Genetic algorithms are good, as you said, when you really understand the space and can come up with a really good candidate generation system. They’re okayish (or, the same as everything else) when you have no understanding of the space at all, and you’re just totally guessing. They can’t latch onto a curve in design space as well as things that look at a simpler gradient can. So maybe they’re best used for really complex spaces where gradient based methods don’t do well. The kind of places you’d use Gibbs sampling, or general optimization algorithms.

So, basically, they’re useful when you have good feature engineering already done, like many methods that have fallen out of vogue in the age of letting algorithms and data do your feature engineering for you. And they’re as good a shot in the dark as any when standard methods fail and you’ve got no clue how to proceed.

So, yeah, the number of times genetic algorithms are the “right” choice is pretty limited these days.

“I don’t think it was malicious, but WTF!” Sums it up nicely. You can do better. Being alone is better. Encouraging him to seek treatment for his depression wouldn’t be out of line, though.

It’d be great if there were some good way to measure corruption and put it into the graph. But I suspect that’d be hard. It might also be divisive - if a US senator holds up a defense appropriations bill until some spending for their district is added, is that corruption? I suspect you can find conflicting, earnest, legitimate answers to that question.

That sounds incredibly complicated (like, literally a sizable fraction of the complexity of all US foreign policy), and really divisive (I.e. would all NATO countries count? Would Ukraine? India? Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? Israel? Taiwan?). You can make really good arguments that the answer for any of those is “yes” or “no”. For that reason, I think such an illustration would be difficult to construct, and impossible to treat as data without an agenda.

Believe it or not, the US has a military presence outside of it’s immediate geographic neighbors. It also projects force even further than that.

I don’t think Mexico and Canada are at the top of the list of countries that the US spends it’s military budget worrying about. Perhaps it’s border security budget (but even then, maybe not - airport security).

I feel like the “Rich man, poor man” metaphors don’t go that well to argue against this metric, because the next step is “Do you want to be a rich man without a gun surrounded by poor men with guns?”

US has about 20% of Africa’s population, and a GDP of $25T compared to $3T for Africa.