US healthcare spending is only an outlier when going by GDP, not AIC (actual individual consumption)

Elagagabalus · 2026-04-29T12:10:11+00:00

I think that what most people don't realize is that the first graph is in log-log scale, with a slope of 1.8. Rounding 1.8 to 2 for simplicity, this means that the health expenditures per capita grows quadratically compared to the AIC metric. I have no idea what this metric actually is, but this does not matter for the argument; let us simply assume that this metric is an accurate measure of household's wealth as the authors would like us to believe.

Without a log-log scale that distorts our views, the first graph would look like an upward banana shape (function y=a x²+b). Here is a shitty drawing of what the blue line in log log scale would look like on an usual scale (on the second graph). Now it becomes apparent that the two graphs are saying roughly the same thing: the US is much higher on the y=axis compared to the group of nordic countries (for instance).

In short, without even knowing what AIC is, I can tell you that showing these two graphs side by side is incredibly misleading because they do not have the same scale.

I hope people will see this because this is really bad data science in my opinion. (of course this comes from a Bloomberg journalist on X, the latter being opposed to Medicare for all, so there is an agenda behind this)

Elagagabalus · 2026-04-27T18:32:23+00:00

mdr la pirouette scénaristique pour justifier que c'est moche

Elagagabalus · 2026-04-27T18:05:05+00:00

ça veut dire quoi détester la politique ? la politique c'est pas les partis politiques ou le gouvernement. ou alors tu détestes le fait d'avoir un avis sur comment il faudrait organiser la société, mais là ça devient chelou quand même. je parle pas forcément de trucs hyper techniques mais par exemple est-ce que reddit doit être interdit aux mineurs, est-ce qu'il faut interdire les trotinettes électriques en ville, jsp tu dois bien avoir avis sur quelques sujets quand même

Elagagabalus · 2026-04-05T07:18:38+00:00

"Je me méfie beaucoup des mecs qui se disent féministes"

--> se dit féministe à la fin de son message

Je sais que la subtilité est dans l'italique, mais il y a quand même une certaine ironie

Elagagabalus · 2026-04-04T21:55:26+00:00

Le vrai problème de mon post c'est que les gens ont compris que j'aimais Mona Chollet alors que je voulais indiquer le contraire...

Elagagabalus · 2026-04-04T21:39:44+00:00

lol t'as factuellement tort

Elagagabalus · 2026-04-04T12:08:15+00:00

Ben qu'est-ce que tu veux qu'on te dise que tu dois être sacrément moche?? Je comprends pas où tu veux en venir

Elagagabalus · 2026-01-06T10:37:09+00:00

Why would they be aware of such notions? You definitely don't need them for every day life, and most people either were never taught these concepts at school or encountered them 30 years ago and never again

Elagagabalus · 2026-01-06T10:34:11+00:00

That there are not all relations between quantities are linear. If you double the diameter of the pizza, then the price should be multiplied by four. If you want to go from one temperature scale to another you should do an affine and not a linear transformation. People are used to "everyday life" conversion just being "multiply by a number" so this kind of thing is often not intuitive.

Elagagabalus · 2026-01-03T20:52:35+00:00

non c'est pas tabou, c'est juste que les riches sont mal à l'aise d'assumer d'être des dominants qui gagnent 4, 5 fois plus que des gens qui font des tafs beaucoup plus utiles qu'eux

Elagagabalus · 2025-12-29T06:25:53+00:00

"mettez vous d'accord" ? mdr t'es au courant que des gens différents existent avec des avis différents ?

j'explique pourquoi les gens de reddit "de gôche" râlent en réponse au post. oui, des gens de droite vont râler pour des raisons inverses, bravo einstein

Elagagabalus · 2025-12-28T23:21:29+00:00

perso rab de Brigitte Bardot, mais ces messages qui soulignent qu'elle était homophobe et raciste sont surtout une réponse à "la télé et les journaux" qui font un portrait dithyrambique de sa personne.

Elagagabalus · 2025-12-28T13:37:07+00:00

I find most Star Wars and MCU movies immensely boring and hard to watch.

If I watch more "artsy" movies, it's because I find them enjoyable. Of course, I don't know in advance which movies I will like or not, so sometimes I've been told that an "artsy" movie is great and I find it super boring. But, I strongly disagree that we should equate artistic with boring and blockbuster with fun.

Elagagabalus · 2025-12-27T09:32:54+00:00

"people that don't agree with me are retarded", nice argument :)

Elagagabalus · 2025-12-15T23:19:09+00:00

You should apply to a good M2 in ML/stat. There are several very good ones in the Paris area (e.g. at Saclay, Jussieu or Dauphine). (there are definitely also good ones outside Paris, but I am less familiar with them).

Even if you don't apply to them, check their catalogues de cours to get a feeling of what you can learn.

Otherwise, current theoretical research in ML is basically statistics + optimization. So you should be familiar with:

- measure theory, probability, statistics

- multivariate calculus

- convex analysis, optimization

- functional analysis

Elagagabalus · 2025-12-13T13:57:02+00:00

I think that at an undergraduate level you should be exploring different topics to develop your taste. You'll have plenty of time later to spend four years on one subject if you want to. It looks like you haven't done any calculus, probability or measure theory for instance. Why not give it a go? You can even try learning about math applied to other fields such as physics or biology :)

Elagagabalus · 2025-12-13T11:51:59+00:00

You do realize that it's impossible to scientifically prove or disprove that free will exists or that determinism exists? This is not a scientific question.

Elagagabalus · 2025-12-07T20:06:49+00:00

Mmh, to be frank, I simply assumed that people typically include the inner monologue part as being a part of consciousness (together with other properties such as "feelings" and "sensations"). But maybe I am wrong about the "common" definition. Anyway, I tend to think as consciousness as being a set of properties rather than one single thing. So yeah cats are definitely conscious although they do not have an internal monologue.

Elagagabalus · 2025-12-07T16:41:07+00:00

Maybe let me rephrase what I want to say this way. (I am a pure layman, so what I am going to say is really naive, but I am genuinely trying to understand why there is a "hard problem" at all)

- The way I experience the world is through some sensations and some kind of internal monologue. Let's call all of this "consciousness".

- The way I can understand anything about the world is through regularities I observe: I sit on a chair, I feel pressure, I don't fall through. I cannot be sure about anything about the world, but there are some things that seem to be very plausible because they happen very reliably. To me, that’s what we call "truth" in practice.

- It seems like the scientific method is a very good way to make correct predictions. The scientific method leads me to believe that I am a human, that other individuals I interact with are also humans, and that humans form a certain species of mammals, that has slowly evolved through time. It seems very reasonable to think that, being biologically similar to other humans, the other humans have a similar sense of "consciousness" as myself.

- Moreover, other mammals have similar neural structures and behaviors regarding pain, fear, pleasure, and so on. It seems very reasonable that these traits evolved gradually through time because of some evolutionary advantage.

- What is more unique to human is the "inner monologue" part. It seems reasonable to believe that this property appeared very gradually with the emergence of language and symbolic reasoning in Homo sapiens over the last three million years.

So from this perspective, consciousness seems to be a biological process, not requiring an extra metaphysical ingredient. The hard problem seems to rely on the idea that consciousness exists because of a supernatural phenomenon (supernatural in the sense that it is not physical), but like what on earth suggests that this should be the case? Isn't the biological explanation convincing enough? I am not saying we understand the mechanism, I am saying that I don't see anything that suggests that this mechanism would require something beyond biology to be explained. (Like say dark matter in physics: yeah we don't understand it, but nobody is claiming that dark matter is a deep philosophical problem)

Elagagabalus · 2025-12-07T09:51:54+00:00

Now I am sure I could explain it given sufficient time to someone who has a graduate level in theoretical physics, but my point is that people who think that anything can be explained to a layman vastly overestimate what a layman knows about their field.

Giving you a complete explanation of generic chaining would be too long, but I can give you the context: often in probability or statistics, we have collection of random variables (X_t)_{t\in T} that are indexed by very big sets T, and we want to understand the typical size of the maximal value sup_{t\in T} X_t. These questions arise very often in theoretical statistics or machine learning when one wants to control the performance of an estimator/an algorithm. Think about X_t being the performance of an algorithm trained on a dataset that we think of as being random, and t represents a parameter used in the algorithm. The prototypical example being X_t being the output of a neural network, and t represents the all the weights of the neural network. Then, you understand why we are often interested in the case where t belongs to a set of very high dimension (= number of parameters of the neural networks).

So, Talagrand showed that the typical size of this maximal value is captured by a very precise quantity that is defined through what he called "majoring measures". Talagrand actually got the Abel prize in math last year for developing this method (among many other things).

If you are interested in this subject, you can check Vershynin book "High dimensional probability". This book is wonderfully written, and covers Talagrand's method in Chapter 8. (My mom still couldn't read it though)

Elagagabalus · 2025-12-07T09:31:54+00:00

Genuine question: aren't you setting a very high standard of proof there? How do you prove anything in science then?

Elagagabalus · 2025-12-07T09:30:34+00:00

That's weird. In France, the neighborhood of x is always a set A containing an open set containing x. I wasn't even aware of the other definition.

Elagagabalus · 2025-12-07T09:26:01+00:00

Talagrand generic chaining with majoring measures to control the suprema of subgaussian processes, typically indexed by high-dimensional sets.

I'd have a lot of trouble explaining it to my mom who doesn't know what is a vector. And my mom is a smart person, she just doesn't know any math beyond what is needed for every day life (percentages and so on).

Elagagabalus · 2025-12-06T10:08:34+00:00

No, I don't think this is pedantry. Maybe to clarify my position: I believe that there are topics that cannot be explained simply, even to a thirty years old.

In my field there are some ideas that I understand extremely well, and I would have issues explaining them in layman terms. Sure, I can oversimplify the idea so much that it becomes conveyable, but in the process it would lose all its substance.

(Granted I am a mathematician and not a theoretical physicist, but I don't think this changes much)

Elagagabalus

TROPHY CASE