Canadian here, who is also not a Trump fan. It is true that Canada has extremely lax border controls and there are complex organized crime networks that exploit this inside of and through Canada.
The US security establishment is aware of this, as is the Canadian security establishment. The 1% fentanyl headline is indeed widely reported, it’s also a red herring. The simple answer is Canada doesn’t really look, so not much is seen. More info here, by one of Canada’s best investigative journalists:
IMO Trump is, as the official white house press release says, trying to put pressure on Canada to address this. Are tariffs the best way to do that? A valid question, for sure. Does he have other, possibly irrational, motivations? Also an excellent question.
But I see much Canadian and US commentary that assumes there is nothing rational about this at all, and that there is no Canadian border/security issues, and I would say that’s incorrect.
> The simple answer is Canada doesn’t really look, so not much is seen
Wouldn't it be the US, on their side of the border, who is looking for what is coming into their country, not Canada looking at what is leaving their country? They seem to have a pretty good handle on how much is entering through the southern border.
I think the heart of the issue is inflow through Canadian ports, as well as complex money laundering and trafficking schemes between Canada, China and Mexico. You can check the article I posted above for more info. There’s also some info about this in the Whitehouse press release I linked below. So it’s not strictly a border crossing problem.
I read the article, and also a lot of the other articles on that site. I'm going to take it with a grain of salt, because that "top investigative reporter" basically seems poised to report everything in the most conspiratorial manner possible.
That said, I'll still definitely grant you the following, especially after researching the issue and seeing information from other outlets: Canada has a serious problem with Chinese money laundering. Fine, but so does the United States: https://www.propublica.org/article/china-cartels-xizhi-li-mo.... None of this feels like anything more than an after-the-fact, invented rationale for the tariffs.
Like the other poster said, the fact that so little fentanyl comes in through the US is not a "red herring" because Canada "isn't looking for it" - you don't go through Customs upon leaving a country, you go through it on entering. And again, even if your argument is that Canada is just supporting the drug trade through its money laundering operations, you could literally point to any country and come up with a host of things that happen within their borders that are somehow bad for the US. You could certainly do it in reverse (shit that the US does that's bad for other countries) 3x. None of it rises to even a teeny bit of the level needed to throwaway a deep, mutually beneficial relationship that has existed for many, many decades.
Sure, we’re all free to form opinions on who to trust.
If the claim is that Trump is simply throwing trade with Canada for no reason whatsoever, i.e. he’s simply an unhinged madman, that’s certainly a politically popular narrative. I’ve provided pointers to reasonable evidence for pressuring a neighbouring state to get its security issues under control, and based on years of hearing about that stuff it seems rational to me. You’re free to disagree, friend.
Ordinarily when there's a really big problem, a President will go to some effort to explain to the public what the problem is, and how their actions will fix it. Apparently this problem is definitely motivation Trump and is also somehow so deeply hidden that we can only find out about it from random newsletter sites.
I'm not saying that this makes it BS. But I'm also saying if this doesn't ring your BS meter, you don't have one anymore.
I follow what’s happening with Canadian drugs / money laundering pretty closely. The article I linked isn’t a random newsletter site, it’s from one of Canada’s top investigative journalists. Here’s the official white house statement from the Whitehouse website. I’ve heard Trump reference this multiple times:
Sure, I just was giving it as an example because I think it's a pretty funny bible verse out of context, and even a little funny in-context.
Still, the old testament in particular has pretty much every single theme that parents clutch their pearls at; Lot has incestuous sex with his daughters (and it's decidedly not condemned) [1], a man murdering his daughter because she's the first person to enter his house [2], prostitutes getting murdered, butchered, and mailed to her suitors [2].
If the old were accurately made into a movie, it would be right next to Se7en or Saw in categorization, certainly not appropriate for children.
I know that this stuff is probably wrapped in layers of metaphor and social context, that's fair enough, but I don't know why similar charity isn't awarded to books that aren't the bible.
> but I don't know why similar charity isn't awarded to books that aren't the bible.
I‘m not sure what you‘re saying here, as the Bible is almost nationally “banned” from public school libraries due to the belief that so much as including it in a library is a literal violation of our country’s founding principles. If you mean why do parents who request books to be “banned” typically give charity to the Bible, while not giving the “banned” books the same charity, then in major part it’s because they are incomparable. The Bible is the book that has led us to where we are today; it led men to found nations, find unity with their fellows, and strive to create a better world. It is a book that has survived and thrived for over 2000 years, and is possibly as old as 8000 years. Additionally, if we wish to be less charitable, then it is because the Bible is the cornerstone of their worldview, just as many who decry “bans” find said books to be cornerstones of their worldview.
Finally, the majority of children are NOT exposed to the sections of the Old Testament you are quoting, or they have been redone (see Veggietales), and most parents, many who would request certain books be “banned”, would agree that those stories are not appropriate for children. The majority of biblical education is focused on the New Testament, which is historical and lacks many of the “colorful” descriptions that the Old Testament typically provides.
I was referring more specifically to the recent stuff in Oklahoma where they want to mandate that a Bible be placed in every public classroom. Constitutionality be dammed.
I might disagree with some of the finer points you laid out but I think I am more or less in broad agreement with what you said.
Absolutely. The problem here is that people that generally parrot the “1984” meme haven’t read the book, let alone read any Orwell, or Huxley for that matter.
Distill.pub was one effort to modernize publishing in CS. Chris Olah wrote some thoughts [1] about why he didn’t feel it was tenable. Seems like the primary challenge was the additional effort and skill involved in crafting rich-content/interactive material.
Honestly, I don't get why we don't just submit to OpenReview and call it a day. Paper is visible and distributed. There are comment sections where peer review can not just happen, but happen in the open (added bonus!). You can iterate and even see the difference between submissions. What is the conference/journal providing that isn't covered here? A stamp of approval? From a well known noisy system that creates other disincentives?
Not sure the openness of the review would solve so many problems of the system. For example would not touch like reproducibility and data and code availability.
Then you will need moderation (or do you imagine that things will be civilized between people on the internet?) and would need to manage various possibilities of bullying/targeting/etc. Of course these things can happen now, but difference would be between a potentially fully automated and simple system and something very clunky (be friends with an editor, convince him to report who are the reviewers, manage to recognize another of his papers, etc.)
> For example would not touch like reproducibility and data and code availability.
These are different issues, which are certainly important. But I do think in some way this would help. OpenReview does allow you to post comments many months after. Effectively think about this as a GitHub issues page. It certainly could be organized better but it is better than what exists now. OR also has links for code and community implementations (as does arxiv now). Here's an example that has all these things[0]. Granted data is missing, but I don't see why this can't also be integrated, but would need to also push cultural norms.
> Then you will need moderation
I think OR has this a bit solved, similarly arxiv. They are not anonymous accounts and are tied to your ORCID record. Arxiv requires you to have a verifier that is already someone with an arxiv account. Yes, this can be abused, but it is also an easier moderation problem that say Reddit or HN even. I think if you're posting bullying comments under a named profile, then it is good that that is visible so others can see. Mind you, bullying does already exist but it is just behind closed doors. It is worse now because only the Area Chair can take action and often they are over worked and works do get dismissed (which results in A LOT of wasted time, and money) because of this bullying. The larger the field, the more noise too and the more this happens. It is just far less common to see people bullying in public than behind closed doors.
I must stress though, that there is no perfect system here. There is no system that can make the amount of bullying 0. So we have to be careful in our critiques because there will always be valid critiques that are in fact of concern (like this one) but are fundamentally unsolvable. The question then becomes if we improve upon the existing frameworks and if whatever costs have been made are worth the added benefits. So I just want to make sure that this idea isn't killed because an impossible bar, despite the critique being valid.
Edit: I'd actually add that this system encourages reproduction. Because if we still measure on citations and number of publications this means that reproduction works can still count towards those metrics and thus someone's career advancements. The whole conference/journal system currently discourages such effort in favor of the absurdly nebulous novelty concept (which also makes papers noisy). My proposal would also allow for the publication of failures, which is also an important thing for academics.
> What does a record label provide when you can just upload music to Spotify?
I believe this is an illustrative example in support of my proposition, not against. Many artists are in fact turning away from record labels in favor of self publishing. Similarly for books.
But I will say that I still think there's value and so I'll expand on my ideas about conferences. I think they should exist, but be focused on meet and greets. So instead of being an indicator of the validity of work, have them invite authors to speak about their works. Allow others to sign up for poster sessions. How to do that appropriately does need to be worked out, but there's nothing wrong with it simply being under recommendation from the advisement of the organizing members. Yes, there will still be preferential bias, but I do mean "still" because we do have preferential biases towards certain institutions and labs. This would just make it a bit more explicit that they are not the arbitrators of quality but just treated as a "reward."
Importantly I think this allows opening the doors for different kinds of research that are not incentivized by our systems. Most important being reproduction
I’m just wrapping up a PhD in ML. The notation here is unnecessarily complex IMO. Notation can make things easier, or it can make things more difficult, depending on a number of factors.
Really? Coming from physics (B.Sc only) the notation is refreshingly familiar and straightforward. My topology and analysis classes were basically like this.
In fact, this pdf is literally the resource I've been searching for as many others are far too ambiguous and handwavey focusing more on libraries and APIs than what's going on behind the scenes.
If only there were a similar one for microeconomics and macroeconomics, I'd have my curiosity satiated.
As a PhD econ student, the mathematics just comes down solving constrained optimization problems. Figuring out what to consider as an optimand and the associated constraints is the real kicker.
It depends on what you’re doing. That is accurate for, say, describing the training of a neural network, but if you want to prove something about generalization, for example (which the book at least touches on from my skimming), you’ll need other techniques as well
Most economists (who write these sort of textbooks) have some sort of math background. The push to find the most general "math" setting has been an ongoing topic since the 50's and so you can probably find what you are looking for. It's not part of undergraduate textbooks since adding generality gives better proofs but often adds "not that much" to insight.
Nevertheless, the standard micro/macro models are just applications of optimization theory (lattice theory typically for micro, dynamical systems for macro). Game theory (especially mechanism design) is a bit of different topic, but I suppose that's not what you are looking for.
E.g., micro models are just constrained optimization based on the idea of representing preference relations over abstract sets with continuous functions. So obviously, the math is then very simple. This is considered a feature. You can also use more complex math, which helps with certain proofs (especially existence and representation).
You could grab some higher level math for econ textbooks, which typically include the models as examples, where you skip over the math.
For example, for micro, you can get the following:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691118673/an...
I think it treats the typical micro model (up to oligopoly models) via the first 50 or so pages while explaining set theory, lattices, monotone comparative statics with Tarski/Topkis etc.
Bishop’s Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning is one example that has tremendous depth and much clearer notation. Deep Learning by Goodfellow et al. is another example, albeit with less depth than Bishop.
I’m glad you’re enjoying the book. The approach is ideal for a very small subset of the ML population, no doubt that was their intention. I’m just weighing in that it’s entirely possible to cover this material with rigour yet much simpler notation. Even as someone who could parse this I’d go with other options.
Thanks for highlighting Bishop to me! I've self-taught through various resources esp. Goodfellow et al 2016. It's taken me a number of years to rebuild my math knowledge so that I feel comfortable with Goodfellow's treatment and look forward to learning from the Bishop book. Fwiw, I've found the math notation in the Goodfellow textbook to be among the best I've ever seen in terms of consistency and clarity. Some other books I enjoy, for example, do not seem to make any typographic indication of whether an object is a vector, scalar, or other. :(
I appreciated the notation in Goodfellow book as well, it was easy enough for me to follow without having a strong mathematics background. I'll agree however with others that this text is instead focused for a different audience and purpose.
Re your question on economics books, I think Advanced Macroeconomics by David Romer could fit your bill. It goes a lot into why the math is the way it is (arguably more interesting, like another poster said). Modern macroeconomics is also built on microeconomics, and to that extent it's covered in the book, so you're sort of getting two-for-one here.
In the linked Paul Graham comment, he is not wholly supportive of remote work. The comparison is that communism, like remote work, can appear to work, but he attributes this to the fact that it sprung from a healthy foundation (his example is in-person work). If anything, Graham leans toward in-person work in this tweet.
I think you have significantly misunderstood things. Paul Graham comparing it to communism is an example of a business person attacking remote work using one of the standard boogeymen.
