Politics
- Apr 21, 2022
I do not care about AI alignment
For the past few months I have had a love-hate relationship with the rationalist movement. Their capacity to produce extremely insightful analyses on very diverse subjects is particularly exciting. But I am bothered by their hubris. It is clear that they have the capacity to accumulate, assimilate and analyze new ideas. But I am not convinced that “reason [can be] the only source of knowledge”. As it is impossible for one person to completely understand most facets of most problems, a healthy dose of (reasoned) trust is necessary. Also, I am bored by their fascination with the AI alignment problem.
- Apr 20, 2022
War and peace
Eight weeks ago it became glaringly apparent that we do not understand the Russians. And that, while most people in the western world do not want it or believe it, we are in a state of war with the Russian Federation.
- Feb 6, 2022
Evolution and identity
A recent study investigates the relation between evolution acceptance and evolution knowledge using largish numbers of students (mostly enrolled in biology related university programs) from many European countries. The authors are European researchers from many universities, supported by EU funding.
- Nov 25, 2020
Politics on the Appalachian Trail
Inspired by the observation
Out of the roughly 2200 miles, 445.6 are in red states, not counting the 20 miles on the border between West Virginia and Virginia. Dare I go county by county in the blue states and get a 2021 political map of the AT?
— Codruța Morari (@CodrutaMorari) November 24, 2020I have decided to play a bit more with
plotly.express.choropleth
. - Nov 23, 2020
My preferred party - The New Greens
In two weeks there will be elections in Romania. Unfortunately, or fortunately, it is easy to choose the best out of multiple bad choices. Still, it is unpleasant not to have a party or, at least, a candidate one could wholeheartedly trust and support.
- Nov 18, 2020
The Reagans
Some thoughts concerning the documentary The Reagans from Showtime.
- Nov 11, 2020
Votes lost by Biden in 2020
Upon discovering some data stores pertaining to the 2020 American presidential elections I could not resist playing with the data and with python visualization tools.
- Oct 13, 2020
Quantity has a quality of her own
By talking to a few hundred senators Cicero was able to start a war. Luther has done it by nailing a piece of paper to a door and Hearst with a journal with maybe 100000 readers. Radio and television have been considered big revolutions in opinion forming. It is thus reasonable to wonder if the changes caused by social media are something new, different from the past. On the one hand the past shows a more or less gradual increase in the speed and strength of information dissemination and opinion-forming. The present follows this quantitative rule but, on the other hand, it could also be qualitatively different.
- Oct 13, 2020
Voters and pyramid of ages
Some Fermi estimates of population structure suggest that 2020 is a turning point in Romanian politics.