New in @Theory_Society, the first systematic, cross-disciplinary, assessment of ideology in social science, drawing from ~600,000 social science abstracts across ~60 years. Check it out here (open access!): link.springer.com/article/10…

This is incorrect. The arguments put forth straightforwardly translate to penalizing atheists for existential denial of Christians fr expressing disbelief in Jesus Christ. They attempt unsuccessfully to say they aren't doing this, but it's special pleading. Dangerous precedent.

This is not a mechanistic model, and so not what I asked for. Further, LLMs can doubt, can question, & have invented new ideas and deduced solutions to conjectures in mathematics. You say it's "faking" them, but without a mechanistic model you don't know what faking it means.

Typical deployment of a soldier to a war zone is 6-12 months. It is a 24/7 affair because, war zone. Naturally, she blocked me because learning about disagreement is sometimes painful. x.com/ljmontello/status/2014…

Fragile egos everywhere today. Blocked twice in one day or mild philosophical disagreements. What gives @cunha_tristan?

Fragile egos be fragile. Also pretty wild that a PhD apparently doesn't understand argument by analogy, or "big words" like "commonalities". 🧐

Displaying intellectual humility increased trust in scientists, their research, and increased intentions to follow their recommendations. Effect was the same regardless of the scientists' gender or race. Seems humility was a virtue for good reasons. nature.com/articles/s41562-0…

An unwarranted trust in science can lead people to harshly retaliate against those who do not share their faith. osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/j2… Whilst distrust in science undeniably has detrimental outcomes, we argue that its opposite, uncritical trust in science and scientists (i.e. scientism) also leads to potential unwarranted societal polarization. Across two studies we compellingly showed that people who deemed science and scientists supreme [more or less endorsing items such as “Science can reach the absolute truth about everything that exists” vs “Science can never truly reach any truth”] were also more prone to endorse different penalizing measures against people who ignore scientific recommendations or advocate for anti-scientific views, ranging from additional taxing the media that promote anti-science, through restricting the right to protest against scientific-based practices, banning skeptics from the media, or even fining or imprisoning them for promoting anti-science, to fining and imprisoning people for disregarding official medical practices. Individuals with stronger scientistic beliefs were more inclined to support the penalization of science skeptics. Even very harsh sanctions, such as imprisonment or denying state-funded medical treatment were endorsed by more than 10% of the respondents in the online community sample. Around 46% of these respondents, the majority of whom are highly educated, agreed that skeptics should be prohibited from protesting, while around one-third thought that people who question scientific facts or criticize scientists should be prohibited from appearing in the media. We further revealed individuals who uncritically trusted science and scientists more were also more likely to moralize rationality, i.e. to perceive scientific thought and rationality as a moral imperative. Thus, trust in science and scientists seems to have transcended from the domain of evidence and rationality to the domain of values, so violating these moral values further calls for sanctions. Our findings demonstrate that unwarranted beliefs, even if positive in their moderate version, are associated with increased support for unwarranted measures against dissenters.

Internet Archive has not been archiving since 10/8. Google Cache has stopped caching. The Alexa service - the one that used to rank web traffic (not the Amazon virtual assistant) is gone. The ability of censors to memory-hole the internet is growing. brownstone.org/articles/they…

I've had many debates with doom skeptics who simply couldn't fathom how digital AIs could ever gather real-world resources or have real-world effects, and I couldn't convincing them that people would climb over each other to just give them resources for their own selfish reasons.

20% of house/parliamentary seats should be from random appointments, aka sortition. This would more easily break partisan deadlocks.

You can read some of my previous writing about this case at astralcodexten.com/p/model-c…… , but my impression is you're uncritically buying the Honduran socialists' propaganda version of this conflict. A more pro-Prospera/balanced version: investment courts are a useful vehicle to prevent countries from inviting international investment, then stealing it as soon as it materializes. Countries voluntarily sign on to these courts to allow them to credibly commit to protecting investors, should those investors pour money into the country. In 2009, the socialist president was couped by the military after he refused to comply with a Supreme Court order not to try to overstay his term limits. In the process, he had tried to fire the rest of the government when they resigned in protest or wouldn't carry out his orders. The Supreme Court ordered his arrest, and the military couped in sympathy with this. Coups are bad in general but in this case I think just saying "it was a coup so they're evil" is extremely deceptive. Democratic elections were then held (which the socialists boycotted), producing the government that approved Prospera. 78% of Congress approved the law to create charter cities with an explicit guarantee that they would protect it for fifty years. They enshrined this in various bilateral treaties with developed countries doing the investment, and within international investment law, because investors wouldn't invest without this. Prospera wasn't directly involved in these negotiations, but *after* Honduras had made all these guarantees to other people, they got together and invested about $100 million in building a new city on a greenfield site in Honduras, at the government's invitation. After a few years, the wife of the socialist who got couped was elected, and her government tried to seize the city without compensation. Prospera sued in the exact international court that the agreement which created them said they should sue in. This was one of several (I think 9, but might be wrong) different suits that different people lodged against the socialist government for trying to nationalize their infrastructure projects in Honduras without compensation. Prospera doesn't actually want the $11 billion, it wants for the socialists to stop trying to seize their stuff and leave them in peace. I believe it has said many times that the second the socialists agree to leave them in peace, they will drop their suit (and I would be disappointed in them if this wasn't true). The socialists have instead announced that they have no obligation to follow any treaties or international law, and they will continue seizing these 9 projects (including Prospera). They refused to send a lawyer to defend themselves in international arbitration, and so the arbitration court ruled against them. The arbitrators can't actually seize the budget of Honduras, but countries that follow the international treaties that established the international court will now be allowed to take whatever Honduran government money is in their countries in order to pay back their investors. There are a bunch of people who hate charter cities because they feel "colonialist" and they would rather these countries languish in poverty than touch "polluted" first world market structures. They have dominated the news coverage on these issues. You can reach out to anyone at Prospera and they would be happy to tell you their own side. Otherwise, I'm not sure what you want - for international investment law not to exist? A world where countries can woo investors by saying "please build infrastructure within our borders, we promise we won't steal it" and then immediately turn around and steal it? Where it's illegal in the court of public opinion to even attempt to create institutions to get around this problem? All this does is ensure that nobody will ever invest in developing countries ever again. There *are* things in the general vicinity of this that are moral gray areas. If some corrupt dictator promises a foreign country all of his country's oil for cheap, costing the country its most valuable resource, can later governments go back on this? I think international law (and the broader court of public opinion) include some mechanisms for dealing with this, but I admit that if those mechanisms fail it's a really hard problem. But this isn't one of those problems. Prospera hasn't taken any resource except a few hundred acres of previously unoccupied land (which they bought at market price from previous owners). This is the easiest, most slam dunk version of this generally-difficult-sort-of-question you could imagine.

When I went to law school, I knew a law degree would be helpful no matter what I chose to do in life. Never did I imagine that I would use my skills & training to "prove" my husband's innocence to federal prosecutors after @jeffbezos & @amazon tried to imprison him. A 🧵 /1

That's not really the only point being made. If everyone is dissatisfied with a system and pushes strongly to change it over a long time, but the system persists, then it is serving someone's purpose quite well, they're just not you, and they clearly have more power than you.

Science Hype is Rising, and Rising, and Rising… A new study by researchers from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, reveals that the use of promotional language in scientific publications – a.k.a. hype – has increased dramatically over the past 36 years. The study analyzed the abstracts of more than 1.5 million papers funded by the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) published between 1985 to 2020 and found that uses of words like “revolutionary” ( 1121%), “promising” ( 1931%), and “unmet” ( 12126%) have skyrocketed, though the winner is the word “scalable” with a boost of 19964%. On the decline are, among others, “greatest” (- 32%), “major” (-11%), and “prestigious” (-29%). Press release here: tsukuba.ac.jp/en/research-ne… Paper here: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam… Figure: Millar et al, JAMA Netw Open. 6, 12, (2023).

Language Models can Solve Computer Tasks Letting LLM to recursively criticize and improve its output significantly outperforms existing LLM methods on computer tasks and surpasses supervised learning (SL) and RL approaches. arxiv.org/abs/2303.17491

After 1.5 years of hard work, I am thrilled to share with you Φ-SO - a Physical Symbolic Optimization package that uses deep reinforcement learning to discover physical laws from data . Here is Φ-SO discovering the analytical expression of a damped harmonic oscillator👇 [1/6]

Your bike share map is very useful, thanks! UI is snappy in portrait mode but unusable in landscape mode on Android phone. Strange. #bikeshare via @oobr

Today’s CRTC decision is a tombstone on the grave of telecom competition in Canada. TekSavvy scraps plans to offer mobile service and drops out of spectrum auction following CRTC’s “arbitrary” reversal on wholesale internet rates: bit.ly/CRTCDecision