Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd February 2025
https://awful.systems/post/3382551
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www.lesswrong.com/posts/…/re-taste
A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of √n.
No it doesn’t, you fools, you absolute rubes
If you consider your normative values to be true, then everything looks like progress.
wat
Scott Alexander was a founding though-leader behind the Lightcone salon.
Your future region of the spacetime diagram is inside a locker, nerd
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Aaaah my eyes
The Great City was built on a modular grid system designed to eliminate geography.
This future doesn’t have hexagons so I already hate it. Hexagons are the bestagons.
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Hexagons are great, would love to see some hexagon based city plans. Especially if they have designed for walkability and public transport!
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Heck yeah walkability!
Also note how the author said the city transcends geography, as if geography was something useless or to be overcome by an advanced civilization (except for a bunch of artsy folks tucked away in a corner I guess?). But humans need variety. I would get so antsy if I lived in a perfect grid city with nothing out of order (or even a perfect hexagon city, no offense hexagons). There need to be paths and trails and rivers. There need to be trees and mountains in the distance.
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Yeah weird thing to eliminate from a city, or weird thing to see without context. Basically: Wrongers try and envision a better world without deleting the parts of human experience that make it meaningful or worthwhile challenge (impossible)
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The ideal wronger future after all is a simulation where human experience is deleted altogether!
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But think of how high the number can go!
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To be fair, im not sure how much the story intends it to be a positive development. (But considering the dada reference by the author in the comments, not sure how much is intentional at all).
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I mean, we tried the whole “fuck yeah grids fuck local geography” thing. That was fucking Le Corbusier and friends’ whole deal. And it created dead cities and/or places in cities that people hated to live in.
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At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, if he wanted to transcend geography then he would have used heptagons!
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My understanding was that 21st-century psychiatrists didn’t speak Baseline nor thought that precisely
Ah a dystopian story. (Not sure if it is intended as much bte, but for me ‘ha the past was foolish, as we now have a perfect way of talking/thinking that uses math! (No you are not allowed to see it dear eeader)’ is quite dystopian coded. Prob why I read Starship Troopers not as it was intended.
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A random walk, in retrospect, looks like like directional movement at a speed of √n.
I aint clicking on LW links on my day off (ty for your service though). I am trying to reverse engineer wtf this poster is possibly saying though. My best guess: If we have a random walk in Z_2, with X_i being a random var with 2 outcomes, -1 or +1 (50% chance left at every step, 50% chance for a step to the right), then the expected squared distance from the origin after n steps E[ (Σ_{i=1}^n X_i)^2 ] = E[Σ_{i=1}^n X_i^2}] + E[Σ_{i not = j, i,j both in {1,2,…n}} X_i X_j}]. The expectation of any product E[X_i X_j] with i not = j is 0, (again 50% -1, 50% +1), so the 2nd expectation is 0, and (X_i)^2 is always 1, hence the whole expectation of the squared distance is equal to n => the expectation of the nonsquared distance should be on the order of root(n). (I confess this rather straightforward argument comes from the wikipedia page on simple random walks, though I swear I must have seen it before decades ago.)
Now of course, to actually get the expected 1-norm distance, we need to compute E[Σ_{i=1}^n |X_i| ]. More exciting discussion here if you are interested!
…wolfram.com/RandomWalk1-Dimensional.html
But back to the original posters point… the whole point of this evaluation is that it is directionLESS, we are looking at expected distance from the origin without a preference for left or right. Like I kind of see what they are trying to say? If afterwards I ignored any intermediate steps of the walker and just looked at the final location (but why tho), I could say "the walker started at the origin and now is approx root(2n/pi) distance away in the minus direction, so only looking at the start and end of the walk I would say the average velocity is d(position)/(d(time)) = ( - root(2n/pi) - 0) /( n ) -> the walker had directional movement in the minus direction at a speed of root(2/(pi*n)) "
wait, so the “speed” would be O(1/root(n)), not root(n)… am I fucking crazy?
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I think they took the rather elementary fact about random walks that the variance grows linearly with time and, in trying to make a profundity, got the math wrong and invented a silly meaning for “in retrospect”.
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hundo p.
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