1. Patrick Collison on Charlie Rose.
2. “They showed me that they have an assassination list, and Paul Simon was at the top of it.”
3. A techie makes apps to randomize his life: “Max lived a randomized life for the better part of two years. In fact, he went global. He created an app that chose the places he would live, travel and eat. When he traveled, he continued using the Facebook events app to find random activities.”
5. Do we live in a very large void? Speak for yourself, I say.
3. “At first, he was nervous: What if people wouldn’t let him in? But, as a kind of unassuming white guy, he actually didn’t have this problem. (And Max acknowledges this privilege.) Once Max explained how and why he had arrived at these events, hosts usually welcomed him, often with only a few questions asked. Most of the time, people were taken by the idea of Max expanding his bubble.”
I know a very attractive blond woman who travels the world solo. Once we were with a group and she held forth “everyone should do it, people are so friendly, they invite you into their homes.” The surrounding group of less attractive people looked around nervously. She turned to me and said “why don’t they believe me?” I did not burst her bubble.
Ah a bitter ugly person- now your politics make sense.
Probably Ray would pick up on the fact that I was with the blond.
Blond = dude. Blonde = hottie. Or maybe you’re more transgressive than you imagine.
I did not know that was a gendered word, I just thought there was spelling variation. Weird.
Only shallow people cara about attractiveness.
* care
It would be nice, but there are three factors. While spiritual values may lay deeper, we are biological creatures. Second, of course, we look for clues in attire, grooming, and physique about group membership. Third, there may be ages where it is more normal to explore and experience.
The gentleman in the story might be fortunate in all three aspects.
It may make sense for a Crips’ guy who fears having wandered into Bloods’ territory or for a Shia guy who fears having wandered into Sunni territory being worried about attire (but Imdoubt “attractiveness” has a place here as something to look for), but it does little to explain the success of the “attractive blonde”. What if she were an ugly brunette?
And we may be biological creatures, but, as Mr. William Shakespeare pointed out: “Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners. So that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many—either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry—why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost’rous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts. “
What do economists call it, normative vs descriptive?
A “claim” is statement that asserts something that could be either true or false. A DESCRIPTIVE claim is a claim that asserts that such-and-such IS the case. A NORMATIVE claim, on the other hand, is a claim that asserts that such-and-such OUGHT to be the case. Normative claims make value judgments.
While I agree with you in the normative sense, in the descriptive examples abound.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268115001675
Saying only shallow people care about attractiveness was a descriptive claim. Saying people should not be like that is a normative claim.
If that’s the way you want to define your terms. I’d think of us more as pants wearing monkeys, mammals, who sometimes manage to rise above subconscious bias. Did you even notice avoiding eye contact in the grocery aisle? Probably not. Your monkey brain took care of that as you composed responses for MR.
My brain does not xompose responses while I am at the grocery because I do not take my computer with me.
I do approve of the effort though, and could see variations of it working for most people.
If thats the case, only shallow people are honest.
Of course not.
rayward aka samuel rayburn
The Rayburn Room, a meeting room at The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.
He coined the term “Sun Belt” while strongly supporting the construction of Route 66.
Rayburn always insisted on paying his own expenses, even going so far as to pay for his own travel expenses when inspecting the Panama Canal
The old man was a pro athlete himself, playing baseball with Ty Cobb and Jim Thorpe. Cobb, a hard drinker like Mantle, also visited the tavern. The dugout was also one of those quintessential smoke-filled rooms, where House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson decided which bills would become law
Let’s be honest, a lot of his experiences must have sucked. He drove for three hours to a Christmas party at a retired psychologist’s house in Fresno? Referring to your earlier Bloomberg column, the choices he made sound terrible compared to all the alternatives available to a Google employee in San Francisco.
An improved algorithm would probably have some sort of cost/utility function, normalize it to turn it into a probability distribution, and then select events according to this distribution. That way the high-utility events would be the most likely to be selected.
I’m pretty skeptical of any algorithm involving a cost/utility/objective function. It’s hard to optimize something as complex as a life trajectory without falling into local minima and the “loops” I mention in the article.
Randomness, for me, is something like a first-order approximation of the “novelty search” strategy from evolutionary AI:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI
It’s not always pleasant in the short-term but it puts me into contact with all sorts of interesting novelty that I would miss if I was trying to optimize for some “best” trajectory.
It was an experiment. He did not know what would happen. Maybe it would be something wonderful he never would have found otherwise. Somebody had to do the experiment. I suppose Margaret Mead didn’t always enjoy her fieldwork.
The barbeque ribs at the KKK cross-burning were incredible! And the cornbread! Who knew the food was so good?
She travels fastest who travels alone.
“One night, he got to drink white Russians with some Russians. Another, he attended acroyoga (as in, acrobatics + yoga). A community center pancake breakfast. A networking event for young professionals. The algorithm chose; Max attended.
Most of these events were something that the nonrandomized Max would never have thought to try.”
I had to laugh at this last sentence, those sound like exactly the things a character like Max would try anyway.
5: I thought we lived far out in an uncharted backwater.
#4. Oops! …I did it again
+1
Russian malware also posts on MR.
I wonder how they define a ‘bot’? Is it a human paid $1 a day to post pro-Putin comments, or a computer program that’s completely automated?
Is it Mulp? Because he really hates Reagan. Perhaps the Russians resent him winning the Cold war?
#5 “Do we live in a very large void? ”
Some people live, some people don’t. Some countries are vast wastelands.
#2: I thought it was going to be about Art Garfunkel. Disappointing.
@#2 – assassinations in Africa were rather common in the 1960s: Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, a better than even chance that Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane was shot down, and numerous others in Angola, Mozambique, South Africa and pretty much all of Africa. Some of it sponsored by the USSR and the USA as part of the Cold War, most of it local.
#2…We had a few here as well, Ray.
Something very strange is going on in that buses v trains article. Surely the most desirable equilibrium is to have robust options in both bus and train travel, so people can choose the mode of transit that works best for them on a given trip?
Even if one runs at a loss because the other is clearly better?
#3 The future is now. Some people are getting so organized and efficient at reducing negative personal interaction risk that they are purposely introducing risk randomness generators into their lives….call it “SlingsArrows TM”. Now that god is dead why not replace its ability to throw you a curveball by capturing it in app form, albeit with the ability to say no if you just don’t feel like it today.
There’s what you know, and there’s what you think you know. You can only structure your interactions to limit negative risk based on what you think you know. Depending on how much overlap there is between what you know and what you think you know, you could be missing out on a lot of net positive interactions.
I made the above somewhat tongue-in-cheek and sarcastically. I agree with you.
When do American buses outcompete trains?
Going down to Florida
https://youtu.be/D0rFBU7pVL4
#2 Is is just me or does Stevie come off like an incredibly arrogant prick here? He projects the typical liberal arrogance that we all know and love, so sure of himself and his message that he dare not evaluate whether HE was wrong. Mandela WAS a communist. Does he not see that it’s not just civil rights vs no civil rights, but a continuous proxy war between revolutionary communists and reactionaries? I’m sure Stevie wouldn’t think twice about the righteousness of BLM and the Black Panthers, or any terrorists that are working to overthrow the terrible hegemony.
Yes – both sides were terrible in the South African civil war, and arguably the terrorist tactics of the ANC and their like, and being supported by Russia, significantly lengthened the Apartheid period. There were plenty of people in South Africa who didn’t join in the violence and just wanted a more civil society. They were the ones to support.
6. Some weird claims in the article:
– “Amtrak’s greatest advantage lies in serving intermediate stops.” Wait what and why? Isn’t it an order of magnitude easier for a bus line to add an intermediate stop on a route if it’s judged to be a competitive advantage?
– Buses supposedly beat trains on longer, but not shorter, trips. This makes no sense. For me, a 1-2 hour bus trip is tolerable, a 4 hour bus trip is just about unbearable, a 6 hour bus trip is hellacious. And once you are talking about a ~300 mile trip (Boston-Philadelphia, LA-Vegas, LA-SF), air travel emerges as a competitor and more obviously dominates buses than trains.
Sorry, posted this as a new thread accidently:
To your first comment, I think the point is that it’s faster for trains to make intermediate stops, like Wilmington in the NE corridor. A bus has to get off the highway and into the city, it can cost 30 minutes. But of course you’re right that it’s easier for busses to make “custom” routes (like Vamoose that goes from midtown to Bethesda, but doesn’t make any other stops). To the second point, not sure how much flying dominates anymore, particularly if one is flying at a high volume time. Being in the air is better than being on a bus or train, but airports are usually further out of city centers (imagine getting to LaGuardia or JFK vs Penn Station as a New Yorker), plus there aren’t any security related slowdowns, which are becoming exceedingly unpleasant. I would only fly 400+, unless I’m billing the travel time.
I don’t think they are commenting on whether it is easier for a train vs bus to have intermediate stops (and I’m not totally sure who wins that argument). They seem to just be saying that Amtrak has intermediate stops and buses do not. So, if you’re going between two midsize towns, you may not even have a bus. Amtrak is going to get that business.
To your first comment, I think the point is that it’s faster for trains to make intermediate stops, like Wilmington in the NE corridor. A bus has to get off the highway and into the city, it can cost 30 minutes. But of course you’re right that it’s easier for busses to make “custom” routes (like Vamoose that goes from midtown to Bethesda, but doesn’t make any other stops). To the second point, not sure how much flying dominates anymore, particularly if one is flying at a high volume time. Being in the air is better than being on a bus or train, but airports are usually further out of city centers (imagine getting to LaGuardia or JFK vs Penn Station as a New Yorker), plus there aren’t any security related slowdowns, which are becoming exceedingly unpleasant. I would only fly 400+, unless I’m billing the travel time.
#5 Does a ‘larger than average void’ increase or decrease the probability that we are living in a simulation?
“Are we living in a simulation?” All true facts decrease the probability; mistaken statements do not increase the probability, but do not decrease the probability………(well you asked) ……………………………………………………………
Cosmology is an interesting field. For decades there was a textbook by a guy called Harrison who lived in New England ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
pause …. living in cloudy New England and being an astronomer is sort of like living in New Jersey and being a volcanologist……………….well they did have a nice observatory in Boston……………………………………………………….
But Professor Harrison’s book put words together so well that it outsold all the other cosmology textbooks. There was some math, too, but nothing so complicated that you could not explain it in a paragraph or two without a single number or mathematical symbol. Interestingly, real physics – that is, the things that happen in the world that are, taken cumulatively, what we call physics – also do not use number symbols or mathematical symbols. In this sense, a physics textbook with no numbers or mathematical symbols has more in common with real material physics, that is the things that happen in the world that are what we call physics, which of course happen as they happen without the use of numbers or mathematical symbols, than does a physics textbook with lots of numbers and mathematical symbols …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Anyway, we do not live in a simulation. You would have been told by now – there have been persons smarter than me, much much smarter – one of them would have told you if we did. The ambiguous pronoun problem was figured out long ago, they did not tell you that,did they – the dopy look and the non-alive eyes of a badly programmed AI are already understood, nobody talks about that, do they – Wallace Stevens figured things out in his last few weeks, God bless his heart, and someone would tell you if we did live in a simulation. You can take my word for it. I would have told you, if nobody else would have………………………………………we do not live in a “void” by the way, it is just sometimes quiet at the beach ************************ here we are back in 1977, spending the day at the sandy beach where the waves of the North Atlantic go in and out, being waves, and once in a while the waves that were and the waves that are about to be join each other in the act of making no current noise. That is not a “void”. Everybody who was there knows that…even the chihuahua resting on the blue towel on the yellow with a tinge of garnet sand – I remember – and the chihuahua lived all the way to 1995, never forgetting that day on the beach; living chihuahua days every day and napping every day, and while napping dreaming not the way you and I dream but dreaming that one was still a chihuahua, that one was continuing to think grateful and energetic chihuahua thoughts, as if one were not a dreaming chihuahua, but a waking chihuahua. Years and years of that! *******How can one even wonder if this is a simulation, knowing how chihuahuas live and dream, even the chihuahuas one remembers from those now might-as-well-be-ancient beaches?
to be clear, I was referring to the “first” ambiguous pronoun problem, the one that tripped up poor L.W. but had already been figured out, not the current one that so vexes so many of us (well, not me, exactly, but us; your – or one’s, to be more accurate – basic “us”, that is).
references, for my niece and nephew in the Bay Area and my old college friend in Manhattan , and the one or two other people that might care – “all true facts”…. that was Pascal. Some Berkeley as well. “Cosmology is” the Harrison textbook on cosmology had some second semester calculus, but not much more, and was widely used in “Cosmology” courses for several decades; the author had a decent prose style. “You would have been told by now” – basic theology. God created us and communicates with us. “The ambiguous pronoun problem” is actually the “Pronoun Disambiguation Problem” and refers to the so far intractable problem that pronouns require more simultaneous context than parallel processing language recognition tools have been designed for – this problem, I think, will no longer be a problem in a few years, but for now there have been no definitively and repeatedly successful algorithms, at least not that I know about. “Wallace Stevens”: the fantastically gifted poet lived a long life of hard work, kindness to his family, marital chastity, and artistic probity. In his last few weeks, according to reliable sources, he knew he was going to die and was not sad about that, as every day he became more and more convinced that Jesus is his Savior. “we do not live in a “void” – Vera Rubin tried mapping the cosmos, there are voids and then there are voids. Look at a map – there is no competent map of the cosmos that puts us in one of the voids that are clearly and without a doubt voids. “quiet at the beach” several of the beaches on the South Shore of Long Island have a vague reddish tint, viewed in almost any slant of sunlight, from the numerous grains of garnet strewn among the less rare grains of non-garnet sand. I am not sure about the numbers. “Chihuahuas” – they actually do dream, as far as I can tell after an amazing number of years studying dogs, that they are chihuahuas. I may dream that I can, if not fly, at least jump and decide not to land right away, contrary to the laws of gravity: a chihuahua dreams of being a chihuahua, and of having friends who like chihuahuas. For the lucky chihuahuas who live in a good home, that means they basically dream about being awake, and being themselves; for the unlucky chihuahuas….I would say what I know but I don’t know you and do not want to make you cry.
Bus vs. train:
1. commuter buses can outperform trains because their routing is more flexible. Trains mostly follow rights-of-way that were laid out in the 19th century; acquiring new right-of-way and building in it is (in most metro areas, anyway) insanely expensive.
Thus, buses can and do pick up commuters in or near the subdivisions in which they live, whereas ancient commuter rail systems not only require a trip to the train station but most ran out of parking long, long ago.
2. Flexibility of routing enables buses to provide transportation to special, limited-duration events.
3. Bus lines began life in the early 20th century as a low-cost alternative to passenger trains and, despite massive subsidies for trains and relatively paltry subsidies for bueses, they still serve as … low cost alternatives to passenger trains.
4. The competitive advantage of trains is the dedicated, private right of way. It’s this which enables trains to (sometimes) offer faster travel times than buses (or cars). BUT this is only true when the train leaves from somewhere close to where you are, and goes someplace close to where you want to go!
5. The competitive advantage of buses is that they don’t need dedicated right-of-way, and this plus smaller vehicle size makes it economically practical to extend bus service to many places where building rail infrastructure could never be cost-justified.
6. What would it cost to join the tracks at Grand Central Station with those at Penn Station?
You can’t make me take the train to work, because neither my home nor work is near a commuter train.
You could convince me to take a bus to work if it was nice. Come to my house and pick me up, along with other people in my neighborhood, then drop us off at our workplaces nearby each other. Even if it takes longer, I can use the bus’s WiFi to read up on my email.
Away from the coasts, the gaps in trains service are amazing.
Houston-Dallas? No.
Cleveland-Columbus-Cinci-Louisville? No. Columbus and Louisville have no train service at all.
Los Vegas? Not served at all.
Nashville? No service.
“service” to Phoenix is thirty miles away because the railway is old and can’t be moved.
But, you know, it doesn’t matter much. Buses are faster, cheaper, run more frequently and run closer to schedule.
There aren’t going to be enough people to justify building a rail line between two cities a few hours apart that don’t have decent public transport. But there can easily be enough to justify a bus line.
The odd thing about the bus v. train article is that they mostly ignored the most important fact. They mentioned that bus riders may be trying to save money, one gets the idea 20-30%. In reality, the bus is about 1/3 the price of the train.
That 1/3 is after the train gets a subsidy.
The antiplanner recently said: “Airfares average 14 cents a passenger mile, intercity bus fares average about 10 cents, and driving averages 25 cents. But Amtrak fares average 34 cents per passenger mile, and the high-speed Acela collects 93 cents a passenger mile. Subsidies to Amtrak average 22 cents per passenger mile, compared with 2 cents for air and auto/bus travel. (Amtrak claims the Acela makes money, but that’s only by not counting maintenance costs or that pesky $50 billion maintenance backlog in the Northeast Corridor.) That means (including subsidies) rail travel is twice as expensive as driving, three times as expensive as air travel, and more than four times as expensive as intercity buses.”
http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=13299
Trains were fun, but it’s time to move on.
Most US cities are just not dense enough for trains to make sense. Trains are great for city to city travel in European, Japanese and most Chinese cities because they are dense enough that once you arrive at the main train station you can either take short public transport or even walk to most destinations. Creating such a public transport system in all cities in the US is impossible now, and like any network system, only becomes valuable when it is mostly operating. A public transport system has to be seamless end to end. Maybe Uber and the like will change this somewhat in favor of the train for the US. It is hugely more appealing to me to take an Uber with the destination, cost and name of the driver known ahead of time, than to jump into some random cab/driver in a shoddy dirty smelly cab at the station (if there are any) and then try to explain your address and hope he knows where it is. That is what drives people away from trains in the US.
Dark energy is the phlogiston theory of our time.
#2…As opposed to prison guards, say? Or people around the world openly supporting apartheid? That’s a weird list.
With all due respect for Steve Van Zandt, Paul Simon wins this one. Graceland is one heckuva work of art. And while I love Bruce Springsteen and sit square in the middle of his demographic and cultural sweet spot, I have to concede that Paul Simon is by far the greater artist. With every year that passes, Simon’s early work continues to sound uncanny, contemporary and original, while Springsteen’s grows murky with an antique sheen. In any case, the idea that whether or not foreign pop stars ignore or comply with boycotts make any difference to the fate of a nation like South Africa is on a level with Steve Jobs’ belief that he could stop his raging cancer by changing his diet.
fwiw, I was a teenager at the time, but first became aware of apartheid because of the musicians involved.