reste

In medio stat virtus, in some instances with high variance. || Currently: PM - Experimentation & User-Response Models @zalando

[Marco Piani 🇮🇹🇨🇦 @Marco_Piani]

@snoopydev99 People should realize that translating standard deviations into how probable an event is depends on the properties of the distribution, which is far from being a normal distribution in this case.

[reste @therestofeden]

Also shows how beautiful football is, because goals are rare and with high variance, a surprise result is always around the corner and David can beat Goliath!

[reste @therestofeden]

Living in Berlin means I took interested in following Turkey during the World Cup. After yesterday’s game I thought “what would be the probability of not winning with a +1.85 xG difference?” and used Perplexity to help me.

[reste @therestofeden]

Was a fun exercise in any case and I had fun using Perplexity step by step, as Karpathy said offloading my thinking but not my understanding.

[reste @therestofeden]

@Iannis2003 @AleEquilibrium Ma infatti… o mi perdo qualcosa?

[Pablo Malo @pitiklinov]

¿Tú con quién estás? ¿Con Harari o con Henrich?

Joseph Heath critica en este artículo el relato de la evolución humana que presenta Yuval Noah Harari en Sapiens por ser anticientífico y obsoleto. Lo contrasta con la teoría mucho más sólida y actual, según él, de Joseph Henrich (The Secret of Our Success), que invierte completamente el orden explicativo.

Heath identifica cuatro capacidades únicas que diferencian a los humanos:
-Inteligencia superior (incluyendo razonamiento abstracto y matemático).
-Lenguaje complejo y gramatical.
-Cooperación ultrasocial (con no parientes).
-Cultura acumulativa (transmisión y mejora continua de conocimiento y artefactos).

Cualquier teoría seria debe explicar cómo evolucionaron estos rasgos en un tiempo evolutivo muy corto (Homo erectus apareció hace unos 2 millones de años o así).

La secuencia de Harari sigue el orden clásico: Inteligencia → Lenguaje → Cooperación → Cultura. Pero Heath le ve muchos problemas:

-El cerebro grande es muy costoso (energía y mortalidad en el parto). No está claro qué beneficio compensatorio habría tenido en la sabana.
-El lenguaje como “mutación casual” (Tree of Knowledge) tiene problemas graves: el primer mutante no tendría con quién hablar (problema de arranque).
-Sin cooperación previa, el lenguaje sería “cheap talk” (habla barata) y poco creíble.
-La cooperación no surge fácilmente de la inteligencia (teoría de juegos y dilema del prisionero lo demuestran).
-La cultura no es solo “más gente trabajando junta”; es evolución cultural acumulativa.

Así que Heath prefiere la secuencia que propone Henrich (siguiendo a Boyd y Richerson): Cultura → Cooperación → Lenguaje → Inteligencia. La historia sería más o menos lo siguiente. El ajuste inicial que lo arranca todo fue una mayor capacidad de imitación fiel: los humanos copian comportamientos complejos con gran precisión, incluso sin entenderlos del todo, a diferencia de los chimpancés. Esta capacidad permitió el surgimiento de la evolución cultural acumulativa, es decir, que las herramientas, técnicas y conocimientos mejoren y se transmitan de generación en generación. La imitación conformista (“haz lo que hace la mayoría”) y la tendencia a imitar a los más exitosos aumentaron la homogeneidad cultural dentro de los grupos, lo que potenció la selección entre grupos: aquellos más cooperativos culturalmente dominaron a los demás, favoreciendo el surgimiento de normas prosociales. Esto, a su vez, desencadenó un proceso de auto-domesticación, en el que los individuos más agresivos eran marginados reproductivamente, haciendo a los humanos más prosociales por naturaleza. Con mayor cooperación, el lenguaje se volvió útil y creíble. Finalmente, la inteligencia (incluido el cerebro grande) fue impulsada por la explosión cultural: valía la pena invertir en mejor memoria y cognición porque permitía absorber y aprovechar una cultura cada vez más compleja.

En resumen, el artículo es una defensa clara de la co-evolución gen-cultura.

[Andy Masley @AndyMasley]

I basically think the average voter is pretty wrong on:

1) Nuclear power (it's good)
2) Foreign aid (we spend very little on it and should spend more)
3) Climate change (a majority say they're not willing to have any additional amounts of their tax money spent on climate. The national average willingness to pay for things that help with climate is ~$300 per year)
4) Immigration (I think it's broadly good across the board, and definitely good to get more high skilled immigrants specifically)
5) Price controls in general (bad!)

I'd like governments to patiently nod along to voter concerns but quietly approve more nuclear, spend more on foreign aid, pay way more on climate, and allow at least more high skilled immigrants. I just flat out think it's wrong for politicians to have 1-1 similar views to the median voter and sometimes they need to diverge.

[Alex & Books 📚 @AlexAndBooks_]

Every man should read this quote:

Friedrich Nietzsche (1895)

[Pablo Espinosa San Mauro @pabloespinosa11]

Me sigue alucinando lo lejos que está comunicativamente la NBA de cualquier competición de fútbol. Mientras la Premier League está preocupada de borrar de Twitter repeticiones de goles y dificultándote el acceso al contenido, llega la NBA y te sube casi 4 minutos del final de uno de los partidos más importantes del año.

Jamás entenderé de dónde viene la creencia de que si le das a la gente parte del contenido gratis, van a dejar de pagar por el producto completo. Nadie va a dejar de pagar por la NBA por ver este vídeo, pero sí que alguno puede empezar a interesarse gracias a él.

[Riccardo Trezzi @RiccardoTrezzi]

🇺🇸🇮🇹 Dear @MichaelAArouet, can you kindly stop publishing non-sense about 🇮🇹 and the Euro? Real wages in Italy haven’t grown for a long time, this is known. But manufacturing data tell a very different story. Real hourly wages in Italian manufacturing rose about 4–5 percentage points *MORE* than in the United States — the opposite of what people think, including yourself. For the record: in 🇮🇹, the issue is the NON-tradable sector, which has little to do with the Euro. So please, can you stop generating fake news and putting gasoline on the anti-system propaganda's fire just to get some visibility?
Thank you.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

For Aristotle, the banausos is not just physically deformed by his profession, but politically and ethically stunted: specialization makes him less a complete man than a TOOL of his occupation.
Politics, book VII:
"And any occupation, art, or science, which makes the body or soul or mind of the freeman less fit for the practice or exercise of virtue, is vulgar; wherefore we call those arts vulgar which tend to DEFORM the body, and likewise all paid employments, for they absorb and degrade the mind."

[reste @therestofeden]

So true and very clear once you enter adult life.
Uni creates a mix of all the great small things (a book, a good professor, a desk and seat, like-minded people, and focus time) repeated with consistency over time. All this becomes much harder to do once you leave it.

[Alex Imas @alexolegimas]

You know what other tools know better than most instructors? Coursera and YouTube courses from top faculty, *the internet*, books from the library. How many students used those tools instead of formal ed? Very very few. How many will use Claude independently to learn the material? Probably the same amount.

I know it doesn’t sound glamorous, but the primary role of faculty is to get students in the seats and create incentives to actually absorb the information. This is your job. AI can help as a tool, I’ve seen some great harnesses of AI for education, but it will not do this.

[Alex Imas @alexolegimas]

I keep coming back to @BenSasse’s comment that I think perfectly captures some of the anxiety around AI (paraphrasing): for a very long time now, you could go to school and decide on a job that you can expect to do for your entire adult life. That era is now over.

[Ryan @ohryansbelt]

@karpathy this is like KD joining the 72-9 warriors

[Alex Imas @alexolegimas]

Here is my take on AI writing. I don’t personally like it, but that’s taste, and I’m sure it’s possible to post train the model to write “well” (conditional on some notion of taste). But that’s besides the point for me: AI writing makes all writing sound the same. If you use AI enough it takes about 30 seconds into a piece to realize it, and then my brain kind of shuts off because that’s the 20th time that day I’ve read the same cadence and tone.

For code it’s fine since the only goal is to get it to run. But if you’re trying to write, eg a substack, part of the goal is to keep the reader engaged and connected to you—the writer—and for that you need to have your own “voice”.

AI for writing is a shortcut. And for some purposes it makes a lot of sense. But I think for writing it is in the interest of the writer to differentiate themselves by using their own voice. Especially as more and more people start using AI.