Wanted to point to the startup the author seems to be running, which is to sell insurance somehow tied to Bitcoin: https://meanwhile.bm/
For the record, that strikes me as seriously improper. Life insurance is a heavily regulated offering intended to provide security to families. It is the opposite of bitcoin, which is a highly speculative investment asset. Those two things should not be mixed.
Also, the fact that the disclosure seems to limit sales to being only occurring in Bermuda seems intentional. I suspect that this product would be highly illegal in most if not all US states, so they must offer this only for sale in Bermuda to avoid that issue.
I think it's actually tax avoidance disguised as life insurance:
> You can borrow Bitcoin against your policy, and the borrowed BTC adopts a cost basis at the time of the loan. So if BTC were to 10x after you fund your policy, you could borrow a Bitcoin from Meanwhile at the 10x higher cost basis—meaning you could sell that BTC immediately and not owe any capital gains tax on that 10x of appreciation
Oooooouch, I missed that when checking their site, and that's extra shady. Especially when at the footing of the page you can see:
Neither Meanwhile Insurance Bitcoin (Bermuda) Limited nor its affiliates Meanwhile Services (Bermuda) Limited and Meanwhile Incorporated, are lawyers or accountants. They do not provide legal or tax advice. You are wholly responsible for obtaining your own legal and tax advice.
And everything incorporated in Bermuda, and regulated only by Bermuda laws, makes it very impractical as an insurance (go and claim whatever you want against them from your country, I don't think it will be easy) and very obviously a tax evasion thing.
> Take whatever job you can now while continuing to look for your next role.
This. And by any job I mean any job. McDonalds, book store, what have you. A good friend of mine dropped out of Harvard sophomore year. She found work at the COOP, then CVS, etc. It was definitely better than going back to an unstable and abusive environment while continuing to job hunt.
The opposite happened. Congress said that an agency should manage aid, and then USAID was created by executive order. Trump could just create another agency.
Congress passed a law in 1998 itself to establish US AID, 37 years after the EO. The EO was made with authority that had been granted by another law.
That 1998 law does not permit the President to abolish it or name a different organization:
> Unless abolished pursuant to the reorganization plan submitted under section 6601 of this title, and except as provided in section 6562 of this title, there is within the Executive branch of Government the United States Agency for International Development as an entity described in section 104 of title 5.
Congress explicitly forbade downsizing of US AID without prior consultation.
> Sec. 7063. (a) Prior Consultation and Notification.--Funds appropriated ... may not be used to implement a reorganization, redesign, or other plan described in subsection (b) by ... the United States Agency for International Development ... without prior consultation ... with the appropriate congressional committees.
> (b) ... a reorganization, redesign, or other plan shall include any action to
> (2) expand, eliminate, consolidate, or downsize the United States official presence overseas ...
> (3) expand or reduce the size of the permanent Civil Service, Foreign Service, eligible family member, and locally employed staff workforce of the Department of State and USAID from the staffing levels previously justified to the Committees on Appropriations for fiscal year 2024.
> I'd be really surprised if Congress can stop the President from firing employees. He is the head of the Executive branch.
The President is bound by law in that role, and most of thr federal civilian workforce is covered by civil service laws that govern hiring and firing, they are not at-will employees serving at the pleasure of the President? And those laws create a legal property interest which means that no one in government can fire them without due process, and that to do so is a violation of not only the statute itself but the 5th Amendment as well. This has been litigated fairly extensively, as one might expect given the size of the federal workforce and the inevitability of disputes over thr legitimacy of adverse workplace actions.
Not publishing results with p >= 0.05 is the reason p-values aren't that useful. This is how you get the replication crisis in psychology.
The p-value cutoff of 0.05 just means "an effect this large, or larger, should happen by chance 1 time out of 20". So if 19 failed experiments don't publish and the 1 successful one does, all you've got are spurious results. But you have no way to know that, because you don't see the 19 failed experiments.
This is the unresolved methodological problem in empirical science that deal with weak effects.
> "an effect this large, or larger, should happen by chance 1 time out of 20"
More like "an effect this large, or larger, should happen by chance 1 time out of 20 in the hypothetical universe where we already know that the true size of the effect is zero".
Part of the problem of p-values is that most people can't even parse what it means (not saying it's your case). P-values are never a statement about probabilities in the real world, but always a statement about probabilities in a hypothetical world where we all effects are zero.
"Effect sizes", on the other hand, are more directly meaningful and more likely to be correctly interpreted by people on general, particularly if they have the relevant domain knowledge.
(Otherwise, I 100% agree with the rest of your comment.)
Publishing only significant results is a terrible idea in the first place. Publishing should be based on how interesting the design of the experiment was, not how interesting the result was.
Both of those statements are false. Everything has a result. And the p-value is very literally a quantified measure of how interesting a result was. That's the only thing it purports to measure.
"Woman gives birth to fish" is interesting because it has a p-value of zero: under the null hypothesis ("no supernatural effects"), a woman can never give birth to a fish.
I ate cheese yesterday and a celebrity died today: P >> 0.05. There is no result and you can't say anything about whether my cheese eating causes or prevents celebrity deaths. You confuse hypothesis testing with P-values.
The result is "a celebrity died today". This result is uninteresting because, according to you, celebrities die much more often than one per twenty days.
I suggest reading your comments before you post them.
p-value doesn't measure interestingness directly of course, but I think people generally find nonsignificant results uninteresting because they think the result is not difficult to explain by the definitionally-uninteresting "null hypothesis".
My point was basically that the reputation / carrer / etc of the experimenter should be mostly independent of the study results. Otherwise you get bad incentives. Obviously we have limited ability to do this in practice, but at least we could fix the way journals decide what to publish.
In THEORY yes, but in practice, there are not a ton of journals I think that will actually publish well done research that does not come to some interesting conclusion and find some p<.05. So....
Plenty of journals do, just mostly in fields that don't emphasize P-values. Chemistry and materials science tend to focus on the raw data in the form of having the instrument output included, and an interpretation in the results section.
The peaks in your spectra, the calculation results, or the microscopy image either support your findings or they don't, so P-values don't get as much milage. I can't remember the last time I saw a P-value in one of those papers.
This does create a problem similar to publishing null result P-values, however: if a reaction or method doesn't work out, journals don't want it because it's not exciting. So much money is likely being wasted independently duplicating failed reactions over and over because it just never gets published.
Another reason that they should never have been allowed to ingest all the books in the first place. Without paying for the rights to use the digital form of the book, a use which is explicitly prohibited by the publisher, they digitized the books anyway. If they used it to train an LLM, and the LLM regurgitates near facsimiles of all the copyrighted works without compensation to the original rights holders, that seems like something that should be illegal.
All the arguments for where to place control over who decides what gets built IMHO are just political power grabs from one constituency or another. Different companies do it differently, and I'm not sure there is one best way. Any time engineering or product or sales or marketing want more power they come up with some reasons why their function should have more control in every company everywhere.
I don't think arguments that any function should always drive can be true, because who is best qualified to make those decisions is based on things like judgement, experience, domain knowledge, and customer understanding.
Instead of saying a specific function should have control, I think empowering the people who have been best a making decisions about scope should do it is the best approach. That can be engineering but that also can be product etc.
The approach is fundamentally flawed. You can’t query an LLM as to whether it has a theory of mind. You need to analyze how its internal logic works.
Imagine the opposite result had occurred, and the LLM had outputted something which was considered a theory of mind… Does that prove it has one, or that it was trained on some data that had something it used which made it sound like it has a theory of mind?
For the record, that strikes me as seriously improper. Life insurance is a heavily regulated offering intended to provide security to families. It is the opposite of bitcoin, which is a highly speculative investment asset. Those two things should not be mixed.
Also, the fact that the disclosure seems to limit sales to being only occurring in Bermuda seems intentional. I suspect that this product would be highly illegal in most if not all US states, so they must offer this only for sale in Bermuda to avoid that issue.