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Speaking of biomedical research:

I am currently looking to recruit a lab tech (or undergrad assistant) to help with *in vitro* gametogenesis research. The lab is in Boston. For more, see here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/come-work-with-me-on-oogenesis

Also, if anyone is interested in partnering with me for a biomedical grant application, please let me know! metacelsus@protonmail.com I'm working at full capacity on the gametogenesis project but I could provide some advice to you about other things.

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Substack really needs an "edit comment" feature. I tried to make *in vitro* italics, messed it up, and now I can't change it.

Furthermore I think this leads to people deleting their comments instead of correcting minor mistakes.

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Something I've been thinking of with regard to aphantasia: we talk of visual aphantasia, that is, the inability to recreate visual images in your mind, but what about the aphantasia of other senses? Are there people with auditory aphantasia, who have no inner monologue and never get songs stuck in their head? How about for touch, taste and smell?

As for me, I think I have mild visual aphantasia; things I imagine are low in detail and complexity. However, I don't find these limitations in sound and touch: I can play a song in my head from beginning to end in a way that comes pretty close to the real thing, and I can similarly recall the texture of a peach or a lychee. My representations of taste and smell are less vivid though, and I have to try very hard to conjure an accurate memory of the complete sensation.

Is this typical, or do your senses also vary in their level of representational detail? Note that I'm not talking about sensory impairments like anosmia here, this is purely on whether you can imagine things as well as you experience them.

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i just started reading this great new blog, https://goodoptics.wordpress.com! i think everyone should check it out

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Idea for a "biomedical" grant that couldn't be funded by other sources: Developing (and maybe distributing?) strains of yeast that make psychedelics.

Cost would probably be below $10000.

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Supposedly John von Neumann had some pretty bad existential terror. I'm not sure how you think it's ethical to take that and multiply it by 20,000.

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Suppose we have a technology enabling us to perfectly measure the hedonic tone of subjective experience, providing a single numerical score. It accounts for many nuances, such as the logarithmic nature of happiness and suffering. You can adjust temporal resolution (quantifying hedonic tone by seconds, hours, years, lifetime) and the scale (specific individual, demographic group, nation, humanity).

1. What findings would most people (including decisive circles) find most surprising?

2. Based on these surprising findings, what kind of:

a) individual life choices,

b) systemic interventions would you likely promote?

I vaguely assume we want to discover the hidden pits of undeserved, intense suffering (to minimize them), and currently unknown, cost-effective ways to promote wholesome forms of happiness.

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i thought i'd share a selection of blog posts that i've written during the last four months. i did this four months ago too but lots has happened since then!

The Devastating Power and Heartbreaking Pain of Truly Changing Minds -- quoting the conclusion which also works as a kind of abstract: "The processes involved in changing one's mind are unusually stark when it comes to Latter-day Saints changing their minds about their religion. This is because various social, cultural and psychological factors incentivise members to keep believing that the Church is true even as information readily available online makes a compelling argument that it isn't. Some Latter-day Saints overcome these forces and reach the latter conclusion anyway. This is a difficult, disorienting and painful undertaking. But it is also somehow beautiful, and I suppose what I find so beautiful about it is that it is the scout, the doubter, the truth-seeker, an underdog here if there ever was one, who wins out despite it all."

=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/the-devastating-power-and-heartbreaking-pain-of-truly-changing-minds/

The American Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation Makes No Sense -- i describe the difference between the British and American styles of quotation mark punctuation and argue that the former is superiour. this one for some reason ended up with an order of magnitude more views than my second most read post ...

=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/the-american-style-of-quotation-mark-punctuation-makes-no-sense/

Utilitarianism Expressed in Julia -- i explore some common variants of utilitarianism by implementing them in the programming language julia, with an eye towards population ethics and the repugnant conclusion.

=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/utilitarianism-expressed-in-julia/

Why Does the Western Left Worry More about Local Poverty than Global Poverty? -- i argue that the western left, to which i belong, should (to some extent) prioritise cross-border poverty over within-border poverty, for instance via cash transfer programs, because income gaps are larger between countries than within countries.

=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/why-does-the-western-left-worry-more-about-local-poverty-than-global-poverty/

Some Books that Have Influenced Me during the Past Decade -- i briefly describe five books that have been important to me during the past ten years. they are tamarisk row, war and peace, the world as will and representation, edge of irony and inventing the future, which in a roundabout way brought me to slate star codex two years ago.

=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/some-books-that-have-influenced-me-during-the-past-decade/

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Hinder the development of AI? Roko's Basilisk will see this.

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As I mentioned in OT 197.5, my wife and I are having our first child in a couple months. Looking for your best parenting advice. (Thanks to those of you who replied on the first thread!)

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Idea for a grant application, free to a good home: execute one of Luisa Rodriguez's suggested research directions on the recoverability of civilizational collapse (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GsjmufaebreiaivF7/what-is-the-likelihood-that-civilizational-collapse-would#Other_research_directions) and use the money to hire expert consultants and buy camping supplies

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There’s an 80% chance your keys are in the chest of drawers, and a 20% chance they are on the table in the other room. There are 4 compartments in the chest. After opening 3 of them what are the odds?

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Does anyone else have any interest in potentially volunteering time to an ACX Grant project?

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> If you have proposals to hinder the advance of cutting-edge AI research, send them to me!

LOL!

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1. If you were to bet, when will covid recede into the background without it being a significant factor in decisions like travel?

2. What are the precautions to be taking now, after the booster?

3. When is the booster going to wane? Do we know anything?

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Last even thread I posted my ideas about helping Haiti. I got a little feedback which I appreciate. I also learned about TheMotte and posted there which was an interesting experience.

Right now I have a question. Are you concerned about Haiti? Do you think about Haiti?

I believe we are watching the rapid disintegration of a somewhat modern state. The US and most of the world seem to be saying to Haiti: "You are on your own."

The response of the Dominican Republic (where I live) is to close the border tighter and to stop providing medical care to Haitians.

What are your thoughts (if you have any)?

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Given the recent US conservative interest in Hungary + recent coverage on this blog, I figured it might be interesting to post occasional news items, which people can use to test/train their intuitions.

Here's one: on Thursday, the government has set a price cap for petrol. The cap is about $1.50 per liter, about 8% decrease from current prices. Petrol tax is left unchanged; typical wholesaler profit margins on petrol are 4%, typical retailer margins are around 2-3%, so gas station owners will now lose money on selling gasoline to their customers. To avoid the obvious consequences, to new regulation forbids closing gas stations or not selling petrol. If the owner does either of those, the gas station is taken away from them and given to another company (selected by the minister of commerce) to operate for the next three months.

(News article in Hungarian: https://www.portfolio.hu/gazdasag/20211112/uzemanyagar-befagyasztas-minden-amit-tudni-kell-a-benzin-es-a-gazolaj-aranak-csokkenteserol-510524 )

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"Anything that might lead to 20,000 clones of John von Neumann" - would that make it a "Von Neumann machine"?

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Hi guys :)

I am a physician planning the thesis for my data science masters I'm currently studying at Harvard. I'm interested in a lot of the topics Scott writes about.

Are there any readers who are academics or know of academics in Boston (particularly Harvard, MIT or BU) working in:

- perceptual control theory / predictive coding (particularly in applications in psychiatry)

- psychedelic assisted psychotherapy (particularly ketamine research for chronic pain, depression and relaxing priors)

- effective altruist aligned research (eg. how to effectively promote altruistic memes within cognitive science / psychology)?

I'm looking to start a 6-month quantitative research project as soon as possible, and basically looking for a decent dataset to do some exploration and analysis on. I'm particularly interested in machine learning, and would like to learn more about NLP and network analysis although not restricted to those topics.

Any help or suggestions are much appreciated!

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Scott, wondering if you saw this and if it prompted any reconsideration of prior views:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2785832

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Is there a way to print out our submission form entry at submission? I don't think so, but having submitted, figured I would ask the question.

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Today I was again frustrated by a blog post by Razib Khan that mentioned a paper that came out just last month, because of course I can't access it. This happens a lot: Bloggers want to talk about the hot new paper that just came out, but unless the paper was in Nature or Science, even most universities won't have that paper online for 6 months to 1 year, because the "everything but the last year" and the "everything but the last 6 months" tiers of online journal subscriptions are substantially less expensive than the "everything" tier.

While I /intend/ to look up the paper in 6 months, when I'll have access to it, past performance says P(I will remember) =~ 1 / (1 + # of papers I have ever planned to read later). So the brief mention of it isn't useful to me.

What do you you all think: Should bloggers talk about the latest papers that came out, or should they wait for 6 months or 1 year, until those papers are more accessible?

I think that unless either

a) the paper is open-access or published in an extremely popular journal (Nature / Science / JAMA / PNAS), or

b) it's ground-breaking (P = NP) or widely-discussed and/or political (the latest IPCC report (that's open-access; just pretend it wasn't)), or

c) the blog discusses it in enough detail that you don't need to read the paper,

then I'd rather bloggers write up their views, then post them 6 months later, when people have some chance of reading the paper themselves.

That would detract from the "hot off the press" excitement, but I think that kind of short-attention-span buzz is mostly bad for science anyway. The actual scientific value to me of a paper published this week is no greater than that of a paper published a year ago. If a paper won't still be worth talking about in a year, it probably isn't worth talking about today.

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Didn't Von Neumann advocate for preemptively nuking the Soviet Union, potentially killing millions of civilians?

Why would you want to see more Von Neumann-type minds if you are also concerned about the risks of AGI?

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I am reading Jonathan Rauch's: "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth". Lots of interesting discussion on the availability of accurate information. He praises Wikipedia as a well vetted source for example. What I found interesting was reading about the techniques of Steve Bannon and Donald Trump in winning either elections or the approval of the electorate. He described it as "Flooding the zone with shit". I was reminded about Campaigns Inc an early political analyst company founded by McMasters and Baxter in the 1920s. In both her book

"These Truths" and an article in the New Yorker called the "Lie Factory" she described how when consulting McMasters and Baxter won 70 of 75 attempts! They promoted the same idea by "flooding the zone with shit" as well.Their version for example used unrelated quotes from Upton Sinclair's books that made him look bad pasted on the front page of the Los Angeles newspaper every day for six weeks. Below I have copied and pasted from Rauch's book and Lepore's New Yorker article. It seemed to me the same technique used 100 years ago continues to work today. Here's the quotes.

From : "Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth"

" A good way to think about such attacks is as environmental. They attack not just individual people or facts but the whole information space. In a famous remark to the journalist Michael Lewis in 2018, Steve Bannon, the Breitbart News chairman who went on to become a senior strategist for candidate Trump and then President Trump, said this: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Flood the zone with shit: although the formulation is crude, there could be no more concise and accurate summation of what modern information warfare is all about. All communities, and especially the reality-based community, rely on networks of trust to decide what is and is not true. People need to know whom they are talking to, whether that person is credible, which institutions confer credibility, and so on. Every aspect of trust and credibility is degraded when the zone is flooded with shit.

From "The Lie Factory" article:

Then they wrote an Opposition Plan of Campaign, to anticipate the moves made against them. Every campaign needs a theme. Keep it simple. Rhyming’s good. (“For Jimmy and me, vote ‘yes’ on 3.”) Never explain anything. “The more you have to explain,” Whitaker said, “the more difficult it is to win support.” Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said. Subtlety is your enemy. “Words that lean on the mind are no good,” according to Baxter. “They must dent it.” Simplify, simplify, simplify. “A wall goes up,” Whitaker warned, “when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.”

--

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Thought I'd save this for an even-numbered thread, since it's political, and the comments may get heated. "What if Xi Jinping just isn't that competent?" by Noah Smith.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-if-xi-jinping-just-isnt-that

I'd have to agree that Xi's political moves seem clumsy. But then again he may see no reason for finesse since he's got such thorough control of the levers of power. Or it may just be Dictator Dunning-Kruger effect—which we've seen over and over again among totalitarians, bot right and left.

From the Xi quote below, he certainly seems proud of his deep understanding of politics. It's almost as if he's compensating for what his family went through during the Cultural Revolution.

"People who have little contact with power, who are far from it, always see these things as mysterious and novel. But what I see is not just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the bullpens [Red Guard detention centers] and how people can blow hot and cold. I understand politics on a deeper level." —Xi Jinping

As an aside, I'm not sure why Noah Smith thinks Putin is a competent dictator. And there are several places where it's clear he hasn't spent any time in China.

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Why don't online dating profiles include letters of reference?

A big problem in dating is identifying bad actors. For those who have a letter of reference from an ex, it seems like this would be a valuable signal. But nobody does this!

If you were online-dating and you saw a profile with a link to a letter of reference from an ex, would that make you more or less interested in the profile? (Assuming the letter said good things.)

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How do you have intuitions on immune health?

It seems apparent that people with stronger immune systems have much harsher responses to vaccines. Does this apply to regular illness as well? Is the guy who gets really sick but bounces back in a day healthier than a guy who has a low-grade cold for three weeks that kinda sucks but never gets *really* bad? Or is a binary "immune system good/bad" not applicable here at all? Is there any relevant research here to dive into?

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Can you tell us what perpetual motion machines were proposed? I really want to know.

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My wife works for the scientific crowdfunding website experiment.com. She frequently talks to me about some of the submissions they get (all of which go through a review process before being approved for posting), so I can only imagine the types of submissions you are getting. I hope you have a good team to help.

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Request for collaborators!

I was considering applying for a grant but what I need are collaborators not money. I’m building a tool to better visualize balance sheets, within the “money view” perspective within banking and finance. The goal is to make it accessible for educational purposes.

Looking for 1-2 people interested in helping build it. I’ve gotten started using d3 but open to alternatives

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founding

There's a program called Backpack Buddies that has spread by word of mouth throughout the country. Volunteers get together to pack weekly backpacks to give to food insecure school kids on Fridays. The kids return the backpacks after the weekend. As far as I know, BB is completely grassroots, no central organization I can find. A grant worthy project might be to hire someone to do a case study on how BB started, how it spread, why it spread, and how other grassroots programs might replicate its success. Apologies if this case study already exists. But if it does, it's not readily findable, at least not by me.

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"Anything that might lead to 20,000 clones of John von Neumann" I pay 20,000 people to change their name to John Von Neumann, which will make them really good scientists since they wouldn't want to let down their namesake. Any takers?

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Here is my grant proposal for an impact on the global poor: Mass production of a simple combustion engine vehicle, similar to the consumer niche a Ford Model-T filled at the beginning of the 20th Century. Supply

chain logistics are probably one of the greatest hurdles to overcome in a developing country. Cars increase demand for roads and their supporting industries.

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What’s a good reason not to invest in https://www.klimadao.finance/? Having read the docs, it seems to check out. I’d appreciate some skeptics…

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An idea for something altruistic to do: Charity jewelry.

People like jewelry because it is expensive. If a guy gives expensive jewelry to a woman it proves (sort of) that he loves her. And people can wear expensive jewelry to show off how rich they are. But mining gold and diamonds is bad for the environment, so currently jewelry is harmful.

But instead of making jewelry from expensive stuff, you can make it from cheap stuff (plastic or some cheap metal) and still sell it for a high prize. How will men prove their love by giving jewelry from cheap material? How will people show off how rich they are? Because when the jewelry is bought the sale is registered on a website anyone can read. It says who bought the jewelry, how much it cost and optionally who they bought it for.

Also there are some symbols on the jewelry that shows how expensive it is. A ring with one heart costs ten dollars. Two hearts: a hundred dollars. Three hearts: a thousand dollars. And so on.

And the money the company makes off the jewelry goes to charity.

One can try to shift public opinion so people think wearing charity jewelry is moral and wearing gold/diamond is immoral. The prize of gold and diamonds will drop as fewer people wear it. Then even people who don’t care about the morality of wearing gold and diamonds will not want to wear it anymore because it is cheap.

(One advantage of this jewelry is it’s worthless to a thief, since the thief’s name isn’t registered on the website.)

It doesn't have to be just jewelry. It could be things you hang on a wall like a painting. Or you can have things to decorate a car with. Somebody can show off that they would rather drive a cheap car and give money to charity, than drive an expensive car. Public opinion could shift to thinking driving an expensive car is immoral.

You can have a place that is like a bar, except instead of men buying drinks for women, they donate to charity for them. (I doubt this last part will be popular.)

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Scott, I think you may be underestimating the amount of good these grants can do simply by giving people permission to be ambitious. In my view, there are a lot of interesting projects out there that just need a small amount of activation energy to unlock months or years of hard work. For most of these the constraint may be much more psychological than financial.

I wouldn't be surprised if you can make a meaningful impact by sending some of these applicants a note saying "I can't fund this, but it looks interesting and I'm excited to see what you can do, please keep me updated". Certainly $500-1k could end up buying much more impact than you'd expect.

Speaking from personal experience, even getting a *followup question* from TC after submitting an Emergent Ventures application was shockingly motivational, even though I never heard back after that. "Wow, TC didn't throw my silly idea into the reject pile immediately." Two years later I'm *still* working on that startup.

You've probably seen Tyler's writing about this: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/10/high-return-activity-raising-others-aspirations.html

This affects two of the categories/questions you mentioned:

1. People looking for a "stamp of approval". First, I don't think you're actually staking any meaningful amount of reputation on this. And second, I'd bet most of the impact would be on the applicant themselves rather than their friends/potential colleagues.

2. The "engineer at google who won't self-fund it". As you point out, obviously this is not a financial constraint. Could you respond with something like: "this looks great, I'm setting aside $1k for you, to be unlocked after you send me a progress update 90 days from now."

Anyway, this is a great initiative and glad you're doing it!

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I wonder if people who experience frequent vivid, lucid dreams are more inclined to believe it's possible that life is just a dream. If you can experience a world of lush detail full of characters and plots while sleeping and write it off as mere imagination upon waking, why give so much credence to waking life as a higher reality?

The biggest difference between dreams and waking life are that dreams usually have big continuity problems. One moment you're in The Batmobile getting it on with Wonder Woman and the next moment you are at a supper club on the moon sitting next to Keith Richards; the next you are in a press conference getting asked hardball questions by your Little League coach from 20 years ago--and you are unable to explain how one event led to the next or why you missed the ground ball.

But here's the thing: usually you only recognize the continuity problems in a dream after you wake. So who's to say we aren't going through waking life missing all sorts of continuity problems? We know, in fact, that we are, in things such as our field of vision, where are brain fills in missing pieces of scenery, but there are also big gaps in continuity we don't notice? Like maybe math isn't real, it just seems to make sense because our brains are enjoying pretending that math is a thing that works.

Other than frequent continuity problems, how else is waking life different from the nocturnal dream world?

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Could anyone pick some really easy low-hanging fruits for the new paradigm in obesity epidemic research ("something's poisoning our drinking water"), such as measuring lithium (or other stuff) contents in drinking water and food plants and correlate that with local obesity numbers? It would be cheap too. https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/

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Haha whoops, I think I just submitted a proposal that might fall under a three categories of things you need less of.

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Hey Scott,

Can you clarify your stance on funding ideas that are for or linked-to a for-profit startup idea? If the startup has some altruistic motives or otherwise fits one of the "proposals I need more of" categories, are you more interested in funding it? What if it comes with a promise to also do some altruistic activity (e.g.: give away the product for free to certain groups, or give discounts to all ACX readers, or do peer-reviewed research) if funding is given?

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Lots of capital chasing relatively few promising projects? That's the Bay Area of the past ~5 years, all right.

I do think a $1000 grant from Scott is worth considerably more than $1000 of software engineer self-funding in a couple of ways-- a) creating feelings of obligation to produce a deliverable and b) as an "advance on one's self-confidence" (I think that's a Tyler Cowen saying?). But Scott doesn't seem confident that he can manufacture either a) or b) efficiently enough for that to be a viable model.

To flip the script a little: Scott seems to have a fairly clear idea of what kinds of questions could use answering, plus access to a talent pool from whom $1000 and the chance to be involved in ACX would buy quite a bit of potentially-high-quality research. Why not spend 5% of the grant budget to commission a dozen MMTYWTK-style investigations of promising topics?

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In SSC comments (or even earlier, or on Reddit..?), somebody mentioned a story about a CS student who literally couldn't understand the for loop. The comment author had spent 50 (?) hours with the student doing 1-to-1 instruction and it still didn't help.

Does anybody remember this story?

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Could someone point me to a fact check or refutation of this article? Basic claim is that heart attacks among pro sports players are way up since large scale vaccination went into effect. What is the alternate explanation?

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/over-a-60x-increase-in-serious-adverse

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I believe that the most interesting and matching ideas are yet to be submitted. Doesn't a good submission take at least a few days to prepare? It's been what, two days? On the contrary, I would expect the least worked-on submissions at this moment! That is not a thing people want to rush, generally. So yeah, good luck to anyone still working on theirs. I would be working on mine, too, if I applied.

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Is this news to anyone? https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnfarrell/2017/05/07/how-sexual-selection-drove-the-emergence-of-homosexuality/?sh=2f46eadc5f84 Chuck in some queer theory / constructionism and I reckon that’s mostly it.

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Invent a standardized test of rationality and do a blind-randomized-crossover study of several nootropics’ effect on those test scores. And another longitudinal cohort study on how the test scores predict life outcomes independently of IQ. Why not? I am not really the right person to do this though, as I am not an expert in rationality or nootropics. (I keep putting off finishing the sequences in favor of playing TF2 and I feel bad about it)

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SSRIs and bruxism: I recently started SSRIs for moderate depression and anxiety (12 days ago). Escitalopram 10mg during dinner in that case. 4-5 days after I started the treatment, my teeth started to hurt when I chewed during the day. Also, I had small sudden teeth clenching movements (a bit like when you take MDMA for people familiar). ~8 days after I started the treatment, my jaw started to feel tired during the day.

For now, I've switched to taking the SSRIs in the morning rather than during dinner, and I'll see how the situation evolves. If the situation doesn't improve after a week, I'll probably try a magnesium supplement. If that still doesn't help, I'm not sure what to do. Lifestyle interventions would probably help, but considering I ended up taking SSRIs instead of making those in the first place, I'm not sure if it's a realistic expectation for myself.

I've searched a bit online, and found one study about it (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5914744/), but the only data was about the absolute rate of bruxism, and not SSRI-induced bruxism: "The overall prevalence of bruxism was higher in the antidepressant group compared to the control group (24.3% vs 15.3%, p = 0.002)". There's also https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26536018/ (I can't see the full text), which says "The prevalence of bruxism was significantly higher in the antidepressant group (24.3%) than in the control group (15.3%). The incidence of antidepressant-induced bruxism was 14.0%.". If I'm reading correctly, this would mean that antidepressant-induced bruxism in people using antidepressants is 24.3% * 14.0% = 3.4%.

I'd be interested in any advice on how to deal with bruxism and the experience of people that had bruxism following an SSRI treatment.

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Do you know any success stories of people who managed to get in touch with (ultra-)high-net-worth individuals, earned their appreciation through establishing a mutually genuine, friendly relationship, and then obtained funds sufficient for securing e.g. a middle-class income for the lifetime (e.g. $2M)? If so, what were the decisive factors and common themes underlying these dynamics?

Bonus points for the situations where it happened online, and the recipient came from the "unappealing" demographic (e.g. an introverted working-class nerd rather than a charismatic salesman type).

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I'm not quite qualified enough to do this, but what would be really cool if anyone has the capacity would be a setup modeling Biocurious outside of the San Francisco area. Maybe a setup to help high school kids make therapeutic phage and explore its ramifications? Of course "someone should do x" is kindof a cheap statement, I suppose. The original Biocurious has several highly credentialed volunteers.

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While conducting this is also above my level, now that there's polygenic testing a long-term study of its effectiveness on something like socioeconomic status would be interesting. Though I don't imagine these grants are large enough to get a p value for something like that. But if there's a shortage of good applications it might be something to consider. Especially since such a study might be less funded from other sources due to social rather than technical issues.

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I'm thinking about writing a blog, updated roughly monthly with deep-dive articles at the intersection of finance, infrastructure, and the environment. Topics would include:

- Short-term harm vs long-term benefits of energy infrastructure expansion, with case studies in hydropower and copper/lithium mining

- Nuclear's niche (or lack thereof) in a world of cheaper renewables

- How to think about the time value of money in the context of finite resources

- Should rich countries build more roads?

- Private vs public ownership series [transport infrastructure / utilities / energy transmission]

My questions for you are:

1) Are you aware of someone already doing something like this? I think it would be useful to exist, but don't want to replicate it if someone's already done basically the same thing.

2) I'm not looking for necessarily mass adoption (these will be long-form and wonkish), but would this be interesting to people, or is it *too* niche? I won't be seeking subscriptions, I'm financially comfortable.

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I see there are spam comments on substack now (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-198/comment/3627168 until it gets deleted). How do we flag them?

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I’d be interested in proposals to restore public trust in science and modern medicine. Like having science communicators, public health experts or historians go to rural Alabama to talk about immunology, the history of infectious diseases etc.

There are excellent science communicators (Kurzgesagt, Veritasium), but the only people who consume them are the people who are already pretty well versed in science.

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"I have already committed to throwing money at things, including unlikely-to-work-but-could-be-cool things. But if I have to stake my reputation on it then I’ll be looking it over with a fine-toothed comb and being super-conservative."

It would be interesting to see a "Reputation as an Exhaustible Resource" post, along the lines of https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/11/sacred-principles-as-exhaustible-resources/. The ubiquity of Letters of Rec in academia and various jobs could provide a lot of fodder for such a post. I imagine that relatively few people are in the position Scott describes here where reputational stakes are actually a tighter constraint than money, at least some of the time, but tell me if I'm wrong.

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Where can I find a relatively objective restrospective on what actually happened in "Russiagate"? In other words, what did the Trump campaign actually do, what did the MSM make up, where were they right/wrong, ditto for right wing media. And it'd be great to get some sort of objective explanation on the recent developments.

Am I asking for the impossible here? I didn't follow this very closely (and I'm not sure I'd be better informed if I had) and it's a little frustrating to still not be able to separate rhetoric & exaggerations from reality.

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There is considerable confusion in the US regarding whether "natural immunity" is better or worse than vaccine-induced immunity. To be clear, I understand that it's better to get vaccinated than to go out and catch Covid. But given that somebody already had Covid, are they better or worse protected from future infection than somebody who got vaccinated? This has serious policy implications.

An Israeli study found one thing; the CDC claimed the opposite.

It occured to me that it's worthwhile looking to see what the scientific consensus is *outside* the US. This issue is hopelessly politicized in the US; maybe scientists in other countries can make a more dispassionate assessment.

Does anyone know what the ex-US consensus is?

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Is there a name for the following phenomenon?

Scientists: Skub could reach 30 in the next century.

Media: SKUB TO REACH RECORD LEVELS, SCIENTISTS SAY

Scientists: Skub will reach 35 in the next century.

Media: SKUB TO GROW AT UNPRECEDENTED RATES

Scientists: Actually, Skub will only top out at 32

Media:

Scientists: Skub could hit 34

Media: SKUB ESTIMATES EVEN BIGGER THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT, SAY SCIENTISTS

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Is anyone seriously working on geothermal? From a sustainable energy viewpoint, there is a massive amount of energy just a few miles beneath the surface. There's all this focus on bringing back fission, pioneering fusion ('30 years in the future'), or getting solar/wind/tidal energy to scale and then figuring out the energy storage problem. Yet a functional local geothermal plant seems to check all the boxes of what we want for a long-term energy supply solution.

My understanding is that most places the heat is too far from the surface for geothermal to make sense, but how much of that is just the engineering problem of digging holes deep into the ground? After all, the heat is down there no matter where you are on the Earth's surface. I see amazing work pioneering new drilling techniques to extract oil, but less focus on drilling for heat. Why isn't that something that could replace a large percent of our energy generation from other sources? Would you characterize this as a 'hard-but-solvable engineering challenge', versus 'first principles make this a practical impossibility'?

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What if my strategy to hinder progress in AI capabilities relies on making crypto an even bigger deal, so that the it hogs all the GPUs?

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https://www.metafilter.com/193262/The-Fallacy-of-Eating-the-Way-Your-Great-Grandmother-Ate

Reading this-- and another argument that I'll keep private-- seems to have increased my ability to interpret statements. All too often, disagreements are about differing interpretations of claims, and sometimes actually misreadings.

In this case, Michael Pollan said to not eat things your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. This is actually a fairly bad dictum for a variety of reasons, but the thing that hit me after reading a lot of comments was that Pollan was *not* saying to eat the way your grandmother did.

However, there was a lot of educational bad temper, and I found out more than I knew about how badly (both quantity and quality) a lot of people were eating possibly less than a century ago, mostly in the US and England. There are also some interesting bean recipes.

Some things wrong with the Pollan dictum: "your grandmother" is distressingly vague, considering the range of eras because of the range of ages of readers.

I don't think either of my grandmothers would have recognized sushi as food, but it's good stuff.

TastyKakes were well within the range of my grandmothers, and they're pretty processed, though I admit I don't have the earlier recipe.

Maybe Pollan meant to not eat ingredients/processes your grandmother wouldn't have recognized as food. Maybe Pringles?

Probably of interest here, there's some discussion from people whose hunger and/or satiety signals are extremely unreliable.

More education-- "things" are part of processes. "Food" doesn't just happen, it needs to be produced, delivered, and prepared. (See also medical care and vaccines.)

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Just to add a little heat to the inequality issue, the US government is richer than just about anything else. Rich enough to impose highly destructive sanctions and hardly notice. Rich enough for wars against small countries to hurt just a little, Rich enough for the war on drugs and mass incarceration to be sort of affordable.

And yet, people who want to reduce inequality want the US government to have *more* money, presumably on the assumption that the people who want to reduce inequality will decide how its spent.

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“if you care so much about this and you’re a software engineer at Google and it only costs $1000 why haven’t you just funded it yourself?” haha I always think the same thing about my HOA. If this is so important, why don't you just pay for it?! People will spend *weeks* arguing about a thousand dollar expense, when any one of them could write a check and never miss the money.

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Were there any prominent Democrats who explicitly and consistently urged the 2020 BLM protesters to go home because of the pandemic?

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> Perpetual motion machines (yes, really)

I would love to see a blog post listing some of the cooler perpetual motion proposals -- with critique hidden behind spoiler tags, so that people could work out the puzzles for themselves.

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I think I might've found something relevant to the whole cost disease conundrum:

https://www.ft.com/content/69899519-ec61-3177-aa1f-be2a9b33da58

Now, everyone is fairly familiar with the petrodollar story, but heres what jumped out to me:

"So let's go back to the original research on Dutch disease. We have a basic model of an economy where the export of a single commodity raises the exchange rate, discouraging the export of manufactured goods. If the commodity is the dollar, then demand for the dollar raises the value of the dollar itself — this isn't too hard to wrap our heads around, and since 1980 the dollar has appreciated, even as the US has declined as a share of global GDP.

We'd expect to see inflation in nontradable services, like medical care and college tuition, but not in tradable goods, like t-shirts and TV sets. And we'd expect a decline in the value added to GDP from manufacturing. None of these are dispositive, and Alphaville is sadly not an econometrician. But they have all happened."

I am not sure of what mechanism the author hints at here. An appreciating dollar should let consumers purchase more Chinese TVs, thus keeping prices anchored, but I don't quite understand why it would lead to inflation for nontradeables; couldn't it just keep foreign products relatively cheap?

I would greatly appreciate if someone spelled out what the author is trying to say, and maybe a more informed opinion on whether or not this actually makes sense (I'm a humble second year economics undergrad).

Thanks lads.

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"The questions I most often had after reading people’s applications were “why would this be good?”, “why isn’t this a for-profit startup?”, “but what actual, concrete things are you going to do?”...."

Oh boy that took me back; I was a program officer at a mid-sized grantmaking foundation for several years ending a decade ago. It was a good experience overall and I learned a lot. But I did also come to see why so many of my peers on foundation staffs were so desperate to find ways to reduce the amount of useless grant proposals without also depressing the flow of decent ones worth considering....some folks who otherwise loved their work had gotten downright wild-eyed about that particular conundrum.

Anyway here's a friendly offer: be happy to volunteer some time to help you with that time-consuming initial sorting of wheat from chaff. Not sure how exactly, we could brainstorm a bit maybe. Anyway it is a process that I have professional experience on both sides of and maybe a bit of that could be useful to you?

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Related to the recent Whither Tartaria post, my reply (featured in the comments follow up) and the general YIMBY movement: I voted against the city council representatives and mayor of the suburb I live in outside of Detroit last week, and they won anyway. These elections are held in the off, off year, as basically the only thing on the ballot to depress turnout and give the incumbents a huge advantage, and they ran mostly on a platform of restrictions and hardline zoning powers. I see a diffuse benefit, concentrated harm to making zoning more permissive here, exacerbated by the relatively low population to begin with, making it hard to get the kind of sweeping change I really desire. Worse than that, the state statute that permits zoning in general and city master plans in particular seems to be more restrictive than similar things in neighboring states. Does anyone know of any kind of concentrated YIMBY movement outside of the like 4 or 5 biggest metros in the country? What about in-depth discussions of land use policy on a state by state basis?

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I recently read Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality. Hoffman makes insane-sounding claims, yet I find the hypothesis hard to reject outright.

His basic hypothesis is that our perceptions aren't showing us anything close to the "truth" of objective reality because having useful perceptions will, in a Darwinian sense, outcompete true perceptions almost every time. On the surface that doesn't sound like such a revolutionary idea; what is revolutionary are the extremes to which he takes the idea.

I generally think of the difference between perception and reality thusly: we perceive the color blue whereas the reality is my eye collides with a frequency of light waves my brain interprets as blue. Blue is the perception; the frequency of light waves the reality.

Hoffman goes WAY beyond this. To him, the light waves themselves are merely the next layer of the onion. After all, we used our powers of perception to perceive the existence of light waves, and our perceptions not only aren't interested in truth, but are fatally allergic to it for Darwinian reasons. So light waves are an illusion, time and space are an illusion (Hoffman uses quantum behavior as Exhibit A of our inability to perceive whatever it is that is actually going on in objective reality), and hence nobody is going to make any progress in figuring out what gives birth to qualia if we continue to believe in silly things like neurons and brains, since they are 3D objects in space and time, mere illusions of our perceptions and therefore implausible.

Whereas Hoffman's hypothesis that "perception attuned to Darwinian fitness" > "perception attuned to reality" is strong enough as to be almost tautological, where he loses me is in his examples that mean to show that fit perception is rarely aligned with truth perception. His typical example is of a resource, let's call it "water", which one needs a moderate amount of to stay fit. Both not enough of it and too much of it will kill you. Now assume an organism has simple binary perception of this resource, water. It can perceive water as red or blue. Now assume water appears in nature in varying quantities probabilistically according to a normal curve. If the binary perception system registered "red" for not much water and "blue" for a lot of water, such perception would be true but not useful, because survival is about getting a moderate amount of water. Consuming water while perceiving it as red or blue could lead to underconsumption or overconsumption of water. OTOH, a perception system which reads "red" for too little water, "blue" for a moderate amount of water and "red" again for a great deal of water would be less true, in the sense that the organism would be bad at gauging whether a little or a ton of water exists, yet more useful because the point is simply to discover whether a moderate amount of water exists.

I think the problems with that model are obvious. Like, what is the analogy here with a real-world situation? If we are actually talking about a resource like water or food, we don't need to perceive a moderate amount of it, we only need to perceive whether we are still hungry or thirsty while consuming it. That's a simple binary perception. I tried to come up with some better analogies for Hoffman's model than he uses in the book yet can't.

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Assuming I am allowed to post a 2nd time, I'd like to recommend this Bollywood movie "Guru", and share this interesting review of it.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/05/guru.html

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If I was younger, I would ask a grant for creating DIY microbiology kits for home use. I remember how people including myself used to do wet photography at home, basically turning bedroom into a photo lab. It was fun, and practical thing at the same time. There are still rare people doing it as a hobby but it is no longer the same when everyone with a mobile home can make much better photos at every instant.

Microbiology DIY at home is something that many people wound enjoy. It could increase interest in science for young people and a lot of fun for everyone. But this is more challenging than a photo lab. Obviously safety issues are much more challenging and regulations could be another obstacle. Even something trivial as sterilizing a streaking wire with a naked flame is something I would try to avoid at home. Maybe it can be done with a special closed electric device where you insert a wire and take it out. And how to avoid most poisonous chemicals and still be able to do cool things with it?

The available DIY microbiology kits for sale are only for schools and they are not really meant to be used at home. Many things would need to be carefully adapted to turn it into a hobby that is as available as photography once was.

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I'm curious if you distinguish between "communication" and training. For instance projects that are lecture or blog like, spreading information, vs projects that teach people skills or broaden thoughts.

For instance the 4th bullet point was:

Improve the academic, governmental, and decision-making institutions that work on these other causes.

The second type of project described above fits that bullet point. Would a project that trained people to think in politically/socially effective ways qualify? In my experience a lot of people both on the volunteer/hobby side and the professional side in politics don't really understand policy but much more importantly they don't understand process or know how to weigh political trade offs.

This produces the pretty large, pretty loud, and pretty lame Jimmy Dore/FTV style politics, and infected a large section of very active left wing people during the last 2 presidential primaries. It also impacts things like the DSA or Sunrise Movement heavily. It seems to me that something that provided people an experience somewhat like actually being in charge of policy decisions and dealing with nearly random, very chaotic systems fits the last two bullet points well and the 1st and second at least tangentially. You'd also be able to sneak in process thought training at the lower and grass roots levels which would improve things as people move up in the political sphere.

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Would caffeine be a scheduled drug had it, instead of being widely consumed for centuries, been first synthesized in a 20th century lab?

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There have always been clinically-relevant questions I've wanted to explore with fervor, and work responsibilities tend to get in the way wrt time.

For example, the relationship between signalling from the enteric nervous system (ENS) and chronic bowel disease.

If our ENS attempts to communicate with the CNS, but the impetus is ignored, does the ENS repeat the signal until the problem is addressed? If so, does the repeat ignoring of the signal and persistent state of ENS activity result in chronic bowel disease over time?

My hope is to write about this over time on Substack, and that others with knowledge in the respective fields can chime in. I think it's an idea worth pursuing.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtZs-MPFcHo&ab_channel=JustHaveaThink

In general, there are probably worthy projects in using micro-organisms to help with recycling, or, for the nervous, replicating and improving evolved enzymes.

Meanwhile, this is a political thread, and I really dislike that they blame capitalism even though it's only capitalists working on that particular bacteria and enzyme.

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Anyone have recommendations for the most cost effective charities for global warming? Givewell has no real suggestions, and, this Vox article: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/12/2/20976180/climate-change-best-charities-effective-philanthropy doesn't have a lot of details about how they made their choices, and, their top choices don't really have strong evidence for their impact.

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I've started doing daily pushups. To prevent my musculature from getting uneven, is there another type of daily workout I should do to grow the upper body muscle groups that pushups neglect? I don't have any workout machines and only four dumbbells.

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It seems that someone should do a controlled, random, double-blind test of masks.

Put 100 people into a dorm, wearing masks whose effects are unknown to the participants and study organizers, but knowable after the fact. Maybe something that looks like it *could* be a N95, but varies from useless to actual N95.

Purposefully infect some of them with the flu (because we can treat the flu easily), then see what happens.

Repeat. Then repeat again. Do it in a few different patterns: maybe different strength masks for everyone in each group, or maybe each test is with a different strength of mask, maybe the infected people purposefully get weaker/stronger masks to test that hypothesis.

This might be expensive, but the benefits will accrue to literally billions of people in the short-term, and it will add to our long-standing knowledge.

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I'm a computational biologist with many years experience. I have some half-baked ideas for something biomedical related, but almost anything would require at least some wetlab facilities, at least a nice sample refrigerator. Also probably best to have a collaborator with more biological knowledge than myself (physics degree). Anybody out there want to collaborate (I'm open to other ideas too)? Either this round of grants or next.

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>High-impact, concrete proposals to help the global poor

Is taking the money and donating it to givewell a viable project?

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What would be the expected cost and return on teaching Scott to be much better at math? I recall he said once he wasn't a fan and that he didn't think he could significantly improve.

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What the hell is going on with Rivian? They're an electric car company that just IPOed, hit a market cap of $140 billion USD (third-biggest car manufacturer in the world after Tesla and Toyota), and have produced less than 200 vehicles.

Specific questions:

Why on Earth does the market think a company this small is worth more than Ford, GM and Chrysler?

Why did the market pick Rivian in particular to go nuts over when there are many tiny EV companies to choose from?

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Here's my grant proposal:

== Convince Scott that AI research is a good idea ==

“Everything we love about civilization is a product of intelligence, so amplifying our human intelligence with artificial intelligence has the potential of helping civilization flourish like never before" – Max Tegmark, President of the Future of Life Institute

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is one of the hottest fields in research right now, despite still being in its infancy. Even the relatively crude AI systems that exist today are turning science fiction into unremarkable facts of life at an ever-increasing pace. Future developments in AI hold the promise of bringing about never-before imagined prosperity, lifting billions out of poverty, ending disease, and so on. Almost any problem in the world today could be solved more effectively with the assistance of improved computer systems.

Scott Alexander is a popular and influential blogger who writes about everything from books he has read to model cities on his blog, Astral Codex Ten. His blog is particularly popular among people in the tech industry, and thus, he is in the position to exert a disproportionate influence over the future course of AI development or lack thereof.

Unfortunately, Scott has expressed skepticism and antipathy towards AI research. For example, he recently wrote "I think AI might be bad, and I hope it comes as late as possible so we have more time to prepare. If you have proposals to hinder the advance of cutting-edge AI research, send them to me!"

Given his position, convincing Scott that AI research is a good idea and one that should be promoted in his writing seems like a high-leverage, yet underappreciated opportunity to improve the state of the world.

Fortunately, his writings also reveal a promising avenue to accomplish this persuasion with minimal investment of funds. In particular, Scott is a huge fan of prediction markets, such as PredictIt and Polymarket, and puts great store in the "predictions" that emerge from them.

Therefore, convincing Scott of the beneficence and importance of AI research should be a simple matter of convincing PredictIt and Polymarket to open markets along the lines of "Is AI research a good idea?", and then using the grant funds to buy as many "yes" shares as possible.

Thanks to the illiquidity of the markets and the lack of any connection to sports or hot button political topics, there should be few if any external punters buying "no" votes, and thus relatively small amounts of money will cause the markets to display a strong prediction that AI research is a good idea. Additionally, the use of "chained prediction markets" is a promising avenue to further reduce the risk of hostile interference in the markets.

Furthermore, this proposal is being submitted for funding by Scott himself. As he will be invested in the project, he will have a strong subconscious desire to see it succeed, which will magnify the persuasiveness of our investments in the prediction markets and improve the odds of success.

FAQ

-- Why isn’t this a for-profit startup? --

Although the benefits of advances in AI will be immense, it is unlikely that a startup will be able to capture them, particularly a "meta level" startup that is focused on improving the state of AI research via online influencers rather than engaging in such research itself.

Additionally, getting Scott to fund the project will make him more invested in its success, and thus making it much more likely to succeed.

-- If you care so much about this and you’re a software engineer at Google and it only costs $1000 why haven’t you just funded it yourself? --

see above

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I posted below about the cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman's book "The Case Against Reality", which is an attempt to understand the nature of consciousness/qualia. This post is an aside about it. (I will likely make another post about that book next OT.)

Hoffman mentions in passing how stroke victims who lose the left hemisphere of their brain lose their capacity for speech, EXCEPT for their ability to use vulgar language. This fucking fascinates me. I've long been fascinated by vulgar language and how it is that people are genuinely offended by words because they are taught that they are supposed to be offended when they hear them. Why does language work this way? I don't mean someone being offended by, say, the word "cocksucker" because they have some woke theory that it's meant to offend homosexuals, so they act offended if they hear the word because they think it is morally wrong to imply sucking a penis is a bad thing. I mean people who are viscerally offended when they hear "Fuck you" "You cocksucker" or whatever. Because people do often become viscerally offended when they hear vulgar language, in every language (so I understand). How is this possible?

Vulgar language tends to be 2 things:

1) Slang for bodily fluids or sex acts

2) At least mildly insensible

I used to think 1 was the key, but after hearing that what I presume is a more primitive part of the brain can cuss but not speak, now I think 2 is clearly the key.

My guess is that vulgar language was our first language as humans. People say it was grunts but I think our pre-historic ancestors were going around calling each other asshats and faggots and pricks and pussies before they could say anything else. It makes sense that our first speech, as humans or pre-humans, would be words of aggression.

When a dog barks at a stranger isn't it basically saying "Fuck You Fuck You Fuck You Fuck You"?

My guess is that when we cuss these days we reach for that insensible part of the brain but the reason it comes out as slang words about intimate subjects that are part of the language--as opposed to insensible aggressive grunts--is because we can only speak inside of our language not outside of it.

No?

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Where can I learn the basics about nutrition? Book or website is fine. I just want to know the basics of what each nutrient is for and how much of them I need.

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[Content warning: discussion of AI doomsday]

Anyone else stressed/depressed about Yudkowsky’s recent prediction of 85% chance of AGI in the next 50 years, and his assertion that basically none of the research being done right now is likely to lead to actual alignment?

Link below, but I’d suggest not reading it if you’re stressed/triggered by this stuff.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CpvyhFy9WvCNsifkY/discussion-with-eliezer-yudkowsky-on-agi-interventions

50 years is not a long time. To me this implies that (assuming you buy into this model) you should drop everything you’re doing and desperately attempt to stop or slow down AI research by (almost) any means necessary. (Except for AI safety research.) But I don’t like where that train of thought leads.

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The year is 2031, and the U.S. and China are at war. Russia stays neutral, but also takes advantage of the opportunity to examine the two combatants' military technology by sending a small flotilla of salvage ships and floating dry docks to the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea to raise the wrecks of recently sunken U.S. and Chinese ships, and transport them to Russia.

How do America and China react? Aside from diplomatic protests, unilateral sanctions, and military strikes against the Russian ships or Russia itself, can they do anything to stop the operation?

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It seems the illustrious PaulaFox's demographic isn't just ACX fans, but the general Libertarian crowd as well: https://reason.com/2021/11/18/brickbat-just-gathering-information/?comments=true#comment-9216062

It feels weird to see the same spam in so many places. I thought this problem was figured out 10 years ago.

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In Mathew 7:3-7:4, Jesus says: "Why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while there is still a beam in your own eye?"

I've contemplated these passages, and my question is: what the hell was wrong with people's eyes back then?

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If there is a multiverse, how frequently are new universes created? I assume I would need to specify that question within a set amount of space or atoms. Has someone done this calculation? Like are there X many new universes per Y atoms over Z period of time?

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What's the reason for the bell curve of male intelligence being different to the female one, eg the male one being overrepresented at the extremes? I couldn't find anything that properly explains it with google.

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