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Anyone got recommended resources for learning about fusion power research?

(An interesting caveat to some news stories: the [energy out / energy in] ratio is called Q. But there's Q_plasma, and Q_total; the former is what's often reported, but the latter is what really matters if you want to run a power plant. [E.g. the plasma outputs more energy than the laser inputs to it, cool, but the laser itself takes power to run.]

Companies talk about Q_plasma>1 as an important milestone, and it is, but often the implication is that that would be enough to actually get energy from it, and that's false; only when Q_total>1 can you actually run a power plant that gives you more energy than it uses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY)

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Jan 3, 2022·edited Jan 3, 2022

There's a lot of movies with an obvious formula and archetypal characters, but where the film can still be really fun and appealing if the execution and acting are charming. "Sing 2" is one of those films, and so are a lot of romantic comedies.

If we develop the technology to emulate a human mind from scanning brains, and then eventually to just create entirely original minds based off what we know about brain mapping, etc in digital form, do you think we'll try and "resurrect" people who died before the technology based off of whatever we know about them in records? Like will we try to create a plausible version of emulated Mozart based off his writings, his music, depictions of him, and what others wrote about him? I wonder how you'd test them for fidelity.

I ran into a weird anti-fusion power argument the other day. It argued that because fusion produces a ton of neutrons, you could use it and some uranium oxide to produce nuclear bomb fuel. Which . . . aside from the challenges of actually concentrating the fissile material, seems funny to me because if you've got 1)Deuterium/Heavy Water, and 2)Uranium Oxide, and 3)Really want fissile material, you could much more easily just make a heavy-water nuclear fission reactor to get it. You don't even need pressure vessels! That's actually how India got the fuel for its first nuclear bomb - they had a test heavy-water reactor for research purposes.

Speaking of fission, the World Nuclear Association estimates that the "overnight cost" of construction per kilowatt of electricity generated for nuclear plants in South Korea and China to be about $2157/kWe and $2500/kWe respectively, and it was at around $1500/kWe in the 1960s in the US. That's a lot lower than what it is now in the US, but still higher than what the US EIA estimates for "Solar Photovoltaic power plus storage" ($1612/kWe) except in the case of the 1960s US plants, and even then the difference isn't huge.

I bring that up because it makes me skeptical of the argument I've seen recently about why nuclear power hasn't come back heavily in the US, which tends to focus a lot on US regulatory changes. If even countries with far more favorable regulatory and political environments for a mass build-out of nuclear power aren't beating solar PV and storage, then it suggests there's other reasons at play - nuke plants may just be really expensive to build unless you're building a LOT of them.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/assumptions/pdf/table_8.2.pdf

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Just embarrassed myself posting in MR comments thinking it was this blog. But I'll repeat the same point: if you review Nixonland please also read Before The Storm. It sets up Perlstein's hypothesis and yeah, he hates Nixon, but he also hates LBJ and kind of has a soft spot for Goldwater.

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Is there some kind of SSC/ACX Readers demographic survey that's been done and that someone could link me to? Would be curious to peruse such a thing in general, but am especially curious about what percentage of Scott's readers follow a (sincere, traditional) religion.

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re: Engines of Cognition, (a) ordered and looking forward to having a physical copy of some LessWrong essays, and (b) distraught that I missed out on the previous offering of A Map that Reflects the Territory — will this ever be in print again? I can’t find it in stock after a cursory search online.

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I'm an editor in the relatively lower-stakes world of sports journalism, but the posts about legible expertise from a while back still haunt me. They stoked my existing hunches that there is no way to reconcile a publication's ceaseless pursuit of growth and attention, and its ostensible goal of producing truthful stories that also give their readers a clearer sense of the world (to say nothing of my hunch that most breaking news reporting is inherently immoral).

What I'm trying to figure out is: Are there any steps that can be taken to drive progress, however incremental, in this area? I hold no illusions about fully disentangling journalism's competing interests, but I remain hopeful that not all is yet lost.

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I'm a traditional horary astrologer who enjoys practicing his art for strangers on the internet. If any of you have a question on just about anything you'd like examined via the toolkit of real astrology, drop me a line at FlexOnMaterialists@protonmail.com. Materialists and even atheists are, despite the email address, quite welcome. I look forward to hearing from you!

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Jan 3, 2022·edited Jan 3, 2022

I recently watched this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvLFEh7V18A), which explains the recent retro video game bubble, where the top auction price of old, high quality video games jumped from $30K to $1.6MM over the past 4 years. According to the video, a group of connected people (including a specific auction house) have been selling retro games between one another at increasingly higher and higher prices. These circular sales give the impression to the general public that the value of retro video games is rising very fast, which creates extra hype, which causes more people to flood the space and buy these retro games for higher prices, with the hope they'll be able to sell the games for an even higher price in the coming months/years. Since retro video games don't have much intrinsic value (games can be played for free on an emulator or bought cheaply on a virtual console), the price they sell for at auction is mostly a function of how much hype exists around them, and how likely buyers think it is they will be able to flip the game for a higher price in the future.

Do any of you think this practice could be even more widespread?

The video says something like this may have happened in the comic book collecting space. Additional places where this practice seem possible to me include sales of fancy art, sales of NFTs, and potentially the prices of some crypto coins. Sales in all of these places (especially in the crypto space) can be very difficult to trace, making circular sales just to bid up the price very doable. In addition, valuations in all of these places (especially in the crypto space) are incredibly dependent on hype and the belief that prices will continue to go up. While there are some safeguards in place (e.g. auction houses have some controls on who buys and sells products there, and some crypto exchanges have identity verification), it doesn't seem like they would be enough. In addition, such circular bidding does not need to go on forever - it's just needed to get some initial hype - afterwards you can let the market do the rest.

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Question for anyone that hires experienced software developers. I am trying to demonstrate soft skills in front end web development. This is not always easy to do in a short interview. Would you be convinced by a series of blog posts on a candidate's personal website?

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Recommendation: don't go to Walgreens for your COVID booster. I did this last week, showed up right on time for my appointment, and they made me wait an hour and a half on an indoor non-socially-distanced line full of coughing people asking about COVID tests (miraculously, I don't seem to have gotten COVID). I'm told that non-Walgreens pharmacies are less bad than this, though I can't personally confirm.

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Like many, I've been "George-Pilled" by the recent series of essays. I'd like to get the other aide of the story. Can anyone link to some good critiques of Georgism?

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Could anyone with life sciences/nootropics background comment on nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) as a supplement? This video has some impressive claims with papers backed up by reputable journals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY25i_bkUys

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2975-4

From my cursory googling this seems to be both available online and safe, yet I haven't seen much discussion of it in the few places that I trust on this kind of material.

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For some reason Google books/play has digital copies of hard to find books at less than half of the price of what you can find elsewhere. I don't know if it's legal or not but I was amazed to get a digital copy of a fairly obscure textbook called "The Rediscovery of Classical Economics" for a fraction of the price I could find it elsewhere. It kind of looks scanned in but it's just fine. It's not a downloadable PDF but you can highlight and save your notes to Google Drive. If you do lots of research this should be a source you check.

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Does anybody know a good resource or resources that succinctly explain this Venn diagram of libertarianism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism#/media/File:Libertarianism-groups-diagram.png

Before I end up in a deep rabbit hole and with hundreds of wikipedia tabs open...

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Is there an effective altruist case to be made for investing in great works of art? Or would a utilitarian framework regard the notion of great art as too mushy? I think art that is goal oriented or dogmatic risks being bad, but surely there is a middle ground between art for its own sake and agitprop?

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"Looking for a Chri…fine, sorry, looking for a Martin Luther King Day gift this year for the rationalist in your life?"

No Christmas? How very Puritan of you 😁 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBCxE8tUIWM

Though it's nice to see the return towards celebrating saint's days, even in a secular manner!

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Jan 3, 2022·edited Jan 3, 2022

People often say processed carbs are bad. I've never quite understood this. Why would it matter if something is 'processed', and what that does even mean?

Here is my best guess of what is going on, but this could be totally wrong (this comment is very much meant as a question). The guess is that 'processed' is a misnomer and it's really about something like 'modified'. It's not actually the case that people in the ancestral environment never had too much to eat, so are bodies are capable of regulating food intake to some extent, but they're used to food with certain compositions. Therefore, if you take grains and make them into flour and make flour into bread, this is still okay even though it's quite 'processed'. But if you only take part of the grains to make the flour, well then you modify the natural composition, and as a consequence, human bodies are worse at regulating it and so you may put on weight.

This would also suggest that modified carbs are really only a problem if you're overweight and otherwise not particularly unhealthy?

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Anyone see this article on Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/

Assuming it's true (any one with expertise care to comment): "science" has spent the past few decades not really understanding how viruses spread. It seems crazy to me. But somehow believable.

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Jan 3, 2022·edited Jan 3, 2022

Regarding the "It should take 0.5-2 hours to write an application (setting aside time actually planning the project)" part, I haven't looked into this particular process, but for the grant applications I have written (various academic options) it generally takes 40-100 hours of work in addition to actually planning the project.

I assume that your process is simpler, but I'm also quite convinced that if you would do a post-application survey of "how much time did you spend on the application" then almost noone would answer 0.5-2 hours, and the majority would be 10+ hours even if you think that it should take less than 2; people applying for grants generally do spend excessive time on various details that may seem trivial to application evaluators.

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Does anyone know if Nick Bostrum has ever addressed computation loss in chains of simulated worlds? ie That there might be a limit to how many dreams in a dream there can be? Never understood from what I’ve read of him why simulation B from parent universe A couldn’t turn around and then simulate parent universe A in such convincing fashion you couldn’t tell who gave birth to who if you can just carry on that kind of nesting forever.

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Since this is the festive season, also for rationalists, I would like to share Händel's praise of the Age of Enlightenment, which should find resonance in this community:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVCtCxnJyKY

Here is what they sing:

As steals the morn upon the night,

And melts the shades away:

So Truth does Fancy's charm dissolve,

And rising Reason puts to flight

The fumes that did the mind involve,

Restoring intellectual day.

#Handel #Milton #Shakespeare

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Jan 3, 2022·edited Jan 3, 2022

The recently discussed omission of Xi from the Covid-19 variant names has got me thinking about the kabbalistic implications of using Greek letters to name virus variants. (It is possible that the observation has already been made by ACX or comments and my brain simply decided to co-opt it. If so, please tell me!)

I think the decision of the WHO to use this naming scheme will prove to be extremely foolish and dangerous. To wit: the last letter of the Greek alphabet is Omega.

Omega famously appears in the book of Revelations, e.g. 21:6: "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end." From my limited understanding, "end" here would mean "end of everything, end of the world". By analogy, it is also used to refer to death, e.g. to mark "Year or date of death" (as per Wikipedia). Do we really want to risk naming a virus variant thus?

Much has been made of the Omicron ("little O") variant, recently. Unsurprisingly, given its name, it seems a bit less deadly. We should imagine that the Omega ("great O") variant will be quite more severe. If one asked an ancient Greek for the factor between "micro" and "mega", I guess they might say perhaps one hundred or so? Science, however, has firmly established that there are twelve orders of magnitude between "micro" and "mega". This is somewhat surprising given that Omega can hardly kill trillions of people, but I think it kinda makes sense if you take the long view: by eradicating humankind, Omega would not only wipe out the present population, but also prevent humans from populating the galaxies, reaching the singularity or what ever else the future might hold in store for us.

I would thus propose that we rename variants of concern using less problematic names. Perhaps the WHO can cut a deal with Disney and use their character names. A Dumbo, Bambi or even Shere Khan variant seems much less likely to cause the death of humankind. As an added bonus, instead of skipping Xi we could just skip Winnie the Pooh instead.

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Is anyone doing work on building a 'rogue AI detection / containment system'? Would it make sense to do that?

Do AI safety researchers generally assume that a self-improving AI s system would be on our radar before it 'escaped'?

Or would it make senes to have 'honeypots' that exist specifically to detect self-aware systems attempting to manipulate human beings, so that they can be shut down?

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What are peoples' opinion on chiropractors? Pseudo-medicine practiced by charlatans or vital restorative therapy? I hurt my back a couple of weeks ago moving a desk, and it's still rather stiff and sore. My lone previous experience with a chiropractor when I hurt my neck many years ago was not very gratifying, but I'm in rough enough shape to at least consider giving it another shot.

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As I mentioned on a previous open thread I'm working on a fantasy world strategy simulator and while I have most of the design down and in code/data there are a few things I'm still thinking about.

I'd like to have more detail in the sort of assimilationist practices of historical empires. Rome, Maurya, Macedonia, Carthage, China, and so forth but also stuff like the Norse invasions of England. And maybe something about the larger African states pre-Scramble. Actually the Russians, Dutch, Ummayads, English, Persians, or Ottomans would work as well.

My goal is to have a variety of options that aren't too focused on one historical era and location.

Additionally I'd like to read some good articles on interesting agricultural and hunting practices in different/rare climates. I'm still debating whether to have "discoveries" for farming, hunting, construction, raw resource processing and so forth or just a slow generic "knowledge" increase with little variance over time. If I do discoveries I'd not a lot of techniques and equipment to be discovered for a large variety of climates and processing methods.

Also I definitely need some reading material for classical and medieval trade/intelligence networks for flavor and character action ideas as well as other purposes since Axioms Of Dominion is a DIP strategy game. Diplomacy(foreign affairs), Intrigue(shadowy affairs, Politics(domestic affairs).

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Jan 3, 2022·edited Jan 3, 2022

Does anyone believe there's actual health benefits to Dry January- to going without alcohol for 30 days? I'm a moderate drinker approaching middle age, so I do have general concerns that Alcohol Is Bad For You, and I'd be happy to go without for a month if I thought there were clear-cut benefits to one's liver or other organs. Are there? I Googled the topic, and of course there are many Pro pieces, but the more scholarly ones seemed skeptical of a concrete improvement to one's physical health in such a short time frame. I'm not interested in going without social drinking for longer than a month. In general I have a very healthy lifestyle otherwise, including fanatically healthy diet, lots of exercise, etc. Any thoughts?

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So the original purpose of memory foam was to protect astronauts during landing by absorbing the impact. Viscosity helped flatten the curve of g-force and prevent any rebound acceleration. But in everyday beds and pillows, viscosity seems to have negative utility. Viscosity makes repositioning less comfortable and makes surface blood flow more obstructed because the material can't deform easily for a single heartbeat. So why are nearly all the foam mattresses/pillows on the market high-viscosity foam aka memory foam?

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I’m curious to know if anyone is aware of a project that is building a system to stitch together different people’s perspectives on how to think of various important issues. Kind of like a wiki-fact check site. A place to go to read about both the pros and cons of [insert contentious issue here].

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Been having a discussion about the relevance of common school knowledge for technical and non-technical people, and how important various aspects of scientific literacy are, and how to increase rates of scientific literacy.

An argument I expect to be uncontroversial here, is that scientific literacy is low is most especially due to how material is generally introduced, as a constellation of beliefs that don't predict the future, or pay rent. Therefore, any attempt to improve education in general, and scientific literacy in particular, would have to reorient teaching practices further toward processes of how to ask and answer questions eg: "how do I figure out what this material is made of" or "how do I sanity check my mathematical model", and away from trying to remember particular facts.

But there's an issue: the above two questions are pretty niche, even for technical people. Most people are going to remember science and mathematics as a loose constellation of facts, simply by nature of not being scientists, mathematicians, and engineers: they aren't using the question asking methods I describe, so those neural pathways will fall away leaving the constellation of facts behind. So too it goes with scientific literacy.

Using chemistry as an example, most technical non-chemists will have taken several courses in chemistry, but wouldn't won't likely be able to tell you much about how to go about answering basic questions in chemistry like "what's this made of", or what X ingredient in their shampoo might do. So for all the non-chemists, chemistry becomes mostly trivia too.

But, the technical folks WILL retain certain knowledge about things like the scientific method, journal literacy, and how to go about attack technical problems in their domain, and might be able to pick the back up, or at least read the abstract of a paper on chemistry. That ability seems to be what we call scientific literacy.

But if we've just supposed that the pathways to asking and answering technical questions require consistent application to be maintained and used, haven't we implied that scientific literacy is basically a function of how many people in a given society are technical? If that's the case, trying to raise scientific literacy by changing education seems like a red herring, and the main focus was actually just trying to get a larger ratio of technical people in society in the first place.

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A lot of material here and elsewhere in the rationalist community pertain to AI safety. As an outsider and passive consumer of rationalist content, the topic has always come across to me as a little sci-fi-y and virtualistic. What's the best digestible reading or listening that would help me appreciate the seriousness of the issue and risks involved?

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Has anyone attempted a scientific paper on the role of opinion in the scientific world?

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Jan 3, 2022·edited Jan 3, 2022

https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_829360_smxx.pdf

New preprint suggesting that unlike earlier strains, which enter the cell directly from the surface, omicron viruses sneak inside endosomes (I think they're pockets of cell membrane that are used to recycle all the protiens on the cell surface) and get in from there.

This means that it doesn't do the thing where multple spike proteins on the viral capsid bind to several cells and make them combine into one big infected blob. Which is apparently what wild-type through delta did. I was happier not knowing about syncytia.

This means that its preference for infecting different types of cells is different from what you see in previous strains (infecting more epithelial cells in the nose and throat, fewer pneumocyces in the lung?). This is consistent which higher infectiousness but lower severity. I am not a biologist.

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I just wrote about herpesvirus treatment and prevention here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/herpesvirus-treatment-and-prevention

If you are a woman of childbearing age I highly recommend enrolling in Moderna's CMV vaccine trial, which is now recruiting: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05085366

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Is there a good Superforecasting/Rationalist-adjacent style book to investing? I'm thinking something relatively accessible to someone with a decent (micro)economic literacy and knowledge?

Investing advice/books seems oddly polarized (not in a big P politics way).

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I have a clear recollection of a website which had human longevity interventions sorted by level of evidence, so exercise -> eat well -> ... -> metformin etc. Some cursory Googling is not finding such a thing. Anyone know what I'm thinking of?

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Do you know what should come back? Illustrations in books. Not talking comics here but those excellent occasional illustrations you would get in Victorian era novels, like Dickens. Maybe on a kindle or ebook they could move a little, like a gif. Scrooge meets Marley and you see him come in.

I’ll write to Bezos.

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I'm looking for a book about a war between the USA and USSR in an alternate universe where nuclear weapons were never invented. Does anyone have suggestions?

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Christmas is over, but I recently discovered that there is a cartoon where the Grinch gets psychoanalyzed by the Cat In The Hat. No, really- the CITH gets the Grinch on his unlicensed psychiatrist couch and gets him to stop being a jerk by reminding him of his mother’s love. I thought Scott might find this amusing, though I wouldn’t recommend watching it without liquor. Despite being generally terrible, “The Grinch Grinches the Cat In The Hat”. won an Emmy for animation in 1982.

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Can anyone recommend a good biography of Thatcher to me? I'm a Canadian so I know very little about British politics, but she is apparently one of the figureheads of neoliberalism and as a dirty neoliberal I keep hearing people complain about her in ways that make me go "She sounds cool, I should learn more about her."

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@Scott Alexander What do you think of Dr Ken Gillman's writings on his blog? https://psychotropical.com/

For example, here is his overview of depression: https://psychotropical.com/depressive_illness/

I'd be interested in a critique about his stance on MAOIs: https://psychotropical.com/maois/

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Self reflection: The pandemic has made me question my interpersonal relationships. And it is turning me a lot more libertarian. For context, I am--as I suspect many of us here are--a mid 20s Northeasterner earning an advanced degree in STEMM.

Consider: the pediatric population. Many of my fellow parents are up in arms about whether they should home school and restrict their children's social circle, possibly indefinitely. And these actions are accepted, if not encouraged, by media and public health authorities. Just today, I read an NPR interview with a peds ID doctor in which a father asked if they could let their 15 month old daughter "return to normal life" after she had a vaccine eg. play inside with other children or if they should wait until she was boosted. What the fuck? The hospitalization rate for covid in young children is less than it is for influenza, or RSV, which are both extremely common. If, in 2018, you socially isolated your children for years on end because you're afraid of them catching one of these illnesses, people would rightfully consider you a psychotic child abuser. But now it's considered virtuous. There is total disrespect for the baseline level of risk people accept every day (consider the similar prevalence, patient population, and pathophysiology of Kawasaki's disease and MIS-C, vs. the amount of press coverage and fear inspired).

Ignorant people are --often justifiably--mocked when they think they know more than their physicians, because their attempts to perform their own research and analysis lead to worse outcomes. But the liberal response to this behavior is to proclaim a blind allegiance to people with the right credentials, a complete abdication of critical thinking. Many liberals think they need an M.S. in a subject to form any sort of opinion at all. You don't need to know about the fine details of vaccine development or viral entry to think "gee, maybe instituting a public curfew for months on end is ineffective at containing the virus and a fundamental violation of rights and freedoms".

One big problem with "science" based decision making and governance is that it tends to downplay the importance of factors that aren't easily quantifiable--having a normal social life, having friends, etc. Sometimes the right response to a concern, or potential danger is "who gives a shit"? rather than a factual rebuttal. By far, the most likely health outcome my children--or you, if you're young and healthy--are going to experience from the pandemic is anxiety, depression, or both. Public health authorities encouraging extremely risk averse, neurotic behavior and then having the audacity to champion mental health care is absurd. Public health and media fear mongering is the cause of widespread, preventable suffering.

I think it's telling that "muh freedoms" is a slur against Republican protests for mask mandates/ lockdowns/ etc. In the end, having a free society means the right to say 'fuck you, I don't give a shit'--and this is important. "Well, you don't really neeeeeed it, and it could be harmful" is an excuse to take away every single thing that makes life worth living. Even if you believe personal freedoms should be overrun for true emergencies, it is becoming harder and harder to see covid as one--the pandemic is being conducted on an opt-out basis, and those who justify measures to curtail freedoms to people unwilling to either a) suffer a mild illness or b)protect themselves with a vaccine strike me as pathetic and life-hating.

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It must be said, that The Last Psychiatrist's "book about porn" has finally been published since first being mentioned in 2013:

_Sadly, Porn_ https://www.amazon.com/dp/1734460822/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_NER175AFT7Q2HX89ZH1R

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Jan 4, 2022·edited Jan 4, 2022

Last week there was much enthusiasm here over the idea of plastic-consuming beetles. I'm ignorant and confused why the existence of plastic is bad. It's non-biodegradable. If you believe man-made climate change is bad, isn't that good? Wouldn't plastic eating beetles speed up the process of releasing carbon absorbed by algae millions of years ago into the atmosphere? Plastic continues to trap the carbon whereas these beetles would release it. Why should I want these beetles?

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Why are so many great contemporary writers Marxists? To name three: our Freddie, Chris Wickham, Justin E.H. Smith.

My best guess is that the fields of Economics and Humanities no longer speak the same language and therefore can't communicate. I believe the above Marxists named are every bit as intelligent and intellectually honest as most top-notch economists, but the language of the respective fields they are in aren't compatible for constructive dialogue.

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I'm curious what Scott, and the community, thinks is going on when people "are hypnotized". I seem to be one of the "not hypnotizeable" people, though of course there are plenty of nonmaterial ways to get me to change my mental state: show me a horror movie, tell me an erotic story, etc., so I can believe, to some degree, that a practiced practitioner could get me into a somewhat unusual mental state.

But what's going on when, say, someone is supposedly hypnotized into thinking they're Jimi Hendrix, or a cat, or that their hand is itchy or whatever? I think that social compliance--the pressure to think in a way that will be in accord with group expectations--is unquestionably powerful, so when I hear about a college orientation where a freshman was hypnotized into acting like a cat in front of his peers, I suspect that this is mostly his being game to please the crowd, even if he doesn't know that consciously; if the audience were half-asleep senior citizens he didn't know, he wouldn't be pulled so hard into the role. My hypothesis is that those of us who are not hypnotizable have just as much capacity to get into roles, we're just a bit more aware of those pressures and tend to retreat to first order thinking when we sense those pressures at work, instead of leaning into them.

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Gratuitous recommendation time, if you're frustrated about not being able to find water filters (due to FDA/labeling issues apparently?!? https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/orq45p/does_anyone_know_what_is_going_on_with_pur_water/) I've been quite pleased with the Berkey water system and used this model extensively for the past 4 months: https://www.berkeyfilters.com/products/big-berkey

It's a bit of an investment, ~$350 with shipping, but that's less insane considering what resellers were asking for: https://www.amazon.com/PUR-MAXION-Replacement-Pitcher-Filter/dp/B07CFX1T6D/

I was concerned after a couple months that the flow was slowing but after cleaning off some mineral buildup on the filter elements it's back to several gallons a day, much more than we need for drinking and cooking purposes

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Does anyone have actual numbers on how much worse rapid antigen tests are at catching omicron? I've seen a lot of headlines that say "less sensitive", but not a lot of comparative confusion matrices.

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So I think I want to take a shot at the NMN/NR supplements, but the entire field of supplement marketing looks like a howling wilderness populated entirely by predators greased in snake oil.

Scott's "20 bucks a bottle" comment in the lifespan post may be situating my estimate a bit, but the prices I am looking at seem really high (honestly even 20 bucks a bottle seems high if it's 30x300mg NR, given the clinical trials were testing at 1000 mg daily). What I have seen instead is 6 bucks a day for NR alone and 3 ish for NMN, plus tax and shipping. I am not sure $3650 per year for possibly useless pills is wise..

Does anyone have a suggestion on where I can get this stuff cheaply (read: about 1.50 per day for 1000 mg doses). Happy to look at Indian/Chinese sources if someone knows a reliable source.

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I don't understand how internet protocols, packaging, IP addresses, routing, networks, and all of that stuff works. I find it unusually difficult to gain this knowledge from Wikipedia because it feels like every article is both too vague and related to about a dozen others. Is there a good book about this? ( I do have a background in cs and math)

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With 2021 over, we can now assess several Metaculus predictions that were featured in the "Mantic Monday 7/26" post.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-726

"Will the US have more than 200,000 daily COVID-19 cases (7-day rolling average) before January 1, 2022?

This question resolves positively if at any point between 2021-07-01 to 2022-01-01 the 7-day rolling average of confirmed COVID-19 cases is greater than 200,000. The source will be CDC's official count of Coronavirus cases, unless Metaculus Admins determine there is a significantly superior source of data."

Result: The U.S. surpassed 200,000 new daily cases on December 24 and has stayed above that level.

"Will the US have more than 100,000 new daily COVID-19 cases before January 1, 2022?

This question resolves positively if on any single day between 2021-07-01 to 2022-01-01 there are more than 100,000 COVID-19 cases recorded. This question resolves negatively if there is no single day the United States records more than 100,000 daily COVID-19 cases according to the CDC's official count of Coronavirus cases."

Result: Milestone was passed on August 5.

"Will the US have more than 1000 daily COVID-19 deaths (7-day rolling average) before 1 January 2022?

This question resolves positively if at any point between 20 July 2021 and 1 January 2022 the 7-day rolling average of confirmed COVID-19 deaths is greater than 1000. The source will be CDC's official count of COVID-19 deaths. Make sure the "Daily Deaths" view is selected."

Result: Milestone was passed on August 18.

"Will EA Global London 2021 be cancelled, rescheduled, or moved online again?

The question resolves negatively if the EA Global London 2021 takes place in the originally scheduled physical location (London UK) at the scheduled dates (29-31 October 2021)."

Result: The conference ended up being held on time and in-person.

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If anyone with covid is having trouble getting a fluvoxamine prescription, you can sign up for a 50-50 shot at it through the Activ-6 clinical trial (recommended by 'mj robinson' in another post's comment section). That trial has two arms for additional drugs but you can opt out of those. Covid out is another trial with 5 different treatment groups. Activ-6 pays participants $100 and covid out pays $400.

https://activ6study.org/

https://covidout.umn.edu/

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I've seen several references from Scott and others to evidence that the actual effects of parenting are pretty minor relative to other factors. Does anyone know a good overview of the evidence on this that they can point me to?

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Sorry for asking, but can someone help me with where i can find some study for the Covid Vaccin? if its safe or not?

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