I’d be more impressed if you could find someone willing to wade through all that crap.

How and why does this happen? I have more torrents stuck at 99.9% than anywhere else combined.

They essentially sell raw material. This seems like the least specific business you can possibly have.

Same price or cheaper? Then sure. Variety is good.

You can just turn the Latin characters on their side and all the connecting nodes will line up again.

I think you’ve lost the context for this conversation. No one’s disputing the reproducibility of QM experiments or for the existence of hidden variables.

The statistical nature of it doesn’t make it any less predictable

Exactly. Similarly, an all-powerful being messing with our world doesn’t mean we can no longer make predictions. We just end up with a model with hidden variables that change over time.

Maybe we use these terms differently in different domains. In my field, stochastic means that repeating the same experiment under the same conditions doesn’t guarantee the same results (e.g. rolling a die). The opposite of stochastic is deterministic. Something that changes depending on the day would be “a function of the date” or something that is “conditional on the date”. This can either be a deterministic function (e.g. calling date.today().day in Python, or a mapping from the date to a uniform distribution ranging from 0 to date.today().day) or a stochastic function (e.g. sample a uniform random integer between 0 and date.today().day).

Edit: I think what you’re talking about is the deterministic mapping from some variable into a distribution. We (as in my field specifically) do sometimes call that “stochastic” too, even though that mapping is deterministic. There may be a bit of terminology overloading here because what we care about in the end is the sample drawn from that distribution, which is actually stochastic.

How do you distinguish axioms from just another parameter of your model? If an all-powerful being is messing with our results, then you just get a stochastic model. In fact, we already have stochastic models in quantum physics. And whether or not the universe is a simulation doesn’t affect the model’s ability to make predictions at all, so why would it matter from a physics perspective? The model would be unchanged either way.

Does the concept of an axiom actually exist and make sense in physics? I thought we just had models.

It led them to the right answer. That’s positive reinforcement.

France has nukes

Well, I’m confirmed not ADHD by a professional and I can definitely relate to this.

Repeating what you were told in different words is a way of confirming your understanding. That’s what I’m trying to do here.

So basically, you’re saying that the two tracks with people tied to them are valued at -1 and -5, while the empty tracks have some positive non-zero value?

And what’s that difference? Both will get you into a discussion on the merits of the other country’s system and the proposed solution.

As many have mentioned, the expected number of deaths is 1 for no action and 1.25 if you pull the lever. Many still choose to pull the lever despite the expected number being higher. As I understand it, the reasoning is that the value of reach outcome doesn’t scale linearly with the number of people alive/dead. Going from 0 deaths to 1 death is a much larger drop in value than going from 1 death to 2.

Something something one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

You’d also have to consider the value of the lives saved by not sending the train to the 5 person track.

There are many things here in Canada that suck. Is it better or worse than that of other countries? Should we try to copy what someone else is doing or come up with a different solution altogether? The way to figure that out is to critically evaluate what’s going on elsewhere, and that comes with engaging in discussions with others on those topics, which can come in the form of criticisms. We may also want to convince others that the state of things in those countries are bad and we should not try to model them, and that also often comes in the form of criticism for that foreign country.

It depends on how relevant I expect those changes to be to me. For programming languages or libraries I use often for example, I’ll always read change logs. For other software, I’ll likely only look at it if I’m waiting for a specific bug fix or feature.