Stock market is even more pathological than weather here. Most statistical tools have baked-in assumptions about some degree of independence between factors under analysis. In weather, things are hard, because everything affects everything but in some random sense. With stock market, it's worse, because some things affect others in an adversarial way. A pattern discovered is not merely drowned in noise, but rather actively canceled out as other people discover and act on it. The way to describe this in formal terms is, I believe, that the stock market is "anti-inductive".

Fortunately, most things we deal with life are much friendlier to predictions than weather or stock prices.

> I think people are seeing

Better late than never, given that this has been empirically demonstrated two years ago by Anthropic. I actually don't understand why people don't make a bigger deal out of it - maybe it's because the AI hype/hate fight is sucking all attention from the room. But the point is: we not only have a thing that can learn concepts we recognize and build abstract world model, but also we have a degree of visibility and control of it we never had before. We can't see, much less suppress or stimulate individual concepts or concept groups in a human brain directly, but we can with LLMs.

LLMs briefly seemed like this too, after subscriptions made the SOTA models too cheap to meter, but before they walked back on that and introduced quotas...

Arguably they are the same thing by definition. The degree and intensity of the scam just varies a bit between well-known companies on one end, and the "kid had an accident" and tech support scams on the other.

Annoyingly enough, first-party scams (i.e. your own phone operator trying to dupe you into something) are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. So are political calls you mention.

My go-to example: your local hairdresser may keep the same prices (adjusted for the official inflation or otherwise), but over the years, they may have stopped serving coffee and started offering only water. The salon used to be beautiful and stylish, and now looks dirty and furnished with cheapest bargain-bin business store furniture. Flowers are gone or replaced with cheap plastics. Toilets never have toilet paper in it, faucet always leaking. Waiting room sofas got replaced with cheap chairs. Even the magazines are gone, and in their place you just get leaflets. Etc.

Repeat the same for your local grocery store, parking lot, car dealership, bus stop, airport, cinema, everything.

The second half of the inflation is literally everywhere, in everything - it can be easily seen once you start looking for it. And after that, you can't unsee it.

--

[0] - Some new phrase I suddenly saw pop up everywhere in the last few days. Must be popular with cool kidz.

Yes. Fortunately, we also usually don't need the error to be zero. In practice, we usually have narrow scope at any given time, and can get away with a lot of error.

E.g. people in the past found alternatives to modern germ theory, involving evil spirits and other such shenanigans, but to the extend they covered the high-level mechanisms (curse transfers through contact, hygiene and boiling water removes the harmful effects, etc.), it doesn't really matter the theories were wrong. The beliefs were consistent with each other and empirical evidence to some degree, and to that degree were useful.

> And a theory focusing on one aspect, minimizing representational error from one direction of approaching it, necessarily has to make assumptions that will contradict those made by another theory trying to minimize representational error coming from another direction / domain.

That's fair. Our brains and attentions are finite, you always have to limit the scope. If you imagine you'd have practically forever, you could sort it out and make it all consistent to arbitrary degree (subject to fundamental computational limits, which are physical limits). In practice, the heuristic of consistency works like this:

- For things within your domain of interest, inconsistent information flags an error.

- For things at the interface between your domain of interest and another domain(s), inconsistent information flags an abstraction boundary. It's where you can observe simplifications both domains make because they don't add up (and if you adjust them to make them mutually consistent, you just allowed two domains to work together).

Nope. But if you said that, and used it as part of an explanation of some process, and every step logically checked out, and the outcome checked out too, and agreed with other things you said, and other things others said, then yes, I'd be likely to believe you.

Alas, a quick look at the periodic table raises a red flag - your explanation is inconsistent with the periodic table and what I know about its structure.

That doesn't necessarily say you are wrong - could be me. But judging by the tone of your comment vs. heaps of other things I know that are consistent with my understanding of chemistry and inconsistent with your statement...

> Physicists don't need self-consistency. They can test consistency against reality itself. That's not self-consistency, that's just plain old empiricism.

No they can't. No one has that much time or money. Physicists aren't routinely replicating every core result empirically for themselves. They rely on the descriptions of experiments and data that they read, and the self-consistency and extreme interconnectedness of reality, which means that wrong information will not add up with someone's experiment, expectations, or lived experience somewhere, and will be quickly flagged as wrong.

Empiricism is only useful because reality is self-consistent. If it weren't, you couldn't really infer anything from empirical evidence because things would just be whatever they wanted to be.

(Or more precisely: we can't prove reality is self-consistent, but if it isn't, nothing can ever make any sense, and we may just as well pack up our technological civilization and go back to the caves we crawled out of. Fortunately, empirical evidence supports the notion of reality being self-consistent to the extent we can observe it :).)

> But they could also just implement verification now, which many governments are trying to do.

That itself is a proof: the voluntary age declaration was and is common on all the services that governments are now trying to force to do age verification, and it wasn't enough.

EDIT: in more general terms, and going beyond age verification thing and over many recent developments in information security, the Internet as a culture is missing an on-line equivalent to a key real-life social feature: the ability to answer with a shocked "gross!", followed by slapping the asker in the face.

Exactly. This tells you where something is off. The problem may be your lack of understanding or wrong understanding, or it may be with the source, or the framing, or you may have hit a genuine lack of data - still, the puzzles don't fit in some area.

And yes, not all self-consistent understanding is correct. But all inconsistent understanding is incorrect. And the more knowledge you gain, the less likely it is that it'll all connect self-consistently, but still be very wrong.

EDIT:

I think it's a kind thing you need to tune yourself into. OTOH, I've observed many (most?) people seemingly being completely oblivious to self-consistency issues of their beliefs and mental models, or even texts they're reading or instructions they're following, and yet... somehow they're generally more successful at life because of it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I confirm, the low frequency range looks weird on every DFT plot I ever saw, particularly the audio ones. I just assumed it has something to do with ADC and is probably explained on Wikipedia. It's literally one of the last place on Earth when I'd expect to find unsolved mysteries.