Re: extremely lavish

Is probably extremely boring - I have never had more fun than when solving problems, life without working on something interesting sounds insufferable to me

How long would I be able to sit on Maui sipping Mai-Tais? Getting massages, ... and more ... whatever I want, whenever I want it ... that is a curse actually.

Surrounded by fake people everyone wanting a piece of the wealth trickle down to them.

On a personal experience, I was a lot happier when I bought my first house, a rundown estate that was the cheapest on the street that then I had to work to improve upon it, ended up replacing most inside and out, some parts I learned to do myself - I ended up remodeling it piecemeal but so, so satisfying

My second house is very respectable, newer, larger, technically incomparably better, it is not even the same ballpark ... yet my new house never provided me with the same joy.

Be careful what you wish for.

> I have never had more fun than when solving problems, life without working on something interesting sounds insufferable to me.

I'm fairly sure that there are many people like this out there, but for others that just... isn't a problem?

Personally, I quit my last job because I felt like I need to learn some new technology, work on a few personal projects, write blog posts and so on. Since, I've done a little of the above (in addition to improving the security of my homelab and running my own CA), but also took a month off to just enjoy watching videos, reading articles, playing video games, as well as do physical labor around the farm.

And frankly, everything feels enjoyable so far - both intellectually stimulating tasks, physically intensive labor like cutting trees and chopping firewood, as well as passively consuming content, or even zoning out a bit occasionally and having a slow day. Though I can't comment on how long each of those would be satisfying for, that also depends on the person.

I can easily imagine someone enjoying a lavish and relaxed lifestyle and never getting tired of it, though.

I believe that the author misremembers the common solution for the first question

> 3 hens lay 3 eggs in 3 days. How many eggs do 12 hens give in 12 days?

> [...] When we got to it, everybody shouted "Three!"

I don't see why the "common" wrong answer would be 3. Why would anybody think that? The problem looks like this 3, 3 -> 3

When we see the 12 and 12 the intuitive, common, wrong answer should be 12 eggs.

That's what makes sense IMHO.

How to annoy the teacher:

> "Ovulation (release of the yolk from the ovary) occurs every 24 – 26 hours regardless of fertilization (so a rooster is not needed). A hen ovulates a new yolk after the previous egg was laid. It takes 26 hours for an egg to fully form (white and shell added), so a hen will lay an egg later and later each day. Eventually the hen will lay too late in a day for ovulation to be signaled. She will then skip a day or more before laying another egg." (UWisconsin Livestock)

So, the 3 hens must have been at the least productive point in their egg-laying cycle over the initial three-day time period... Now if we have the two-hour daily offset, over 12 days, ummm, maybe two or three days skipped per hen? So, ah, 108-120 eggs is what the farmer could expect from the 12 hens?

I remember a story where school teacher was showing plastic animals and asking kids what it was. At some point all kids wrote "cow" except for one farm boy who wrote "goat". Turns out the plastic cow had wrong number of udders. Cows have four, goats have two.

Once I saw 5-armed snowflake as an icon on weather forecast in TV.

You meant teats, they both have one udder, but otherwise right :)

This is gold!

I read it as the students being familiar with a similar "trick" question and erroneously pattern matching on that.

Another similar riddle goes like:

"If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?"

The correct answer there being "5 minutes", and the intuitive wrong answer being "100" as per your post.

That would make sense as to why the teacher also expected "3", since they should be familiar with the existence of their non-intuitive questions, even if they misremember the specific non-intuition.

Or as to why adding more people to a late project makes it later: 1 woman takes 9 months to grow a baby, how long does it take 9 women to grow a baby?

Of course it was "Twelve!". Thank you for bringing this up. It is fixed now.

I took me surprisingly long to convince myself the author was correct: the answer is 48 because there's 4x as many hens and 4x as many days: 3 x 4 x 4 = 48. The "wrong" way to solve this problem is to compute hen-laying in terms of hen-egg-days, and then scaling.

>The "wrong" way to solve this problem is to compute hen-laying in terms of hen-egg-days, and then scaling.

I am not sure to understand what you mean by "wrong" way, I got the right result through a different reasoning that seems to me based on hen-egg-days.

It takes 3 days for 3 hens to make 3 eggs.

The 3 days time are "fixed", i.e. it takes 3 days for each hen to make its own egg.

The egg production rate is 1/3 egg per day per hen.

So I have 12 hens x 12 days x 1/3 = 144 x 1/3 = 48

I dunno, I immediately noted that 12 hens must lay 12 eggs in 3 days (it takes 3 days for a hen to lay an egg). Then I just asked myself how many 3-days are in 12-days--okay, 12 [eggs] * 4 [3-day egg periods] = 48...

I didn't need to resort to pen and paper, but I'm also not in primary school.

I always skip straight to dimensional analysis for such a thing.

3 eggs / 3 chickens / 3 days * 12 chickens * 12 days cancels out to 48 eggs

There are a lot of right ways to solve this problem, but this is clearly the most fun way.

That's because it's output/input = eggs/(hen*day), not eggs/(hen/day), which is clear from meaning and logic if you aren't a GPT 2 LLM

There is a visual illustration in the article. I thought it might be useful for understating why it's 48.

He misremebered the third task as well, since his solution to it, as stated, is wrong. If you aren't given that every card has a number on one side and a color on the other, then you need to check everything which does not satisfy the consequent.

I added "We have cards with a number and color on each face." to the task statement. Hope this makes rules clearer as I could not phrase it better.

The rules were clear before, what has changed is that they are now different rules. You were just wrong before.

You've still got a problem though, now when you ask the reader to verify the rule, you have to explicitly state that they're not trying to verify the first rule.

Oh shit, you are right. Added a completely explicit statement under the problem question. In both situations.

Thank you for pointing this out.

the article says everyone shouted 12 not Three

It said 3 originally.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35688034

I am trying to read the numbers but not sure I can validate whether the title is true or not.

The post is going to be great in figuring out who is reading the content and who is just "reacting"

Millions of dollars flow to an organization headed by a convicted fraudster ... rest assured there are much more efficient ways to divert those funds than workshops

If anything the workshops are legit front.

It is because the person is evidently a con-man.

So it is not as much "interesting" but "illuminating" that supposedly smart people like scientists can be just as easily mislead as the random person responding to an email scam.

I'd say being a confidence man is secondary. Primarily, he seems to have some sort of mental illness. He's paranoid, and seems quite unstable. It's likely he has delusions of grandeur and considers himself a major force behind saving millions or billions from COVID.

I suspect if pushed to replace himself as governance for GISAID (which I suspect he controls alone... I doubt the mentioned technical or governance boards exist) he may well lock off all access to the data that's accumulated or even delete it to prevent someone from taking it from him.

Everybody, without exception, can be conned. Smart people are no more resistant to it than anyone else.

"Smart people are no more resistant to it than anyone else" Absolute statements are very rarely correct.

There is a huge amount of data, going back at least a hundred years, that backs my statement up. But just to be very clear, I'm speaking statistically. You might be the exception to this (but I wouldn't bet on it).

The reason smart people are no more resistant to being conned than anybody else is because conning people is an emotional approach, not an intellectual one.

Any given specific con may not be one that will sucker everybody (in fact, it certainly won't), but con artists tailor their cons to their target. The one a smart person will fall for is different than the one a dumb person will fall for.

As Brian Brushwood says in his excellent podcast "The World's Greatest Con"... "We don't get conned because we're stupid. We get conned because we're human."

It's a statistical statement, so it's very easy for it to be correct.

A subgroup is either more X, less X, the same X to the limits of testing, or has too complicated a relation with X to fit into the above.

The only "absolute" aspects are things like the median and deviation. No positions are being pushed to the extreme.

Even better, "no more" covers both "less" and "same", so it's even easier for a statement like that to be correct.

This is how I interpret the statement: "Smart people are no more resistant to it than anyone else". 'it' = being conned. 'anyone' does include the dumbest people in the world, so, "Smart people are no more resistant to being conned than the dumbest people in the world" which is enough in my opinion to falsify the absolute statement.

I understand that interpretation but I think "anyone else" is supposed to stand in for an everyman, not the most connable person you can find.

Thank you for your explanation.

I agree with your main point.

Is the term "smart people" sufficiently vague that it would need refinement for the level of certainty you're describing?

I don't feel like it does. The more vague you make a category, the easier it is to say it's the same as the general population.

Of course that everyone can be conned,

but smart people are more resistant - for the mere fact that they probably know more and are better versed in the goings of life -

I am surprised that anyone would think otherwise.

> but smart people are more resistant - for the mere fact that they probably know more and are better versed in the goings of life -

Nah, you just run a different playbook. You gotta leverage that arrogance. Like Bankman-Fried.

I think otherwise simply because that's what the data says.

I was talking to a con artist once who took the point even further. He said smart people are actually easier to con for a few reasons.

The smarter a person is, the better they are at working out a chain of reasoning that can "prove" the con isn't a con. Since a con is appealing to human emotion, not logic, you can make a smart person want to believe the con so much that they'll work out the "proof" that it's legit all by themselves.

2

Almost certainly is all about money.

How would you know how the millions of dollars sent to the organization are being spent?

For starters he is impersonating another director of the organization - right there probably pulling in two leadership salaries for a start. How many other fake employees are there?

Then he is most likely the sole decider on how that money is spent ... the article shows that he is a convicted grifter that spent time in jail for fleecing people ...

First the argument that we failed to automate it hence it is expensive is feels specious.

But let's accept it at face value. And now take it all the way. Suppose you reject 15 papers for every single one accepted.

And suppose that accepted pays $3K

So what costs $200 per rejection?

What is that work that you need to put in that adds up to costing $200 per rejection? Or $300 or $500?

In my experience at least half (if not more) of the rejections come right from the editorial desk ... someone spending 5 minutes with the paper.

For a high-prestige journal, you get 50 submissions per 1 published article.

Let's reject 80% of them right off the bat from the editorial desk.

We now have twenty articles left to properly peer review. I had originally said 15, so let's make it 15.

In order to get three peer reviews in an article, you have to email thirty people, because the conversion from "request to peer review" to "get a review" is 10%. So, to get 3 peer reviews, you have to email 30 people, and then maintain a funnel (some people dont respond, some people say maybe, some people say yes, but in a month, etc. etc. then reminders, follow-ups, etc.) until the peer review is done.

$200. Let's say the total cost of an employee is $50 / hour (salary + insurance + taxes). Surely it's plausible that it takes a total of 4 hours, spread across multiple months, to maintain multiple (start at 30 and then drop) threads of communication that eventually get a review to completion.

And I did not include in that calculation anything that even remotely includes any other administrative costs, or, heaven forbid, "how much the CEO makes"

>> In order to get three peer reviews in an article, you have to email thirty people, because the conversion from "request to peer review" to "get a review" is 10%. So, to get 3 peer reviews, you have to email 30 people, and then maintain a funnel (some people dont respond, some people say maybe, some people say yes, but in a month, etc. etc. then reminders, follow-ups, etc.) until the peer review is done.

All that is either handled automatically -sending emails to people who submitted articles on online submission systems- or performed by unpaid editors -soliciting reviews, desk rejection or communicating with authors to request clarifications or respond to questions, chasing reviewers, and so on, and so forth.

But, hey, if the editors in your journal get paid for all this drudgery, then please let me know where to apply.

As I've already pasted elsewhere, you can apply to a publisher that pays its editors at https://www.mdpi.com/editors

It is the safest bet for someone you don't know much about.

Much above reliability (that everyone wants) with tradeoffs (that we are unable to judge for others)

“Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” I find that more compelling than, “Erase the past so we can build again.”

The primary function of culture is to pass knowledge and habits to the next generation. If we remember the past we can build on it — standing on the shoulders of giants, as they say — rather than re-finding old mistakes.

Old movies teach us about (of course) old movies, and that’s interesting for anyone learning the art. Even in very dated art there is often something worth copying, stealing, learning from.

Old movies teach us about ourselves, and in a more visceral way than any other art form. Some of those old movies show cultural context in a way that’s difficult to document — clothes, street signs, mannerisms, slang.

There are already plenty of forces intent upon the destruction of old cultural artifacts, from Egyptian pharaohs breaking monuments of prior rulers, to the burning of the library at Alexandria, to the looting of the Baghdad museums in the Gulf War. That doesn’t even account for the primary killers of old culture: mildew, insects, rot, loss, indifference, repurposing.

It’s a miracle when any old culture survives. It’s a good thing.

Yeah, but we still don't learn from mistakes with well-known history behind them.

For example, I still hear from smart, educated people that we can stop illegal drug use by applying severe punishment to the drug suppliers.

It might be that knowledge of the past is necessary but not sufficient to avoid repeating previous mistakes.

The fact that some people lack knowledge (whether by choice or by accident) is hardly a compelling argument against its utility.

> The primary function of culture is to pass knowledge and habits to the next generation.

At first glance this makes sense, but then if that was really the case, why are we losing cultural artifacts and not protecting them..? Why is copyright law continuing to be weaponized to such an extent..? Maybe what culture “was” has changed and modern culture is just one of ownership and consumerism.

While i somewhat agree with you, i do not share your optimism. We already have lots of information to prevent from repeating errors from the past. Yet, more than i'd like seem to creep out of the shadows right now.

And I'm not even talking about the intrinsic value (or lack thereof) of a cultural item.

Remembering the past does not mean remember every single pointless thing.

Lots of things in the past were not worth the paper they were printed on.

That is a common attitude. Consider also that “worth” is relative. I’d burn the Mona Lisa for heat to keep my family alive, but that doesn’t mean it has no worth.

The writer & engraver William Blake, one of the most influential artists of the last few centuries, was so poor that he had to melt down his copper printing plates once he’d used them. He couldn’t afford to buy more copper. Blake’s technique was unique in all of printing, and a little insane, and fantastically detailed. Having all his original plates would be glorious.

So was it that those plates were worth nothing? Not at all. He had to feed his family.

And note that no one — no one at all — is arguing to “remember every single pointless thing.” That’s a straw man. You’ll have better discussions if you avoid such things.

Imagine that Mona Lisa was lost shortly after its creation ... do you think we would not have something else like Mona Lisa in its place?

Society created the value of Mona Lisa out of nothing. It is not such a unique thing - there are tens of thousands of paintings that could be just as valuable.

OK and saving a bunch of film reels or tens of thousands of Mona Lisas takes a tiny amount of space in a salt mine warehouse or some megabytes or gigabytes taking literally zero space. It's not a zero-sum game where disposing of this stuff makes more room for future artists.

Lots of things have been lost because people didn't consider them worth paper.

What is important ends up being very strange. Ephemera become _very_ important.

For example, how did women care for their hair during Victorian times? Did they wash their hair? What with? Lye soap is really strong, and they didn't have detergent based shampoos.

So, what did they use?

That example came to mind because it was the focus of one of the "live a while in the shoes of someone from time X" on TV. It was a huge thing for the women of the house to be able to care for their hair, and no one knew how it was done!

What we consider useless to keep now may become extremely important to a future historian.

Talk to an archaeologist sometime.

Some of the most valuable finds in terms of learning about past societies have been very ordinary things: the everyday objects that we make, use, and keep says so much about us that doesn't get put into official records.

Archival isn't just for entertainment. It's for research, for history, and for remembering and understanding where we've come from.

There's a line in an old Time Team episode about how Phil Harding [I think] had found one of the most exciting things an archaeologist could find: [Totally deadpan] "A ditch."

Indeed, the things that make good historical evidence are very frequently rather counter-intuitive.

how about the current era, where every human generates thousands of photos per year ... is that a history worth remembering and will it help where we've come from?

I am not saying to not study history, I am saying storing everything is probably worse than storing half of it.

Aside from the pictures of the insides of purses or completely blurry and incomprehensible ones, yeah, it's worth remembering, and it will help understand where we've come from if we can preserve it for the next few centuries. Especially since so much of it is time- and geo-tagged. That kind of dataset is an absolute gold mine for people studying history.

Seriously, talk to some people whose field this is, or at least look up some things by or about them.

"Yellow Journalism" - a contemporary appreciation might have gone a long way

> I wish lots of content disappeared - in the past the passage of time was a way to filter for quality, because we only bothered to preserve something worth preserving.

While I agree that preserving through something through time does take intentional effort I disagree that this acts as a 'quality' filter. What we've received from the past comes to us through a surprising amount of accidents, or close scrapes. Beowulf exists now in millions of copies but the original is a single, damaged codex. Was Beowulf worth preserving more than the other, now lost oral poems of that era? Gilgamesh was popular in the ancient world and was told and retold, yet we still don't have and may never have a complete Gilgamesh. Is it not worth preserving? It may be, through sheer blind luck, that in 10,000 years some trade paperback you have in your home right now will be the only written example of your native tongue. Is all the literature composed in your tongue not worth preserving?

> The current archival processes are something so radically new, we don't yet understand how it shapes society.

Are they so new? And, as to how archival practices shape society, I think you need only look at the European Renaissance to see what a rediscovery of the past will do to a people. Or, consider the rediscovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls on Biblical scholarship in the modern era.

Stoker's widow won a lawsuit and all of the copies of Nosferatu were destroyed. Well, all but one. Every copy today has that source, that accidental source, as its ancestor.

"Bothering to preserve" is a terribly blunt filter. Luck (good: a crazed archivist; bad: a nitrate fire) is too fickle to select for the best.

It isn't just the films themselves: often, we have no sense of a given actor's career. We know that they had a huge impact at the time, but we have only secondhand evidence of it.

Turns out to be a pretty interesting story, and one that I somehow never heard!

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/10/17/dracula-vs-nosfer...

The mistake was letting a widow have a say in anything.

Couple of these "who cares about old stuff" comments on here and I worry that this is the dark side of the AI revolution; once you're hooked up to the infinite content hose, or Bach faucet, you're adrift from culture as a continuous succession of works by humans engaged in conversation with one another.

I don't know that I'd argue - in the case of cultural artifacts - that time is a quality filter. I'm certainly glad that it seems as much good stuff survives as we have, but we also find lots of interesting things after the fact and in spite of ourselves. We make a decent attempt at archiving things of cultural significance so far as we can assess such things in our own time is about as generous as I'd get.

Also it's a weird idea that we should forget things so that someone later can feel special when they do it again. Really weird.

In music, at least, I've reluctantly concluded that time is an almost infallible judge. I'm a violist, and we have very little repertoire, so we're always excited when we discover a viola piece among the works of a forgotten or little-known composer from the 19th century or earlier, but almost invariably, it's either mediocre or outright trash. Zelter, Sitt, Ritter, Zitterbart, Firket, Rougnon, — it sounds like I'm making these names up, but I'm not — mediocrities all. As a professor of mine was fond of pointing out to me, "There's a reason we haven't heard _x_," where _x_ is the new find of the day.

I think that was more true when less stuff was being produced, and the cost of keeping a copy was non-zero.

Those things stopped being true ~ 100 years ago, so now we end up with strange filters. For example, a large number of high-value film masters were lost in a single warehouse fire. (Arguably, shorter copyright terms would have prevented that, since distributors and fans would have had geographically distributed backups that the film studio had little financial incentive to maintain).

Those are all good points.

As a musician, perhaps you can answer this for me.

It seems that people who play a guitar try their hand at composing music. But the people who play violins and other orchestral instruments appear to be satisfied playing other peoples' compositions.

Why is that? Have you tried to compose new viola pieces?

I do compose and make arrangements — and am firmly a mediocrity. In fact, lots of the great composers were violists: Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Britten, Dvorak, and others. Most of them also played a keyboard instrument, which is a useful tool for a composer, but a violist is perfectly placed to understand the orchestra as a whole, and is usually not saddled with too difficult a part, so they can spare some attention.

Also, violinists who composed were very common, but their works tend to display skill rather than profundity. Paganini is a good example: delightful melody, amazing technical displays, but not a lot to sink your teeth into.

I don't play viola or any other orchestra instrument, but do play some guitar, so much of this is just a guess.

I'd guess that a big factor is that guitar is a good solo instrument. It can do melody and chords well. You can get a good full sounding piece of music out of a guitar. Also if you want you can sing while you play so it works great if you want to add words to your composition.

Most orchestra instruments don't really work nearly as well solo. Yes, many classical pieces include solos for various instruments but those solos are meant to be in the context of the orchestra or string quartet or whatever. If all you've got is a lone violinist while that can be beautify it is not going to have the richness that you can get from a lone guitar (or a lone piano). Also for many orchestra instruments singing while playing them might be hard or annoying.

So if I want to try composing for my guitar, I only have to get good enough at composing to compose decent guitar music.

A violist would probably need to get good enough to compose for viola and for at least the rest of a string quartet.

While it's true you cannot sing while playing the trumpet, Herp Alpert could make his trumpet sing!

But still, he played covers of other peoples' songs.

Lots of violin players do composition (and even improvisation!) they just call it a fiddle when they do so!

Less cheekily, the difference you're pointing out is about folk vs classical traditions. Many instruments are strongly associated with one or the other, but the violin is one of few that exists in both.

I think it's a genre thing. I bet you can find plenty of violinists, at least, composing music, in the bluegrass scene, for example.

Instruments that rarely feature as regular parts of more folk-derived genres, sure, probably not so much. Viola, French Horn, that kind of thing.

> Also it's a weird idea that we should forget things so that someone later can feel special when they do it again. Really weird.

What would you think of a service, that when you take a photograph that is beautiful, unique and moving for you and say you want to share it with someone else - would pop in and would should an image just like it - only a better with some additional elements that make it even more breathtaking - taken by someone else and would recommend you to send that

wouldn't you prefer to have your own emotions?

> Every phenomenal photo of a sunset takes away the future generation's credit when recreating an identically phenomenal sunset.

It also takes away future generations' knowledge that such a phenomenal photo can be taken and potentially the means to do so.

It is bullshit because it only works in theory, the big refrigerator will crush the tiny fly ... in reality the fly escapes with ease

the bullshit part refers to just that, pretending that the refrigerator could be an appropriate good solution, when in fact can't actually even perform the task

nitpicky. would you prefer an insect that can't fly away?