Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.
-Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
I've often seen this in traders who get outrageously successful with a particular strategy at a particular point in time. Their brain overfits seeing that pattern at times when it really doesn't apply. The smart ones manage to get out before losing everything, the not so smart ones end up where they were before the success. It is like a lottery winner who 'reinvests' all his winnings back into lotteries.
You receive a message from an an alien civilization 1000ly away that they have started a deterministic process that will shoot a death ray at earth in 500 years. Should you act on the information that there's doom heading for earth right now or not?
Nothing can travel faster than light. If the Death ray travels at the speed of light, then the 1,000 years it takes the message to get to us, and the 1,000 years it takes the Death Ray to get to us are exactly the same, so cancel each other out. So it would still be 500 years between message and Death Ray.
If someone dropped a ball from a tall building with a message that said “in 5 minutes, I am dropping a ball filled with explosives”, you would still have the same 5 minutes if the building was 5 stories tall or 200 stories. The message and the danger have to travel the same amount of spacetime to get to you.
> So it would still be 500 years between message and Death Ray.
Yes of course, but you'd still act as if the death-ray is on its way, i.e. firing it already happened 500 years before you received the message. The systems may be causally separated but as long as each follows near-deterministic processes we can still calculate its state forward.
In the case of betelgeuse we could hypothetically, if we had sufficiently accurate models, derive from observations that it'll explode in 100 years (relative to the observed state) which given the separation means the light of that event would only be 100ly away which in a sense does mean the event already happened.
We can't be certain, perhaps a rogue black hole might swallow it in the meantime, but for casual conversation "predictable thing effectively already happened and its results are on the way" is good enough, and if one one had to worry about GRBs aimed at earth even prudent.
I see what you are saying but I think I still disagree. We can make predictions about what will happen in the future but we don’t know. Adding the separation of lightyears seems to make people talk as if they do know what will happen in the future, which we don’t.
We don’t know the Death Ray is on its way. Maybe a new alien was elected Supreme Gbectravic and canceled the project. We are guessing what will happen in 500 years, whether we are looking at our sun or a star 1,000 light years away.
And since light is the universal speed limit for all things, including information, then for casual conversation when we observe something is when it is effectively happening.
> Adding the separation of lightyears seems to make people talk as if they do know what will happen in the future, which we don’t.
Perhaps a distinction is that we like to think that at least in principle we can influence almost any future events that are causally downstream of previous events on Earth. Even someone with very lethal radiation poisoning (alive but predictably dead) might just be one hypothetical stem cell transplant treatment away from defying the previous odds. So we don't treat those as set in stone.
Something causally separated on the other hand is seen as a mechanistic process. And there are very few things that would stop a star from becoming a supernova.
Betelgeuse is approximately 650 to 700 light-years away from Earth, so if you consider a few 300 then that means we have at least ~350 years to continue studying it.
Terrible shitshow all around. They could have just played it cool and waved their hands like they were juts enjoying a show and got a it carried away. Though it might be difficult to explain them going to a Coldplay concert to their spouses.
Allowing men to set a BMI or weight preference would be business-wise far more sound decision. Their userbase is anyway men dominated and they are pretty much the entire revenue source.
But that imbalance means they have to cater to women to get them to sign up, or men won't have a reason to pay for the service. And if you start asking for weight or BMI, there goes most of your already-too-small female membership.
I feel it is not just about bigger but also about what all is supported in the current brain that is potentially not as useful anymore or useful for intelligence as such. The evolutionary path for our brain has an absolutely major focus on keeping itself alive and based on that keeping the organism alive. Humans will often take potentially sub-optimal decisions because the optimal decision may have a very low probability of death for themselves or those genetically related to them. In some sense, similar to a manned fighter jet vs a drone, where in one case a large amount of effort and detail is expended on keeping the operating envelope consistent with keeping the human alive, whereas a drone can expand the envelope way more because the human is no longer a concern. If we could jettison some of the evolutionary baggage of the brain, it could potentially do so much more even within the same space.
Could also be Covid sequelae showing up. Many blue states significantly delayed opening up schools post Covid and the effects are only being apparent now.
The politicians that matter most are the marginally elected representatives for their party, and they care about the marginal voter in their district. The median Republican does not matter when it comes to impeachment and removal. What matters is about one standard deviation in views left of the median.
Videos without metadata is not as useful. Google also has details on which videos are watched where. Which parts do people skip. All the videos that are blocked for various reasons. The performance of videos with humans over time and so on. They can focus on videos with signals that indicate that humans prefer those videos or clips.
I've often seen this in traders who get outrageously successful with a particular strategy at a particular point in time. Their brain overfits seeing that pattern at times when it really doesn't apply. The smart ones manage to get out before losing everything, the not so smart ones end up where they were before the success. It is like a lottery winner who 'reinvests' all his winnings back into lotteries.