How often do Antarctic tourists experience cardiovascular symptoms? How much time does it take for them to manifest? What changes occur in the blood circulation systems of the winterers (who stay there for a year), compared to the people who only make a short visit? Is there at least some difference between the Maritime Antarctica and the East Antarctica research bases (it's colder and drier in the EA)? What about the USA Scott-Amundsen Station (South Pole)?
1. Cold exposure increases cardiovascular risk in the short term.
2. But I also know that cold exposure increases basal metabolic rate. This *might" prevent obesity and have a longer term protective effect against cardiovascular diseases, if people don't fully compensate by eating more.
Which effect is bigger? It doesn't look like 2 has been researched very much.
"Homeotherms maintain an optimal body temperature that is most often above their environment or ambient temperature. As ambient temperature decreases, energy expenditure (and energy intake) must increase to maintain thermal homeostasis. With the widespread adoption of climate control, humans in modern society are buffered from temperature extremes and spend an increasing amount of time in a thermally comfortable state where energetic demands are minimized. This is hypothesized to contribute to the contemporary increase in obesity rates. Studies reporting exposures of animals and humans to different ambient temperatures are discussed. Additional consideration is given to the potentially altered metabolic and physiologic responses in obese versus lean subjects at a given temperature. The data suggest that ambient temperature is a significant contributor to both energy intake and energy expenditure, and that this variable should be more thoroughly explored in future studies as a potential contributor to obesity susceptibility."
>> "How can we get food to them?" Chomsky told YouTube's Primo Radical Sunday. "Well, that's actually their problem."
I would have gone with "Doordash" there, but share the general sentiment, in regard to mandates. If you're trying to portray yourself as "taking a stand", you shouldn't turn around and try to play the victim either, if you lose your job.
A friend has to write a Bachelor thesis which is kind of a literature summary on semantic text understanding through AI. I know almost nothing about that field. (The description was also very vague about what kind of things have to be understood.) Are there any generic helpful pointers for approaching this?
One thing I found interesting in the discussion of hypothermia (and deaths due to extreme temperature) was the quick turn to one of two explanations: wealth/poverty of a region, or genetic adaptation.
I find this pair of explanations lacking something important. It is lacking something mentioned in a book review by Scott, of a book titled "The Secret of Our Success."
The skills needed to survive a cold night (without suffering hypothermia) are the type of skills that people learn from the culture they live in.
In the parts of the world that don't deal with extreme cold on a regular basis, the local culture may not remember the tricks used to survive a cold night. Even if that cold night is only 10 degrees C, in a climate that usually has overnight temperatures around 20 degrees C.
In cold regions of the world, the local culture may not remember how to deal with the occasional bout of extreme heat. Thus, members of that culture may be at risk of heat-stroke in scenarios that other cultures think of as a hot-but-survivable day.
The wealth of the industrialized world gives us a different cultural answer to the problem of keeping warm (or cool) when weather is extreme. That cultural answer is less than a century old: buy a better heater/air-conditioning-unit for your house. Find a building/car with AC. Buy a cold drink, or a cup of hot chocolate. Find a better jacket.
Within the past few centuries, we've seen many teams of explorers attempt to map poorly-known regions of the planet. In most cases, those explorers were interacting with economically-poor natives in the area of exploration. (Think of Livingstone in the heart of Africa, or explorers trying to find the NorthWest Passage.)
Generally, the natives were poorer than the explorers. But they were better at living off the land, and probably equally good at surviving extreme weather typical in that area of the world.
It is definitely true that a wealthy culture provides easy-to-use ways for all members of that culture to survive harsh weather. But it is also true that wealth, by itself, isn't the only factor in helping people survive harsh weather. Cultural knowledge is a huge factor.
As we see with the discussion of hypothermia: a wealthy culture can lose common-knowledge-level of information about dealing with cold temperatures. Even if that knowledge was common in that culture a century or two ago.
I just wanted to say "thank you", to everyone who came to the Cambridge meetup. Scott, thank you also for being there. It was great to meet you all. I am a longtime reader of the ACX and SSC blog, and it has had a big impact on my life, especially over the past few years. The biggest effect I have seen is that it has raised my own expectations of myself. I try (much of the time I fail, but I am always trying) to reason my way through problems in a rational way. I have found this a really valuable approach in my life when making decisions/ deciding how to think about new ideas, as well as when interacting with other people (and particularly those I disagree with). I want to express my gratitude that this blog and this community exists. Thank you all.
I know this corner of the internet has a certain affinity to "optimized internet food". I'm in need of a state-of-the-art recommendation. I'm looking for something that can take me through the day with as little preparation, timing and other ceremony as possible (and can be ordered on the East Coast, but that shouldn't be a big problem?). If it helps keep me awake, that's a bonus, but all is fine as long as it doesn't actively make me sleepy.
I don't mean to change my general eating habits; I need a temporary fix for the remaining 2 months of crunch time on my job.
There's a song I like a lot in Russian whose lyrics purport to be a translation of a W.J. Smith poem. (Depending on the website I look at, sometimes the claim is that it's an original invention, but it being a translation would make better sense to me.) I'm looking for the original poem.
It's about a dragon who lives in a tower (as dragons do), and, being bored there, plays the violin. He is visited by a princess, who scolds him but then they're reconciled and get married. He explains that he's fed up living in a tower like a dragon, and instead would like normal domestic life. He also says that the princess shouldn't be afraid of the dragon who lives beyond the marshes, because if he ever gets rude with her, he (the dragon) will tell him to leave and he'll go. (Yes, it's supposed to be ambiguous whether there's really two dragons involved.)
Anyone have any idea what the original poem might be?
I'm looking for a learning resource on how to test hypotheses using (frequentist or Bayesian) statistics. Basically: given a hypothesis, how do I then use data (e.g. samples) to refute that hypothesis?
We just had a realspace South Bay meetup (Sunday, October 24th). Thirty to forty people attending. If infection rates continue to fall, we plan to do another one in a month or two.
Suppose that a group of whimsical aliens decide they want to make Saturn's rings prettier so they teleport a new shepherd moon into orbit in the middle of a ring. How long will they have to wait before a new gap appears in the rings: are we talking years, millennia, or astronomical time scales?
There's a lot of focus (both in public AI-risk activism and within the community itself) on the failure mode where an AGI gets created with a buggy utility function and turns the universe into paperclips or whatever. There's another really bad failure mode, however, where the AGI gets created by CCCP or whatever with some version of the utility function "make all humans obey Xi Jinping/Putin/<some evil group of people>'s dictats forever".
If making an AGI requires a huge Manhattan project style research effort (rather than being a hacker-in-a-room thing) then IMO having a country/world with liberal politics is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for creating a good AGI. If you buy this argument, a crucial part of dealing with AGI x-risk is (a) making sure your favorite liberal countries have the leading AI programs and (b) pushing back on totalitarianism world wide.
When we add this to the fact that surveillance AI could lead to a bunch of other x-risk scenarios (e.g., impossible to remove world-wide totalitarianism, counter-value nuclear war with AI guided missiles), IDK... It might be that the summed x-risk associated with all the failure modes widely used surveillance AI creates (including leading to bad AGI) outweighs the x-risk of bad AGI directly.
If telepathy was possible, wouldn't its enormous reproductive advantage have made it a universal trait?
Being able to read the minds of your prey, predators, and conspecifics seems like it would confer vast reproductive advantages over non-telepathic rivals.
Did any of those parapsychology researchers look into the heritability of such mental powers? Wouldn't such an advantage have made these kind of abilities universal among humans?
I've been thinking a lot about different types of reasoning styles, and I figure here are a few axes along which people can differ, and examples of people at different ends of each axis.
First, we have the individuals/institutions axis. In this axis, we consider whether or not we take the reasoning done by an individual to be trustworthy, or if we consider individuals to be fallible, and in need of institutions to come in and correct them. On the extreme individual end, we have people like Eliezer Yudkowsky arguing against epistemic humility, and on the extreme institution end we have the catchphrase "trust the experts", or Naomi Oreskes' method of censensus.
Second, we have the facts/paradigms axis. This axis asks whether or not you think the fundamental object of analysis is individual facts, or larger narratives and stories. On the paradigm side you would have people like Thomas Kuhn and most leftists, while on the facts side you would have reductionists like Descartes, or neoclassical economists.
Finally, we have the reason/intuition axis. On the reason side, we have people who think that the best way to find out if something is true is by carefully going through the justifications for every statement, and making sure that everything fits into nice syllogisms, or some other form of formal reasoning. On the intuition side, we can say that methods like that are potentially misleading, and instead trust "human" aspects of judgement. For reason, you might have someone like Richard Dawkins or Peter Singer, while on the intuition side you might have someone like James Scott or Joseph Henrich, or the entire idea of "lived experiences".
I think that these three axes provide a nice categorization of different types of reasoning that you can see nowadays. Most rationalist types probably fall into the individuals/facts/reason corner, while mainstream progressivism probably fall into the institutions/paradigms/reason corner.
I think that this provides a nice explanatory model for why so many rationalists tend to be libertarian oriented, as well. Libertarian analysis is extremely individualist, places skepticism in what they believe are fallible institutions, and tends to place high emphasis on mathematical/game theoretical models. This fits quite nicely with the individuals/facts/reason corner, which as mentioned before seems to be where rationalists typically fall.
Do you think this categorization is useful? Is there anything in particular that you would add/change about it? Where do you fit on it?
I was saving this till we passed the Hoary Astrologer part of the thread because it isn’t very important.
I’ve always had trouble with the 1-10 rating of pain at my doctor’s office. It’s a problem of calibration. What would qualify as a 10?
I’m pretty sure I’ve never felt a 10 level of pain so how do I scale my radius compression fracture? I mean it’s not nearly as bad as passing kidney stones. - Go through that a couple times and you become a fiend about hydration -
So yeah, it hurts a bit. Do you want to know if I need codeine or sonmething? No, it’s not that bad. But now that I think about it that stuff does produce a rather pleasant mood, but no I don’t *need* it. Ibuprofen can handle this one.
Now the time I had my four wisdom teeth extracted and had 4 dry sockets, that was painful. Even percodan didn’t completely dull that. I’d have to give if a solid 8 maybe even a 9, but you know, I want to leave room at the top end in case something worse comes along.
When I had reconstructive surgery on my face to pop my cheekbone back out after that sandlot football mishap, I woke my surgeon up with a call to his home after the coagulated blood re-liquified and started to find some way out of my head. Sumbitch, that probably *was* a 9. But who knows? Things can always get worse.
So the upshot is. most of the time I just shrug and say 2 maybe a 3.
A little while ago, there was a lot of discussion about schooling. I decided to take a dive into Wikipedia to look at the history of schooling in the US. The result is now on my blog:
One possible explanation for the question 'Why don't we have Puritans anymore?' is that we replaced the Puritan education system with the Prussian education system.
Any suggestions for good Discord discussion servers? The one linked to on the blogroll of this substack is surprisingly disappointing, and substack's comment system is nigh-unusable.
Horary astrologer in the traditional method here. Performing analysis of various questions is how I get better at horary astrology, so I would be pleased to use what I know to answer any inquiry you have. My email address is FlexOnMaterialists@protonmail.com.
I apologize if this is not permitted as it is technically an ad. I'm still looking for participants for a small study. (LW link (includes an email, you don't need an account): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HjFkEcw26GGHrjMXu/?commentId=EbH9i4o5ExeDfjojL). I require one university course (course, not degree) in computer science or statistics, but no knowledge in image processing. And the compensation is quite generous (60$ for ~60 min). I'm still hoping to get by without using Mechanical Turk.
Can someone point me toward a decent study or report showing that the covid 19 vaccines slowed the pandemic? I’m most curious to see their action in comparison to other flu or similar pandemics (or just epidemics). So far all I’ve found are articles that say, “duh, stupid…scientists said so!” And other ones that describe reasons not enough vaccines were given or reasons why they might not be as useful or arguments for/against them causing variants. I just want to know if it worked and from what I can tell this pandemic followed about the same path as other pandemics making me unsure the vaccines really had much of an impact. I haven’t seen anything that doesn’t appear totally spoiled by ideology and I’m sincerely not trying to be a troll.
I have a student flat that's like 3 minutes walk from the Edinburgh meetup. And plenty of teabags. (A few vaccinated people in the communal kitchen should be OK if sheltering from rain.)
Does anyone have a back-of-the-envelope number for the percentage of de novo germline mutations attributable to ionising radiation (as opposed to endogenous mutagenic processes)? I suppose it would be species-specific, so I guess I could narrow the scope of the question to Homo sapiens in particular, but my interest in the question is broadly along the lines of: approximately how much of the mutative "raw material" supplied to natural selection in the evolution of organisms in general is due to the sun?
A lot of the literature I went through was focused on narrow-scope quantification of medical risk due to exposure to mutagens etc, and was therefore irrelevant to the objective of my search. Can someone point me in the right direction?
This seems to be an AI optimistic blog. I’m more of a skeptic. I’ll believe we are on the way to the singularity (maybe) when speech technology is able to not just translate letters and words into speech but to modify the output based on context. A good example for irregular verbs where the past tense is spelt the same but pronounced differently. I spoke this to my phone today.
“ I went to the park yesterday, while I was there I read the paper. I read the paper every day, I like to keep ahead of the news.”
I pronounced the first read as red (
/rEd/ ) and the second as reed (/riːd/). When I asked to play it back the phone pronounces both as reed. (/riːd/). Humans get it right.
I’ve never seen a text to speech AI do this. Has anybody? It’s a hard problem, not just learning to map symbols to sound but understanding the context of entire sentence, or even paragraph.
> When a third red box is added to the experiment, the results change quite a lot. Researchers have found preschoolers are ultimately torn over which box Maxi will choose, splitting their choice 50/50 between red and blue.
> "When there are only two locations, 4- and 5-year-old children can answer correctly without truly understanding that Maxi has a false belief about the location of the chocolate bar," explains psychologist William Fabricius from Arizona State University.
> "Adding a third location results in them guessing at chance between the two empty locations."
> Preschoolers appear to understand that Maxi does not know the chocolate is in the green box, because he did not see his mother put it there. As far as they are concerned, that leaves the red box or the blue box as Maxi's inevitable 'wrong choice'.
> The authors call this thinking perceptual access reasoning, or PAR. While a child understands that seeing leads to knowing, they do not incorporate the memory of Maxi putting the chocolate in the blue box into their answer.
Does anybody recall Scott saying something about how the worst thing you can do when encountering a viewpoint you don't understand is round it off to "they're just evil and hiding it"? I know the Seventh Meditation addresses something much like this, but I recall the quote (or something like that quote).
(It might be from somewhere other than Scott, but I'd still like to find it.)
In Europe, we have the Digital Green Certificate, issued after 1) full COVID vaccination or 2) 14 days after a positive PCR test (maybe there is something similar in the US). In case 1) the certificate is valid indefinitely AFAIK, and in case 2) for 6 months.
Currently the ECDC recommends against issuing this certificate after any sort of antibody test, proving past infection. Their stated reasons as I understand them are: there relationship between antibodies and immunity is yet to be determined, we do not know what levels of antibodies detected is sufficient and how long any such immunity lasts [0].
However the ECDC seems agree with these two facts:
1. (At least some of the available) antibody tests provide a reliable enough identification of past infection and
2. Past infection is sufficient to issue a green certificate (one is available shortly after a positive PCR)
In the US, the CDC seems to hold a similar position [1]. The evidence they cite point in the direction of strong and lasting natural protection (fact 2 above), and from my reading of their document they do not seem to worry about the test not being able to indicate past infection (fact 1). However the CDC is also against using antibody tests to assess immunity [2], citing concerns similar to the ECDC, namely that 'serologic correlates of protection have not been established'.
However I find it hard to reconcile this stance with the two facts above. If the evidence for natural protection is not strong enough, shouldn't PCR tests also be insufficient for getting the certificate? If the issue is that antibodies may indicate an infection too long ago in the past, shouldn't vaccine-related certificates also come with a time restriction (since there we also have no good evidence of the duration of protection)?
Can somebody try to give me a better explanation of the ECDC reasoning? Also, I would love to hear your stances on whether the risks outweigh the benefits of allowing such certificates to be issued after a positive antibody test or not.
During my master thesis I’ve developed a new method for metal printing, potentially cutting cost by a factor of ten. I want to turn this technology into a business and make metal printing accessible to SMEs, focusing creative industries. (designers, architects, artists, ...)
There is a crude proof-of-principle and by the end of the year, a proof-of-concept should exist.
I’m still looking for a cofounder. The recent ACX-meetup Vienna showed me what a good proxy ACX-reedership is for “compatible ways of thinking”. There’s no particular profile I’m looking for, just a lot of motivation regarding metal printing.
About myself: Physicist by heart. Finished my masters degree in 2019. Earned money as a programmer while at university, was researching/working on metal printing ever since. Mostly extrovert.
I’m open to found somewhere other than Vienna, but not outside Europe.
About the company: There's business plan. While it will be a profitable business, I do believe it's strongest asset is it's potential social impact by providing a lot of people with access to new manufacturing methods.
If you think this is great and want to help without becoming a founder: I’m also looking for showcase-projects (Stuff that only works with metal printing / would be too expensive without it) and buckloads of money. I have absolutely no idea how angel investors or VCs can be found so this is my try at it.
Looking over the sixth IPCC report, a question occurred to me that I don't think they discuss and I wondered if anyone here was aware of published work on it. One of the more confident predictions about the effect of climate change on tropical cyclones (aka hurricanes, typhoons) is that their tracks will shift poleward, but I don't think the report says by how much although I could have missed it. Looking at a map of past cyclone tracks and a map of population density, it looks as though the intense cyclones over land are largely over densely populated regions — Mexico, Central America, Southern China, India. If so, a shift poleward might, if large enough, move them to less densely populated regions, decreasing total human damage.
One result would be to move them more over the U.S., which would be unfortunate for us and might increase material damage, since there is more expensive stuff to be damaged in the U.S. than in Mexico — but fewer people per square mile.
Has anyone looked at the question? The report mentions that changing the cyclone tracks could change their affect on humans, but not how.
It’s international stuttering awareness day. We still have only a poor understanding of the disorder, but for a while now studies have been exploring the use of dopamine antagonists as a possible pharmacological treatment. (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2020.00158/full) Would be curious to hear people’s thoughts on the quality of evidence here, and on the idea of stuttering as a dopamine issue more broadly
Hey, we're running a Discord server about achieving financial independence through side businesses, career advancement and investments in decentralized finance. Would love to have ACX members join http://BowTiedDiscord.com
Our community has lately been wondering how to look for arbitrage opportunities through bridging (e.g. on Arbitrum), as well as any airdrop opportunities. Happy to hear any suggestions or thoughts from you all!
I'm currently in the process of training to become a secondary school teacher in the UK (ages roughly 12 to 18). I'll need to do some research on theories/models of how children learn, and I was wondering if people here might have useful suggestions of sources I should check out - particularly if they cover Rationality-adjacent concerns, but generally anything beyond the usual Piaget and Vygotsky references is greatly appreciated.
So I was introduced to the concept of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) a few years ago while seeing a therapist for various issues. I didn't end up getting much value out the therapist process itself, but I did purchase a CBT workbook, study up on the topic quite a bit like the nerd I am (and some variations like Acceptance and Commitment Theory), and so my question is- am I actually doing it successfully now?
I have some actual life issues that most outsiders would objectively consider to be relatively serious problems (i.e. they are not just thought distortions as described by CBT). My..... I guess cognitive update over the last couple of years is that I simply don't dwell on them- I don't really think about them at all. Is this CBT? For example let's pretend that you have a homeless alcoholic who was previously depressed about his life status, but now he simply doesn't think about his various issues whatsoever, and his personal happiness is greatly increased even though he remains homeless, addicted to alcohol etc. Is this CBT? (I am not a homeless alcoholic, just using this as an example).
TLDR if I have serious, chronic problems in my life and I simply ignore them and think about something pleasant instead- am I practicing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? I would say that doing so has reduced my depression a ton- but I'm also not doing anything active to fix ongoing issues. I'm closer to what Pink Floyd described as 'comfortably numb'. It's worth noting that I started practicing meditation around the same time that I took this up, which has probably enhanced my ability to not dwell on the negative/direct my thoughts in general. Would be interested to hear people's general thoughts on CBT, ACT etc. etc.
I wonder if it would have an effect on new reader intake if the thing people saw when going to acx.s was *not* half open threads and lynxes. Like if there was a distinct meta tab, and you weren't viewing it by default. Because the way it is now, a passerby might think 'I can't start this, there's more community than content', but the other way, it might look a bit emptier/updated more rarely than other substacks.
I'm looking for suggestions of great short stories with a business/finance element or theme. One example: The Accountant by Ethan Canin. I'm assembling material for a series of zoom sessions that I'm co-moderating with an English professor this winter. If you haven't read The Accountant, i recommend it. Beautifully written with a pitch perfect voice, at times very funny, at times quite philosophical.
For a virus most people haven't heard of, CMV is suprisingly bad. This is because it causes birth defects, and contributes to aging. My rough estimate of its DALY cost places it in the range of HIV.
And yet I didn't even know CMV was a thing until my final year of undergrad studies!
Humans are incredibly resistant to cold. As someone who grew up in Manitoba Canada, and now lives in Edmonton, Canada - it is so strange to learn that people can die of hypothermia at 50 F, equivalent to 10 degrees C. The idea that dying from exposure at such a high temperature is just completely outside of my experience. If you are soaked to the bone, and the wind is really blowing, and the average temp is 10 degrees, but you are in the shade, making the local temp lower - I guess I can see it happening somehow. But you could probably just walk or jog briskly indefinitely to keep warm in this situation if you have the open space and enough energy.
In my hometown, the temperature routinely goes down to minus 30 degrees for an entire month in the winter, with temperatures including wind-chill during that time at around minus 40 degrees, down to - 50 on the worst days. School only shut down maybe once or twice a year due to cold or snow - and the reason was that the busses couldn't start in the extremely low temps, even though they were all plugged in to keep the oil warm. It would need to be -40C before wind chill effects in order to have it so bad that the busses couldn't start. I walked to school with friends all winter during high school, 30 minutes one way. The cold wasn't an issue.
Will there be "Learn French with ACX" and (most excitingly) "Learn English with ACX" posts after your trips to France/the UK? (apologies for referring to subscriber-only posts in public, feel free to delete if you don't like that)
Gnostics have long seen the Bible or the canon as an instance of esoteric writing, but rarely are characters within the Bible submitted to Straussian readings.
Didn't call it Straussian in the essay itself, but did in the tweet:
How often do Antarctic tourists experience cardiovascular symptoms? How much time does it take for them to manifest? What changes occur in the blood circulation systems of the winterers (who stay there for a year), compared to the people who only make a short visit? Is there at least some difference between the Maritime Antarctica and the East Antarctica research bases (it's colder and drier in the EA)? What about the USA Scott-Amundsen Station (South Pole)?
I've reviewed a puzzle game on Less Wrong which I'd consider to be a rationalist game, i.e. one where playing it requires practice of rationalist skills like forming hypotheses, noticing confusion, etc. Link to the review: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/39Ae9JEoGCEkfiegr/recommending-understand-a-game-about-discerning-the-rules
The arts science divide started around the time the Nobel Prizes did, and since then the PMs have been rather more lopsided.
In the last century Cambridge have had one PM (Stanley Baldwin, first elected 1923). Oxford have had 11.
1. Cold exposure increases cardiovascular risk in the short term.
2. But I also know that cold exposure increases basal metabolic rate. This *might" prevent obesity and have a longer term protective effect against cardiovascular diseases, if people don't fully compensate by eating more.
Which effect is bigger? It doesn't look like 2 has been researched very much.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13679-011-0002-7
"Homeotherms maintain an optimal body temperature that is most often above their environment or ambient temperature. As ambient temperature decreases, energy expenditure (and energy intake) must increase to maintain thermal homeostasis. With the widespread adoption of climate control, humans in modern society are buffered from temperature extremes and spend an increasing amount of time in a thermally comfortable state where energetic demands are minimized. This is hypothesized to contribute to the contemporary increase in obesity rates. Studies reporting exposures of animals and humans to different ambient temperatures are discussed. Additional consideration is given to the potentially altered metabolic and physiologic responses in obese versus lean subjects at a given temperature. The data suggest that ambient temperature is a significant contributor to both energy intake and energy expenditure, and that this variable should be more thoroughly explored in future studies as a potential contributor to obesity susceptibility."
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jameson-Voss/publication/235379448_Association_of_elevation_urbanization_and_ambient_temperature_with_obesity_prevalence_in_the_United_States/links/00b4953cdca7a14139000000/Association-of-elevation-urbanization-and-ambient-temperature-with-obesity-prevalence-in-the-United-States.pdf
"In the fully adjusted GEE model controlling for elevation, urbanization, demographics, and lifestyle, all
temperature categories (5 °C increments) were not statistically significantly different than the highest temperature
category, but extremes of temperature category trended to the lowest odds (Table 1). Median BMI by quantile
regression was similar across temperature categories with suggestion of lower median BMIs at the extremes of
temperature category (Table 3)."
If there is any effect of ambient temperature on obesity rates, it was too small to reach statistical significance here.
Noam Chomsky on the unvaccinated, stating they should "remove themselves from the community".
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/noam-chomsky-unvaccinated-should-remove-themselves-from-the-community-access-to-food-their-problem/ar-AAPYJFH?ocid=msedgntp
>> "How can we get food to them?" Chomsky told YouTube's Primo Radical Sunday. "Well, that's actually their problem."
I would have gone with "Doordash" there, but share the general sentiment, in regard to mandates. If you're trying to portray yourself as "taking a stand", you shouldn't turn around and try to play the victim either, if you lose your job.
Israel is iodine deficient. Unlike other developed countries, it does not iodize salt. Iodine is known to increase IQ. New EA cause area?
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israeli-kids-low-in-iodine-desalinated-water-use-blamed-1.9969026
A friend has to write a Bachelor thesis which is kind of a literature summary on semantic text understanding through AI. I know almost nothing about that field. (The description was also very vague about what kind of things have to be understood.) Are there any generic helpful pointers for approaching this?
One thing I found interesting in the discussion of hypothermia (and deaths due to extreme temperature) was the quick turn to one of two explanations: wealth/poverty of a region, or genetic adaptation.
I find this pair of explanations lacking something important. It is lacking something mentioned in a book review by Scott, of a book titled "The Secret of Our Success."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret-of-our-success/
The skills needed to survive a cold night (without suffering hypothermia) are the type of skills that people learn from the culture they live in.
In the parts of the world that don't deal with extreme cold on a regular basis, the local culture may not remember the tricks used to survive a cold night. Even if that cold night is only 10 degrees C, in a climate that usually has overnight temperatures around 20 degrees C.
In cold regions of the world, the local culture may not remember how to deal with the occasional bout of extreme heat. Thus, members of that culture may be at risk of heat-stroke in scenarios that other cultures think of as a hot-but-survivable day.
The wealth of the industrialized world gives us a different cultural answer to the problem of keeping warm (or cool) when weather is extreme. That cultural answer is less than a century old: buy a better heater/air-conditioning-unit for your house. Find a building/car with AC. Buy a cold drink, or a cup of hot chocolate. Find a better jacket.
Within the past few centuries, we've seen many teams of explorers attempt to map poorly-known regions of the planet. In most cases, those explorers were interacting with economically-poor natives in the area of exploration. (Think of Livingstone in the heart of Africa, or explorers trying to find the NorthWest Passage.)
Generally, the natives were poorer than the explorers. But they were better at living off the land, and probably equally good at surviving extreme weather typical in that area of the world.
It is definitely true that a wealthy culture provides easy-to-use ways for all members of that culture to survive harsh weather. But it is also true that wealth, by itself, isn't the only factor in helping people survive harsh weather. Cultural knowledge is a huge factor.
As we see with the discussion of hypothermia: a wealthy culture can lose common-knowledge-level of information about dealing with cold temperatures. Even if that knowledge was common in that culture a century or two ago.
I just wanted to say "thank you", to everyone who came to the Cambridge meetup. Scott, thank you also for being there. It was great to meet you all. I am a longtime reader of the ACX and SSC blog, and it has had a big impact on my life, especially over the past few years. The biggest effect I have seen is that it has raised my own expectations of myself. I try (much of the time I fail, but I am always trying) to reason my way through problems in a rational way. I have found this a really valuable approach in my life when making decisions/ deciding how to think about new ideas, as well as when interacting with other people (and particularly those I disagree with). I want to express my gratitude that this blog and this community exists. Thank you all.
I know this corner of the internet has a certain affinity to "optimized internet food". I'm in need of a state-of-the-art recommendation. I'm looking for something that can take me through the day with as little preparation, timing and other ceremony as possible (and can be ordered on the East Coast, but that shouldn't be a big problem?). If it helps keep me awake, that's a bonus, but all is fine as long as it doesn't actively make me sleepy.
I don't mean to change my general eating habits; I need a temporary fix for the remaining 2 months of crunch time on my job.
Thanks for any tips!
There's a song I like a lot in Russian whose lyrics purport to be a translation of a W.J. Smith poem. (Depending on the website I look at, sometimes the claim is that it's an original invention, but it being a translation would make better sense to me.) I'm looking for the original poem.
It's about a dragon who lives in a tower (as dragons do), and, being bored there, plays the violin. He is visited by a princess, who scolds him but then they're reconciled and get married. He explains that he's fed up living in a tower like a dragon, and instead would like normal domestic life. He also says that the princess shouldn't be afraid of the dragon who lives beyond the marshes, because if he ever gets rude with her, he (the dragon) will tell him to leave and he'll go. (Yes, it's supposed to be ambiguous whether there's really two dragons involved.)
Anyone have any idea what the original poem might be?
I'm looking for a learning resource on how to test hypotheses using (frequentist or Bayesian) statistics. Basically: given a hypothesis, how do I then use data (e.g. samples) to refute that hypothesis?
We just had a realspace South Bay meetup (Sunday, October 24th). Thirty to forty people attending. If infection rates continue to fall, we plan to do another one in a month or two.
Scott reviewed Turchin on Secular Cycles some time ago on SSC https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cycles/ Now Bret Devereaux aka The Pedant went over this and other psychohistory-style theories in his Fireside Friday: https://acoup.blog/2021/10/15/fireside-friday-october-15-2021/#easy-footnote-3-9666 He is not impressed.
Suppose that a group of whimsical aliens decide they want to make Saturn's rings prettier so they teleport a new shepherd moon into orbit in the middle of a ring. How long will they have to wait before a new gap appears in the rings: are we talking years, millennia, or astronomical time scales?
Has there been any recent progress (dis)proving the variable speed of light theory?
Steel-manning the Surveillance AI X-Risk > AGI X-Risk Case
Example: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/22/palantirs-peter-thiel-surveillance-ai-is-more-concerning-than-agi.html
There's a lot of focus (both in public AI-risk activism and within the community itself) on the failure mode where an AGI gets created with a buggy utility function and turns the universe into paperclips or whatever. There's another really bad failure mode, however, where the AGI gets created by CCCP or whatever with some version of the utility function "make all humans obey Xi Jinping/Putin/<some evil group of people>'s dictats forever".
If making an AGI requires a huge Manhattan project style research effort (rather than being a hacker-in-a-room thing) then IMO having a country/world with liberal politics is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for creating a good AGI. If you buy this argument, a crucial part of dealing with AGI x-risk is (a) making sure your favorite liberal countries have the leading AI programs and (b) pushing back on totalitarianism world wide.
When we add this to the fact that surveillance AI could lead to a bunch of other x-risk scenarios (e.g., impossible to remove world-wide totalitarianism, counter-value nuclear war with AI guided missiles), IDK... It might be that the summed x-risk associated with all the failure modes widely used surveillance AI creates (including leading to bad AGI) outweighs the x-risk of bad AGI directly.
If telepathy was possible, wouldn't its enormous reproductive advantage have made it a universal trait?
Being able to read the minds of your prey, predators, and conspecifics seems like it would confer vast reproductive advantages over non-telepathic rivals.
Did any of those parapsychology researchers look into the heritability of such mental powers? Wouldn't such an advantage have made these kind of abilities universal among humans?
Sorry to have missed today's meetup. I hope you enjoy your visit to Edinburgh
I've been thinking a lot about different types of reasoning styles, and I figure here are a few axes along which people can differ, and examples of people at different ends of each axis.
First, we have the individuals/institutions axis. In this axis, we consider whether or not we take the reasoning done by an individual to be trustworthy, or if we consider individuals to be fallible, and in need of institutions to come in and correct them. On the extreme individual end, we have people like Eliezer Yudkowsky arguing against epistemic humility, and on the extreme institution end we have the catchphrase "trust the experts", or Naomi Oreskes' method of censensus.
Second, we have the facts/paradigms axis. This axis asks whether or not you think the fundamental object of analysis is individual facts, or larger narratives and stories. On the paradigm side you would have people like Thomas Kuhn and most leftists, while on the facts side you would have reductionists like Descartes, or neoclassical economists.
Finally, we have the reason/intuition axis. On the reason side, we have people who think that the best way to find out if something is true is by carefully going through the justifications for every statement, and making sure that everything fits into nice syllogisms, or some other form of formal reasoning. On the intuition side, we can say that methods like that are potentially misleading, and instead trust "human" aspects of judgement. For reason, you might have someone like Richard Dawkins or Peter Singer, while on the intuition side you might have someone like James Scott or Joseph Henrich, or the entire idea of "lived experiences".
I think that these three axes provide a nice categorization of different types of reasoning that you can see nowadays. Most rationalist types probably fall into the individuals/facts/reason corner, while mainstream progressivism probably fall into the institutions/paradigms/reason corner.
I think that this provides a nice explanatory model for why so many rationalists tend to be libertarian oriented, as well. Libertarian analysis is extremely individualist, places skepticism in what they believe are fallible institutions, and tends to place high emphasis on mathematical/game theoretical models. This fits quite nicely with the individuals/facts/reason corner, which as mentioned before seems to be where rationalists typically fall.
Do you think this categorization is useful? Is there anything in particular that you would add/change about it? Where do you fit on it?
I was saving this till we passed the Hoary Astrologer part of the thread because it isn’t very important.
I’ve always had trouble with the 1-10 rating of pain at my doctor’s office. It’s a problem of calibration. What would qualify as a 10?
I’m pretty sure I’ve never felt a 10 level of pain so how do I scale my radius compression fracture? I mean it’s not nearly as bad as passing kidney stones. - Go through that a couple times and you become a fiend about hydration -
So yeah, it hurts a bit. Do you want to know if I need codeine or sonmething? No, it’s not that bad. But now that I think about it that stuff does produce a rather pleasant mood, but no I don’t *need* it. Ibuprofen can handle this one.
Now the time I had my four wisdom teeth extracted and had 4 dry sockets, that was painful. Even percodan didn’t completely dull that. I’d have to give if a solid 8 maybe even a 9, but you know, I want to leave room at the top end in case something worse comes along.
When I had reconstructive surgery on my face to pop my cheekbone back out after that sandlot football mishap, I woke my surgeon up with a call to his home after the coagulated blood re-liquified and started to find some way out of my head. Sumbitch, that probably *was* a 9. But who knows? Things can always get worse.
So the upshot is. most of the time I just shrug and say 2 maybe a 3.
I’m curious how other people approach this.
A little while ago, there was a lot of discussion about schooling. I decided to take a dive into Wikipedia to look at the history of schooling in the US. The result is now on my blog:
http://thechaostician.com/a-brief-history-of-schooling-in-america/
One possible explanation for the question 'Why don't we have Puritans anymore?' is that we replaced the Puritan education system with the Prussian education system.
Any suggestions for good Discord discussion servers? The one linked to on the blogroll of this substack is surprisingly disappointing, and substack's comment system is nigh-unusable.
Horary astrologer in the traditional method here. Performing analysis of various questions is how I get better at horary astrology, so I would be pleased to use what I know to answer any inquiry you have. My email address is FlexOnMaterialists@protonmail.com.
I apologize if this is not permitted as it is technically an ad. I'm still looking for participants for a small study. (LW link (includes an email, you don't need an account): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HjFkEcw26GGHrjMXu/?commentId=EbH9i4o5ExeDfjojL). I require one university course (course, not degree) in computer science or statistics, but no knowledge in image processing. And the compensation is quite generous (60$ for ~60 min). I'm still hoping to get by without using Mechanical Turk.
Can someone point me toward a decent study or report showing that the covid 19 vaccines slowed the pandemic? I’m most curious to see their action in comparison to other flu or similar pandemics (or just epidemics). So far all I’ve found are articles that say, “duh, stupid…scientists said so!” And other ones that describe reasons not enough vaccines were given or reasons why they might not be as useful or arguments for/against them causing variants. I just want to know if it worked and from what I can tell this pandemic followed about the same path as other pandemics making me unsure the vaccines really had much of an impact. I haven’t seen anything that doesn’t appear totally spoiled by ideology and I’m sincerely not trying to be a troll.
I have a student flat that's like 3 minutes walk from the Edinburgh meetup. And plenty of teabags. (A few vaccinated people in the communal kitchen should be OK if sheltering from rain.)
Hi all. Long-time lurker, first-time commenter.
Does anyone have a back-of-the-envelope number for the percentage of de novo germline mutations attributable to ionising radiation (as opposed to endogenous mutagenic processes)? I suppose it would be species-specific, so I guess I could narrow the scope of the question to Homo sapiens in particular, but my interest in the question is broadly along the lines of: approximately how much of the mutative "raw material" supplied to natural selection in the evolution of organisms in general is due to the sun?
A lot of the literature I went through was focused on narrow-scope quantification of medical risk due to exposure to mutagens etc, and was therefore irrelevant to the objective of my search. Can someone point me in the right direction?
This seems to be an AI optimistic blog. I’m more of a skeptic. I’ll believe we are on the way to the singularity (maybe) when speech technology is able to not just translate letters and words into speech but to modify the output based on context. A good example for irregular verbs where the past tense is spelt the same but pronounced differently. I spoke this to my phone today.
“ I went to the park yesterday, while I was there I read the paper. I read the paper every day, I like to keep ahead of the news.”
I pronounced the first read as red (
/rEd/ ) and the second as reed (/riːd/). When I asked to play it back the phone pronounces both as reed. (/riːd/). Humans get it right.
I’ve never seen a text to speech AI do this. Has anybody? It’s a hard problem, not just learning to map symbols to sound but understanding the context of entire sentence, or even paragraph.
Wow these default avatars are hard to differentiate. Bring back Gravatar, or those funky monsters ThingofThings used?
And did the bloke in London with the doctors without borders jacket get a headcount?
Interesting article saying that we may have overestimated how much theory of mind children have at a young age, as when given a variant on the normal hidden object test they don't do so well: https://www.sciencealert.com/new-evidence-suggests-children-may-not-have-theory-of-mind-until-age-6-or-7 (original paper linked in the article)
> When a third red box is added to the experiment, the results change quite a lot. Researchers have found preschoolers are ultimately torn over which box Maxi will choose, splitting their choice 50/50 between red and blue.
> "When there are only two locations, 4- and 5-year-old children can answer correctly without truly understanding that Maxi has a false belief about the location of the chocolate bar," explains psychologist William Fabricius from Arizona State University.
> "Adding a third location results in them guessing at chance between the two empty locations."
> Preschoolers appear to understand that Maxi does not know the chocolate is in the green box, because he did not see his mother put it there. As far as they are concerned, that leaves the red box or the blue box as Maxi's inevitable 'wrong choice'.
> The authors call this thinking perceptual access reasoning, or PAR. While a child understands that seeing leads to knowing, they do not incorporate the memory of Maxi putting the chocolate in the blue box into their answer.
Does anybody recall Scott saying something about how the worst thing you can do when encountering a viewpoint you don't understand is round it off to "they're just evil and hiding it"? I know the Seventh Meditation addresses something much like this, but I recall the quote (or something like that quote).
(It might be from somewhere other than Scott, but I'd still like to find it.)
In Europe, we have the Digital Green Certificate, issued after 1) full COVID vaccination or 2) 14 days after a positive PCR test (maybe there is something similar in the US). In case 1) the certificate is valid indefinitely AFAIK, and in case 2) for 6 months.
Currently the ECDC recommends against issuing this certificate after any sort of antibody test, proving past infection. Their stated reasons as I understand them are: there relationship between antibodies and immunity is yet to be determined, we do not know what levels of antibodies detected is sufficient and how long any such immunity lasts [0].
However the ECDC seems agree with these two facts:
1. (At least some of the available) antibody tests provide a reliable enough identification of past infection and
2. Past infection is sufficient to issue a green certificate (one is available shortly after a positive PCR)
In the US, the CDC seems to hold a similar position [1]. The evidence they cite point in the direction of strong and lasting natural protection (fact 2 above), and from my reading of their document they do not seem to worry about the test not being able to indicate past infection (fact 1). However the CDC is also against using antibody tests to assess immunity [2], citing concerns similar to the ECDC, namely that 'serologic correlates of protection have not been established'.
However I find it hard to reconcile this stance with the two facts above. If the evidence for natural protection is not strong enough, shouldn't PCR tests also be insufficient for getting the certificate? If the issue is that antibodies may indicate an infection too long ago in the past, shouldn't vaccine-related certificates also come with a time restriction (since there we also have no good evidence of the duration of protection)?
Can somebody try to give me a better explanation of the ECDC reasoning? Also, I would love to hear your stances on whether the risks outweigh the benefits of allowing such certificates to be issued after a positive antibody test or not.
During my master thesis I’ve developed a new method for metal printing, potentially cutting cost by a factor of ten. I want to turn this technology into a business and make metal printing accessible to SMEs, focusing creative industries. (designers, architects, artists, ...)
There is a crude proof-of-principle and by the end of the year, a proof-of-concept should exist.
I’m still looking for a cofounder. The recent ACX-meetup Vienna showed me what a good proxy ACX-reedership is for “compatible ways of thinking”. There’s no particular profile I’m looking for, just a lot of motivation regarding metal printing.
About myself: Physicist by heart. Finished my masters degree in 2019. Earned money as a programmer while at university, was researching/working on metal printing ever since. Mostly extrovert.
I’m open to found somewhere other than Vienna, but not outside Europe.
About the company: There's business plan. While it will be a profitable business, I do believe it's strongest asset is it's potential social impact by providing a lot of people with access to new manufacturing methods.
If you think this is great and want to help without becoming a founder: I’m also looking for showcase-projects (Stuff that only works with metal printing / would be too expensive without it) and buckloads of money. I have absolutely no idea how angel investors or VCs can be found so this is my try at it.
Here is a very crude homepage: http://budgetmetalprinting.com/
Looking over the sixth IPCC report, a question occurred to me that I don't think they discuss and I wondered if anyone here was aware of published work on it. One of the more confident predictions about the effect of climate change on tropical cyclones (aka hurricanes, typhoons) is that their tracks will shift poleward, but I don't think the report says by how much although I could have missed it. Looking at a map of past cyclone tracks and a map of population density, it looks as though the intense cyclones over land are largely over densely populated regions — Mexico, Central America, Southern China, India. If so, a shift poleward might, if large enough, move them to less densely populated regions, decreasing total human damage.
One result would be to move them more over the U.S., which would be unfortunate for us and might increase material damage, since there is more expensive stuff to be damaged in the U.S. than in Mexico — but fewer people per square mile.
Has anyone looked at the question? The report mentions that changing the cyclone tracks could change their affect on humans, but not how.
It’s international stuttering awareness day. We still have only a poor understanding of the disorder, but for a while now studies have been exploring the use of dopamine antagonists as a possible pharmacological treatment. (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2020.00158/full) Would be curious to hear people’s thoughts on the quality of evidence here, and on the idea of stuttering as a dopamine issue more broadly
Hey, we're running a Discord server about achieving financial independence through side businesses, career advancement and investments in decentralized finance. Would love to have ACX members join http://BowTiedDiscord.com
Our community has lately been wondering how to look for arbitrage opportunities through bridging (e.g. on Arbitrum), as well as any airdrop opportunities. Happy to hear any suggestions or thoughts from you all!
I'm currently in the process of training to become a secondary school teacher in the UK (ages roughly 12 to 18). I'll need to do some research on theories/models of how children learn, and I was wondering if people here might have useful suggestions of sources I should check out - particularly if they cover Rationality-adjacent concerns, but generally anything beyond the usual Piaget and Vygotsky references is greatly appreciated.
So I was introduced to the concept of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) a few years ago while seeing a therapist for various issues. I didn't end up getting much value out the therapist process itself, but I did purchase a CBT workbook, study up on the topic quite a bit like the nerd I am (and some variations like Acceptance and Commitment Theory), and so my question is- am I actually doing it successfully now?
I have some actual life issues that most outsiders would objectively consider to be relatively serious problems (i.e. they are not just thought distortions as described by CBT). My..... I guess cognitive update over the last couple of years is that I simply don't dwell on them- I don't really think about them at all. Is this CBT? For example let's pretend that you have a homeless alcoholic who was previously depressed about his life status, but now he simply doesn't think about his various issues whatsoever, and his personal happiness is greatly increased even though he remains homeless, addicted to alcohol etc. Is this CBT? (I am not a homeless alcoholic, just using this as an example).
TLDR if I have serious, chronic problems in my life and I simply ignore them and think about something pleasant instead- am I practicing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? I would say that doing so has reduced my depression a ton- but I'm also not doing anything active to fix ongoing issues. I'm closer to what Pink Floyd described as 'comfortably numb'. It's worth noting that I started practicing meditation around the same time that I took this up, which has probably enhanced my ability to not dwell on the negative/direct my thoughts in general. Would be interested to hear people's general thoughts on CBT, ACT etc. etc.
I wonder if it would have an effect on new reader intake if the thing people saw when going to acx.s was *not* half open threads and lynxes. Like if there was a distinct meta tab, and you weren't viewing it by default. Because the way it is now, a passerby might think 'I can't start this, there's more community than content', but the other way, it might look a bit emptier/updated more rarely than other substacks.
I'm looking for suggestions of great short stories with a business/finance element or theme. One example: The Accountant by Ethan Canin. I'm assembling material for a series of zoom sessions that I'm co-moderating with an English professor this winter. If you haven't read The Accountant, i recommend it. Beautifully written with a pitch perfect voice, at times very funny, at times quite philosophical.
I've recently published a piece on cytomegalovirus as part of my series, "The human Herpesviruses: much more than you wanted to know". https://denovo.substack.com/p/cytomegalovirus-the-worst-herpesvirus
For a virus most people haven't heard of, CMV is suprisingly bad. This is because it causes birth defects, and contributes to aging. My rough estimate of its DALY cost places it in the range of HIV.
And yet I didn't even know CMV was a thing until my final year of undergrad studies!
Humans are incredibly resistant to cold. As someone who grew up in Manitoba Canada, and now lives in Edmonton, Canada - it is so strange to learn that people can die of hypothermia at 50 F, equivalent to 10 degrees C. The idea that dying from exposure at such a high temperature is just completely outside of my experience. If you are soaked to the bone, and the wind is really blowing, and the average temp is 10 degrees, but you are in the shade, making the local temp lower - I guess I can see it happening somehow. But you could probably just walk or jog briskly indefinitely to keep warm in this situation if you have the open space and enough energy.
In my hometown, the temperature routinely goes down to minus 30 degrees for an entire month in the winter, with temperatures including wind-chill during that time at around minus 40 degrees, down to - 50 on the worst days. School only shut down maybe once or twice a year due to cold or snow - and the reason was that the busses couldn't start in the extremely low temps, even though they were all plugged in to keep the oil warm. It would need to be -40C before wind chill effects in order to have it so bad that the busses couldn't start. I walked to school with friends all winter during high school, 30 minutes one way. The cold wasn't an issue.
Will there be "Learn French with ACX" and (most excitingly) "Learn English with ACX" posts after your trips to France/the UK? (apologies for referring to subscriber-only posts in public, feel free to delete if you don't like that)
Gnostics have long seen the Bible or the canon as an instance of esoteric writing, but rarely are characters within the Bible submitted to Straussian readings.
Didn't call it Straussian in the essay itself, but did in the tweet:
https://twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1451575808800313352
https://etzhasadeh.substack.com/p/the-conspiracy