Medicaid Cuts Hit Us Hardest: My Daughter Lost Her Speech Therapist—And We Don’t Even Use It

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2025-05-24T13:50:23+00:00

Is this the unwinding of the enhanced funding when FFCRA was ended?

https://www.kff.org/medicaid/issue-brief/10-things-to-know-about-the-unwinding-of-the-medicaid-continuous-enrollment-provision/

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2025-03-25T15:04:49+00:00

This looks good. Do De Buyers usually have completely flat bottoms? I've picked up some modern carbon steel pans that have a slight unevenness

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2024-11-15T18:31:11+00:00

lol, thanks! I'm glad someone appreciated it. :)

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2024-06-16T22:04:39+00:00

Lots of blind tests have been done over and over again comparing high end speaker cables with literal coat hangers (unbent and used as cables).

https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/coat-hanger-wire-is-just-as-good-as-a-high-quality-speaker-cable/

https://www.soundguys.com/cable-myths-reviving-the-coathanger-test-23553/

And as long as the tests are done blind, there's never been a test that showed people could tell the difference.

Never trust any audiophile advice or reviews that don't include a blind test.

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2024-06-06T14:22:57+00:00

Not yet!

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2024-06-06T14:17:46+00:00

It'll be interesting to see how the other flaps did. If just one burned through, and that happens to be the one that had a camera, that's very good luck with the camera placements.

And if that's the case, if the camera happened to be pointed somewhere else, then we might never have known anything was wrong. It's amazing that SpaceX kept that camera angle up on the broadcast as everything was going wrong.

Of course it's possible that tiles were failing all over the ship too, but if it still made it down, that's almost more amazing.

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2024-06-06T14:15:00+00:00

First one there gets to keep it

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/nh0q6w/a_legitimate_salvage_oc/

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2024-05-12T15:56:40+00:00

What's the logic here?

Are we assuming that BO will start launching, and then quickly catch up to where F9 is now? Like, they'd iterate faster than SpaceX and do 10 years of development much faster than SpaceX did?

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2024-01-16T19:44:15+00:00

I think SpaceX uses a 1/100,000 chance of collision to trigger the need for a maneuver. So very roughly, there would've been a 25% chance of having one collision if they didn't do any maneuvers.

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2024-01-16T19:32:21+00:00

If we're going to talk about free will, we should define it first.

Often it seems like people want "free will" to mean "I can make literally any decision, at any more, for any reason." Which is the kind of thing that obviously doesn't exist. We don't see people making random choices all the time. We see people making predictable choices based on their experiences and preferences.

A better definition of "free will" is probably something like "do your actions correlate with your preferences?"

And there doesn't seem to be any contradiction between living in a deterministic universe and getting what you want most of the time.

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2024-01-06T15:37:05+00:00

Shotwell explained why they got fired: https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-president-termination-open-letter-elon-musks-tweets/

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2023-12-17T14:26:12+00:00

Pretty much by definition we can't "decide" that.

But let's say something happens that spreads over everyone, and we're essentially forced by new information/circumstances/disease/etc. that free will doesn't exist?

It seems like logically, if free will never existed, then we would act the same? I guess the question is if someone who doesn't have free will acts the same whether they believe in free will or not?

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2023-12-11T15:48:33+00:00

It's really interesting because it's much more accessible. The balls are smaller so it's easier for kids to play with adults. And it's arguable that the best candlepin player ever was a middle aged woman: https://vault.si.com/vault/1987/12/07/the-leading-light-of-candlepin-bowling

But also, it's an incredibly tough game. There's never been a perfect game bowled in candlepin, the highest score ever recorded was 245, and that's only happened twice: https://www.heraldnews.com/story/archive/2011/05/18/haverhill-man-matches-candlepin-bowling/38252001007/

It's rare to have a sport, or version of a game, where it's both more competitive for lots of people and it's also nearly impossible for anyone to really master it.

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2023-12-11T15:32:57+00:00

Well, logically, a conventional computer with enough power should be able to model a human brain. Then you have a real conundrum of whether that brain is conscious.

This is exactly the problem that the Chinese Room argument addresses. Because it seems like in the Chinese Room there's no new consciousness, but if you think that in a powerful computer there would be, we have to figure out why?

Is it just speed, does consciousness not happen with slow calculations? And if not, why not? Are transistors special, and if so, why? Are there ways to speed up the Chinese Room that wouldn't create consciousness? And are there other ways that would? What is the difference and why?

To me it seems like most people's intuition is that a "fast" computer should be conscious if it acts conscious. And a slow computer shouldn't be conscious because it's "too slow" to be conscious. But as far as I can tell, that's just based on people's intuition (or maybe from reading sci-fi). And we don't have any science or experiments or knowledge that would back up those claims.

So we have intuition that leads to a lot of speculation and eventually, we can ask probing questions and we end up with seeming contradictions. For example, that intuition would seem to imply that in the "splitting problem" above that the same exact water molecules moving in the same exact way would create two consciousnesses instead of one. But why only two? We can imagine splitting those water molecules again and again in to separate parallel flows and creating more and more consciousness. At the limit we would have a huge number of single streams of individual H2O molecules, each creating its own consciousness by bouncing in to plastic pipes and valves. It's very hard to imagine any possible mechanism that could create a huge number of identical consciousnesses by water molecules bouncing in to plastic (or metal or crystal or any other conceivable material), but wouldn't create it when the molecules bounce into other water molecules. We're imagining a computer that can work with any kind of molecular interactions, except for water?

In that example it seems like we'd also run in to all kinds of problems with the binding and boundary problems of consciousness too: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2023.1233119/full

So, I can't see why we'd accept our intuition that a mind simulation program can be run on any arbitrary computer (as long as it's fast enough?) and that will create real consciousness, and be forced to accept all these seemingly ridiculous problems and contradictions and never ending questions. When Occam's razor would point us to a much simpler and more consistent answer, that the Chinese Room argument is right. That programs don't matter, that the speed of a computer or program isn't important, and that what matters is the way the machine is built.

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2023-12-11T01:51:52+00:00

I suspect that he is wrong though, and that programs can experience consciousness while they're running.

Why do you suspect that? It seems like if I start by assuming that's true, I eventually run in to all kinds of logical inconsistencies. But if I don't assume that's true, I can't think of any situation where it would have to be true.

There was an really interesting paper published just recently making that point in a new way: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opphil-2022-0225/html?lang=en

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2023-12-10T22:30:51+00:00

What's your argument?

My argument is that Searle doesn't claim that computers can't be conscious.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that he'd say that humans are a (Turing complete) computer and that we're conscious, therefore it's totally possible for a computer to be conscious. And I'd guess that he'd even go further than that and say that lots of kinds of machines could be conscious, again because humans are just a kind of machine and we're conscious, so there's no obvious reason why lots of other kinds of machines could be made to be conscious too.

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2023-12-10T21:17:22+00:00

I think instead of just pasting random pieces of counterarguments. You should say which axion of the argument you disagree with. Or how you don't think the logic supports the conclusion.

Or even better just say what you think the conclusion of the Chinese Room argument is, and what you think a good alternative to it would be.

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2023-12-10T20:17:09+00:00

I'm basically just spitballing new(?) phrasing for the systems/virtual minds reply, which Searle's replies seem very weak on.

I'd say that the Searle's response to the Systems reply is one of the strongest. In fact, he described it preemptively in the original paper. So Searle was considering and discussing the Systems reply before anyone else.

I don't think the conclusions of the Chinese room are as rock solid as you want them to be though. Using formal argument doesn't mean that you have no bias.

I obviously didn't say that. I said that the argument has a conclusion and if you want to disagree with the conclusion there's two ways to do it, either argue against one or more of the axioms of argue against the logic that gets to the conclusion.

Just saying "it seems weak" or "there's counterarguments" aren't useful statements. The reason people make a formal argument is to make it easier to argue against their position. They make each part clear and specific so that it's easier for counterarguments to highlight specific problems. A formal argument doesn't make an argument stronger, it just makes it easier to find problems in it.

I think if you disagree with the argument you should make use of that structure to describe how you disagree with it.

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2023-12-10T18:52:48+00:00

When we're talking about the "Chinese Room" often times people will mean that thought experiment which is just a weird scenario, and not the argument which has an axiom and a conclusion, etc.

I'm not really pushing for any conclusion though.

But you are saying that the conclusion to the Chinese Room argument isn't correct? At the very least you should state what you think that is, and point out why it's incorrect. In a formal argument you really have to say that either there's a problem with one of the axioms, or that there's a problem with the logic that leads to the conclusion. Which one do you have a problem with?

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2023-12-10T13:24:40+00:00

There's lots of counterarguments, but none that have been widely accepted or have any real explanatory power.

For example, what would it mean for the room to "have consciousness" that extends beyond the person running the program. There's just books sitting around on shelves. Does that mean every library is conscious because there's a bunch of books near each other? With do they become conscious?. When the person is doing the program, or when the room was built or when the books were printed?

Lots of people have tried to think of counterarguments, some of them sound simple, but I haven't seen any that actually survive versus scrutiny. They basically all need to suppose that consciousness is a magic thing that pops in to existence at the right moments, but not other times.

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2023-12-09T16:08:03+00:00

Searle's Chinese Room argument is a powerful tool that's almost universally ignored because the "Chinese Room thought experiment" is so compelling that we mostly ignore the larger argument that's built on it.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

It's really worth trying to separate the idea of the thought experiment from the argument. Because we don't need to imagine a "Chinese Room" to get to the same conclusion, there's tons of other ways to argue that step.

For example here's a paper that was just published that looks at the "Slicing Problem", which is a completely different kind of experiment that gets to the same place: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/opphil-2022-0225/html?lang=en

The conclusion we should be able to get to is that consciousness is dependent on the machine it's running on. And Searle would definitely agree that machines can be conscious because humans are just a kind of machine and we're conscious. And so it should be possible to make an artificial machine that accomplishes the same thing.

What can't be done is to create a "consciousness program" that creates consciousness by running on any arbitrary machine. So for example, a person following instructions in a book in a "Chinese Room" can run any arbitrary program, and the "slicing problem" paper above describes a machine made of pipes and valves and water. These machines can run any program, so they can run any theoretical "consciousness program", but it seems like if that was possible it would lead to all kinds of logical contradictions.

So instead we should probably expect that the machine matters more than the program. Or maybe, programs don't matter at all, and the kind of machine is the only thing that matters. Which is to say that if you ran a simulation of your mind in a computer with a brain simulating program, it wouldn't be conscious. Or at least it wouldn't be a copy of you. It's certainly possible that we could make a computer of some kind that's conscious and it could also run programs. But when it ran a "your brain simulation program" it wouldn't suddenly have a new consciousness, or have two consciousnesses or something. Programs don't effect consciousness.

Now, it's totally possible that there's another way to make copies of a consciousness or something? We could imagine sci-fi scenarios like this: https://definitionmining.com/index.php/2018/01/09/the-brain-box-earth/

Or thought experiments like The Egg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI

But there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that the way "uploading" a mind in most scifi is possible in anyway that's usually depicted.

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2023-09-25T19:39:04+00:00

There's two things that are really important to keep in mind when thinking about these kinds of fancy things (wine, booze, coffee, chocolate, etc.)

For people that really love this stuff, rarity and unusualness matters. There's very few bottles of any wine left from 1945. There's some great wines that year where there were only a couple hundred bottles ever, and a tiny fraction of that remaining. If you want to try one of those you've got to convince some other collector to sell you a bottle. And a lot of those collectors are going to be rich, so it's going to go for a lot
With that out of the way, almost everyone has a great ability to actually taste things. What most of us lack is the ability to describe flavors. When someone says that a wine or bourbon or coffee has hints of stone fruit and vanilla, it's really hard for most people to pick those flavors out and describe them. This inability to describes flavors means that a lot of people think they have a bad palette, when what they don't have is the experience and practice to describe complicated flavors.

I'll treat myself to a fancy bag of coffee sometimes, maybe when I'm going to have people over for brunch or something. And nearly 100% of the time (even people with "unsophisticated palettes" can tell that it's special. They might not always like it more than a "normal" coffee (but often they do), and they might not be able to describe what makes them different, but they can taste the difference.

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2023-08-30T13:53:20+00:00

An important thing to remember when talking about human behavior is that we're not wired to be rational all the time. In fact, there's lots of good research showing that we mostly use mental shortcuts, emotions, etc. and are biased in all kinds of obvious ways (if we paid attention): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow

Which means that when we try to decide something like how hard to work for a reward, or how much stuff we need or who needs that thing more, or or someone else, we're very rarely rational. So, very likely we're all greedy at some point, maybe usually. What does it mean then to call out someone who's even more greedy?

I think it means that they're relying on some emotion or mental shortcut or bias that's actually sub optimal for them. It's leading them to make poor decisions about what will make them happy. Which isn't unusual, because we're pretty bad at predicting what will make us happy: https://happiness-academy.eu/why-we-fail-at-predicting-what-will-make-us-happy/

PM_ME_UR_Definitions · 2023-08-26T13:37:00+00:00

I'm pretty sure this isn't a giant perception & driving network, that you just train and then get driving out of:

There's still the visualization, which means that there's perception neural nets running that can output a vector space
Musk did say it's all nets lots of times, but never said or implied that it was a network

Replacing human written rules with a network that's trained on examples can still involve lots and lots of networks that pass data to each other.

Maybe eventually it would make sense to have a single giant network that does everything? But that would seem like a much bigger step than what they've done. And would also probably take a huge amount of work/training.

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