Agreed when I first heard the phrase it sounded odd. Maybe they thought it subtly conveyed they would be setting the pace... But again this is something AI would come up with in its awkwardly post hoc sort of way.
Though tbf corporate-speak and AI-slop are both insufferable in similar ways...
No, they also capitalize abbreviations like COVID and PIP.
I remember having a phase as a teen where I didn't capitalize the first letter of sentences because it just seemed redundant. Periods are there; why need another signal that another sentence has started? It was like a redundancy = bad phase.
Somehow, that reminds me: when I was younger and started learning programming, I had a phase where I seemed to hate most optional whitespace that wasn’t indentation. So each line would be indented to the proper level, but the rest of the line would look like this:
This is a perfect analogy. Just as we have coding standards, we have grammar and punctuation rules so that people can effectively communicate with each other.
Anyone who refuses to follow coding standards or punctuation rules is just an asshole. Obviously we relax them based on context - a comment here or text message are different from a blog post which is different from an academic paper. But surely publishing articles/essays on your blog, which you preusmably hope people will read, requires at least some minimal respect for language rules.
Evidently this person doesn't feel that way, so they have to accept (whether they do it consciously or not) that some people are just going to lint themselves away from reading it. Not worth the hassle.
Or to bring it back to the original context... Reducing volatility would be reducing the impact of bad weather on your harvest, absorbing volatility is finding someone to cover your losses. (presumably by giving up some profits on the good years. It's like a financial low pass filter)
Volatility is a natural consequence of weather, blight, etc., etc.
To reduce volatility you would need to actually stabilize the supply of onions.
What futures do is allow traders to shift risk from the future to the present. By pricing that risk, it's possible for people who depend on onions to pay a little more now in exchange for a guarantee about the future.
It's not magically going to make onions less volatile (although high risk prices can spur investment which might) but it can reduce disruptions caused by volatility.
The classic example of this is futures on jet fuel which allow airlines to weather random wars in the middle east, OPEC shenanigans, etc. Ticket prices are higher this way, but the existential threat of being forced to cancel a bunch of flights is gone.
For speculators yes. But for a farmer and the consumer of the goods they would rather lock in a margin for their goods and run their business than risk guessing what the price will be at harvest time or consumption time. It’s called hedging.
How many farmers do you imagine are in this thread?
And consumers neither lock in margins nor run a business because consumers buy at retail…
Ok charitably, maybe you use “consumer” in a special sense of businesses that consume raw materials such as owners of onion ring factories. In those cases, future prices (as opposed futures prices) are typically negotiated directly into contracts with producers of those commodities…and how many of those are in this thread?
In the vast majority of cases, futures are traded speculatively and physical delivery of goods and chattles is an extreme exception.
People are willing to lose a small but predictable amount of money to avoid occasionally and unpredictably losing a massive amount of money. The former is a loss they can plan for and absorb. The latter might kill their business.
Traders are often happy to take the other side of that trade because they can trade against many counterparties, collect a small premium from each one, and try to ensure their counterparties won’t all fail in a correlated way.
You may have liabilities or income that exist outside of financial markets e.g. if I have 500t of wheat due to be harvested I might want to hedge enough to guarantee I can pay my staff - ive locked in the price of wheat, I might make less money as a result but my risk is lower.
Like if CERN published the discovery of the Higgs boson with 99.9997% certainty, but refusing to tell you how they calculated that number, or what equipment they used and how they calibrated it, in order to prevent other labs from copying their methods.
Or like a machine learning lab claiming SOTA on a benchmark, beating a well-known method that they re-implemented, possibly with bugs, on their private dataset, for millions of compute. But you don't get the source to check, and they don't release any intermediate results or ablation experiments. Aka, from the outside you can't distinguish it from corporate marketing.
Equivalent? In the analogy of the math or physics results it would be a mental model in someone's brain that you can't access or verify. You just hope it's true
I think the idea does: the point is that closed-source software isn't useful for anyone else than the (copyright)owner. In scientific standards, that is. Similar to esoteric and cryptic theories that resist accessible explanations.
The simple truth many have come to realize is a European leadership that insists mass migration is not a problem and head-in-the-sand denies the critical importance of cultural unity and shared identity for the maintenance of stable and liberal democracies is a much clearer and present danger than Russia.
War a nation can recover from, but from an erosion of cultural unity and shared identity it cannot.
I like that you said genocide and not me. But what I like more is enjoying the long slide into irrelevancy of opinions like the one you expressed in your original comment. I look forward to the day we can have constructive discussions about capital investment and migration which feature no mention of such puerile and ignorant notions of ethnicity and nationalism.
They're not. Rather, the organizers of war – typically rich and powerful people in or close to London or Washington – use their propaganda networks to play these popular cards of culture and identity. Don't confuse the cause and the means.
You're not totally wrong but you do underestimate the power of an organized Europe with freedom of movement and commerce. I'm not saying you're getting this wrong but many people reading these comments take seriously that nominal US per capita GDP is an unequivocal signal that we've got it right. A lot of that signal goes away on the basis of a PPP comparison, and then even more goes away when you compare things like healthcare costs. And on top of all of that Europe can point to superior quality of life outcomes. If that GDP number doesn't translate into quality of life, what good is all of that money?
European, living within the EU, who loves the idea of the conmon market.
But it is badly implemented and in need of drastic improvements. Just see recent comments made by EU President Von der Leyen and head of the ECB Christine Lagarde on how the biggest obstacles to the EU isn't US tarrifs but internal tarrifs.
Counted up they effectively make goods twice as costly as they should be.
A true common goods and finance market in the EU would be a force to reckon with.
We’re seeing a return to multilateral regional hegemony. Russia, China, India, a new Persia, Israel and Turkey duking it out in Asia. The edges of those conflicts trying to bring war back to Europe. And America getting potentially balanced by China and Europe in the Americas, with the Pacific theatre figuring out its own balancing game plan.
The wild card being this will be the first time the world has entered this sort of unstable state since the invention of nuclear weapons. I expect to see a total failure of non-proliferation and the first nuclear civil war in my lifetime, if not the first nuclear war of territorial conquest. (I do not expect to see the first nuclear extermination.)
This seems right to me. Nuclear proliferation could very well end up being the most consequential legacy of this administration. Their malicious incompetence in this area has dimmed the outlook for humanity to a material degree.
The amount of countries with nukes is going to increase dramatically in the medium term. That will mean exponentially more opportunities for a nuclear conflict to break out. I think there is a very good chance we see a nuclear war in the next couple decades, and the odds are dramatically higher than they were pre-trump.
The only spot I sort of disagree is that I think it's an uncomfortably short hop from a moderately sized nuclear war to a global nuclear war, and I think the chances of the latter are uncomfortably high now as well.
> America getting potentially balanced by China and Europe in the Americas
I can't figure out a way to parse this sentence that makes sense. Are you saying that "Europe" will "balance" the USA in the Americas? As in, European influence will counteract US influence in the Americas?
Would assume it's in reference to things like the EU offering associate membership to Canada, or China's trade deals with Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, etc.
> European influence will counteract US influence in the Americas?
Yes. If you’re Canada or Mexico or frankly anyone else in the Americas, you probably don’t want all your weapons systems to be dependant on American supply chains. And then if you think about it, you probably don’t want all your energy imports dependent on Washington’s noblesse. Et cetera.
American exceptionalism was built on the trust the world put in us getting so unilaterally powerful without being balanced.
Debt is easy to deal with for a sovereign. Just dilute the currency. That will obviously happen before a debt crisis is allowed to materialize. And so the rich will get richer.
The real problem is not the debt, but the social instability caused by the measures taken to address the debt.
This would also make countries that constituionally prevent that level of debt look smart. At least if we see the state as an institution that should serve its citizens. If taking on debt requires making your citizens worse off to the point that it causes social instability that didn't serve them very well
If you see the state as an institution to allow the rich and powerful to extract resources from the rest of the population, then it's all fine. Just take out some debt to give a contract to your nephew, then pay it back by devaluing the currency
If people want to collaborate, they will. If collaboration makes people more effective, they will want to collaborate. The novelty of any new technology is exciting and disrupting to existing habits but as the years pass we will reflect on what works and what doesn't. At least, those who are willing to reflect and adapt. Humans have a knack for this sort of thing...
>"While it may be technically infeasible to completely prohibit the use of automated tools to perform indiscriminate solution extraction, I believe that we can still designate many classes of problems as being desirous of a careful analysis that not only solves the problem, but identifies insights from the solution process, and learn more about the difficulty landscape for nearby problems, and for which raw solutions without such analysis would be of negligible or even negative value for these purposes."
Not sure I agree with this. AI generated proofs can still be analyzed and mined for useful insights. I suppose he's saying the process of banging our heads against the wall on a problem can itself yield useful insight? But what is stopping us from analyzing a proof after the fact. And if we can generate many different versions of a proof that should help us develop a much deeper understanding of the problem than we would have without being able to perceive the "proof landscape"...
The point of mathematics is not to prove results. It is to build conceptual thinking about mathematics. Important problems are important because in order to solve them we have to build concepts tying different things together.
We're not searching for answers. We're searching for insights. Trying to understand the problem causes us to draw the connections and find those insights.
AI gives us answers. But it doesn't help us build those insights. AI has a complete mastery of existing human insights. But doesn't build new ones from its own experience. In a real way, it does not find the opportunity to really learn.
So it tackles problems and either solves them or not. If solved, we now have an answer. If not, it's too hard for humans.
The issue I see with a handed-over proof is tunnel-vision: you explore only the understanding of the proof.
Without a proof, your exploration branches out much further, in directions that could seem fruitless, but may uncover new understandings that are now "hidden" because the handed-over proof drastically lowered the incentives to find them.
I think you're misunderstanding the point of math problems. Mathematics is as much a process as it is a result. This is why even from early on, relatively rudimentary mathematics questions you are graded by your capacity to correctly achieve the desired process to the answer than getting the answer correct. The risk here is that AI generated proofs removes the process part of mathematics, where actually interesting concepts live (because then you can apply novel concepts to other unsolved problems and then thereby unlock new concepts that way...) Sure you can kind of try to reverse-engineer it but you lose the entire intuition and "we tried applying it in X, Y, Z ways and it didn't work" intuition, because even the non-working process can teach you about how not to apply the working process to novel problem spaces.
Basically: Tasting a delicious soup doesn't tell you how to layer the flavors, but if you want to be a good chef, you better be learning flavors more than you learn dishes!
- If you have only a fuzzy idea of how to get to your travel destination, wrong turns and alternate routes may reveal sights and places you'd never have encountered without that wandering.
- If your GPS directs you straight to your travel destination, you are now where you wanted to be but missed out on the exploration. This is the sort of consequences the AI math proofs have.
STEM research thrives on that side exploration and unearthing unexpected things along the way. James Burke's famous documentary Connections spends the middle episodes talking about the unexpected directions that exploration has taken science. It's very hard to credibly make the case that this sort of meandering exploration is not valuable.
He's saying that in such a scenario, almost all of the value is located in the analysis and just dumping the proof has "negligible or even negative value". (The negative value would occur in the cases where the proof doesn't contain enough information to reconstruct what insights would have led a person to it.)
Though tbf corporate-speak and AI-slop are both insufferable in similar ways...
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