@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

dlakelan

@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org

Applied Mathematician, Julia programmer, father of two amazing boys, official coonhound mix mutt-walker.

PhD in Civil Engineering. Debian Linux user since ca. 1994.

Bayesian data analysis iconoclast

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dlakelan, to random
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

Just had a long talk with my poor overworked wife about my realization that when it comes to research, Universities are just rent-seeking middlemen. There is no reason why researchers should be EMPLOYEES of Universities (other than historical accident). In fact, Universities, which are big capital holders funded by the govt should be employed BY researchers and competing to provide researchers with quality facilities at competitive prices.

dlakelan, to random
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

I give you civilian labor force with a disability (16yo or older)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01074597

dlakelan, to science
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

I showed this diagram about the SI units from Wikipedia to my wife, who is a mid career professional research biologist, and she said she'd never seen something like it before and it is now her religion and she plans to put it on T-shirts and go door to door spreading the good news... Keep up the good work!

dlakelan, to datascience
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

So my wife is trying to do some grading using Google Sheets, and she's got a situation where she asks it to sum(a1:a5) or whatever it sometimes gives absolutely wrong answers, and sometimes not. like it was showing the sum of a bunch of integers was 53.5 or something like that, actual answer was 62 or something similar. Completely unhinged, but not consistent either, some rows were fine, others were garbage.

Anyone seen this kind of thing before?

dlakelan, to random
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

From the introduction to how probability density functions work:

"Suppose, for the usual reasons, we are trying to get our children to accurately weigh a bag of long tailed weasels"

dlakelan, to random
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

Holy shit, if you are following @economics@a.gup.pe you really need to go read https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-bowman-the-10-10-event-origins-of-an-economic-meltdown

I take issue with some of his claims but this is literally the first piece of writing which addresses the concerns I have about our economy in a plausible way going back to about WWII. The real problem is that no one is talking about the problem.

dlakelan,
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

@economics@a.gup.pe

also relevant to @anoneuoid interests... Discusses the Eurocurrency market how deficit spending and trade imbalances drove money production and inflation of business assets and real estate in the US through 2000-2008. It was written a while back, but you can continue the line through the quantitative easing and then COVID era.

dlakelan, to animals
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

The queen last night informing me that my time limit has been reached on the computer and it was now time to take her for a walk #dogsofmastodon

dlakelan, to Teachers
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

Have any of you ever read r/Teachers on Reddit? Shit is WILD over there. Like, my kids come home from 7th and 8th grade and talk about how there are 7th graders who just can't read and I'm like "my kid is exaggerating" and then there's actual damn TEACHERs talking to each other saying "Shit my kids can't read like just CAN'T"... and it's apparently stuff teachers have been saying for around 10 yrs... In about 5-10 years our society is going to collapse as far as I can see.

dlakelan, to random
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

In this random comment on Gelman's blog I describe how @SaintPeter and I broke into the field of "industrial mathematics" LOL

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/05/23/gpt-today-jokes-and-buffons-needle-in-python-with-plotting/#comment-2372790

dlakelan, to socialism
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

So, every other subthread is someone talking this and that with very poor commonality of definitions. So here's one to try on for size:

Capitalism: a system of economics in which the state determines through threat of violence a special group of people who have exclusive say in how capital goods are used.

That covers for example both the USA, and USSR pretty well. any other capitalist countries we'd like to discuss?

dlakelan,
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

@Cirdan
Perhaps a GitHub for the document? Just a thought.
@GhostOnTheHalfShell

dlakelan, to random
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

Just put this song on constant repeat until further notice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NXnxTNIWkc

dlakelan, to Economics
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

@economics@a.gup.pe

Steve Keen discusses the money creation mechanisms here https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/why-are-economists-trying-to-hide

A thing I think he doesn't give enough attention to is the role the Fed DOES play. The Fed indirectly controls bank lending rate through a couple mechanisms. The first is whatever rules it has for declaring a bank solvent. They've eliminated reserve requirements but now it's something like a stress test or whatever. A bank can't keep lending

dlakelan,
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

@GhostOnTheHalfShell

So it's an indirect effect for sure. And if The Fed steps in and says "haha psych we'll buy bonds at par value!" like they did around SVB failure... then it's kinda all bets off.

dlakelan, to random
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

Seriously how profitable are investments in Israel that universities don't want to divest badly enough that they are willing to ghoulishly bring in police to fire baton rounds at peaceful 20 year olds? They will be on the wrong side of history and be eventually immortalized on the walls of the university halls as the people who fucked up... But they'll be responsible for 3% increase of the endowment!

I can't even...

dlakelan,
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

Tuition costs inflated dramatically faster than any other area of the economy since 2000, and administration is like 3x as big as it was per student when I was in college the first time in 1990s. Meanwhile teaching has shifted to adjunct faculty who make less per hour than wait staff at restaurants. People outside of academia just imagine universities are similar to the way they were 30 years ago but its not even close.

dlakelan, to random
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

This article describes a day in the life of an average first world person just swatting rent seekers out of the way wholesale while trying to do the very basic everyday stuff... It hits home hard. I boosted the post where i first saw it as well

https://www.takahe.org.nz/heat-death-of-the-internet/

ChrisMayLA6, to random
@ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us avatar

How do you know you've been gaslighted?

when a Bank of England director tells you its 'possible' interest rates will be reduced over the summer....

Of course its possible they'll be reduced, but my guess is they'll just want to keep them high a little longer... just to make sure those pesky workers & their demands for a return to pst standards of living have been firmly dampened down.

Perhaps, by some strange co-incidence they'll fall the month before an Autumn election?

dlakelan,
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

@GhostOnTheHalfShell
Richard McElreath's "Statistical Rethinking" is my recommendation.

I started putting together some example stuff for videos here

https://github.com/dlakelan/JuliaDataYouTube

But then opted out of the YouTube ecosystem. Thinking of doing them on my own PeerTube instance instead.

dlakelan, to statistics
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

So I'm probably going to be nerd sniped into developing a Jupyter notebook to examine the question of how well are mid income families 2 adults and 2 kids doing relative to how well their parents were doing 30 years earlier. I'm going to use a dirichlet prior over the weights on a 5 item CPI based expense index. The missing part is paired nominal earnings of people and their parents... Anyone know a dataset @economics@a.gup.pe

dlakelan,
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

@economics@a.gup.pe

This NBER paper used anonymized tax records and actually matched children to their actual parents... For kids born in the 80s to parents who had median incomes, MORE THAN HALF of them had LOWER incomes than their parents CPI all-items adjusted

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwards-decline-usa-us-america-economics/

https://opportunityinsights.org/paper/the-fading-american-dream/

dlakelan,
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

@economics@a.gup.pe

Preliminary results from today's fiddling with data...

I constructed a CPI index using Rent, Food at home, Transport, Education/Childcare, and Healthcare. Because I don't know exactly what the weights should be, but families use at least a similar-ish quantity of each I used a Dirichlet([15,15,15,15,15]) prior, and plotted 25 draws. Basically around 20% weight of each in 1981... Then projected forwards in time.

dlakelan, to random
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

I can't emphasis enough the point that exp(t)/(exp(t) + exp((1-epsilon)t)) ~ 1 for large t and any positive epsilon.

This may seem obscure but it's the problem with "capitalism" as we know it. Even in an infinite world where wealth grows exponentially forever, eventually the person with the epsilon larger growth rate than everyone else owns everything.

Add in political power and finite resources and it just happens faster.

dlakelan,
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

For the non math nerds, you can imagine two groups, one billionaire has wealth growing like exp(t) and the rest of society has growth growing at a just marginally slightly lower rate exp((1-epsilon) t). Then after a while, the billionaire will own essentially 100% of everything.

For the math nerds out there, multiply by 1 in the form of exp(-t) / exp(-t) you get

1 / (1 + exp((1-epsilon - 1)t))
= 1/ (1+exp(-epsilon * t))

for large t exp(-epsilon * t) goes to zero and the result is 1/1 = 1

jackofalltrades, to random
@jackofalltrades@mas.to avatar

In the past, countries used fossil fuels to develop, as these happened to be the energy sources available. Now we have renewables, so we can abandon fossil fuels.

Environmental destruction is not inherent to industrial civilization, but is caused by capitalism. The growth imperative is a feature of capitalism and not part of any unchanging human nature.

By adopting a different economic/political system we can resolve all ecological tensions.

Is this story true? How would I know if it is?

dlakelan,
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

@jackofalltrades
Now you can see why I keep thinking I need to start a nonprofit and get funding for research because this kind of question is the kind of question I want to ask and start to answer... Know anyone looking to fund nonprofit research into these questions?
@FantasticalEconomics

dlakelan,
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

@FantasticalEconomics
This is ultimately intimately connected to civil engineering. If we stop chasing profit and start doing nonprofit stuff or worker owned coop stuff based on say anarchic councils on investment, then we will need answers to questions like "given that people have voted to build a combined living space and vertical indoor farm, how can we best design and build it to maximize well being return on usage of physical resources?" In other words civil engineering.
@jackofalltrades

dlakelan, to statistics
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

Here's the logical structure of what you will be taught in terms of as a masters student in pretty much any field.

If MY DATA is a sample from two random number generators of PARTICULAR TYPE, and MY TEST has a small p value then MY FAVORITE EXPLANATION FOR THE DIFFERENCES IS TRUE.

This is, quite simply, a logical fallacy. The first thing wrong is that your data IS NOT a sample from a random number generator of that particular type. So we can ignore the rest logically.

dlakelan,
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

So the very basic stuff you are taught in masters level or stats or whatever is built on two layers of logical fallacy.

So that's why poor stats practices are absolutely more common than good stats practices. That's why the kind of thing posted on the Reddit post I mentioned in my recent posts is actually everywhere in science. Students are literally taught to do things wrong in the textbooks.

dlakelan, to random
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

In around 1979 my father together with a small number of electrical power engineers and activists sued the California Public Utility Commission to try to force them to allow solar and combined-heat-and-power cogeneration. He was naive about how much entrenched power there was. The CPUC was captured by Pacific Gas and Electric, and argued successfully that it was incredibly unsafe and impossible to allow people to generate electricity in their homes. 50 years later there's so much solar cogen

dlakelan,
@dlakelan@mastodon.sdf.org avatar

My father died 15 years ago or so without ever seeing this come about, but if a larger group of people with more power had forced this issue through the courts in the late 1970's we could have had fairly widespread solar and combined-heat-and-power generation in CA by 1989, dramatically reducing greenhouse emissions from CA over the last 30 years.

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