a bit more interesting than "everyone took their mask off the day after the election". Plenty of hard-line right wing people in the world, of course, but at one point if you're that deep in the right all the posturing pre-2024 would be really hard to do. But if it's all cynical then any amount of posturing makes sense!
Bezos is calculating his years remaining with regards to Blue Origin and that a given President can cause severe disruption to the pathway Bezos has in mind for his organization. I'm sure his ideal would be to finely balance WaPo's reputation and his need to placate the current President, and I'm also certain with Trump it's not doable (so he'll sacrifice some of WaPo's reputation to keep progress going on Blue Origin during the Trump years).
The best predictor of future events is past experience.
Every US president in history has left office peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future presidents will too.
Similarly, some people always think that the current president will crown himself a king and the Other Party will never ever be able to get into power. And these people have been so far always wrong.
I’m not saying it can’t happen this time, but in my opinion, it is unlikely.
The real skeptical in me says it doesn’t even matter, no matter who you vote for, you’ll get John McCain.
> You being alive today is the best predictor of you being alive tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year.
An unprecedented glioblastoma diagnosis would predict otherwise. When the facts in evidence become extraordinary, one must adapt the adage accordingly.
That's the point: you can "prove" anything by saying "the best predictor of future events is past experience" and then pointing to the obvious wrong past experience from which to extrapolate.
I'm unsure where you thought we were talking about "proving" anything with these statements? Forming illogical counter-examples doesn't show that the original premise was false, just that one can form clearly wrong examples of this.
No one has ever lived 150 years. Therefore there is nothing that can be predictive of living 150 years. One is starting with something that is known to be incorrect and then working backwards to phrase it in a similar way.
What do you do when the model you know to be best ("past experience") consistently fails to predict anything after an agent of chaos is introduced to the mix? Do you still stand by it? Can you really say past experience consistently predicted the events of this year alone?
If you're in the middle of a nuclear winter do you still insist summer is just a few months away based on past experience? And if you hear someone saying it will you believe it's anything other than disingenuous or ignorant?
I'm not sure how you can say every President left office peacefully when four of them left by way of being assassinated, but I do see that's not quite the point you're trying to make. I'm not sure why we'd be so narrow as to only examine US history, rather than history at large unless we're operating under some guise of American Exceptionalism.
Nixon?
Very technically left office peacefully but he would have been impeached and removed had he not.
Strange to note that his crimes would hardly warrant mention in the context of the current occupant of the oval office.
That's a very... pre-1748 kind of philosophy. Hume, Keynes, Russell, Popper and others have written at length about the limitations of prediction from past experience. You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction
Even if we accept that extrapolation is the best you can do, you'd still need to justify why the domain of "past experience" is exactly wide enough to generalise across current and previous US presidencies, but not so wide as to include even one of the numerous populist strongman takeovers in non-US political history. Proof by American Exceptionalism, perhaps?
This is why black swan events can be so devastating.
I saw another comment here about a month ago that said many people tend to round a very small risk down to zero risk. The comments were related to driving and the risk of serious injury or death that most people discount, but I think it also applies to other areas of risk in life, too, for many people.
Exceptional events are low probability by definition, and thus people tend to ignore the possibility, assuming instead that the status quo will continue to exist.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future presidents will too.
That is false. On January 6th 2021 the sitting president fomented a mob to violently keep him in power.
If we’re going off your rule of past events being the best prediction for future events then we should all be shitting ourselves over the fact that this guy isn’t leaving peacefully
> The best predictor of future events is past experience.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully
Considering the current US President tried to have his VP and Congress killed by an angry mob if they didn't hand over a second presidential term to him, we should expect the same this time, but better organized and with ~8 years of planning.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully, the most probable outcome is that future presidents will too.
I think you are forgetting a date that happened on the 6th day after the start of 2021. I would most certainly not call that pieceful in any way shape or form (and yes, I count that as part of leaving office, being the certification of the next president). By your logic this would mean that it is unlikely that he will peacefully leave office.
> Similarly, some people always think that the current president will crown himself a king and the Other Party will never ever be able to get into power.
As far as I know, this is the first time a president has completely disregarded civility, declared marshall law under false pretenses (not false alarm, specifically false pretenses), talked about crowning himself king, and various forms of rigging future elections.
So the fact that some people (allegedly) thought Clinton/Bush/Obama/Biden would crown themselves is pretty irrelevant.
>> The best predictor of future events is past experience.
That's why you're currently reading HN with Internet Explorer on your IBM desktop running OS/2 2025.
The adage about history as an indicator only applies to the steady state. It compeltely breaks down when with events that are so rare as to be unpredictable when they have extreme - good or bad - consequences.
ex:
"The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology."
And I would argue the world today isn't even close to the edge of the spectrum when it comes to lack of predictability or how extreme the outcomes may be.
> Every US president in history has left office peacefully,
That's not how I would describe Jan 6 2021 not to mention Trump's other efforts to subvert the election results, and refusal to accept the results to this day.
> some people always think that the current president will crown himself a king and the Other Party will never ever be able to get into power.
Really? When has there been such a public outcry before? There have never been "No Kings" protests before, because they weren't needed. Even if you hated Reagan, Clinton or Obama, you knew he wasn't going to try to run for a third term, whereas Trump keeps publicly saying he might.
Not when you take into account how Trump has behaved in his second term and that there's an authoritarian playbook he's following that has worked in other contemporary countries like Hungary. What other president has refused to acknowledged they lost an election, and refused to acknowledge that they're not permitted a third term by the Constitution? There are former Trump officials from his first term who warned about his reelection.
What's going to doom US democracy is all the people in denial that an authoritarian coup could and is happening in America.
It's amazing how much he's turned it into a cult of personality to the point that things like states rights, free markets and Federal overreach no longer matter.
Please don't use epithets like this on HN. Snark, swipes, name-calling are all explicitly against the guidelines. We're trying for curious conversation here, not whatever this is.
Iunno, I'm willing to give Trump a fair shake but none of those descriptors seem particularly wrong to me. Trump runs on quid-pro-quo politics, for better and worse.
It stands to reason that the most blatantly-corrupt people in America are now in a race to the bottom to buy out their pardon and negotiate protectionist foreign policy.
I am fairly certain he decided to and is executing "do better" - nevertheless the 1 or 2 people with net worths of 100's of billions have different opinions on what "better" looks like than the other 8 billion of us.
I would bet that something like 80 or 90% of Washington Post subscribers don’t know who owns the paper, and I would save you the same thing about the Wall Street Journal.
Think about the world's poorest man, and how disconnected he is from the rest of humanity. Now think of the world's richest man. They are equally disconnected.
Hmm, the initial comment was disconnection from realty, not humanity. Most likely, reality as, all this daily throttle that recalls you that you are not the center of the universe and you have to been to its laws which were not fine tuned to please human desire if you want to accomplish anything. In that sense most humans are closer to the poorest man.
The fact that this happened and that you have evidence of it make it enormously interesting even if the actual substance of the prompts and the response are mundane as hell. Please post.
I think that is a little like pi. There is a limit to what we can measure. In a real life drawing on paper the "one point" is not dimensionless. There is a limit to what we can draw.
The "one point" in "one point perspective" isn't drawn at all, rather it is the point where all lines going into the page perpendicular to the viewing plane eventually converge to. Eg if you were to stand on a set of straight train tracks (don't do this) you would see both rails (and any roads or whatever else is parallel to them) converge to a point somewhere on the horizon line. The artists call it the "vanishing point", the mathematicians call it "the point at infinity".
Indeed with the point at infinity you can simplify geometry by dispensing with Euclid's 5th postulate. There are no parallel lines, any two lines intersect at a single point just the same way as any two points are intersected by a single line, and the intersection points of the lines we call "parallel" simply happen to be "at infinity" (outside the set of ordinary finite coordinates).
The vanishing point in a perspective drawing is a point with a value that is literally beyond the finite coordinates of any object. And you don't need to be looking at a drawing to see it.
In a certain regard its an accounting trick. Saying parallel lines meet at infinity is literally like saying "lets schedule this meeting for never", except the mathematicians added an actual box to the calendar for a date called "never" as an accounting hack, but the hack works so well you really have to wonder if it might actually be a real date or if its just an incredibly useful fiction.
Aren't all numbers just incredibly useful fictions?
Why is a date called never / a point at infinity any different?
Kurt Godel rather famously claimed to have spotted logical contradictions in the US constitution, which of course is not too controversial on its own (and was probably right given who he is), but presenting this argument in response to questions about the constitution that were given as part of his citizenship test was an insane thing to try no matter how good his logic.
There's only two ways one could have been contradicting information from the WHO which was later revised prior to them revising it. Either:
1. They really did have some insight or insider knowledge which the WHO missed and they spoke out in contradiction of officialdom in a nuanced and coherent way that we can all judge for ourselves.
2. They in fact had no idea what they were talking about at the time, still don't, and lucked into some of it being correct later on.
I refer to Harry Frankfurt's famous essay "On Bullshit". His thesis is that bullshit is neither a lie nor the truth but something different. Its an indifference to the factuality of ones statements altogether. A bullshit statement is one that is designed to "sound right" for the context it is used, but is actually just "the right thing to say" to convince people and/or win something irrespective of if it is true or false.
A bullshit statement is more dangerous than a lie, because the truth coming to light doesn't always expose a bullshitter the way it always exposes a lie. A lie is always false in some way, but bullshit is uncorrelated with truth and can often turn out right. Indeed a bullshitter can get a lucky streak and persist a very long time before anyone notices they are just acting confident about things they don't actually know.
So in response.
It is still a good idea to censor the people in category two. Even if the hypothetical person in your example turned out to get something right that the WHO initially got wrong, they were still spreading false information in the sense that they didn't actually know the WHO was wrong at the time when they said it. They were bullshitting. Having a bunch of people spreading a message of "the opposite of what public health officials tell you" is still dangerous and bad, even if sometimes in retrospect that advice turns out good.
People in category one were few and far between and rarely if ever censored.
> It is still a good idea to censor the people in category two.
I disagree on numerous levels with this position, not just on ethical grounds, but also on empirical grounds. People are simply not as gullible as you think they are, but I don't have time to delve into this, so I'll just leave it at that.
> People in category one were few and far between and rarely if ever censored.
According to whom? The stated policy makes no such distinction, it says anyone who contradicts WHO positions ought to be censored. There is no nuance, and how exactly is YouTube going to judge who belongs in each category? If they could reliably judge who was bullshitting, they wouldn't need the WHO policy to begin with. The policy is a "cover my ass" blanket so they don't have to deal with the nuance.
"People are simply not as gullible as you think they are, but I don't have time to delve into this, so I'll just leave it at that." well i for one don't believe you :).
