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Can't spell classical without "class". If you like classical music and don't find at least parts of the culture obnoxious and elitist, I'd worry for you.

I think you miss the point of this book. Karl had tuberculosis, Jonathan died saving him from a fire despite knowing Karl would soon die (which he did). No suicide there, only tragedy. Then they had an "afterlife" which is full of the adventure they wished they had when they were alive - which also means that there's some serious darkness there to fight, so not heaven by any means. In the end, Karl gets to do for Jonathan essentially what he did for him, and they're ready to move on. They didn't commit suicide, they were already dead. I don't think a single Swedish kid killed themselves over misunderstanding this book, they didn't miss the part that the brothers really treasured life and it was a tragedy that they died in the first chapter.

Same here, they are still extremely cheap, though.

Very odd. I've used DeepSeek heavily for some weeks, and haven't seen a single Chinese character either in its replies or its thinking. Are you using a quantified model or a different provider by any chance?

Remember that Astrid Lindgren was born in 1907, got pregnant at 18 and had to give up her son to a foster home for the first few years. She grew up in a completely different world, and it's no coincidence that a lot of her stories are basically about consoling traumatized children.

> She grew up in a completely different world,

Also, back then in 1925 infant mortality was probably ~10x worse [0], which adds to how we (today) might underestimate the prevalence of parent-child traumas.

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN?location...


I don't know why you are down voted. Death was so much more present in kids lives back then. Death from diseases and injuries so common. Kids having dead siblings entirely normal.

The writing of Charles Dickens support this thesis strongly!

I am familiar with her background she was sadly later projecting into many/most of her books. I am pretty sure vast majority of Swedish kids was growing back then in complete families without dead mother/father, same as they do nowadays regardless of marriage or divorce status.

Emil of Lönneberga and The Six Bullerby Children are great books, the rest about traumatized kids/orphans not so much as kid books.


As a Swede, I can't read the Emil books because of fremdscham for the parents from those scenes where Emil feels the need to run to the carpentry shed.

The farmer class could actually be like this, before we banned it, even though she tries to write about it in a comical way, but it was always a low class thing to punish ones children and to read stories where it happens is basically intolerable at least to me.

Astrid Lindgren probably knew this though. She isn't some idiot who puts this in as comic relief, it's comic but there's a serious and intolerable feel to it too. She knows she's portraying something bad and she intends for us readers to sit with the dissonance-- the low class going-to-punish-his-children aspect, the family's love for Emil, that book in which his mother writes down what he does, that Emil is well-meaning, that everything goes well in the end and that the adult Emil becomes a nämndeman, etc.

Astrid Lindgren is one of the scariest Swedish authors because of her deliberate careful and nuanced use of moral dissonance. She's scarier than Willem Fredrik Hermans.


You are sure wast majority of kids had both parents same as today after WWI when childbirth was way more dangerous then today?

One of parents being dead was way more commom situation then it is today.


according google in 1925 85% Swedish kids were born to married parents

and

"Long-term cohort studies tracking historical Swedish registry data from the early-to-mid 1900s indicate that approximately 2.3% to 3.6% of children experienced the death of a biological parent before reaching adulthood (under 15 to 18 years of age)"

so less than 4% of the kids experienced parental death, absolute majority was born into regular complete families, my point was like half of the Lindgren characters are missing parent for whatever reason, not one in 20 books main characters, she was clearly projecting something unhealthy unrealistic into her books, if she was following reality it would be rare in her books and not that many if not majority of her characters are from incomplete families


What does it mean "according to google"? Google does not track historical demographic data. Like, use actual source.

Second 4% is actually a lot. In a class of 20 kids, one will have dead parent. That makes it something all kids growing during the era are aware of.

To me it suggest it should be expected for some writers to write about this group.


it is not that much, it means if she had 25 (4% is 1 in 25, not 1 in 20) main characters, one of them should have dead parent if she would reflect the reality and didn't have some orphan/death fetish with significant number (way way more than 1 in 25 or even 1 in 10) of her characters being orphans/foster/neglected kids

The "if you show a minority in your book, their number must not exceed their exact demographic share" rule would make it impossible to write about any minority.

> if she would reflect the reality and didn't have some orphan/death fetish

The aggressive hostility toward writing about non-majority is super weird.


Yes, and it's a problem procedural space games have in particular. Because the planets usually don't interact at all in any meaningful way - what's on one planet (or indeed in one zone on a planet) has no impact outside it. Maybe you can get random quests on planet A to find some landmark on planet B, but it doesn't feel like that was because anything on planet A had anything to do with what was on planet B. For all its improvements over the years (and they are many, and OK in their own way) this is a thing which has not changed in No Man's Sky.

This I think is a core challenge with procedural generation. You can have procgen countries with procgen cities with procgen citizens, but if none of those citizens have an aunt in another city - who you can actually visit, in a new world from the same seed, and learn that she has a nephew in the first city - then it feels empty, fake.

Hierarchial procgen is easy. But you need cross-interactions like that to make it feel alive, and that's hard.


They've added a lot of elements inspired by other games. One of the first things they added was base-building. Also a colony sim subgame, a pokemon-like subgame, fishing and cooking subgames, a roguelike subgame (exploring derelict dreadnought spaceships), as well as a lot more non-procedurally generated storyline/quests.

The worst thing I can say about it is that it tries to be everything for everyone, and is relentlessly friendly - all the new mechanics are very forgiving, very optional and (from what I've seen) rather easy. But there is sort of an in game story explanation for why it sometimes feels more like Stardew valley than a space exploration game.


It may be bad at recognizing it, but if all arms are equally good, that doesn't matter.

Talking about this in terms of exploration/exploitation may be a bit misleading, because from a pure exploration-exploitation perspective, biases wouldn't be a problem if the groups were secretly all identical. If they are, you are "right" to spend zero effort on exploration, your initial inaccurate model that the X are better doctors than Y, will produce no worse results than the completely accurate model.

I think this is implied by your comment that the issue is framed improperly, but just to point it out explicitly: the reason that this is a problem is because it would lead to segregation, inequality, and injustice in a society where the biased selection mechanism is used.

Even if it happens to be “optimal” in this case at assigning employees to positions based purely on the information available and their likelihood to succeed, biases can present other issues.


> Even if it happens to be “optimal” in this case at assigning employees to positions based purely on the information available and their likelihood to succeed, biases can present other issues.

Yeah, even if the Aima people were 50% better at being a doctor than the Weku (or whatever) we still would not want Aima to be preferred over Weku just for being Aima.

This is the core flaw of this study, imho. The whole equal treatment thing isn't supposed to be "everybody should be equally likely to be picked for a job", but rather "everybody's chances to be picked for a job should only rely on direct characteristics that influence their competence for the job". This study effectively forces the decision maker to use group membership as a proxy for competence due to the lack of information on direct characteristics.

It is hard to see real world situations where there is no performance penalty for structurally choosing participants less fit for the job by using only group membership as a proxy.


While that may be true in reality no such externality consequences appear to be baked into the game theory of the experiment.

It's like having people or neural networks choose door 1 from door 2 without clear advantage to either of them and without making it clear that one door somehow represents "donating blood" while the other represents "kicking puppies".


Isn’t exploration vs exploitation about the decision-making process, not about the actual reality in the world around you? It doesn’t matter if they are secretly identical or not. The exploration/exploitation trade-off is in the person making those decisions.

I don't understand what you suggest that implies?

I think they're saying that while it doesn't matter, the agent and human "do not actutally know" that it does not matter.

Philosophy sometimes says that knowledge is a "justified true belief"*; in this experiment, agents and humans have incorrectly justified a false belief that some applicants are better for certain roles.

* other times, it says this isn't good enough


Seems quite odd to cite all of philosophy as saying something, as if it were a single person with contradictory beliefs..

And then its like you are both saying the justification is incorrect and the belief is false, so its not really like the bare nuance of the concept is adding to the point. Why feel the need to appeal to an (imaginary) authority at all in this case?

"Oh well if philosophy said it, I better be taking this seriously!"


I think you misunderstood my point, just as the other commentor misunderstood one level up.

Perhaps a different approach to explain the problem here:

"It ain't what they don't know, it's what they know for sure that just ain't so".


Hm ok, but how are you mapping this, like, epistemological concept to what you are responding to re exploration/exploitation? Has exploration happened or not if it amounts to false beliefs? The whole point tradeoff doesn't seem to make sense if the person in fact can't actually successfully explore! Or even if there the possibility of that. But it is also very likely I am misunderstanding!

A flat distribution is still a distribution, and correct exploration would have revealed that the distribution is flat. The agent appears to have gained the false belief that it has learned something and done some exploring, when in fact it has not.

c.f. Sally-Anne test: Sally thinks she knows where her toy is, we know that she doesn't, and indeed couldn't. The LLM (and humans in similar conditions) think they know what the distribution is, we know that they don't.


Really not trying to be reductive here, but it feels like all you are trying to articulate here is that the LLM was wrong in this instance about something. Is that right? Is there something more we need to understand?

> Is there something more we need to understand?

Only if you're interested in the specific failure modes that LLMs have.

That's all this story is.


Re your asterisk, the justified true belief (JTB) criteria are considered necessary, but no longer considered sufficient as a definition of knowledge.

Because of that, JTB is often treated as a useful first approximation.

It's easy to see why the JTB criteria are necessary:

Belief: if you don't believe it then you can't count it as knowledge.

Truth: a belief is not (valid) knowledge if it's false.

Justification: accidentally getting the right answer isn't normally knowledge.

But the original claim for JTB was that it was a sufficient definition of knowledge. Later critiques like Gettier's showed that this is not generally true, i.e. there are edge cases for which it fails. In many scenarios, those edge cases don't matter much. So you end up with JTB being an imperfect but useful definition.


Of course it does, if you start filtering people out at random then you have pointlessly introduced the possibility of randomly filtering out the best candidate.

You have no other information to go by in this scenario, so whatever you do you're equally likely to randomly exclude the best candidate.

Probably not any 23andMe haven't already told you about. They test a limited set of SNPs, balancing between ones thought useful for genealogy, ones useful for ethnicity estimates and ones thought useful for health-related things (the latter they would like to make their main selling point, the two former are really all commercial DNA services' bread and butter).

It's unlikely that they would luck into testing some unknown SNP which turned out to be relevant for disease.


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