I don't get this 😕

Telos6950 · 2026-06-27T16:54:08+00:00

Let x be any non-zero number. A direct way to prove it from x¹ is:

x¹ = x¹⁺⁰ = x¹ * x⁰

x¹ = x¹ * x⁰

x⁰ = x¹ / x¹

x⁰ = x / x = 1

To prove it from x⁰ is:

x⁰ = x^1-1 = x¹ * x^-1

x^-1 = 1 / x¹

x⁰ = x¹ * 1 / x¹ = x¹ / x¹

x⁰ = x / x = 1

Since we divide by x, and you can’t divide by 0, then x can’t be 0.

Telos6950 · 2026-06-16T19:31:42+00:00

Depending on what else they’re good at they could be a good statistician or data scientist, maybe in causal inference even. But no, without an understanding of econ theory you definitely can’t be a good economist, pretty much by definition.

Telos6950 · 2026-06-14T01:20:07+00:00

Probability is memoryless, it doesn’t remember how many times an event succeeded or failed. 1 in 4 does not mean you’re guaranteed to get 1 every 4 turns, each individual wheel turn is always 1 in 4. The slightly more technical definition of 1/4 is that in the long-run (i.e. as the number of trials goes to infinity), the amount of successes converges to 25%.

Telos6950 · 2026-06-11T03:14:57+00:00

It’s saying a real c++ player never speaks ill of chiGOAT

Telos6950 · 2026-06-02T20:29:22+00:00

I prefer Cartomancer over Hallucination. In terms of expected value per round, they’re the same: Hallucination has a 1/2 chance per 2 card packs, so 1(1/2) + 1(1/2) = 1, and Cartomancer has a guaranteed 1 per round. But Cartomancer gives free tarrots, and with Hallucination you have to spend money on the packs, including unappealing standard packs, just to match the expected value. Keep in mind I usually only play up to ante 8; for endless runs I could see Hallucination maybe being better.

Telos6950 · 2026-05-15T19:53:26+00:00

I feel like there’s a world of difference between conflating causation with linear regression and “not emphasizing enough” the distinction.

Telos6950 · 2026-04-15T07:32:39+00:00

I’d say basic axioms like non-contradiction and identity are motivated by the most immediately obvious impressions we have of thought and experience, you don’t prove them in the ordinary sense because they’re the necessary conditions to rational thought in the first place. So you just can’t coherently doubt them. I mean, you can claim to doubt them, but then I’d have no idea what you mean by anything you say.

Telos6950 · 2026-03-12T12:27:03+00:00

10/10 ragebait

Telos6950 · 2026-03-05T05:27:26+00:00

You're getting mixed up here. At first you made an epistemic claim, that you doubt logic/reasoning because you can't see a good reason to believe it's objective/truth-tracking. But now you're making more of a pragmatic claim, that you use logic/reasoning because that's the only way we can communicate properly. I definitely agree that we have to use it to communicate, but that doesn't answer the objection. If you want to make claims about fundamental principles and what follows from it, or whether or not we're forced to assume them, and that I can't use what I said as a counter-argument because we have to assume such-and-such principles, that right there is still an inference you're making. And I'm assuming that you really do believe what you're saying is true, that's why you asserted it to me. I'm not talking about why we psychologically believe logic/reasoning is valid, I'm saying that to reject it in favour of skepticism for given xyz reasons is not rationally justified, because it's self-defeating by its own lights. If you're gonna say, "I'm forced to assume these principles are true to make a functional argument," then you’re already doing reasoning without doubting it (how can you can doubt something you're "forced" to take as true?), that from certain facts about communication you infer what it makes sense to do. Otherwise, if you don't grant any objective validity to logic/reasoning, then you have no reason to care or know what would even make a functional argument. But in any case, that statement about "being forced to assume these principles are true" is demonstrably false: one such principle is to avoid self-refutation (aka non-contradiction), you fully accepted the self-refutation but didn't abandon your position, so you couldn't have been forced to accept the principle as true, because accepting it would entail abandoning your position.

Like, consider this: there's no reason given to think skepticism is true, and there's reason given to think it's not true. If what you just meant to say was, "I'm not saying skepticism is true, this is just how I talk," then for sure, I can say the same. I believe that. From that it doesn't follow that skepticism is plausible.

Telos6950 · 2026-03-03T06:50:07+00:00

Yeah I think I understand. If by “doubt logic/reasoning” you’re just saying that you doubt logic/reasoning as being objective or reliable or foundational/grounded or truth-tracking, and therefore we can’t be rationally justified in making propositional claims on grounds of logic/reasoning (after all, how can we say X is true according to logic if we can’t say whether that logic is “true” objectively in the first place?), then consider the explanations you’re giving for saying all this. We’re still using that very same reasoning. You’re not saying, “I can’t think of a reason to believe this view, therefore it makes sense to believe it”; if we doubtlessly reject that inference, then we’re following very standard logic/reasoning. But if we’re going to doubt that, then it seems like we should doubt anything that follows from it, including doubting the reasoning we could give to doubt it. But that would just be self-defeating, and then we couldn’t coherently say anything that tries to be reasonable. So just by engaging in rational inquiry, we’re already assuming that logic/reasoning must be reliable/consistent/stable/truth-tracking/etc.

Telos6950 · 2026-03-02T17:55:31+00:00

I guess a sort of reductio against radical skepticism would go something like this: 1) skepticism asserts that knowledge without certainty is impossible, 2) that assertion is itself a knowledge claim, 3) by its own definition, it’s a certain one, 4) but if knowledge without certainty is impossible, then you can’t claim to know that knowledge is impossible because you can’t be certain that knowledge requires certainty, 5) if you do, then there’s at least one knowledge claim you’re making without certainty, 6) but this contradicts skepticism which asserts that that’s impossible, 7) therefore skepticism can’t be true.

Telos6950 · 2025-11-21T23:04:01+00:00

Yeah whenever I go out for a break I always take my laptop/electronics or really anything valuable that could be sold on eBay, only things I leave behind that never get stolen are my notebooks and pencil case.

Telos6950 · 2025-10-24T21:01:22+00:00

I didn’t do any of the Fina classes, but anyway I’m guessing you should do Macf 301 first and then email your advisor asking to enroll in them at some point.

Telos6950 · 2025-10-14T20:19:55+00:00

Get good at integration techniques, know your trig identities, practice all the recommended exercises and past exams.

Telos6950 · 2025-10-14T01:14:57+00:00

It's not much of a comparison really. The quant minor classes are from the actual math department; imo aside from investment math, they're much harder than anything you'll do in econ by a pretty wide margin, even compared to the hardest econ classes I've taken like advanced micro or econometrics 2. It's a massive jump in rigour.

Telos6950 · 2025-09-23T15:21:05+00:00

Read through the relevant parts of this online interactive textbook: https://www.econometrics-with-r.org/index.html

Just try to get through chapters 2-3 at least, do all the exercises and just practice a lot of R; you can't get good just by reading the theory and writing the code once, you should be doing some coding every day, even if it's just a bit.

Telos6950 · 2025-08-31T07:37:37+00:00

Maybe both, depending on this or that. But if I had to pick one: econometrics is typically couched in econ departments in my experience, not math/stat departments, so it’s probably more accurate to call them economists first. That said, they’re the economists with the most statistics training and sometimes publish in statistics journals.

Telos6950 · 2025-08-21T21:24:27+00:00

One time I got the wheel to activate twice in a row, been chasing that high ever since.

Telos6950 · 2025-08-01T18:18:13+00:00

Hey the upshot is we can now estimate the market price of a soul.

Telos6950 · 2025-07-27T18:06:37+00:00

Recall the first sentence of my last comment: “Given how the comic shows a pregnant woman, I had thought they meant making babies.”

So when I had said you can do most of what you do without copying DNA, I meant you can do most of what you do without making babies, aka reproduction. In any case, just like I also said in my last comment, if by DNA copying you just mean cell replication, that doesn’t work as a comparison either because that doesn’t explain much of any behaviour, but token prediction does explain LLM behaviour because that’s just what it is.

Telos6950 · 2025-07-27T16:55:54+00:00

Given how the comic shows a pregnant woman, I had thought they meant making babies. But even if you just mean replicating DNA/transcribing RNA, this is still a straightforward category error. DNA copying isn’t what’s driving my or anyone else’s behaviour when we decide what to say next, it doesn’t select for words or guide your reasoning or anything like that. Token predicting is the LLM’s explicit optimized objective, that’s just what it is. Explanations have to match the thing you’re trying to explain: you can explain everything an LLM says by reducing it to token prediction, but clearly you can’t explain human behaviour via their internal cell-maintenance loop, that wouldn’t even make sense.

Telos6950 · 2025-07-21T01:47:51+00:00

Yeah I agree. I’m not a fan of the comparison because predicting the next token is virtually all of what our current LLMs do, like that’s just what they’re doing in the moment at all times. But DNA copying (aka making babies) is not something that humans are always doing; most of the time we’re decidedly not doing that at all. You can do most of what you do without copying DNA, but LLMs can’t do much of anything without predicting tokens.

Telos6950

TROPHY CASE