schmit's comments

Even more hilarious given their own charter:

> We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.

> Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit.

> We will actively cooperate with other research and policy institutions; we seek to create a global community working together to address AGI’s global challenges.

My point is not that this work is flawed, or that there should not be an article reporting on this research or the topic of interviewing. Rather, I think it'd be better for a third party to write about the topic in a more objective manner, rather than a professor promoting his own research (and thus with skewed incentives).

In particular, I was disappointed to find a (short) paragraph in the article that I find bogus. That does not mean the article shouldn't have been posted in the first place, but just that this paragraph should have been edited or removed.

I think there is something wrong when I feel like I have to look up the actual research paper and check whether the claims made in an article are supported by data and methodology. I should not be a skeptic when reading New York times articles.

To be fair, it is posted in the opinion section, but should we really just take this article as an opinion? That doesn't feel right to me either.

Then onto your last question and Daniel Kahneman, we can talk about that for a long time, but let me keep it short. The best place I know (though technical) is the blog by Andrew Gelman ([1][2] turned up in a 5 second Google, but there is way more on his blog), and Daniel Kahneman himself has "admitted" flaws in his studies [3][4].

[1] http://andrewgelman.com/2014/09/03/disagree-alan-turing-dani... [2] http://andrewgelman.com/2016/06/26/29449/ [3] http://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-unde... [4] https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...

Sorry I was not more clear. What I meant was that the NY Times employs journalists and fact checkers and editors to validate stories, say on politics to make sure, to the best of their abilities, that the articles they post are correct.

Why is that not the case here, where a professor is allowed to sell his own work? It is as if Obama is the NYT reporter for Obamacare.

That people believe politicians blindly is a topic for another day :)

I find it quite problematic that researchers get to talk about their own research and present it as facts without anyone taking a critical look.

Over time I’ve become more skeptical about this kind of psychology research (as more studies fail to replicate) and, as is often the case, here the sample size is quite small (76 students, split across 3 groups), predicting something relatively noisy as GPA. It is unclear to me that one would be able to detect reasonable effects.

Furthermore, some claims that make it into the piece are at odds with the data:

> Strikingly, not one interviewer reported noticing that he or she was conducting a random interview. More striking still, the students who conducted random interviews rated the degree to which they “got to know” the interviewee slightly higher on average than those who conducted honest interviews.

While Table 3 in the paper shows that there is no statistical evidence for this claim as the effects are swamped by the variance.

My point is not that this article is wrong; verifying/debunking the claims would take much more time than my quick glance. But that ought to be the responsibility of the newspaper, and not individual readers.

Politicians don’t get to write about the successes of their own policies. While there is a difference between researchers and politicians, I think we ought to be a bit more critical.

One quick comment: in general it is a bad idea to compute the inverse of a matrix (to solve a linear system). It's much better to compute the QR factorization or SVD instead (or simply call least square solver).

See for example: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/01/19/dont-invert-that-m...

Funny how Google is paying for data

This short course is taught every quarter at Stanford, usually by a PhD student in ICME (Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering). This is the course page for the class as was taught a couple of years ago.

Edit: google CME193 to find more course pages, if interested

In short:

For a voting system (ranking of some candidates based on preferences of voters), it would be nice if:

- A single voter cannot determine the ranking (as a dictator) - For every possible set of voter preferences, there is an outcome (not random) - If everyone likes candidate A over candidate B, then in the final ranking candidate A should be ranked higher than candidate B - If one prefers A over B when comparing just A and B, then one should also prefer A over B when an additional option C is offered

Sounds like some reasonable properties for a voting system, right?

Well, the theorem states that if there are more than 2 candidates, then there is no voting system that has all 4 properties above.