Any recommendations for informative and topical Discord servers other than the one this substack links to? I've given it a chance but it's become quite clear that Scott is hardly ever involved and the people actually administering the server do their best to come off as pompous losers.
Here is an amusing article looking at the carbon footprint of buying something on Amazon.com -- along the same lines as AstralCodexTen's attempt to quantify carbon costs earlier this year. With math!
Is there a reason the comments in the classified thread are for paying subscribers only? I'd love to reply to someone requesting comments, but not so much I'm going to pay for the privilege... Perhaps shilling for comments should be done in open threads if not everyone can post in the classifieds.
After finishing Unsong recently and thinking about Greta Thunberg today, it occurred to me that she seems to have the "somebody has to and no one else will" mindset
1) You answered a question on polyamory. There is a book I can recommend that makes a good case against it (IIRC in one of the last chapters). It is called "Cheap Sex" by Mark Regnerus.
He argues with a market model: People differ a lot in how attractive they are to others (a fact similar to how people differ a lot in money-making ability).
If you allow them to acquire a lot of partners (or money), inequality arises, which can lead to different levels of power and/or self-esteem etc.
This is why we level out income inequality on the labour market (with different tax levels for poor and rich people). In that picture, "mandated" monogamy can be seen as levelling out inequality in attractiveness.
On the mating market, the effects of inequality are even worse than on the financial one, since potential partners are a finite resource, and money/wealth is not necessarily.
"Steve was preoccupied with the nature and quality of his own thinking. He expected so much of himself and worked hard to think with a rare vitality, elegance and discipline. His rigor and tenacity set a dizzyingly high bar. When he could not think satisfactorily he would complain in the same way I would complain about my knees.
As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process. He understood creating should be afforded rare respect—not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient.
Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas, they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea. Problems are easy to articulate and understand, and they take the oxygen. Steve focused on the actual ideas, however partial and unlikely."
So I saw this youtube channel about car dependent suburbia vs how most European countries build things, and it really resonates with me. I can't help but wonder how much this contributes to America's problems, from income inequality, to obesity, to political polarization. :/
Hi everyone! I've written a piece on why I think it's very unlikely that voting-intention polls are intentionally biased by pollsters. Quite a bit of it is unique to the Australian context (in particular my analysis showing there is no overall skew in Australian polling), but much of it has fairly wide applicability (e.g. the incentives of everyone in the polls-pseph-media complex, and the difficulty of using biased polling to influence voting intention).
I'd be interested in hearing counterarguments for why a pollster might intentionally attempt to produce a skewed voting-intention poll, even taking into account the factors I mention in my piece.
Man, it’s killing me that you’re so ‘close’ to me (I’m in Belgium) but you’re not passing here. Is there a way to come say hi to your group house or something if I ever pass by SF?
I've been trying my hand at some inflation analysis on the Australian side of the Pacific, attempting to understand where inflation is going to go and why. Much of it is applicable to the American experience, and I'd be interested in people's thoughts.
Some of you may remember my Orwell review from the contest, which I'm still amazed got promoted up to 2nd by reader voting. For my follow up I've taken a look at a roughly Orwell-adjacent book: Ryszard Kapuscinski's 'The Emperor'. It's basically a collection of stories from courtiers who served in the royal court of Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia from 1930-1974.
I found it to be an incredible piece of journalism, mostly because Kapuscinski basically gets to act as a time traveler, a fly on the wall in a medieval court. The courtiers he speaks with are the last of a dying race, and they know it--the sense that it's deeply wrong for a bombastic, Kafkaesque royal court to go on existing into the 1970s is everywhere in the text, and creates a uniquely dramatic, and sometimes even comedic, tension. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, mainly because I see the royal court structure as something emerging everywhere that people are competing for status and resources without recourse to violence.
I am curious, is there some republicanism in Sweden?
Or perhaps more generally, how citizens of a country whose image is so intertwined with social democracy and social justice reconcile this with the fact Sweden is still a hereditary monarchy?
While I don’t mind long comments that are interesting, and technically detailed and in depth and complex ones are some of my favorites on SSC (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september/comments#comment-2988501 I loved and probably didn’t get enough attention, and the less interesting but more inflammatory neighbors to the top on racism and to the bottom on obesity (my bad...) got many comments) (and if you like those do check out datasecretslox.com - a SSC adjacent forum with lots of in depth posts - and TheMotte also has lots of great in depth technical and historical stuff if you can wade through and ignore culture politics waves)
... a bit off track. Anyway, I find that substack doesn’t collapse the parent comment when you collapse children, and doesn’t have a way to, incredibly annoying for just browsing the comments. So I have to scroll over twenty paragraphs to get past it! Annoying. And while I’m complaining, the fact that when you click an email reply link it doesn’t take you to the right place 8 of 10 times is annoying too. As is the fact that if you accidentally minimize a parent comment while typing a reply, very easy because clicking on a side line minimizes and they’re omnipresent, your comment disappears! And edit button of course. And it should really handle deeply nested comment threads better. Smh.
I had to search what that image was, and of course (duh!) it's the Golem of Prague. I have to say, though, that for public art images on these posts, Barcelona still has Prague beaten 😀
Fantastic article about retired greyhound racing dogs who become living blood donors. Is life as a living blood bag for dogs whose owners can afford expensive pet surgeries a life worth living?
There was a somewhat acerbic exchange about Guardians Against Pandemic on the 9/18 Open Thread 190, mainly having to do with "they say they're non-partisan, but they use ActBlue for funding, how the hell is this possible?!" This was a convincing enough argument to e.g. make me withdraw my donation to them (to their credit: they were prompt and polite about refunding it) until they explain themselves. Attempts to get them to explain themselves seem to run into the wall of "We will have a Q&A on October 12, please just ask us then," with a side of "yes we realize, but right now it makes the most sense to press Democrats because it's their Congress, but we expect to press Republicans e.g. next year and will use WinRed then."
Two questions:
1. Is it plausible for a single organization to use ActBlue and WinRed (simultaneously or alternating between them)? I'm known to be naive about this, to the point of believing ActBlue when it says it allows "progressive" but not "Democratic" organizations; I was mocked for believing this in the previous thread (perhaps deservedly, though I will point out that no actual counterexamples ever materialized).
2. Is anyone planning to attend their Q&A, and if so, could I ask them to report on what they hear? (I don't think I'll be able to make it, the time between when the toddler comes home from daycare and when the toddler goes to bed is pretty hectic for me.) If you don't want to report in public, I can give you my email -- I honestly just want to know what they have to say.
I was just listening to a news story about the financial industry pushing hard for in person meetings to make deals. There's a belief that the deals are better in some sense when people have a more accurate idea of each other's emotional/physiological reactions.
We might have a chance to find out what difference personal presence makes to deals. Logically, it seems like it should be zero-sum. People push each other differently, but it seems unlikely that, say, lenders or borrowers would generally do better or worse in person rather than at a distance.
It's conceivable that some institutions might have accidentally selected for people who are better at zoom/phone/email and others have selected for people who are better in person.
I'm concerned that my next-door neighbor is sliding into the grip of a paranoid/delusional disorder during the isolation of the pandemic. Their recent nearly-unprompted disclosures to me about their background and habits strongly suggest to me that what I'm seeing is the worsening of a mental disease that will likely proceed to derail their life.
Neighbor, as an immigrant to the US from another country, tells me that they are a publicly-unacknowledged child of a deceased political leader in a third country, whose heirs/assigns have been working, so far unsuccessfully, to achieve neighbor's desired repatriation to said third country, in association with various improbably-associated US federal agencies. This by itself, while far-fetched, did not strike me as conclusively out-of-touch -- stranger things have been known to happen, though why I in particular would be informed of them I can't begin to suppose.
However, neighbor then proceeded to explain/demonstrate how they have been undertaking, with increasing frequency, an admittedly dangerous and disfiguring self-treatment for a self-diagnosed disorder which would, if present, be acutely life-threatening -- but for which I was unable to persuade them to seek professional medical attention. I intend to provide them with resources about how they may still be able to get access to affordable medical care in our area, in combination with interpreter services if needed, despite their complex immigration situation.
Either of these things in isolation would be unusual, but presenting together, in someone who appears to have minimal social support, it seems indicative of some kind of mental break. I never knew this neighbor well enough before the pandemic to tell just how unusual the current beliefs and behavior are for them, but it's pretty damn unusual absolutely, especially for someone otherwise put-together enough to have obtained a graduate STEM degree in the not-to-distant past. If the stuff I'm hearing here is somehow the product of a sound mind, I'd at least expect a degree of self-awareness about how nuts it must *sound* to an uninitiated observer, but I'm not picking up any such self-awareness.
I don't really know how to proceed here, if it's even my place to do anything. I'm just getting the impression that all this bizarre stuff has been unloaded on me because neighbor has no one else to tell -- as far as I know, they're currently NEET (as am I for the time being, I'm not one to judge) and have no family in this country, and maybe no friends either.
I figure worst cases of inaction are that neighbor ends up deported to illiberal homeland when the "special arrangement" they believe has been worked out on their behalf to let them overstay their visa turns out to be a fantasy, or they die of self-diagnosed disease which they may actually have because they wouldn't seek treatment, or they die of complications of their dangerous and increasingly intense self-treatments. And the worst cases of action are that neighbor ends up entangled in some low-income social services labyrinth and involuntarily committed as a danger to themselves, while getting no real effective treatment, or neighbor decides that I am part of some conspiracy with agents from illiberal home country and cuts my brake lines or something. Knows where I live, you know?
I can't think of any really good best-case outcomes no matter what I might do, so I guess maybe I should just try to leave the situation alone. I may even be wrong about the implausible background, and foreign agents from third country really are lending them support, and will soon provide some new plan of action for the repatriation -- it's not like I have a better idea of how they've been paying their rent for the past couple of years. I've been in neighbor's residence, and it's a lot tidier than mine, and it's not like they're outright talking to themselves, AFAIK. "Taking care of things ourselves is just how we always did it back home" is sort of a reasonable explanation for the self-diagnosis and self-treatment, and it's possible they have good reasons to avoid contact with medical professionals. But on the whole, that feels like rationalizations for not sticking my neck out. My best guess is that this person is on a crash course with reality, and there may be nobody else to potentially help them off it. I'll at least try to see if there's anyone else they trust who they might be able to talk to about any of this with, but I have a sinking feeling that there isn't.
Insofar as "rationalists" can be considered a kind of community one can speak of broadly (I think they can be, loosely, speaking as someone who does not consider themselves part of said community!), do they on the whole have better, or more correct, views on aesthetics?
There are a whole host of reasons I wouldn't identify as a rationalist, but one part of it, when examining my own internal sense of identity, does seem to be a *deep* discrepancy in how we approach aesthetics, and the areas where aesthetics bleeds into ethics & meaning more generally. I simply find the views of most rationalists totally lacking in these areas, and that makes being more genial to their whole project harder.
I also recognize this is a pretty vague question, and I'd have to think more to make it more precise, so I'm just tossing it out there, hoping it spurs discussion. (I'm also aware that to whatever questions re: aesthetics there are, a lot of rationalists will probably say that the positions on these questions aren't truth-apt, or they'll be error theorists, or whatever.)
I'm considering getting LASIK in the near future. My myopia is quite mild, to the point that I don't bother wearing glasses at home or in the office, only while driving or while needing to look somewhere far away.
I've read a little too deeply into LASIK horror stories online though, and I'm a little worried that I could turn my "mild-myopia-barely-even-need-glasses" into something much worse.
My questions are thus:
Do the risks of LASIK scale to the severity of the myopia before the operation, or are they essentially flat per-surgery, no matter how intense the surgery is?
Are different clinics riskier than others, or is it usually a flat risk no matter which I go to?
Do you have any advice in evaluating clinics? (individual clinics certainly wouldn't advertise a high complication rate)
Any other advice or stories would be much appreciated too!
Is there anybody who is NOT a crypto coin/blockchain enthusiast talking about “web3” ? In my circles at least it seems entirely confined to that world, whereas back with Web 2.0 that phenomenon seems to have had much wider buy in. By contrast “web3” seems entirely relegated to this subgroup. Just me or is this how it looks for other people too?
Less wrong post I stumbled across from Roko (now far right) from ten years ago. Less wrong was more fun back then, lol. Posting just because it’s so absurd it’s funny
Something I was thinking about in the context of the TV adaptation of Foundation: how many generations before race ceases to exist?
Or, to go with something a bit more quantifiable, how many generations before less than one percent of the human population can trace more than half their ancestors to a single racial group (with "racial group" defined in some vaguely-reasonable way so that there's circa ten races in the world right now)?
Absent any novel strong force that prevents different races from interbreeding, we should expect that eventually there'll be no identifiable racial groups left and everyone will be one brownish race. I'd say it should certainly happen on the timescale of Foundation (25,000 years in the future) but will it already have happed on the timescale of, say, Star Trek (300 years in the future)?
I feel like I'm increasingly seeing the word "gross" to describe something that the speaker finds reprehensible. I can't decide if it's a good thing -- because I actually think it's true to reality to link moral/ethical failings with disgust -- or a bad thing, because it's an opportunity to lazily replace argument with emotional appeals. Thoughts? Here's an example of what I'm seeing:
I'd like to catch up on old Slate Star Codex posts, but I hate reading off a screen. What is the most efficient way to print out all old SSC posts (with figures, without comments)?
Has anyone here or on lesswrong written a review, or have a good review to recommend, on the book "The Tycoons: How Rockefeller, Gould, Carnegie and Morgan invented the American supereconomy"?
I’ve picked up two beliefs that are popular in my circles:
1. Gain-of-function research is dangerous and not worth the risk. Our civilization is not competent enough to do this safely, and we probably won’t learn much from it anyway.
2. We should pursue nuclear energy more aggressively. Safety concerns are overblown - our civilization is competent enough to avoid having another Chernobyl. With experience, we could learn a lot about improving our reactor designs.
The last open thread had a discussion about the relative merits of Imperial vs metric units.
One North American unit of measure not covered was the ‘ton of refrigeration.’ It reaches new heights of impracticality IMO.
It is defined as the rate of heat transfer that results in the freezing or melting of 1 short ton (2,000 lb; 907 kg) of pure ice at 0 °C (32 °F) in 24 hours.
I did some work modeling heat transfer in custom air conditioning units in the 1990’s. The idea was to predict the performance of a massive AC unit before it was actually manufactured and sent to a lab. Think of cooling the Twin Cities Mall of America. They were one of our clients.
The Application and Design Engineers I was working with loved to throw the term “tons of cooling” around.
Media is becoming increasingly addictive and entertaining. A lot of people are addicted to their own form of media whether it be Netflix, twitter, video games, reddit or a forum for ACX readers. I think things will only get more addicting. It will become harder and harder to not get sucked into entertainment and focus on the task at hand.
Will the highly successful people of the future be not only smart but extremely conscientious about not getting addicted to media?
Before the pervasiveness of mirrors, did people have out-of-body experiences where they "saw themselves?" The phenomena of seeing yourself from the ceiling probably takes your self-image and divorces it from positional data, as would happen in a dream. But if you have no visual concept of the self, doing so seems impossible.
Just a fun whimsical thing I found about Dungeons and Dragons. For most objects listed in the store, their price can be estimated within a factor of 2 error by looking it up on amazon and converting $10->1 gold piece
For utilitarians: Is there really any justification for tax money being spent on things like fine arts, libraries, local parks, national parks, etc. when it is still relatively inexpensive to save lives in the developing world? Do you support redirecting all of that money toward saving lives?
Are there important institutions that you think could "never be built today"? For instance, I think without historical precedence, something like the public library system could never be built today. Imagine the lobbying backlash you would get if you proposed using public funds to buy books and infinitely lend them if such an institution didn't already exist.
Are there institutions being built today that might become harder to build in the future that we should pay special attention too?
why aren't there any big-name rationalist politicians? You'd think politics would be an excellent testing ground for a lot of our theories, with the potential to make a significant difference if you genuinely believe you have insights others may not have, but yet that currently seems surprisingly unexplored in rationalist spaces (although plenty of rationalists hold very strong views on a wide variety of political subjects, you rarely see that acted on in the context of playing the *current* political system, rather than dreaming of what one might do in a rationalist-ruled world)
Any recommendations for informative and topical Discord servers other than the one this substack links to? I've given it a chance but it's become quite clear that Scott is hardly ever involved and the people actually administering the server do their best to come off as pompous losers.
Here is an amusing article looking at the carbon footprint of buying something on Amazon.com -- along the same lines as AstralCodexTen's attempt to quantify carbon costs earlier this year. With math!
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/bezos-is-the-greenest-man-alive
Is there a reason the comments in the classified thread are for paying subscribers only? I'd love to reply to someone requesting comments, but not so much I'm going to pay for the privilege... Perhaps shilling for comments should be done in open threads if not everyone can post in the classifieds.
After finishing Unsong recently and thinking about Greta Thunberg today, it occurred to me that she seems to have the "somebody has to and no one else will" mindset
Hi Scott, I want to follow up on 2 things:
1) You answered a question on polyamory. There is a book I can recommend that makes a good case against it (IIRC in one of the last chapters). It is called "Cheap Sex" by Mark Regnerus.
https://www.amazon.de/Cheap-Sex-Transformation-Marriage-Monogamy/dp/0190673613
He argues with a market model: People differ a lot in how attractive they are to others (a fact similar to how people differ a lot in money-making ability).
If you allow them to acquire a lot of partners (or money), inequality arises, which can lead to different levels of power and/or self-esteem etc.
This is why we level out income inequality on the labour market (with different tax levels for poor and rich people). In that picture, "mandated" monogamy can be seen as levelling out inequality in attractiveness.
On the mating market, the effects of inequality are even worse than on the financial one, since potential partners are a finite resource, and money/wealth is not necessarily.
Here is a 10min clip that sums it up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO1ifNaNABY
2) I was talking about the Yes/No debate framework. You asked for the
subreddit, here it is:
https://www.reddit.com/r/YesNoDebate/
I already ran a few debates, both in person and online, and here I
summarized the feedback:
https://yesnodebate.org/blog/insights/
And the debates's rules are here:
https://yesnodebate.org/
So far, I hope you will enjoy your trip to Berlin – hope you take the train, not the bus, see here why ;)
https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/berlin-to-prague-by-train.htm
Anyone know whether payments from youtube/patreon/substack are tracked as part of the economy?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/jony-ive-steve-jobs-memories-10th-anniversary-11633354769?
"Steve was preoccupied with the nature and quality of his own thinking. He expected so much of himself and worked hard to think with a rare vitality, elegance and discipline. His rigor and tenacity set a dizzyingly high bar. When he could not think satisfactorily he would complain in the same way I would complain about my knees.
As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process. He understood creating should be afforded rare respect—not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient.
Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas, they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea. Problems are easy to articulate and understand, and they take the oxygen. Steve focused on the actual ideas, however partial and unlikely."
So I saw this youtube channel about car dependent suburbia vs how most European countries build things, and it really resonates with me. I can't help but wonder how much this contributes to America's problems, from income inequality, to obesity, to political polarization. :/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ
Had Einstein never been born, how long would it have been before someone else discovered the Theory of Relativity?
Hi everyone! I've written a piece on why I think it's very unlikely that voting-intention polls are intentionally biased by pollsters. Quite a bit of it is unique to the Australian context (in particular my analysis showing there is no overall skew in Australian polling), but much of it has fairly wide applicability (e.g. the incentives of everyone in the polls-pseph-media complex, and the difficulty of using biased polling to influence voting intention).
https://armariuminterreta.site/2021/09/27/poll-conspiracy-theories-dont-make-sense/
I'd be interested in hearing counterarguments for why a pollster might intentionally attempt to produce a skewed voting-intention poll, even taking into account the factors I mention in my piece.
https://anjel.blog/?p=58
https://anjel.blog/?p=56
I would welcome any comment about these two short blog posts on mistakes I have made in the past.
Is there some place on the internet where free (as in beer) substacks are collected and indexed by topic?
Man, it’s killing me that you’re so ‘close’ to me (I’m in Belgium) but you’re not passing here. Is there a way to come say hi to your group house or something if I ever pass by SF?
Would it make economic sense for Libya to build a freight railroad network? Assume it costs $2 million per mile. How should any network be laid out?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Africa_railway_map_gauge.jpg
Scott, is there anything one can do for you to make the meetup a more (likely) pleasant experience?
Rare non-political article from me:
https://residentcontrarian.substack.com/p/on-unbeatable-video-games
I've been trying my hand at some inflation analysis on the Australian side of the Pacific, attempting to understand where inflation is going to go and why. Much of it is applicable to the American experience, and I'd be interested in people's thoughts.
https://armariuminterreta.site/2021/10/01/pandemic-economics-ii/
Some of you may remember my Orwell review from the contest, which I'm still amazed got promoted up to 2nd by reader voting. For my follow up I've taken a look at a roughly Orwell-adjacent book: Ryszard Kapuscinski's 'The Emperor'. It's basically a collection of stories from courtiers who served in the royal court of Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia from 1930-1974.
I found it to be an incredible piece of journalism, mostly because Kapuscinski basically gets to act as a time traveler, a fly on the wall in a medieval court. The courtiers he speaks with are the last of a dying race, and they know it--the sense that it's deeply wrong for a bombastic, Kafkaesque royal court to go on existing into the 1970s is everywhere in the text, and creates a uniquely dramatic, and sometimes even comedic, tension. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it, mainly because I see the royal court structure as something emerging everywhere that people are competing for status and resources without recourse to violence.
You can read my write-up here if you're interested: https://whimsi.substack.com/p/book-review-the-emperor
I wish there was a non-intrusive way to find out more about my favorite ACX commenters. Some of you people are soooo fascinating.
I am curious, is there some republicanism in Sweden?
Or perhaps more generally, how citizens of a country whose image is so intertwined with social democracy and social justice reconcile this with the fact Sweden is still a hereditary monarchy?
Also I am looking forward to Prague meetup.
While I don’t mind long comments that are interesting, and technically detailed and in depth and complex ones are some of my favorites on SSC (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-september/comments#comment-2988501 I loved and probably didn’t get enough attention, and the less interesting but more inflammatory neighbors to the top on racism and to the bottom on obesity (my bad...) got many comments) (and if you like those do check out datasecretslox.com - a SSC adjacent forum with lots of in depth posts - and TheMotte also has lots of great in depth technical and historical stuff if you can wade through and ignore culture politics waves)
... a bit off track. Anyway, I find that substack doesn’t collapse the parent comment when you collapse children, and doesn’t have a way to, incredibly annoying for just browsing the comments. So I have to scroll over twenty paragraphs to get past it! Annoying. And while I’m complaining, the fact that when you click an email reply link it doesn’t take you to the right place 8 of 10 times is annoying too. As is the fact that if you accidentally minimize a parent comment while typing a reply, very easy because clicking on a side line minimizes and they’re omnipresent, your comment disappears! And edit button of course. And it should really handle deeply nested comment threads better. Smh.
I had to search what that image was, and of course (duh!) it's the Golem of Prague. I have to say, though, that for public art images on these posts, Barcelona still has Prague beaten 😀
Fantastic article about retired greyhound racing dogs who become living blood donors. Is life as a living blood bag for dogs whose owners can afford expensive pet surgeries a life worth living?
https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/67/bolman.php
There was a somewhat acerbic exchange about Guardians Against Pandemic on the 9/18 Open Thread 190, mainly having to do with "they say they're non-partisan, but they use ActBlue for funding, how the hell is this possible?!" This was a convincing enough argument to e.g. make me withdraw my donation to them (to their credit: they were prompt and polite about refunding it) until they explain themselves. Attempts to get them to explain themselves seem to run into the wall of "We will have a Q&A on October 12, please just ask us then," with a side of "yes we realize, but right now it makes the most sense to press Democrats because it's their Congress, but we expect to press Republicans e.g. next year and will use WinRed then."
Two questions:
1. Is it plausible for a single organization to use ActBlue and WinRed (simultaneously or alternating between them)? I'm known to be naive about this, to the point of believing ActBlue when it says it allows "progressive" but not "Democratic" organizations; I was mocked for believing this in the previous thread (perhaps deservedly, though I will point out that no actual counterexamples ever materialized).
2. Is anyone planning to attend their Q&A, and if so, could I ask them to report on what they hear? (I don't think I'll be able to make it, the time between when the toddler comes home from daycare and when the toddler goes to bed is pretty hectic for me.) If you don't want to report in public, I can give you my email -- I honestly just want to know what they have to say.
I was just listening to a news story about the financial industry pushing hard for in person meetings to make deals. There's a belief that the deals are better in some sense when people have a more accurate idea of each other's emotional/physiological reactions.
We might have a chance to find out what difference personal presence makes to deals. Logically, it seems like it should be zero-sum. People push each other differently, but it seems unlikely that, say, lenders or borrowers would generally do better or worse in person rather than at a distance.
It's conceivable that some institutions might have accidentally selected for people who are better at zoom/phone/email and others have selected for people who are better in person.
I'm concerned that my next-door neighbor is sliding into the grip of a paranoid/delusional disorder during the isolation of the pandemic. Their recent nearly-unprompted disclosures to me about their background and habits strongly suggest to me that what I'm seeing is the worsening of a mental disease that will likely proceed to derail their life.
Neighbor, as an immigrant to the US from another country, tells me that they are a publicly-unacknowledged child of a deceased political leader in a third country, whose heirs/assigns have been working, so far unsuccessfully, to achieve neighbor's desired repatriation to said third country, in association with various improbably-associated US federal agencies. This by itself, while far-fetched, did not strike me as conclusively out-of-touch -- stranger things have been known to happen, though why I in particular would be informed of them I can't begin to suppose.
However, neighbor then proceeded to explain/demonstrate how they have been undertaking, with increasing frequency, an admittedly dangerous and disfiguring self-treatment for a self-diagnosed disorder which would, if present, be acutely life-threatening -- but for which I was unable to persuade them to seek professional medical attention. I intend to provide them with resources about how they may still be able to get access to affordable medical care in our area, in combination with interpreter services if needed, despite their complex immigration situation.
Either of these things in isolation would be unusual, but presenting together, in someone who appears to have minimal social support, it seems indicative of some kind of mental break. I never knew this neighbor well enough before the pandemic to tell just how unusual the current beliefs and behavior are for them, but it's pretty damn unusual absolutely, especially for someone otherwise put-together enough to have obtained a graduate STEM degree in the not-to-distant past. If the stuff I'm hearing here is somehow the product of a sound mind, I'd at least expect a degree of self-awareness about how nuts it must *sound* to an uninitiated observer, but I'm not picking up any such self-awareness.
I don't really know how to proceed here, if it's even my place to do anything. I'm just getting the impression that all this bizarre stuff has been unloaded on me because neighbor has no one else to tell -- as far as I know, they're currently NEET (as am I for the time being, I'm not one to judge) and have no family in this country, and maybe no friends either.
I figure worst cases of inaction are that neighbor ends up deported to illiberal homeland when the "special arrangement" they believe has been worked out on their behalf to let them overstay their visa turns out to be a fantasy, or they die of self-diagnosed disease which they may actually have because they wouldn't seek treatment, or they die of complications of their dangerous and increasingly intense self-treatments. And the worst cases of action are that neighbor ends up entangled in some low-income social services labyrinth and involuntarily committed as a danger to themselves, while getting no real effective treatment, or neighbor decides that I am part of some conspiracy with agents from illiberal home country and cuts my brake lines or something. Knows where I live, you know?
I can't think of any really good best-case outcomes no matter what I might do, so I guess maybe I should just try to leave the situation alone. I may even be wrong about the implausible background, and foreign agents from third country really are lending them support, and will soon provide some new plan of action for the repatriation -- it's not like I have a better idea of how they've been paying their rent for the past couple of years. I've been in neighbor's residence, and it's a lot tidier than mine, and it's not like they're outright talking to themselves, AFAIK. "Taking care of things ourselves is just how we always did it back home" is sort of a reasonable explanation for the self-diagnosis and self-treatment, and it's possible they have good reasons to avoid contact with medical professionals. But on the whole, that feels like rationalizations for not sticking my neck out. My best guess is that this person is on a crash course with reality, and there may be nobody else to potentially help them off it. I'll at least try to see if there's anyone else they trust who they might be able to talk to about any of this with, but I have a sinking feeling that there isn't.
https://www.sciphijournal.org/index.php/2021/09/30/read-only/
A bit of fun with a very hypothetical huge increase of intelligence.
Inspired by Lafferty's "Slow Tuesday Night".
https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781618249203/9781618249203___2.htm
Insofar as "rationalists" can be considered a kind of community one can speak of broadly (I think they can be, loosely, speaking as someone who does not consider themselves part of said community!), do they on the whole have better, or more correct, views on aesthetics?
There are a whole host of reasons I wouldn't identify as a rationalist, but one part of it, when examining my own internal sense of identity, does seem to be a *deep* discrepancy in how we approach aesthetics, and the areas where aesthetics bleeds into ethics & meaning more generally. I simply find the views of most rationalists totally lacking in these areas, and that makes being more genial to their whole project harder.
I also recognize this is a pretty vague question, and I'd have to think more to make it more precise, so I'm just tossing it out there, hoping it spurs discussion. (I'm also aware that to whatever questions re: aesthetics there are, a lot of rationalists will probably say that the positions on these questions aren't truth-apt, or they'll be error theorists, or whatever.)
I'm considering getting LASIK in the near future. My myopia is quite mild, to the point that I don't bother wearing glasses at home or in the office, only while driving or while needing to look somewhere far away.
I've read a little too deeply into LASIK horror stories online though, and I'm a little worried that I could turn my "mild-myopia-barely-even-need-glasses" into something much worse.
My questions are thus:
Do the risks of LASIK scale to the severity of the myopia before the operation, or are they essentially flat per-surgery, no matter how intense the surgery is?
Are different clinics riskier than others, or is it usually a flat risk no matter which I go to?
Do you have any advice in evaluating clinics? (individual clinics certainly wouldn't advertise a high complication rate)
Any other advice or stories would be much appreciated too!
Is there anybody who is NOT a crypto coin/blockchain enthusiast talking about “web3” ? In my circles at least it seems entirely confined to that world, whereas back with Web 2.0 that phenomenon seems to have had much wider buy in. By contrast “web3” seems entirely relegated to this subgroup. Just me or is this how it looks for other people too?
Less wrong post I stumbled across from Roko (now far right) from ten years ago. Less wrong was more fun back then, lol. Posting just because it’s so absurd it’s funny
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SkXLrDXyHeekqgbFg/shock-level-5-big-worlds-and-modal-realism
I can see how he came up with the basilisk
Something I was thinking about in the context of the TV adaptation of Foundation: how many generations before race ceases to exist?
Or, to go with something a bit more quantifiable, how many generations before less than one percent of the human population can trace more than half their ancestors to a single racial group (with "racial group" defined in some vaguely-reasonable way so that there's circa ten races in the world right now)?
Absent any novel strong force that prevents different races from interbreeding, we should expect that eventually there'll be no identifiable racial groups left and everyone will be one brownish race. I'd say it should certainly happen on the timescale of Foundation (25,000 years in the future) but will it already have happed on the timescale of, say, Star Trek (300 years in the future)?
I feel like I'm increasingly seeing the word "gross" to describe something that the speaker finds reprehensible. I can't decide if it's a good thing -- because I actually think it's true to reality to link moral/ethical failings with disgust -- or a bad thing, because it's an opportunity to lazily replace argument with emotional appeals. Thoughts? Here's an example of what I'm seeing:
https://twitter.com/roddreher/status/1304416594265870336?lang=en
I'd like to catch up on old Slate Star Codex posts, but I hate reading off a screen. What is the most efficient way to print out all old SSC posts (with figures, without comments)?
Has anyone here or on lesswrong written a review, or have a good review to recommend, on the book "The Tycoons: How Rockefeller, Gould, Carnegie and Morgan invented the American supereconomy"?
https://www.amazon.com/Tycoons-Carnegie-Rockefeller-Invented-Supereconomy/dp/0805075992
I’ve picked up two beliefs that are popular in my circles:
1. Gain-of-function research is dangerous and not worth the risk. Our civilization is not competent enough to do this safely, and we probably won’t learn much from it anyway.
2. We should pursue nuclear energy more aggressively. Safety concerns are overblown - our civilization is competent enough to avoid having another Chernobyl. With experience, we could learn a lot about improving our reactor designs.
Am I being inconsistent or is this ok?
So, I'm a tech guy. Good with math and stuff. Not good with art. Well, I love viewing art. But I don't have a lot of skill in *making* art.
Lately I've been doing some "crafts". I find that I don't have a good sense for how to plan for something that will "look good".
Basically: is there a "science of aesthetics" that I can learn? If so can anyone recommend a book (or whatever) that might cater to me?
The last open thread had a discussion about the relative merits of Imperial vs metric units.
One North American unit of measure not covered was the ‘ton of refrigeration.’ It reaches new heights of impracticality IMO.
It is defined as the rate of heat transfer that results in the freezing or melting of 1 short ton (2,000 lb; 907 kg) of pure ice at 0 °C (32 °F) in 24 hours.
I did some work modeling heat transfer in custom air conditioning units in the 1990’s. The idea was to predict the performance of a massive AC unit before it was actually manufactured and sent to a lab. Think of cooling the Twin Cities Mall of America. They were one of our clients.
The Application and Design Engineers I was working with loved to throw the term “tons of cooling” around.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton_of_refrigeration
Media is becoming increasingly addictive and entertaining. A lot of people are addicted to their own form of media whether it be Netflix, twitter, video games, reddit or a forum for ACX readers. I think things will only get more addicting. It will become harder and harder to not get sucked into entertainment and focus on the task at hand.
Will the highly successful people of the future be not only smart but extremely conscientious about not getting addicted to media?
Before the pervasiveness of mirrors, did people have out-of-body experiences where they "saw themselves?" The phenomena of seeing yourself from the ceiling probably takes your self-image and divorces it from positional data, as would happen in a dream. But if you have no visual concept of the self, doing so seems impossible.
Hot take: Marxbro isn't banned so Scott can jack up the engagement numbers.
Just a fun whimsical thing I found about Dungeons and Dragons. For most objects listed in the store, their price can be estimated within a factor of 2 error by looking it up on amazon and converting $10->1 gold piece
For utilitarians: Is there really any justification for tax money being spent on things like fine arts, libraries, local parks, national parks, etc. when it is still relatively inexpensive to save lives in the developing world? Do you support redirecting all of that money toward saving lives?
Is it plausible that libertarianism is an artifact of some people having a genetic predisposition to wanting to be the leader of their own troop?
I get the impression the ancestral evolutionary environment had a LOT more room for sovereigns.
Mega thread on Gadamer and hermeneutics
https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1442147987484971012
Are there important institutions that you think could "never be built today"? For instance, I think without historical precedence, something like the public library system could never be built today. Imagine the lobbying backlash you would get if you proposed using public funds to buy books and infinitely lend them if such an institution didn't already exist.
Are there institutions being built today that might become harder to build in the future that we should pay special attention too?
why aren't there any big-name rationalist politicians? You'd think politics would be an excellent testing ground for a lot of our theories, with the potential to make a significant difference if you genuinely believe you have insights others may not have, but yet that currently seems surprisingly unexplored in rationalist spaces (although plenty of rationalists hold very strong views on a wide variety of political subjects, you rarely see that acted on in the context of playing the *current* political system, rather than dreaming of what one might do in a rationalist-ruled world)
I wonder about calling the list of in-person gatherings a “spreadsheet” during COVID… ;)