Agreed.
I remember hearing very good talk from someone working on Django documentations that was very close to what you describe.
Cannot find the reference to the talk, but indeed this is how the documentation is organized:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.2/#how-the-documentation...
That looks like a typical collider bias to me...
There should be no correlation between location and quality... But as you are looking at restaurant that are still "in business" you are introducing a bias.
If you simplify, a restaurant can have :
- good/bad location
- good/bad food
If your restaurant has bad location and bad food, it is not going to stay in business very long.
After that you can have a mix of all, but if you remove the "bad/bad" restaurant there is a correlation that appears, but it is due to the collider bias.
> if you remove the "bad/bad" restaurant there is a correlation that appears, but it is due to the collider bias.
This sounds like the correlation appears because of you throwing away some data, but the way I see it, that correlation is real - you're not removing the bad/bad restaurants, the market is.
I've been reading up on collider bias on Wiki and pondering the examples[0] - restaurants, dating, celebrities - and the way I see it, the biased statistics is still true for whoever is doing the classification (person visiting fast-food restaurants, or looking for a date), and if their selection (taste) generalizes, it might also carry over to the general population.
I feel the restaurant example from Wiki, with its associated image below, is worth discussing:
"An illustration of Berkson's Paradox. The top graph represents the actual distribution, in which a positive correlation between quality of burgers and fries is observed. However, an individual who does not eat at any location where both are bad observes only the distribution on the bottom graph, which appears to show a negative correlation."
This feels wrong to me. Why is the regression line nearly horizontal when, eyeballing the graph, a nearly vertical one would fit better and capture an even stronger positive correlation between qualities of hamburgers and fries? In fact, I'm tempted to even throw away the leftmost and rightmost points on the lower panel as outliers.
Anyway, this example assumes the bad/bad restaurants are not visited by the subject - however, if we take your scenario where bad/bad restaurants quickly go out of business, then it's the market that creates the correlation between those two hypothetically independent qualities, so as long as we're talking real world and not some imaginary spherical restaurants in frictionless vacuum, it would be fair to say the correlation exists (and that the causal mechanism behind it is market selection).
I haven’t seen this mentioned in the conversation yet, so I’ll bring it up here.
A research paper from a few years ago introduced the concept of “customer inertia.” It found that users tend to overestimate their difficulty in unsubscribing from a service. In other words, when a subscription includes auto-renewal (or a similar feature), a significant portion of potential users will choose not to subscribe because they fear they won’t be able to cancel if they stop using the service.
As someone who often doesn't subscribe because I don't want to get NYTed into having to pick up the phone to cancel, no this approach to pricing wouldn't change things for me.
What does work for me is when the service's docs have a very clear page on how to cancel the service without having to talk to someone.
That's really interesting as a concept. As one random person on the internet (not a sample) I definitely avoid services that look like they'll be a pain to unsubscribe from, and will be much more likely to try out a free trial of something if it looks like an easy one to cancel. Super interesting that some people are trying to factor in that things into wider-scale enomics.
Yeah such are race to the bottoms. Because some assholes did turn cancelation into a Kafkaesque nightmare, now people don't want to subscribe in the first place. Who could have seen that coming? Genius MBA logic. And now honest businesses are in the shitter for it.
Seeing how much revenue subscription services make from inactive customers (and how much I have paid over my lifetime to services I no longer used) people don't overestimate this at all. If anything, users still underestimate it.
The disconnect between the researchers and people's actual estimations is that "cancelling a service" is much harder than the couple button clicks it usually takes. You have a structural problem: If you don't use a service, you don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. It's easy to cancel something if you make a conscious decision to stop using something. But if it just gradually falls out of use, your only reminder that you should cancel it are your bank statements or the occasional payment reminder email (that some services avoid sending for exactly this reason).
You are correct, he's also been a guest on "Well There's Your Problem" (an engineering disasters podcast/channel) and TRASHFUTURE (UK tech/politics podcast) a few times.
About four weeks ago I read Harry Mathews' short-story collection The Human Country.
I came to it for "Franz Kafka in Riga" (sold to me as a sort of proto-quine, but really it's not very quiney, it's more a funny story about the writerly ego).
His most famous work in there is "Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)". It's a story that requires leisure to read, as the recipe does to cook; if you just want to read the story and get it over with, it's not going to work at all. Which is clever in hindsight. Of course I just wanted to get it over with, and so it didn't come out for me.
There are several stories literally about linguistic games (particularly the first few in the book); personally I found them intriguing and entertaining but ultimately kind of pointless. (The kind of erudite game where you want to get out a paper and pencil, or go to Wikipedia, but suspect with near-certainty that you won't find any there there if you do.) "The Bratislava Spiccato" is worth reading twice just to see how the non-digressions actually do add up to a reasonable story; I thought it was going to be like Douglas Hofstadter's "Little Harmonic Labyrinth", but (IIRC) I decided that it was actually totally honest, which made the second read feel very satisfactory.
The story I enjoyed most from that collection — the one I recommend it's worth a small amount of your time no matter who you are — was "The Broadcast", which is a linguistic game in technique but not in subject matter. The (much) longer variation "Their Words, For You" also somewhat appealed to my aesthetic sense but (like "Farce Double") went on much longer than my patience.
Thanks for the tip on the short stories. When I read “The Conversions” I tried to tease out all the meta games, same with Tlooth. But I never found it rewarding. I’m more drawn to his prose, topics, and the air of aristocracy that comes from his eccentric and wealthy upbringing. His talent plus that inescapable past makes for some unusual stories. Like The Journalist, or Cigarettes.
Reading that the Norway-Poland pipeline just happened to open today...
Sounds like a loud a clear message to me, along the lines of "Gas pipeline seems to be very fragile around here, let's just hope nothing happens to yours".
If you add factions into the mix, I would say that this might be what makes the most sense.
There's also the fact that it just shakes things up a bit. Russia isn't benefiting from the pipeline now. Leaving it intact leaves long-term opportunities and risks that strategic actors with time on their side can turn against Russia (or against Putin in particular). Blowing a hole in the pipeline creates confusion, disruption and opportunities today. For what? Unclear, but Putin seems to thrive on short-term crises.
destroying something as vital as the poland-norway pipeline or other norwegian gas infrastructure could be seen as a trigger for article 5.
Mind you, this is something russian claims it wants (the war against the west and all that), but actually triggering it or something like it which allows to poor even more weapons into ukraine will result in an even weaker russia.
I think the point here is that her wealth being mostly private (or enough of it being private not being a specialist in those matters), the way she carried her duty was even more remarkable.
You could easily imagine somebody inheriting similar wealth and not behaving nearly as well as she did for her country.
I do not think it is about being pro or against monarchy here.
Legally their may be a distinction but the monarch's wealth was ultimately taken from the people and maintained via favourable tax laws - there's no inheritance tax on a monarchs estate, she didn't pay income tax etc.
If you think that Queen Victoria, head of the largest empire the world has ever seen and who purchased Balmoral, got rich by skimping on taxes, then I’d recommend taking some time to read a book or two.
I don't think their comment was arguing that at all, and in fact it seems like an indefensibly uncharitable interpretation.
> ultimately taken from the people and maintained via favourable tax laws
Taken from the people and maintained via favorable tax laws. UK inheritance tax is 40% (over the threshold, which is so low as to be meaningless next to the royal estate). With 5 royal deaths since Victoria, Charles III would have less than 8% of what he actually does if that 40% were taken each time (which is obviously vastly oversimplifying to make a point).
There are actually quite a lot of them, the AIEA maintains the PRIS database: https://pris.iaea.org/pris/
You will see a lot of them being connected to the grid since.
