"I’m interested in the community’s opinion: would you go to an in-person indoors ACX meetup in ~September? Would you consider it irresponsible to hold one? "
I would not go (but I wouldn't be going even without Covid). I would not consider it irresponsible to hold one.
How about treating the SSC community like adults, advertise the meetings if anyone wants to host, add a line mentioning that Covid is still a thing and letting folks decide for themselves?
In general, I am okay (up to a point, but a fairly tolerant point) with letting people make decisions about their own lives even if I think it is a mistake. I'm even okay shouldering some externalities to enable this, hoping that folks return the favor if I want to take different risks than they do.
Re meetups - the NYC rationalist community has been having in-person meetups again for a few months now (I know there's been some people here who've expressed interest).
I use this site to sometimes mention my podcast. I hope people don't mind. Anyway the latest was on Sumo with Kenji Tierney (he has such a nice voice!) I found it really interesting - he went into the history and comes at it as an anthropologist. Was startled to find that when the Japanese wanted to impress Perry they put on a Sumo exhibition (which had the exact opposite effect that they wanted - naked men - how barbaric!) and Perry had some of his men black up and put on a minstrel show.
TL;DR: The FDA is 5X too worried about long term credibility
There's been a debate about how soon the FDA should fully approve the mRNA vaccines. Critics like Matthew Yglesias and Eric Topol argue that full approval could be very beneficial because it opens the door to more mandates and allows advertising. Defenders of the FDA say the critics aren't thinking about the long term. If safety issues emerge after full approval, the defenders claim, the credibility of the FDA would be shot for years, driving fewer vaccinations in the long term.
The FDA's concerns about long term credibility seems hand-wavy and non-quantitative, so I decided to do some some back-of-the-envelope math to see how much it actually matters. With some reasonable assumptions that are quite favorable to the FDA, I estimate that they are 5X too worried about long term credibility. Even after accounting for long term risk, faster approval could give us 40 million vaccinated person-years over the long term, which could save over 100,000 lives.
The crux of the issue is this: The FDA worries about the unlikely scenario where safety issues emerge after approval of the 2021 vaccine, driving long term vaccine reluctance. That's fair, but that's mostly true *regardless* of whether the 2021 vaccine got full approval or an EUA. More details in my post linked to below.
I encourage anyone to question any of my assumptions!
I have been noodling for awhile now on creative ways to reduce emissions from air travel. Here's a fun one: what if we had electric towplanes tow jet aircraft off the ground as a present-day towplane does a glider, and the jet engines kicked in only after takeoff?
Advantages:
-- An electric towplane might be more feasible than a medium/long-range electric passenger plane, because all it needs to do is get the towed plane off the ground, unhook the tow cable, and land again before recharging, so the batteries required would be relatively small.
-- Besides the fuel and emissions savings from not having to use jet engines for takeoff, it would also reduce noise and air pollution around airports.
-- Retrofitting existing planes to be towed might be cheaper than replacing them.
Possible obstacles:
-- A towed takeoff might be too rough and/or too unreliable compared to a powered takeoff.
-- Existing tow cable materials might not be strong enough to take the load of a large passenger jet.
-- Existing airframes of passenger jets might not withstand being towed into the air, and retrofitting them might be infeasible.
-- The towing process might be so aerodynamically inefficient as to cancel out the energy savings. (Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about aerodynamics or aircraft engineering).
Making good progress on my first game. I've finished writing the rough draft for the main dialog, just need to write the rest of it and make more progress in Godot. We're at about where I was when I abandoned the project in 2012 in terms of gameplay currently.
Modeling of each country's Delta waves are all over the place, but after it gets a country to herd immunity, it seems like in-person indoor meetups would be thoroughly appropriate.
That could very well happen first in Europe. The UK wave seems to be cresting (although I've heard a couple competing hypotheses, like a test shortage). They also have very high immunity levels, suggesting that the Delta burn through the remainder of the unvaccinated population would be quick.
The US has a much larger unvaccinated (and uninfected) portion of its population, so the Delta wave will probably be longer and worse. It seems like a good idea to go to (parts of) Europe.
@Deiseach would you be at all interested in having an email conversation with me? I'm a trans woman with I think a rare perspective and I'd like to talk about it. If so, email me at jmb3481@gmail.com
I'm in the UK and would not go to an indoor meetup in September unless cases and hospitalisations are significantly down from the current level (which depends on a whole lot of things about vaccination uptake and effectiveness we don't really know yet).
We’re in the middle of an irresponsible experiment with removing restrictions before vaccine coverage is complete, so I'd say non local indoor meets (ie of people who wouldn't normally mix, especially from multiple localities) are irresponsible to plan at this time.
On the other hand, there are lots of lovely country parks and similar outdoor venues with seating throughout the country and I'd cheerfully attend a meetup in one of those - many have roof but no walls arrangements usually used as smoking areas which are ideal for a weatherproof but relatively covid safe meetup.
I'd argue that it's irresponsible to *not* have September indoor meetups, at least in places where vaccines are generally available - once vaccination of the willing is complete, the biggest danger from covid is that governments (or culture) go into permanent covid mode, where they keep travel and gathering restrictions or limits forever on increasingly thin pretext. "Universal vaccination" is pretty much the only Schelling point we have on when to come out of lockdown, and if we don't use it we might be stuck in lockdown misery for decades (just like we are with the TSA).
Ok, I've been trying to search and collect evidence and studies that show if antipsychotic do, or not, shrinks the brain in the long term, so does anyone know about more this topic? Any help would be appreciated.
A couple of open threads ago I rambled on about what the US as a multiparty system would look like. I hope it's not gauche for me to continue talking about it, because I've been thinking about this a lot, and also I got some interesting new data. The Republican polling firm Echelon Insights conducted a bunch of research on this exact topic- their Twitter thread about it is here
They theorize 5 political parties for the US- Nationalist (Trumpy), Conservative (Reagan/country club Republican), Acela (Bloomberg/neoliberal), Labor (blue collar economically liberal/socially conservative) and Green (AOC). From their original sample, their respondents broke down at 19/21/12/28/10%, respectively- Labor being the single most popular party. (Interestingly I had a hard time thinking of a US politician to use as an example for that).
As I mentioned, traditional Poli Sci teaches that multiparty presidential systems are pretty dysfunctional, with Latin America being the classic example. The parties squabble, and with a separately elected President with no power to advance legislation on his/her own, not much gets done. I'm trying to imagine how these 5 parties would govern together if they were in Congress now, with Biden as President.
Part of my skepticism is that the present US system incentivizes politicians to act unusually crazily, to bring in campaign donations, and there are no strong party actors to say 'stop being quite so crazy on social media or we'll kick you out'. So the Nationalist and Green parties would be even more obstreperous, because their voters & donors demand it. 'Sure, we'll pass a budget/raise the debt ceiling/fund the military.... once you kick every illegal immigrant out of the country!' says the Marjorie Taylor Green-lead Nationalist party. Or, nationalize every oil company for the AOC-lead Green party, etc.
But- maybe the two more centrist parties would just form a coalition together every single year, and mostly ignore the more extreme parties? This seems to be how, say, Germany runs. Anyways, would be interested in hearing other peoples' points of view. Could these 5 parties pass major legislation on a regular basis? What's political life like in a European country that just gets run by the same two centrist parties every year?
This is very interesting, indeed. Given the same data sets, different teams will draw different conclusions based on the decisions they made during the analysis process. And cognitive bias, at least in regards to the prior beliefs and attitudes, had much less effect on the results than expected. I'm still absorbing this, but I thought I'd put it out there for the rationalist community to consider...
"Abstract:
How does noise generated by researcher decisions undermine the credibility of science? We test this by observing all decisions made among 73 research teams as they independently conduct studies on the same hypothesis with identical starting data. We find excessive variation of outcomes. When combined, the 107 observed research decisions taken across teams explained at most 2.6% of the total variance in effect sizes and 10% of the deviance in subjective conclusions. Expertise, prior beliefs and attitudes of the researchers explain even less. Each model deployed to test the hypothesis was unique, which highlights a vast universe of research design variability that is normally hidden from view and suggests humility when presenting and interpreting scientific findings."
Paul Graham asked recently, "What's the oldest man-made object that you can hold in your hands that has never been lost and later found by someone else?" I found it to be a fun rabbit hole and posted my answers here: http://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-oldest-thing-that-has-never-been.html but I'd like to get help from some of the knowledgeable crowd here.
(I tried to post this on the subreddit, but it was removed and they said to post it here.)
The recent wave of COVID infections is almost exclusively among unvaccinated people. I assume the vast majority of ACX readers who have access to a vaccine has gotten one, so I don't see much risk for a gathering in areas where it is widely available. I would go to a meetup, but there isn't one anywhere near me.
In the Crazy Like Us Review, Scott wondered what a society with Mental Health Unawareness Campaigns would be like. It was presented as fanciful, but his description actually reminded me of one real society---Nazi Germany in the Second World War. At least according to the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld in his book Fighting Power, the Nazis disdained psychiatry as a Jewish science and had very little willingness, compared to the Anglo-Saxon countries, to accommodate soldiers with what we would now call PTSD.
And, at least according to van Creveld, it worked---the German armed forces had considerably lower rates of mental health casualties than Anglo-American ones. He further argues, in an anti-mental health/psychiatry vein, that this was a difference in the actual incidence of the problem, not merely in reporting/diagnosis. I don't know anywhere near enough to say if this is an accurate judgement, but perhaps people more knowledgeable about these issues would find the chapter discussing this interesting.
Also, maybe someone brought this up already, but I feel obligated to mention Sebastian Junger's book Tribe, which argues that warfare (e.g. London during the Blitz) can often *decrease* the prevalence of mental health issues.
I have noticed that those described as "woke" (social justice advocates and critical theorists) have what are called "binding" moral values, which are purity, loyalty and authority. They seem to have a fixation on purity of language, demonstrate strong in-group behavior and have a strong deference to the authority of the victimized group. This is in contrast with the values of liberals, prior to the shift toward more "woke" thinking, who had stronger individualizing foundations, which are harm avoidance and fairness.
I was unsure as to why this might be the case. One plausible theory I think is The Parasite-Stress Theory of Values and Sociality conceived by Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher. They believe that an environment with a lot of disease causes people to have"collectivist" morals and values. This behavior serves as protection against disease. Normally, this manifests in ethnocentrism, concerns about cleanliness and the like. For the woke, the disease is racism. I think that in the woke, it manifests in behavior that seems odd, puritanical or obsessive to those that don't share the same view for racism.
The woke understand that racial disparities are present all over the place and they attribute the disparities to racism. Since racism is infrequently explicit, it must manifest in covert and sometimes unintended ways, like in unconscious bias and micro-aggressions. I believe this might make the comparison between racism and disease as more than an analogy. The woke may begin to think about racism like it's a spreadable disease, leading them develop binding moral values.
People always talk about how Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan was Deeply Influenced by his observation of the English Civil War. But wasn't the English Civil War sort of, if anything, the exact *opposite* of a Hobbesian conflict? Two organized factions fought for control of a powerful, centralized state, driven by high-minded religious/ideological beliefs. In doing so, they, at least by the standards of most civil wars, generally respected civilians and private property. Whereas the brutal, self-interested, disorganized, etc. dynamics of conflict that Hobbes so insightfully described would seem more evident in e.g. the Scottish Highlands or rural Ireland, or in England during the Dark Ages.
If you were bullied physically (that is, people consistently and without provocation went past threating and actually hit you/physically prevented you from moving),
did this increase or decrease your fear of violence vs:
People that never got past the threatening phase, ie, you are surrounded and can't leave, but nobody is hitting you/holding you down?
I routinely got into fights and occasionally got lightly beaten by a group, and after getting out of the system, I notice that I am not afraid of physical violence/confrontation at all, but I get very quickly keyed up when someone is confrontational (I.e, if I am in a situation where another man whom I am having a negative interaction with approaches closer that 2 feet, my heart rate picks up and I feel myself entering fight mode, like I am 2 rounds deep into a sport fighting match.)
This means I do well in arguments/ aggressive negotiation at work and out, but that I need to be very aware of what is actually a threat, and what is behavior from someone who's never been struck with murder aforethought.
I wonder if having the threatening behavior without the actual physical component would have been even worse.
So long as the meetups are outside in the open air, I don't consider them irresponsible. If one were to happen in Amsterdam or anywhere else in the Netherlands I would definitely go.
Serbia is opening up, and while in September more soft measures might be in place, a meeting in the open air should not be a problem. I don't think there's any, but I'd be willing to organize some! Perhaps monthly or bi-weekly, don't know how I can find out if there's interest (except through this comment I suppose)
You may have seen this paper, covered recently in media e.g. Vice and the Guardian (UK), which plugs recent data into some 20th century modelling of the risk of catastrophic societal collapse in the mid-21st. It concludes that we're in a critical 10-20 year period in which 'business as usual' is likely to be disastrous. I don't know enough to appraise it though and would appreciate insights from anyone who does.
Seeking advice: should I pressure my aunt into getting the COVID vaccine?
Context: My aunt is 78 years old, and I'm the only remaining family member that she's close to. I'm about to have a baby, and she is very excited for me and is eager to meet the baby. This would involve airplane travel. She has not gotten the COVID vaccine (or any vaccine for many years, even the flu shot). She's not ferociously anti-vax, but believes very strongly in "natural medicine" and thinks that "putting artificial things" in her body is a bad idea.
I am tempted to tell her she can't meet the baby unless she gets vaccinated. Partly out of potential risk to the baby, but mostly because I'm extremely worried she's going to get COVID and I haven't been able to make any progress with gentle persuasion. The pressure might work, but it would feel cruel, like I'm emotionally blackmailing her. I'm also concerned she might A) refuse or B) lie to me that she's gotten it.
1. The Dublin LessWrong group would be delighted to have you! Would be surprised if covid were too bad here, given that vaccine coverage is now slightly higher than the US and hesitancy is low. We are small though, I suspect it would only be worth your time if you have friends in Ireland you want to meet.
2. My favourite SSC post of all time is your book review of that book about Herbert Hoover. You need to make a sequel! I feel sufficiently strongly about this that if you write it, I will redirect my yearly donations to a charity of your choice :)
For meetups, DC has been hosting them for a while. We've done them inside the last couple inside because DC is miserable outside in the summer, and there have been no issues. Numbers are down a little from the beforetime (~20 people instead of ~30). We're definitely in favor of more advertisement for the meetups, and if you're in DC you should definitely be coming! Sign up for the facebook group or mailing list here:
Commenters treat them fairly differently. Commenters are more forgiving of a woman doing it and view her motives as different. Eg on the debater-girlfriend: “[she] isn't interested in winning, she's interested in learning what you believe”, whereas on debater-boyfriend: “He wants to be the top dog. He wants to pick fights because then he can feel dominant. Content doesn't matter, he is trying to create situations where he feels strong... probably to compensate for something.”
Most commenters think the debater-boyfriend should be broken up with immediately or at least given an ultimatum. Debater girlfriend gets some mean comments (“She sounds insufferable to be around. I'm guessing she doesn't have a lot of friends”), but much fewer commenters recommend breaking up with her (that is famously quite rare for r/relationships, they are pretty trigger-happy about saying “dump the bitch/bastard”).
For me this is very interesting because I am very much the person being complaining about (hey, I’m on SSC!). Perhaps not entirely: I don’t *like* upsetting people, so I put effort into being more sensitive than is being described in these threads. And I don’t play devil’s advocate, unless a broad definition of that term is applied. So maybe I am or maybe I’m not like these people (though no-one's broken up with me about it).
Also, I want a relationship with someone exactly like debater-girlfriend. In my adult life, in all the relationships I’ve ended, lack of respectful disagreements has been a factor.
My model for both, which a fair few of the commenters go along with, is:
“Not everyone is interested in respectful disagreements. Many people who have opinions just want to keep those opinions, and to make statements but not have them be questioned, or only be questioned in a way that creates opportunities to affirm them. But some of us do; hearing that a person we like disagrees with us makes us eager to listen the reasons and find counter-arguments to them. It is a hobby, and as with any hobby, it can be frustrating for your partner to try to force you to engage in that hobby if you aren’t interested in it yourself. And it may indeed be the case that debate is just a status/class signalling exercise (again, just like other hobbies) but that does not change the fact that we learn a lot from it.”
Sometimes I worry like that that model is too blind to the way that status/control works in romantic relationships as opposed to friendships (most of my conversations with my platonic friends are debates). Many commenters on the debater-boyfriend thread are pretty opposed to the guy doing anything other than "having her back", which I think is sad.
But on the other hand, the debater-girlfriend thread exists. And I didn’t find that many other debater-boyfriend threads, so there might not even be that much gender disparity. Though I didn’t spend long looking.
I think the double standard is bad. They’re right that both of those people should break up with their partners, or not expect them to change. But it’s wrong that so many more of them say the dude’s behaviour is immoral than the woman’s.
When I spent a great deal of time thinking about memory and information retention, I recognized that sometimes people come to believe something for good reasons but they forget a lot of the reasons or the evidence that they read. The person is left with a strong conviction that is warranted but when someone asks them to justify their conviction, they appear to have no good reason for thinking what they do. Is there a name for this?
European here (and from a country that got a pretty big COVID spike recently). I would go to an in person indoor meeting in september. I would be slightly more comfortable in October, but that's largely paranoia at this point (I think).
Definitely not irresponsible to hold or promote one at this point.
I'm looking for a fall sublet/rental in Washington DC for the fall.
Briefly about me: I'm a mid-20s male PhD student in Planetary Science, spending the fall working on space policy on capitol hill. I currently live in a group house (5 BR, 6 people) and I love it, so I'm hoping for something similar in DC. Lately I spend most of my time biking, and I like just about everything outdoors. I love baseball and theater, board games and card games. I really like to cook but wouldn't be surprised if I end up eating out a lot since I'll actually have access to worthwhile restaurants. I'm very respectful of common-space cleanliness (sometimes my own room gets a bit messier), and I like to think I'm generally quite easygoing.
Budget is a mildly-flexible $1k/month, and I'm planning to be around from mid/late-September through mid/early-December. I'd like to live somewhere that makes it easy to commute to work on the hill, so something on the red/green/yellow line would be good, and/or somewhere close enough to bike easily.
[I posted this in the previous open thread and on DSL, I won't post it again, sorry if this is already getting spammy, but I'm worried I got to the previous open thread too late]
- March 2020: covid hits and the UK screws up the initial response
- Nov 2020: Cummings quits / gets fired at no10
Whatever he tried to do within the government: is there some other interpretation than "he failed"?
I should add that I'm not interested in a heated debate our a shouting match. I was very skeptical of Cummings approach from the beginning and instead of being "told you so" I'd like to hear better takes on this.
If you are interested in deepening your Stoic practice or learning more about Stoicism I co host a weekly zoom study group. We are working from this book. We just started week 2. Comment if you want an invite to the group.
I think I'm 50/50 on whether I'd be comfortable attending an indoor meetup in September. Case rates seem to be going down over the last handful of days, but it would be a lot of people and I think I'd have difficulty understanding conversation if we were masked.
(If I am comfortable going I'm the most likely organizer. We have an existing group "London rationalish" which used to be London LW before LW kind of died for a few years.)
I would be delighted to attend an in-person meet up in the US. Ideal would be a maskless meetup where everyone’s vaccination cards are checked at the door. Slightly less ideal is a maskless meetup with no vaccination checks. Even less ideal is a mask-enforced meetup but I’ll still attend one.
I consider it responsible to hold meetups in any countries where adults are able to walk into their nearest pharmacy and get vaccinated. So it’s fine in the UK but would be irresponsible in Mexico or Taiwan.
I sometimes thought about attending a meetup pre-pandemic, but never quite convinced myself to go. That degree of engagement is not going to push me over the edge into attending in a pandemic world. So, in a word, no.
I don't know what the covid data locally will look like in September, and I remain convinced that the PTB are choosing not to record things I'd very much like to know to judge actual risks. I can't predict how I'd feel about any indoor gathering of strangers that far into the future.
FWIW, I am currently visiting grocery stores in person, after a long period of getting groceries delivered instead. And I never stopped visiting medical facilities in person.
I am officially fully vaccinated, but my immune system was not at its best when I got the two Pfizer shots. I'm also 63 years old.
Probably I'm being overly paranoid, but OTOH, I'm an introvert; I don't really mind interacting with strangers only outdoors.
FWIW, my employer ratcheted back its demand for in-person work starting at the beginning of September; it's now holding off until October. And I'm currently off work on disability, contemplating retirement rather than return (NOT because of covid), so this is a data point rather than a concern.
My concern is primarily with the unvaccinated breeding new and improved variants that break through vaccinations more readily, but secondarily with data not being gathered on breakthrough cases, leading me to mistrust those who, having chosen not to collect the data that would provide evidence for their assertions, now assure me that I'm perfectly safe.
I had terrible food poisoning a few months ago, the worst I've ever had, from some leftover chicken. I decided to stop eating chicken forever as a result (so far, so good). It's an idea I had entertained for a while, for ethical reasons, but the misery I experienced gave me a renewed appreciation for suffering, and between the desire to not experience it (probably avoidable by just being more discriminating with leftovers) and to not inflict it, I got over the hump and made a decision I feel good about.
It's a pretty major part of most religions, but experiencing suffering really is necessary, for many or most people (including me) to really take suffering as seriously in decision making as its moral weight demands.
Somehow this seems obvious now, and much less so before I was sick. I wonder if we've become so distanced from suffering that much of our (the average Western person's) moral philosophy has been built entirely upon higher rungs of Maslow's hierarchy, resulting in some odd ideological conflicts.
I just listened to Lex Fridman interview Bret Weinstein and found the Weinstein's views on vaccination inconsistent and frustrating. Here's a brief summary:
1) He thinks we still have an opportunity to eradicate SARS-Cov-2 and should try to (I agree).
2) He has concerns about the possible effects of the mRNA and even the viral-vector vaccines. A steelman of his concern goes something like: "Because both the mRNA vaccine and the viral-vector vaccine are narrowly targeted at the spike protein, it does not provide as good immunity as real infection. In addition, this narrow focus introduces selection pressure on the virus to mutate. If we had deployed the virus before the pandemic was raging, it would be a different story, as the virus would not have an opportunity to reproduce with that selection pressure."
I disagree with this -- why does he not have this concern for other widely used vaccines, such as the flu, the measles, or other viruses that are already with us? I've read estimates that the vaccine is likely more effective against variants than natural immunity (partially because the dose is quite large), but admittedly the data is early. More to the point, many more studies reliably show that >99.95% of people hospitalized for COVID did not take the vaccine, and I presume some percentage may have been infected before.
3) He has a concern that the vaccination may induce antibody-dependent enhancement, making a later infection worse than it would have been with no infection. I am not aware of _any_ evidence showing this, if someone knows of some, could you kindly link it?
4) He feels it's borderline unethical to vaccinate children because they fare so much better than older people. I think a steelman would be "Our goal is herd immunity, not necessarily vaccination. We should let children develop her immunity naturally because so few children have problems getting COVID". It seems to me this argument directly contradicts his first point, which is that we should try to eradicate the disease. Eradication is more likely the more quickly we increase overall immunity, and vaccinating children helps this.
I cohost the Affix podcast (https://www.affix.live/), a two-dudes talking style podcast focusing on articles/books commonly discussed in this community. Probably the most similar podcast I can think of is Very Bad Wizards, but we're much less academic. I don't really want any monetary support, but would really appreciate getting some constructive feedback on what we're doing.
I wanted to jump on to that thread in the last comments free-for-all about PTSD. I won’t go on and on about it but it intrigued me, and the first thought I had was (just sort of trying) to imagine what was culturally “normative” in those times. If anyone’s interested in pursuing it I would love to talk about it more.
I would attend an outdoor gathering (even though it may well be cold where I live by September). I am not sure whether I would attend an indoor gathering.
I’ve been meaning to get the Philadelphia meetup running again, starting with rebranding our Google Group as ACX Meetup. We had been meeting at my home under our spacious covered porch for much of 2020, but suspended the meetup last December as cases skyrocketed, besides it being too damn cold.
I would have started up again already, but we had a baby in May. Given the shape of things currently, I’d like to continue hosting on my porch. I’ll consult my co-organizer and we’ll pick a date in the next few weeks for the revived meetup.
So I just learned in the past week or so that there's something called the 'non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment' or NAIRU, and I was a little blown away and horrified. As far as I can tell, this is an implicit promise that central banks will increase the cost of capital in order to deliberately make people unemployed. Isn't this really bad? If this is somehow necessary for the economy to function, how can societies justify making unemployment such a terrible experience?
I've been running an online discussion group on Parfit's Reasons and Persons. We're wrapping up Part One next week (fourth meeting). This isn't so far into the book that it would be difficult for anyone to ramp up and join us.
Worth a read - this paper by a team working with Gelman at Columbia is super-interesting and explains something you have talked about a bit in terms of multiple causes and limited possible room for explanation, but it explains this far more clearly than anything I have seen before.
Abstract: In some scientific fields, it is common to have certain variables of interest that are of particular importance and for which there are many studies indicating a relationship with a different explanatory variable. In such cases, particularly those where no relationships are known among explanatory variables, it is worth asking under what conditions it is possible for all such claimed effects to exist simultaneously. This paper addresses this question by reviewing some theorems from multivariate analysis that show, unless the explanatory variables also have sizable effects on each other, it is impossible to have many such large effects. We also discuss implications for the replication crisis in social science.
I'm not very active here, but I would be interested in going to a meetup in Malta in ~September, and I wouldn't consider holding one indoors irresponsible, though I think meeting outdoors would be more pleasant. Not sure if there are any other readers from Malta tho?
I'm organizing the ACX / LessWrong meetings in Portland, Oregon for the past couple months and we are comfortable meeting in person with an online option.
It would appear we still don't have much of our pre-pandemic attendence and I would very much appreciate any publicity or visits you could offer. We meet bi-weekly at the beeminders house, and have attendence around 10 people. I'd be happy to communicate more about it over email at scelarek@gmail.com.
I want to recommend "The Hidden Spring" by Mark Solms. It talks at length about predictive coding, etc, and also purportedly gives an account for how and why consciousness arose.
I experience debilitating shame for situations that my subconscious deems "mistakes". It can scale from the event haunting me for a couple of hours, to days, to weeks, and the worst cases I'll remember as painful flashbacks forever. If I make a mistake that gets deemed as particularly bad, my brain will use most of its processing power to go over the situation again and again, making it impossible to focus on anything. I've walked through red light into a street in this state only realizing it after a car horn. This is similar to when you hear about a problem someone is having and your brain immediately goes into problem solving mode, except there is no solution to past mistakes so you get stuck in a loop. I've kind of learned to live with this, but it seems to be a root cause for many traits and behaviors.
The problem I'm having though is that I have difficult time defining what this is, finding any information on it or finding people who have this issue. There's avoidant personality, but that places emphasis on relationships and otherwise doesn't feel like a fit. There is generally just discussion on shame, but it often places emphasis on feelings of inadequacy. My emphasis is more on the aftermath, the debilitating effect of it, the flashbacks that feel like someone stabbing me out of the blue. It doesn't matter if I rationally know I made no mistake, I still can't shake the reaction my body has to it.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? Any resources you can point out for me to further research this on my own?
What are some possible future trajectories for lock-down-like Covid-19 restrictions? (I'm primarily interested in the US, but the arguments might be generic.) Here are a few I can think of:
1. Permanent mini-lockdown, possibly oscillates up and down. Businesses are legally required to discourage work from the office as much as possible, local public transport requires masks, air travel requires health checks and/or proofs of vaccinations, international travel includes quarantines, etc. This seems difficult to pull off both politically and also in terms of long-term compliance (including "difficult politically because of poor long-term compliance").
2. A requisite portion of the population (70%?) gets vaccinated, and Covid-19 is declared to be over. Seems somewhat implausible (and/or slow) in the US as a whole since vaccinations seem to have stalled at a bit more than 50%, although perhaps if the vaccine is approved in children, we'll cross that threshold. Also, with the Delta variant more contagious (and perhaps more likely to turn vaccinated people into carriers / spreaders) than previously expected, the previously-advertised 70% might get bumped up higher?
3. It is empirically observed that cases and/or deaths have dropped enough to stop imposing restrictions. (i.e. mini-lockdown that actually gradually ends.) Perhaps this is because we achieve herd immunity by natural immunity; with ~10% of the US as cases, and ~50% vaccinated, depending on how many cases were missed due to lack of symptoms, we might actually be close. Because of inertia, I would expect Covid-19 deaths being treated as more important than other deaths for a while, causing this to take longer than e.g. if we had equivalent levels of deaths but had crossed an observable vaccination threshold.
4. We declare Covid to be over now, and just deal with the extra cases. This would be somewhere between declaring that lockdowns were a bad idea to begin with, and declaring that we've achieved #3 (e.g. "yes cases from delta are rising, but they're not rising all that much").
My interest here is partly in planning my own life (e.g. when might international travel be a thing again?) and partly in trying to understand some of the positive externalities vaccinations have on other people (e.g. if we're following scenario #2, then you vaccinating makes my lockdown end faster; this mechanism is absent from scenarios #1, #3, #4).
I'd be super interested in holding a meetup in Mexico City. As for whether it is irresponsible, although vaccination has been slower than what one would wish for, most people I hang out with here are already vaccinated (most got vaccinated in the US over the past few months). I imagine that people who would'd be interested in an ACX meet up would be drawn from a similar population and hence have higher than average vaccination rates, so I wouldn't be very worried about risk of contagion. Of course, one can always make, vaccination mandatory for the meeting.
I would go to either indoor or outdoor meetup in September. I would be more worried about the state of restrictions here in Poland by then: there are virtually no cases at the moment, so September might still see a new peak in cases and some lockdowns (vaccination-wise, Poland is doing slightly worse than EU overall).
I think a lot of rationalists and rationalist-adjacent types massively overestimate the possible practical value of space colonisation as a way of avoiding extinction.
The future is hard to predict, sure. It could be very good, or very bad. I think a future where humans progress to the point where humans are, someday, capable of establishing functioning colonies on Mars, the Moon, and conceivably other objects in the solar system, while optimistic, is perfectly credible. And a future in which human activity or natural disaster renders the earth uninhabitable beyond anything we can do to prevent it, and humans go extinct is distressingly plausible.
But a future in which both those things happen simultaneously strikes me as much, much less likely. Establishing undersea civilisations, or turning the Sahara or the Antarctic into hospitable paradises, or reversing all the pollution humans have ever caused and much worse besides, or would be tasks with a lot in common with rendering other planets hospitable, but much easier.
If we ever become capable of colonising other planets, we almost certainly won't need to.
Could anyone give me a more nuanced explanation as to what “ban teaching critical race theory in schools” looks like as a policy? I’ve seen that sort of terminology tossed around in the media for some states’ laws, but it feels like there’s a lot of vagueness there. To me there’s a big difference between “critical race theory can never be mentioned/explained/analyzed in schools” and “students can’t be forced to take a class that teaches them that critical race theory is true.”
I’d just like to note that I will try to avoid getting myself into arguments over whether the policies are good; I’m more interested in whether this is something like the Georgia voting laws that got oversimplified by the media, or if they’re as cut and dry as it is made out to be.
I have a room that isn't getting as cool as the rest of the house, causing some suffering for people inside of it, so I'm looking into window AC units.
The room also doesn't heat well in the summer, so I thought, "oh, I'll get one with a heat pump, too."
Well, window AC units are less than $200, and AC-units-with-heat-pumps seem to go for at least $600.
What gives? I thought a heat pump was just an AC unit running in reverse. This is for a relatively southern climate, so I don't need to push against an insane heat gradient. From the looks of it I'll just be better running a space heater 24/7.
I want to do research on the chance of being cancelled (fired from one's job for political reasons). It would seem useful to have a rough probability of this even though there are lots of factors. Are people excessively precautious? This was something I thought about a lot prior to creating my blog. I ended up making it but sometimes I wonder if I'm being stupid.
Does anyone have data on this of whatever kind or research?
Whenever I hear someone complain about the "digital dark age", I wonder if it really is a problem in light of the likelihood that the NSA has been saving all the contents of the internet for years now. Someday, it will be released back to the public.
I've been happy doing indoor social events with presumably vaccinated people the past few weeks. I'm not sure if I still would be happy with this in September. It will depend a lot on whether the recent spikes in the US reverse themselves.
I basically think of capitalism as expressing human desires weighted by purchasing power. If you imagine some kind of "work point" system based on how long you work, how arduous your work is, and how rare the skills are for your work in comparison to the desire for it, it seems to me that when you work for someone else you earn "work points" in the form of money that you can spend to get someone else to do work that *you* want them to do. (Except in a complicated acasual way where people predict your desires instead of responding to them, but in effect it's similar.) Then there's saving, where you sacrifice your work points in the present (freeing people up to do work other people want them to do), somehow in exchange for more work points in the future, that I don't fully understand. Is that a good way of thinking about it?
The data from the US military might be more reliable than much of the other data. Is there reason to doubt the general conclusion from Scott's article? Or is the US military just a weird outlier?
I'd be happy to host a Greater London ACX meetup - picnic in Hyde Park or somewhere? @Scott can I ask Claire & Buck if they can fund evidence-based brain-boosting drinks & healthy nibbles?
With some cities reinstating mask mandates I’m wondering what the long term plan is here. Do they expect the number of people vaccinated to increase significantly going forward? If not is there any end to this cycle? Are we going to have new variants every few months and never resume regular life? Have any of these public officials explained what the end game is here ?
If everyone is vaccinated, I think the chance of someone getting in a car crash on the way to the meetup far exceeds the chance of someone getting seriously ill from covid caught at the meetup.
Let's suppose average meetup attendee has to drive 50 miles. Most of this is over busy bay-area streets, which are probably four times more dangerous than the average mile driven in the US. The chance of any car crash is 1 in 366 per 1000 miles driven, so the average attendee's chance of a car crash on the way to the meetup is about 1 in 2000.
What is the probability you catch covid from another vaccinated attendee at a meetup where everybody is fully vaccinated? Hard to quantify, but probably lower than that. And if you do catch it while vaccinated, it will almost always be a very mild case not leading to hospitalization.
Back of the envelope, 99.5% of covid deaths in the US are unvaccinated, versus about half of the population is vaccinated, so the vaccine reduces individual risk of death from covid by 99% through some combination of reducing the risk of infection and reducing the severity post-infection. If covid was less than 100 times worse than the flu pre-vaccine (which seems to be supported by the death tolls), then post vaccine it's not much to worry about.
My null hypothesis is that media will continue to hype any new variant with a few SNPs that make it slightly more transmissible, without regard to the scope of the risk relative to ordinary activities like driving and smoking. Same thing with terrorism -- people find it more interesting than the scope of the risk warrants, so it gets more media coverage than it deserves.
Does anyone think that the recent surge in house prices and rents prices is (at least partially) caused by the eviction and foreclosure moratoriums?
Certainly some of the house prices can be attributed to low mortgage rates (payments would be lower). But if people are not leaving the homes they can't afford (due to the moratoriums) then wouldn't that "distort" the market?
Just curious if anyone else sees it that way. I see a lot of people complaining that "hedge funds" are driving up prices. That could be. But I'm not sure where it goes from here.
Would I go to (realistically, host) an in-person indoors ACX meetup in September? --> Depends on the local case rates, but probably not. My rough prediction is that they will still be highish by September and given high-risk status of household members, I'm inclined to be cautious. If they go back to normal, maybe. (Or if I am absolutely sure Covid isn't a serious risk to us, but I'm sufficiently risk-averse that that is a high bar.)
Would I consider it irresponsible to hold one? --> Depends on the local case rates. If they continue their current climb through September (seems highly unlikely, but so does the fact that they're climbing now) then yes. If they've crested and gotten halfway down, no. If they're back to baseline "I think this is probably false positive" levels, then absolutely not.
Scott: the "See all" link on the main page of the blog (Archive view sorted by most recent) is now only displaying the most recent 12 posts rather than lazy-loading through all of them (both before and after your most recent post). Archive view sorted by most popular is still displaying everything, but this is making it rather time-consuming to access old stuff since the order there isn't obvious.
I've confirmed with a friend that he's experiencing the same issue, so it's not my browser at fault, and it was fine a couple of days ago.
I've been following the group pile-on of Kelsey Piper over on the DSL forum, and I'm absolutely blown away - not for the first time - by what an incredibly nasty, vicious conversation it is over there, how truly horrible the people who dominate that conversation are, and how thin the veneer of rationalism is over the substance, which is nothing but sheer hatred: for the left, for minorities, for normies, for journalists, for anyone and everyone who isn't them.
The situation is that Piper, a Vox journalist who's also part of the rationalist community, wrote a couple of Tumblr posts back in 2019, the entire sum and substance of which was that she and others she knew found US border enforcement policies genuinely upsetting, and those who assumed that those feelings were cynical and performative were wrong. That's it. That's all they said. Later, before the end of Trump's term, she stopped posting on Tumblr entirely.
The hive mind on DSL has decided that: (1) These two Tumblr posts were part of a coordinated campaign of anti-Trump propaganda, as proven by the fact that Piper hasn't written anything about immigration since Biden's election. (2) Even though she never used her feelings as a policy argument, or argued for anything other than "These feelings exist," she must have been intentionally empowering others to do so. Apparently, you're accountable not just for what *you* say, but for everyone that DSL decides is on your side. We live in a society, I guess? (3) The fact that she apparently withdrew from Tumblr entirely before the election, and thus wouldn't be expected to write anything about Biden there, is only further proof of her dastardly scheming. (4) If she was sincere about her feelings on border enforcement, she would necessarily have written about them on Vox - even though that's not her beat on Vox and writing about anything in that professional capacity requires a substantial commitment. (5) If she had actually been dazed and crying herself to sleep in 2019 when this came to her attention, she would have been in that state continuously all this time - because, you know, that's totally how emotions work, fellow humans. Adjusting to a situation and going on with life, after being upset, isn't something that people do. No evil robots here! (6) If she had been a functional human being, she wouldn't have felt emotional distress about the suffering of people who weren't her friends or family in the first place. People who feel a human connection to others outside their tribe don't deserve to be taken seriously. This altruism bullshit is all well and good until someone actually *cares* about it, am I right?
Now these paragons of rationality are solemnly talking about what to do when the principle of charity breaks down, and acting like they have irrefutable proof of Piper's bad faith - whereas if they were capable of *practicing* clear thinking instead of just peacocking about it, they would know that they have no valid evidence at all. Piper, whose work is essentially to spread rationalist values in the mainstream media, is gamely engaging with these preposterous attacks. I don't know whether to admire her for it or shake my head at her for trying to reason with those who are manifestly not motivated by reason.
I would certainly go to a meet up within a reasonable distance if there was a good chance you’d be there. I would check out one nearer even if not. I do not consider it unreasonable to hold them, since for me the pandemic is largely over—I’m vaccinated, everyone I care for is either vaccinated or determined to take their chances, and the level of risk these days is simply not high; it’s time for life to go on.
Regarding the meetups - I run the Atlanta SSC meetup group - we've had over 12 so far - though the lockdown has put a damper on them for the past year or so (mostly we've moved online) - however
I speak for everyone in the group when I say we would all go to an indoors ACX meetup in September, and none of us consider it irresponsible to hold one.
The case for enchantment https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/the-case-for-enchantment
"I’m interested in the community’s opinion: would you go to an in-person indoors ACX meetup in ~September? Would you consider it irresponsible to hold one? "
I would not go (but I wouldn't be going even without Covid). I would not consider it irresponsible to hold one.
How about treating the SSC community like adults, advertise the meetings if anyone wants to host, add a line mentioning that Covid is still a thing and letting folks decide for themselves?
In general, I am okay (up to a point, but a fairly tolerant point) with letting people make decisions about their own lives even if I think it is a mistake. I'm even okay shouldering some externalities to enable this, hoping that folks return the favor if I want to take different risks than they do.
What do Adam Grant, David Sedaris, and Foucault have in common? https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/does-power-obscure-perception
Re meetups - the NYC rationalist community has been having in-person meetups again for a few months now (I know there's been some people here who've expressed interest).
They're usually Tuesday nights, occasionally on other days or weekend events. Ongoing mailing list/details are here https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/overcomingbiasnyc
I use this site to sometimes mention my podcast. I hope people don't mind. Anyway the latest was on Sumo with Kenji Tierney (he has such a nice voice!) I found it really interesting - he went into the history and comes at it as an anthropologist. Was startled to find that when the Japanese wanted to impress Perry they put on a Sumo exhibition (which had the exact opposite effect that they wanted - naked men - how barbaric!) and Perry had some of his men black up and put on a minstrel show.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/8916373
TL;DR: The FDA is 5X too worried about long term credibility
There's been a debate about how soon the FDA should fully approve the mRNA vaccines. Critics like Matthew Yglesias and Eric Topol argue that full approval could be very beneficial because it opens the door to more mandates and allows advertising. Defenders of the FDA say the critics aren't thinking about the long term. If safety issues emerge after full approval, the defenders claim, the credibility of the FDA would be shot for years, driving fewer vaccinations in the long term.
The FDA's concerns about long term credibility seems hand-wavy and non-quantitative, so I decided to do some some back-of-the-envelope math to see how much it actually matters. With some reasonable assumptions that are quite favorable to the FDA, I estimate that they are 5X too worried about long term credibility. Even after accounting for long term risk, faster approval could give us 40 million vaccinated person-years over the long term, which could save over 100,000 lives.
The crux of the issue is this: The FDA worries about the unlikely scenario where safety issues emerge after approval of the 2021 vaccine, driving long term vaccine reluctance. That's fair, but that's mostly true *regardless* of whether the 2021 vaccine got full approval or an EUA. More details in my post linked to below.
I encourage anyone to question any of my assumptions!
https://chris-said.io/2021/07/25/fda-and-vaccines/
I'll be away in my hometown during September, but in October why not an open air meeting in Amsterdam during a good weather day in a nice park?
I have been noodling for awhile now on creative ways to reduce emissions from air travel. Here's a fun one: what if we had electric towplanes tow jet aircraft off the ground as a present-day towplane does a glider, and the jet engines kicked in only after takeoff?
Advantages:
-- An electric towplane might be more feasible than a medium/long-range electric passenger plane, because all it needs to do is get the towed plane off the ground, unhook the tow cable, and land again before recharging, so the batteries required would be relatively small.
-- Besides the fuel and emissions savings from not having to use jet engines for takeoff, it would also reduce noise and air pollution around airports.
-- Retrofitting existing planes to be towed might be cheaper than replacing them.
Possible obstacles:
-- A towed takeoff might be too rough and/or too unreliable compared to a powered takeoff.
-- Existing tow cable materials might not be strong enough to take the load of a large passenger jet.
-- Existing airframes of passenger jets might not withstand being towed into the air, and retrofitting them might be infeasible.
-- The towing process might be so aerodynamically inefficient as to cancel out the energy savings. (Disclaimer: I know next to nothing about aerodynamics or aircraft engineering).
What else am I missing?
Making good progress on my first game. I've finished writing the rough draft for the main dialog, just need to write the rest of it and make more progress in Godot. We're at about where I was when I abandoned the project in 2012 in terms of gameplay currently.
"would you go to an in-person indoors ACX meetup in ~September?"
Yes.
"Would you consider it irresponsible to hold one?"
No.
Modeling of each country's Delta waves are all over the place, but after it gets a country to herd immunity, it seems like in-person indoor meetups would be thoroughly appropriate.
That could very well happen first in Europe. The UK wave seems to be cresting (although I've heard a couple competing hypotheses, like a test shortage). They also have very high immunity levels, suggesting that the Delta burn through the remainder of the unvaccinated population would be quick.
The US has a much larger unvaccinated (and uninfected) portion of its population, so the Delta wave will probably be longer and worse. It seems like a good idea to go to (parts of) Europe.
@Deiseach would you be at all interested in having an email conversation with me? I'm a trans woman with I think a rare perspective and I'd like to talk about it. If so, email me at jmb3481@gmail.com
I’d love to go to a European meetup.
Does anyone have thoughts about the recent crackdowns in the Chinese tech scene?
I'm in the UK and would not go to an indoor meetup in September unless cases and hospitalisations are significantly down from the current level (which depends on a whole lot of things about vaccination uptake and effectiveness we don't really know yet).
We’re in the middle of an irresponsible experiment with removing restrictions before vaccine coverage is complete, so I'd say non local indoor meets (ie of people who wouldn't normally mix, especially from multiple localities) are irresponsible to plan at this time.
On the other hand, there are lots of lovely country parks and similar outdoor venues with seating throughout the country and I'd cheerfully attend a meetup in one of those - many have roof but no walls arrangements usually used as smoking areas which are ideal for a weatherproof but relatively covid safe meetup.
I'd argue that it's irresponsible to *not* have September indoor meetups, at least in places where vaccines are generally available - once vaccination of the willing is complete, the biggest danger from covid is that governments (or culture) go into permanent covid mode, where they keep travel and gathering restrictions or limits forever on increasingly thin pretext. "Universal vaccination" is pretty much the only Schelling point we have on when to come out of lockdown, and if we don't use it we might be stuck in lockdown misery for decades (just like we are with the TSA).
Ok, I've been trying to search and collect evidence and studies that show if antipsychotic do, or not, shrinks the brain in the long term, so does anyone know about more this topic? Any help would be appreciated.
A couple of open threads ago I rambled on about what the US as a multiparty system would look like. I hope it's not gauche for me to continue talking about it, because I've been thinking about this a lot, and also I got some interesting new data. The Republican polling firm Echelon Insights conducted a bunch of research on this exact topic- their Twitter thread about it is here
https://twitter.com/EchelonInsights/status/1196494470772072448
They theorize 5 political parties for the US- Nationalist (Trumpy), Conservative (Reagan/country club Republican), Acela (Bloomberg/neoliberal), Labor (blue collar economically liberal/socially conservative) and Green (AOC). From their original sample, their respondents broke down at 19/21/12/28/10%, respectively- Labor being the single most popular party. (Interestingly I had a hard time thinking of a US politician to use as an example for that).
As I mentioned, traditional Poli Sci teaches that multiparty presidential systems are pretty dysfunctional, with Latin America being the classic example. The parties squabble, and with a separately elected President with no power to advance legislation on his/her own, not much gets done. I'm trying to imagine how these 5 parties would govern together if they were in Congress now, with Biden as President.
Part of my skepticism is that the present US system incentivizes politicians to act unusually crazily, to bring in campaign donations, and there are no strong party actors to say 'stop being quite so crazy on social media or we'll kick you out'. So the Nationalist and Green parties would be even more obstreperous, because their voters & donors demand it. 'Sure, we'll pass a budget/raise the debt ceiling/fund the military.... once you kick every illegal immigrant out of the country!' says the Marjorie Taylor Green-lead Nationalist party. Or, nationalize every oil company for the AOC-lead Green party, etc.
But- maybe the two more centrist parties would just form a coalition together every single year, and mostly ignore the more extreme parties? This seems to be how, say, Germany runs. Anyways, would be interested in hearing other peoples' points of view. Could these 5 parties pass major legislation on a regular basis? What's political life like in a European country that just gets run by the same two centrist parties every year?
This is very interesting, indeed. Given the same data sets, different teams will draw different conclusions based on the decisions they made during the analysis process. And cognitive bias, at least in regards to the prior beliefs and attitudes, had much less effect on the results than expected. I'm still absorbing this, but I thought I'd put it out there for the rationalist community to consider...
"Abstract:
How does noise generated by researcher decisions undermine the credibility of science? We test this by observing all decisions made among 73 research teams as they independently conduct studies on the same hypothesis with identical starting data. We find excessive variation of outcomes. When combined, the 107 observed research decisions taken across teams explained at most 2.6% of the total variance in effect sizes and 10% of the deviance in subjective conclusions. Expertise, prior beliefs and attitudes of the researchers explain even less. Each model deployed to test the hypothesis was unique, which highlights a vast universe of research design variability that is normally hidden from view and suggests humility when presenting and interpreting scientific findings."
https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/cd5j9/
Paul Graham asked recently, "What's the oldest man-made object that you can hold in your hands that has never been lost and later found by someone else?" I found it to be a fun rabbit hole and posted my answers here: http://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-oldest-thing-that-has-never-been.html but I'd like to get help from some of the knowledgeable crowd here.
(I tried to post this on the subreddit, but it was removed and they said to post it here.)
The recent wave of COVID infections is almost exclusively among unvaccinated people. I assume the vast majority of ACX readers who have access to a vaccine has gotten one, so I don't see much risk for a gathering in areas where it is widely available. I would go to a meetup, but there isn't one anywhere near me.
In the Crazy Like Us Review, Scott wondered what a society with Mental Health Unawareness Campaigns would be like. It was presented as fanciful, but his description actually reminded me of one real society---Nazi Germany in the Second World War. At least according to the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld in his book Fighting Power, the Nazis disdained psychiatry as a Jewish science and had very little willingness, compared to the Anglo-Saxon countries, to accommodate soldiers with what we would now call PTSD.
And, at least according to van Creveld, it worked---the German armed forces had considerably lower rates of mental health casualties than Anglo-American ones. He further argues, in an anti-mental health/psychiatry vein, that this was a difference in the actual incidence of the problem, not merely in reporting/diagnosis. I don't know anywhere near enough to say if this is an accurate judgement, but perhaps people more knowledgeable about these issues would find the chapter discussing this interesting.
https://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Power-Performance-1939-1945-Contributions/dp/0313091579
Also, maybe someone brought this up already, but I feel obligated to mention Sebastian Junger's book Tribe, which argues that warfare (e.g. London during the Blitz) can often *decrease* the prevalence of mental health issues.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01F7UOSU0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
I have noticed that those described as "woke" (social justice advocates and critical theorists) have what are called "binding" moral values, which are purity, loyalty and authority. They seem to have a fixation on purity of language, demonstrate strong in-group behavior and have a strong deference to the authority of the victimized group. This is in contrast with the values of liberals, prior to the shift toward more "woke" thinking, who had stronger individualizing foundations, which are harm avoidance and fairness.
I was unsure as to why this might be the case. One plausible theory I think is The Parasite-Stress Theory of Values and Sociality conceived by Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher. They believe that an environment with a lot of disease causes people to have"collectivist" morals and values. This behavior serves as protection against disease. Normally, this manifests in ethnocentrism, concerns about cleanliness and the like. For the woke, the disease is racism. I think that in the woke, it manifests in behavior that seems odd, puritanical or obsessive to those that don't share the same view for racism.
The woke understand that racial disparities are present all over the place and they attribute the disparities to racism. Since racism is infrequently explicit, it must manifest in covert and sometimes unintended ways, like in unconscious bias and micro-aggressions. I believe this might make the comparison between racism and disease as more than an analogy. The woke may begin to think about racism like it's a spreadable disease, leading them develop binding moral values.
An elaboration and examples: https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/does-viewing-racism-as-a-disease
People always talk about how Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan was Deeply Influenced by his observation of the English Civil War. But wasn't the English Civil War sort of, if anything, the exact *opposite* of a Hobbesian conflict? Two organized factions fought for control of a powerful, centralized state, driven by high-minded religious/ideological beliefs. In doing so, they, at least by the standards of most civil wars, generally respected civilians and private property. Whereas the brutal, self-interested, disorganized, etc. dynamics of conflict that Hobbes so insightfully described would seem more evident in e.g. the Scottish Highlands or rural Ireland, or in England during the Dark Ages.
Links post gave me a thought re. Bullying.
For those of you that were bullied:
If you were bullied physically (that is, people consistently and without provocation went past threating and actually hit you/physically prevented you from moving),
did this increase or decrease your fear of violence vs:
People that never got past the threatening phase, ie, you are surrounded and can't leave, but nobody is hitting you/holding you down?
I routinely got into fights and occasionally got lightly beaten by a group, and after getting out of the system, I notice that I am not afraid of physical violence/confrontation at all, but I get very quickly keyed up when someone is confrontational (I.e, if I am in a situation where another man whom I am having a negative interaction with approaches closer that 2 feet, my heart rate picks up and I feel myself entering fight mode, like I am 2 rounds deep into a sport fighting match.)
This means I do well in arguments/ aggressive negotiation at work and out, but that I need to be very aware of what is actually a threat, and what is behavior from someone who's never been struck with murder aforethought.
I wonder if having the threatening behavior without the actual physical component would have been even worse.
So long as the meetups are outside in the open air, I don't consider them irresponsible. If one were to happen in Amsterdam or anywhere else in the Netherlands I would definitely go.
Serbia is opening up, and while in September more soft measures might be in place, a meeting in the open air should not be a problem. I don't think there's any, but I'd be willing to organize some! Perhaps monthly or bi-weekly, don't know how I can find out if there's interest (except through this comment I suppose)
Re: meetups: I would not go, and I would consider it vaguely irresponsible to hold or promote indoor meet-ups in September. I'm in the UK.
https://advisory.kpmg.us/articles/2021/limits-to-growth.html
You may have seen this paper, covered recently in media e.g. Vice and the Guardian (UK), which plugs recent data into some 20th century modelling of the risk of catastrophic societal collapse in the mid-21st. It concludes that we're in a critical 10-20 year period in which 'business as usual' is likely to be disastrous. I don't know enough to appraise it though and would appreciate insights from anyone who does.
Seeking advice: should I pressure my aunt into getting the COVID vaccine?
Context: My aunt is 78 years old, and I'm the only remaining family member that she's close to. I'm about to have a baby, and she is very excited for me and is eager to meet the baby. This would involve airplane travel. She has not gotten the COVID vaccine (or any vaccine for many years, even the flu shot). She's not ferociously anti-vax, but believes very strongly in "natural medicine" and thinks that "putting artificial things" in her body is a bad idea.
I am tempted to tell her she can't meet the baby unless she gets vaccinated. Partly out of potential risk to the baby, but mostly because I'm extremely worried she's going to get COVID and I haven't been able to make any progress with gentle persuasion. The pressure might work, but it would feel cruel, like I'm emotionally blackmailing her. I'm also concerned she might A) refuse or B) lie to me that she's gotten it.
1. The Dublin LessWrong group would be delighted to have you! Would be surprised if covid were too bad here, given that vaccine coverage is now slightly higher than the US and hesitancy is low. We are small though, I suspect it would only be worth your time if you have friends in Ireland you want to meet.
2. My favourite SSC post of all time is your book review of that book about Herbert Hoover. You need to make a sequel! I feel sufficiently strongly about this that if you write it, I will redirect my yearly donations to a charity of your choice :)
For meetups, DC has been hosting them for a while. We've done them inside the last couple inside because DC is miserable outside in the summer, and there have been no issues. Numbers are down a little from the beforetime (~20 people instead of ~30). We're definitely in favor of more advertisement for the meetups, and if you're in DC you should definitely be coming! Sign up for the facebook group or mailing list here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595
https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/dc-slatestarcodex
If anyone holding meetups wants a place to post them, there is the (currently somewhat neglected) community forum on DSL here:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/board,8.0.html
Here are two posts on r/relationships, gender swapped, complaining that their partner debates them too much:
"My [25F] boyfriend [29M] of 1.5 years wants to debate EVERYTHING and always seems down to argue. It's making me not like him. Help?": https://web.archive.org/web/20210723234553/https://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/421dab/my_25f_boyfriend_29m_of_15_years_wants_to_debate/
"My [28M] Girlfriend [27F] of 3 years will constantly want to "push" my values and argue all of them.": https://web.archive.org/web/20210723234726/https://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/7e3fqv/my_28m_girlfriend_27f_of_3_years_will_constantly/
Commenters treat them fairly differently. Commenters are more forgiving of a woman doing it and view her motives as different. Eg on the debater-girlfriend: “[she] isn't interested in winning, she's interested in learning what you believe”, whereas on debater-boyfriend: “He wants to be the top dog. He wants to pick fights because then he can feel dominant. Content doesn't matter, he is trying to create situations where he feels strong... probably to compensate for something.”
Most commenters think the debater-boyfriend should be broken up with immediately or at least given an ultimatum. Debater girlfriend gets some mean comments (“She sounds insufferable to be around. I'm guessing she doesn't have a lot of friends”), but much fewer commenters recommend breaking up with her (that is famously quite rare for r/relationships, they are pretty trigger-happy about saying “dump the bitch/bastard”).
For me this is very interesting because I am very much the person being complaining about (hey, I’m on SSC!). Perhaps not entirely: I don’t *like* upsetting people, so I put effort into being more sensitive than is being described in these threads. And I don’t play devil’s advocate, unless a broad definition of that term is applied. So maybe I am or maybe I’m not like these people (though no-one's broken up with me about it).
Also, I want a relationship with someone exactly like debater-girlfriend. In my adult life, in all the relationships I’ve ended, lack of respectful disagreements has been a factor.
My model for both, which a fair few of the commenters go along with, is:
“Not everyone is interested in respectful disagreements. Many people who have opinions just want to keep those opinions, and to make statements but not have them be questioned, or only be questioned in a way that creates opportunities to affirm them. But some of us do; hearing that a person we like disagrees with us makes us eager to listen the reasons and find counter-arguments to them. It is a hobby, and as with any hobby, it can be frustrating for your partner to try to force you to engage in that hobby if you aren’t interested in it yourself. And it may indeed be the case that debate is just a status/class signalling exercise (again, just like other hobbies) but that does not change the fact that we learn a lot from it.”
Sometimes I worry like that that model is too blind to the way that status/control works in romantic relationships as opposed to friendships (most of my conversations with my platonic friends are debates). Many commenters on the debater-boyfriend thread are pretty opposed to the guy doing anything other than "having her back", which I think is sad.
But on the other hand, the debater-girlfriend thread exists. And I didn’t find that many other debater-boyfriend threads, so there might not even be that much gender disparity. Though I didn’t spend long looking.
I think the double standard is bad. They’re right that both of those people should break up with their partners, or not expect them to change. But it’s wrong that so many more of them say the dude’s behaviour is immoral than the woman’s.
When I spent a great deal of time thinking about memory and information retention, I recognized that sometimes people come to believe something for good reasons but they forget a lot of the reasons or the evidence that they read. The person is left with a strong conviction that is warranted but when someone asks them to justify their conviction, they appear to have no good reason for thinking what they do. Is there a name for this?
European here (and from a country that got a pretty big COVID spike recently). I would go to an in person indoor meeting in september. I would be slightly more comfortable in October, but that's largely paranoia at this point (I think).
Definitely not irresponsible to hold or promote one at this point.
I'm looking for a fall sublet/rental in Washington DC for the fall.
Briefly about me: I'm a mid-20s male PhD student in Planetary Science, spending the fall working on space policy on capitol hill. I currently live in a group house (5 BR, 6 people) and I love it, so I'm hoping for something similar in DC. Lately I spend most of my time biking, and I like just about everything outdoors. I love baseball and theater, board games and card games. I really like to cook but wouldn't be surprised if I end up eating out a lot since I'll actually have access to worthwhile restaurants. I'm very respectful of common-space cleanliness (sometimes my own room gets a bit messier), and I like to think I'm generally quite easygoing.
Budget is a mildly-flexible $1k/month, and I'm planning to be around from mid/late-September through mid/early-December. I'd like to live somewhere that makes it easy to commute to work on the hill, so something on the red/green/yellow line would be good, and/or somewhere close enough to bike easily.
[I posted this in the previous open thread and on DSL, I won't post it again, sorry if this is already getting spammy, but I'm worried I got to the previous open thread too late]
Thoughts on Dominic Cummings, anyone? (If this was already in the discussion of the links post, I missed it)
I didn't follow me to closely, but to me it looked like
- Jan 2020: Cummings set out to transform the way the government works, see e.g. https://dominiccummings.com/2020/01/02/two-hands-are-a-lot-were-hiring-data-scientists-project-managers-policy-experts-assorted-weirdos/
- March 2020: covid hits and the UK screws up the initial response
- Nov 2020: Cummings quits / gets fired at no10
Whatever he tried to do within the government: is there some other interpretation than "he failed"?
I should add that I'm not interested in a heated debate our a shouting match. I was very skeptical of Cummings approach from the beginning and instead of being "told you so" I'd like to hear better takes on this.
If you are interested in deepening your Stoic practice or learning more about Stoicism I co host a weekly zoom study group. We are working from this book. We just started week 2. Comment if you want an invite to the group.
A Handbook for New Stoics: How to Thrive in a World Out of Your Control―52 Week-by-Week Lessons https://www.amazon.com/dp/1615195335/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fabc_61F89Y0B266193J0V0HQ?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1
I think I'm 50/50 on whether I'd be comfortable attending an indoor meetup in September. Case rates seem to be going down over the last handful of days, but it would be a lot of people and I think I'd have difficulty understanding conversation if we were masked.
(If I am comfortable going I'm the most likely organizer. We have an existing group "London rationalish" which used to be London LW before LW kind of died for a few years.)
I would be delighted to attend an in-person meet up in the US. Ideal would be a maskless meetup where everyone’s vaccination cards are checked at the door. Slightly less ideal is a maskless meetup with no vaccination checks. Even less ideal is a mask-enforced meetup but I’ll still attend one.
I consider it responsible to hold meetups in any countries where adults are able to walk into their nearest pharmacy and get vaccinated. So it’s fine in the UK but would be irresponsible in Mexico or Taiwan.
I sometimes thought about attending a meetup pre-pandemic, but never quite convinced myself to go. That degree of engagement is not going to push me over the edge into attending in a pandemic world. So, in a word, no.
I don't know what the covid data locally will look like in September, and I remain convinced that the PTB are choosing not to record things I'd very much like to know to judge actual risks. I can't predict how I'd feel about any indoor gathering of strangers that far into the future.
FWIW, I am currently visiting grocery stores in person, after a long period of getting groceries delivered instead. And I never stopped visiting medical facilities in person.
I am officially fully vaccinated, but my immune system was not at its best when I got the two Pfizer shots. I'm also 63 years old.
Probably I'm being overly paranoid, but OTOH, I'm an introvert; I don't really mind interacting with strangers only outdoors.
FWIW, my employer ratcheted back its demand for in-person work starting at the beginning of September; it's now holding off until October. And I'm currently off work on disability, contemplating retirement rather than return (NOT because of covid), so this is a data point rather than a concern.
My concern is primarily with the unvaccinated breeding new and improved variants that break through vaccinations more readily, but secondarily with data not being gathered on breakthrough cases, leading me to mistrust those who, having chosen not to collect the data that would provide evidence for their assertions, now assure me that I'm perfectly safe.
I had terrible food poisoning a few months ago, the worst I've ever had, from some leftover chicken. I decided to stop eating chicken forever as a result (so far, so good). It's an idea I had entertained for a while, for ethical reasons, but the misery I experienced gave me a renewed appreciation for suffering, and between the desire to not experience it (probably avoidable by just being more discriminating with leftovers) and to not inflict it, I got over the hump and made a decision I feel good about.
It's a pretty major part of most religions, but experiencing suffering really is necessary, for many or most people (including me) to really take suffering as seriously in decision making as its moral weight demands.
Somehow this seems obvious now, and much less so before I was sick. I wonder if we've become so distanced from suffering that much of our (the average Western person's) moral philosophy has been built entirely upon higher rungs of Maslow's hierarchy, resulting in some odd ideological conflicts.
Let's say I want to approach Chaos Magic from a rat angle.
Anyone already taken a look and can recommend a place to start? Or got a take on whether it's worth exploring?
I just listened to Lex Fridman interview Bret Weinstein and found the Weinstein's views on vaccination inconsistent and frustrating. Here's a brief summary:
1) He thinks we still have an opportunity to eradicate SARS-Cov-2 and should try to (I agree).
2) He has concerns about the possible effects of the mRNA and even the viral-vector vaccines. A steelman of his concern goes something like: "Because both the mRNA vaccine and the viral-vector vaccine are narrowly targeted at the spike protein, it does not provide as good immunity as real infection. In addition, this narrow focus introduces selection pressure on the virus to mutate. If we had deployed the virus before the pandemic was raging, it would be a different story, as the virus would not have an opportunity to reproduce with that selection pressure."
I disagree with this -- why does he not have this concern for other widely used vaccines, such as the flu, the measles, or other viruses that are already with us? I've read estimates that the vaccine is likely more effective against variants than natural immunity (partially because the dose is quite large), but admittedly the data is early. More to the point, many more studies reliably show that >99.95% of people hospitalized for COVID did not take the vaccine, and I presume some percentage may have been infected before.
3) He has a concern that the vaccination may induce antibody-dependent enhancement, making a later infection worse than it would have been with no infection. I am not aware of _any_ evidence showing this, if someone knows of some, could you kindly link it?
4) He feels it's borderline unethical to vaccinate children because they fare so much better than older people. I think a steelman would be "Our goal is herd immunity, not necessarily vaccination. We should let children develop her immunity naturally because so few children have problems getting COVID". It seems to me this argument directly contradicts his first point, which is that we should try to eradicate the disease. Eradication is more likely the more quickly we increase overall immunity, and vaccinating children helps this.
Am I off in my analysis of this?
Are the hidden open threads better? Is there more discussion (people responding to comments).
I cohost the Affix podcast (https://www.affix.live/), a two-dudes talking style podcast focusing on articles/books commonly discussed in this community. Probably the most similar podcast I can think of is Very Bad Wizards, but we're much less academic. I don't really want any monetary support, but would really appreciate getting some constructive feedback on what we're doing.
I wanted to jump on to that thread in the last comments free-for-all about PTSD. I won’t go on and on about it but it intrigued me, and the first thought I had was (just sort of trying) to imagine what was culturally “normative” in those times. If anyone’s interested in pursuing it I would love to talk about it more.
I would attend an outdoor gathering (even though it may well be cold where I live by September). I am not sure whether I would attend an indoor gathering.
I’ve been meaning to get the Philadelphia meetup running again, starting with rebranding our Google Group as ACX Meetup. We had been meeting at my home under our spacious covered porch for much of 2020, but suspended the meetup last December as cases skyrocketed, besides it being too damn cold.
I would have started up again already, but we had a baby in May. Given the shape of things currently, I’d like to continue hosting on my porch. I’ll consult my co-organizer and we’ll pick a date in the next few weeks for the revived meetup.
So I just learned in the past week or so that there's something called the 'non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment' or NAIRU, and I was a little blown away and horrified. As far as I can tell, this is an implicit promise that central banks will increase the cost of capital in order to deliberately make people unemployed. Isn't this really bad? If this is somehow necessary for the economy to function, how can societies justify making unemployment such a terrible experience?
is vaccine hesitancy an isolated demand for rigor?
Anyone in Ann Arbor?
I find it shocking that the APS wouldn't publish this opinion piece. One has to wonder...
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/07/can-physics-be-too-speculative.html
I've been running an online discussion group on Parfit's Reasons and Persons. We're wrapping up Part One next week (fourth meeting). This isn't so far into the book that it would be difficult for anyone to ramp up and join us.
Meetup link: https://www.meetup.com/Seattle-Analytic-Philosophy-CLUB/events/279625335/
All are welcome as long as you do the reading and stay on topic.
Worth a read - this paper by a team working with Gelman at Columbia is super-interesting and explains something you have talked about a bit in terms of multiple causes and limited possible room for explanation, but it explains this far more clearly than anything I have seen before.
http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/unpublished/piranhas.pdf
Abstract: In some scientific fields, it is common to have certain variables of interest that are of particular importance and for which there are many studies indicating a relationship with a different explanatory variable. In such cases, particularly those where no relationships are known among explanatory variables, it is worth asking under what conditions it is possible for all such claimed effects to exist simultaneously. This paper addresses this question by reviewing some theorems from multivariate analysis that show, unless the explanatory variables also have sizable effects on each other, it is impossible to have many such large effects. We also discuss implications for the replication crisis in social science.
I've been holding meet ups in Budapest, and we'll definitely be ready to do one in September
I'm not very active here, but I would be interested in going to a meetup in Malta in ~September, and I wouldn't consider holding one indoors irresponsible, though I think meeting outdoors would be more pleasant. Not sure if there are any other readers from Malta tho?
I'm organizing the ACX / LessWrong meetings in Portland, Oregon for the past couple months and we are comfortable meeting in person with an online option.
It would appear we still don't have much of our pre-pandemic attendence and I would very much appreciate any publicity or visits you could offer. We meet bi-weekly at the beeminders house, and have attendence around 10 people. I'd be happy to communicate more about it over email at scelarek@gmail.com.
Thanks Scott!
In England no one has any idea what stuff will be like by September I personally don't think I would comfortable go to a meet up until 2022
I want to recommend "The Hidden Spring" by Mark Solms. It talks at length about predictive coding, etc, and also purportedly gives an account for how and why consciousness arose.
I experience debilitating shame for situations that my subconscious deems "mistakes". It can scale from the event haunting me for a couple of hours, to days, to weeks, and the worst cases I'll remember as painful flashbacks forever. If I make a mistake that gets deemed as particularly bad, my brain will use most of its processing power to go over the situation again and again, making it impossible to focus on anything. I've walked through red light into a street in this state only realizing it after a car horn. This is similar to when you hear about a problem someone is having and your brain immediately goes into problem solving mode, except there is no solution to past mistakes so you get stuck in a loop. I've kind of learned to live with this, but it seems to be a root cause for many traits and behaviors.
The problem I'm having though is that I have difficult time defining what this is, finding any information on it or finding people who have this issue. There's avoidant personality, but that places emphasis on relationships and otherwise doesn't feel like a fit. There is generally just discussion on shame, but it often places emphasis on feelings of inadequacy. My emphasis is more on the aftermath, the debilitating effect of it, the flashbacks that feel like someone stabbing me out of the blue. It doesn't matter if I rationally know I made no mistake, I still can't shake the reaction my body has to it.
Does this sound familiar to anyone? Any resources you can point out for me to further research this on my own?
What are some possible future trajectories for lock-down-like Covid-19 restrictions? (I'm primarily interested in the US, but the arguments might be generic.) Here are a few I can think of:
1. Permanent mini-lockdown, possibly oscillates up and down. Businesses are legally required to discourage work from the office as much as possible, local public transport requires masks, air travel requires health checks and/or proofs of vaccinations, international travel includes quarantines, etc. This seems difficult to pull off both politically and also in terms of long-term compliance (including "difficult politically because of poor long-term compliance").
2. A requisite portion of the population (70%?) gets vaccinated, and Covid-19 is declared to be over. Seems somewhat implausible (and/or slow) in the US as a whole since vaccinations seem to have stalled at a bit more than 50%, although perhaps if the vaccine is approved in children, we'll cross that threshold. Also, with the Delta variant more contagious (and perhaps more likely to turn vaccinated people into carriers / spreaders) than previously expected, the previously-advertised 70% might get bumped up higher?
3. It is empirically observed that cases and/or deaths have dropped enough to stop imposing restrictions. (i.e. mini-lockdown that actually gradually ends.) Perhaps this is because we achieve herd immunity by natural immunity; with ~10% of the US as cases, and ~50% vaccinated, depending on how many cases were missed due to lack of symptoms, we might actually be close. Because of inertia, I would expect Covid-19 deaths being treated as more important than other deaths for a while, causing this to take longer than e.g. if we had equivalent levels of deaths but had crossed an observable vaccination threshold.
4. We declare Covid to be over now, and just deal with the extra cases. This would be somewhere between declaring that lockdowns were a bad idea to begin with, and declaring that we've achieved #3 (e.g. "yes cases from delta are rising, but they're not rising all that much").
My interest here is partly in planning my own life (e.g. when might international travel be a thing again?) and partly in trying to understand some of the positive externalities vaccinations have on other people (e.g. if we're following scenario #2, then you vaccinating makes my lockdown end faster; this mechanism is absent from scenarios #1, #3, #4).
I'd be super interested in holding a meetup in Mexico City. As for whether it is irresponsible, although vaccination has been slower than what one would wish for, most people I hang out with here are already vaccinated (most got vaccinated in the US over the past few months). I imagine that people who would'd be interested in an ACX meet up would be drawn from a similar population and hence have higher than average vaccination rates, so I wouldn't be very worried about risk of contagion. Of course, one can always make, vaccination mandatory for the meeting.
I would attend an in-person meetup. I'm already going to indoor gatherings 1-2x per week currently.
I'm in Seattle and would attend
I would go to either indoor or outdoor meetup in September. I would be more worried about the state of restrictions here in Poland by then: there are virtually no cases at the moment, so September might still see a new peak in cases and some lockdowns (vaccination-wise, Poland is doing slightly worse than EU overall).
I think a lot of rationalists and rationalist-adjacent types massively overestimate the possible practical value of space colonisation as a way of avoiding extinction.
The future is hard to predict, sure. It could be very good, or very bad. I think a future where humans progress to the point where humans are, someday, capable of establishing functioning colonies on Mars, the Moon, and conceivably other objects in the solar system, while optimistic, is perfectly credible. And a future in which human activity or natural disaster renders the earth uninhabitable beyond anything we can do to prevent it, and humans go extinct is distressingly plausible.
But a future in which both those things happen simultaneously strikes me as much, much less likely. Establishing undersea civilisations, or turning the Sahara or the Antarctic into hospitable paradises, or reversing all the pollution humans have ever caused and much worse besides, or would be tasks with a lot in common with rendering other planets hospitable, but much easier.
If we ever become capable of colonising other planets, we almost certainly won't need to.
Could anyone give me a more nuanced explanation as to what “ban teaching critical race theory in schools” looks like as a policy? I’ve seen that sort of terminology tossed around in the media for some states’ laws, but it feels like there’s a lot of vagueness there. To me there’s a big difference between “critical race theory can never be mentioned/explained/analyzed in schools” and “students can’t be forced to take a class that teaches them that critical race theory is true.”
I’d just like to note that I will try to avoid getting myself into arguments over whether the policies are good; I’m more interested in whether this is something like the Georgia voting laws that got oversimplified by the media, or if they’re as cut and dry as it is made out to be.
Thanks in advance
Anyone have a recommendation for a good course to learn solidity ?
I have a room that isn't getting as cool as the rest of the house, causing some suffering for people inside of it, so I'm looking into window AC units.
The room also doesn't heat well in the summer, so I thought, "oh, I'll get one with a heat pump, too."
Well, window AC units are less than $200, and AC-units-with-heat-pumps seem to go for at least $600.
What gives? I thought a heat pump was just an AC unit running in reverse. This is for a relatively southern climate, so I don't need to push against an insane heat gradient. From the looks of it I'll just be better running a space heater 24/7.
How did "simp" replace "beta orbiter?"
I want to do research on the chance of being cancelled (fired from one's job for political reasons). It would seem useful to have a rough probability of this even though there are lots of factors. Are people excessively precautious? This was something I thought about a lot prior to creating my blog. I ended up making it but sometimes I wonder if I'm being stupid.
Does anyone have data on this of whatever kind or research?
Whenever I hear someone complain about the "digital dark age", I wonder if it really is a problem in light of the likelihood that the NSA has been saving all the contents of the internet for years now. Someday, it will be released back to the public.
I've been happy doing indoor social events with presumably vaccinated people the past few weeks. I'm not sure if I still would be happy with this in September. It will depend a lot on whether the recent spikes in the US reverse themselves.
I basically think of capitalism as expressing human desires weighted by purchasing power. If you imagine some kind of "work point" system based on how long you work, how arduous your work is, and how rare the skills are for your work in comparison to the desire for it, it seems to me that when you work for someone else you earn "work points" in the form of money that you can spend to get someone else to do work that *you* want them to do. (Except in a complicated acasual way where people predict your desires instead of responding to them, but in effect it's similar.) Then there's saving, where you sacrifice your work points in the present (freeing people up to do work other people want them to do), somehow in exchange for more work points in the future, that I don't fully understand. Is that a good way of thinking about it?
Book Review Request: Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
The number of suicides in US military was much higher in 2020 than in 2018 (384 vs 326).
Does anyone know how this relates to Scott's finding that suicides almost universally went down during the pandemic? https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/why-didnt-suicides-rise-during-covid/
The data from the US military might be more reliable than much of the other data. Is there reason to doubt the general conclusion from Scott's article? Or is the US military just a weird outlier?
I'd be happy to host a Greater London ACX meetup - picnic in Hyde Park or somewhere? @Scott can I ask Claire & Buck if they can fund evidence-based brain-boosting drinks & healthy nibbles?
With some cities reinstating mask mandates I’m wondering what the long term plan is here. Do they expect the number of people vaccinated to increase significantly going forward? If not is there any end to this cycle? Are we going to have new variants every few months and never resume regular life? Have any of these public officials explained what the end game is here ?
If everyone is vaccinated, I think the chance of someone getting in a car crash on the way to the meetup far exceeds the chance of someone getting seriously ill from covid caught at the meetup.
Let's suppose average meetup attendee has to drive 50 miles. Most of this is over busy bay-area streets, which are probably four times more dangerous than the average mile driven in the US. The chance of any car crash is 1 in 366 per 1000 miles driven, so the average attendee's chance of a car crash on the way to the meetup is about 1 in 2000.
What is the probability you catch covid from another vaccinated attendee at a meetup where everybody is fully vaccinated? Hard to quantify, but probably lower than that. And if you do catch it while vaccinated, it will almost always be a very mild case not leading to hospitalization.
Back of the envelope, 99.5% of covid deaths in the US are unvaccinated, versus about half of the population is vaccinated, so the vaccine reduces individual risk of death from covid by 99% through some combination of reducing the risk of infection and reducing the severity post-infection. If covid was less than 100 times worse than the flu pre-vaccine (which seems to be supported by the death tolls), then post vaccine it's not much to worry about.
My null hypothesis is that media will continue to hype any new variant with a few SNPs that make it slightly more transmissible, without regard to the scope of the risk relative to ordinary activities like driving and smoking. Same thing with terrorism -- people find it more interesting than the scope of the risk warrants, so it gets more media coverage than it deserves.
Does anyone think that the recent surge in house prices and rents prices is (at least partially) caused by the eviction and foreclosure moratoriums?
Certainly some of the house prices can be attributed to low mortgage rates (payments would be lower). But if people are not leaving the homes they can't afford (due to the moratoriums) then wouldn't that "distort" the market?
Just curious if anyone else sees it that way. I see a lot of people complaining that "hedge funds" are driving up prices. That could be. But I'm not sure where it goes from here.
Would I go to (realistically, host) an in-person indoors ACX meetup in September? --> Depends on the local case rates, but probably not. My rough prediction is that they will still be highish by September and given high-risk status of household members, I'm inclined to be cautious. If they go back to normal, maybe. (Or if I am absolutely sure Covid isn't a serious risk to us, but I'm sufficiently risk-averse that that is a high bar.)
Would I consider it irresponsible to hold one? --> Depends on the local case rates. If they continue their current climb through September (seems highly unlikely, but so does the fact that they're climbing now) then yes. If they've crested and gotten halfway down, no. If they're back to baseline "I think this is probably false positive" levels, then absolutely not.
Scott: the "See all" link on the main page of the blog (Archive view sorted by most recent) is now only displaying the most recent 12 posts rather than lazy-loading through all of them (both before and after your most recent post). Archive view sorted by most popular is still displaying everything, but this is making it rather time-consuming to access old stuff since the order there isn't obvious.
I've confirmed with a friend that he's experiencing the same issue, so it's not my browser at fault, and it was fine a couple of days ago.
I've been following the group pile-on of Kelsey Piper over on the DSL forum, and I'm absolutely blown away - not for the first time - by what an incredibly nasty, vicious conversation it is over there, how truly horrible the people who dominate that conversation are, and how thin the veneer of rationalism is over the substance, which is nothing but sheer hatred: for the left, for minorities, for normies, for journalists, for anyone and everyone who isn't them.
The situation is that Piper, a Vox journalist who's also part of the rationalist community, wrote a couple of Tumblr posts back in 2019, the entire sum and substance of which was that she and others she knew found US border enforcement policies genuinely upsetting, and those who assumed that those feelings were cynical and performative were wrong. That's it. That's all they said. Later, before the end of Trump's term, she stopped posting on Tumblr entirely.
The hive mind on DSL has decided that: (1) These two Tumblr posts were part of a coordinated campaign of anti-Trump propaganda, as proven by the fact that Piper hasn't written anything about immigration since Biden's election. (2) Even though she never used her feelings as a policy argument, or argued for anything other than "These feelings exist," she must have been intentionally empowering others to do so. Apparently, you're accountable not just for what *you* say, but for everyone that DSL decides is on your side. We live in a society, I guess? (3) The fact that she apparently withdrew from Tumblr entirely before the election, and thus wouldn't be expected to write anything about Biden there, is only further proof of her dastardly scheming. (4) If she was sincere about her feelings on border enforcement, she would necessarily have written about them on Vox - even though that's not her beat on Vox and writing about anything in that professional capacity requires a substantial commitment. (5) If she had actually been dazed and crying herself to sleep in 2019 when this came to her attention, she would have been in that state continuously all this time - because, you know, that's totally how emotions work, fellow humans. Adjusting to a situation and going on with life, after being upset, isn't something that people do. No evil robots here! (6) If she had been a functional human being, she wouldn't have felt emotional distress about the suffering of people who weren't her friends or family in the first place. People who feel a human connection to others outside their tribe don't deserve to be taken seriously. This altruism bullshit is all well and good until someone actually *cares* about it, am I right?
Now these paragons of rationality are solemnly talking about what to do when the principle of charity breaks down, and acting like they have irrefutable proof of Piper's bad faith - whereas if they were capable of *practicing* clear thinking instead of just peacocking about it, they would know that they have no valid evidence at all. Piper, whose work is essentially to spread rationalist values in the mainstream media, is gamely engaging with these preposterous attacks. I don't know whether to admire her for it or shake my head at her for trying to reason with those who are manifestly not motivated by reason.
I would certainly go to a meet up within a reasonable distance if there was a good chance you’d be there. I would check out one nearer even if not. I do not consider it unreasonable to hold them, since for me the pandemic is largely over—I’m vaccinated, everyone I care for is either vaccinated or determined to take their chances, and the level of risk these days is simply not high; it’s time for life to go on.
Regarding the meetups - I run the Atlanta SSC meetup group - we've had over 12 so far - though the lockdown has put a damper on them for the past year or so (mostly we've moved online) - however
I speak for everyone in the group when I say we would all go to an indoors ACX meetup in September, and none of us consider it irresponsible to hold one.