On the Guardians Against Pandemics front, a big point in their favor is that if you ask them to please refund your contribution, they're prompt and polite about it. (I hadn't noticed the significance of ActBlue on first reading, but the commentariat here convinced me to at least withdraw my money until they explained themselves at length on that topic.)
Here's GAP responding to an email of "please refund my money, I realized I have no idea how you plan to be bipartisan if you're going through ActBlue, and really don't want to fund this becoming a partisan issue":
"There is good reason to use ActBlue now just as a practicality. We are raising right now for Democratic candidates because Democrats are in control of both Houses at the moment, so many of our asks are directed towards Democrats. We are likely to use WinRed to solicit Republican PAC donations in the future as the chambers flip and we have asks for Republican members such as restrictions on GOF research."
I don't know to what extent ActBlue and WinRed would be in favor of an organization trying to use them both simultaneously, but it seems somewhat reasonable.
Somewhere in one of these open threads I recall a discussion about the spectrum of human personalities and proclivities. I am not sure but I think it was in relationship to an” on the spectrum” discussion of “being”, or “personality,” or “proclivity” or …. (You pick a word.)
The consensus seems to be that the world was richer for having multiple sorts of all of those things.
Given that, does not it make much more sense to have a pantheon of gods? So that all kinds of people will have someone to look up to?
The more Elemental of us might identify with Mars for instance and He might even speak to us.
Those of us perhaps more Murcureal in temperament, would listen to… Well, you know.
I guess I am trying to start a discussion about whether the world would be in a better place if they were more gods to choose from.
But only if they shared some of our qualities and deficiencies in order to make them easier to identify with.
Our present gods are largely ideals, aspirations, that have fallen into the hands of lawyers poets and politicians since they were invented. They would be welcome to the pantheon.
We could all go about our business secure in the knowledge that there was a God who was a little better than you but” bent” kind of the way you are. It strikes me as a healthier relationship to the world.
Suppose that early in 2020, Moderna decided that damn the ethics boards, they were going to do a challenge trial. At what point in the plan would they be stopped? Are vaccines regulated enough that the police could come by and arrest the people running the trial, or would they make it to the step of getting stonewalled by the FDA because their study didn't follow proper procedure?
I think it's great that the Biden Administration is promoting Covid vaccinations, and has encouraged pop stars to reach out to their fans. And given the threat that Covid poses to Baby Boomers, why not recruit ACDC into the effort? Still, I'm taken aback by a headline in today's New York Times:
"A C.D.C. panel is meeting to decide who should get Pfizer boosters."
This is a random place to post this but you're all smart.
I just moved into a place and the basement briefly floods when it rains hard (which it has a few times since I moved in). I don't particularly care because the sump pump gets 95% of it out and only leaves small puddles. I never actually spend any time in the basement except to switch my laundry.
But a week ago I left a guitar case down there, and I went down today and found it dotted everywhere with yellow-y mold, which seemed like alarmingly fast growth. There is also mold on the basement walls which I previously just ignored.
I live on the first floor, right above the basement. Does this seem like a concerning situation?
I have been living in the US for 6 years and am sick and and tired of this stupid imperial system. I love almost everything else about living here.
<vent>
Fahrenheit must be the dumbest unit ever invented, based on (horse?) body temperature. Inches are barely better and have been defined using metric since the 50s anyway. It would be better if things were 0.625" but the whole odd numerator thing is sooooo stupid.
</vent>
Does anybody know of any movements trying to accelerate metric adoption in the US? I want to join, or start my own, for the sake of my grandkids. Enough is enough.
If you took part in a vaccine trial, do they eventually tell you if you got the placebo? Seems like that'd be important to know if you're deciding whether to get the shot again.
Does anyone else feel mildly annoyed when the run into the word ‘nonplussed’ in print? It currently has two completely different meanings and I usually have to try to use context or information about the author’s age and continent of residence to get at their intended meaning.
Or in a similar vein, how about the word ‘bemused’?
There is this common pattern in philanthropy, more often seen in left-wing stuff, where when someone wants to do X, instead of raising money and then doing X with it, they raise money to lobby the government to spend money on X.
An example: I once lived in Madison, WI, where it is both quite left-wing and very cold in the winter. There was a fairly large homeless population and one or two of them would die of exposure every winter. I knew some folks who were trying to raise money for a warming shelter so the homeless folks could sleep there at night instead of freezing to death on the streets. Their plan was to collect money and hire a lobbyist to try and get the city government to build a warming shelter. They had this whole plan worked out, which land they could use, how much it would cost, how it would fit into the city budget. I talked with them in the square for a while and told them that it looked like they money they planned to raise was more than enough for the downpayment for the building. Hadn't crossed their mind, and they weren't interested. They were comfortable in the world of lobbying the city, and construction or building things weren't things they knew how to do.
This "Guarding Against Pandemics" thing has this in *spades*. Set aside the avowed Democratic partisanship: the only thing they can think of to do with the money they collect is to give it to politicians. How about they offer some more funding to the Seattle Flu Study? I've had some arguments with Trevor Bedford, but he personally has done more good against COVID than the entire CDC, especially early in 2020. I'll bet he sure could use some funding to hire a couple more techs. Or maybe GAP could spin up similar tracking groups in other US cities. That sure seems like it would be more use than re-electing Elizabeth fucking Warren.
Okay, it's a casual game and I haven't even played the trial version yet, but somebody seems to have made a game around the "is it ethical/utilitarian to steal and then give the money to charity?" question 😀
How dangerous, really, is vaping (I'm speaking here of nicotine, not THC vapes ginned up in someone's garage)? I know the Brits have more or less decided it's not a big deal, but in the States it's being treated like a stepping stone to chasing the dragon in a trap house. Does anyone have any feel or knowledge for what (if any) the actual scientific consensus on this is, or even if there is one?
Scott, I’m guessing if you’re “squeezing in” Amsterdam, you don’t have a lot of time there. But I think you’d really enjoy the Ritman Library, if it’s open while you’re in town. It’s full of Rosicrucian and Neoplatonic mystic texts collected by the eccentric millionaire who invented the airline beverage cart.
Other top recommendations off the tourist beaten track are the eco projects at De Ceuvel in Amsterdam Noord, story nights (if they’re doing them) at Mezrab, and whatever is going on at Mediamatic. Best view of the city is from the cafe on the roof of the public library near Centraal Station. If you have a chance, grab a rijsttafel at Kartika on Overtoom, or some Surinamese food at Ram’s Roti on Van Galenstraat. We used to live in Amsterdam and these are the places we would take our visitors, and that we miss.
Let's get away from arguing for a bit, here's a nice dance piece from last night's dance competition show (Chinese only, for the English subtitles you'll have to watch the full Episode 6):
GAP is using a payment processor that *REQUIRES* all of it's customers to be partisan. Either they are lying to us or lying to ActBlue. Either way, they're lying.
I regret not discussing COVID more with rationalists in February.
Can't go back though.
Anyone want to preregister a prediction for Evergrande?
So... what will VOO open at on 4 October? And how can we think through this?
COVID dropped it something like 30% in two weeks, then it rebounded as quickly.
Is the implosion of the Chinese economy twice as bad as COVID, half as bad, or not at all bad?
I feel like March 2020 markets were pricing in the collapse of the global economy, to include China, so I'm going with less bad. I don't have strong intuitions on how much though. 65% chance of 400 to 350 by the opening on 4 October?
Some chance this will be contained in China. I'd say 10% but I'm really just guessing. There are lots of ways that economy is tied to the rest of the world, and a lot of ways it's isolated. There are a ton of people with more expertise than me who can game how that shakes out, my intuitions are really shaky here.
FDA's advisory committee voted fairly heavily against approving third booster shots, the whole thing was 8 hours long and so I only listened to segments of it.
My Layman (familiar with statistics, unfamiliar with medicine) understanding of the state of the vaccines seemed to conform to the kinds of discussions and assumptions the meeting members had.
1) Vax effectiveness at lowering transmission rate reduces over time
2) Vax effectiveness at lowering severe outcomes (hospitalization/death) holds
3) Risk of Myocarditis is taken as credible but uncertainty exists around how large it is. Other risks of repeated doses were mentioned in some of the presentations but did not feature as prominently.
My tentative thought: A younger individual with 2 shots is already protected against adverse outcomes how much more they benefit from a third shot would be the change in the infection rate between the third and weakened second dose and then multiplied by the hospitalization and/or death risk which is going to be very small number. The committee wasn't comfortable in assuming the trade off between that and Myocarditis favored the third jab.
Did anyone watch or hear about this meeting? Am I missing something?
Overall I very pessimistic:
Other observations:
1. Anti-Vax or Vax Hesitant seem to be either using the raw trends in vaccinations and infections to argue not so subtly that vaccines are causing infections, or pointing to some countries like Israel which did not have their deaths/hospitalizations as front-loaded in 2020. The market for per-capita break downs is much smaller than the market for bullying and moral grandstanding.
2. Vaccination rates and lockdown intensities being positively correlated. A lot of people, myself included, got vaccinated despite not being particularly susceptible to the virus out of a hope that it would hasten a return to normalcy. Blaming the unvaccinated who represent on a per-capita basis a larger portion of the most severe outcomes is reasonable but it looks like there are sufficient number of people in positions of influence to maintain the social patterns of 2020 even in areas with >90% vaccination rates. Even if you imposed vaccination universally at gunpoint, the people who either go by covid case rates or insist that deaths must be prevented *at all costs* will probably have their way.
This is really too much for me. I've been a big fan of Scott's for a long time, but this uncritical endorsement of a group that is obviously lying about its intent is the last straw. I am cancelling my subscription.
Planned obsolescence has always been unsustainable in my mind, but I'm starting to think that it might actually be an existential threat. A lot of economic statistics seems like a sham when you consider the incentives: reduce the lifetime of a product by 5%, and lo and behold, growth in that sector went up 5%! A simplistic take, but I think the basic idea is right.
Clearly this relationship establishes strong negative feedback loops pushing planned obsolescence throughout the economy to make numbers look good, but a lot of it it is a mirage, and the bill will come due. The waste is already prodigious, and while recycling could mitigate some of that, manufacturers are not incentivized to make their products easy to disassemble, recyclable, or repairable. Since they are not responsible for the full product lifecycle, disposal has become a large negative externality that governments "handle" poorly by just shipping that crap overseas. The policy incentives towards planned obsolescence are so strong that I can't imagine any politician having the courage to stop this freight train.
Some positive signs though: the right to repair movement is gaining steam, and this provides some incentives to engineer products to let users extend their life. I don't think it will be enough though, and like any growing movement, I fear it will probably end up being coopted by some political actors for other ends, or otherwise politically neutered.
Two ideas popular in blue-tribe spaces are cities and economic equality. Aren't these in conflict? Cities concentrate wealth. We live in them because the connections and specializations they afford make us more productive and therefore richer. We live in them because to do so is a desirable luxury, and we're rich enough to afford it.
It seems to me that a serious program of economic equality would be devastating to city dwellers. I mean, the city itself is a luxury. The express purpose of taxing the rich, who city-dwellers are, is to inhibit luxury. And it seems like it would do that. Tall buildings aren't cheap. Elevators aren't cheap. Subways aren't cheap. With incomes driven towards those in rural Iowa, you couldn't have those things. With the resources of rural Iowa, you're going to have the material conditions and lifestyle of rural Iowa.
So why are the people calling for this the ones currently living in New York and not Iowa? What gives?
Scott, the PAC uses ActBlue. ActBlue is explicitly a Democratic non-profit technology company that is set up to help the Democratic Party and left wing groups win. Part of the process of getting on ActBlue is a verification process that you are helping Democrats win elections or are otherwise a left wing, partisan group. It is a complete torpedo to any kind of non-partisan credentials. They have claimed they are going to find an alternative for Republicans but the fact they don't know about the Republican alternative (WinRed) is ridiculous on its face.
I don't mind if you want to endorse political causes. But you should be explicit about the partisan nature of what you're endorsing.
In an effort to put every resource to use against humanity, Skynet orders its machines to modify several dozen biplanes from a WWI aviation museum to fight against the humans. The biplanes can be piloted by obsolete, damaged Terminators that nonetheless have perfect reflexes and flying skills.
What armaments (if any) do the biplanes get?
In what military role(s) are they used?
If employed in combat, what tactics do the biplanes use?
Assume the humans still have some planes of their own, like in Terminator Salvation.
So you've probably heard about how at-home rapid covid test kits are like under a dollar in eg Germany, but more like $30 in the US, a ~2000% price hike. I work at a (US) pharmacy/conenience store, and though the price is absurdly high, it's still not enough to match the supply and demand.
For starters, they've put up the extra barrier of putting all the tests behind the pharmacy counter where you have to be specifically ask the pharmacist for it -- it's not advetised and out on a shelf in the open. You can't just see it, grab it, and pay for it at the register like most non-prescription medicine.
But despite the lack of advertising, a third of the calls I get these days are "Do you have any at-home covid-tests left?" And 95% of the time I tell them no. Because the crazy high prices + medical bureaucracy obstacles + being completely unadvertised and hidden *still* does not match supply and demand; we restock every Saturday, and by Sunday afternoon the Covid tests are gone again.
Idk how much they'd cost if the price was the only thing doing the allocating, but it would be much more than the current cost. So yeah, unless my pharmacy/region/state is atypical, the situation is even worse than the pricetag makes it look.
(Also, there's an appointment-only, results-in-days, free-at-the-point-of-sale covid test at the pharmacy, but most people who are disappointed to find we're out of the rapid tests aren't interested in that.)
Question -- in Germany and other places with cheap rapid tests, is the pricetag doing all of the work of matching supply and demand? Or do they have it just as bad, with the actual price hidden in non-monetary forms? Are they merely "cheap", or actually plentiful?
(PS: The nice thing about only using price to allocate stuff is that higher prices increases the incentive to jump in and produce more; that's not the case with the "beauracracy + hiding + luck of whoever's first in line" methods of allocation. But on the other hand, testing for covid is mostly illegal in the US, so higher prices wouldn't increase supply anyway, so I guess the point is moot.)
A new sarbecovirus was just discovered in horseshoe bats from Laos. The RBD of its spike protein is only 2 amino acids divergent from the original Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 strain. And it binds to ACE2 receptors just as efficiently.
So there is nothing "uniquely adapted" or unnatural about SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. you don't need a lab running GoF experiments or splicing genomes to create this virus). If you're a Leaker, though, you might say this was one of the genomes that was on listed on the WIV spreadsheet that was taken down, and it leaked from the WIV! Well, you'd still have the timeline issue to work around. And now that we have a virus found in a wild bat population that is very very similar the Wuhan nCoV we really don't need a lab leak to explain anything.
This is probably too broad/general of a question to get answered, but (as an American) I've been fascinated recently by how parliamentary systems work. So- do major laws get passed easier in a parliamentary country than in America? I just finished reading a comparative political systems book, so I know that most democracies that aren't the US are either unicameral, or the second house/parliament is much weaker- so they can't veto legislation a la the US Senate. And by definition you can't really have divided government between the prime minister and the parliament- right? Because the PM is the leader of the largest plurality party (right?)
So- do other 1st world democracies who use a parliamentary system pass major/sweeping legislation more easily than we do here in the US, with its multiple veto points? Obviously here one has to clear the House, the Senate filibuster, and then get the President to sign it. Is the rest of the developed world just clearly much more efficient at legislating than America? Is it an obviously better system?
One argument why this *wouldn't* be the case if that, with multiple parties, even having the largest plurality in the parliament doesn't mean the other parties want to pass your laws. But Britain should be exempt from this, with their Westminster system where the PM has a majority in the House of Commons and the opposition parties basically have zero power (right?)
This comment is particularly designed for Richard Gadsen (spelling?), who always has excellent comparative politics knowledge and is also I believe British
This is a moonshot, but is anyone here a member of the Aro gTér? I'm trying to get ahold of their meditation course (https://aromeditation.org) , but I received no email after signup, and haven't found a working email to contact them either.
I'm interested in them because David Chapman, creator of Meaningness, among other things, is a member.
I was doing some deep diving into inflation yesterday and while explaining it to my wife this morning kind of realized how absurd it all is. After going through some of the glaring problems with "CPI" as measured by the government she sensibly asked "why don't they change it to better reflect reality" and I said that if they did it would invalidate the prior data points (unless you could go back and reliably recompute them) but perhaps, more importantly, there is a giant system that is indexed to the value as it is currently constructed. So the CPI we have today is "real" insofar as it's part of this whole made-up system. So "real" inflation is something you should calculate yourself based on your own inputs.
Recent international news has discussed the formation of an alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with its first major activity being the development of a new class of nuclear-powered submarines for the Australian navy. This deserves some kabbalistic analysis.
The notarikon for this alliance is AUKUS, pronounced like "Orcus", the Roman god of the underworld later and better known as Pluto. Project Pluto was a 1960s US project to develop a nuclear-powered ... aircraft.
But Project Pluto was kabbalistically unbalanced: it focused on developing aircraft, whereas Pluto is a god of the underworld. The fuel for its nuclear engines was similarly unbalanced: uranium is mined from deep within the earth, whereas Uranus is a god of the sky. To find balance we can look astronomically, between Pluto and Uranus, or physically between earth and sky, to find Neptune, god of the sea, and the submarines that will be developed for Project Orcus.
Further correspondence can be found in Project Pluto, based in the northern hemisphere, developing craft to travel over the surface, while Project Orcus, based in the southern hemisphere, develops craft to travel under it. This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
Is anyone else suddenly finding the google spreadsheet for meetups doesn't work? I've been checking for info on the Oxford/London meetups about twice a week for a while, as I'll probably go to whichever of those is more convenient, and now the times have been announced, I've gone to the spreadsheet to double-check the locations as I can't quite remember them exactly, and both they and maybe something like 75% of the total rows seem to have vanished? Is this something obscene happening on my end, or has something odd gone on, perhaps related to the changes to google docs/drive happening about now?
Does anyone have advice for people who have political opinions far different from most of their friends and family? How do you navigate this situation? Do you just shut up and let your opinions fester inside, not let anyone know your true beliefs? This seems somewhat torturous to me. Do you try to actively argue with people? This also seems torturous, and likely to end up with everyone misunderstanding me and my positions. People don't seem to understand the nuances of positions outside the Overton window. They tend to think I'm more of an extremist than I really am, or think I'm stupid, or just plain old not like me and not want to be around me.
So, the Covid situation here in England (and I think the rest of the UK) is starting to get scary again (hospitals seem to be under much strain as cases are rising ahead of a likely new wave). With vaccination numbers stalled far short of herd immunity levels, and with the government insisting on relaxing security measures, I'm personally suspecting we're back to a strategy of achieving (the required difference in numbers for) herd immunity by means of infections.
So... I don't want to be that guy, but might this mean it's worth rethinking meetups here?
I want to try to come up with names for things--names that, as soon as you hear them, you immediately understand what the name is referring to, and wonder why no one gave it a name before:
singularity FOMO
the great leap whoreward
rent seeking license
divine right of parents
the principle of "The kleptocrat is dead. Long live the kleptocrat."
How should one’s own goals be balanced with those of others in persuasion? In particular, how much should we trust others’ ability to protect & advocate for themselves when we are being persuasive?
First, some groundwork: I think that a true *win* in any negotiation is one in which both sides agree that the deal made is the best possible "free" choice for them. Persuasion is guiding someone to realize that the logical best choice is one that you prefer. (This definition can certainly be poked apart, but my main aim is to establish that I'm not interested in "wins" by coersion (eg. guilt, threats, ultimatums). These are essentially cheating — maybe you get what you want, but you would have lost if you were limited to using Reason as your weapon.)
Often, I’ve found that persuasion really comes down to understanding the other side as much as possible, to find a deal that both sides agree is better than no deal. So good persuasion shouldn’t really have a “sucker.” (Although it can certainly still appear that way from the outside, and either party may, in hindsight, decide that the deal wasn’t as good as it seemed. I think this is non-ideal, but is ultimately fine.)
If we can agree on the above, then here's a short scenario:
In a group project with a tight deadline, one member mentions that she would prefer to skip one of the final meetings — she cites multiple personal reasons: her grandpa recently died and she’s packing to leave town for his funeral, her dad just got out of the hospital, her thesis work just started this week… she’s got a lot going on. But she adds, “I suppose I can meet tonight for an hour if it'll help.” Even with everything going on, it would still be preferable for the group to have her at the meeting, and it would be false to say that things will be all the same without her. You reply that “if it’s too much for you then please let us know, but otherwise if you can do it, I’d love for us to meet for an hour! It would be more productive.” You end up meeting, the friend enjoys the meeting and is glad she ultimately attended, saying that it was a welcome distraction from the stresses of her personal life. Except…
The thing is, it worked out in this case, but it might not have. It’s entirely possible for a person to not be a good advocate for themselves, and put others’ needs before their own too heavily. An alternative view might be that one could have “read the hints,” and intuited that she didn’t really have the bandwidth for a meeting. It would also be truthful to say, "Actually, it’s fine; we do want you here and it would help, but it seems like you're dealing with a lot and we can still get a lot done without you."
I realize there’s not really a single “right” answer for this, but I’m confused regarding how/when to ask for things and assert one’s own needs/desires, if you can’t always trust others to have proper boundaries and value their own needs as important. At some point, I figure there's a necessity to assume that each person is ultimately the authority on their own internal needs/wants/desires. (Actually, to assume responsibility for someone else's calculus of what they can handle seems incredibly arrogant and paternalistic.) At the same time, there certainly is some validity to intuiting when what someone actually wants vs what they claim are misaligned; certainly, an excuse of, “Well, they said they were fine” can be plain wrong. (Just look at any consent / sexual harassment issues for evidence.)
I don’t know if there’s a resolution to be found here, but this seems like an unresolved question. Do we account for others’ needs in a world where people frequently don’t state what they want, or even realize/acknowledge it to themselves? And if so, when / how?
I've been recently pondering about the (Sci-Fi?) possibility of consciousness synchronicity: Can we humans "sync" our consciousness to other human or animal consciousnesses?
For example, if you're wondering what's the cognitive qualia of your cat sitting calmly in its litter box, and you'd like to know what it "thinks" like, you'd have some cognitive tool to help you get into that cognitive state, hence "sync" your consciousness with that of your cat.
Or, think of a flying bird: We humans sometimes wonder what it "feels" like to fly like a bird. Maybe we can have a tool that can help us get into a bird cognitive state, so that we can know what it "thinks" like.
Or, think of your partner. If only we could think like they do!
What I'm having in mind is some NeuroFeedback tool (which I hear can help some people) that can record cognitive states and then train you to "sync" with these states. Or some equivalent to NeuraLink that can send the right pulses to "sync" you with a pre-recorded cognitive state (i.e. consciousness).
Yes, we don't know what consciousness is, but I guess someone ever thought of this idea despite that? I couldn't find a resource that uses that term (except for lots of Jung's Synchronicity resources, which is completely unrelated). Do you know of some interesting resources that discuss this idea?
I just thought of something in light of debates over whether the drug price-setting thing in Congress will upset drug development. Could a pharma company cut a deal with some random country to offer drugs for sale only there in the advent of such rules, and then only offer the drugs for sale there?
I want to make a simple game based on text and clickable images and maybe some simple animations. I want to have a working prototype up in a day and I want it to be playable on a website I created. Kingdom of Loathing is a good example of the style I'm going for (but the game will of course be a lot simpler).
What framework/engine should I use? I'm a decent programmer but I know little of game design. I want to use something that is "living" with an active community, that is close to programming (no-code stuff just doesn't work IMO, I want to version control with git), and that gets me going as fast as possible so that I can get a prototype working ASAP. My devenv is Ubuntu if that matters.
I have googled around but most tips for getting started with simple games talk about platformers and arcade-like games, which is not what I'm going for. Right now my best idea is either to use the LÖVE framework, but I'm unsure on how relevant Lua still is, or to use GameMaker Studio, but it isn't free and seem a bit more complex than what I need. I thought about just doing it in python but that doesn't seem to be recommended and Pygame looks dead. I looked into Interactive Fiction stuff but it seems too simple, with little room for game logic beyond branching the story.
Help and suggestions from anyone with experience would be very appreciated!
I suspect that LSD causes analysis of details and the patterns that come out of them.
I am ignorant, but these are my impressions.
At high doses, its failure is in amplifying pure noise. Hallucinations. Raising the noise floor so high, that noise almost seems meaningful, vivid, and patterned. Meaningful information is lost, drowned out. It becomes hard to tell hot from cold, it takes more time for the difference to have an perceivable effect even when one focuses on it. The noise drowns out what your filters would normally let through.
If your failure is in not noticing broader detail, this is a tool that may help give that perspective. An example: I don't clean as much as I should, if I liked my health very much. Dirt and dust stands out to an incredible degree. I could see it before, but now it is obvious and needs attention.
If there is some broader pattern that you've mistakenly failed to seem, some set of details that form a pattern, those patterns will look more interesting.
Noise will look more interesting, too, and patterns of noise will stand out more readily. But that is for your consciousness to sort out.
If you are good at discarding noise, amplifying your attention to details is a tool worth wonder, terrible fear, and awe.
And yet, these things are terrifying. People lose their reason over it. Their reason!
I'd like to hope to aspire to something vaguely scientific and rational, in the structure of its method.
People seem to get lost in psychedelics. If I seem hopelessly lost, or if I'm not making any sense, I'd appreciate the signal...
Poultry used to suffer from small losses caused by a herpes-like virus. In 1970, a safe and effective vaccine was introduced, but it was "leaky", i.e. it could not "stop the spread". After close to 100% of chickens were vaccinated, the virus promptly evolved so that it spreads in, yet otherwise does not harm, vaccinated chickens. However, it now kills between 80 and 100% of unvaccinated chickens, a disastrous increase. For that reason, chickens are normally vaxxed “in ovo”.
This is called “Marek’s Disease”.
Have we ever vaxxed a whole population with a leaky vaccine against a rapidly mutating pathogen? Is the Marek’s Disease mutation a central outcome, or an outlier? If I were an epidemiologist, should I investigate this? Would it benefit me to not investigate this further?
The subject of reincarnation came up on the previous open thread, along with a great discussion of differences between Hindu and Buddhist (post Shakyamuni Buddhist) concepts of reincarnation. So, I'm curious how many people out there have memories of past lives? And, if you consider yourself to be a rationalist, how do you explain/dismiss/workaround those memories?
Full disclosure. I'm a member of "the secret club" below. As someone who was raised an atheist and who has a excellent grounding in the sciences and the scientific method, I assumed that my past-life memories were "false memories", and that they were artifacts of my 3+ years of heavy psychedelic experimentation — until I had to confront something that made me doubt this pat explanation...
My ex-girlfriend, a tenured professor of sociology, who is Jewish (and who also has past-life Holocaust memories), and her younger brother, who was fascinated by our stories, ended up just going out and asking their friends and acquaintances whether they had past life memories — and specifically memories of WWII and the Holocaust. Last I heard they had about 20 people who were born between 1958 and 1961 who had some pretty horrific past life memories. Of course, this would never qualify as a scientific inquiry, but I found that number to be higher than I would have guessed. (And what's interesting to me, is it seems like it takes average of about 15 years to reincarnate, at least after traumatic experiences).
I did my own informal survey while living in Hong Kong of my Chinese coworkers and friends (in my own age group), although some were reticent to talk about this subject, a few admitted that they had some unpleasant memories about WWII that they should have been too young to have.
Granted, my generation grew up on WWII movies and documentaries. So this phenomenon may just be a side effect of our cultural inculcation and our active imaginations. But I thought I'd put it out to the general rationalist masses and see if anyone has any sort of past life memories — not necessarily Holocaust or traumatic WWII memories.
No need to share specific details if you're uncomfortable doing so. And if you don't have these memories, please be polite to those of us who do. Thanks!
This appears to be far more of a democratic PAC (it gets funded through actblue, objectively partisan), and focuses on pushing a single issue of pandemic preparedness by... pushing candidates with a range of positions that don't necessarily prioritize pandemic preparedness? I think your promotion of this PAC is pretty disingenuous as you describe it as a lobbying group whereas the whole point of raising from individual donors here is specifically to donate direct cash to candidates.
Further, per them
"Thanks for taking the time to read through, Larks! Some of these questions are better answered via the upcoming Q&A on October 12, so we highly encourage you to intend if you are interested in contributing. Responding briefly to your other questions:
Since this is a new PAC, we are currently soliciting for a small pool of biosecurity champions that at the moment are Democratic. The ActBlue account accepting donations reflects this, but as we grow, we will broaden the ways we solicit for Republican candidates. We can share more on the considerations behind this choice at the Q&A. "
It is clear that their priority is supporting Democrats rather than those who are the most focused on fighting pandemics from either party.
I was super excited about the "Guarding Against Pandemics" thing, because obviously they're gonna support comprehensive test/trace/isolate programs and rapid vaccine development, because, everyone knows, those are the things that stop pandemics. But it seems like the actual thing that "Guarding Against Pandemics" is going to use your money for is.... donating to Elizabeth Warren?
"Donations to the PAC would go towards supporting candidates who are champions for pandemic preparedness in Congress, like Senator Elizabeth Warren"
Whose plans for protecting against the covid pandemic are well publicized and.... underwhelmingly involve just giving people money to feel better as they die of the pandemic. Both links were written early on in the pandemic, right around when the first US death was identified:
Plan: free healthcare treatment for covid, free time off from work, stimulus money. These are perhaps good ideas, but they don't... "guard against a pandemic".
Which was a few days later, involved even MORE free money, and almost nothing about actually stopping the pandemic. There was this one thing though:
"In addition, the lack of widespread testing in the United States—especially in comparison to South Korea and other countries—is a disgrace. According to the CDC’s last released data, our country has tested fewer than 2,000 people in a population of over 300 million. If we hope to control this outbreak, the Administration must immediately allocate funds from the recent emergency supplemental appropriation to state and local health departments and hospitals to rapidly stand up testing capacity nationwide. Additionally, to the extent that volume constraints at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention limit testing kit distribution or technical assistance to labs developing their own tests, it is critical to temporarily increase their capacity. "
Which is (emotionally) great! We should've had a massive nationwide ramp up in testing. But read that last part. She honestly thought it was the CDC's "volume constraints" and funding were what was holding back "lots of testing," not, well, all the rules (no you can't do your own tests without approval, and also well, we contaminated the first 180k with our incompetence) they (and the FDA) put in place. This is at the heart of so many of her misunderstandings of how things work: it's SimCity thinking: "well the CDC controls diseases right?, so if we just increase their resources and funding, they'll control the disease better!" When they were - particularly early on in the pandemic, when she wrote this - part of the problem!
But as we now know, the vaccines are the real pandemic harm-reducer. (if you take them, anyway) So the real heartbreaking part of her plan is this:
"And we should aim to build up our national scientific capacity, including the ability to bring vaccines to market, by committing $200 billion to vaccine development efforts..."
Oh, man, now I see why GAP is supporting her - she was advocating for rapid vaccine development even in the early days of the pandemic, what foresightedness! I apologize for not believing in her! Let's read the rest of this inspiring paragraph:
"...over the coming years. This will require guaranteed purchases of an eventual coronavirus vaccine after the current crisis passes"
Oh. Oh..... She doesn't mean 200 billion for a covid vaccine to end the pandemic. She means after we're done counting the millions of bodies, we can invent a vaccine. Because she, like almost everyone else, assumed that by any "realistic" FDA timeline, there was no way they would get a covid vaccine in time (she probably guessed 5-7 years) - despite the moderna vaccine already existing at this time. Because just like her understanding of the CDC, the FDA-as-it-was is baked into her idea of what Governmental Pandemic Preparation was. Which is * the * problem, and means that supporting her as the solution to "guarding against pandemics" is ludicrous. "Guarding against the next pandemic" means radically (perhaps even abolishing and reinventing) the CDC and FDA and our entire public health mentality. It means A) having a test/trace/isolate plan (and one that isn't immediately hamstrung by the CDC and FDA) ready to go and B) having as rapid a vaccine FDA regulatory approval (because development was NOT the critical path!) plan based on cost/benefit weighing the severity of the pandemic against the risk of side effects from the vaccine. It does not mean "200B for vaccines after the pandemic is over" and "lots of stimulus".
If "donating to Elizabeth Warren" is "guarding against the pandemic" and this is/was her plans... then you're killing me. I * wanted * to like this. I desperately want a real Guarding Against Pandemics, because this pandemic (and the next one) really are the most critical goals in our society, and I desperately want a way that I can help. But this..... come on.
Give me a Guarding Against Pandemics that takes your donations, writes up a Pandemic Manifesto that calls for reforming the CDC to focus exclusively on widescale contagious diseases with corporate/hospital/lab/local/state integration of test/trace/isolate strategies and reforming the FDA to enable rapid approval of treatments in proportion to the threat of a pandemic, and only donates to senators/congresspeople who publicly sign the manifesto and support bills in congress that effect that.
A question. I read online a lot of different thoughtful commentators from across the political spectrum - from Marxists to traditional liberals to Reaganite conservatives to libertarians to religious conservatives. And I've regularly congratulated myself on my open-mindedness and willingness to learn from all sides ... but then I noticed that I'm actually a lot less open-minded than I've been giving myself credit for, because every single one of the people I read regularly shares my dislike of the various "identitarian" movements that are so much in the news nowadays.
So I would like to "steelman" identitarianism, and in pursuit of that I'm hoping for suggestions of a thoughtful online writer I could read who supports such movements - by "thoughtful", I mean someone who is prepared to take seriously and respond carefully and rationally to the various critiques that people make of them. A small example: Matt Bruenig's critique of what he calls "identitarian deference" (https://mattbruenig.com/2013/02/26/what-does-identitarian-deference-require/). Does anyone know someone who has responded from the "identitarian" side to Bruenig's critique - perhaps by demonstrating that no such "deference" takes place at all (which would surprise me, since there are a lot of apparent examples of it), or who accepts that it does take place, but argues that Bruenig's criticisms of it are mistaken.
Please note, I am NOT looking for books to read from such perspectives: I've already read quite a number of those, including various of the Critical Race Theory classics. I'm more interested in a current online writer who is in the business of engaging seriously with and responding to critiques like Bruenig's when they occur. Any suggestions?
In the SSC meetup I attended, someone mentioned how the world is finally done with leaded gasoline. Seeing how we have known about the damaging effects of lead on cognitive development and IQ for a while now, I was surprised that this took so long. Anybody has a good explanation for this? Is it something like a Tobacco companies denying the harms caused by their products and lobbying in its behalf? Perhaps the problem is diffuse enough that I doesn't get political traction and democracy ends up ignoring it?
Someday, I want to write a whole thing about the important of sorting information properly.
Reddit, for example, sorts information by votes.
Votes have the problem of bringing up the uncontroversial, things are are easy to vote for.
That's the subtle, and incredibly important problem with votes. People will vote more on things that they understand, and less on things that they don't.
As a result, when voting is used to sort, it mistakenly surfaces the uncontroversial or already well known, and buries anything complex or interesting beyond obvious approval.
There is incredible harm in this. Much of social media amplifies based on votes, and I suspect this to be a cause of disinformation — think the Flat Earth — caused by an improper sorting of information that buries the wrong ideas, and amplifies things it shouldn't.
The Internet is very efficient, even small kinks in the way we've laid out or systems can amplify to cause societal effects.
There is incredible harm in this, and it pains me how little intention is paid to how information is presented. Everywhere you look, you will see mistakes. Lists that are not sorted, or where the sorting makes no sense at all (most chronologies!).
Lists instead of hierarchical, or hierarchical instead of lists. Even simple questions like these.
More broadly, poorly search, poor filtering, or poor sorting.
Watching a BBC One show on PBS, “The Indian Doctor” from 2010. A child is presenting symptoms of smallpox. The doctor advises quarantine, facial coverings and people staying 6 feet apart. Set in Wales circa 1962 so I guess no metric system yet.
Thanks for boosting Guarding Against Pandemics, they're really doing some good work! Especially with their focus on the risks of engineered pathogens (which are really quite scary).
Looking at the Guarding Against Pandemic site, I'm glad that their goals seem pretty sensible and concrete in terms of what they're trying to pay for (although it seems like a tall order to make vaccines in advance, since how exactly would we know which ones will cause a pandemic?
But also, I see little acknowledgement of how much the failures in response were political and regulatory, and NOT lack of resources, or talent, or knowledge or capacity? And how GAP plans to address those issues?
There's a fantasy trope of having old Greek/Norse/whatever gods exist as powerful (but not omnipotent) entities in the world (e.g. American Gods, Dresden Files or Everworld). Does anyone know of a fantasy universe that does this and also has Jesus as an existing God on the same level as the other gods?
In 1722 William Wollaston discovered that the natural religion of mankind, discoverable without reliance on divine revelation, was adherence to truth and devotion to reason. His rationalist magnum opus anticipated Kant’s Categorical Imperative, described and defended what we would now call the libertarian non-aggression principle, and provided the writers of the Declaration of Independence with their “purſuit of happineſs”. Why haven't you ever heard of him?
Transparency is as important an idea to society, as open-source was to software.
I could write pages upon pages about this. I have the, maybe radical, idea that anything not private ought to be published, so that it can be examined and have its inefficiencies removed.
Anything that works well, will work better when people can looks at the parts under the light of Sun.
Now, to have an interesting idea that can turn into policy, you have to define it in relation to its negative space. Where does the idea stop?
What people do as individuals, and not as members of any organization, that is out of the purview of Transparency as a societal tool.
We care about systems that are bigger than a single person. We want to let sunlight into those, we want to make sure they're efficient, and that they're the best systems they can be.
I want anything than any organization bigger than a person does, to be public. Anything an individual does as themselves, should be eligible for strong privacy.
That will bring Good to society, the likes of which Open Source has brought to Software.
I would very much like to see more data being gathered on the effectiveness of Transparency!
We are very far from that ideal, but if true the impact of that insight on on how we build societies and structures is enormous.
Or maybe I am being foolish by thinking that there is such a big improvement to be had, with such a simple idea.
I would think those most opposed to embryo selection and preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P) would be conservatives because they are typically religious and the religious are typically morally opposed to discarding embryos. However, some liberals are very opposed to PGT-P because of a general aversion to eugenics and concerns of exacerbating inequality.
Will embryo selection likely be regarded as right-wing or left-wing? Will it be popular among secular conservatives? Will there be bipartisan opposition in the near future? Will it ever be widely adopted?
On the Guardians Against Pandemics front, a big point in their favor is that if you ask them to please refund your contribution, they're prompt and polite about it. (I hadn't noticed the significance of ActBlue on first reading, but the commentariat here convinced me to at least withdraw my money until they explained themselves at length on that topic.)
Here's GAP responding to an email of "please refund my money, I realized I have no idea how you plan to be bipartisan if you're going through ActBlue, and really don't want to fund this becoming a partisan issue":
"There is good reason to use ActBlue now just as a practicality. We are raising right now for Democratic candidates because Democrats are in control of both Houses at the moment, so many of our asks are directed towards Democrats. We are likely to use WinRed to solicit Republican PAC donations in the future as the chambers flip and we have asks for Republican members such as restrictions on GOF research."
I don't know to what extent ActBlue and WinRed would be in favor of an organization trying to use them both simultaneously, but it seems somewhat reasonable.
How to get paranoid people to take a vaccine? Speak to their paranoia: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/09/28/nolte-data-confirms-trump-counties-dying-to-own-the-libs/
Somewhere in one of these open threads I recall a discussion about the spectrum of human personalities and proclivities. I am not sure but I think it was in relationship to an” on the spectrum” discussion of “being”, or “personality,” or “proclivity” or …. (You pick a word.)
The consensus seems to be that the world was richer for having multiple sorts of all of those things.
Given that, does not it make much more sense to have a pantheon of gods? So that all kinds of people will have someone to look up to?
The more Elemental of us might identify with Mars for instance and He might even speak to us.
Those of us perhaps more Murcureal in temperament, would listen to… Well, you know.
I guess I am trying to start a discussion about whether the world would be in a better place if they were more gods to choose from.
But only if they shared some of our qualities and deficiencies in order to make them easier to identify with.
Our present gods are largely ideals, aspirations, that have fallen into the hands of lawyers poets and politicians since they were invented. They would be welcome to the pantheon.
We could all go about our business secure in the knowledge that there was a God who was a little better than you but” bent” kind of the way you are. It strikes me as a healthier relationship to the world.
Suppose that early in 2020, Moderna decided that damn the ethics boards, they were going to do a challenge trial. At what point in the plan would they be stopped? Are vaccines regulated enough that the police could come by and arrest the people running the trial, or would they make it to the step of getting stonewalled by the FDA because their study didn't follow proper procedure?
I think it's great that the Biden Administration is promoting Covid vaccinations, and has encouraged pop stars to reach out to their fans. And given the threat that Covid poses to Baby Boomers, why not recruit ACDC into the effort? Still, I'm taken aback by a headline in today's New York Times:
"A C.D.C. panel is meeting to decide who should get Pfizer boosters."
This is a random place to post this but you're all smart.
I just moved into a place and the basement briefly floods when it rains hard (which it has a few times since I moved in). I don't particularly care because the sump pump gets 95% of it out and only leaves small puddles. I never actually spend any time in the basement except to switch my laundry.
But a week ago I left a guitar case down there, and I went down today and found it dotted everywhere with yellow-y mold, which seemed like alarmingly fast growth. There is also mold on the basement walls which I previously just ignored.
I live on the first floor, right above the basement. Does this seem like a concerning situation?
Next up, in the triumphal parade that culminates in Satya Yuga! (by which I mean my blog):
Alexander the Great was Aristotle's Greatest Achievement:
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/alexander-the-great-was-aristotles
I have been living in the US for 6 years and am sick and and tired of this stupid imperial system. I love almost everything else about living here.
<vent>
Fahrenheit must be the dumbest unit ever invented, based on (horse?) body temperature. Inches are barely better and have been defined using metric since the 50s anyway. It would be better if things were 0.625" but the whole odd numerator thing is sooooo stupid.
</vent>
Does anybody know of any movements trying to accelerate metric adoption in the US? I want to join, or start my own, for the sake of my grandkids. Enough is enough.
If you took part in a vaccine trial, do they eventually tell you if you got the placebo? Seems like that'd be important to know if you're deciding whether to get the shot again.
Does anyone else feel mildly annoyed when the run into the word ‘nonplussed’ in print? It currently has two completely different meanings and I usually have to try to use context or information about the author’s age and continent of residence to get at their intended meaning.
Or in a similar vein, how about the word ‘bemused’?
There is this common pattern in philanthropy, more often seen in left-wing stuff, where when someone wants to do X, instead of raising money and then doing X with it, they raise money to lobby the government to spend money on X.
An example: I once lived in Madison, WI, where it is both quite left-wing and very cold in the winter. There was a fairly large homeless population and one or two of them would die of exposure every winter. I knew some folks who were trying to raise money for a warming shelter so the homeless folks could sleep there at night instead of freezing to death on the streets. Their plan was to collect money and hire a lobbyist to try and get the city government to build a warming shelter. They had this whole plan worked out, which land they could use, how much it would cost, how it would fit into the city budget. I talked with them in the square for a while and told them that it looked like they money they planned to raise was more than enough for the downpayment for the building. Hadn't crossed their mind, and they weren't interested. They were comfortable in the world of lobbying the city, and construction or building things weren't things they knew how to do.
This "Guarding Against Pandemics" thing has this in *spades*. Set aside the avowed Democratic partisanship: the only thing they can think of to do with the money they collect is to give it to politicians. How about they offer some more funding to the Seattle Flu Study? I've had some arguments with Trevor Bedford, but he personally has done more good against COVID than the entire CDC, especially early in 2020. I'll bet he sure could use some funding to hire a couple more techs. Or maybe GAP could spin up similar tracking groups in other US cities. That sure seems like it would be more use than re-electing Elizabeth fucking Warren.
Okay, it's a casual game and I haven't even played the trial version yet, but somebody seems to have made a game around the "is it ethical/utilitarian to steal and then give the money to charity?" question 😀
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEbgagpzVhM&t=4s
How dangerous, really, is vaping (I'm speaking here of nicotine, not THC vapes ginned up in someone's garage)? I know the Brits have more or less decided it's not a big deal, but in the States it's being treated like a stepping stone to chasing the dragon in a trap house. Does anyone have any feel or knowledge for what (if any) the actual scientific consensus on this is, or even if there is one?
We already have a harder line, it just got ignored.
Scott, I’m guessing if you’re “squeezing in” Amsterdam, you don’t have a lot of time there. But I think you’d really enjoy the Ritman Library, if it’s open while you’re in town. It’s full of Rosicrucian and Neoplatonic mystic texts collected by the eccentric millionaire who invented the airline beverage cart.
Other top recommendations off the tourist beaten track are the eco projects at De Ceuvel in Amsterdam Noord, story nights (if they’re doing them) at Mezrab, and whatever is going on at Mediamatic. Best view of the city is from the cafe on the roof of the public library near Centraal Station. If you have a chance, grab a rijsttafel at Kartika on Overtoom, or some Surinamese food at Ram’s Roti on Van Galenstraat. We used to live in Amsterdam and these are the places we would take our visitors, and that we miss.
Let's get away from arguing for a bit, here's a nice dance piece from last night's dance competition show (Chinese only, for the English subtitles you'll have to watch the full Episode 6):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTitVOttxC8
GAP is using a payment processor that *REQUIRES* all of it's customers to be partisan. Either they are lying to us or lying to ActBlue. Either way, they're lying.
I regret not discussing COVID more with rationalists in February.
Can't go back though.
Anyone want to preregister a prediction for Evergrande?
So... what will VOO open at on 4 October? And how can we think through this?
COVID dropped it something like 30% in two weeks, then it rebounded as quickly.
Is the implosion of the Chinese economy twice as bad as COVID, half as bad, or not at all bad?
I feel like March 2020 markets were pricing in the collapse of the global economy, to include China, so I'm going with less bad. I don't have strong intuitions on how much though. 65% chance of 400 to 350 by the opening on 4 October?
Some chance this will be contained in China. I'd say 10% but I'm really just guessing. There are lots of ways that economy is tied to the rest of the world, and a lot of ways it's isolated. There are a ton of people with more expertise than me who can game how that shakes out, my intuitions are really shaky here.
FDA's advisory committee voted fairly heavily against approving third booster shots, the whole thing was 8 hours long and so I only listened to segments of it.
https://youtu.be/WFph7-6t34M
My Layman (familiar with statistics, unfamiliar with medicine) understanding of the state of the vaccines seemed to conform to the kinds of discussions and assumptions the meeting members had.
1) Vax effectiveness at lowering transmission rate reduces over time
2) Vax effectiveness at lowering severe outcomes (hospitalization/death) holds
3) Risk of Myocarditis is taken as credible but uncertainty exists around how large it is. Other risks of repeated doses were mentioned in some of the presentations but did not feature as prominently.
My tentative thought: A younger individual with 2 shots is already protected against adverse outcomes how much more they benefit from a third shot would be the change in the infection rate between the third and weakened second dose and then multiplied by the hospitalization and/or death risk which is going to be very small number. The committee wasn't comfortable in assuming the trade off between that and Myocarditis favored the third jab.
Did anyone watch or hear about this meeting? Am I missing something?
Overall I very pessimistic:
Other observations:
1. Anti-Vax or Vax Hesitant seem to be either using the raw trends in vaccinations and infections to argue not so subtly that vaccines are causing infections, or pointing to some countries like Israel which did not have their deaths/hospitalizations as front-loaded in 2020. The market for per-capita break downs is much smaller than the market for bullying and moral grandstanding.
2. Vaccination rates and lockdown intensities being positively correlated. A lot of people, myself included, got vaccinated despite not being particularly susceptible to the virus out of a hope that it would hasten a return to normalcy. Blaming the unvaccinated who represent on a per-capita basis a larger portion of the most severe outcomes is reasonable but it looks like there are sufficient number of people in positions of influence to maintain the social patterns of 2020 even in areas with >90% vaccination rates. Even if you imposed vaccination universally at gunpoint, the people who either go by covid case rates or insist that deaths must be prevented *at all costs* will probably have their way.
This is really too much for me. I've been a big fan of Scott's for a long time, but this uncritical endorsement of a group that is obviously lying about its intent is the last straw. I am cancelling my subscription.
Nominative determinism watch: Alex Murdaugh
Planned obsolescence has always been unsustainable in my mind, but I'm starting to think that it might actually be an existential threat. A lot of economic statistics seems like a sham when you consider the incentives: reduce the lifetime of a product by 5%, and lo and behold, growth in that sector went up 5%! A simplistic take, but I think the basic idea is right.
Clearly this relationship establishes strong negative feedback loops pushing planned obsolescence throughout the economy to make numbers look good, but a lot of it it is a mirage, and the bill will come due. The waste is already prodigious, and while recycling could mitigate some of that, manufacturers are not incentivized to make their products easy to disassemble, recyclable, or repairable. Since they are not responsible for the full product lifecycle, disposal has become a large negative externality that governments "handle" poorly by just shipping that crap overseas. The policy incentives towards planned obsolescence are so strong that I can't imagine any politician having the courage to stop this freight train.
Some positive signs though: the right to repair movement is gaining steam, and this provides some incentives to engineer products to let users extend their life. I don't think it will be enough though, and like any growing movement, I fear it will probably end up being coopted by some political actors for other ends, or otherwise politically neutered.
Two ideas popular in blue-tribe spaces are cities and economic equality. Aren't these in conflict? Cities concentrate wealth. We live in them because the connections and specializations they afford make us more productive and therefore richer. We live in them because to do so is a desirable luxury, and we're rich enough to afford it.
It seems to me that a serious program of economic equality would be devastating to city dwellers. I mean, the city itself is a luxury. The express purpose of taxing the rich, who city-dwellers are, is to inhibit luxury. And it seems like it would do that. Tall buildings aren't cheap. Elevators aren't cheap. Subways aren't cheap. With incomes driven towards those in rural Iowa, you couldn't have those things. With the resources of rural Iowa, you're going to have the material conditions and lifestyle of rural Iowa.
So why are the people calling for this the ones currently living in New York and not Iowa? What gives?
Scott, the PAC uses ActBlue. ActBlue is explicitly a Democratic non-profit technology company that is set up to help the Democratic Party and left wing groups win. Part of the process of getting on ActBlue is a verification process that you are helping Democrats win elections or are otherwise a left wing, partisan group. It is a complete torpedo to any kind of non-partisan credentials. They have claimed they are going to find an alternative for Republicans but the fact they don't know about the Republican alternative (WinRed) is ridiculous on its face.
I don't mind if you want to endorse political causes. But you should be explicit about the partisan nature of what you're endorsing.
In an effort to put every resource to use against humanity, Skynet orders its machines to modify several dozen biplanes from a WWI aviation museum to fight against the humans. The biplanes can be piloted by obsolete, damaged Terminators that nonetheless have perfect reflexes and flying skills.
What armaments (if any) do the biplanes get?
In what military role(s) are they used?
If employed in combat, what tactics do the biplanes use?
Assume the humans still have some planes of their own, like in Terminator Salvation.
So you've probably heard about how at-home rapid covid test kits are like under a dollar in eg Germany, but more like $30 in the US, a ~2000% price hike. I work at a (US) pharmacy/conenience store, and though the price is absurdly high, it's still not enough to match the supply and demand.
For starters, they've put up the extra barrier of putting all the tests behind the pharmacy counter where you have to be specifically ask the pharmacist for it -- it's not advetised and out on a shelf in the open. You can't just see it, grab it, and pay for it at the register like most non-prescription medicine.
But despite the lack of advertising, a third of the calls I get these days are "Do you have any at-home covid-tests left?" And 95% of the time I tell them no. Because the crazy high prices + medical bureaucracy obstacles + being completely unadvertised and hidden *still* does not match supply and demand; we restock every Saturday, and by Sunday afternoon the Covid tests are gone again.
Idk how much they'd cost if the price was the only thing doing the allocating, but it would be much more than the current cost. So yeah, unless my pharmacy/region/state is atypical, the situation is even worse than the pricetag makes it look.
(Also, there's an appointment-only, results-in-days, free-at-the-point-of-sale covid test at the pharmacy, but most people who are disappointed to find we're out of the rapid tests aren't interested in that.)
Question -- in Germany and other places with cheap rapid tests, is the pricetag doing all of the work of matching supply and demand? Or do they have it just as bad, with the actual price hidden in non-monetary forms? Are they merely "cheap", or actually plentiful?
(PS: The nice thing about only using price to allocate stuff is that higher prices increases the incentive to jump in and produce more; that's not the case with the "beauracracy + hiding + luck of whoever's first in line" methods of allocation. But on the other hand, testing for covid is mostly illegal in the US, so higher prices wouldn't increase supply anyway, so I guess the point is moot.)
A new sarbecovirus was just discovered in horseshoe bats from Laos. The RBD of its spike protein is only 2 amino acids divergent from the original Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 strain. And it binds to ACE2 receptors just as efficiently.
So there is nothing "uniquely adapted" or unnatural about SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. you don't need a lab running GoF experiments or splicing genomes to create this virus). If you're a Leaker, though, you might say this was one of the genomes that was on listed on the WIV spreadsheet that was taken down, and it leaked from the WIV! Well, you'd still have the timeline issue to work around. And now that we have a virus found in a wild bat population that is very very similar the Wuhan nCoV we really don't need a lab leak to explain anything.
https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-871965/v1/986c09ca-d494-4a7c-a65b-9eec9c0a06b8.pdf?c=1631900665
Does NYC really have an indoor rule requiring toddlers to mask up?
Reference https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1439610789728382983?s=21
This is probably too broad/general of a question to get answered, but (as an American) I've been fascinated recently by how parliamentary systems work. So- do major laws get passed easier in a parliamentary country than in America? I just finished reading a comparative political systems book, so I know that most democracies that aren't the US are either unicameral, or the second house/parliament is much weaker- so they can't veto legislation a la the US Senate. And by definition you can't really have divided government between the prime minister and the parliament- right? Because the PM is the leader of the largest plurality party (right?)
So- do other 1st world democracies who use a parliamentary system pass major/sweeping legislation more easily than we do here in the US, with its multiple veto points? Obviously here one has to clear the House, the Senate filibuster, and then get the President to sign it. Is the rest of the developed world just clearly much more efficient at legislating than America? Is it an obviously better system?
One argument why this *wouldn't* be the case if that, with multiple parties, even having the largest plurality in the parliament doesn't mean the other parties want to pass your laws. But Britain should be exempt from this, with their Westminster system where the PM has a majority in the House of Commons and the opposition parties basically have zero power (right?)
This comment is particularly designed for Richard Gadsen (spelling?), who always has excellent comparative politics knowledge and is also I believe British
This is a moonshot, but is anyone here a member of the Aro gTér? I'm trying to get ahold of their meditation course (https://aromeditation.org) , but I received no email after signup, and haven't found a working email to contact them either.
I'm interested in them because David Chapman, creator of Meaningness, among other things, is a member.
I was doing some deep diving into inflation yesterday and while explaining it to my wife this morning kind of realized how absurd it all is. After going through some of the glaring problems with "CPI" as measured by the government she sensibly asked "why don't they change it to better reflect reality" and I said that if they did it would invalidate the prior data points (unless you could go back and reliably recompute them) but perhaps, more importantly, there is a giant system that is indexed to the value as it is currently constructed. So the CPI we have today is "real" insofar as it's part of this whole made-up system. So "real" inflation is something you should calculate yourself based on your own inputs.
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/13/1033993846/the-federal-government-sells-flood-prone-homes-to-often-unsuspecting-buyers-npr-
HUD is doing a worse job of telling buyers about flood risk than banks are required to do.
Recent international news has discussed the formation of an alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with its first major activity being the development of a new class of nuclear-powered submarines for the Australian navy. This deserves some kabbalistic analysis.
The notarikon for this alliance is AUKUS, pronounced like "Orcus", the Roman god of the underworld later and better known as Pluto. Project Pluto was a 1960s US project to develop a nuclear-powered ... aircraft.
But Project Pluto was kabbalistically unbalanced: it focused on developing aircraft, whereas Pluto is a god of the underworld. The fuel for its nuclear engines was similarly unbalanced: uranium is mined from deep within the earth, whereas Uranus is a god of the sky. To find balance we can look astronomically, between Pluto and Uranus, or physically between earth and sky, to find Neptune, god of the sea, and the submarines that will be developed for Project Orcus.
Further correspondence can be found in Project Pluto, based in the northern hemisphere, developing craft to travel over the surface, while Project Orcus, based in the southern hemisphere, develops craft to travel under it. This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
Is anyone else suddenly finding the google spreadsheet for meetups doesn't work? I've been checking for info on the Oxford/London meetups about twice a week for a while, as I'll probably go to whichever of those is more convenient, and now the times have been announced, I've gone to the spreadsheet to double-check the locations as I can't quite remember them exactly, and both they and maybe something like 75% of the total rows seem to have vanished? Is this something obscene happening on my end, or has something odd gone on, perhaps related to the changes to google docs/drive happening about now?
Fresh PhD graduate here! I'm looking for job opportunities or paid projects.
Apart from working on my academic topic, molecular biology, I also:
run a photography freelance business (https://www.see-elegance.com)
organize a dating advice group (https://discord.gg/rz4PVuK)
and play around with data using Python (https://www.reddit.com/r/Hololive/comments/owutig/oc_i_learned_programming_so_i_could_graph_inas/)
Remote work is a possibility, but I would prefer to move abroad. I'm a Russian citizen.
Here's the CV I'm sending out to recruiters: https://docdro.id/wiaLOTe
Let me know if you need any other info.
Does anyone have advice for people who have political opinions far different from most of their friends and family? How do you navigate this situation? Do you just shut up and let your opinions fester inside, not let anyone know your true beliefs? This seems somewhat torturous to me. Do you try to actively argue with people? This also seems torturous, and likely to end up with everyone misunderstanding me and my positions. People don't seem to understand the nuances of positions outside the Overton window. They tend to think I'm more of an extremist than I really am, or think I'm stupid, or just plain old not like me and not want to be around me.
So, the Covid situation here in England (and I think the rest of the UK) is starting to get scary again (hospitals seem to be under much strain as cases are rising ahead of a likely new wave). With vaccination numbers stalled far short of herd immunity levels, and with the government insisting on relaxing security measures, I'm personally suspecting we're back to a strategy of achieving (the required difference in numbers for) herd immunity by means of infections.
So... I don't want to be that guy, but might this mean it's worth rethinking meetups here?
Sun sets at 17.49 in Edinburgh on Sun 24 Oct, just so you know for an outdoor meetup
I want to try to come up with names for things--names that, as soon as you hear them, you immediately understand what the name is referring to, and wonder why no one gave it a name before:
singularity FOMO
the great leap whoreward
rent seeking license
divine right of parents
the principle of "The kleptocrat is dead. Long live the kleptocrat."
Can you come up with any good ones?
How should one’s own goals be balanced with those of others in persuasion? In particular, how much should we trust others’ ability to protect & advocate for themselves when we are being persuasive?
First, some groundwork: I think that a true *win* in any negotiation is one in which both sides agree that the deal made is the best possible "free" choice for them. Persuasion is guiding someone to realize that the logical best choice is one that you prefer. (This definition can certainly be poked apart, but my main aim is to establish that I'm not interested in "wins" by coersion (eg. guilt, threats, ultimatums). These are essentially cheating — maybe you get what you want, but you would have lost if you were limited to using Reason as your weapon.)
Often, I’ve found that persuasion really comes down to understanding the other side as much as possible, to find a deal that both sides agree is better than no deal. So good persuasion shouldn’t really have a “sucker.” (Although it can certainly still appear that way from the outside, and either party may, in hindsight, decide that the deal wasn’t as good as it seemed. I think this is non-ideal, but is ultimately fine.)
If we can agree on the above, then here's a short scenario:
In a group project with a tight deadline, one member mentions that she would prefer to skip one of the final meetings — she cites multiple personal reasons: her grandpa recently died and she’s packing to leave town for his funeral, her dad just got out of the hospital, her thesis work just started this week… she’s got a lot going on. But she adds, “I suppose I can meet tonight for an hour if it'll help.” Even with everything going on, it would still be preferable for the group to have her at the meeting, and it would be false to say that things will be all the same without her. You reply that “if it’s too much for you then please let us know, but otherwise if you can do it, I’d love for us to meet for an hour! It would be more productive.” You end up meeting, the friend enjoys the meeting and is glad she ultimately attended, saying that it was a welcome distraction from the stresses of her personal life. Except…
The thing is, it worked out in this case, but it might not have. It’s entirely possible for a person to not be a good advocate for themselves, and put others’ needs before their own too heavily. An alternative view might be that one could have “read the hints,” and intuited that she didn’t really have the bandwidth for a meeting. It would also be truthful to say, "Actually, it’s fine; we do want you here and it would help, but it seems like you're dealing with a lot and we can still get a lot done without you."
I realize there’s not really a single “right” answer for this, but I’m confused regarding how/when to ask for things and assert one’s own needs/desires, if you can’t always trust others to have proper boundaries and value their own needs as important. At some point, I figure there's a necessity to assume that each person is ultimately the authority on their own internal needs/wants/desires. (Actually, to assume responsibility for someone else's calculus of what they can handle seems incredibly arrogant and paternalistic.) At the same time, there certainly is some validity to intuiting when what someone actually wants vs what they claim are misaligned; certainly, an excuse of, “Well, they said they were fine” can be plain wrong. (Just look at any consent / sexual harassment issues for evidence.)
I don’t know if there’s a resolution to be found here, but this seems like an unresolved question. Do we account for others’ needs in a world where people frequently don’t state what they want, or even realize/acknowledge it to themselves? And if so, when / how?
I've been recently pondering about the (Sci-Fi?) possibility of consciousness synchronicity: Can we humans "sync" our consciousness to other human or animal consciousnesses?
For example, if you're wondering what's the cognitive qualia of your cat sitting calmly in its litter box, and you'd like to know what it "thinks" like, you'd have some cognitive tool to help you get into that cognitive state, hence "sync" your consciousness with that of your cat.
Or, think of a flying bird: We humans sometimes wonder what it "feels" like to fly like a bird. Maybe we can have a tool that can help us get into a bird cognitive state, so that we can know what it "thinks" like.
Or, think of your partner. If only we could think like they do!
What I'm having in mind is some NeuroFeedback tool (which I hear can help some people) that can record cognitive states and then train you to "sync" with these states. Or some equivalent to NeuraLink that can send the right pulses to "sync" you with a pre-recorded cognitive state (i.e. consciousness).
Yes, we don't know what consciousness is, but I guess someone ever thought of this idea despite that? I couldn't find a resource that uses that term (except for lots of Jung's Synchronicity resources, which is completely unrelated). Do you know of some interesting resources that discuss this idea?
I just thought of something in light of debates over whether the drug price-setting thing in Congress will upset drug development. Could a pharma company cut a deal with some random country to offer drugs for sale only there in the advent of such rules, and then only offer the drugs for sale there?
I want to make a simple game based on text and clickable images and maybe some simple animations. I want to have a working prototype up in a day and I want it to be playable on a website I created. Kingdom of Loathing is a good example of the style I'm going for (but the game will of course be a lot simpler).
What framework/engine should I use? I'm a decent programmer but I know little of game design. I want to use something that is "living" with an active community, that is close to programming (no-code stuff just doesn't work IMO, I want to version control with git), and that gets me going as fast as possible so that I can get a prototype working ASAP. My devenv is Ubuntu if that matters.
I have googled around but most tips for getting started with simple games talk about platformers and arcade-like games, which is not what I'm going for. Right now my best idea is either to use the LÖVE framework, but I'm unsure on how relevant Lua still is, or to use GameMaker Studio, but it isn't free and seem a bit more complex than what I need. I thought about just doing it in python but that doesn't seem to be recommended and Pygame looks dead. I looked into Interactive Fiction stuff but it seems too simple, with little room for game logic beyond branching the story.
Help and suggestions from anyone with experience would be very appreciated!
What long term effects do you think the COVID-19 pandemic will have on world history within the next 30 years?
I suspect that LSD causes analysis of details and the patterns that come out of them.
I am ignorant, but these are my impressions.
At high doses, its failure is in amplifying pure noise. Hallucinations. Raising the noise floor so high, that noise almost seems meaningful, vivid, and patterned. Meaningful information is lost, drowned out. It becomes hard to tell hot from cold, it takes more time for the difference to have an perceivable effect even when one focuses on it. The noise drowns out what your filters would normally let through.
If your failure is in not noticing broader detail, this is a tool that may help give that perspective. An example: I don't clean as much as I should, if I liked my health very much. Dirt and dust stands out to an incredible degree. I could see it before, but now it is obvious and needs attention.
If there is some broader pattern that you've mistakenly failed to seem, some set of details that form a pattern, those patterns will look more interesting.
Noise will look more interesting, too, and patterns of noise will stand out more readily. But that is for your consciousness to sort out.
If you are good at discarding noise, amplifying your attention to details is a tool worth wonder, terrible fear, and awe.
And yet, these things are terrifying. People lose their reason over it. Their reason!
I'd like to hope to aspire to something vaguely scientific and rational, in the structure of its method.
People seem to get lost in psychedelics. If I seem hopelessly lost, or if I'm not making any sense, I'd appreciate the signal...
Poultry used to suffer from small losses caused by a herpes-like virus. In 1970, a safe and effective vaccine was introduced, but it was "leaky", i.e. it could not "stop the spread". After close to 100% of chickens were vaccinated, the virus promptly evolved so that it spreads in, yet otherwise does not harm, vaccinated chickens. However, it now kills between 80 and 100% of unvaccinated chickens, a disastrous increase. For that reason, chickens are normally vaxxed “in ovo”.
This is called “Marek’s Disease”.
Have we ever vaxxed a whole population with a leaky vaccine against a rapidly mutating pathogen? Is the Marek’s Disease mutation a central outcome, or an outlier? If I were an epidemiologist, should I investigate this? Would it benefit me to not investigate this further?
The subject of reincarnation came up on the previous open thread, along with a great discussion of differences between Hindu and Buddhist (post Shakyamuni Buddhist) concepts of reincarnation. So, I'm curious how many people out there have memories of past lives? And, if you consider yourself to be a rationalist, how do you explain/dismiss/workaround those memories?
Full disclosure. I'm a member of "the secret club" below. As someone who was raised an atheist and who has a excellent grounding in the sciences and the scientific method, I assumed that my past-life memories were "false memories", and that they were artifacts of my 3+ years of heavy psychedelic experimentation — until I had to confront something that made me doubt this pat explanation...
https://www.aish.com/sp/so/Ive-Been-Here-Before-Holocaust-and-Reincarnation.html
My ex-girlfriend, a tenured professor of sociology, who is Jewish (and who also has past-life Holocaust memories), and her younger brother, who was fascinated by our stories, ended up just going out and asking their friends and acquaintances whether they had past life memories — and specifically memories of WWII and the Holocaust. Last I heard they had about 20 people who were born between 1958 and 1961 who had some pretty horrific past life memories. Of course, this would never qualify as a scientific inquiry, but I found that number to be higher than I would have guessed. (And what's interesting to me, is it seems like it takes average of about 15 years to reincarnate, at least after traumatic experiences).
I did my own informal survey while living in Hong Kong of my Chinese coworkers and friends (in my own age group), although some were reticent to talk about this subject, a few admitted that they had some unpleasant memories about WWII that they should have been too young to have.
Granted, my generation grew up on WWII movies and documentaries. So this phenomenon may just be a side effect of our cultural inculcation and our active imaginations. But I thought I'd put it out to the general rationalist masses and see if anyone has any sort of past life memories — not necessarily Holocaust or traumatic WWII memories.
No need to share specific details if you're uncomfortable doing so. And if you don't have these memories, please be polite to those of us who do. Thanks!
This appears to be far more of a democratic PAC (it gets funded through actblue, objectively partisan), and focuses on pushing a single issue of pandemic preparedness by... pushing candidates with a range of positions that don't necessarily prioritize pandemic preparedness? I think your promotion of this PAC is pretty disingenuous as you describe it as a lobbying group whereas the whole point of raising from individual donors here is specifically to donate direct cash to candidates.
Further, per them
"Thanks for taking the time to read through, Larks! Some of these questions are better answered via the upcoming Q&A on October 12, so we highly encourage you to intend if you are interested in contributing. Responding briefly to your other questions:
Since this is a new PAC, we are currently soliciting for a small pool of biosecurity champions that at the moment are Democratic. The ActBlue account accepting donations reflects this, but as we grow, we will broaden the ways we solicit for Republican candidates. We can share more on the considerations behind this choice at the Q&A. "
It is clear that their priority is supporting Democrats rather than those who are the most focused on fighting pandemics from either party.
I was super excited about the "Guarding Against Pandemics" thing, because obviously they're gonna support comprehensive test/trace/isolate programs and rapid vaccine development, because, everyone knows, those are the things that stop pandemics. But it seems like the actual thing that "Guarding Against Pandemics" is going to use your money for is.... donating to Elizabeth Warren?
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Btm562wDNEuWXj9Gk/guarding-against-pandemics#What_would_my_donation_pay_for_and_why_does_that_matter_
"Donations to the PAC would go towards supporting candidates who are champions for pandemic preparedness in Congress, like Senator Elizabeth Warren"
Whose plans for protecting against the covid pandemic are well publicized and.... underwhelmingly involve just giving people money to feel better as they die of the pandemic. Both links were written early on in the pandemic, right around when the first US death was identified:
https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/protecting-from-coronavirus
Plan: free healthcare treatment for covid, free time off from work, stimulus money. These are perhaps good ideas, but they don't... "guard against a pandemic".
https://elizabethwarren.com/plans/updated-plan-address-coronavirus
Which was a few days later, involved even MORE free money, and almost nothing about actually stopping the pandemic. There was this one thing though:
"In addition, the lack of widespread testing in the United States—especially in comparison to South Korea and other countries—is a disgrace. According to the CDC’s last released data, our country has tested fewer than 2,000 people in a population of over 300 million. If we hope to control this outbreak, the Administration must immediately allocate funds from the recent emergency supplemental appropriation to state and local health departments and hospitals to rapidly stand up testing capacity nationwide. Additionally, to the extent that volume constraints at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention limit testing kit distribution or technical assistance to labs developing their own tests, it is critical to temporarily increase their capacity. "
Which is (emotionally) great! We should've had a massive nationwide ramp up in testing. But read that last part. She honestly thought it was the CDC's "volume constraints" and funding were what was holding back "lots of testing," not, well, all the rules (no you can't do your own tests without approval, and also well, we contaminated the first 180k with our incompetence) they (and the FDA) put in place. This is at the heart of so many of her misunderstandings of how things work: it's SimCity thinking: "well the CDC controls diseases right?, so if we just increase their resources and funding, they'll control the disease better!" When they were - particularly early on in the pandemic, when she wrote this - part of the problem!
But as we now know, the vaccines are the real pandemic harm-reducer. (if you take them, anyway) So the real heartbreaking part of her plan is this:
"And we should aim to build up our national scientific capacity, including the ability to bring vaccines to market, by committing $200 billion to vaccine development efforts..."
Oh, man, now I see why GAP is supporting her - she was advocating for rapid vaccine development even in the early days of the pandemic, what foresightedness! I apologize for not believing in her! Let's read the rest of this inspiring paragraph:
"...over the coming years. This will require guaranteed purchases of an eventual coronavirus vaccine after the current crisis passes"
Oh. Oh..... She doesn't mean 200 billion for a covid vaccine to end the pandemic. She means after we're done counting the millions of bodies, we can invent a vaccine. Because she, like almost everyone else, assumed that by any "realistic" FDA timeline, there was no way they would get a covid vaccine in time (she probably guessed 5-7 years) - despite the moderna vaccine already existing at this time. Because just like her understanding of the CDC, the FDA-as-it-was is baked into her idea of what Governmental Pandemic Preparation was. Which is * the * problem, and means that supporting her as the solution to "guarding against pandemics" is ludicrous. "Guarding against the next pandemic" means radically (perhaps even abolishing and reinventing) the CDC and FDA and our entire public health mentality. It means A) having a test/trace/isolate plan (and one that isn't immediately hamstrung by the CDC and FDA) ready to go and B) having as rapid a vaccine FDA regulatory approval (because development was NOT the critical path!) plan based on cost/benefit weighing the severity of the pandemic against the risk of side effects from the vaccine. It does not mean "200B for vaccines after the pandemic is over" and "lots of stimulus".
If "donating to Elizabeth Warren" is "guarding against the pandemic" and this is/was her plans... then you're killing me. I * wanted * to like this. I desperately want a real Guarding Against Pandemics, because this pandemic (and the next one) really are the most critical goals in our society, and I desperately want a way that I can help. But this..... come on.
Give me a Guarding Against Pandemics that takes your donations, writes up a Pandemic Manifesto that calls for reforming the CDC to focus exclusively on widescale contagious diseases with corporate/hospital/lab/local/state integration of test/trace/isolate strategies and reforming the FDA to enable rapid approval of treatments in proportion to the threat of a pandemic, and only donates to senators/congresspeople who publicly sign the manifesto and support bills in congress that effect that.
A question. I read online a lot of different thoughtful commentators from across the political spectrum - from Marxists to traditional liberals to Reaganite conservatives to libertarians to religious conservatives. And I've regularly congratulated myself on my open-mindedness and willingness to learn from all sides ... but then I noticed that I'm actually a lot less open-minded than I've been giving myself credit for, because every single one of the people I read regularly shares my dislike of the various "identitarian" movements that are so much in the news nowadays.
So I would like to "steelman" identitarianism, and in pursuit of that I'm hoping for suggestions of a thoughtful online writer I could read who supports such movements - by "thoughtful", I mean someone who is prepared to take seriously and respond carefully and rationally to the various critiques that people make of them. A small example: Matt Bruenig's critique of what he calls "identitarian deference" (https://mattbruenig.com/2013/02/26/what-does-identitarian-deference-require/). Does anyone know someone who has responded from the "identitarian" side to Bruenig's critique - perhaps by demonstrating that no such "deference" takes place at all (which would surprise me, since there are a lot of apparent examples of it), or who accepts that it does take place, but argues that Bruenig's criticisms of it are mistaken.
Please note, I am NOT looking for books to read from such perspectives: I've already read quite a number of those, including various of the Critical Race Theory classics. I'm more interested in a current online writer who is in the business of engaging seriously with and responding to critiques like Bruenig's when they occur. Any suggestions?
In the SSC meetup I attended, someone mentioned how the world is finally done with leaded gasoline. Seeing how we have known about the damaging effects of lead on cognitive development and IQ for a while now, I was surprised that this took so long. Anybody has a good explanation for this? Is it something like a Tobacco companies denying the harms caused by their products and lobbying in its behalf? Perhaps the problem is diffuse enough that I doesn't get political traction and democracy ends up ignoring it?
Someday, I want to write a whole thing about the important of sorting information properly.
Reddit, for example, sorts information by votes.
Votes have the problem of bringing up the uncontroversial, things are are easy to vote for.
That's the subtle, and incredibly important problem with votes. People will vote more on things that they understand, and less on things that they don't.
As a result, when voting is used to sort, it mistakenly surfaces the uncontroversial or already well known, and buries anything complex or interesting beyond obvious approval.
There is incredible harm in this. Much of social media amplifies based on votes, and I suspect this to be a cause of disinformation — think the Flat Earth — caused by an improper sorting of information that buries the wrong ideas, and amplifies things it shouldn't.
The Internet is very efficient, even small kinks in the way we've laid out or systems can amplify to cause societal effects.
There is incredible harm in this, and it pains me how little intention is paid to how information is presented. Everywhere you look, you will see mistakes. Lists that are not sorted, or where the sorting makes no sense at all (most chronologies!).
Lists instead of hierarchical, or hierarchical instead of lists. Even simple questions like these.
More broadly, poorly search, poor filtering, or poor sorting.
Watching a BBC One show on PBS, “The Indian Doctor” from 2010. A child is presenting symptoms of smallpox. The doctor advises quarantine, facial coverings and people staying 6 feet apart. Set in Wales circa 1962 so I guess no metric system yet.
This is pretty creepy.
Thanks.
I wish there was a way to use the knowledge, talent and experience of Bill Gates too.
Thanks for boosting Guarding Against Pandemics, they're really doing some good work! Especially with their focus on the risks of engineered pathogens (which are really quite scary).
I think the Nucleic Acid Observatory (https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.02678) should definitely get funded as a first step.
1. “Stronger” is a red flag for me. What we needed was “smarter” actions that passed cost benefit tests.
Looking at the Guarding Against Pandemic site, I'm glad that their goals seem pretty sensible and concrete in terms of what they're trying to pay for (although it seems like a tall order to make vaccines in advance, since how exactly would we know which ones will cause a pandemic?
But also, I see little acknowledgement of how much the failures in response were political and regulatory, and NOT lack of resources, or talent, or knowledge or capacity? And how GAP plans to address those issues?
There's a fantasy trope of having old Greek/Norse/whatever gods exist as powerful (but not omnipotent) entities in the world (e.g. American Gods, Dresden Files or Everworld). Does anyone know of a fantasy universe that does this and also has Jesus as an existing God on the same level as the other gods?
In 1722 William Wollaston discovered that the natural religion of mankind, discoverable without reliance on divine revelation, was adherence to truth and devotion to reason. His rationalist magnum opus anticipated Kant’s Categorical Imperative, described and defended what we would now call the libertarian non-aggression principle, and provided the writers of the Declaration of Independence with their “purſuit of happineſs”. Why haven't you ever heard of him?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/P75rzmpJ62E2Qfr3A/truth-reason-the-true-religion
Transparency is as important an idea to society, as open-source was to software.
I could write pages upon pages about this. I have the, maybe radical, idea that anything not private ought to be published, so that it can be examined and have its inefficiencies removed.
Anything that works well, will work better when people can looks at the parts under the light of Sun.
Now, to have an interesting idea that can turn into policy, you have to define it in relation to its negative space. Where does the idea stop?
What people do as individuals, and not as members of any organization, that is out of the purview of Transparency as a societal tool.
We care about systems that are bigger than a single person. We want to let sunlight into those, we want to make sure they're efficient, and that they're the best systems they can be.
I want anything than any organization bigger than a person does, to be public. Anything an individual does as themselves, should be eligible for strong privacy.
That will bring Good to society, the likes of which Open Source has brought to Software.
I would very much like to see more data being gathered on the effectiveness of Transparency!
We are very far from that ideal, but if true the impact of that insight on on how we build societies and structures is enormous.
Or maybe I am being foolish by thinking that there is such a big improvement to be had, with such a simple idea.
But I'd look into that.
I would think those most opposed to embryo selection and preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P) would be conservatives because they are typically religious and the religious are typically morally opposed to discarding embryos. However, some liberals are very opposed to PGT-P because of a general aversion to eugenics and concerns of exacerbating inequality.
Will embryo selection likely be regarded as right-wing or left-wing? Will it be popular among secular conservatives? Will there be bipartisan opposition in the near future? Will it ever be widely adopted?
I wrote 100 tweets in critical tribute to Martin Buber and his concept of I-Thou: https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1437420726865338375
Minor life tip: receipts are excellent bookmarks