One thing that confuses me is that some of these papers were successfully replicated, so juxtaposing them to the ones that have not been replicated at all given the title of the page feels a bit off. Not sure if fair.

The ego depletion effect seems intuitively surprising to me. Science is often unintuitive. I do know that it is easier to make forward-thinking decisions when I am not tired so I dont know.

>some of these papers were successfully replicated, so juxtaposing them to the ones that have not been replicated at all given the title of the page feels a bit off. Not sure if fair.

I don't like Giancotti's claims. He wrote: >This post is a compact reference list of the most (in)famous cognitive science results that failed to replicate and should, for the time being, be considered false.

I don't agree with Giancotti's epistemological claims but today I will not bloviate at length about the epistemology of science. I will try to be brief.

If I understand Marco Giancotti correctly, one particular point is that Giancotti seems to be saying that Hagger et al. have impressively debunked Baumeister et al.

The ego depletion "debunking" is not really what I would call a refutation. It says, "Results from the current multilab registered replication of the ego-depletion effect provide evidence that, if there is any effect, it is close to zero. ... Although the current analysis provides robust evidence that questions the strength of the ego-depletion effect and its replicability, it may be premature to reject the ego-depletion effect altogether based on these data alone."

Maybe Baumeister's protocol was fundamentally flawed, but the counter-argument from Hagger et al. does not convince me. I wasn't thrilled with Baumeister's claims when they came out, but now I am somehow even less thrilled with the claims of Hagger et al., and I absolutely don't trust Giancotti's assessment. I could believe that Hagger executed Baumeister's protocol correctly, but I can't believe Giancotti has a grasp of what scientific claims "should" be "believed."

You make some good points based on your deeper read. I am a bit saddened that the rest of the comment section (the top 6 comments as of right now) devolved into "look at how silly psychology is with all its p-hacking"

That might be true, but this article's comment section isn't a good place for it because it doesn't seem like the article is entirely fair. I would not call it dishonest, but there is a lack of certainty and finality in being able to conclude that these papers have been successfully proven to not be replicable.

The idea isn't that it is easier to do things when not tired. It is that you specifically get tired exercising self control.

I think that can be subtly confused by people thinking you can't get better at self control with practice? That is, I would think a deliberate practice of doing more and more self control every day should build up your ability to do more self control. And it would be easy to think that that means you have a stamina for self control that depletes in the same way that aerobic fitness can work. But, those don't necessarily follow each other.

you can hoard anything, including knowledge.

so the malware launches AI tools that have wider access than the app is loaded in?

I did not know AI tools could access sensitive directories.

Or is it that AI brute forces access to directories that the malware already had access to but the developer of the malware was not aware of?

Does the inventory.txt get uploaded? There seems to be an outbound connection but I did not see verification that it is the inventory.txt.

sometimes these bots just go awry. i wish you could checkpoint spots in a conversation so you could replay from a that point, maybe with a push in the latent space or a new seed.

I think the issue with the math is that it doesn't read well.

For example, the paragraphs around the paragraph with "compute the exact Poisson tail (or use a Chernoff bound)" and that paragraph itself could be better illustrated with lines of math instead of mostly language.

I think you do need some math if you want to approach this probabilistically, but I agree that might not be the most accessible approach, and a hard threshold calculation is more accessible and maybe just as good.

For something like this, annotated graphs and examples (IMO) work a lot better than formulas in explaining the problem and solution.

Particularly because distributed computer systems aren't pure math problems to be solved. Load often comes from usage which is often closer to random inputs rather than predicable variables. Further, how load is processed depends on a bunch of things from the OS scheduler to the current load on the network.

It can be hard to really intuitively understand that a bottlenecked system processes the same load slower than an unbound system.

Never knew people viewed notion and obsidian in the same space.

i usually compare obsidian to joplin... seems like i should be looking more at obsidian because i was considering starting a new wiki in notion.

I have tried to digest why this is done. It is not because they believe they are 10x faster.

It is because they think it will 10x their chances of getting a really good engineer for 1/10th as cheap.

At least that is my theory. maybe i am wrong. i try to be charitable.

No engineer is smart and overall capable enough to be called a 10x one and yet doesn't realize their price in western value. And we still talk about corporate cogs, the truly brilliant simply start their own gigs

I never knew a single 10x. I know lots of them who say they are 10x though, but my parrot does a better job then most of them

I knew 2 at least. They could run literal circles around whole experienced team and achieved sometimes, ie if given ie a week things that would be hard for seniors to do at all.

I talk about ie taking ActiveMQ, building it on your own and tweaking various calls and internal parameters to achieve cca 10x performance boost compared to just vanilla installation. Companies bundling it as part of the product would kill and pay serious money for such distro. Guy did this in maybe 3-4 days from never touching ActiveMQ or any other similar messaging system before to have it reliably working and moving to next thing.

These folks can be dangerous though, they come up with complex solution that can be extremely hard to maintain, debug and evolve by others. So their added value on long enough time scale can be actually negative even for quite senior but not absolutely top notch brilliant team. Not something 'code ninjas' (or as I call them brilliant juniors) care about, but if you work on something long term you will see this pattern from time to time.

Also these folks are hard to keep since they get bored when things slow down and big challenges are not around, and quickly and easily move on. Making the issue above pretty serious item to consider.

Do you think you could do a better job than a CEO of public company [x] from a technical standpoint - in other words, omitting the connections and public-facing charisma that they typically bring as part of the package?

I genuinely do, but kind of paradoxically also suspect I'm wrong. It's simply that it's something so far outside my domain that I just can't really appreciate their skills honed over many years of practice and training, because all I get to externally see are their often ridiculous limitations, failures, and myopia.

I imagine this is, in many ways, how people who have no understanding of e.g. software, let alone software development, see software engineers. I don't think it's uncharitable, it's just human nature. Imagine if we were the ones hiring CEOs. 'That guys a total asshat, and we can get ten guys in India - hard working, smart guys, standouts in 1.4 billion people - for the same price.' Go go go.

I think there is confusion because coding is easy, software engineering is hard.

Coding was never the hardest problem. And it is hard to say why people are taking so long to realise it

People who don't know how to code know they don't know how. They can look over your shoulder and see that it looks like gibberish, and they also have no interest in understanding it even if they could.

On the other hand, designing the software or engineering a solution to the problem seems like something they could do, as far as they know, because it's not something concrete that they can look at and see is beyond their abilities.

Alternatively, when your outsourcing agency finds they have accidentally assigned you an actually good engineer, term used loosely, that you're not paying for (they know this happens when the engineer gets up to speed with your codebase at all), "your guy" is replaced with another guy who inherits the name, the email address and the SSH key.

And if the agency doesn't do that, the good engineer will figure out he's being underpaid as slop-for-hire cannon fodder and move on his own accord.

anti free speech stuff like this is why i only bring burner phones into europe.

That's just Germany. Europe is not a country.

Britain too

Cause they all read gwern and all eugenics leads into cults because conspiracy adjacent garbo always does.