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Against Complacency

Even the best placed among us are to be pitied. Human lives today are blighted by five things: 1. Limited time. While we have made impressive gains in longevity over the last 100 years, our lives are still too short. 2. Less than excellent health. Limited lifespan is further blighted

Traveling Salesman

White-collar elites venerate travel, especially to exotic and far-away places. There is some justification for the fervor—traveling is pleasant. But veneration creates an umbra that hides some truths: 1. Local travel is underappreciated. We likely underappreciate the novelty and beauty available locally. 2. Virtual travel is underappreciated. We know

Limits of Harms From Affirmative Action

Stories abound about unqualified people getting admitted to highly selective places because of quotas. But the chances are that these are merely stories with no basis in fact. If an institution is highly selective and if the number of applicants is sufficiently large, quotas are unlikely to lead to people

Missing Market for Academics

There are a few different options for buying time with industry experts, e.g., https://officehours.com/, https://intro.co/, etc. However, there is no marketplace for buying academics’ time. Some surplus is likely lost as a result. For one, some academics want advice on what they write. To get

American PII: Lapses in Securing Confidential Data

At least 83% of Americans have had their confidential data shared with a company breached (see here and here). The list of most frequently implicated companies in the loss of confidential data makes for sobering reading. Reputable companies like LinkedIn (Microsoft), Adobe, Dropbox, etc., are among the top 20 worst

Not Recommended: Why Current Content Recommendation Systems Fail Us

Recommendation systems paint a wonderful picture: The system automatically gets to know you and caters to your preferences. And that is indeed what happens, except that the picture is warped. Warping happens for three reasons: 1. Humans want more than immediate gratification. The systems, however, are designed to learn from

Not Normal, Optimal

Reports of blood work generally include guides for normal ranges. For instance, for LDL-C, in the US, a score of < 100 (mg/DL) is considered normal. But neither the reports nor doctors have much to say about what LDL-C level to aspire for. The same holds true for things

Smallest Loss That Compute Can Buy

With Chris Alexiuk and Atul Dhingra The most expensive portion of model training today is GPU time. Given that, it is useful to ask what is the best way to spend the compute budget. More formally, the optimization problem is: minimize test loss given a FLOPs budget. To achieve the