As a (young, thus-far childless) woman, I feel it's important to add something that men may not fully grasp and I haven't seen much in the thread so far: what tips the scales in this decision is often not just daycare costs/career prospects, but also the potentially extreme side effects of pregnancy on the body.
Going through the process of being pregnant and giving birth is absolutely terrifying to me and most of my friends. How many tech bros do you know who do their blood labs on a yearly basis, or track their blood sugar daily? How many do sports physio to avoid the possibility of a minor training injury, or do any number of peptide interventions to micro-optimise some aspect of their health or physique?
If having babies, for them, was basically a coin toss re: possibly developing diabetes, ripping open their pelvic floor and becoming incontinent, adding 8 points to your BMI, or major sleeping problems, etc., would they still be as mystified about the low TFR?
(Of course, many men go through physical hell when raising children too, and I don't want to diminish their contribution, but on average their physical symptoms are less extreme)
Sometimes the knee jerk 'just get a caesarean' and lower maternal mortality numbers mask the reality of how barbaric the process seems, at least from my vantage point as someone who might one day be involved in the process. The number of privileged women who choose the surrogate path alone should suggest how many women might opt out of the physical part of it, if they could; if having babies isn't a social obligation or a biological inevitability without birth control, there's quite a strong argument for putting it off just one more year...
Childless women don't age well. If they are saved from the effects of a never-pregnant climax on their arteries/metabolism, they will face a dementia cared by nieces. Not that mothers don't have these but physically and psychologically they are much less burdensome. The hormone flooding of pregnancy is a health blessing.
Needs citation for your argument. All I read today on this subject claims the contrary:
"Associations between number of children, age at becoming a parent, and dementia risk were similar for both sexes. Lifestyle and socioeconomic factors are more likely to explain the observed associations than normal pregnancy-related physiological changes."
Caring for elderly depends on the role of family in society. In my country family still plays a huge role so having no direct descendants has it's impact.
This actually isn't true for some types of farmed fish, like Norwegian salmon, but it varies by area and by company.
The industry is looking into alternatives like insects, and typically 30-40% of the feed now comes from vegetable proteins and oils.
On the other hand, farmed Faroese salmon (just next door) has a much higher % of wild-caught fish in its feed, which contributes to the high omega 3 content of Faroese salmon.
>> Through the big role played by the industrial fishing, 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic float in our oceans, enough to circulate the equator 425 times, go to the moon twice and back, with the total amount of plastic heavier than the weight of 38,000 elephants. The debris comes from about 640,000 tonnes of nets, lines, and other fishing materials, all having the same weight as 55,000 double-decker buses.
Double decker buses, elephants, to the moon - all we're missing is the 'football pitch' standard journalistic unit..
On a different note, the author fails to include the world 'wild' fish; sustainable aquaculture practices are going to be a very useful way to meet the world's protein needs.
The protein conversion ratio of farmed salmon is lower than chicken, beef, pork, and most conventionally farmed land animals.
There are different levels of sustainability - shrimp farming in former mangroves is not very good for overall climate.
ASC-certified salmon farming in Norway, where antibiotic use is heavily restricted, is much better. Wild fishing has many evils; fish farms when done properly are not as bad.
Oh my. Furniture does seem to elicit strong feelings. The moment someone decides their home is worth more investment than they have ever invested before is a special moment, indeed.
Interesting site. I currently work at a hedge fund, but have a small dose of NLP in my academic background, so it's always interesting to see concepts like this come out.
Two questions:
- Are you using EDGAR's 'Facts' function? It seems to make SEC Filings a lot more like structured text than they have been previously, but I haven't seen really convincing tools developed to use it yet
- How/do you ever see yourself interfacing with similar 'red flag' screening tools that just work on the numerical side i.e. accounting ratios ?
Also, you've got a grammatical error on your Values and Vision page.
Normally I wouldn't comment to point that kind of thing out, but for an NLP startup it seems more appropriate ('its volume' not 'it's volume')!
We don't rely on XBRL for parsing. It's not very consistent/reliable and its mostly for numeric content. We've definitely considered integrating ratios both into our dashboard. It isn't a current priority because ratios are already well supported elsewhere.
Asking to learn - ex-Algo here. May I ask where else ratios are represented. Thanks and all the best for your launch. Very useful service.
From experience, I would suggest you have way for the manager of a fund or a desk or a bank, to see the usefulness. You will have good pull from the line staff, but selling to the managers is the hard part.
You would enjoy Saygin et al, (2000) [1] ('Turing test: 50 years later).
'Not getting math right' is part of a classic repertoire of cheap hacks used to pass the Turing test by mimicking 'how' a human might speak. This includes pauses in typing, grammatical errors, fillers such as 'like' and on son in order to pass the TT, instead of building language competency so well that passing the TT is a by-product.
It's like 'teaching to the test' instead of teaching the subject.
"Some people interpret the TT as a setting in which you can "cheat". The game has no rules constraining the design of the machines. At some places in the paper, Turing describes how machines could be "rigged" to overcome certain obstacles proposed by opponents of the idea that machines can think.
"A very obvious example is about machines making mistakes. When the machine is faced with an arithmetical operation, in order not to give away its identity by being fast and accurate, it can pause for about 30 seconds before responding and occasionally give a wrong answer. Being able to carry out arithmetical calculations fast and accurately is generally considered intelligent behavior. However, Turing wishes to sacrifice this at the expense of human-ness.
"Some commentators think this is "cheating". The machine is resorting to certain "tricks" in its operations rather than imitating the human ways. However, arithmetic is a highly specific domain. Modifying the programs in this manner cannot hurt: If a machine can pass the test, it can then be re-programmed not to cheat at arithmetic. If it does not resort to this, the interrogator can ask a difficult arithmetical problem as his/her first question and decide that he/she is dealing with a machine right then and there."
[1]: Saygin, A. P., Cicekli, I., & Akman, V. (2000). Turing test: 50 years later. Minds and machines, 10(4), 463-518.
I’d personally be interested in a form of test that didn’t allow these sorts of side-channel attacks. Submit a test script, get answers back some time in the future, do a few iterations to dig down into answers maybe. Would rather people’s time not be wasted on irrelevant stuff.
LBOs do not always lead to corporate raiding or asset stripping, in the same way that the restructuring and rationalisation that follow an LBO does not always result in mass redundancies.
Theoretically, LBOs allow a company to avoid the pressure of the quarterly reporting cycle for a while and make more long-term decisions without facing instant 'repercussions'.
If you're interested in how LBOs got the reputation they got, and a case study in the biggest and most notorious LBO, try 'Barbarians at the Gate', which follows the LBO of RJR Nabisco.
These predictions often surely make most sense and are most prevalent in a particular field of NLP research, like dialogue (open-domain, non-task oriented). Believable dialogue seems to require some kind of world knowledge, certain forms of 'common sense' (e.g. arithmetic reasoning), and the ability to track belief states and be coherent over long periods.
GPT-2 was critiqued for its inability to deal with simple arithmetic questions, as well as contradicting itself over long periods [1].
GPT-3 has similar deficiencies in terms of sensible real-world knowledge and displaying coherence both with its own previous answers and with a more general real-world knowledge:
'Within the domain of discrete language tasks, we have noticed informally that GPT-3 seems to have special difficulty with “common sense physics”, despite doing well on some datasets (such as PIQA [BZB+19]) that test this domain. Specifically GPT-3 has difficulty with questions of the type “If I put cheese into the fridge, will it melt?”.' [2]) of the type that would obviously torpedo attempts at open domain dialogue over long periods.
Take a typical two paper pointing out the failings of brute force methods for dialogue. They trot out a classic example:
'Without getting into the specifics of how these systems are constructed, it is apparent that such an approach [brute force] provides a method for imitating a dialogue but not for participating in one. We can see the limitations of the approach from examples like these:
Human: what is your job ? Machine: i ’m a lawyer .
Human: what do you do ? Machine: i ’m a doctor
(Vinyals & Le, 2015).' [3]
Huge models can provide plausible, but not consistently coherent, dialogue inputs. In the dialogue domain, the 'winter' will come (/has come) when it becomes clear that Meena, BlenderBot etc need a little help when it comes to coherence over an arbitrary number of turns, displaying 'common sense physics', and so on.
An interesting overview of Edward Bernays' life, work, and life's work cementing his position as the creator of modern commercial propaganda is Larry Tye's _The Father of Spin_. It's the source of a hundred little ingenious anecdotes that demonstrate the imagination behind Bernays' campaigns, but one of the most alarming is that of Beech-nut bacon. Here I quote from one of Bernays' own books, 'Biography of an Idea':
"The sales of Beechnut bacon were falling off because people had slimmed down their breakfast to a piece of toast, orange juice and a cup of coffee.[...] Beechnut favoured breakfast habits of a century before, when people started their day with bacon and eggs, doughnuts, pie and coffee. If the trend of breakfasts could be reversed, beechnut, the dominant breakfast bacon, would regain its sales.
Physicians confirmed to me [i.e. Bernays] that heavy breakfasts were scientifically desirable. The body needs food replenishment twelve hours after an evening meal. I enlisted a well-known New York phyisican, Dr A L Goldwater, to write to phyisicians thoughout the country for their opinion on heavy verses light breakfasts. Physicians from all over the country gave overwhelming support to the hearty breakfast.
Six months after widespread publicity on the survey, Bartlett Arkell, president of Beechnut, announced that Beechnut sales of bacon had increased “enormousely in the past half year. Nothing else did it , except the recommendation of American doctors.”/
Bernays recounts this anecdote in such a way as to minimise the appearance that he himself deliberately sought or bought trusted medical opinions to confirm his campaigns: they simply 'confirmed' things to him. But while the Lucky Strike and soap-carving contests he organised often get the most attention - they're beautiful works of creative showmanship and inventive campaigning - quick portraits of his work tend to obscure just how data-driven he actually was. Rare was the PR stunt he pulled without extremely thorough research behind him.
It's also traditional to comment that either Ivy Lee or Walter Lippmann were in fact the 'real' fathers of public relations. One of Edward Bernays' most interesting commentators was Jacques Ellul, whose work expands and develops the role of propaganda in mass or atomised society. He's not well-known in the Anglophone sphere because he published in French, but his book 'Propaganda' has been translated into English and, despite first being published in 1962, actually remains shockingly relevant. In his estimation, 'public opinion' was infinitely malleable, and any political or commercial system that answered to public opinion, without recognising just how vulnerable that was to anyone with an agenda and a good means of delivering misinformation, was doomed. Both he and Bernays make excellent reading in the context of modern political advertising and 'populism' i.e. when public opinion is led or actively wanders into dangerous territory.
Going through the process of being pregnant and giving birth is absolutely terrifying to me and most of my friends. How many tech bros do you know who do their blood labs on a yearly basis, or track their blood sugar daily? How many do sports physio to avoid the possibility of a minor training injury, or do any number of peptide interventions to micro-optimise some aspect of their health or physique?
If having babies, for them, was basically a coin toss re: possibly developing diabetes, ripping open their pelvic floor and becoming incontinent, adding 8 points to your BMI, or major sleeping problems, etc., would they still be as mystified about the low TFR? (Of course, many men go through physical hell when raising children too, and I don't want to diminish their contribution, but on average their physical symptoms are less extreme)
Sometimes the knee jerk 'just get a caesarean' and lower maternal mortality numbers mask the reality of how barbaric the process seems, at least from my vantage point as someone who might one day be involved in the process. The number of privileged women who choose the surrogate path alone should suggest how many women might opt out of the physical part of it, if they could; if having babies isn't a social obligation or a biological inevitability without birth control, there's quite a strong argument for putting it off just one more year...