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It doesn't mean anything. The point is that the language of lean, and its proof derivation system, are able to express (and prove) statements that do not correspond to any meaningful mathematics.

I feel obliged to mention that this does feature prominently in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy. The single most important piece of infrastructure on Mars is a space elevator, but not everyone on the planet is happy with how the owners of the space elevator are running things.



It sure would be great if they just owned the supplier outright and could align incentives that way.


Not only does Southwest exclusively fly Boeing aircraft, they exclusively fly 737s, which enables their unusual routing style. Essentially every pilot and crew at Southwest can fly any aircraft the company has for them. Presumably this gives Boeing a strong incentive to keep making new 737s that push the engineering envelope, instead of making a new narrowbody aircraft.


That strategy makes some sense in the short to medium term, but I always wonder what the end game is supposed to be. Convincing Boeing to just keep making 737 variants forever so Southwest can keep flying a single aircraft type seems like it will lock the two in a death spiral where they slowly become less and less competitive due to forced reliance on an increasingly aging airframe. The MAX is an obvious example of the types of compromises that need to be made to try to keep pace, but it sees unlikely it will be the last. At some point both Boeing and Southwest need a path to replace the 737 entirely.


Other airlines have switched from exclusively Boeing to exclusively Airbus - eg Easyjet did in the early 2000s, and operated a mixed fleet for about a decade.

https://simpleflying.com/easyjet-boeing-to-airbus/

Obviously it's more of a challenge, but it's not insurmountable.


You're right that switching airplane models certainly seems possible, even for airlines that operate one model exclusively. I wonder if Southwest being such a huge airline by fleet size (much larger than EasyJet for example) would make that harder or easier.

Either way I was thinking less about Southwest jumping ship to Airbus and more switching to an entirely new model from either manufacturer. I wouldn't see Southwest going through the trouble of switching to the A320 for example, but maybe to an A320 or 737 replacement. The A320 may be a newer platform than the 737, but it still dates to the 80s (admittedly better than dating to the 60s). I doubt Southwest would want to go through the hassle of changing models just to end up on a 40 year old airframe that they might have to transition away from again in the not-too-distant future.


If Southwest will have to make One Big Decision on its next generation, Airbus could have a reasonable shot at it eh.


I imagine Airbus does have a chance, although like I said in a sibling comment, I think they'll need a new plane to do it. The A320 might be newer than the 737, but it's not really that new. I don't see a company like Southwest planning a generational shift to an airframe that itself is nearly a generation old. Whichever company comes out with the next generation single aisle might end up with the business though.


Not just any two couples, one couple was her ex-husband's parents...


That right there moves it solidly into "planned action", but I don't have much available data.


The expected value of this distribution goes up with every iteration, there is no such Kelly point. You could try this with

heads: double your money tails: lose all your money

in which case the expected value is always $1, as you have a 1/2^n chance of having $2^n dollars after n rounds, and 0 otherwise.

The point of discussing ergodicity here, however, is whether you can describe the behavior of the iterated distribution deterministically if you exclude a portion of that distribution which has measure zero.


The "average" of the distribution goes up as you increase the number of rounds, but the probability that you get an average or above value when you sample that distribution once goes to zero as the number of rounds increases.


If you repeat this game n times (as n goes to infinity), you will have Θ(n) pairs of (heads, tails) and O(sqrt(n)) unpaired wins or losses, except for a vanishingly small fraction of the time when the results fall outside of any fixed number of standard deviations.

The point is that you as an individual playing a repeated game don't get to meaningfully sample the expected value of the distribution. You only get to sample once, and you will almost surely (i.e. with probability approaching 1 as n goes to infinity) sample a point in the distribution where you lose nearly all of your money.


Absolutely. The individual is long-run guaranteed to be wiped out. But I disagree with the original author’s way of concluding that fact (ie, that it arises from “losing 5% per round”, which is just false).


I believe the entire point of the ergodicity question here is "If you apply this process n times, with n approaching infinity, obviously the result may depend on what point in the n-times iterated distribution you sample, but if you choose a volume of vanishingly small measure to exclude, can you make a single concrete statement about what the process is doing without taking an expected value over the different outcomes"

And the answer is yes - with probability approaching 1 as n increases (ie excluding a portion of the distribution whose measure decreases to 0), the random process matches a deterministic process which is described by "you lose 5% each round".


Great description of a framing I hadn’t considered before, thanks!


I should admit I'm being very generous to Peters here - I came to the conclusion that this is what he means only because the math of ergodicity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_theory#Ergodic_theorem...) talks a lot about "except on a set of measure zero". He provides no explanation of how he moves from "the time average of values in a particular run of the process" (which is ergodicity) to "what does a typical process round do, with probability 1" (which is perhaps what someone computing a utility function cares about).

I asked a friend who is an econ professor "Why does this Peters guy explain this so poorly" and his response was more or less, yes, all of economics has been wondering that too since he first published his Nature Physics paper on this a decade ago.


Time flies when you're having fun but it was less than four years ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0732-0

This quote tells you all you need to know about the author's ability to understand things:

"my second criticism is more severe and I’m unable to resolve it: in maximizing the expectation value — an ensemble average over all possible outcomes of the gamble — expected utility theory implicitly assumes that individuals can interact with copies of themselves, effectively in parallel universes (the other members of the ensemble)."


> Additionally, Scharf received a reprimand for not using preferred pronouns in notes related to an interview he conducted with a job applicant whose preferred pronouns did not align with their biological gender. Scharf argued in the lawsuit that he refrained from using any pronouns during the interview and only used the applicant’s biological pronouns in internal notes.

It is so easy to just always write "the candidate" in your interview notes, and never need to write any third person pronouns. Certainly he was making a stand, rather than just non-confrontationally abiding by his beliefs. Obviously one wouldn't use any gendered pronouns in the interview since we only have "you" in English - though I imagine "refrained from using any pronouns" is a misreporting.


He should have known he was going down a dangerous path doing what he did, but it was bound to happen somewhere. Someone has to die on this hill. Now let's see if the courts are going to stick to the letter of the law or succumb to culture war pressures like so many other institutions have done


What does the letter of law say?


As far as I know you can't change your gender without going through an administrative process at the government, which at least means changing your identity card.

I don't know about U.S., but in my country there's an administrative team that has to approve gender change (operations are not required by law).


Have you ever taken notes during an interview? If I wrote "the candidate" every time, I would just lose track of what the candidate is saying.

On top of that, I don't know how it works at Bitwarden, but interview notes are only supposed to be used by you to later synthesize, so it shouldn't matter if you write "the candidate", "the dude", or whatever else is the most efficient when taking notes.

Lastly, it wouldn't even come to my mind to ask a candidate's pronouns in an interview, so it's already unreasonable expectations for me to even know them.


Have you ever shared interview notes with anyone? I type mine up... and 'TC' is just as useful in my shorthand as he/she would be.

I agree with you that if these were his personal notes from which he then composed his evaluation of the candidate it wouldn't matter - but I bet you that's not what this was, and I would further bet you that he was informed of the candidates pronouns and did know them.


Hey what do you know, I found the lawsuit: "That same week, Bitwarden tasked Mr. Scharf with interviewing a potential employee whose “preferred pronouns” were in contradiction to Mr. Scharf’s religious beliefs. Mr. Scharf conducted the interview in a professional and respectful manner, avoiding the use of pronouns all together. Mr. Scharf assessed the interviewee favorably and recommended that the interviewee advance to the next stage of the interview process. Because of Mr. Scharf’s religious beliefs, in his notes regarding the interview, which were shared internally and not with the interviewee, Mr. Scharf did not use the interviewee’s requested pronouns."


Using “they” & “the candidate” or “TC” has been standard practice for interviews at my employers.


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