Cohen's d is one of the most popular measures of effect size out there. It happens sometimes that Cohen's d is not accurately translated into our intuitions of how relevant soething is. Here I will explain it with a few charts.
Cohen's d measures effect size, which a standarised measure of the difference between two distributions. In the case of Cohen's d,
That's the difference between two distribution's means, over a pooled standard deviation, and it looks like this:
Let's look at some examples.
First, he…
Many people do not understand what capitalists do within capitalism. Some suggest they ought to be removed, as they are just parasites who tax the productive elements of society (e.g. workers)
(I)
It is said, for example, that capital income (rents, interest, dividends, capital gains) does not come from producing anything, but from owning. It's not from matching capital with labor and such, because it's entrepreneurs who do that. To a point, it would be workers (CEOs, HRs, etc) too.
Elon Musk, or Amancio Or…
[Part of the Soviet Union series]
I wanted to do a longer post on the fall of the USSR, and that will appear here at some point, but I wanted to do a quick post now with some minor points.
First, a chart of the fall, measured from peak GDP,
That's 13 years to recover. Some communists take this to mean.. ahá! This proves that communism works, as GDPpc falled badly when the transition to capitalism happened. Here's the chart for the years prior to the fall:
So communism was zooming along, then a transition …
Many economists say we are living through a Great Stagnation. The term, was made famous by Tyler Cowen'sbook of the same name and the latest iteration is, of course, Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth.
But they usually look at economic factors like Total Factor Productivity (TFP) or GDP per hour worked. By these measures, we are living through a stagnant period. Some expected that the stagnation would go away once we properly accounted for the Internet and similar hard to account for innov…
Robin Hanson has a recent post in his blog that is best summarised by his tweet:
https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/723905628004073473
Do read the full post, though.
Here, I argue that there are good reasons to reject the argument, even if we grant Hanson his view on personal identity.
From his drawing, I don't get exactly what he means. (Are the dots a period of amnesia? Of 'mind jump'?) So I redrew them to present the cases better:
So the Case A is you going to a party, and then forgetting about it.(…
Here are some, in increasing order of difficulty
Magic The Gathering and Hearthstone. As far as I know, there is no meaningful work on AI here, but DeepMind is trying to read cards into code directly. Perhaps a first step. Somewhat easy because the game is turn based. But difficult because of the high number of possible combinations of plays, long term thinking needed, and incomplete information: you can't see your opponent's deck or hand, only what is on the board.
Starcraft or Civilization. Right now Sta…