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Jay Daigle@profjaydaigle.bsky.social |
53 followers 30 following 90 posts
Mathematician at GWU. I write about teaching, epistemology, math, and metascience, and how hidden assumptions shape our decisions and beliefs. I write at jaydaigle.net/blog
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Okay, but nearly half of the participants they DIDN'T give $1000 also secured housing. (The $50-a-month group started from a somewhat higher base, though, which seems like a partial randomization failure.)
This is much less impressive than the headline.
www.denverbasicincomeproject.org/research
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Okay, but nearly half of the participants they DIDN'T give $1000 also secured housing. (The $50-a-month group started from a somewhat higher base, though, which seems like a partial randomization failure.)
This is much less impressive than the headline.
www.denverbasicincomeproject.org/research
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67 Sound
@67sound.bsky.social
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Ford should be pilloried for eliminating wastewater surveillance. But the notion we aren’t post-pandemic in a meaningful way is nonsense. The very fact that viral counts are as high but excess deaths have dropped almost to zero is a *good* thing. Vaccines work. Flattening the curve worked.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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This is something I generally try to spend like a day on in my calc 1 class. Ten years from now a lot of them won't remember the Extreme Value Theorem, but they CAN have a much more deeply rooted understanding of the difference between rates and levels.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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To my knowledge, the only questionable part of that tweet is the word "correctly". When I've seen concerns, it's been about OpenAI slowly starving the superalignment team of compute, in violation of their promises, which may cause problems if the AI does hit hard takeoff. (Which I doubt but...)
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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(And that's leaving aside that Mathematica specifically has some weird bug where it insists on treating it as arrow keys rather than numbers any time I shift focus away and back.)
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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If you read forums on ergonomic keyboards they're all emphatic that the numpad is bad. (And if you really need one, you can get a standalone.) But like, I use it! All the time! And right now I'm experimenting with a standalone and the fact that it's not in a consistent place is so bad.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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I would never stoop so low as to use an Apple product. (Also, on googling the Happy Hacker keyboards, I will comment that I will _never_ understand why anyone would accept a tenkeyless keyboard.)
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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This reminds me of when I was young and optimistic, and was waiting for someone to come out with a keyboard phone that had finger-triggers for ctrl and alt so that emacs would work well on it.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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The administration encourages us to file various reports when we're worried about a student getting into (emotional or academic) trouble. I'd be a lot more willing to do this if I thought it were going to accomplish much of anything. Or if any student had ever told me it had been useful to them.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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That's true, but I didn't mean white collar crime so much as crimes by the corporation itself. The kind you punish by fining the corporation, not the employees. Sort of the flip side of "Corporations just budget in paying fines for doing this because it's so profitable". We could change that!
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Reading this makes me think: this could plausibly be true specifically of _corporate_ misconduct. The enforcement is mostly fines, and corporate decision-making tends to be more "rational" than traffic violations or violent crimes.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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I got an email two months ago letting me know that an audit had determined I was no longer teaching at my old institution and they needed to remove my account. I stopped working there in May 2020. (In their defense, they did have other things to think about at the time.)
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Knight First Amendment Institute
@knightcolumbia.org
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Knight Institute Joins Coalition of Tech Policy and Civil Liberties Groups Calling on Congress to Oppose New Federal TikTok Ban. Read the letter here: knightcolumbia.org/blog/knight-...
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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"Trump and the Republicans are trying to undermine democracy and steal elections because their anti-abortion policies in favor of cutting medicaid and raising tariffs so rich people can pay less in taxes are too unpopular to pass honestly". I think that's the framing he's recommended.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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I don't know if he said that here, but I know he's said it often. One recurring argument between him and Beutler on their podcast is that Beutler wants to focus on "Trump is an authoritarian jerk" and Yglesias wants to consistently tie the authoritarianism to Trump's bad and unpopular policies.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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That is, literally, the argument he's making.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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I think this is about what he's advocating for. Less "Trump is a threat to abstract democracy and that's bad" and more "Trump is undermining elections so that he can cut Medicaid and give money to rich people."
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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I like Jekyll!
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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"Democrats are the party that says they can make you taller, smarter, better-looking, and get the weeds out of your lawn. Republicans are the party who say that government doesn't work, then get elected and prove it."
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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A good recipe will specify. A bad recipe will make me go look up a good recipe to figure it out.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Buttermilk and ranch have very similar acidities! Google says buttermilk is pH 4.4 to 4.8, and Ranch is 4.4. Ranch is basically buttermilk plus herbs and spices. I'd expect you to get pancakes that taste like garlic, onion, mustard, and dill. Possibly a bit thicker but within normal variation.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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There's a tumblr thread somewhere that I can't find that talks about the famous people of history like Big Alex, but all of them pale in comparison to the importance of Oily Josh.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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By "dispose of" you mean "give to me", right? I keep looking for a source of plain Oreo biscuits and I absolutely cannot find one.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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We had like three inches of snow a couple days ago and I took a two-hour walk to enjoy it. Because I grew up in New Orleans and spent most of my professional life in Los Angeles and "actual snow on the ground" is still a super novel experience.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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I have a new musing on the blog.
I've been working through my reading list, and it's interesting to see how quickly things change sometimes. The Art of the Steal and Enlightenment 2.0 are very different, but both had now-anachronisms I found fascinating.
jaydaigle.net/blog/old-boo...
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Do you have a sense of what the scholarship on these issues looks like in China? I've been trying to learn some Chinese history recently, and it seems like a lot of histories are repeating single estimates from historical sources without many caveats. But I can't really evaluate the sources myself.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Oh, that's easy. It weighs just a little more than an ounce of water.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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I feel like any definition of "normal" that excludes 2004 is a bit too restrictive. I get what you mean to say that we were in the shadow of war, but by that standard we are in the shadow of war more often than we aren't, right?
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Or Heinlein fans!
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Lately I've had lots of students who took calculus with me multiple years ago asking me for grad/med school rec letters. I suspect they'd get better recs from profs who know them more recently with more depth, but they think it's important to get a math letter. Are they right?
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Lately I've had lots of students who took calculus with me multiple years ago asking me for grad/med school rec letters. I suspect they'd get better recs from profs who know them more recently with more depth, but they think it's important to get a math letter. Are they right?
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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The taste?
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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What humans have and current AI doesn't is the ability to focus. Sure, an apathetic human attention will make plenty of dumb mistakes. (Sarah Constantin wrote "Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences".) But you can (sometimes) shock them into fully engaging. An AI you can't.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Of course, in a lot of the industries you're discussing, the fact that you can get the customer service rep to act like a focused human rather than an apathetic cog is sometimes a bug, from the perspective of the company. So AI might be win-win for them.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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What humans have and current AI doesn't is the ability to focus. Sure, an apathetic human attention will make plenty of dumb mistakes. (Sarah Constantin wrote "Humans Who Are Not Concentrating Are Not General Intelligences".) But you can (sometimes) shock them into fully engaging. An AI you can't.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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The interesting thing about this position—which I don't think is wrong!—is that it puts a big separation between "AI is commercially viable" and "AI is smarter than all of us and takes over the world". AI can replace apathetic humans because apathetic humans aren't very effective!
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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The thing is, I absolutely believe the eagle will fuck you up. But it's like a tenth of your weight and it has hollow bones. If you see it coming and it still attacks, you're headed for the ER but I'm pretty sure you can kill the eagle first.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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It seem to me that most humans clearly could beat an eagle, for reasonable definitions of beat. Like, if the eagle wants to get away, it absolutely can. But they're under twenty pounds. For them to hurt you they have to close, and then you'll win. (You'll get hurt, but the eagle will be hurt more.)
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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I use discord in my classes. Started during remote teaching but I've kept it up. Some students get a lot of use out of it; some find it confusing and alienating, so I don't ever rely on it. (But of course if it were more normalized they'd figure it out.)
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Oh yeah, that's both annoying and probably a dealbreaker. Both for compliance reasons and for the things I would actually want it to _do_....
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Would we even need a business account? Surely below some scale you can just make one. I think the main obstacle for making this actually happen at my department is the median age of the faculty.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Yeah, I get a spectrum from students who do not understand or want to understand discord, to students who immediately sign up and start spamming memes in the memes channel. (Which, to be clear, is fine; that's why I have a memes channel.) Not everyone uses it but some get a lot out of it.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Although most of my students are freshman non-math-majors. They're still on the STEM-ier side of things; otherwise they wouldn't be in my classes. And that might still have this effect. (But a lot are econ, which I'd call a social science.)
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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I believe that! And like, I have no real experience working with slack, but it sounds like it would solve some problems for coordinating my 20-person department that, you know, has personnel turnover on the scale of years.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Right yes that's what I want. Isn't that the point? There's a new private channel for each thread, and you can either read it or mute it depending on whether it's relevant. And you can even mute it, and then come back later and look at it if you think you might need something.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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I get a decent amount of value out of my class Discord. But I also haven't (yet?) noticed the issues with email y'all are discussing; either my students are reading their emails, or the things they aren't reading haven't been causing visible problems.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Sure, but it seems like it's the right tool for handling a lot of the things that are the most annoying email chains I get.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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Mine has a thing where if you close the tab without explicitly logging out it doesn't log you out properly. So when you try to log in again, you get a window that says "you weren't logged out properly. Click here to finish logging out." And then you can log in _another_ time to get access.
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Jay Daigle
@profjaydaigle.bsky.social
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And here I've been thinking about if/how I can get my department to switch from email to something like Slack!
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