dyno-might's comments

dyno-might | 4 years ago | on: Experimenter effects and the remote effects of staring [pdf]

Via The Control Group is Out of Control

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o...

dyno-might | 5 years ago | on: Two states tax some drivers by the mile. Many more want to give it a try

I like it. We might want to take some extra efforts to make sure the odometer is accurate, but there's pretty strong incentives to fool with odometers already.

Apparently the average person pays 150-400 in gas taxes per year now. I guess the depreciation from mileage on car is of a similar order of magnitude. And we seem to do OK now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odometer_fraud

(I'm sure people cheat on gas taxes, too.)

dyno-might | 5 years ago | on: Two states tax some drivers by the mile. Many more want to give it a try

I have a technical question: Is there any feasible way to implement a vehicle miles tax without building a massive surveillance state that basically tracks every single place everyone goes? This hardly seems beyond the wit of man, but I'm not aware of any existing off-the-shelf way to accomplish this, other than just having the government promise to delete all records after X days.

dyno-might | 5 years ago | on: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

Do you have any pointers for better studies regarding test-retake reliability with the MBTI and/or Big Five? The Wikipedia page does not appear to be helpful in this regard. As far as I can tell, every citation is regarding 16 discrete bins.

dyno-might | 5 years ago | on: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

Sorry, I accidentally pushed it to live before I was finished revising it, then hurriedly (but not hurriedly enough, clearly) pulled it down again. Blame me, not the site.

dyno-might | 5 years ago | on: In Defense of Myers Briggs (2020)

Hi, I'm the author of this post. Any way we can change the link to here: https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html ?

This is a slightly updated version of the post (new links, slightly less unhinged language, and a link to this MBTI quiz that I made to promote non-binary axes: https://dynomight.net/mbti )

dyno-might | 5 years ago | on: Dyson air purifier outperformed by cheap DIY box fan filter in Marketplace test

I did a bunch of tests with a similar filter (albeit comparing to a cheaper commercial purifier)

https://dynomight.net/2020/12/15/some-real-data-on-a-DIY-box...

It's crazy that commercial manufacturers usually don't even attempt to provide data like this to show that their products actually, you know, work.

dyno-might | 5 years ago | on: Sales tax creates more unnecessary pain than value added tax

It looks OK to me. Do you mean the $2.40 in the text or in the table?

dyno-might | 5 years ago | on: Sales tax creates more unnecessary pain than value added tax

I can't imagine anyone would care, but if you'd like, you're welcome to browse the full commit history! :)

https://github.com/dyno-might/dyno-might.github.io/commits/m...

I didn't change the article between submitting and the time you made your comment. I did just add two paragraphs to the end of the "Before We Begin" section to try to clarify this point. (Your interpretation was what I intended.)

dyno-might | 5 years ago | on: Sales tax creates more unnecessary pain than value added tax

Author here. I very much appreciate your polite tone! I'm aware that taxes on items for resale aren't treated like in the toy model. (This is mentioned in the article already.)

Can you please take a look at this article and let me know if it changes your view:

https://www.cost.org/globalassets/cost/state-tax-resources-p...

dyno-might | 5 years ago | on: Sales tax creates more unnecessary pain than value added tax

It's amazing to me how much movement there has been towards VAT. There's this map on Wikipedia, made a few years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax#/media/File:Co...

I think it was accurate when it was created. But when I double-checked, I found that something like half the countries had created a VAT in the meantime!

dyno-might | 5 years ago | on: Why fairness is basically unobservable

It’s a bit debatable if this is really a “data” problem that could be solved in principle by gathering enough data or more of a “philosophical” problem where we aren’t exactly sure what bias means.

dyno-might | 5 years ago | on: Why fairness is basically unobservable

I feel like a lot of people don’t recognize how incredibly hard it is to check bias from data. The problem is that you have to define “subgroups” in a way that’s inherently arbitrary. This turns out to intersect with Simpson’s paradox in a weird way.