If that 20% never had a factory job before, it is not a reliable indicator. It just means their current job is already shitty. They may get a factory job and realize that they were better off flipping burgers, even with less pay.
From TFA:
> When I first went to China as a naive 24 year old, I told my supplier I was going to “work a day in his factory!” I lasted 4 hours.
This poll is being propped up as evidence that people don't actually want to work in a factory, yet more people voiced interest in doing so than are currently, by an order of magnitude. If you believe there's a disconnect between perception and reality, that's fair, but it would have to be off by an order of magnitude on the positive side to support the premise, and an anecdote about a Chinese factory is very weak evidence of that. I would posit that many people would be happier and more fulfilled working in a factory than being stuck doing gig work or packing foreign products for Amazon or even bullshit desk work, but I'm not elitist enough to pretend to know what blue-collar workers in stagnant towns actually feel, let alone argue that they actually want the opposite of what they say. Personally, I wish I had the chance to work in a factory at 16 years old instead of a call center.
It's tricky when you think of a continuous system because the "differential entropy" is different (and more subtle) than the "entropy". Even if a system is time-reversible, the "measure" of a set of states can change.
For example: Say I'm at some distance from you, between 0 and 1 km (all equiprobable). Now I switch to being 10x as far away. This is time-reversible, but because the volume of the set of states changed, the differential entropy changes. This is the kind of thing that happens in time-reversible continuous systems that can't happen in time-reversible discrete systems.
I have yet to see differential entropy used successfully (beyond its explicitly constructed-for purpose for calculating channel capacity). Similar to your thought experiment is the issue that the differential entropy value depends on your choice of unit system. Fundamentally the issue is that you cant stick a quantity with units into a transcendental function and get meaningful results out
Yeah, it's quite disturbing that the differential entropy (unlike the discrete entropy) depends on the units. Even worse, the differential entropy can be negative!
Interestingly, the differential KL-divergence (differential cross-entropy - differential entropy) doesn't seem to have any of these problems.
Isn't that kind of what we want entropy to capture though? If a particle darts off into the distance then in theory it might be time reversible, but in practice it's not so simple. If the particle escapes the gravitational pull, the only way it can come back is if it bumps into some other object and pushes that object away. So things will inevitably spread out more and more creating an arrow of time.
This can then be related to the big bang, and maybe it could be said that we are all living of the negentropy from that event and the subsequent expansion.
Getting different entropy values based on choice of units is a very nasty property though. It kinda hints that there is one canonical correct unit (plank length?)
Perhaps the most surprising sources of particular matter is... sea spray. As water crashes around, stuff in the water (e.g. salt) often ends up suspended in the air. This apparently contributes a non-negligible percentage of PM2.5 matter in coastal areas, though exact percentages are hard to come by.
While I’m quite concerned about particulates generally (I use a few HEPA air purifiers around the house etc.), with this kind of thing it does feel like that kind of matter can’t be as bad for you as other types of PM2.5. I haven’t yet seen any research quantifying it (most studies just look at all PM2.5 as a single category) but surely there must be a difference about how bad different types of particulates are depending on what they’re made of - like those from combustion, tyre wear etc. it would seem are very obviously going to be toxic, but I also measure raised PM2.5 from cooking with my electric oven or induction stove (but not burning the food), surely that can’t be quite as bad? And sea spray you would think would be even less harmful…
Most definitely different types of particles cause different levels of harm. (Extreme example: asbestos.) However, we don't really have good data to quantify this. It intuitive from evolutionary perspective that "natural" sources would be less harmful since we've been breathing sea spray and dust for millions of years. Yet, smoke from wood fires is clearly still extremely harmful. So... my instinct is that the harm is probably less, but I find it very hard to be confident that any particular source is totally safe.
I reckon if you wanted to choose just a single rule it should be, "Write something that you yourself would actually read." The problem is that our brains are designed to sort of lie to us and tell us that what we've created is amazing when in fact we'd never actually read it if someone else had written it. If you can find a way to be objective and see your own writing as the far-from-perfect mess it actually is.
(In principle, you could use "write something that someone else would actually read", but I think this is much harder, because it's much harder to know how other people would react! If you yourself would read it, well, we aren't that unique, lots of other people would read it too.)
> I reckon if you wanted to choose just a single rule it should be, "Write something that you yourself would actually read."
This is a good rule, and I think the first test of it is "have you suffered through proof-reading it three times?"
The garbage people write when they don't even proof-read it themselves! I find that by the third time I read through my writing (ideally spaced out over a few days) I have worked out most of its kinks.
And read it out loud! If you cannot, at least get an AI voice actor to read it for you. You catch so many more problems that way.
That is always what I hate about discussions like on HN, reddit, and the like: if you don't respond "fast" nobody will read it. By rights instead of hitting the reply button in a couple minutes I should put this reply in some queue, and review it several times over several times and then hit reply. However that means my insightful (lets assume insightful, though that isn't always a given) reply has waited until this is well off the front page and so nobody (except maybe the person I'm replying to) will notice.
Instead what I do is glance over things - but that mostly means I fix anything my spell checker has flagged. I know from experience that if less than several hours haven't passed I will not see all the things that don't make sense - they make sense in my mind and I know what I meant really meant. Several hours/days later I will see just how impossible things are to understand. (I'm now going to press that reply button, I hope this all makes sense to you..)
>And read it out loud! If you cannot, at least get an AI voice actor to read it for you. You catch so many more problems that way.
Definitely agree.
I initially included this in the article but I took it out because I wanted to limit to just advice I didn't see covered much elsewhere, but I always tell people to read their writing aloud.
I don't think an AI voice would get most of the benefits, though. For me, a lot of what I notice when I read my writing aloud is that I find myself naturally finishing sentences in a way that departs from what's on the page. And however I finished the sentence naturally almost always is a better rewrite than what was originally there.
> The problem is that our brains are designed to sort of lie to us and tell us that what we've created is amazing when in fact we'd never actually read it if someone else had written it.
You've just described 98% of my poetry output. Luckily I consider this to be a feature, not a bug, and shall continue to churn out more poetry regardless of what the rest of the world thinks.
Fun fact: Americans are seemingly allowed to own up to 1.5 kg of yellowcake. (That's pure uranium, refined from uranium ore, but not enriched to extract the 0.7% U-235 from the 99.3% U-238.)
The atomic weight of Uranium is 238; the atomic weight of Oxygen is 16. By weight, Triuranium octoxide is ~84% Uranium. Even if you're only counting the uranium in the Triuranium octoxide, that's still 60+% of the total mass coming from Uranium Atoms. I'd take that purity any day.
One of the underrated downsides of the professionalization of research is how much it sucked the "fun" out of things. It's strange, but research papers in most fields are written very differently from how people actually talk to each other. Professional researchers still communicate informally like normal humans, in ways that are "fun" and show much more of how they came up with ideas and what they are really thinking. But this is very hard for outsiders to access.
Agree! I spent the last 15 years teaching myself genetics and human biology. I will send emails to researchers and we often some long, interesting, conversations. I even assisted a researcher at Stanford, helping her set up a study on a nutritional genetics. And another even stole my idea about ethanol addiction and did a study on it as well.
They have no idea I only have a degree in American History and Secondary Education. When they do ask some actually get upset thinking that I was tricking them! I used to get upset, but I know now how much some people hold their degree close to their ego.
Possibly unhelpful answer: Arguably none! This is presented as a surprising fact, but you could easily argue that this is the proper definition of an exponential distribution. If you do
x = -log(rand())/lambda
a bunch a times, that comes from something, right? Well, let's call that something an exponential distribution.
From this perspective, the thing that actually needs math is finding the density function of the exponential distribution. (For that, in theory you just need calc 101 and probability 101.)
That post (https://dynomight.net/homeless/) uses HUD's counts from January 2023. There's a long delay with these—the counts are done each year in January but usually only published in December. The January 2024 counts are now available and do indeed show much higher levels: A total of 771k on Jan 2024 as opposed to 653k in Jan 2023 or 582k in 2022. But that post was done in July 2024, when that data wasn't available yet. (And was, I hope, clear that it was using the Jan 2023 counts.)
Currently less than 20% of Americans work in factories. All those 80% need to want is that the 20% of people who want to work in factories can do so.
reply