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My tldr: people see what they want to see according to their political commitments.

The abstract:

> “Cultural cognition” refers to the unconscious influence of individuals’ group commitments on their perceptions of legally consequential facts. We con- ducted an experiment to assess the impact of cultural cognition on perceptions of facts relevant to distinguishing constitutionally protected “speech” from unpro- tected “conduct.” Study subjects viewed a video of a political demonstration. Half the subjects believed that the demonstrators were protesting abortion out- side of an abortion clinic, and the other half that the demonstrators were protesting the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy outside a military recruitment center. Subjects of opposing cultural outlooks who were assigned to the same experimental condition (and thus had the same belief about the nature of the protest) disagreed sharply on key “facts”—including whether the protestors obstructed and threatened pedestrians. Subjects also disagreed sharply with those who shared their cultural outlooks but who were assigned to the opposing experimental condition (and hence had a different belief about the nature of the protest). These results supported the study hypotheses about how cultural cognition would affect perceptions pertinent to the speech-conduct distinction. We discuss the significance of the results for constitutional law and liberal principles of self-governance generally.


I think this (from near the end) is also noteworthy (based on the two quotes from the late Justice Scalia at the beginning of the article):

>Still another point illustrated by Justice Scalia’s reactions is the ubiquity of cultural cognition. The disposition to form perceptions of fact congenial to one’s values isn’t a pathological personality trait or a style of reasoning integral to a distinctive, and distinctively malign, ideology. (Indeed, the appeal of those sorts of surmises could themselves be seen as evidence of the disposition to form culturally congenial perceptions of how the world works.) Precisely because cultural cognition doesn’t discriminate on the basis of worldview, members of all groups can anticipate that as a result of it they, like Justice Scalia, will likely find themselves members of a disappointed minority in some empirical or factual debates and a member of the incredulous majority in others.

The kind of cultural cognition highlighted by the article/study is common to everyone, not to some groups that just are incapable of seeing it in themselves.


> The kind of cultural cognition highlighted by the article/study is common to everyone, not to some groups that just are incapable of seeing it in themselves.

Yeah this seems political, and it is, but it's really about cognitive bias. Reframing the thing in terms of daily workplace dynamics is pretty easy: just convert "legally consequential facts" to "technically consequential facts" and convert "cultural outlook" to "preferred tech-stack". Now you're in a planning and architecture meeting which is theoretically easier to conduct but where everyone is still working hard to confirm their bias.

How to "fix" this in other people / society at large is a difficult question, but in principle you can imagine decision-systems (like data-driven policies and a kind of double-blind experimental politics) that's starting to chip away at the problem. Even assuming that was a tractable approach with a feasible transition plan, there's another question. What to do in the meanwhile?

IOW, assuming the existence of citizens/co-workers that have more persistent non-situational goals and stable values that are fairly unbothered by "group commitments".. how should they participate in group dynamics that are still going to basically be dominated by tribalism? There's really only a few strategies, including stuff like "check out completely", "become a single issue voter", or "give up all other goals and dedicate your entire life to educating others". All options seem quite bad for individuals and the whole. If group-commitment is fundamentally problematic, maybe a way to recognize a "good" faction is by looking for one that is implicitly dedicated to eliminating itself as well as the rival factions.


It made immediate sense to me, since the painted statues do, in fact, look gaudy and horrible. I think he was evoking a widely held feeling that is bot in common knowledge.


I’m guessing that this is the first thing they thought of and the problem only exists in the superficial gloss you’re responding to?


I think the concern is that if the system is susceptible to this sort of manipulation, then when it’s inevitably put in charge of life critical systems it will hurt people.


The system IS susceptible to all sorts of crazy games, the system IS fundamentally flawed from the get go, the system IS NOT to be trusted.

putting it in charge of life critical systems is the mistake, regardless of whether it's willing to say slurs or not


There is no way it's reliable enough to be put in charge of life-critical systems anyway? It is indeed still very vulnerable to manipulation by users ("prompt injection").


Just because neither you nor I would deem it safe to put in charge of a life-critical system, does not mean all the people in charge of life-critical systems are as cautious and not-lazy as they're supposed to be.



A language learning platform that works would be nice, instead of this.


Duolingo should have been that. Founded by a professor who wanted to make language learning free for the world, funded by a MacArthur fellowship and a National Science Foundation grant. When they rejected making it a non-profit, it lost its potential to be that platform IMO.


Probably not. I think it's the beginning of a major language evolution.


Hieroglyphics comes full circle.


Thistle bee ace.


I experience and wonder the same thing, but literally yesterday I had to help my grandmother recover from a phishing scam that actually (very nearly) worked on her. So there you go.


I don't have any particular knowledge about oxide's cooling, but think about how bloated and inefficient literally every part of the compute stack is from metal to seeing these words on a screen. If you imagine fixing every part of it to be efficient top to bottom, I think you'll agree that we're not even in the same galaxy as the physical limitations of moving electrons around at high speeds.


But the majority of heat is going to come from the CPU and this is a product to run arbitrary customer workloads.

If the customers leave these things idle, then oxide is going to shine. But a busy rack is going to be dominated by CPU heat.


According to Oxide Computer, they found that going from 20mm to 80mm fans dropped their chassis power usage (efficiency is to the cube of the radius): a rack full of 1U servers had 25% of its power going to the fans, and they were able to get down to 1.2%:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJYY_Y1H9Q

From their weblog post:

> Compared to a popular rackmount server vendor, Oxide is able to fill our specialized racks with 32 AMD Milan sleds and highly-available network switches using less than 15kW per rack, doubling the compute density in a typical data center. With just 16 of the alternative 1U servers and equivalent network switches, over 16kW of power is required per rack, leading to only 1,024 CPU cores vs Oxide’s 2,048.

* https://oxide.computer/blog/how-oxide-cuts-data-center-power...


20mm fans aren’t used in server cooling applications. You must be thinking of 40mm fans.

Going from 40mm fans to 80mm fans will not take energy usage from 25% to 1-2%. They must have taken an extreme example to compare against. What they’re doing is cool, but this is a marketing exaggeration targeted at people who aren’t familiar with the space.

Oxide also isn’t the only vendor using form factors other than 1U or focusing on high density configurations. Using DC power distribution is also an increasingly common technique.

To be honest, a lot of this feels like Apple-esque marketing where they show incredible performance improvements, but the baseline used is something arbitrary.


Our claim is not that just switching fans drops from 25% to 1-2%. We are claiming that the rack has very low energy usage, and we like to talk about the fans as one part of that reason because it's very visceral and easy to understand.


I think 1U was poorly optimized for scale, and thus bigger chassis in a rack could use bigger heatsinks and fans at lower speeds instead of small screamers.


This is not any different than the "blade" form factor that was popular in the 90s. Shared power and cooling that was not constrained by the height of a 1U rack chassis, with larger fans. Hell, even Supermicro has blade-style chassis with 80mm fans. This is not novel.

It's just plain old engineering, optimized to sell whole racks not individual servers or <=8U units, sprinkled with opinions about low-level firmware etc, with a bespoke OS and management stack.


Yes, we're primarily an engineering company, not a research organization.

It's also about what we don't have. We don't have a UEFI, for example, which means we don't have UEFI vulnerabilities.


Yeah and you're doing good work there. It just kinda annoys me when people go from "oh that's a cool company" into idolatry. 1U servers were always a poor form factor for modern day hot chips & drives. Breaking that mold has been done over and over and isn't something that should be treated as new.

Scaling from the 8U (that blades could already do in the 90s) to full rack as the unit of "slide unit in to connect" DC power and networking is way cooler than using 80mm fans.

Re UEFI: I feel like that part is less about UEFI itself and more about how you have very minimal third party firmware.

I'm pretty excited about openSIL and such in general. If only AMD could execute well in the world of software.


I can't speak to others' views, but having worked with large-scale bare-metal deployments at Meta, I personally admired Oxide for its clear product vision and rigorous first-principles approach (Rust is a real game-changer!), and applied to work here for that reason.


> It's just plain old engineering, optimized to sell whole racks not individual servers or <=8U units, sprinkled with opinions about low-level firmware etc, with a bespoke OS and management stack.

Yes, "just".


An F1 car is also just plain old engineering, optimized to get around the track quickly, sprinkled with opinions and with a niche bespoke drivetrain. Nothing to see here.


Their rack scale from-scratch redesign includes fans big enough that they've reportedly managed to cool CPU hardware that was actually designed for water-cooling, with no expectation for air cooling (though admittedly, they say they only achieved this just barely, and with a LOT of noise). That seems like something that's going to be objectively verifiable as a step up in efficiency.


When I was doing a bunch of learning about linguistics, situations like this were very interesting and confusing to me. I still don't have a good working intuition for how this is possible. I don't understand what maintains the sound differences in the face of the continuous exposure to substantially different accents. It's empirically possible, but it's never made sense to me. Why don't you and your brothers end up talking the same after a while?


I mean, people do end up talking the same after a while. Regional differences are disappearing and being leveled all over the world due to the influence of centralized education systems and media.


I think you can mostly fake this by waiting until the player reenters the range to generate what happened since the last time they interacted. If it's a complex simulation it won't work without more effort, but if it's flavor text like "Bob told me last week you killed the dragon, nice work!" then it can be done like 5ms after the player enters the simulation radius of the NPC.


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