I recall seeing a collection of links from Scott about alternative healthcare options or navigating the healthcare/health insurance system if you're not in an ideal position. Does anyone happen to know where that was or have a link?
Does anyone knows if 'Boss As A Service' is still a going thing, accepting new clients? I did sign up but haven't heard anything. Also, any recommendations for personal accountability? Beeminder isn't doing it for me, either because I need an actual person or because I need to set individual goals for each week (not a generic weekly target).
Anyone know if any good meetups for learning solidity ? I’m already on blockchain NYC, and it seems good, but they don’t meet as often as I’d like. I’d also like to hear about any good discords for solidity novices.
I think the following post is _not_ about politics. If Scott disagrees, I apologize in advance, feel free to delete this without feeling bad about it
The other day I wrote up some thoughts about the latest spike in the covid pandemic, some musing on the reliability (or lack thereof) of data, and the value of using common-sense heuristics with appropriate uncertainty. The folks on Facebook mostly ignored it, but maybe you all would appreciate it more. It is reproduced below
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Disclaimer: the following post is not meant to imply anything beyond exactly what I am saying. Please don't assume I have other subtextual or connotative conclusions.
Austin is in the middle of a covid spike and there are a lot of different (and conflicting) messages coming from various authorities and data sources. How do we know what sources to take seriously? What should we believe?
Personally, to square this circle, I've taken a handful of heuristics that have served me well. One of them is the presumption that covid is seasonal, like basically every other respiratory illness. Based purely on this heuristic, on July 30th, I made the following prediction:
The current spike in Austin will peak between August 12th and August 18th, and fall afterwards almost as quickly as it rose.
Why did I make this prediction? Last year in July, the spike (as measured by the 7-day rolling average of daily hospitalizations) peaked 13 days after entering stage 5. Last year in December, the spike peaked 19 days after entering stage 5. We entered stage 5 on July 30th, 2021.
Sure enough, it is now August 15th. And what actually happened? The (7-day rolling average of) daily new hospitalizations were rising very quickly at the start of August. Around August 6th, the rate-of-increase began to shrink. The hospitalization rate peaked on August 11th at 83.6 (Higher than the July 2020 peak at 75.1, lower than the Dec 2020 peak at 93.7). It has been falling ever since, at 78.7 today. If it continues to fall at the same rate it is falling now, we will leave stage 5 somewhere around August 22nd.
(Note: August 11th was only a few days ago, and there is the possibility that this is premature. However, since I'm looking at a 7-day rolling average, any trend needs to exist for a week-ish before it shows up in the graph at all. This gives me confidence that this isn't a blip, but a real trend).
(Added for ACT comment: I wrote this two days ago, when the most recent data point available was Aug 13. The next four days of data continued the downwards trend, albeit with a blip today. My prediction conditional on "fall at the same rate" is likely not correct, however we appear to still be on a rapid downwards trajectory)
I would like to propose some simple questions to all of you. I am not trying to argue or convince anyone of anything; Facebook is not the correct place for that. I'm simply curious what thoughts other people have put into this, and would like to politely suggest consideration of some things people may not have considered.
2) How bad did you think it was going to be this time around? Better than this? Worse than this?
3) What were the trusted authorities (whichever authorities you choose to trust) saying about how bad it was going to be? Why were they saying what they were saying? Were they accurate?
4) Was my prediction from three weeks ago accurate?
Consider the following: There are a lot of people out there, with fancy credentials, decades of experience, deep domain knowledge, and formally recognized positions of authority on this pandemic. They have made various claims about what will happen, and justified those claims with elaborate appeals to their expertise. Meanwhile, I'm not a doctor, I have no statistical models, and no deep reasoning. I just have a simple heuristic: "it'll probably be the same as it was last time". Assuming that you agree with (1) above, my predictions in the past few weeks have been more accurate than every single public health authority I've paid attention to.
During the pandemic there has been a lot of talk of "trust the science" or "trust the experts". Science is very important and frequently correct, and trusting it is generally a good idea. But more important than trusting it is understanding it, and I've been somewhat disappointed in what I've seen in that regard. Part of understanding science is understanding its limitations, and its biggest limitation is time, effort, and data. Science takes time and requires a large amount of data and analysis before we can make strong and confident predictions. Despite today being March 533rd, 2020 (https://calendar2020.noj.cc/), 500 days isn't that much time by scientific standards (something something Zooey Deschanel). And despite our increasingly quantified society, much of our data is still very noisy and less objective than we'd like to believe. While we can, should, and are doing all the hard work of scientific analysis to better answer these various questions, we should also be modest and be careful not to overstate our confidence in unreliable data.
It's easy to be bamboozled by charts and graphs and numbers. But at the end of the day, things still have to make sense. Things are roughly consistent over time and space. Magic doesn't happen. Everything has to be coherent with itself and each other, and unprincipled exceptions to basic principles rarely if ever happen. All the data in the world won't help you if that data is noisy, unreliable, or incomplete. Meanwhile, basic common-sense rules of thumb, based on the above simple principles, taken with the appropriate amount of uncertainty, is frequently a very good way of making accurate and well-calibrated predictions.
I'll leave you all with a parting question. Our leaders invoke complicated and elaborate statistical models, detailed research papers, and decades of subject matter experience and they make one prediction. I ignore all of that, and make a different prediction based on nothing other than the basic scientific principle that patterns are real. Their predictions took millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours of time to make. My prediction took about 15 seconds of eyeballing a graph (copied below, so you can check my work). My predictions are more accurate than our experts'. So the question is: What do we do with this information? If basic rough guesses are more accurate than all that scientific work, how should we respond to this in a way that gives us the best predictions and information going forward?
https://files.catbox.moe/xa0jt6.jpg - annotated graph of 7-day rolling average of daily new hospitalizations, taken straight from the City of Austin's Staging Dashboard
My 10 year old daughter has gained weight during the pandemic, mostly as a result of her exercising and playing less. She went from slim to chucky, with an obviously fat stomach and face. Now I'm concerned that her body is defending this new setpoint.
Does anyone have any advice for helping her lose weight? Yes, I am trying to get her involved in sports, but it's been slow so far. We cook almost all meals at home and have a fairly healthy diet.
I saw someone on Twitter who disputed a medical bill that he received by arguing that they had given him an extremely complex code when a simple one was necessary. It occurred to me that would be an amazing public service if there were a publicly searchable database of all billing codes. I believe that new legislation now allows all patients to read their charts, which would enable them to access these codes. If not, who could create it? Would it violate some sort of intellectual property to create a site like this?
I have read a few defenses of logical positivism lately, not because I was seeking them out but rather I happened to come across them. In particular, Liam Kofi Bright has appeared on a few podcasts arguing for it, and Scott himself has written something kind of like a defense of it. Wikipedia, however, describes it as "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes", and as far as I understand there were some slam-dunk criticisms of it that really did show it being untenable (although I personally have not looked into them very much yet). Is there now a resurgence in logical positivism, or did I just happen to stumble across the only two people who will defend it?
I'm in Zurich for the next two weeks. Is there any meetup here during that time period? I'd also love to grab coffee or something with anyone here. Let me know if you're interested!
I have been trying to follow the war in Ethiopia through reading any new articles I come across, but I feel like they never give a very complete picture. A few things seem very odd to me. The dispute escalated very quickly from timing of elections to a pretty brutal civil war, for instance.
Is there a good long form article that gives a good overview of the Ethiopian war so far? Or maybe a report from a think tank/gov agency or something?
"DSM Review: The Meanings of Madness: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, features nearly 300 diagnoses. What’s the science behind it?" By Stephen Eide | Aug. 15, 2021
"If there really is a mental-health crisis, then doctors—psychiatrists—should have a lead role in responding to it. Rutgers sociologist Allan V. Horwitz’s history of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” or DSM—the medical field’s definitive classification of mental disorders—explores psychiatry’s claim to such authority. “DSM: A History of Psychiatry’s Bible” puts forward two arguments: first, that the DSM is a “social creation”; second, that we’re stuck with it.
I ask as I noticed that I started eating less and less meat recently AND I am prone to repeating eating the same food for days AND I hate tofu/soy products/chia/quinoa. So I am worried that I should worry about incomplete protein.
But is (for example) eating a lot of rice (and just rice for 5 days) and then eating a lot of beans for next three days balancing each other or not at such timescale?
Substack is reverting comments to "New First" every time I load a new article. It didn't do this for a while (not sure whether it reverted to chronological or was sticky). Is this an intentional change?
Any industrial engineers in here, particularly with experience in safety engineering? I'm wondering if the discipline covers such things as individuals taking initiative to prevent disaster. It seems there are disasters (Challenger, Chernobyl) that could have been prevented by a well placed individual taking actions that would have seemed excessive to individuals who thought there was no danger.
Anybody got a covid vaccine effectiveness update? I'm trying to convince some hesitant friends of mine that are trying to get a dr's note, even though they are in risky careers (Nurse and Fireman).
Regarding the meetups, are you going to contact people and give them a chance to sort their plans out before posting all of them? I just put in a placeholder place and time, since I don't expect to have to be the one to host anyway, but just in case.
I'm going to see a psychiatrist for the first time, and since appointments are very expensive and hard to come by where I live, I want to try to get the most out of it. Was hoping people here might have some advice. I've written a summary of the situation and then some of my questions at the end.
Basically I'm concerned I might have undiagnosed ADD. When I was a kid, many teachers and (I think but not sure) my GP suggested I might have ADD based on my behavior, but my parents were pretty ideologically opposed to ADD diagnosis of children in general and preferred the explanation that I was a gifted child who was bored.
My whole life I've had a pretty typical list of symptoms - I struggle to concentrate on tasks and I always feel scattered and lost among different threads of thought and attention. If I do concentrate I hyperfocus and I have to whip myself up into a highly stressed state to be able to do it, I always do all my work at the last minute in a state of panic, I struggle with simple life admin tasks. I'm very restless and I'm always jiggling and moving or I catch myself jumping up and moving around for no reason. As a kid I had a lot of social difficulties but over time I've learnt to mask these pretty well. I acted up terribly in school when I was younger but calmed down as a teenager. I watch other people sit down and do a few hours of gently focused productive work without distraction and I can't imagine ever being able to do that. I've also suffered from (and been diagnosed with and treated for) depression during several periods since I left school, but I was also pretty depressed as a teenager.
I'm worried that a psychiatrist will dismiss this because I did very well at school and at university. I suspect that having very high intelligence has concealed the issues with my attention, and I think I'm actually massively underachieving. Consequently I've worked in jobs that haven't been very challenging or interesting, and I've become bored and left after a couple of years in each one. The last job, though, required a lot of 'self starting' planning and focused work on tasks that weren't just given to me on a proverbial conveyor belt, and I struggled hard and often spent hours just staring at my screen panicking about what to do next, waiting for an email to react to.
Now I'm self-employed and making a modest living, largely enabled by a partner who earns much more than I do. I'm not doing anywhere near the requisite amount of focused work to make my business grow and thrive. If the next decade passes like the one we just had, I'm going to be extremely unhappy, and either very poor and single or largely dependent on my partner. My depression will come back. I DO have the skills, knowledge and ability to do really well at what I do, what I need is just to be able to sit down and do good, focused work for hours a day, every day, without having to engineer emergencies that ramp up my anxiety to unsustainable levels. I drink ridiculous amounts of coffee and find I get a good productive couple of hours after that (like right now.)
So questions:
1. I really want to try medication for this - probably Ritalin. Many years ago when I was at university I tried dexamphetamine (in irresponsibly large recreational doses) on about five occasions and found it really enjoyable for meditating and reading. I stopped experimenting with it when I noticed I felt a compulsion to take more, and never took it again since. I remember the feeling of being on dex as having my attention turn into a spotlight I could direct at will wherever I wanted and hold it there easily, and it was very relaxing. I think to the psychiatrist I will seem to know a suspicious amount about these medications and I'm worried he might take me for a drug seeker - although this is a pretty perverse bind to be in, because I am indeed seeking the drug that is proven to be effective against the condition I think I have. How do I talk about these medications and the research I've done on them without sounding like I'm just trying to get a script to get high? Should I not mention previous recreational use from ten years ago?
2. How do I persuade the psychiatrist that I'm actually underachieving, and that I'm not simply regularly achieving and beating myself up unnecessarily? I think this will be easier than before, since I'm much more precariously employed so my life looks worse on paper than it did when I had a steady job. How do I explain how serious my situation is?
3. How do I explain that I've already tried so many different methods like meditating, productivity software, GTD, scheduling my day in 15 minute chunks the night before, and I just can't seem to finish any complex, multi-stage projects? What do I do if the psych says 'thanks for waiting three months and giving me all that money, now go away and try writing down your goals for the day the night before'?
I'd be open to a meetup in Taipei, but the situation here is not really like other places. Low vaccine access, but also close to zero cases thanks to entry quarantines and testing. I'd feel very safe, but not sure that's universal.
Any interest (or opposition to this happening at all) here?
I've been trying to find a plot of the frequency of extreme weather events over time to see if they're becoming more common with climate change. However, it's frustratingly hard to find. The best I could do was this graph from the Met Office: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/climate/climate-and-extreme-weather
...but it doesn't link to any paper, nor does it explain its methodology. Does anyone know of a highly regarded paper, preferably a review paper or meta-analysis, that shows whether or not extreme weather events have become more frequent with time?
How much would you pay for a deliberately boring news feed? Not that it shies away covering important topics, but that its goal is to minimize your surprisal when you read someone else’s headline.
A puzzle for those who enjoy such things: for which values of n is it possible to paint the vertices of an n-dimensional hypercube in n colours, in such a way that no point is adjacent to two points of the same colour?
Hanania says that people go to grad school rather than become welders because they value status and influence above money. I didn't go to grad school for two years and get a master's degree because I wanted status and influence. That's silly. I did it because I wanted a white-collar career for which a master's was the entry credential, a career that I'd enjoy more and be better at than I would be a welder.
Interested in hearing peoples first hand experience with brand Adderall vs generic. I had been under the assumption that generic drugs are always identical to name brand. I started on name brand Adderall a couple months ago and then recently switched to a generic version. I felt like the name brand was less effective, so I did some googling and there are other people who feel the same way, citing things like different filler ingredients:
I've gone back to name brand and the effectiveness has returned. There should be no difference in the active ingredient so I am a little confused. I am open to it being a placebo effect, but I noticed the decrease in effectiveness while I still believed them to be equivalent, so that makes me a little skeptical.
As a soon-to-be parent, I’d like to ask for recommendations for parenting books. However, I’m looking for a specific sort of parenting books - which I call Outlier Parenting or Extreme Parenting.
Let me try to map out what I mean by Outlier Parenting.
I would define it as: Parenting that seeks right tail results via right tail methodology.
Outlier Parenting is not data-driven. This is because outlier parenting is rare enough not to have enough data points for analysis. Whereas many parenting books speak to the mainstream parent and focus on the normal distribution of child outcomes, outlier parents - both in their behavior and in their goals - are seeking to be on the far end of the right tail of the distribution.
As such, I would expect that each set of Outlier parents have their own specific ingredients and methods for parenting.
Example: Scott Alexander had written about and reviewed Polgar’s “Raise a Genius!” I found a lot of value in the book. But I want more… much more.
Another example: First 30 minutes of Captain Fantastic. Ok, fine, this isn’t a book, it’s a movie. And it’s not even a documentary, it’s fiction. But that’s an example of the type of Outlier Parenting that I would love to read about.
I’m not looking for books that tell us how mainstream education is bad. At this point, the existing education system has become a straw man for people like me.
I’m also not looking for books on homeschooling. Whereas “traditional schooling” has become so rigid that we know exactly what to expect, “homeschooling” as a term is so undefined that it can mean 1 million different things in 1 million different homes.
I’m also not looking for books on unschooling, unless unschooling means lots of goals, tons of work by both parents and children, and at least some structure.
I’m also not looking to engage in the nature versus nurture debate. Clearly (I think), my target for parenting books will focus more on the nurture side.
I’d like to read books by people who set out to raise superhumans. I’d like to know the details of their methodology, experience, and the results and lessons.
If such books don’t exist, I would appreciate any other leads (blogs, diaries…) Thanks!
Question: What is the difference between life on Earth and life on a large, luxurious, self-sustaining spacecraft lost in space?
In the movie/poem Aniara, a large (4,750 meters long and 891 meters wide) and luxurious passenger spacecraft (named Aniara) leaving Earth for Mars is hit by some space debris. This results in the spacecraft losing control over its trajectory and they are now unable to return to mars nor earth. The spacecraft is self-sustainable, but after a few months the passengers are reduced to eating algae. The movie explores how meaningless life seems to be for everyone on-board.
I suspect that most people, like myself, believe that life on Earth is meaningful while life on Aniara is not. I find this to be strange since ultimately both Earth and Aniara is just a large thing floating in space, so somehow life should be equally (not) meaningful. So, what are the key differences between Aniara and Earth? Or in another word, what features should Aniara have to make life feel meaningful?
Another interesting question is how the psychological aspects of life on Aniara compares with early humans' life (under any reasonable interpretation of early humans). Is the psychological struggle of Aniara similar to the struggle of early humans? Perhaps this is why religion is so universal?
Anyone here have experience/knowledge of NMN? I'd in particular be interested in:
1) An ELI5 explanation of what it does and how that is supposed to slow down aging. I've tried to look around a bit, but a lot of what I find is way, way over my head.
2) Relative estimates for how likely it is to do anything helpful/harmful.
3) A good (preferably high status) place to point family members towards to convince them you're not just taking creepy drugs because the internet told you to.
I would very much like to request Scott - or someone else who feels they could tackle it - to do a post about the history of the teaching of science in schools, particularly with reference to the vexed question of Human Evolution.
I've had some small exchange of views on this in another comment thread, but I don't know enough. All I really know is (1) the Scopes Trial happened in 1925, and there was such a lack of people lining up to hire lawyers on the basis that "I was fired simply for teaching the science!" that they had to advertise for anyone wanting to take such a case (2) "Survivals and New Arrivals" by Hilaire Belloc in 1929 twitting the Protestants over such controversies (though, being Belloc, he backs Lamarck over Darwin) in criticism of Biblical Literalism:
"The Literalist believed that Jonah was swallowed by a right Greenland whale, and that our first parents lived a precisely calculable number of years ago, and in Mesopotamia. He believed that Noah collected in the ark all the very numerous divisions of the beetle tribe. He believed, because the Hebrew word JOM was printed in his Koran, "day," that therefore the phases of creation were exactly six in number and each of exactly twenty-four hours. He believed that man began as a bit of mud, handled, fashioned with fingers and then blown upon.
These beliefs were not adventitious to his religion, they were his religion; and when they became untenable (principally through the advance of geology) his religion disappeared.
It has receded with startling rapidity. Nations of the Catholic culture could never understand how such a religion came to be held. It was a bewilderment to them. When the immensely ancient doctrine of growth (or evolution) and the connection of living organisms with past forms was newly emphasized by Buffon and Lamarck, opinion in France was not disturbed; and it was hopelessly puzzling to men of Catholic tradition to find a Catholic priest's original discovery of man's antiquity (at Torquay, in the cave called "Kent's Hole") severely censured by the Protestant world. Still more were they puzzled by the fierce battle which raged against the further development of Buffon and Lamarck s main thesis under the hands of careful and patient observers such as Darwin and Wallace.
So violent was the quarrel that the main point was missed. Evolution in general—mere growth—became the Accursed Thing. The only essential point, its causes, the underlying truth of Lamarck's theory, and the falsity of Darwin's and Wallace's, were not considered. What had to be defended blindly was the bald truth of certain printed English sentences dating from 1610."
So what happened between 1860 and 1925? What was the state of acceptance of the Theory of Evolution and how was it adopted into school curricula? Did the Northern United States teach it where the Southern states did not, or was it just that there wasn't a big splashy trial in the North? I'm aware of how the science is new and exciting but it hasn't made it into the school textbooks yet, so I'd like someone smarter and better-informed to trace the path of development from "Darwin says I'm a monkey's uncle????" to "sure, of course all our school textbooks contain this!"
Did it get taught earlier in Europe? Was America an outlier? What was the state of play in 1925? Because I have no objection to being called a troglodyte who wants to drag everything back to the Middle Ages, but I'd like to see some *facts* on this rather than the pop culture version of "Ordinary high school teacher doing his job was dragged into court by the ignorant Bible-bashers".
(Nobody has called me a troglodyte, just to make this clear! The other party was exasperated but polite!)
I get the impression many rpeople think gain-of-function research is obviously net harmful and should be stopped; could people help walk me through the conceptual model that leads people to that conclusion, please?
Yes, yes, sure, obviously serial passage sorts of experiments create an environment in which there is artifical selection pressure on pathogens to become more pandemic-y (I will use the non-technical term since I have a vague impression that GoF research can target a number of different "functions"). I don't think this point is important or interesting on its own, however.
Because what *also* creates an environment in which there is selection pressure on pathogens is human society. And odd pathogens come into contact with human society all the time. So what we want to know is the ratio:
Potential human pathogens in GoF experiments : Potential human pathogens outside GoF experiments.
You would presumably want to weight both sides by "likelihood of getting inside a human" (which makes the GoF ratio scarier, I expect) and by "likelihood of being selected into a pandemic" (which may or may not make the GoF ratio scarier, I'm not sure about how to think about this one).
If this ratio is something like 1-in-a-hundred, then GoF does seem pretty obviously bad in terms of expected value. If this ratio is something like 1-in-a-quadrillion, then GoF seems pretty obviously positive-expected-value. If the ratio is something like 1-in-a-million, then my instinct is that it is pretty plausible that GoF research is either net-helpful or net-harmful, and we would have to sit down and think pretty carefully about exactly what benefits we expect to gain from GoF research. This latter is not the process I see going on when people declare that GoF research is net harmful, so I assume that they think the ratio is somewhere in the higher part of the range?
Or maybe more likely, my model is missing some important piece?
For utilitarians, how do I know "we ought to maximize utility" is true but "we ought to never violate someone's natural rights" or "we ought to never lie" is not true? In other words, how do you get this one "ought" but not other "oughts"?
To what extent do you think that it matters, historically, how much a leader *wants* his country to develop (intrinsically or due to the right incentives)?
I feel that there is an extensive literature and lots of ideas on the correct and incorrect ways to pursue growth, but reading historical accounts gives the feeling that much of the time, countries didn't grow because leaders had neither the interest nor the incentives to grow the economy. Kleptocrats who were able to maintain power through repression, whether through support from other countries, natural resources or however, presided over long periods of stagnation or poverty, often not because they got things wrong but because they had no intention of getting things right. Meanwhile, I feel it's harder to think of leaders whose countries failed terribly despite genuine intentions and efforts to increase development (call it "benevolence"). India, perhaps, before the 1990s reforms? Lebanon?
I think the tricky part is how to categorize leaders who (arguably at least) wanted to increase the country's overall power but had no qualms about trampling rights en masse while doing so, a la (arguably) Mao or others. And there are plenty of gray cases. But I'm curious how much you think the question of (top-down) development ends up being about "who rises to the top" vs "what they choose to do when they get there".
How do you balance the time you attribute to life and work?
I am a freshly accepted masters AI student, and in addition to the (objectively hard) university, I've been working two part-time jobs in my field of expertise throughout my bachelors.
I've been relatively happy at each point in time during the studies, but looking back, I think I've done more work and less of the "fun" stuff you'd expect a 20yo to do; my SO has said as much as well. I'm afraid that if I don't change anything, I might regret I lost the best part of life.
What exact amount of work is "unhealthy"? How do I notice I'm stepping over the boundary? (And what do I do with all the free time I'm about to get?) I'll have to find these answers myself, but I wonder if you have some resource that could help me along the way.
I’m about to start teaching precalc at a collegiate level. Do any experienced teachers have any advice? I know this is kind of a general request, but I feel like I’m at the point where I know the basics but I “don’t know what I don’t know” if you will.
Been thinking about climate change recently, since there have been so many headlines etc. Anybody know of any thorough effective-altruist style analyses of what an individual person should be doing about it (if anything)?
I recall seeing a collection of links from Scott about alternative healthcare options or navigating the healthcare/health insurance system if you're not in an ideal position. Does anyone happen to know where that was or have a link?
If anyone is looking for interesting content across tech, media, art, finance feel free to check out: https://gokhansahin.substack.com/p/curated-content-for-busy-folk-45
Here's a slightly more mathematical/coding based puzzle.
Consider the following snippet of pseudocode. What property do you think "test" might test for?
if( (trailing_zeroes(x) & 1) | (((x >> trailing_zeroes(x))&7)^1) ==0): test(x)
Explanation of the components for non programmers:
&,| and ^ are binary and, or and xor, so 3&5 =4, 3|5 = 7, 3^5 = 6.
>> is rightshift - that is, x>>n is the floor of x/2^n
if(a==b): c will do c if a and b are the same number, and do nothing otherwise.
Does anyone knows if 'Boss As A Service' is still a going thing, accepting new clients? I did sign up but haven't heard anything. Also, any recommendations for personal accountability? Beeminder isn't doing it for me, either because I need an actual person or because I need to set individual goals for each week (not a generic weekly target).
Anyone know if any good meetups for learning solidity ? I’m already on blockchain NYC, and it seems good, but they don’t meet as often as I’d like. I’d also like to hear about any good discords for solidity novices.
Scott what should I put for this question? https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6554/astral-codex-ten-mentions-this-question/
Any interest in a diplomacy game? We (over at DataSecretsLox) are trying to get a quorum together. We have five. Need two more.
I think the following post is _not_ about politics. If Scott disagrees, I apologize in advance, feel free to delete this without feeling bad about it
The other day I wrote up some thoughts about the latest spike in the covid pandemic, some musing on the reliability (or lack thereof) of data, and the value of using common-sense heuristics with appropriate uncertainty. The folks on Facebook mostly ignored it, but maybe you all would appreciate it more. It is reproduced below
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Disclaimer: the following post is not meant to imply anything beyond exactly what I am saying. Please don't assume I have other subtextual or connotative conclusions.
Austin is in the middle of a covid spike and there are a lot of different (and conflicting) messages coming from various authorities and data sources. How do we know what sources to take seriously? What should we believe?
Personally, to square this circle, I've taken a handful of heuristics that have served me well. One of them is the presumption that covid is seasonal, like basically every other respiratory illness. Based purely on this heuristic, on July 30th, I made the following prediction:
The current spike in Austin will peak between August 12th and August 18th, and fall afterwards almost as quickly as it rose.
Why did I make this prediction? Last year in July, the spike (as measured by the 7-day rolling average of daily hospitalizations) peaked 13 days after entering stage 5. Last year in December, the spike peaked 19 days after entering stage 5. We entered stage 5 on July 30th, 2021.
Sure enough, it is now August 15th. And what actually happened? The (7-day rolling average of) daily new hospitalizations were rising very quickly at the start of August. Around August 6th, the rate-of-increase began to shrink. The hospitalization rate peaked on August 11th at 83.6 (Higher than the July 2020 peak at 75.1, lower than the Dec 2020 peak at 93.7). It has been falling ever since, at 78.7 today. If it continues to fall at the same rate it is falling now, we will leave stage 5 somewhere around August 22nd.
(Note: August 11th was only a few days ago, and there is the possibility that this is premature. However, since I'm looking at a 7-day rolling average, any trend needs to exist for a week-ish before it shows up in the graph at all. This gives me confidence that this isn't a blip, but a real trend).
(Added for ACT comment: I wrote this two days ago, when the most recent data point available was Aug 13. The next four days of data continued the downwards trend, albeit with a blip today. My prediction conditional on "fall at the same rate" is likely not correct, however we appear to still be on a rapid downwards trajectory)
I would like to propose some simple questions to all of you. I am not trying to argue or convince anyone of anything; Facebook is not the correct place for that. I'm simply curious what thoughts other people have put into this, and would like to politely suggest consideration of some things people may not have considered.
1) Is my above characterization of this spike fair and accurate? For the record, I am going primarily off of the city's data dashboard, available here https://austin.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/0ad7fa50ba504e73be9945ec2a7841cb
2) How bad did you think it was going to be this time around? Better than this? Worse than this?
3) What were the trusted authorities (whichever authorities you choose to trust) saying about how bad it was going to be? Why were they saying what they were saying? Were they accurate?
4) Was my prediction from three weeks ago accurate?
Consider the following: There are a lot of people out there, with fancy credentials, decades of experience, deep domain knowledge, and formally recognized positions of authority on this pandemic. They have made various claims about what will happen, and justified those claims with elaborate appeals to their expertise. Meanwhile, I'm not a doctor, I have no statistical models, and no deep reasoning. I just have a simple heuristic: "it'll probably be the same as it was last time". Assuming that you agree with (1) above, my predictions in the past few weeks have been more accurate than every single public health authority I've paid attention to.
During the pandemic there has been a lot of talk of "trust the science" or "trust the experts". Science is very important and frequently correct, and trusting it is generally a good idea. But more important than trusting it is understanding it, and I've been somewhat disappointed in what I've seen in that regard. Part of understanding science is understanding its limitations, and its biggest limitation is time, effort, and data. Science takes time and requires a large amount of data and analysis before we can make strong and confident predictions. Despite today being March 533rd, 2020 (https://calendar2020.noj.cc/), 500 days isn't that much time by scientific standards (something something Zooey Deschanel). And despite our increasingly quantified society, much of our data is still very noisy and less objective than we'd like to believe. While we can, should, and are doing all the hard work of scientific analysis to better answer these various questions, we should also be modest and be careful not to overstate our confidence in unreliable data.
It's easy to be bamboozled by charts and graphs and numbers. But at the end of the day, things still have to make sense. Things are roughly consistent over time and space. Magic doesn't happen. Everything has to be coherent with itself and each other, and unprincipled exceptions to basic principles rarely if ever happen. All the data in the world won't help you if that data is noisy, unreliable, or incomplete. Meanwhile, basic common-sense rules of thumb, based on the above simple principles, taken with the appropriate amount of uncertainty, is frequently a very good way of making accurate and well-calibrated predictions.
I'll leave you all with a parting question. Our leaders invoke complicated and elaborate statistical models, detailed research papers, and decades of subject matter experience and they make one prediction. I ignore all of that, and make a different prediction based on nothing other than the basic scientific principle that patterns are real. Their predictions took millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours of time to make. My prediction took about 15 seconds of eyeballing a graph (copied below, so you can check my work). My predictions are more accurate than our experts'. So the question is: What do we do with this information? If basic rough guesses are more accurate than all that scientific work, how should we respond to this in a way that gives us the best predictions and information going forward?
https://files.catbox.moe/xa0jt6.jpg - annotated graph of 7-day rolling average of daily new hospitalizations, taken straight from the City of Austin's Staging Dashboard
A brief interlude at AI Defense in Depth, to introduce our youtube channel:
https://aidid.substack.com/p/gestalt-communications
Just discovered Ted Gioia, one of my fave writers on music, has a substack - https://tedgioia.substack.com/people/4937458-ted-gioia. Anyone interested in music should check it out. A good sample: I didn't know James Joyce was almost a famous singer - https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-james-joyce-almost-became-a-famous
What are your favorite newsletters other than this one?
My 10 year old daughter has gained weight during the pandemic, mostly as a result of her exercising and playing less. She went from slim to chucky, with an obviously fat stomach and face. Now I'm concerned that her body is defending this new setpoint.
Does anyone have any advice for helping her lose weight? Yes, I am trying to get her involved in sports, but it's been slow so far. We cook almost all meals at home and have a fairly healthy diet.
I saw someone on Twitter who disputed a medical bill that he received by arguing that they had given him an extremely complex code when a simple one was necessary. It occurred to me that would be an amazing public service if there were a publicly searchable database of all billing codes. I believe that new legislation now allows all patients to read their charts, which would enable them to access these codes. If not, who could create it? Would it violate some sort of intellectual property to create a site like this?
I have read a few defenses of logical positivism lately, not because I was seeking them out but rather I happened to come across them. In particular, Liam Kofi Bright has appeared on a few podcasts arguing for it, and Scott himself has written something kind of like a defense of it. Wikipedia, however, describes it as "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes", and as far as I understand there were some slam-dunk criticisms of it that really did show it being untenable (although I personally have not looked into them very much yet). Is there now a resurgence in logical positivism, or did I just happen to stumble across the only two people who will defend it?
I'm in Zurich for the next two weeks. Is there any meetup here during that time period? I'd also love to grab coffee or something with anyone here. Let me know if you're interested!
I have been trying to follow the war in Ethiopia through reading any new articles I come across, but I feel like they never give a very complete picture. A few things seem very odd to me. The dispute escalated very quickly from timing of elections to a pretty brutal civil war, for instance.
Is there a good long form article that gives a good overview of the Ethiopian war so far? Or maybe a report from a think tank/gov agency or something?
"DSM Review: The Meanings of Madness: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, features nearly 300 diagnoses. What’s the science behind it?" By Stephen Eide | Aug. 15, 2021
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dsm-review-the-meanings-of-madness-11629062194
"If there really is a mental-health crisis, then doctors—psychiatrists—should have a lead role in responding to it. Rutgers sociologist Allan V. Horwitz’s history of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” or DSM—the medical field’s definitive classification of mental disorders—explores psychiatry’s claim to such authority. “DSM: A History of Psychiatry’s Bible” puts forward two arguments: first, that the DSM is a “social creation”; second, that we’re stuck with it.
On which timescale protein in a diet should be complete?
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/complete-protein-for-vegans answered many of my questions (though if someone knows better resource - let me know!), but I am unsure whether I should care about complete protein each day? Each week? Each month?
I ask as I noticed that I started eating less and less meat recently AND I am prone to repeating eating the same food for days AND I hate tofu/soy products/chia/quinoa. So I am worried that I should worry about incomplete protein.
But is (for example) eating a lot of rice (and just rice for 5 days) and then eating a lot of beans for next three days balancing each other or not at such timescale?
Substack is reverting comments to "New First" every time I load a new article. It didn't do this for a while (not sure whether it reverted to chronological or was sticky). Is this an intentional change?
Any industrial engineers in here, particularly with experience in safety engineering? I'm wondering if the discipline covers such things as individuals taking initiative to prevent disaster. It seems there are disasters (Challenger, Chernobyl) that could have been prevented by a well placed individual taking actions that would have seemed excessive to individuals who thought there was no danger.
Anybody got a covid vaccine effectiveness update? I'm trying to convince some hesitant friends of mine that are trying to get a dr's note, even though they are in risky careers (Nurse and Fireman).
Regarding the meetups, are you going to contact people and give them a chance to sort their plans out before posting all of them? I just put in a placeholder place and time, since I don't expect to have to be the one to host anyway, but just in case.
I'm going to see a psychiatrist for the first time, and since appointments are very expensive and hard to come by where I live, I want to try to get the most out of it. Was hoping people here might have some advice. I've written a summary of the situation and then some of my questions at the end.
Basically I'm concerned I might have undiagnosed ADD. When I was a kid, many teachers and (I think but not sure) my GP suggested I might have ADD based on my behavior, but my parents were pretty ideologically opposed to ADD diagnosis of children in general and preferred the explanation that I was a gifted child who was bored.
My whole life I've had a pretty typical list of symptoms - I struggle to concentrate on tasks and I always feel scattered and lost among different threads of thought and attention. If I do concentrate I hyperfocus and I have to whip myself up into a highly stressed state to be able to do it, I always do all my work at the last minute in a state of panic, I struggle with simple life admin tasks. I'm very restless and I'm always jiggling and moving or I catch myself jumping up and moving around for no reason. As a kid I had a lot of social difficulties but over time I've learnt to mask these pretty well. I acted up terribly in school when I was younger but calmed down as a teenager. I watch other people sit down and do a few hours of gently focused productive work without distraction and I can't imagine ever being able to do that. I've also suffered from (and been diagnosed with and treated for) depression during several periods since I left school, but I was also pretty depressed as a teenager.
I'm worried that a psychiatrist will dismiss this because I did very well at school and at university. I suspect that having very high intelligence has concealed the issues with my attention, and I think I'm actually massively underachieving. Consequently I've worked in jobs that haven't been very challenging or interesting, and I've become bored and left after a couple of years in each one. The last job, though, required a lot of 'self starting' planning and focused work on tasks that weren't just given to me on a proverbial conveyor belt, and I struggled hard and often spent hours just staring at my screen panicking about what to do next, waiting for an email to react to.
Now I'm self-employed and making a modest living, largely enabled by a partner who earns much more than I do. I'm not doing anywhere near the requisite amount of focused work to make my business grow and thrive. If the next decade passes like the one we just had, I'm going to be extremely unhappy, and either very poor and single or largely dependent on my partner. My depression will come back. I DO have the skills, knowledge and ability to do really well at what I do, what I need is just to be able to sit down and do good, focused work for hours a day, every day, without having to engineer emergencies that ramp up my anxiety to unsustainable levels. I drink ridiculous amounts of coffee and find I get a good productive couple of hours after that (like right now.)
So questions:
1. I really want to try medication for this - probably Ritalin. Many years ago when I was at university I tried dexamphetamine (in irresponsibly large recreational doses) on about five occasions and found it really enjoyable for meditating and reading. I stopped experimenting with it when I noticed I felt a compulsion to take more, and never took it again since. I remember the feeling of being on dex as having my attention turn into a spotlight I could direct at will wherever I wanted and hold it there easily, and it was very relaxing. I think to the psychiatrist I will seem to know a suspicious amount about these medications and I'm worried he might take me for a drug seeker - although this is a pretty perverse bind to be in, because I am indeed seeking the drug that is proven to be effective against the condition I think I have. How do I talk about these medications and the research I've done on them without sounding like I'm just trying to get a script to get high? Should I not mention previous recreational use from ten years ago?
2. How do I persuade the psychiatrist that I'm actually underachieving, and that I'm not simply regularly achieving and beating myself up unnecessarily? I think this will be easier than before, since I'm much more precariously employed so my life looks worse on paper than it did when I had a steady job. How do I explain how serious my situation is?
3. How do I explain that I've already tried so many different methods like meditating, productivity software, GTD, scheduling my day in 15 minute chunks the night before, and I just can't seem to finish any complex, multi-stage projects? What do I do if the psych says 'thanks for waiting three months and giving me all that money, now go away and try writing down your goals for the day the night before'?
I'd be open to a meetup in Taipei, but the situation here is not really like other places. Low vaccine access, but also close to zero cases thanks to entry quarantines and testing. I'd feel very safe, but not sure that's universal.
Any interest (or opposition to this happening at all) here?
Scott, can I send you a short screen capture of a substack comment bug/misbehaviour via youtube?
I'd simply post it here, but that puts my real name in front of everyone :p
I've been trying to find a plot of the frequency of extreme weather events over time to see if they're becoming more common with climate change. However, it's frustratingly hard to find. The best I could do was this graph from the Met Office: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/climate/climate-and-extreme-weather
...but it doesn't link to any paper, nor does it explain its methodology. Does anyone know of a highly regarded paper, preferably a review paper or meta-analysis, that shows whether or not extreme weather events have become more frequent with time?
How much would you pay for a deliberately boring news feed? Not that it shies away covering important topics, but that its goal is to minimize your surprisal when you read someone else’s headline.
A puzzle for those who enjoy such things: for which values of n is it possible to paint the vertices of an n-dimensional hypercube in n colours, in such a way that no point is adjacent to two points of the same colour?
Hanania says that people go to grad school rather than become welders because they value status and influence above money. I didn't go to grad school for two years and get a master's degree because I wanted status and influence. That's silly. I did it because I wanted a white-collar career for which a master's was the entry credential, a career that I'd enjoy more and be better at than I would be a welder.
Interested in hearing peoples first hand experience with brand Adderall vs generic. I had been under the assumption that generic drugs are always identical to name brand. I started on name brand Adderall a couple months ago and then recently switched to a generic version. I felt like the name brand was less effective, so I did some googling and there are other people who feel the same way, citing things like different filler ingredients:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ADHD/comments/2nyshz/for_the_love_of_barkley_please_explain_this/
I've gone back to name brand and the effectiveness has returned. There should be no difference in the active ingredient so I am a little confused. I am open to it being a placebo effect, but I noticed the decrease in effectiveness while I still believed them to be equivalent, so that makes me a little skeptical.
As a soon-to-be parent, I’d like to ask for recommendations for parenting books. However, I’m looking for a specific sort of parenting books - which I call Outlier Parenting or Extreme Parenting.
Let me try to map out what I mean by Outlier Parenting.
I would define it as: Parenting that seeks right tail results via right tail methodology.
Outlier Parenting is not data-driven. This is because outlier parenting is rare enough not to have enough data points for analysis. Whereas many parenting books speak to the mainstream parent and focus on the normal distribution of child outcomes, outlier parents - both in their behavior and in their goals - are seeking to be on the far end of the right tail of the distribution.
As such, I would expect that each set of Outlier parents have their own specific ingredients and methods for parenting.
Example: Scott Alexander had written about and reviewed Polgar’s “Raise a Genius!” I found a lot of value in the book. But I want more… much more.
Another example: First 30 minutes of Captain Fantastic. Ok, fine, this isn’t a book, it’s a movie. And it’s not even a documentary, it’s fiction. But that’s an example of the type of Outlier Parenting that I would love to read about.
I’m not looking for books that tell us how mainstream education is bad. At this point, the existing education system has become a straw man for people like me.
I’m also not looking for books on homeschooling. Whereas “traditional schooling” has become so rigid that we know exactly what to expect, “homeschooling” as a term is so undefined that it can mean 1 million different things in 1 million different homes.
I’m also not looking for books on unschooling, unless unschooling means lots of goals, tons of work by both parents and children, and at least some structure.
I’m also not looking to engage in the nature versus nurture debate. Clearly (I think), my target for parenting books will focus more on the nurture side.
I’d like to read books by people who set out to raise superhumans. I’d like to know the details of their methodology, experience, and the results and lessons.
If such books don’t exist, I would appreciate any other leads (blogs, diaries…) Thanks!
Question: What is the difference between life on Earth and life on a large, luxurious, self-sustaining spacecraft lost in space?
In the movie/poem Aniara, a large (4,750 meters long and 891 meters wide) and luxurious passenger spacecraft (named Aniara) leaving Earth for Mars is hit by some space debris. This results in the spacecraft losing control over its trajectory and they are now unable to return to mars nor earth. The spacecraft is self-sustainable, but after a few months the passengers are reduced to eating algae. The movie explores how meaningless life seems to be for everyone on-board.
I suspect that most people, like myself, believe that life on Earth is meaningful while life on Aniara is not. I find this to be strange since ultimately both Earth and Aniara is just a large thing floating in space, so somehow life should be equally (not) meaningful. So, what are the key differences between Aniara and Earth? Or in another word, what features should Aniara have to make life feel meaningful?
Another interesting question is how the psychological aspects of life on Aniara compares with early humans' life (under any reasonable interpretation of early humans). Is the psychological struggle of Aniara similar to the struggle of early humans? Perhaps this is why religion is so universal?
An economics question –
Is there statistical research showing that undistributed earnings later return to shareholders?
Anyone here have experience/knowledge of NMN? I'd in particular be interested in:
1) An ELI5 explanation of what it does and how that is supposed to slow down aging. I've tried to look around a bit, but a lot of what I find is way, way over my head.
2) Relative estimates for how likely it is to do anything helpful/harmful.
3) A good (preferably high status) place to point family members towards to convince them you're not just taking creepy drugs because the internet told you to.
I would very much like to request Scott - or someone else who feels they could tackle it - to do a post about the history of the teaching of science in schools, particularly with reference to the vexed question of Human Evolution.
I've had some small exchange of views on this in another comment thread, but I don't know enough. All I really know is (1) the Scopes Trial happened in 1925, and there was such a lack of people lining up to hire lawyers on the basis that "I was fired simply for teaching the science!" that they had to advertise for anyone wanting to take such a case (2) "Survivals and New Arrivals" by Hilaire Belloc in 1929 twitting the Protestants over such controversies (though, being Belloc, he backs Lamarck over Darwin) in criticism of Biblical Literalism:
"The Literalist believed that Jonah was swallowed by a right Greenland whale, and that our first parents lived a precisely calculable number of years ago, and in Mesopotamia. He believed that Noah collected in the ark all the very numerous divisions of the beetle tribe. He believed, because the Hebrew word JOM was printed in his Koran, "day," that therefore the phases of creation were exactly six in number and each of exactly twenty-four hours. He believed that man began as a bit of mud, handled, fashioned with fingers and then blown upon.
These beliefs were not adventitious to his religion, they were his religion; and when they became untenable (principally through the advance of geology) his religion disappeared.
It has receded with startling rapidity. Nations of the Catholic culture could never understand how such a religion came to be held. It was a bewilderment to them. When the immensely ancient doctrine of growth (or evolution) and the connection of living organisms with past forms was newly emphasized by Buffon and Lamarck, opinion in France was not disturbed; and it was hopelessly puzzling to men of Catholic tradition to find a Catholic priest's original discovery of man's antiquity (at Torquay, in the cave called "Kent's Hole") severely censured by the Protestant world. Still more were they puzzled by the fierce battle which raged against the further development of Buffon and Lamarck s main thesis under the hands of careful and patient observers such as Darwin and Wallace.
So violent was the quarrel that the main point was missed. Evolution in general—mere growth—became the Accursed Thing. The only essential point, its causes, the underlying truth of Lamarck's theory, and the falsity of Darwin's and Wallace's, were not considered. What had to be defended blindly was the bald truth of certain printed English sentences dating from 1610."
(3) The big debate/discussion between Darwin's Bulldog and Soapy Sam took place in 1860: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Oxford_evolution_debate
So what happened between 1860 and 1925? What was the state of acceptance of the Theory of Evolution and how was it adopted into school curricula? Did the Northern United States teach it where the Southern states did not, or was it just that there wasn't a big splashy trial in the North? I'm aware of how the science is new and exciting but it hasn't made it into the school textbooks yet, so I'd like someone smarter and better-informed to trace the path of development from "Darwin says I'm a monkey's uncle????" to "sure, of course all our school textbooks contain this!"
Did it get taught earlier in Europe? Was America an outlier? What was the state of play in 1925? Because I have no objection to being called a troglodyte who wants to drag everything back to the Middle Ages, but I'd like to see some *facts* on this rather than the pop culture version of "Ordinary high school teacher doing his job was dragged into court by the ignorant Bible-bashers".
(Nobody has called me a troglodyte, just to make this clear! The other party was exasperated but polite!)
At what inflection point does intellectualism become a vice, reading a kind of gluttony for ideas?
I get the impression many rpeople think gain-of-function research is obviously net harmful and should be stopped; could people help walk me through the conceptual model that leads people to that conclusion, please?
Yes, yes, sure, obviously serial passage sorts of experiments create an environment in which there is artifical selection pressure on pathogens to become more pandemic-y (I will use the non-technical term since I have a vague impression that GoF research can target a number of different "functions"). I don't think this point is important or interesting on its own, however.
Because what *also* creates an environment in which there is selection pressure on pathogens is human society. And odd pathogens come into contact with human society all the time. So what we want to know is the ratio:
Potential human pathogens in GoF experiments : Potential human pathogens outside GoF experiments.
You would presumably want to weight both sides by "likelihood of getting inside a human" (which makes the GoF ratio scarier, I expect) and by "likelihood of being selected into a pandemic" (which may or may not make the GoF ratio scarier, I'm not sure about how to think about this one).
If this ratio is something like 1-in-a-hundred, then GoF does seem pretty obviously bad in terms of expected value. If this ratio is something like 1-in-a-quadrillion, then GoF seems pretty obviously positive-expected-value. If the ratio is something like 1-in-a-million, then my instinct is that it is pretty plausible that GoF research is either net-helpful or net-harmful, and we would have to sit down and think pretty carefully about exactly what benefits we expect to gain from GoF research. This latter is not the process I see going on when people declare that GoF research is net harmful, so I assume that they think the ratio is somewhere in the higher part of the range?
Or maybe more likely, my model is missing some important piece?
For utilitarians, how do I know "we ought to maximize utility" is true but "we ought to never violate someone's natural rights" or "we ought to never lie" is not true? In other words, how do you get this one "ought" but not other "oughts"?
To what extent do you think that it matters, historically, how much a leader *wants* his country to develop (intrinsically or due to the right incentives)?
I feel that there is an extensive literature and lots of ideas on the correct and incorrect ways to pursue growth, but reading historical accounts gives the feeling that much of the time, countries didn't grow because leaders had neither the interest nor the incentives to grow the economy. Kleptocrats who were able to maintain power through repression, whether through support from other countries, natural resources or however, presided over long periods of stagnation or poverty, often not because they got things wrong but because they had no intention of getting things right. Meanwhile, I feel it's harder to think of leaders whose countries failed terribly despite genuine intentions and efforts to increase development (call it "benevolence"). India, perhaps, before the 1990s reforms? Lebanon?
I think the tricky part is how to categorize leaders who (arguably at least) wanted to increase the country's overall power but had no qualms about trampling rights en masse while doing so, a la (arguably) Mao or others. And there are plenty of gray cases. But I'm curious how much you think the question of (top-down) development ends up being about "who rises to the top" vs "what they choose to do when they get there".
How do you balance the time you attribute to life and work?
I am a freshly accepted masters AI student, and in addition to the (objectively hard) university, I've been working two part-time jobs in my field of expertise throughout my bachelors.
I've been relatively happy at each point in time during the studies, but looking back, I think I've done more work and less of the "fun" stuff you'd expect a 20yo to do; my SO has said as much as well. I'm afraid that if I don't change anything, I might regret I lost the best part of life.
What exact amount of work is "unhealthy"? How do I notice I'm stepping over the boundary? (And what do I do with all the free time I'm about to get?) I'll have to find these answers myself, but I wonder if you have some resource that could help me along the way.
I’m about to start teaching precalc at a collegiate level. Do any experienced teachers have any advice? I know this is kind of a general request, but I feel like I’m at the point where I know the basics but I “don’t know what I don’t know” if you will.
Thanks in advance
Been thinking about climate change recently, since there have been so many headlines etc. Anybody know of any thorough effective-altruist style analyses of what an individual person should be doing about it (if anything)?
Do people here like https://www.cochrane.org/? How trustworthy should I find it?
From what I've looked at, I like their style, and they seem credible.