In unrelated news, biologists held a tiger by the tail for a month.

The election the Constitution is referring to is the Electoral College, not the general election.

Is it normal usage now to use “model” to refer to a server with an LLM endpoint (as opposed to the software it's using)?

“Low-information voters” could be voters who ignore news and media and vote based on perceived changes to their everyday lives—which could be a good thing, depending on the reliability of the news sources they'd be using otherwise.

They also mention “people under 75”, so I assume they’re just using quarter-century ranges: 0–24; 25–49; 50–74; and 75–99.

Actually, here's a figure from the original study that uses 5-year bands, and you can see the anomaly covers those specific bands (with the under-25 bands looking more like random noise, which I assume is a statistical effect of the low number of total deaths in that range).

It seems like a lot of likely causes would be outside the scope of a medical study (for example, the age range is specifically working-age people, so it could be due to changes in occupations).

Decisions based on low information are like studies with small sample sizes: the results will fluctuate more due to random noise.

Pain signals are nature’s error channel.

Criminalize cops and prosecutors enforcing laws differentially based on the wealth of the suspects or victims.

The purpose of college isn’t to measure your intelligence, it’s to teach you new things.

White: Harold and Maude.
Black: I Love Boosters.

This idea goes all the way back to ancient Greece, where the Methodic school of medicine argued that illnesses could be treated by selecting treatments automatically based on a checklist of symptoms:

The Methodic school takes it to be that once a doctor has recognized the disease a patient has for what it is, the treatment that should follow is inherently obvious. It is not a matter of inference or observation, but of an immediate knowledge.

But the mainstream consensus has always been that each disease can manifest differently in each individual, and physicians need to rely on intuition derived from experience with previous diseases to diagnose each new case. And removing the physician from the loop—even in cases where final prescription would be the same—reduces the physician's ability to make observations of the patient and the disease that could help inform them if there are future developments.

If a system has become so degraded that there’s only one remaining semi-useful function left, it doesn’t follow that we should replace the system with one that only does that thing—the functions the system is failing to perform are the ones in need of replacement.

Jorge Luis Borges.

If that’s what he wanted, he wouldn’t have done it secretly.

Liu emphasized that this was an open-loop experiment, meaning that the organoids only received initial inputs without getting new feedback about their performance on the tasks. For this reason, the study does not prove that the organoids actually learned Braille, or were altered in any permanent way, just that they could classify Braille letters after receiving the electrical inputs.

So all they established is that the organoids respond in distinct ways to distinct signals out of the box?

I have issues with Silver too, but to be fair, an 80% likelihood should be wrong one time in five. If it always predicted the winner, the 80% figure would be inaccurate.

I think people confuse predicted chance of winning with predicted poll results, where 82% would indeed predict an unstoppable landslide.

I’m about thirty years ahead of you there.

It does diddly squat in addressing the ‘confidently incorrect’ hallucination / Bullshit-generator problem fundamental to LLMs

Eh, I can see some potential relevance. If an AI starts by dividing objects into “pointy things” and “round things” where a human would divide them into “animals” and “artifacts”, the AI would be more likely to mistake a cat for a car where a human would mistake a cat for a dog. Neither mistake is objectively worse than the other; but to a human, the former is a bizarre hallucination while the latter is an excusable misperception.

Fiction: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Nonfiction: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity