“TCP ex Machina: Computer-Generated Congestion Control” (“Although the RemyCCs appear to work well on networks whose parameters fall within or near the limits of what they were prepared for—even beating in-network schemes at their own game and even when the design range spans an order of magnitude variation in network parameters—we do not yet understand clearly why they work, other than the observation that they seem to optimize their intended objective well. We have attempted to make algorithms ourselves that surpass the generated RemyCCs, without success.”)
“Sequence Thinking vs. Cluster Thinking” (False dichotomy—“cluster thinking” is simply “sequence thinking” sans arbitrary restrictions of hypotheses/models, like a cryonics analysis which only uses conjunctions and never disjunctions, so it’s unsurprising that sequence thinking is faster & easier but generally less accurate than cluster thinking; but still interesting.)
He has in mind Yudkowsky’s favourite far future argument, so your statement appers wrong, and thus needlessly dismissive, which I think is why you have been downvoted.
Yeah. It takes a long time to really get going, but then it’s a pretty amazing… essay? history? debunking? critique of propaganda? I’m not even sure how to describe it.
To this day, most Russians think World War II was something that happened primarily in their country and the battles everywhere else in the world were a sideshow.
more than 3⁄4 of German casualties were on the Eastern Front
Article:
In August 1943, for instance, in the hilly countryside around the city of Kursk (about 200 miles south of Moscow), the German and Soviet armies collided in an uncontrolled slaughter: more than four million men and thousands of tanks desperately maneuvered through miles of densely packed minefields and horizon-filling networks of artillery fire. It may have been the single largest battle fought in human history, and it ended—like all the battles on the eastern front—in a draw.
Cocaine Discovered in Egyptian Mummies, Ancient Hebrew Inscribed on a Rock in New Mexico, Ancient Roman Statues in Mexico, A Norse Coin in Maine, and Ancient Japanese Speakers in New Mexico.
I don’t know anything about the rest, but the Maine penny, while certainly Norse (with the caveat that there’s some dispute over its context), could easily have been obtained through trade from the well-known Norse outposts at e.g. L’Anse aux Meadows. Not that baffling.
Short Online Texts Thread
Technology:
“In the Beginning was the Command Line”, Neal Stephenson
Data Compression Explained, Matt Mahoney
“A Pedagogy of Diminishing Returns: Scientific Involution across Three Generations of Nuclear Weapons Science”, Gusterson 2005
“Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk: A Survey”, Sotala & Yampolskiy 2013
“It’s All About The Benjamins: An empirical study on incentivizing users to ignore security advice”, Christin et al (excerpts)
“Visualizing Algorithms” (sorting, maze-drawing)
“how I created 8088 Domination, which is a program that displays fairly decent full-motion video on a 1981 IBM PC”
“Fixing Unix/Linux/POSIX Filenames: Control Characters (such as Newline), Leading Dashes, and Other Problems” (on the nigh-insuperable difficulties of correct filename handling)
“TCP ex Machina: Computer-Generated Congestion Control” (“Although the RemyCCs appear to work well on networks whose parameters fall within or near the limits of what they were prepared for—even beating in-network schemes at their own game and even when the design range spans an order of magnitude variation in network parameters—we do not yet understand clearly why they work, other than the observation that they seem to optimize their intended objective well. We have attempted to make algorithms ourselves that surpass the generated RemyCCs, without success.”)
Ultra-long-term civilizations: planets warmed by neutrinos
Statistics:
“Knowing When to Stop: How to gamble if you must-the mathematics of optimal stopping”
“Model Combination and Adjustment”
“Big Data: New Tricks for Econometrics”, Varian 2014 (Readable overview of some machine learning techniques for economics.)
“If correlation doesn’t imply causation, then what does?”, Nielsen
“Sequence Thinking vs. Cluster Thinking” (False dichotomy—“cluster thinking” is simply “sequence thinking” sans arbitrary restrictions of hypotheses/models, like a cryonics analysis which only uses conjunctions and never disjunctions, so it’s unsurprising that sequence thinking is faster & easier but generally less accurate than cluster thinking; but still interesting.)
Using Repeated Measures & LOESS smoothing to Remove Artifacts from Longitudinal Data (The idea of measures which systematically vary over time terrifies me, but that’s a neat approach: occasionally take calibration samples and fit a curve to control for the bias.)
“The Neutral Model of Inquiry (or, What Is the Scientific Literature, Chopped Liver?)”
Gustav III of Sweden’s coffee experiment
Medicine:
“Who By Very Slow Decay”: end-of-life medical care
Economics:
“How Copyright Keeps Works Disappeared”, Heald 2013
“How bad were the Navigation Acts really?”
“Results of the German and American submarine campaigns of WWII”
The price of the Cold War: ~$12,000 billion?
The price of Apollo: ~$170 billion.
The price of the Manhattan Project: ~$30 billion.
“Should Oregon fund college through equity?”
“Sequence Thinking vs. Cluster Thinking” is pretty obviously Holden expressing annoyance at the lower decile of LessWrong.
He has in mind Yudkowsky’s favourite far future argument, so your statement appers wrong, and thus needlessly dismissive, which I think is why you have been downvoted.
Politics/religion:
Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Graeber 2004 (excerpts)
“A Genome-Wide Analysis of Liberal and Conservative Political Attitudes”, Hatemi et al 2011 (excerpts)
“Growing Up Sexually in Europe”
“Losing the War” (WWII in propaganda vs as experienced)
Basil Zaharoff
“A Filthy History: When New Yorkers Lived Knee-Deep in Trash”
“Bin Laden raid reveals ‘state failure’: Leaked report offers scathing assessment of how al-Qaeda chief was able to evade detection” (and if you believe that...)
“New New Fatherhood in the Inner City: A new book reveals how poor urban dads are reversing gender roles in caring for their children, but not being providers”
Higher education is signaling
“‘Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book’: The new warrior cop is out of control”
“U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement”
“What Can the Middle East Learn From What’s Happening in Qatar?”
“Xhosa cattle-killing movement and famine (1854-1858)”
Psychology:
“A preliminary report of kayak-angst among the Eskimo of West Greenland: a study in sensory deprivation”, Gussow 1963
“Do Rational People Exist?”
“Social Psychology Is A Flamethrower”
“Hikikomori as a Gendered Issue: Analysis on the discourse of acute social withdrawal in contemporary Japan”, Dziesinski 2004 (excerpts)
“Drugs and the Meaning of Life”, Sam Harris
“Fooled twice, shame on who? Problems with Mechanical Turk study samples, part 2”
training murder investigations:
Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death
“1930s: Nutshell studies of unexplained death”
Death in Diorama
“These Gruesome Dollhouse Death Scenes Helped Create Forensic Science”
Losing the War is incredible. Here’s an equally incredible flash animation of the Eastern Front, to counter it’s American bias.
Yeah. It takes a long time to really get going, but then it’s a pretty amazing… essay? history? debunking? critique of propaganda? I’m not even sure how to describe it.
Article:
Reality:
Article:
Reality:
5 Baffling Discoveries That Prove History Books Are Wrong from Cracked. They are:
Cocaine Discovered in Egyptian Mummies, Ancient Hebrew Inscribed on a Rock in New Mexico, Ancient Roman Statues in Mexico, A Norse Coin in Maine, and Ancient Japanese Speakers in New Mexico.
I don’t know anything about the rest, but the Maine penny, while certainly Norse (with the caveat that there’s some dispute over its context), could easily have been obtained through trade from the well-known Norse outposts at e.g. L’Anse aux Meadows. Not that baffling.