Here is a game, made by me, about bayesian updating and "putting a number on it" - you get together with friends; you watch a murder mystery TV show together; and buy and sell bets on who did it, using in-game money: https://murdershebet.com/
:) Though I do say so myself, it's super fun. I'm slightly allowed to say that because it is an adaptation of on Robin Hanson's boardgame of the same name. The whole thing is, precisely, a prediction market - i.e. it is a system where you are strongly incentivized to figure out what you think the probability of an event is, and then bet using that probability - i.e. the game works as a lie detector for the kinds of people who watch a murder mystery and say "oh I KNOW WHO DID IT NOW!"
I think I’m going to use the Tik Tok addiction piece in an essay for school. I want to trace the idea of moral culpability for addiction to an American sense of religious purity and punishment dating from our very religious days. Is there any part of ”personal failure addiction” which is specifically American?
Can anyone recommend ACX-style blogs (ie. engagingly written, charitable to different points of view, rationally weighing data and arguments) but focused on UK culture/issues/politics?
There have been reports that covid RNA reverse-transcripts itself into DNA that then integrates into human cells. This is excessively banal, like 5-10% of human DNA is made from remnants of ancient viral DNA, and should be a surprise to no one but people who still believe "genes" and "the environment" can be separated at all, but in some cases this phenomenon is suspected to disrupt some genome regulation networks which is at the origin of certain types of cancer.
So this is absolutely not grounded in reality but one could make an interesting Ayn Rand type plot where, due to a lot of very rich and powerful people having had covid and fearing for their lives, "incentives" are magically aligned so that we find a cure for cancer in the next couple of decades. Free market fundamentalists rejoice! In any case the long-term followups to this unknown disease that struck millions of people are going to be interesting to watch.
TLDR: Scott wrote about Pride Parades as an aspect of civil religion. American society changed from police suppressing gay rights to marching for them. The latest step in that process is that NYC Pride is banning the police. Quite the reversal of positions in the 50 years since Stonewall.
Am I missing something? I’m fascinated about the response to the new CDC advise about masks. I’ve felt that since the beginning of the pandemic, that these organizations have been viewed as the mouth piece for the administration at times or the opposition depending on the time and situation. Never fully independent. Either a bunch of Democrats trying to stick it to the administration or republicans trying to tow the party line.
How a disease can become political was surprising but in retrospect, not unexpected. What isn’t political? What topic couldn’t be shaded for political advantage.
That being said, to have a democrat in power, have the CDC give basically give end of pandemic guidance, have the democratic administration basically agree by inaction, then still have to populous question what to do is puzzling.
(Democrats have generally been pro-mask, some republicans, anti-mask. I hate stereotypes, but needed to stretch for discussion purposes)
My logic fails me on this. I could probably flow chart this and I won’t make sense to me. I could understand if Trump was in power but with Biden in power, my logic falters.
I agree with the companies that are doing the honor code. Time for some independent responsibility. There are enough ICU beds for people who don’t abide by the honor code. Their call.
If I walk into a store and I see someone without a mask, I will assume they are vaccinated as I am.
If they aren’t, no worries, hope they don’t get sick from the other person who is pretending to be vaccinated like they are on the next isle but not really my concern.
At least in my area, they are having walk-up clinics. My 12 and 15 year old just got their first dose this week. Super easy. Could have picked many places and times.
I think my thoughts likely stem from the fact that I don’t expect this disease to just disappear. It has shown not to be seasonal, combined with the vast reservoir of cases across the world. Vaccination is the answer. One might worry about variants, which is something we probably should worry about but we could also worry about a plane crashing on my house right now. Both things we can’t control. Will leave that to the companies who stand to make money by creating boosters as these things arise.
A little about my background, so you can scrutinize my thoughts. I am a practicing physician in an outpatient setting. Would likely have a different view, which I understand, if I worked in the ICU.
So, economics question. Econ 101 describes price as a function of quantity, with a demand curve that slopes downward, a supply curve that slopes upward, and equilibrium at their intersection. Less demand at higher prices makes sense. What has confused me for quite some time is why the supply curve is treated as sloping upwards (increased price with increased quantity). It assumes a marginal cost of production that grows with production, in other words, a negative economy of scale; but this is pretty clearly the exception and not the rule. Logically, the supply curve should be flat, if anything sloping very slightly downward (even for an aggregate supply curve, you'd get scale effects from complements being bigger; and while in some cases you'd eventually run into finite resources, basic supply-and-demand is not modeling this).
What I've read online as a defense of a positive-sloping supply curve is that it applies to short-term equilibrium, when you can't expand production to meet demand. But "short-term equilibrium" is a nonsensical concept - if the decision-makers can predict the future, they'll be aware of that future (i.e. if demand for folders in high on weekdays and low on weekends, prices will still be stable). And yes, all models are wrong but some are useful; but there's not very many models that will stay useful when you flip a negative sign.
My best guess is that this is something that's only relevant for Econ 101 and nowhere else. But I'd still be interested in what actual economists think.
Very reassured about Apple's commitment to protecting my privacy from the NSA/FBI and advertising companies, given that apparently their employees are too delicate to work in the same office with a guy who once wrote some sexist stuff in a book talking about his girlfriend.
I'm confused by the American idea of a "suburb". I live in Australia, where every subdivision of a city is known as a suburb, with the possible exception of the central business district. But in the US it seems to mean something else, but I've never quite figured it out.
Is the Upper West Side of New York a suburb? Is the Outer Sunset area of San Francisco a suburb? Is Berkeley a suburb? Is Mountain View a suburb? Is San Jose a suburb? Is Beverly Hills a suburb?
I'm curious--does anyone know much about delta-8 THC? The sites I find googling all seem to be repeating the same anecdotal findings. I'm curious if it's been studied much.
I am (very slowly and intermittently) reading the Joseph R. Allen edition of Waley's translation of Shijing. In the explanation preceding poem 154 ("The Seventh Month") someone (probably Waley, but maybe Allen?) states that the phrase "The Fire ebbs" means "Scorpio is sinking below the horizon at the moment of its first visibility at dusk" and then asks whether this happened in northern China around September during the eight and seventh centuries BC, suggesting that an astronomer may know the answer. I've tried googling it, and haven't found anything. Are there any astronomers/fans of ancient Chinese poetry on here who know the answer?
It seems very likely that cicadas are using a strategy of flooding predators by emerging in huge numbers at intervals of prime numbers of years. Any ideas about how such a thing could evolve?
Should counties other than India be worried about B.1.617.2?
It doesn't seem to noticeably do vaccine escape but it might be more virulent than B.1.1.7 (Kent).
So it's a question of where a rising proportion of the B.1.617.2 meets a falling number of non-immune people. I doubt many developed countries other than the UK have enough travel from India to kick off a meaningful outbreak before everybody's vaccinated.
Or is this all an artefact of extrememly high infection rates within India driving what looks like exponetial community transmission?
Does anyone know or know of any autistic therapists or counselors who work with autistic teens? Asking for a parent I know. The kid wants someone who understands autism from the inside.
Is anyone following the Restaurant Revitalization Fund grants? Women, veterans and “economically disadvantaged minorities” were given priority to receive grant funds and now there are no more funds available.
If a government was trying to stoke racism and sexism, this seems like one way to do it.
I remember reading a blog post some years ago. I think I found it in the SSC comments. It was written by a doctor, and it listed all known medical interventions that are so obviously effective that we don't need RCTs and statistics to know that they work. One example was insulin for diabetes. The list wasn't that long, which was discussed in the post as well.
This is how I remember it at least, but I've lost the link. Does anyone recognise what I'm talking about? I would be grateful if I could find it again.
I announced New Science (newscience.org) a few days back - a nonprofit the goal of which is to build new institutions of basic science, starting with life sciences.
The board of directors consists of me, Mark Lutter, and Adam Marblestone and we are advised by Tessa Alexanian, Tyler Cowen, Andrew Gelman, Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy, Konrad Kording, and Tony Kulesa.
If the site is exciting and *especially if you do biology*, I would love to talk to you.
The first project is going to be a fully funded in-person summer fellowship for young scientists during which they will work on their ambitious exploratory research projects they couldn’t work on otherwise.
I'm just here to give meaningless criticism. It doesn't make sense to say "Otherwise, post about whatever you want", on even numbered threads. That sentence only makes sense when immediately preceded by a warning not to get political. Scott seems to have been making this mistake consistently for at least the past few weeks, possibly longer.
There's a topic that's popping up in my mind from time to time that baffles me, so I'll just write that to see what will the hivemind decision on it would be:
Why don't other countries crack down on tax havens? Some music/movie companies lost a not backbreaking amount of money, and they got the international community to raid piratebay servers in Sweden or wherever. USA staged coups for far less amount of money in Latin American countries. Now why don't they nicely ask or peer-pressure let's say Ireland or Netherlands as they are respectable countries (they're not rogue states that wouldn't reason)? Or outright pressure Liberia or those micronations which is only known for their tax regimens? Just a few hours of gunboat diplomacy would stop them all, and net USA (or Germany, or wherever) with incredible amount of extra tax income.
But why doesn't this happen? I can only think the reason would be some collusion from up top, but governments change yet the situation doesn't. Strange.
What are the possibilities for new investments that people mostly invest a little in just in case it works? Dogecoin paid off for at least some people.
How can we in principle figure out whether some regulator institute is unnecessary and needs to be defunded or on the contrary requires more investments to work better, without actually implementing such changes? I've seen some talks about defunding the police and abolishing the FDA but I feel generally confused about my abilities to evaluate arguments.
Suppose we have a Regulator that is ensuring that no-one produce poisonous hamburgers. Regulator functioning cost some tax money and creates some problems to the hamburger producing businesses. Suppose only 0.0001% of hamburgers turn out to be poisonous. So most of the regulator work is dealing with false positives which creates problems to businesses that do not poison their customers. But how to account for survivors bias here? Maybe there are so few poisonous hamburgers only due to the fact that such regulator exists and people are aware of it in the first place?
For those of you for whom that was incomprehensible, let me just pause to go "Another reason to blame Mondalez, Cadbury's has never been the same since the Americans took over!"
But alas! We are running out of Flakes! In order to address the crisis, Mondalez issued a statement to The Irish Times (sort of like issuing one to The New York Times as 'the newspaper of record', that's how serious things are) to explain the shortage and reassure us all that matters were in hand. Because the entire story is behind a paywall, here it is below:
"Supply problems and soaring demand has caused a shortage of the crumbliest chocolate that traditionally elevates ice-cream cones to 99 status.
Despite the cold start to the summer, demand for mini Flakes has intensified in recent weeks while supply has struggled to keep up, and 99s are now at risk of disappearing from shops, vans and ice-cream parlours entirely.
Cone connoisseurs across the Irish ice-cream industry have said they have never seen shortages like this, and warned that supplies may be exhausted by the middle of June.
Joe Quinn of the Bon Bon beach shop in Salthill was tipped off about the shortages last week and managed to secure a supply ahead of his shop’s reopening today after months of lockdown. “I was lucky to get some in because they can’t be got now,” he said.
Paddy O’Donnell’s Clarmac business supplies Flakes to ice-cream vendors across the country, but he said his supplies were dwindling.
“They are impossible to get at the moment but there is word they will be coming out in dribs and drabs. It is the first time I heard of a shortage like this.”
He said half of his supply was gone already. “I have sold more Flakes so far this year than I had right up to the middle of last summer,” he said. “Hopefully things will be back to normal soon but I am lucky at leave to have some stock left.”
Cadbury, which makes the crumbly chocolate bars that have been sitting on top of soft scoop ice-cream cones for almost 100 years, confirmed the shortages but moved to assure the public that it was working hard to boost supplies to satisfy summer demand.
“We are seeing a recent increase in demand for our Cadbury 99 Flake in Ireland, ” said a spokeswoman for Mondalez , the multinational that now owns Cadbury. “The product is still available to order and we’re continuing to work closely with our customers.”
For generations Cadbury made its 99 Flakes in Dublin, but in recent years the bulk of its production has moved to Egypt. The 99 is so-called in honour of the elite guard made up of 99 soldiers who traditionally protected Italian monarchs. The chocolate maker borrowed the number name to appeal to expat Italians who dominated the ice-cream business in Ireland and Britain at the time."
No blame to the Egyptians, but the American owners just don't realise the importance of the iconic British Isles products they have acquired (as we saw with the proposal for the super-league recently).
And why is it called a 99? Other explanations for the name are as follows:
"One claim states that it originated from Portobello, Scotland, where Stefano Arcari who had opened a shop in 1922 at 99 Portobello High Street. Arcari would break a large "Flake" in half and stick it in ice cream but the name came from the shop's address.
Elsewhere, another address-based claim for the beloved ice cream is made by the Dunkerleys in Gorton, Manchester, who operated a sweet shop at 99 Wellington Street.
The report states that: "The 99 is so-called in honour of the elite guard made up of 99 soldiers who traditionally protected Italian monarchs. The chocolate maker borrowed the number name to appeal to expat Italians who dominated the ice-cream business in Ireland and Britain at the time."
The Cadbury website says that the reason behind the Flake being called a "99" has been "lost in the mists of time"."
What is a research paper/blog post that you've read that fundamentally changed the way you looked at the world? Preferably not one written by Scott as there's a chance I would have read it already. I've gotten amazing recommendations from ACX readers in the past, and hence trying this again.
Abba Eban: "The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." A lot of pro-Israel people were fed up with Netanyahu and the situation in Sheikh Jarrah was just the thing to push them into open disaffection with Israel. Then Hamas rocketed Israel and the usual thugs and anti-Semites came out of the closet. Eban was right.
It seems like the anonymity of cryptocurrency has led to a raft of various cyber crimes. Obviously, there is a limit to how good cybersecurity can be. It's an arms race that cannot be won. There's only a small hiatus between raising cybersecurity measures in some respect, and the creation of a workaround by cyber criminals. It's a futile aspiration to be fully secure.
I'm curious to know what people foresee as any kind of mitigation of the anonymity of cryptocurrency. Or, whether this community is so libertarian that they consider it a non-issue. Do lives lost that can be lost through crypto- anarchy? Does it matter if hospitals are taken offline by ransomware? What about schools, electrical grids, water supply, ad nauseam. Are there solutions? Does it matter? Discuss.
Can anyone tell me the difference between Rats, which I take to be rationalist; and post-rats, which I take to be post-rationalists? I’m sure this is a really naive question but I thought I’d toss it anyway…
Any predictions on how the Bill Gates saga is going to unfold?
I can say with 60% confidence that this will blow over quickly and not tarnish his legacy in a lasting way, unless it is proved that he solicited illegal sex from teenagers, which I think has a probability of maybe 20%. Are these odds reasonable?
The Supreme Court has decided to take up Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization for the upcoming term, with the eventual decision to be reached before June 2022. The case focuses on Mississippi's 2018 Gestational Age Act, which blocks all abortions after 15 weeks with the only exceptions being medical emergency and severe fetal abnormality. Said law has currently been blocked by the 5th Circuit, and is now on its way to SCOTUS.
This will not have been the only abortion case before the court in recent years, but it will definitely be the most direct. In contrast, June Medical Services LLC v. Russo in 2020 was a challenge to a Louisiana law that required abortion clinics to have certain hospital admission privileges - notably, only one provider in the state qualified. The decision was 5-4 with Roberts joining the liberals; since then, RBG has been replaced by ACB.
I make no predictions as to how it will go at this juncture, well in advance of oral arguments. But one way or another or another entirely, it'll definitely be the highest-profile case in quite some time.
In the not-so-distant past intellectual discussions were done in Latin - why not do that again?
-It selects for conscientious, reasonably intelligent and educated people
-It acts as a signal - by being able to participate in the discussion you show you have put in the work and are more likely than not to be willing to argue in good faith
-Reduced risk of having someone stumble upon your posts and taking them out of context to cancel you or whatever
-It reconnects with a millenia-old tradition of scholarship that was only broken in the name of national interests. It is in Latin that Copernicus, Newton, Euler and countless others spread their findings and theories to the world. Aesthetics and tradition matter
-It is more culturally neutral than living languages - because everyone has to learn it, everyone is equally linguistically insecure, whereas debates in English always kind of give an upper hand to native English speakers, since your point suffers when you make mistakes (even though it shouldn't, but we are irrational)
-It has a long tradition of teaching and plenty of quality learning materials
Is there any drawback that doesn't trivially reduce to "I can't be bothered with learning it"?
"A theme that I return to every so often on the blog is the degree to which we don’t understand the molecular mechanisms of psychiatric syndromes. I’ve found that many people outside of the biomedical world are surprised by this – depression, for example, is something that’s distinctive enough, widespread enough, and certainly has enough of a presence in most people’s consciousness as something real (as it should). And there are even pop-pharmacology explanations that many people have heard of (“not enough serotonin!”), so it can come as a surprise to find out that we really, really don’t have a handle on it on that level at all. And the same goes for all the other diagnoses with similarly high profiles, such as schizophrenia, PTSD, and more."
"All this leads up to this new paper (open access) in Nature Medicine. It presents the result of a randomized placebo-controlled trial for PTSD sufferers. 45 of them got placebo medication plus integrative psychiatric therapy, and another 45 got the same psychiatric therapy after doses of MDMA. The results very strongly indicate a positive effect for the latter, as assessed by widely-accepted ratings scales administered by independent (treatment-blinded) observers. These results appear to be better than any of the drugs actually approved for PTSD therapy, namely sertraline and paroxetine."
"And this work is of course part of a broader movement for the controlled use of psychedelics and other drugs largely known for recreation and for abuse. I’ve written about this before on the blog. Some people who know me personally will have encountered my own policy of no recreational drug use, which is pretty wide-ranging and of lifelong standing. But I’m all for these studies – given the state of knowledge in the field, I see absolutely no reason not to investigate a drug that might be useful just because other people want to take it for fun. It seems a ridiculous distinction to make. And even though I have no desire at all to experiment with my brain chemistry on a random Saturday night, if I suffered from something like PTSD – and I am overwhelmingly glad to say that I don’t – I would leap at the chance to alter my brain chemistry in order to lessen it."
Hopefully we'll get more details, because right now this looks really bad. It appears DoJ issued a subpoena under seal for the account details (incl. name, email, and physical address) of one of Nunes' anonymous Twitter trolls, with an accompanying gag order preventing disclosure of the subpoena. Unless there is one hell of a good explanation behind this, it marks a significant escalation from the already-unacceptable use of punitive litigation that anti-SLAPP exists to combat. More news as it comes in.
Well known science writer Nicholas Wade, late of the NYTimes, wrote a very well researched and reported pair of articles on the origins of the pandemic (links below):. The following is the abstract I made of the articles, which you should read in their entirety:
A research team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology headed by Dr. Zheng-li Shi, (called “Bat Lady” because of her research on bat viruses) did gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. Shi had gathered many coronaviruses, (the type to which the virus that produces COVID-19 belongs) from caves in Yunnan in southern China.
Shi took spike protein genes from different viruses and inserted them into a series of virus backbones, to find the combination that would best infect human cells. Some or all of this work was performed in labs at biosafety level 2 on a four step scale, where 4 is the most secure.
One or more people in Wuhan were infected by the viruses produced in these experiments. The virus spread through Wuhan to the rest of the world.
From 2014 through 2019, New York City-based EcoHealth Alliance (run by Dr. Peter Daszak) had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The grants were approved by Anthony Fauci M.D., as Director of NIAID in a way that subverted Presidential instructions not do such research.
In February 2020, (before the pandemic really hit the US) the British medical journal Lancet published a letter written by Daszak and endorsed by others claiming the virus had originated in wildlife and spread through the Wuhan “Wet Market”.
In late 2020 and early 2021, Daszak was a part of a delegation of researchers from WHO that went to China to investigate the origin of the pandemic. Their report said that transmission of the virus from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely scenario and that a lab leak is “extremely unlikely.”
Fauci Funded Daszak so Dasak could fund Chinese scientists.
The Chinese scientists created the coronavirus that causes COVI-19. It escaped from their lab, and caused the pandemic that has killed almost 600,000 Americans and more than 3 million worldwide.
Daszak covered up for Fauci and the Chinese.
Links to the Wade articles:
”The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?” By Nicholas Wade | May 5, 2021 in “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”
Approximately how many people are there who should be vaccinated and are willing to be vaccinated but aren't because of lack of availability of vaccine?
Is there any rationalist review /commentary on the work of Pierre Bourdieu? I've seen a lot of writing on class, signaling, and education that points in the same general direction as Bourdieu, sometimes essentially redoing his whole thing, without ever acknowledging the connection.
Cryptocurrency/DeFi/etc has been on my metaphorical radar for quite some time, but I feel hesitant about investing/working in it. Here are some of my worries, in (very roughly) descending order:
1. Coinbase/Binance/etc doesn't allow people under 18 to join and trade (which is think is for legal reasons), and I'm one of them. (And, more generally, the legality of using cryptocurrencies/DeFi/etc.)
2. Even if I don't use a company like that, I might need to install special software in order to do this properly, and I'm afraid of messing up my computer beyond repair in the process.
3. Not everyone accepts cryptocurrency as payment for commerce.
4. I'll have to pay taxes on it, which I don't know how to do properly.
5. There are a lot of criminals involved in this area.
6. Someone recommended (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEtj34VMClU) that I use relatively extreme security measures before even beginning (such as writing passwords in a paper notebook, using 2FA everywhere), and I have no sense of calibration on whether this is too much or not enough.
7. Hackers/scammers/ordinary market fluctuations could wipe out any profits that I make.
8. Mining cryptocurrency takes a lot of energy, which produces a lot of environmental damage. Renewable/zero-emissions energy sources could mitigate a lot of it, but it's not exactly straightforward to find or obtain.
9. I don't understand any economics.
Can you clarify whether these issues are as important as I think and recommend ways I could take care of the important ones? Thanks.
Since politics is allowed in this thread, and since I read this story today, I'd be interested in opinions and I hope that on here I will get something better than the usual online exchange of "you're a big poopy-head" "no, you are!" that these kinds of thing usually degenerate into.
So, what do you think: vindictive and pointless campaign that has now reached Ken Starr-levels of "I'm gonna get him for something by hook or by crook" on the part of "Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a Democrat, [who] has been investigating Mr Trump's pre-presidency business dealings for more than two years" or vital, necessary probe to bring down notorious criminal (well, whatever the charges exactly may be) now that he no longer has the shield of public office?
I don't know the merits of this case, which is why I'm asking. Otherwise, it does look like the Democrats are doing tit for the Clinton impeachment efforts tat.
I'm reading Harvey's book (A Brief History of Neoliberalism), and one of the claims he makes in Chapter 2 is "Many of the key breakthrouhgs in pharmaceutical research, for example, had been funded by the National Institute of Health in collaboration with the drug companies. But in 1978 the companies were allowed to take all the benefits of patent rights without returning anything to the state". The reference cited is Marcia Angell's The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC1V1A/), which is a 352-page book that I don't own a copy of and neither does my library system. On the other hand, I'm betting someone in this community knows enough about the history of the NIH to comment -- how much truth is there to this claim? My impression was that, to first order, pharmaceutical companies patent stuff and charge a lot of money to cover the expense of ushering things through FDA approval, and I wouldn't have expected the NIH to have anything to do with that part -- but (a) I might be misrepresenting the current state, and (b) this is talking about the 60s and 70s, and it's entirely possible that the expensive parts of the process were different.
As a data guy, I spend a lot of my time reminding colleagues to think about the "other"/weird buckets in multi-set intersections. "13% of the dentists also have tattoos and adult children, should they get the invitation or not?" It hurts my head to do even with practice, it's conversationally agonizing, and many of my colleagues seem to have never been taught to think this way. But this thinking is hugely important for assessing and attacking almost every significant social/political problem or proposed solution - certainly at least remembering to check whether the "other" buckets have a lot of people in them or not at a bare minimum. Has anybody seen good tools for teaching/talking about these sorts of things?
Does Tesla really have the "largest casting machine that has ever been made"? Weren't the casting machines used to make the turrets and hulls of old tanks, like the M4 Sherman, even bigger?
Just listening to Po-Shen Loh with Lex Fridman. Wow! Perhaps most topical is they've developed a Covid app that tells you when you are in danger. Very cool ideas. (and simple)
Hi Scott, longtime reader first time poster, blah blah blah blah.
I recently came across the Dungeons and Discourse writeup (https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Ep2Z42hYqj68QZz6w/king-under-the-mountain-adventure-log-soundtrack), and the hilarious songs. However some of the links to the lyrics are broken and I cant find them anywhere, Do you still have the lyrics to the missing songs? Specifically "I'm evil Immanuel Kant" and both "All is Water" versions. I've been looking and found all of the other songs but can't find even lyrics for those. Thanks!
If you think AI takeoff is likely to happen in the next 20-30 years but are useless at coding/politics/business management/finance, how do you do something useful with your life?
I mean, aside from literally stopping people from dying before singularity (which could actually be bad in case of Roko-style or MMAcevedo-style Virtual Hell), there's not much you can do for people that won't be rendered irrelevant by a bad *or* good AI takeoff, and without access to one of those you have ~0 control over the time and goodness of takeoff.
Has Scott commented on the 'p factor' debate in mental health? If he has, can someone direct me where to go to search for comments.
In 50 years time how will the majority of historians talk about the Trump presidency?
Bitcoin is a form of identity politics (thread) https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1393978928478441474
Here is a game, made by me, about bayesian updating and "putting a number on it" - you get together with friends; you watch a murder mystery TV show together; and buy and sell bets on who did it, using in-game money: https://murdershebet.com/
:) Though I do say so myself, it's super fun. I'm slightly allowed to say that because it is an adaptation of on Robin Hanson's boardgame of the same name. The whole thing is, precisely, a prediction market - i.e. it is a system where you are strongly incentivized to figure out what you think the probability of an event is, and then bet using that probability - i.e. the game works as a lie detector for the kinds of people who watch a murder mystery and say "oh I KNOW WHO DID IT NOW!"
Happy to answer any questions!
I think I’m going to use the Tik Tok addiction piece in an essay for school. I want to trace the idea of moral culpability for addiction to an American sense of religious purity and punishment dating from our very religious days. Is there any part of ”personal failure addiction” which is specifically American?
Can anyone recommend ACX-style blogs (ie. engagingly written, charitable to different points of view, rationally weighing data and arguments) but focused on UK culture/issues/politics?
Forgive the gauche self-promotion, but knowing your writings and readership I figured you might be interested in this https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/may/14/weird-dreams-train-us-for-the-unexpected-says-new-theory
There have been reports that covid RNA reverse-transcripts itself into DNA that then integrates into human cells. This is excessively banal, like 5-10% of human DNA is made from remnants of ancient viral DNA, and should be a surprise to no one but people who still believe "genes" and "the environment" can be separated at all, but in some cases this phenomenon is suspected to disrupt some genome regulation networks which is at the origin of certain types of cancer.
So this is absolutely not grounded in reality but one could make an interesting Ayn Rand type plot where, due to a lot of very rich and powerful people having had covid and fearing for their lives, "incentives" are magically aligned so that we find a cure for cancer in the next couple of decades. Free market fundamentalists rejoice! In any case the long-term followups to this unknown disease that struck millions of people are going to be interesting to watch.
Update to https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/
https://apnews.com/article/health-coronavirus-pandemic-police-lifestyle-0f7be416f6e91433809220e2f9a695f9
TLDR: Scott wrote about Pride Parades as an aspect of civil religion. American society changed from police suppressing gay rights to marching for them. The latest step in that process is that NYC Pride is banning the police. Quite the reversal of positions in the 50 years since Stonewall.
Am I missing something? I’m fascinated about the response to the new CDC advise about masks. I’ve felt that since the beginning of the pandemic, that these organizations have been viewed as the mouth piece for the administration at times or the opposition depending on the time and situation. Never fully independent. Either a bunch of Democrats trying to stick it to the administration or republicans trying to tow the party line.
How a disease can become political was surprising but in retrospect, not unexpected. What isn’t political? What topic couldn’t be shaded for political advantage.
That being said, to have a democrat in power, have the CDC give basically give end of pandemic guidance, have the democratic administration basically agree by inaction, then still have to populous question what to do is puzzling.
(Democrats have generally been pro-mask, some republicans, anti-mask. I hate stereotypes, but needed to stretch for discussion purposes)
My logic fails me on this. I could probably flow chart this and I won’t make sense to me. I could understand if Trump was in power but with Biden in power, my logic falters.
I agree with the companies that are doing the honor code. Time for some independent responsibility. There are enough ICU beds for people who don’t abide by the honor code. Their call.
If I walk into a store and I see someone without a mask, I will assume they are vaccinated as I am.
If they aren’t, no worries, hope they don’t get sick from the other person who is pretending to be vaccinated like they are on the next isle but not really my concern.
At least in my area, they are having walk-up clinics. My 12 and 15 year old just got their first dose this week. Super easy. Could have picked many places and times.
I think my thoughts likely stem from the fact that I don’t expect this disease to just disappear. It has shown not to be seasonal, combined with the vast reservoir of cases across the world. Vaccination is the answer. One might worry about variants, which is something we probably should worry about but we could also worry about a plane crashing on my house right now. Both things we can’t control. Will leave that to the companies who stand to make money by creating boosters as these things arise.
A little about my background, so you can scrutinize my thoughts. I am a practicing physician in an outpatient setting. Would likely have a different view, which I understand, if I worked in the ICU.
Thoughts?
So, economics question. Econ 101 describes price as a function of quantity, with a demand curve that slopes downward, a supply curve that slopes upward, and equilibrium at their intersection. Less demand at higher prices makes sense. What has confused me for quite some time is why the supply curve is treated as sloping upwards (increased price with increased quantity). It assumes a marginal cost of production that grows with production, in other words, a negative economy of scale; but this is pretty clearly the exception and not the rule. Logically, the supply curve should be flat, if anything sloping very slightly downward (even for an aggregate supply curve, you'd get scale effects from complements being bigger; and while in some cases you'd eventually run into finite resources, basic supply-and-demand is not modeling this).
What I've read online as a defense of a positive-sloping supply curve is that it applies to short-term equilibrium, when you can't expand production to meet demand. But "short-term equilibrium" is a nonsensical concept - if the decision-makers can predict the future, they'll be aware of that future (i.e. if demand for folders in high on weekdays and low on weekends, prices will still be stable). And yes, all models are wrong but some are useful; but there's not very many models that will stay useful when you flip a negative sign.
My best guess is that this is something that's only relevant for Econ 101 and nowhere else. But I'd still be interested in what actual economists think.
Very reassured about Apple's commitment to protecting my privacy from the NSA/FBI and advertising companies, given that apparently their employees are too delicate to work in the same office with a guy who once wrote some sexist stuff in a book talking about his girlfriend.
https://academictimes.com/studying-science-isnt-what-makes-students-less-religious/
Made me think of Scott's post about new atheism as a failed harmology. The relationship between religion and science is not as clear as we think
I'm confused by the American idea of a "suburb". I live in Australia, where every subdivision of a city is known as a suburb, with the possible exception of the central business district. But in the US it seems to mean something else, but I've never quite figured it out.
Is the Upper West Side of New York a suburb? Is the Outer Sunset area of San Francisco a suburb? Is Berkeley a suburb? Is Mountain View a suburb? Is San Jose a suburb? Is Beverly Hills a suburb?
What have you learned recently that has surprised you?
I'm curious--does anyone know much about delta-8 THC? The sites I find googling all seem to be repeating the same anecdotal findings. I'm curious if it's been studied much.
I am (very slowly and intermittently) reading the Joseph R. Allen edition of Waley's translation of Shijing. In the explanation preceding poem 154 ("The Seventh Month") someone (probably Waley, but maybe Allen?) states that the phrase "The Fire ebbs" means "Scorpio is sinking below the horizon at the moment of its first visibility at dusk" and then asks whether this happened in northern China around September during the eight and seventh centuries BC, suggesting that an astronomer may know the answer. I've tried googling it, and haven't found anything. Are there any astronomers/fans of ancient Chinese poetry on here who know the answer?
It seems very likely that cicadas are using a strategy of flooding predators by emerging in huge numbers at intervals of prime numbers of years. Any ideas about how such a thing could evolve?
Should counties other than India be worried about B.1.617.2?
It doesn't seem to noticeably do vaccine escape but it might be more virulent than B.1.1.7 (Kent).
So it's a question of where a rising proportion of the B.1.617.2 meets a falling number of non-immune people. I doubt many developed countries other than the UK have enough travel from India to kick off a meaningful outbreak before everybody's vaccinated.
Or is this all an artefact of extrememly high infection rates within India driving what looks like exponetial community transmission?
SAGE minutes, largely about the Indian variant:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/986564/S1236_Eighty-nineth_SAGE_meeting.pdf
Weekly VOC data:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/986380/Variants_of_Concern_VOC_Technical_Briefing_11_England.pdf
Does anyone know or know of any autistic therapists or counselors who work with autistic teens? Asking for a parent I know. The kid wants someone who understands autism from the inside.
Is anyone following the Restaurant Revitalization Fund grants? Women, veterans and “economically disadvantaged minorities” were given priority to receive grant funds and now there are no more funds available.
If a government was trying to stoke racism and sexism, this seems like one way to do it.
Does anyone else feel really stupid while reading comments on here?
For the sentimental cartography files: https://www.halcyonmaps.com/map-of-the-internet-2021/
Re-posting this for visibility:
I remember reading a blog post some years ago. I think I found it in the SSC comments. It was written by a doctor, and it listed all known medical interventions that are so obviously effective that we don't need RCTs and statistics to know that they work. One example was insulin for diabetes. The list wasn't that long, which was discussed in the post as well.
This is how I remember it at least, but I've lost the link. Does anyone recognise what I'm talking about? I would be grateful if I could find it again.
I announced New Science (newscience.org) a few days back - a nonprofit the goal of which is to build new institutions of basic science, starting with life sciences.
The board of directors consists of me, Mark Lutter, and Adam Marblestone and we are advised by Tessa Alexanian, Tyler Cowen, Andrew Gelman, Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy, Konrad Kording, and Tony Kulesa.
If the site is exciting and *especially if you do biology*, I would love to talk to you.
The first project is going to be a fully funded in-person summer fellowship for young scientists during which they will work on their ambitious exploratory research projects they couldn’t work on otherwise.
alexey@newscience.org
Systematic traumatization of the young is the primary mechanism through which civilization has been forged.
I'm just here to give meaningless criticism. It doesn't make sense to say "Otherwise, post about whatever you want", on even numbered threads. That sentence only makes sense when immediately preceded by a warning not to get political. Scott seems to have been making this mistake consistently for at least the past few weeks, possibly longer.
There's a topic that's popping up in my mind from time to time that baffles me, so I'll just write that to see what will the hivemind decision on it would be:
Why don't other countries crack down on tax havens? Some music/movie companies lost a not backbreaking amount of money, and they got the international community to raid piratebay servers in Sweden or wherever. USA staged coups for far less amount of money in Latin American countries. Now why don't they nicely ask or peer-pressure let's say Ireland or Netherlands as they are respectable countries (they're not rogue states that wouldn't reason)? Or outright pressure Liberia or those micronations which is only known for their tax regimens? Just a few hours of gunboat diplomacy would stop them all, and net USA (or Germany, or wherever) with incredible amount of extra tax income.
But why doesn't this happen? I can only think the reason would be some collusion from up top, but governments change yet the situation doesn't. Strange.
What are the possibilities for new investments that people mostly invest a little in just in case it works? Dogecoin paid off for at least some people.
Is Trump likely to have a successor? My impression is that his followers want his personality, and it's quite a rare personality.
How can we in principle figure out whether some regulator institute is unnecessary and needs to be defunded or on the contrary requires more investments to work better, without actually implementing such changes? I've seen some talks about defunding the police and abolishing the FDA but I feel generally confused about my abilities to evaluate arguments.
Suppose we have a Regulator that is ensuring that no-one produce poisonous hamburgers. Regulator functioning cost some tax money and creates some problems to the hamburger producing businesses. Suppose only 0.0001% of hamburgers turn out to be poisonous. So most of the regulator work is dealing with false positives which creates problems to businesses that do not poison their customers. But how to account for survivors bias here? Maybe there are so few poisonous hamburgers only due to the fact that such regulator exists and people are aware of it in the first place?
How long do you think it'll be until the first robot coup?
(I don't necessarily mean AI rebellion, just some non-state actor seizing power with a robot army.)
The summer in Ireland - if we get a summer, after the past thunderstorms and unseasonal rain and possibly more rain coming - could be ruined!
Not because of Covid (well, indirectly because of Covid) but because the traditional summertime ice-cream treat, the 99, is threatened due to a lack of Flakes https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/99-problems-after-flake-shortage-24122907
For those of you for whom that was incomprehensible, let me just pause to go "Another reason to blame Mondalez, Cadbury's has never been the same since the Americans took over!"
Okay, so we have the ordinary soft-serve vanilla ice-cream in a cone. Some genius (allegedly possibly Scots-Italian) took the chocolate Flake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flake_(chocolate_bar) and inserted it into the cone, creating the iconic 99. https://www.carlowlive.ie/resizer/-1/-1/true/1494595550100.jpg--.jpg?1494595551000
But alas! We are running out of Flakes! In order to address the crisis, Mondalez issued a statement to The Irish Times (sort of like issuing one to The New York Times as 'the newspaper of record', that's how serious things are) to explain the shortage and reassure us all that matters were in hand. Because the entire story is behind a paywall, here it is below:
"Supply problems and soaring demand has caused a shortage of the crumbliest chocolate that traditionally elevates ice-cream cones to 99 status.
Despite the cold start to the summer, demand for mini Flakes has intensified in recent weeks while supply has struggled to keep up, and 99s are now at risk of disappearing from shops, vans and ice-cream parlours entirely.
Cone connoisseurs across the Irish ice-cream industry have said they have never seen shortages like this, and warned that supplies may be exhausted by the middle of June.
Joe Quinn of the Bon Bon beach shop in Salthill was tipped off about the shortages last week and managed to secure a supply ahead of his shop’s reopening today after months of lockdown. “I was lucky to get some in because they can’t be got now,” he said.
Paddy O’Donnell’s Clarmac business supplies Flakes to ice-cream vendors across the country, but he said his supplies were dwindling.
“They are impossible to get at the moment but there is word they will be coming out in dribs and drabs. It is the first time I heard of a shortage like this.”
He said half of his supply was gone already. “I have sold more Flakes so far this year than I had right up to the middle of last summer,” he said. “Hopefully things will be back to normal soon but I am lucky at leave to have some stock left.”
Cadbury, which makes the crumbly chocolate bars that have been sitting on top of soft scoop ice-cream cones for almost 100 years, confirmed the shortages but moved to assure the public that it was working hard to boost supplies to satisfy summer demand.
“We are seeing a recent increase in demand for our Cadbury 99 Flake in Ireland, ” said a spokeswoman for Mondalez , the multinational that now owns Cadbury. “The product is still available to order and we’re continuing to work closely with our customers.”
For generations Cadbury made its 99 Flakes in Dublin, but in recent years the bulk of its production has moved to Egypt. The 99 is so-called in honour of the elite guard made up of 99 soldiers who traditionally protected Italian monarchs. The chocolate maker borrowed the number name to appeal to expat Italians who dominated the ice-cream business in Ireland and Britain at the time."
No blame to the Egyptians, but the American owners just don't realise the importance of the iconic British Isles products they have acquired (as we saw with the proposal for the super-league recently).
And why is it called a 99? Other explanations for the name are as follows:
"One claim states that it originated from Portobello, Scotland, where Stefano Arcari who had opened a shop in 1922 at 99 Portobello High Street. Arcari would break a large "Flake" in half and stick it in ice cream but the name came from the shop's address.
Elsewhere, another address-based claim for the beloved ice cream is made by the Dunkerleys in Gorton, Manchester, who operated a sweet shop at 99 Wellington Street.
The report states that: "The 99 is so-called in honour of the elite guard made up of 99 soldiers who traditionally protected Italian monarchs. The chocolate maker borrowed the number name to appeal to expat Italians who dominated the ice-cream business in Ireland and Britain at the time."
The Cadbury website says that the reason behind the Flake being called a "99" has been "lost in the mists of time"."
What are some counter-intuitive lessons on getting along with people/making friends?
What is a research paper/blog post that you've read that fundamentally changed the way you looked at the world? Preferably not one written by Scott as there's a chance I would have read it already. I've gotten amazing recommendations from ACX readers in the past, and hence trying this again.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/05/piles-ancient-poop-reveal-extinction-event-human-gut-bacteria?fbclid=IwAR2chXWcXREMWg8xSiDy3sLVlJzyDBKrK7EDV-CTSEYUQmboqTlnzAl_0S0
Dozens of species of human gut bacteria have gone extinct. Does the precautionary principle recommend recreating them or not recreating them.
Abba Eban: "The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." A lot of pro-Israel people were fed up with Netanyahu and the situation in Sheikh Jarrah was just the thing to push them into open disaffection with Israel. Then Hamas rocketed Israel and the usual thugs and anti-Semites came out of the closet. Eban was right.
It seems like the anonymity of cryptocurrency has led to a raft of various cyber crimes. Obviously, there is a limit to how good cybersecurity can be. It's an arms race that cannot be won. There's only a small hiatus between raising cybersecurity measures in some respect, and the creation of a workaround by cyber criminals. It's a futile aspiration to be fully secure.
I'm curious to know what people foresee as any kind of mitigation of the anonymity of cryptocurrency. Or, whether this community is so libertarian that they consider it a non-issue. Do lives lost that can be lost through crypto- anarchy? Does it matter if hospitals are taken offline by ransomware? What about schools, electrical grids, water supply, ad nauseam. Are there solutions? Does it matter? Discuss.
Do people really like the taste of tea, or bitter foods/drinks in general?
I've always assumed tea is some kind of identity/status signalling phenomenon. I myself have a similar thing going on with eating broccoli.
Can anyone tell me the difference between Rats, which I take to be rationalist; and post-rats, which I take to be post-rationalists? I’m sure this is a really naive question but I thought I’d toss it anyway…
Any predictions on how the Bill Gates saga is going to unfold?
I can say with 60% confidence that this will blow over quickly and not tarnish his legacy in a lasting way, unless it is proved that he solicited illegal sex from teenagers, which I think has a probability of maybe 20%. Are these odds reasonable?
The Supreme Court has decided to take up Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization for the upcoming term, with the eventual decision to be reached before June 2022. The case focuses on Mississippi's 2018 Gestational Age Act, which blocks all abortions after 15 weeks with the only exceptions being medical emergency and severe fetal abnormality. Said law has currently been blocked by the 5th Circuit, and is now on its way to SCOTUS.
This will not have been the only abortion case before the court in recent years, but it will definitely be the most direct. In contrast, June Medical Services LLC v. Russo in 2020 was a challenge to a Louisiana law that required abortion clinics to have certain hospital admission privileges - notably, only one provider in the state qualified. The decision was 5-4 with Roberts joining the liberals; since then, RBG has been replaced by ACB.
I make no predictions as to how it will go at this juncture, well in advance of oral arguments. But one way or another or another entirely, it'll definitely be the highest-profile case in quite some time.
I've been bingeing on old SSC. (I'm mostly a newbie.)
https://guzey.com/favorite/slate-star-codex/
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/
Any other 'best of' collections, or lists?
Thanks.
In the not-so-distant past intellectual discussions were done in Latin - why not do that again?
-It selects for conscientious, reasonably intelligent and educated people
-It acts as a signal - by being able to participate in the discussion you show you have put in the work and are more likely than not to be willing to argue in good faith
-Reduced risk of having someone stumble upon your posts and taking them out of context to cancel you or whatever
-It reconnects with a millenia-old tradition of scholarship that was only broken in the name of national interests. It is in Latin that Copernicus, Newton, Euler and countless others spread their findings and theories to the world. Aesthetics and tradition matter
-It is more culturally neutral than living languages - because everyone has to learn it, everyone is equally linguistically insecure, whereas debates in English always kind of give an upper hand to native English speakers, since your point suffers when you make mistakes (even though it shouldn't, but we are irrational)
-It has a long tradition of teaching and plenty of quality learning materials
Is there any drawback that doesn't trivially reduce to "I can't be bothered with learning it"?
"Treatment With MDMA" By Derek Lowe | 17 May 2021
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/05/17/treatment-with-mdma
"A theme that I return to every so often on the blog is the degree to which we don’t understand the molecular mechanisms of psychiatric syndromes. I’ve found that many people outside of the biomedical world are surprised by this – depression, for example, is something that’s distinctive enough, widespread enough, and certainly has enough of a presence in most people’s consciousness as something real (as it should). And there are even pop-pharmacology explanations that many people have heard of (“not enough serotonin!”), so it can come as a surprise to find out that we really, really don’t have a handle on it on that level at all. And the same goes for all the other diagnoses with similarly high profiles, such as schizophrenia, PTSD, and more."
"All this leads up to this new paper (open access) in Nature Medicine. It presents the result of a randomized placebo-controlled trial for PTSD sufferers. 45 of them got placebo medication plus integrative psychiatric therapy, and another 45 got the same psychiatric therapy after doses of MDMA. The results very strongly indicate a positive effect for the latter, as assessed by widely-accepted ratings scales administered by independent (treatment-blinded) observers. These results appear to be better than any of the drugs actually approved for PTSD therapy, namely sertraline and paroxetine."
"And this work is of course part of a broader movement for the controlled use of psychedelics and other drugs largely known for recreation and for abuse. I’ve written about this before on the blog. Some people who know me personally will have encountered my own policy of no recreational drug use, which is pretty wide-ranging and of lifelong standing. But I’m all for these studies – given the state of knowledge in the field, I see absolutely no reason not to investigate a drug that might be useful just because other people want to take it for fun. It seems a ridiculous distinction to make. And even though I have no desire at all to experiment with my brain chemistry on a random Saturday night, if I suffered from something like PTSD – and I am overwhelmingly glad to say that I don’t – I would leap at the chance to alter my brain chemistry in order to lessen it."
Lots of legal news today! This one aims at anonymity on the internet, which I hear is something of a topic of note around here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.224281/gov.uscourts.dcd.224281.3.0.pdf
Hopefully we'll get more details, because right now this looks really bad. It appears DoJ issued a subpoena under seal for the account details (incl. name, email, and physical address) of one of Nunes' anonymous Twitter trolls, with an accompanying gag order preventing disclosure of the subpoena. Unless there is one hell of a good explanation behind this, it marks a significant escalation from the already-unacceptable use of punitive litigation that anti-SLAPP exists to combat. More news as it comes in.
Well known science writer Nicholas Wade, late of the NYTimes, wrote a very well researched and reported pair of articles on the origins of the pandemic (links below):. The following is the abstract I made of the articles, which you should read in their entirety:
A research team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology headed by Dr. Zheng-li Shi, (called “Bat Lady” because of her research on bat viruses) did gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. Shi had gathered many coronaviruses, (the type to which the virus that produces COVID-19 belongs) from caves in Yunnan in southern China.
Shi took spike protein genes from different viruses and inserted them into a series of virus backbones, to find the combination that would best infect human cells. Some or all of this work was performed in labs at biosafety level 2 on a four step scale, where 4 is the most secure.
One or more people in Wuhan were infected by the viruses produced in these experiments. The virus spread through Wuhan to the rest of the world.
From 2014 through 2019, New York City-based EcoHealth Alliance (run by Dr. Peter Daszak) had a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, to do gain-of-function research with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The grants were approved by Anthony Fauci M.D., as Director of NIAID in a way that subverted Presidential instructions not do such research.
In February 2020, (before the pandemic really hit the US) the British medical journal Lancet published a letter written by Daszak and endorsed by others claiming the virus had originated in wildlife and spread through the Wuhan “Wet Market”.
In late 2020 and early 2021, Daszak was a part of a delegation of researchers from WHO that went to China to investigate the origin of the pandemic. Their report said that transmission of the virus from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely scenario and that a lab leak is “extremely unlikely.”
Fauci Funded Daszak so Dasak could fund Chinese scientists.
The Chinese scientists created the coronavirus that causes COVI-19. It escaped from their lab, and caused the pandemic that has killed almost 600,000 Americans and more than 3 million worldwide.
Daszak covered up for Fauci and the Chinese.
Links to the Wade articles:
”The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?” By Nicholas Wade | May 5, 2021 in “The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/
Also at https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038
Wade wrote a condensed version for NYPost: “The theory that COVID-19 escaped from a lab may not be so far-fetched” By Nicholas Wade | May 9, 2021
https://nypost.com/2021/05/09/theory-that-covid-escaped-from-a-lab-may-not-be-far-fetched/
78% of epidemiologists surveyed by the NYT think there should be limits on indoor gatherings between vaccinated people from different households:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/upshot/covid-epidemiologists.html
Are they telling Noble Lies, or do they seriously doubt that the vaccines work?
What do people here think of the recent UFO news?
Is it actually aliens?
Approximately how many people are there who should be vaccinated and are willing to be vaccinated but aren't because of lack of availability of vaccine?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohxGA7fpfu0&ab_channel=WhistlinDiesel
Floridiana Man outfits a truck with 8 gigantic tires so that it can cruise a bit in the Gulf.
I'm posting this because it's delightful, but if people want to get serious, does it fit into Albion's Seed?
Is there any rationalist review /commentary on the work of Pierre Bourdieu? I've seen a lot of writing on class, signaling, and education that points in the same general direction as Bourdieu, sometimes essentially redoing his whole thing, without ever acknowledging the connection.
Reposting this from OT171:
Cryptocurrency/DeFi/etc has been on my metaphorical radar for quite some time, but I feel hesitant about investing/working in it. Here are some of my worries, in (very roughly) descending order:
1. Coinbase/Binance/etc doesn't allow people under 18 to join and trade (which is think is for legal reasons), and I'm one of them. (And, more generally, the legality of using cryptocurrencies/DeFi/etc.)
2. Even if I don't use a company like that, I might need to install special software in order to do this properly, and I'm afraid of messing up my computer beyond repair in the process.
3. Not everyone accepts cryptocurrency as payment for commerce.
4. I'll have to pay taxes on it, which I don't know how to do properly.
5. There are a lot of criminals involved in this area.
6. Someone recommended (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEtj34VMClU) that I use relatively extreme security measures before even beginning (such as writing passwords in a paper notebook, using 2FA everywhere), and I have no sense of calibration on whether this is too much or not enough.
7. Hackers/scammers/ordinary market fluctuations could wipe out any profits that I make.
8. Mining cryptocurrency takes a lot of energy, which produces a lot of environmental damage. Renewable/zero-emissions energy sources could mitigate a lot of it, but it's not exactly straightforward to find or obtain.
9. I don't understand any economics.
Can you clarify whether these issues are as important as I think and recommend ways I could take care of the important ones? Thanks.
Since politics is allowed in this thread, and since I read this story today, I'd be interested in opinions and I hope that on here I will get something better than the usual online exchange of "you're a big poopy-head" "no, you are!" that these kinds of thing usually degenerate into.
Okay, so now the investigation into Trump/The Trump Organisation is criminal and not just civil, at least by this story: https://www.rte.ie/news/2021/0519/1222476-trump-organisation-under-criminal-investigation/
So, what do you think: vindictive and pointless campaign that has now reached Ken Starr-levels of "I'm gonna get him for something by hook or by crook" on the part of "Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a Democrat, [who] has been investigating Mr Trump's pre-presidency business dealings for more than two years" or vital, necessary probe to bring down notorious criminal (well, whatever the charges exactly may be) now that he no longer has the shield of public office?
I don't know the merits of this case, which is why I'm asking. Otherwise, it does look like the Democrats are doing tit for the Clinton impeachment efforts tat.
I'm reading Harvey's book (A Brief History of Neoliberalism), and one of the claims he makes in Chapter 2 is "Many of the key breakthrouhgs in pharmaceutical research, for example, had been funded by the National Institute of Health in collaboration with the drug companies. But in 1978 the companies were allowed to take all the benefits of patent rights without returning anything to the state". The reference cited is Marcia Angell's The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FC1V1A/), which is a 352-page book that I don't own a copy of and neither does my library system. On the other hand, I'm betting someone in this community knows enough about the history of the NIH to comment -- how much truth is there to this claim? My impression was that, to first order, pharmaceutical companies patent stuff and charge a lot of money to cover the expense of ushering things through FDA approval, and I wouldn't have expected the NIH to have anything to do with that part -- but (a) I might be misrepresenting the current state, and (b) this is talking about the 60s and 70s, and it's entirely possible that the expensive parts of the process were different.
As a data guy, I spend a lot of my time reminding colleagues to think about the "other"/weird buckets in multi-set intersections. "13% of the dentists also have tattoos and adult children, should they get the invitation or not?" It hurts my head to do even with practice, it's conversationally agonizing, and many of my colleagues seem to have never been taught to think this way. But this thinking is hugely important for assessing and attacking almost every significant social/political problem or proposed solution - certainly at least remembering to check whether the "other" buckets have a lot of people in them or not at a bare minimum. Has anybody seen good tools for teaching/talking about these sorts of things?
Does Tesla really have the "largest casting machine that has ever been made"? Weren't the casting machines used to make the turrets and hulls of old tanks, like the M4 Sherman, even bigger?
https://youtu.be/CQfKZ5lo9dc
https://tankandafvnews.com/2016/10/08/photo-of-the-day-m60-cast-hull-at-factory/
Just listening to Po-Shen Loh with Lex Fridman. Wow! Perhaps most topical is they've developed a Covid app that tells you when you are in danger. Very cool ideas. (and simple)
https://www.novid.org/about
Hi Scott, longtime reader first time poster, blah blah blah blah.
I recently came across the Dungeons and Discourse writeup (https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/Ep2Z42hYqj68QZz6w/king-under-the-mountain-adventure-log-soundtrack), and the hilarious songs. However some of the links to the lyrics are broken and I cant find them anywhere, Do you still have the lyrics to the missing songs? Specifically "I'm evil Immanuel Kant" and both "All is Water" versions. I've been looking and found all of the other songs but can't find even lyrics for those. Thanks!
If you could ask a random representative US sample any question, what would you ask?
If you think AI takeoff is likely to happen in the next 20-30 years but are useless at coding/politics/business management/finance, how do you do something useful with your life?
I mean, aside from literally stopping people from dying before singularity (which could actually be bad in case of Roko-style or MMAcevedo-style Virtual Hell), there's not much you can do for people that won't be rendered irrelevant by a bad *or* good AI takeoff, and without access to one of those you have ~0 control over the time and goodness of takeoff.
Just want to signal-boost this amazing article by Scott in the journal "Works in Progress"- https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-didnt-suicides-rise-during-covid/
Apologies if Scott intended to post it on this substack as well at some point.