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I wrote a post about some of the wild stuff that goes on in prediction markets: https://misinfounderload.substack.com/p/tales-from-prediction-markets

Note that these are all from the last 3 months; I only joined in January.

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For the benefit of those of us who might also wish to donate to support direct air capture, may we know which DAC charity's offset claims you consider extra trustworthy?

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As some of you might already know, I've made an extension to help tidy up the ACX Substack experience. Most recently, I've added an option to heart comments again. Only people with this extension or EdwardScizorhands' will be be able to see them, but with enough activity there could be a small ecosystem. Other new features include hiding comments by username, dark mode for the settings popup, and hiding sub only posts.

The extension is called ACX Tweaks and works with Chrome and Firefox, available on their respective stores or at https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks

As always, if you have any feedback or find any bugs, leave a comment at https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks/issues or email me at <my username> + "n" @ gmail.

For anyone who doesn't like getting emails about hearts but still wants to know about replies to their comments, you can filter out emails from reaction@mg1.substack.com, which is the address that sends heart notifications.

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You are utterly mistaken about the non-fungibles' "downsides," and I do not think somebody such as yourself can be such blind to an emergent file format's industrial and societal implications. Plus, a smart contractual transaction does not add up to the overall energy consumption of a blockchain. A simple query in replicated research would also convince any mind that blockchains are the most active participants in optimizing against the environmental costs of value-extraction. That is, you are just virtue-signalling wrt NFTs.

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Awhile ago I had a discussion with someone on the SSC subreddit about the Iraq War and the morality of having a career in the military. We had very different views on this polarizing and heated issue, but the discussion was in good-faith, and didn't devolve into personal attacks, straw-manning, or hatred for each other.

It occurred to me that r/SSC was the only forum I was aware of where a topic so controversial could be discussed in good faith. Can anyone recommend any other forums where heated but good-faith conversations like this can happen?

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Reposting my unanswered comment from your AMA in case somebody else wants to weigh in and provide suggestions:

1. Your past answers to my questions have significantly broadened my intellectual horizons, enriching my life in difficult times. Some time ago, I've made a document where I collect all the new questions I'd love to ask you. It currently contains almost 600 of them. How should I best approach this?

2. It seems that the pandemic made many people (especially rationalists) worried about the fragility of human life. What is your stance on the various approaches to longevity (e.g. http://immortality-roadmap.com/IMMORTEN.pdf)? What are you personally doing (and/or what would you recommend doing) in order to secure the continuity of personal identity?

3. Could there be some clever way in which we might get your answers to the important but controversial culture war/taboo questions, without you actually taking the risk of responding to them directly, and/or being linked with the replies? While it seems impossible at first glance, maybe there's a smart way to solve the problem with a "one weird trick [journalists HATE him!]". It could be useful to draw inspirations from the past examples of successfully circumventing the censorship and adversarial social currents.

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During the 2009 swine flu pandemic, a vaccine by Pandemrix was administered in Europe and was found to cause narcolepsy. I have two questions.

1. Why are we so sure that new vaccines won’t have severe side effects?

2. Is there is a pithy, quick response to a COVID vaccine-hesitant person that sums up why the benefits outweigh the risks?

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Exercise junkies of ACX...

1. What's your primary form of exercise?

2. Why?

3. Have rationality/scientific principles had an influence? What is it?

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Who is the "direct air capture charity whose offset claims are extra-trustworthy"? I just had to cancel my recurring donation to Clean Air Task Force due to a credit card compromise, but would consider shifting my donation to another more effective climate organization if there's one available.

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founding

Won't voting on the winners just incentivize people to write reviews that people will vote for?

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founding

What was your carbon cost estimate of a single NFT?

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I would love to know your take on NFTs. They seem silly to me. If seeing Michelangelo’s David on my computer was as good as having it in my house, I don’t think I’d bother to buy it and I doubt anyone would care if I did. But that’s not very sophisticated and I’d love to have my opinion challenged/supported.

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I guess I'll start the politics comments now.

With the new Georgia election law, and a few other recent events, the blue tribe/"centrist" media/whatever you want to call them has spilled a lot of ink about how democracy is so important and republicans/conservatives/the red tribe/trump supporters is antidemocratic. Now there seems to be a pattern where the blue tribe strongly pushing something makes the red tribe start opposing it.

My question is, how big of a threat to democracy is this process emerging from media narratives? For the record, my two cents are that the Georgia election law is 1) silly and 2) probably not racist or antidemocratic, and that conservatives/red tribers/trump supporters actual-factual turning against democracy is the most probable way for democracy in the united states to collapse, so it's important not to pointlessly alienate them.

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I put this essay this on Facebook today. I'm reposting it here because I recall that some of you are interested in these matters.

Here in southeast Michigan, the term "Arsenal of Democracy" brings to mind the bomber plant in Ypsilanti. But here's another amazing piece of World War II industrial production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_ship

Liberty ships were cargo ships produced in U.S. shipyards in 1941-45. These ships were huge, each carrying 10,000 tons of cargo. They were 441 feet long -- that's about a third the length of the quarter-mile-long container ship that blocked the Suez canal recently.

And they built 2,710 of them!

As Wikipedia says: "The immensity of the effort, the number of ships built, the role of female workers in their construction, and the survival of some far longer than their original five-year design life combine to make them the subject of much continued interest."

The relevance of Liberty ships to my Political Graveyard project (biographical material on US political figures from Colonial times to the present, https://politicalgraveyard.com) is that most of them were named for famous Americans. Hundreds of these names were of political figures -- starting with each of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Using multiple sources, I'm working on documenting, for my web site, which politicians were honored in this particular way.

Ships were named for governors and senators, yes, but also for writers, poets, actors, musicians, journalists, inventors, theologians, generals, industrialists, doctors, humanitarians -- pretty much every category.

Some of the choices were perverse to modern eyes: there was a ship named SS Jefferson Davis, for the president of the Confederacy; SS Nathan B. Forrest, for the infamous founder of the KKK; and SS George A. Custer, for the general who died at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

But there were also SS Harriet Tubman, SS Frederick Douglass, SS Booker T. Washington, SS George Washington Carver, SS Geronimo, and SS William Lloyd Garrison.

(William Lloyd Garrison was the ferocious slavery-abolitionist who wrote, 30 years before the Civil War: "I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and _I_will_be_heard._" See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lloyd_Garrison )

Going through the list, I have come across many fascinating and mostly-forgotten folks. A few examples follow. The text is quoted or condensed from Wikipedia:

* Hans Christian Heg (1829-1863): A Norwegian American abolitionist, journalist, anti-slavery activist, politician and soldier. As Wisconsin prison commissioner, he spearheaded many reforms to the prison, believing that prisons should be used to "reclaim the wandering and save the lost." He led a Scandinavian volunteer regiment in the Civil War, and died of the wounds he received at the Battle of Chickamauga.

* Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908): The most distinguished female sculptor in America during the 19th century, and the first female professional sculptor. She also designed and constructed machinery, and devised new processes, especially in connection with sculpture, such as a method of converting the ordinary limestone of Italy into marble, and a process of modeling in which the rough shape of a statue is first made in plaster, on which a coating of wax is laid for working out the finer forms. While living in Rome, she associated with a colony of artists and writers that included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bertel Thorvaldsen, William Makepeace Thackeray, and the two female Georges, Eliot and Sand. When in Florence, she was frequently the guest of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.

* Harriet Monroe (1860-1836): editor, scholar, literary critic, poet, and patron of the arts; publisher and editor of Poetry magazine. As a supporter of the poets Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, H. D., T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Max Michelson and others, Monroe played an important role in the development of modern poetry. Her correspondence with early twentieth century poets provides a wealth of information on their thoughts and motives.

* Harvey Cushing (1869-1939): A pioneer of brain surgery, he was the first exclusive neurosurgeon and the first person to describe Cushing's disease. He wrote a biography of William Osler which won a Pulitzer Prize. He wrote numerous monographs on surgery of the brain and spinal column, and made important contributions to bacteriology. Under his influence neurosurgery became a new and autonomous surgical discipline. He considerably improved the survival of patients after difficult brain operations for intracranial tumors. But Cushing's greatest contribution came with his introduction to North America of blood pressure measurement.

* Haym Salomon (1740-1785): Poland-born Jewish businessman and financial broker who, like Robert Morris, went broke financing the American Revolution. In 1775, Salomon joined the New York branch of the Sons of Liberty. In September 1776, he was arrested as a spy. The British pardoned him, but only after requiring him to spend 18 months on a British boat as an interpreter for Hessian soldiers – German troops employed by the British. Salomon used his position to help prisoners of war from the Continental Army escape and encouraged the Hessians to desert the war effort. In 1778 Salomon was arrested again and sentenced to death. Again, he managed to escape. From the period of 1781–1784, records show Salomon's fundraising and personal lending helped provide over $650,000 (more than $9.4 billion in current dollars) in financing to George Washington in his war effort. He died penniless.

* Helena Modjeska (1840-1909): A renowned Polish-American actress who specialized in Shakespearean and tragic roles. Despite her accent and imperfect command of English, she achieved great success. In 1893 Modjeska was invited to speak to a women's conference at the Chicago World's Fair, and described the situation of Polish women in the Russian and Prussian-ruled parts of dismembered Poland. This led to a Tsarist ban on her traveling in Russian territory. Scholars have posited that Modjeska might have been Arthur Conan Doyle's model for the character Irene Adler, the only woman that Sherlock Holmes came close to loving. Susan Sontag's award-winning 1999 novel, "In America", though fiction, is based on Modjeska's life.

And that's just a few from the "H" section!

All of these, and a couple thousand others, were recognized in the names of Liberty ships.

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I'm still mulling "Towards a Bayesian Theory of Willpower" and dug up an ancient Scott Alexander post called "Applied Picoeconomics" on LessWrong -- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NjzBrtvDS4jXi5Krp/applied-picoeconomics -- which proposed a nice application of Ainslie's ideas on hyperbolic discounting.

What are practical applications of the Bayesian theory?

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Question/pondering about a financial instrument that seems obvious and I'm surprised it either doesn't exist or doesn't exist prominently enough for me to know about it.

When I'm saving for retirement, i don't know exactly how long I'll live after retirement. If my life expectancy is 25 +- 15 years post-retirement, I could save 25 years of expenses and risk being destitute if I live too long, or I could save 40 years and risk having saved way too much money (these of course both need to be adjusted for market growth, but the savings needed to fund 40 years is still significantly higher than the savings needed to fund 25 years). My financial advisor friend tells me this is called "longevity risk".

It strikes me that this is a huge risk for people planning for retirement, and one that just begs to be insured. If you have 1000 people who need to fund 25 +- 15 years, they could all independently save 40 years of expenses, or they could each save (e.g.) 28 years of expenses, pay 3 of them to an insurance company, and that insurance company covers them however long they survive. In a way this is the opposite of life insurance.

So why can't I buy this insurance (as far as I know)? Social Security and pensions both implicitly accomplish this, but I can't really access a pension without totally changing my career plans, and I'd like to retire with more than social security offers (plus I don't totally trust it to still exist). The same financial advisor friend says that annuities work toward this goal, but it seems like an annuity tends to also lock you into a really conservative investment mix; I want to insure my longevity risk but have the same market risk exposure as a normal IRA. The closest I can think of is having an IRA until I retire and then all at once moving it into an annuity, but my longevity uncertainty will be smaller at retirement than now, so I'll still have to oversave in case my mean life expectancy is higher at retirement than it is now. I want to either 1) directly insure my longevity risk, or 2) buy into an IRA-like-vehicle that insures it by having an agreement "you invest/grow this however you want, and then at retirement, we pocket all of it, and we'll pay you 10% less than you'd be able to withdraw if you drew it down such that you'd hit 0 at exactly your mean life expectancy".

so my questions:

1) Does this exist?

2a) If not, why not? It seems obvious that it should, so there are probably good reasons it doesn't. My working theory is that it's hard to market, but that's not super satisfying

2b) If it does exist, why isn't it more prominent? I'm no expert, but I'm reasonably well informed about retirement for a nonexpert, so if I don't know about it, there's no way that many people do, and it might as well not exist for most people. It seems like it should be as popular as a normal IRA

3) Anyone want to partner with me to build a business selling this? (mostly sarcastic, but seriously, this seems like a huge opportunity that isn't being exploited)

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The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) is a politically neutral, multi-disciplinary team of experienced neuroscientists, technology industry leaders, physicists, and machine learning experts from across academia and industry who have developed an integrated technology platform – Contextus { https://networkcontagion.us/technology/ } – to track and expose the epidemic of virtual deception, manipulation, and hate, as it spreads between social media communities and into the real world.

https://networkcontagion.us/

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I share concerns about those Gulen schools from the Erdogan post :

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan

https://www.rue89strasbourg.com/ditib-strasbourg-94118 (fr)

It's kind of weird to see Erdogan pretty much doing a political campaign in a foreign country, with an anti-Kurd message, even though the country in question is supposedly an ally of the Kurds !

I also find this "Islamic campus" also questionable, with Erdogan, AKP and Millî Görüs being aligned behind a project of a political Islam, and to "keep the Turkish identity of the diaspora".

Especially when you remember the "Party of Equality and Justice", that wanted to gather all the Muslims in a single party :

https://www.rue89strasbourg.com/parti-egalite-justice-nouveau-parti-musulman-80105 (fr)

Their program (was?) :

- Candidates in all the country

- More diversity for the cultural grants [Wouldn't this be illegal?]

- The Central European Bank should be able to directly lend to states.

- More structural support in the ghettos [The kind of "structure" that often comes from Islamists these days ?]

- Integrate a multicultural vision of the French history in the school manuals

- Rethink secularism to allow a social and public religious practice

- A holiday for the Aïd

- Halal menus in schools

- Revocation of the law forbidding headscarves in school

- Stop [forbid ?] teaching gender studies in school

- Review [revocation ?] of the laws allowing gay marriage

- Palestine should be recognized as a country

- Turkey should be allowed in the EU (in the case it wants to join it again one of these days)

Now it seems that they have failed, getting like 1% (?) of the votes country-wide - I'd guess that for a country with about ~10% of Muslims, the Oumma is still quite divided, with the various "home" countries like Algeria and Morocco having a heavier weight than Turkey.

Still, political Islam should really be recognized as a danger, especially these days, and even in the countries where it hardly has any foothold, like the USA with those Gulen schools...

I'm not sure that Macron did the best thing in forbidding homeschooling and basically rolling back the separation of church and state (!) by deciding that the state should be responsible for the formation of imams :

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/07/macron-wants-to-start-an-islamic-revolution/

But on the other hand the fact that it pissed off Erdogan might mean that it's going in the right direction ?

*Something* had to be done after the recent terror attacks, and more drastic decisions (closing down all the mosques ??) could have started a civil war...

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Given all we've seen in the last 15 months, what is most likely to happen if a kilometre-size asteroid is in fact observed heading for the continental US?

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Can you say which 14 books the finalist book reviews are on?

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In last week's Open Thread, I posted a question regarding the predictive processing / trapped priors model of mental illnesses, particularly in the context of my own struggles with OCD. I was still very confused at the time, and my question was somewhat confusing as a result. Now, I have a much better understanding of the issues at hand, and would like to revisit it in a more clear-headed way.

Guys... it's time for some game theory.

In the review for Antifragile (which I had not yet read at the time of posting last week's comment), Scott says:

"For example, if some very smart scientists tell you that there's an 80% chance the coronavirus won't be a big deal, you thank them for their contribution and then prepare for the coronavirus anyway. In the world where they were right, you've lost some small amount of preparation money; in the world where they were wrong, you've saved hundreds of thousands of lives."

I will be using this example, along with two others: a phobic person who is afraid of dogs, and an OCD person who is afraid of accidentally leaving the stove on.

Let's define two statements, G and B (for "Good" and "Bad", respectively). G could be "The coronavirus won't be a big deal", or "This dog will not hurt me", or "I did not leave the stove on". B could be "The coronavirus WILL be a big deal", or "This dog WILL hurt me," or "I DID leave the stove on". Along with these two statements, let's define two actions: G' and B', corresponding to the rational action to take if G and B are true. For example, G' could be "don't bother preparing for the coronavirus", or "approach the dog", or "walk away and don't check the stove again". B' could be "prepare for the coronavirus", or "stay away from the dog", or "go back and check to make sure the stove isn't on".

Now we can make a matrix of outcomes for this decision:

G B

----- -----

G' | G'G G'B

B' | B'G B'B

There are two reasons someone might choose B' in this scenario.

First, they could have a high prior on B being true. For example, someone might think the coronavirus is likely to be a big deal, and thus decide to prepare for it. Or someone might have a high prior on dogs being a threat, and thus decide to stay away. Or someone might have a high prior on the stove being left on, and thus decide to go check. This is more or less the assumption of what's going on with the trapped priors framework as Scott describes it.

But there's another possibility: Someone might have a low prior on B being true, but decide that the costs of G'B (that is, acting as if G is true, while B is actually true) are so high that average payoff is always better choosing B'. For example, maybe someone only thinks there's a 20% chance of the coronavirus being a big deal, but the costs of not preparing (and then the virus being a big deal) are so high that it's better to prepare anyway. Or someone might think it's extremely unlikely for the dog to hurt them, but consider the possibility of getting hurt to be so awful that they avoid the dog anyway. Or someone might think it's extremely unlikely for the stove to be left on, but consider the possibility of it being left on to be so awful that they go check anyway. As far as I can tell, Scott's description of trapped priors with regard to mental illnesses doesn't take this into account.

So what I'm wondering is: How much of a phobia of dogs involves a high trapped prior in favor of dogs being dangerous, and how much of it involves assigning extremely large cost to the possibility of getting hurt? How much of OCD behavior involves a high trapped prior in favor of the stove being left on, and how much of it involves assigning extremely large cost to the possibility of it being left on?

I feel like it must be some combination of both, which complicates Scott's discussion of this topic. In that discussion, phobias are a combination of high priors in favor of the feared object being dangerous, combined with low bandwidth on the sensory channel preventing these priors from updating. But I feel like there must be some role for the idea of "the phobic person considers getting hurt by a dog to be such a horrible outcome that it may not even need to be a *likely* outcome in order for them to try to avoid it".

It's hard for me to tell the difference introspectively in my own OCD case, as a lot of this is happening "under the hood" so to speak. But I wonder if there's any empirical way of determining how much of a role each factor (priors on the one hand, and cost estimates on the other hand) is playing. I feel like if cost estimates were playing too big of a role, then exposure therapies wouldn't work, since exposure seems to be in the business of untrapping priors (e.g. convincing the phobic person that dogs are unlikely to harm them). But I'm not sure, and I'd like to hear what other people (especially Scott, if he sees this) think.

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*General life advice thread:*

Prompts: 1) What is the most counter intuive advice you've received that has helped you a lot? 2} What is the fairly obvious advice that you found actually surprisingly helpful? 3) What problem have you had that hasn't been amenable to the obvious solutions

Please also feel free to pot replies unrelated to the prompt in the general theme or asking for or offering life advice

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US political system question: doesn't the 12th Amendment make using ranked choice voting unlikely for US presidential elections? The 12th Amendment states that the Presidential winner must receive a 'majority' of votes cast by the electors- not a plurality. With multiple parties, the odds of anyone getting a raw majority is pretty low, especially after the number of parties reaches 4+. If no one receives a majority, the election is then cast to the House- where, each state receives 1 vote (I am unclear how they choose which House Rep gets their state's votes). This could be seen as generally giving the election to Republicans/conservatives, given that they tend to be spread out across more low-population states.

If your argument is 'well we can go through multiple ranked choice voting rounds until we find who gets a majority for the Presidency'- the 12th Amendment seems very clear to me that you get ONE voting round and then it goes to the House. Text below. So unless you'd prefer having House reps from rural states picking the President every time, it seems that ranked choice voting can't work in the US, no?

'The person having the greatest Number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons having the highest numbers not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President, the House of Representatives shall choose immediately, by ballot, the President'

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I've been wondering recently about drug names. Not any specific drug names, but more about the whole general class of drug names. I feel like pretty much anything I think of as sounding "like a drug name" is missing a whole bunch of qualities which I feel like a name ought to have at least some combination of. Take adalimumab (which google helpfully reminds me is the generic name of Humira) as a representative example. As far as I can tell, the name-

1: Doesn't tell you anything about the formula or structure of the drug. Adalimumab is a monoclonal antibody, meaning that it's a large molecule whose full organic chemical name would be a huge pain in the ass which nobody would ever want to use for conversational purposes. But as far as I can find, the name "adalimumab" doesn't even point to some broad area in the space of pharmacokinetics which the drug falls into. It seems like an outright syllable salad.

2: Doesn't sound euphonious or appealing. It's hard for me to imagine anyone having positive associations with the word, or thinking it sounds like something they'd want put in their body.

3: Doesn't evoke the idea of a cure to the diseases it's indicated for. It's hard to imagine anything which evokes this concept for all the specific diseases it's prescribed for, but it's used for a bunch of types of arthritis and inflammatory diseases, so a name which conveyed the feeling of anti-inflammatoriness seems intuitively suitable.

4: Is hard to say. It's such an easy word to stumble over, it sounds like ability to pronounce it is supposed to be a job qualification.

So, on what basis was the name actually chosen? Wikipedia explains the meaning behind the brand name, Humira, but that actually sounds like a thing a human being might deliberately name something. Whatever process generated a name like "adalimumab" is completely opaque to me, and whatever it is, it doesn't seem like something conducive to coming up with names people would want.

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Anybody has any particularly interesting/fruitful approach to tourism?

My wife and I do a fair amount of traveling for tourism, and I increasingly find that the standard walk-around-and-take-pictures-at-famous-locations approach doesn't really do it for me. There is just a limited so many churches/colonial buildings/castles/cute touristy locations you can visit before it gets old.

I am open to any suggestion. I have experimented, for example, with preparing my self for a trip by reading a bit about the place's history, but I didn't find that it particularly improved my experience. I have found that more exotic locations are more entertaining (exotic meaning places that are further from my culture, upbringing, etc.), but those are usually further away and not reachable within, say, a weekend.

Anyway. I'm open to suggestions!

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I wrote an article about understanding a particular model of adult psychological development using Philip Glass' life. I'd really appreciate if someone so inclined could give feedback on how engaging the writing is, and other structural-level suggestions you might have. Feedback on content is welcome also.

https://deaexmachinus.substack.com/p/machines-society-20-how-to-grow-a

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I see the Electoral College vs. multiple parties is under discussion. Rather than respond to a specific post, let me trot out my ideas about this.

First of all, with the entire Executive Branch, for four years, handed over to the winner of a single high-stakes election, game theory dictates that everyone will try to build a 51% coalition to win that election.

It's not a conspiracy: having single elected head of government (unlike most other democracies) means you get a stable two-party system. Third or fourth parties may sometimes appear as serious contenders, but the system always resolves back down to two major parties.

If you want multiple parties to play serious roles in governance, you need a parliamentary system. It's hard to see that happening in the U.S.

Second, the Electoral College.

I agree with the criticisms of the Electoral College. Not only does it distort election outcomes, it narrows the field of competition to a handful of "swing" states. In the last few elections, issues of interest to Wisconsin or Pennsylvania get tremendous attention, while issues of interest to Kansas or California get zero.

But getting rid of the Electoral College (even if it were politically feasible to pass a constitutional amendment) is more complicated than most people realize.

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the 12th Amendment requires that the winning candidate get a majority of the electoral votes; if no one does, there is an unappealing alternative process. Okay.

If the president were to be elected directly by the voters, what happens to the majority requirement? In 1968, Richard Nixon won the most votes, but only got 43% of the total. In 2020, Joe Biden got a majority, but only by a whisker. Some of the popular-vote proposals require the winner to get at least 40% of the votes, but that seems arbitrary.

Additionally, if a vote in one state counts precisely as much as a vote in any other state, there would need to be uniform Federal standards for all elections nationwide. Imagine, say, Utah lowering the voting age to 14 for presidential elections, in order to balloon the number of Republican votes. And if it were a very close election, that might require a nation-wide recount, an awkward and expensive proposition for everyone involved.

Short of getting rid of the Electoral College, the Maine/Nebraska approach should NOT be emulated. Choosing electors by Congressional district gives enormous power to whoever draws those district boundaries.

One alternative which ought to be explored is to allocate electors proportionately within each state. The simplest way would be to mandate that each state's electors be allocated, in integer numbers, to the top two vote-getters in that state.

(As I said, the two-party system is already baked in, and splitting electors multiple ways requires making some suspiciously arbitrary rules.)

I haven't done the math myself, but others have, and my understanding is that proportional elector votes would be considerably less likely to yield a result different from the popular vote. Not impossible, but much less likely. And only state-level recounts would be necessary.

In this system, almost every state would have some "swing" electors. Let's say a state has 10 electors: then it matters whether that state's leading candidate gets 55% (winning six of the ten electors and gaining a 2-elector margin), or less than 55% (and winning only five). Nobody's polling is good enough to predict the percentages with much accuracy. Few states would be completely ignored.

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Hi Everyone,

I’m a long-time reader, sometimes commenter, and occasional meet-up go-er. I’ve got an announcement about a project I’m developing that may be of interest to your average SSC/ACX reader.

It’s an online platform for creating or joining campaigns for collective action in adversarial situations - with elements like participation-based activation thresholds to solve game-theoretic coordination problems. Think “Kickstarter,” but instead of crowdfunding products, it’s for safely recruiting and organizing participants for any project that requires a group effort. I’m tentatively calling it “Spartacus App” and you can get more info about it here: https://spartacus.carrd.co/. You can also follow the newly created Twitter account at https://twitter.com/AppSpartacus.

This is not an entirely novel concept - many of the underlying principles have been validated by other successful platforms like Kickstarter, GoFundMe, and Change.org, The Point, (before it pivoted to become Groupon) for different use cases.

The operating assumptions:

#1. A coordinated group effort breaks a bad status quo equilibrium where no single individual has an incentive to act first but would be willing to act if joined by others.

#2. A coordinated group effort would help achieve a set goal where any individual attempt would fail.

I hope to increase the expected value of organizing around true preferences by lowering the courage requirements for taking action (from heroic to average) and reducing individual actors’ risks (from potentially catastrophic to marginal).

About me:

I have a B.S. in Behavioral Economics, so I’ve always been interested in these types of problems. The germ of this idea preceded my first reading of “Meditations on Moloch'', but the impact of that essay galvanized me into attempting something more concrete one day. The pandemic and an evolving work-life balance created the opportunity to get it started.

As for my professional background, I have over 10 YEO working with tech startups in sales, marketing, business development, and project management. I’ve consulted with multiple seed-stage companies on revenue strategies, monetization models, product-market fit, and market research. I was also Employee #1 and Director of Sales for a VR HealthTech startup called Vivid Vision (www.seevividly.com).

Use Cases:

--Brenda wants better working conditions at her company.

--She knows if she speaks up, she’ll probably get fired. Besides, she needs X number of coworkers to join her to have any leverage to negotiate.

--Spartacus allows her to raise awareness for her plan and others to join her without exposing their identities, protecting them from intimidation and retaliation.

--If, (and only if), Brenda recruits a certain number of people, everyone’s identities are revealed simultaneously.

--The group, now public, can proceed with whatever plan of action they collectively decide to pursue.

The use cases for Spartacus App can vary widely and are ideologically agnostic by design. Some subjects and objectives would be out-of-bounds for legal reasons. Here are some hypothetical examples of campaigns:

--Unionizing Veggies R Us Distribution Center Workers.

--Presenting an alternative DEI training curriculum at Hopscotch inc.

--Uncovering sexual harassment in the Marketing Department at Frazzle.io

--Concerned parents of Cedar Country Day School against changes to the history curriculum.

--Faculty of University X in support of unjustly penalized colleague Y.

--Exposing accounting malfeasance at Enbition Energy Inc.

--Those yet to be named by Robespierre, against Robespierre.

On a personal level, why am I doing this?

--I believe social norms enforced by unquestionable orthodoxies are probably wrong and deserve scrutiny and challenge.

--I don’t like bullies, no matter where they’re from or how they justify themselves.

--Mafia-style intimidation and making “examples” out of people through disproportionate punishment to change social norms are illiberal and disgraceful but unfortunately effective tactics. But it creates fraudulent public discourse, which is anathema to the ideals of a liberal society.

--I think a social climate where people are honest rather than dishonest and where problems are confronted rather than repressed, is preferable.

--I believe that organized collective action and collective bargaining are one of the very few forms of leverage ordinary people have against self-perpetuating institutional power centers. Pitting atomized individuals armed with personal consumer choice and performative self-expression against powerful organizations is an unfair fight; I want to try evening the odds.

--I suspect there are all kinds of dormant preference cascades waiting to be triggered under the right circumstances.

Project Status:

I’m currently looking to recruit people for proof of concept experiments and beta testing.

I’d also love to connect with the following sorts of people in general:

--Anyone with a strong social science background who wants to be involved and/or offer input.

--Anyone who thinks they might be a potential user of the app.

--Anyone who wants to support this project through signal boosting online.

--Anyone with a SWE background who has experience with MVPs.

You can contact me in the thread, through the intake form on the site (https://spartacus.carrd.co/#contact), or via Twitter @AppSpartacus

Thanks!

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founding

I'll give you $1 for an NFT of this open thread.

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A Dutch post-election scandal:

One of the 'scouts' tasked with investigating which parties should start negotiating to form a government, let a piece of paper be photographed which showed: "Pieter Omtzigt, position (of employment) elsewhere."

Pieter Omtzigt is a Representative who played a central role in uncovering a government scandal that caused the previous government to fall. He is the only Representative from a mainstream party who is highly critical of 'the system,' giving him huge popularity. One of the pollsters polled people on who they would vote for in the hypothetical situation where Omtzigt founds his own party, which resulted in 23 seats, while the party he currently belongs to only got 15 seats in the recent election (although that poll probably overestimates how many votes he would actually get). Farmers from his province are meming: "Omtzigt for president." See: https://www.gelderlander.nl/oost-gelre/achterhoekse-boeren-willen-pieter-omtzigt-for-president~a4011aaa/201446927/

"Position elsewhere" was widely interpreted as an attempt to get rid of this Representative. The House of Representatives was up in arms. Various party leaders, including the Prime Minister denied that they made the suggestion that Omtzigt be given another position. The scouts claimed that the piece of paper that was photographed didn't reflect their discussions with the party leaders, but that it was an "assessment from multiple angles, including media reports," thereby insinuating that the media speculated about a new job for Omtzigt. However, people were quick to point out that there was no such media speculation. The House of Representatives demanded a debate before they would allow cabinet formation to continue, but that this debate would only be held if all scouting documents were made public, including the minutes of the pre-negotiation conversations with the party leaders. The Prime Minister said that this wouldn't happen, which is a weird thing for him to say, since he is obviously not in charge of the process of forming the new government, so this came across as a cover-up attempt, just like the scouts blaming the media looked like a cover-up.

When the documents were made public, it turned out to actually be the Prime Minister who said: "we have to do something with Omtzigt: make him a minister" (similar to secretary of state). The Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, has established a bit of reputation for being rather forgetful or having incorrect memories about inconvenient facts, which some see as a tactic to withhold information from the House of Representatives, while still being able to claim to have not done so intentionally due to bad memory. However, in this case Rutte claimed to have forgotten after only a little more than a week, which is not very believable. Note that it is one of the two main tasks of the House of Representatives to review the actions of the cabinet, which requires being well-informed. Withholding information intentionally is generally regarded to be one of the worst transgression by the cabinet.

During the government scandal that Omtzigt exposed, it was also uncovered that bureaucrats use the term 'Rutte Doctrine' to describe a policy of withholding information from the House of Representatives by classifying most government documents as "personal policy views" of bureaucrats. It is legal to withhold personal opinions to allow bureaucrats to speak/write freely, preventing witch hunts. However, the 'Rutte Doctrine' expands that greatly. In the eyes of many, way beyond what is reasonable.

So we are now left with a bit of a mess. The leader of the largest party typically provides the Prime Minister, which would be Rutte. However, the entire opposition has supported a motion to 'fire' Rutte from the cabinet. This makes it hard for them to enter into a coalition with Rutte as the Prime Minister. So a logical choice might be to continue with the current coalition, but those parties have expressed strong disapproval, including doubting Rutte's integrity. That coalition would include Omtzigt's party, who cannot just ignore how their Representative was treated. Rutte could forego the job of Prime Minister, allowing a respected party member to take the job. However, he crafted his political persona around lacking an ideology, which makes it hard to return to being a Representative. Also, the party just lost their 'crown prince,' who left after being involved in a fairly minor and silly scandal, so there is no obvious replacement. It's also a possibility to allow another coalition member to provide the Prime Minister, but the job is associated with a substantial 'electoral bonus,' so it is unlikely that the largest party is willing to forego that benefit. Perhaps everything will fizzle out, like it often does in Dutch politics, but there is a chance that 'Teflon Rutte,' so nicknamed for surviving many a scandal with very little damage to his reputation or popularity, will be ousted, which in turn may cause a crisis in the largest political party.

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Thanks for the update on the reviews! If we wrote a review and were a finalist, would we know by now?

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I posted a comment to Brett & Heather's podcast, and got this reply:

"That’s nice, thanks for replying, you can send a message to my administrator on Watsap to earn in crypto especially bitcoin + 1.. (.. 7.. 6.. ). 2.. 8.. 4.. 7.. 4.. 7.. 0.. 8.. he’s excellent at what he does, tell him I referred you to him. His passionate strategies are top notch.🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸"

Even granting that Watsap is a typo for Whatsapp, I still can't figure out what to do, and I consider unlikely that my comment is going to get me any bitcoin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYOpn7eDImE&ab_channel=BretWeinstein

Brett and Heather were discussing disgust, and what good it might do a deer for its decomposing body to smell bad to some mammals. They didn't discuss scavengers, and possibly they should have.

Anyway, I pointed out that bacteria have an interest in not getting eaten.

Maybe I should post my replies to Brett and Heather podcasts here instead of there.

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14 finalists in the book reviews plus 89 non-finalists - I am definitely here for the Times Literary Supplement edition of the site! 😁

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I still don't really understand NFTs* . So, the buyer gets to own a blockchain address which contains either some work of art, or metadata containing a link. But - what prevents someone else from putting exactly the same information somewhere else on the blockchain? Are there safeguards in the blockchain preventing this? Is there some ultimate authority who determines what is the real thing?

*After reading the linked article and the first 7 or 8 google results. I really wish the people writing explanation pieces would read eliezers article on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2TPph4EGZ6trEbtku/explainers-shoot-high-aim-low .

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I feel like the sequence book reviews are posted might make a difference in how voting goes. Actually, what sort of voting system will you have? Just a single vote for a favorite seems like it'll be hard to decide on, but ranked choice would also be difficult with that many options.

If my entry is a finalist, is it okay for me to share a link off the site to show my friends what I wrote, or would that be considered to be violating the blinding?

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Let's suppose that a strain of covid develops that the current vaccines don't apply to.

How would we know?

My guess is that we'd notice very quickly, because [significant numbers of] people would start showing up in hospitals and they'd say "hey, I have covid even though I got the vaccine", and this would be major news.

And my guess is that the fact this hasn't happened means the vaccine protects against all currently extant strains of covid.

Does this sound right?

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I wish there was a way to know whether a link was going to (1) open a new tab/window, (2) move the current tab somewhere else, or (3) run some javascript.

I often find myself reading long pages where I want to open a bunch of links in new tabs. I usually middle-click all the interesting links without looking at them, planning to read them later. This works fine as long as they were actually normal links. But with the Newfangled Internet this ends up opening a blank "javascript.void(0);" page half the time because it was trying to run javascript to give me the option to open the links (like the way google docs does links) and by the time I notice, I've lost my place on the original page so I never get to read whatever it was. I'm usually not willing to just normal-click on a link, because that runs the risk of taking me away from whatever I'm currently reading.

Does anyone here have a way of dealing with this? Maybe I should make a plugin/extension or something. Yeah, yeah, I could just take the extra second to see whether the link opened properly or not, but I don't want to.

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Someone should offer me money for no reason as well so I can pay rent next month

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Scott, just an FYI Polymarket recently released a P2P feature that enables direct transfer into a polymarket account for no fees. Effectively, you setup a polymarket account, another polymarket user transfers $x of USDC to your polymarket address, and then you Venmo/CashApp/etc. them equivalent cash. Works well enough for modest amounts - I was able to find someone to support my P2P in just a few minutes on the polymarket discord after previously failing to transfer in money via Metamask. Anyways, thought you might want to know as I initially found the site from your post!

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I am basically certain I have ADHD. (I have never been able to do work until it's guaranteed to be late; I lose things constantly; I got a near perfect score on some self-diagnosis test; etc.) It's becoming a somewhat desperate situation because I am struggling to manage things at my job. How I can get prescribed Adderall? I emailed a couple clinics about ADHD testing; the first clinic told me it could cost $4000 to get an initial evaluation and neuropsychological testing and that they don't accept insurance, though they said maybe I could get partially reimbursed. The second only told me they aren't booking until June, and I feel this is somewhat urgent.

Will PCPs prescribe it?

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What is the research on how groups behave in regard to ideological changes? I'm not familiar with the field, but I want to know. In order to create a piece of convincing fake news (which I am not going to do, I just want to understand the dynamics), how many actors per population need to give a "truth" signal for most of the rest of the population to flip to giving a "truth" signal? For example, one signal in a field of 100,000 won't do it, but is 1,000 enough? Or 5,000? I am sure that somewhere out there is a lot of research on this, maybe in the context of marketing and advertising. Anyone know?

In terms of voting, I used to think of elections as decided by individual votes, taken en bloc. But I'm beginning to think that strategists are not interested in convincing individuals, they are releasing signals into information environments as if people were cellular automata or something, theorizing that a certain type of signal will turn 30% of type X blue, while that signal will turn 10% of type Y red and only 5% of type Y blue. Where is all this research?

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This article (https://getpocket.com/explore/item/machine-learning-confronts-the-elephant-in-the-room?utm_source=pocket-newtab) on neural networks came up on my Pocket suggested articles. It discusses what to my mind seems like predictive processing, essentially stating that most neural networks don't have the capacity for what predictive processing would call "surprisal." Am I reading this correctly? If so, are there neural network models that incorporate surprisal?

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Here is the least surprising news ever about college admissions:

"Inconvenient Facts for the War on Testing: College admission based on personal essays helps affluent students." By The Editorial Board | April 4, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inconvenient-facts-for-the-war-on-testing-11617563017

"Among the “emergency” progressive policy changes likely to persist after the Covid-19 pandemic is the abandonment of standardized testing in college admissions. Anti-testing activists had been winning the argument for years by claiming the tests favor privileged students. ...

"But college admissions based on “soft” rather than numerical criteria won’t be more equitable or progressive.

"... the same resources and academic preparation that enable students to score well on the SAT also enable them to get better grades, pad their resumes, and write polished admissions essays.

"The Stanford researchers ran nearly 60,000 student essays submitted to the University of California in 2016 through a computer program. The computer identified the essay topics and “linguistic, affective, perceptual, and other quantifiable components of essay content.” The essays predicted the student’s family income better than SAT scores. ..."

https://cepa.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/wp21-03-v042021.pdf

Only a lottery system for college admissions can be both fair to everyone and not biased by any external factors.

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As a Dutchman with a Political Science background, I wanted to comment on last open thread's comment about the Dutch elections:

I do think polarization is taking place in Holland, and last elections showed that. To give some examples:

1) The main story of last elections should not be the "victory of the center". Yeah, D66 and VVD (left- and right-liberals) won, but the other traditional centrist party CDA lost 4 seats. Together, these parties won 2 seats (out of 150) which is hardly significant. By historical standards, their number of seats is nothing impressive.

2) More significant: the humiliation of the three traditional large left-wing parties (Socialists, Labour, Greens) who combined lost 11 seats and had their worst election ever and the victory of the populist-right (PVV, FvD, JA21) who combined won 6 seats and got their best election result ever.

3) Extremism got a place in Dutch Parliament: newcomer BIJ1 is the most far-left party we have seen in decades in Holland, with a "Kill the Boer"-chanting EFF-supporter on the list. FvD, the big winner of the elections, has a leader, Thierry Baudet, who has claimed that COVID was designed by George Soros for world domination, asked a colleague "what is it with your crusade against anti-semitism, everyone I know is an anti-semite", who called the Jews a "parasitical culture" preying upon "White European Civilization", questioned the holocaust, et cetera et cetera. He has also allowed his party to split up over him defending the party's youth wing, which sung the Nazi Horst Wessel Song on summer camp and has people in leadership positions sharing SS-quotes in germanic rhunes on their Instagram.

FvD got 8 seats, which is roughly 5% of the vote, having the largest gains of any party in the elections. It is quite beyond me how you can speak of "little polarization" here.

3) Some Dutch political scientists, such as the great electoral geographer have pointed towards the "Eastern-Europeanization" of Dutch politics. Similar to countries such as Poland (and France!), politics is increasingly a battle between centre-to-centre-right parties in the larger cities: culturally liberal, economically centrist, cosmopolitan, environmentally conscious and pro-EU and populist-right parties in the country-side: culturally conservative (mostly on immigration/integration issues), economically divergent (the largest populist-right party in the Netherlands, the PVV, have developed left-of-centre views on healthcare, pensions, social security. While in America, "pro-worker conservatism" is largely posturing imho, in Holland, France and Poland it exists), opposed to environmentalism and anti-EU. In this political landscape, the big loser is the left, whose existence is based on a sense of understanding and solidarity between academics, artists and PMCs that no longer exists.

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What is also an interesting development in Dutch politics, for ACT-readers:

Dutch PM Mark Rutte got into a lot of trouble last week for leaked notes which suggested he or his aides wanted to "promote away" Pieter Omtzigt, a Christian Democrat MP.

Pieter Omtzigt is a most curious man. He is a member of probably the most "establishment"-party there is, but has always held on to his independence and was seen as the fiercest critic of Rutte's last cabinet (while being a coalition member!). His work on a child-benefit scandal, in which up to a 100.000 parents were falsely accused by the Dutch state, led to the resignation of the cabinet. Polling shows that if he would run for parliament with his own party, he would gain the #1 spot. He has popular appeal on left, right and centre.

So what's his main critique? Well, he's an econometrist. And he criticizes the Dutch modelling agencies for being "not accounting for uncertainties", making two-hour long YouTube videos on the failures of economic forecasting and the complexity of the Dutch welfare state. He argues for "more think tanks, and proper policy evaluation", "less reliance on modelling and more on the rule of law" and "more constitutional guarantees in dealing with basic rights of poor people being crushed by the welfare state".

More than any other politician in Holland recently, Omtzigt has managed to articulate wide-spread resentment towards policy elites. He has gained respect from friend and foe: the far-right wanted to make him PM, the liberal youth party deemed him "liberal of the year", while actually working most together with a PM from the Socialist Party. He is a hero of the people, with a platform that is all about intricate arguments over tax policy, Seeing-like-a-state critiques of model-making and procedural reform.

I think Omtzigt serves as an inspiration for reform-oriented politicians all across the West and proves to show that there does not have to be a choice between between "popular" and "wonkish".

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I've been hearing a lot about increases in violent crimes and/or hate crimes against Asians in the US, possibly because of Covid. Trying to research(google) this a bit myself, I found many articles repeating this thesis, but I found the data in all of them to be very thin. Has anyone here found more comprehensive data that could be used for investigating this thesis? I don't have any particular reason to doubt this narrative, but any time I see the same story being picked up in a lot of places it makes me want to look at the foundations to see what it is all based on. One thing that I noticed is when I tried a quick search for violent crimes targeting Asians--everything that came up was about hate crimes, but I expect data about hate crimes to be harder to find/not as reliable, and indeed many of the results are about why it is hard to find this data. But more general crime statistics that don't rely on the hate crime designation seem like they might be easier to find.

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After hesitating, I decided to get the vaccine.

https://demurray.substack.com/p/vaccination

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Does anyone else feel that lately they are spending prohibitive amounts of time fighting bad code not at work but in real life?

The oven in my GE stove was coded by someone who didn't realize that people might have more than one cooking task and might follow a higher-temperature task with a lower-temperature task. So if you first bake something at 450F, then set temperature at 350F, it will not attempt to cool itself but will immediately signal that it is at 350F, and the only way around this is to turn it off for a few minutes and let it cool down to below 350F and then to turn it on to bake at 350F.

The elevators in our building have a much shorter delay for closing doors after someone arrived on the elevator than after the elevator arrived empty to pick you up. Unfortunately, if the elevator you were waiting for arrived with someone who pressed the button to get off on your floor, the someone-just-arrived case will be executed instead of the someone-is-waiting case, and the doors will close really fast without giving you time to enter (and will actually sometimes hit you).

Elevators and the oven (and Alexa's speech recognition screw-ups) are what I have to deal with every day.

Within the last year also the following things happened:

- My bank account (which had never been overdrawn, never violated any terms of service, never had a low balance) was closed without an explanation by what appears to have been an algorithm. No human is on record as having made any decisions, and no human was able to explain what happened.

- One of my identical twins got completely different bills for the same services with the same provider than the other twin. It's been some months and a lot of phone calls, and nobody can explain what's going on.

- Our propane company thrice generated bogus bills for repairs that were supposed to be covered by the service plan. Two of these were eventually explained away as user mistakes. Nobody could explain the third one, but they were nice and refunded it anyway.

- My attempts to pay to our power company from my bank account resulted in two payments disappearing into the blue. The bank debited my account and swears that the payments were delivered. All the data on the payments is correct as far as everyone can tell. The power company swears they never got them.

I'm not even going to tell you about all those cases of websites (including government websites) doing really strange things when faced with a web browser they don't like. My favorite one was a website that was using stylesheets that would not display data entry boxes if it didn't like your web browser (resulting in me not being able to figure out how to sign up for their waiting list).

Is it just me? If it's not just me, would you say it used to be as bad as this, or would you also say it got much worse lately?

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Is there a solid Rationalist review of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto I can look at after I read it? I sometimes fear that I fall victim to compelling arguments and need a trusted additional perspective for calibration. Also, I can bring it to my book club for some extra perspective.

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Does anyone know if there's an advantage to getting your second mrna vaccine in a different arm? I vaguely remember reading something about the vaccine getting to a different lymph node but I can't find it anywhere. Any insight would be much appreciated!

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I'm not sure if this has been asked before, but when you were writing Meditations on Moloch, did you have any idea it would become one of if not your single most popular posts? If so, did you approach it significantly differently than any other of your posts?

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What is the thing I should read to understand what everyone means when they describe things as legible?

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It's probably time for another Naval Gazing update. I've finished my Polaris series (starting at https://www.navalgazing.net/NWAS-Polaris-Part-1, finishing at https://www.navalgazing.net/NWAS-Polaris-Part-5), looked at Iowa's Auxiliary Machinery spaces (https://www.navalgazing.net/Pictures-Iowa-Auxiliary-Machinery) posted some Completely Correct Battleship Facts (https://www.navalgazing.net/Completely-Correct-Battleship-Facts) and told the story of Vincent Capodanno, a Chaplain in Vietnam: https://www.navalgazing.net/Father-Capodanno.

And I'm now starting a look at what happened to the French Fleet when France surrendered in 1940: https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Fate-of-the-French-Fleet-Part-1.

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Hello.

Hopefully this isn't too much of a fishing expedition, but:

Those who can see the hidden articles - are they all CW-related, as Scott said when setting this up?

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Committee for the Future of Finnish Parliament had a hearing with GPT-3.

>At the meeting, MPs first asked questions orally and then via chat. Committee experts wrote the questions for the AI on a shared screen. The answers were discussed, and further questions asked. The members of the committee asked the AI questions particularly related to the UN Agenda2030 on which the committee is currently preparing a report. The discussion focused, among other things, on the causes of poverty, unemployment, education, and the role of technology in poverty eradication and sustainable development. GPT-3 also highlighted Finland's opportunities in regional Talent Hubs.

>The final discussion analysed the significance of technologies such as artificial intelligence as an opportunity and a threat. The aim has not been to come up with the best possible answers to problems, but to provide as illustrative examples as possible of how artificial intelligence handles problematic issues and how it responds to them.

https://www.eduskunta.fi/EN/tiedotteet/Pages/Committee-for-the-Future-heard-AI-probably-as-the-first-parliamentary-committee-in-the-world.aspx

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