Entropy🌻Chase

Finished an article summarizing some tips I learned to write faster pandas code! Notebook included! [buymeacoffee.com/entropychase/f…] For me, this led to big speed improvements, esp for tasks that require row by row iteration!

@gadboit2 The issues I had w sapiens was that it did have some obviously bad claims (like the agriculture one) & that's mainly what I take issue with. This is just me venting. Fine for books to have opinions, I just prefer ones that arent easily debunkable. plenty of gray area to explore.

@EntropyChase Pretty much all any of us have are opinions though. I disagree with you about lots of things I don't think either of us aren't informed about. There is rarely a consensus except on things that are so obvious nobody is even discussing them.

It's unfortunate how often popular non fiction books are full of inaccuracies. I've started to realize that you can usually get better insight from reading critical reviews of those books than the books themselves. Example: newenglishreview.org/articles/a-res…

@gadboit2 🤣🤣😭😭 this is exactly my point, I just feel like these books make people less informed. It's cool if they "start the conversation" & ppl dive deeper after wards, but that's basically not how it goes. I just need to yell at the clouds I think.

@EntropyChase Well there was Wengrow and Graeber but I think you will like that one even less :)

@gadboit2 Yeah. I do accept it. I find it sad tho bc I think for many "infotainment" books like this, readers actually come away more confused than they started. Everyone's free to do it but I hope to see better ones.

@EntropyChase Anyone writing a book is going to have an influence. That's partly why they do it. I think we just have to accept that. The burden is on the reader to be skeptical. We can't expect people to only write evidence-based claims (and his book is infinitely less bad than many others).

@JesusFerna7026 Foolish Q: any thoughts that some of that bump in income may be warranted due to greater probability of health issues or need for medical care?

Yesterday, I highlighted the distributional concerns raised by aged societies: those with high life expectancy and low fertility. Many readers objected that the elderly need fewer resources, since they often already own a home, are less active, and have no young children to support. All of that may be true, but it is not how the political system works. No large group of voters ever concludes that it receives too much. If you are in academia, have you ever met a colleague who thinks they are overpaid and asks for a pay cut while keeping their current duties? Or that has walked into the chair’s office and asked for extra teaching because their current teaching load is too low? Spain is a good illustration. Not because Spain matters much (though we do seem to know how to play football), but because it is a fairly aged society, because I have good data that a friend helped me put together, and because I understand the country well. I suspect Spain shows what is already happening elsewhere or is about to. The figure plots income by age group in four panels. The top panel is market income: wages, capital income, and so on. Those between 65 and 85 have the lowest market income. (Figures for those above 85 are hard to come by, because the sample is small.) I then add government transfers (gross income, second panel), subtract taxes (disposable income, third panel), and add in-kind transfers, mainly health services, since Spain runs quite a generous national health system (extended disposable income, fourth panel). The last panel is the most interesting. Once the government has finished redistributing, those between 65 and 85 have the highest income in the country, ahead even of those between 50 and 65, who are at the peak of their market income and, usually, of their professional careers. In welfare terms, the picture is starker still. Extended disposable income leaves out the flow of services from owner-occupied housing. It also ignores the fact that retirement benefits are indexed to inflation each year, so the elderly bear far less income risk than those still in the labor market. Is this outcome a surprise? Of course not. Those over 65, and those approaching it, are the largest voting bloc in Spain. Why do you think your own country will be different?

@gadboit2 would ideally take more responsibility about that, realize the influence of this stuff & maybe try a bit harder to give an evidence-backed discussion or at least better sourcing. PS: thanks for letting me rant.

@gadboit2 Agree there. But it was deliberately branded to sound scientific & rigorous (note the title, "sapiens"). And importantly, basically no one is gonna dive into the actual evidence (out of those who read sapiens). Fact is, books like this shape the common view & I think authors

@gadboit2 I think what irks me is, you could've had a serious presentation of the evidence that could be really engaging. I wouldve liked to see that. After all, we're intrigued by what's unknown, so it can be engaging to actually acknowledge it.

@EntropyChase Yes it's not a serious academic book, I agree with that. But not everyone has time for that. In serious academia you'd spend your whole life arguing about the finer points of just one tiny aspect of everything he has in that book.

@gadboit2 That doesnt make him an expert on the history of LLCs or business law tho... and he clearly isn't given his description of biz lawyers as "sorcerers" who provide no real value

@EntropyChase I'm sure he has read lots of history and anthropology etc books.

@gadboit2 That sounds reasonable to me. I think my main issue is there was such a low effort by Harari to carefully back stuff w evidence, & what's worse, the claims that seem exaggerated always lean to his ideological view (which actually seems similar to the degrowth ppl)

@EntropyChase ... actually useful knowledge). Our desire to have an explanation is so strong that we keep going until we have one, long past the point where we had any justification. We love to speculate. Like I am here.

@gadboit2 It's something you'd expect in people who arent academics. It's common to point at something we take for granted and say "look at this whole thing, do we even need it?" while making no effort to review the history of how & why it emerged lol

@gadboit2 I think the claim re agriculture is fairly cut and dry BS. For religion, I need to double check. The way harari describes lawyers & LLCs is comically foolish too, argues there's no real value & it's all fabricated

@gadboit2 Importantly, consistent with many claims, so little effort to try to back it up w evidence or compare evidentiary base w that of alternatives. Even a brief mention & better sourcing wouldve been a huge improvement, even if buried in appendices.

@gadboit2 I think religious belief was likely common before powerful states and domineering ruling classes, tho I need to double check. It's ofc tempting to create some explanation for scary unknown stuff like droughts etc!

@gadboit2 re influence, consider:

@gadboit2 Anyone can claim anything. Doesnt mean we shouldnt call out clear BS. Esp important bc his work was massively influential. Maybe even one of the most influential PopSci books ever written.

@gadboit2 🤣🤣🤣🤣

@EntropyChase Yes his AI stuff is total 🐎 💩. But that's normal these days. At least we can say he was an early pioneer :)

@gadboit2 but then, he doesn't lay out any clear evidence supporting that origin story as opposed to any other.

@gadboit2 His argument was that they were intentionally invented to keep people under the control of others, not simply that they are false beliefs.

@AndyMasley this is a win for rock music. Popularity shouldve tanked in the 1970s and 1980s if lead was a major driver, and that didn't happen.

@gadboit2 this part was cringe af too

@gadboit2 lol yeah... That's a pretty big topic to screw up and, imo, rightly calls his credibility as a narrator of human history into question.