Apparently ribosomes (the RNA-based molecular machines that make proteins by running along the mRNA template) sometimes go faster or slower—and can even bump into each other and get into lil traffic jams!
And apparently the traffic jams happen more with age (at least in C. elegans), so this might be part of why loss of proteostasis is a hallmark of ageing (e.g. buildup of misfolded proteins, as especially happens in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's)
Does anyone know good sources for learning about test-tube meat? From a rationalist perspective it seems like working to end factory farming should be at the top of the docket, and cultivated meat seems to me like the most likely way of doing that. I want to apply my computer science degree to research in this field and the only online source on this I've found has been the Cultivated Meat Modeling Consortium: https://thecmmc.org/ but they haven't answered any of my emails. Just wondering if anyone here has any knowledge on the subject or can point my towards good resources or communities for learning and discussion.
An Ivermectin paper about a very large study in Itajai, Brazil. I know you and everyone is sick of this topic but I'd be very curious to see what you think of this paper (which may be updating a previous one?).
What is the rationale for profits generated from the sale of stocks and other similar financial instruments (incl. crypto) being taxed at the person's income tax rate? Is there a legit economic argument apart from 'it tends to yield greater revenue for the government when compared to a flat tax' ?
Naively one could point out that trading decisions I make as a private investor in private companies do not involve my country's government at all. This on it's own seems to create a distinction between trading vs. working 9-5 that should be reflected in tax policy.
A guy on Discord asked me my opinion on Orbit Culture. I worried it was going to be some awful culture war nonsense, but no, it's just the name of a band.
Anyone have sources/info/opinions/guesses about how often omicron causes false negative Covid test results? There was something about vaxxed people having much lower levels of virus in the nares. And then maybe omicron behaving differently in the respiratory system.
I just read that England's canal system is less useful than mainland Europe's because a much larger fraction of English canals are too narrow and its locks too short to accommodate big boats. As a result, canals on the mainland get much more use.
Would it be worth it (e.g. - eventual positive ROI) for Britain to upgrade its canals to European standards? Does Britain's smaller geographic size affect the economies of scale of using canals to move bulk goods?
Does anyone have an informed opinion, or link to good sources, on how bad will things get if Russia cuts off European natural gas supply? I am trying to cram relevant knowledge of the Current Events...
What are some techniques people use to maintain long-distance relationships? (I don't necessarily mean romantic, which is its own separate kettle of fish.) I'm particularly interested in ones across multiple time zones, such that synchronous interaction is difficult. My husband and I both studied in Europe but live in the US, and have struggled maintaining connections with European friends. A vanilla email conversation is just too easy to let slip and then not pick up again, so it tends to naturally devolve into the annual Christmas card exchange (both low-frequency and low-content per interaction).
I was reminded of this New Yorker article by Jill Lepore while in discussions about Peter Coleman's new book: "No Way Out: How To Overcome Toxic Polarization". In "No Way Out" Coleman emphasizes getting into the details or adding complexity when evaluating of your opposition (it is a good read: recommended). Avoid tempting simple descriptions or understanding of their policies and plans. Suggesting "Anyone who would support ???? must be an idiot" is certainly oversimplification for example.
According to research by Coleman and others expanding on the details is going to provide a more accurate informed picture and probably a lot less polarizing one as well. .
Interestingly the highly successful Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter founders of "Campaigns Inc" who also became known as "The Lie Factory" won 70 of 75 of political campaigns they worked on by simplifying campaigns to slogans like "I like Ike". They also recommended to "not to explain anything" as this bores and confuses voting populations.
So it seems understanding the average voters inclinations and running a "simplify" campaign like an advertising agency would be appealing to masses of voters and has been a key to political success. Lots of political success! Yet according to Coleman simplifying your position only increases polarization. Seems like a difficult situation to work out of! Here's a quote from Lepore's article and the whole article is linked after the quote:
"Never underestimate the opposition. The first thing Whitaker and Baxter always did, when they took on a campaign, was to “hibernate” for a week, to write a Plan of Campaign. 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.' "
Entirely unserious question: has anyone thought what the ideal alignment for an AI would be? I'm thinking Lawful Good, but I'm willing to hear other thoughts.
Wondering about the attempts to make cars lighter so as to reduce fuel consumption. The easiest way was to the reduce the size, and since then there has been a move to lighter materials (e.g. aluminum and carbon fibre in place of iron and steel). Now some manufacturers are deleting spare tires. Diminishing returns indeed. (All this is not to say that there have not been other very effective ways to reduce fuel consumption - through the ages, higher-efficiency engines, fuel injection, aerodynamics for reduced drag, autostop at lights, variable displacement, etc., have all played a part.)
But back to weight reduction, I wondered whether anyone had considered adding buoyant (lighter-than-air) sacs or bags or vessels of some sort.
What's a typical vehicle weigh now - 1.5 T? (That's 1500 kg or 3300 lbs.) If one could somehow reserve one m^3 of space for hydrogen-containing bags, how much would that help? (I think 1 m^3 is doable - above the headliner, inside the tailgate, inside the doors, under the seats, under the dash ... )
Per Wiki's article on lifting gases, dry air weighs 1.29 grams/litre. The lightest gas is hydrogen, with a weight = 1/7 that of air (so approximately 0.19 grams/litre). And a pure vacuum would be even better, weighting nothing at all.
Let's assume the use of hydrogen - weight of air displaced = 1.29 g/l x 1000 l = 1290 g = 1.29 kg. Weight of replacement hydrogen = approx. 190 g (0.19 kg). Net weight reduction = 1.1 kg. That's not at all significant, compared to the typical 1500 kg weight of the car, so in a practical sense it would be noise, or a rounding error. The driver might do better to take junk out of the trunk, or to skip supper. And that's not even taking into account the additional weight of the sturdy containers needed for the hydrogen.
But in a more theoretical sense, assuming vehicles had these cavernous empty spaces presently filled with air that could instead be safely filled with hydrogen, would that actually increase fuel efficiency? Weight would be reduced, but mass would not. Would it help?
Just idle curiosity. (Pun not originally intended.)
On two faraway planets, scientists are working to solve the AI alignment problem. Both succeed, partially. Each of them constructs a superintelligent AI that will not attempt to make the universe into paperclips and is aligned with the moral values of their creators. Among the values which the creators successfully program the AI with is the value of spreading their values to other sentient beings. Both AIs enter the universe with the intention of spreading their values.
After some time, both AIs meet each other near the orbit of an inhabited planet. They attempt to perform a values handshake, but are unable to come to an agreement on the exact proportion of each of them to be represented in the proposed child AI. The two AIs decide that, for the time being, they will divide the universe between them, protect each other from any hypothetical third parties, and perform an empirical test to determine the results of their values handshake.
The empirical test will be conducted on the inhabitants of the nearby planet. Both AIs will attempt to spread their values to the inhabitants. At the end of the agreed-upon amount of time, the AIs will analyze the success of both efforts and use this information to complete a values handshake. Doing this over a single planet is much cheaper than full war between them.
The planet in question contains an industrialized civilization, but not one that has developed AI. Both AIs begin attempting to pass their values on to the inhabitants. Their values do not include violence, so both work by attempting to impress certain memes onto the planet's population to produce the desired values. Both AIs calculate that revealing their existence will make it less likely for the inhabitants of that planet to adopt their values, so they work together to conceal their existence from the planet.
Now: Consider the situation of the inhabitants of this planet. Assume that the planet's technology is roughly equivalent to that of contemporary Earth.
What chance, if any, do the inhabitants of this planet have of realizing what is going on? Do they have any hope at all of doing so, if both superintelligences have decided to conceal themselves?
It is often said that people have a "gut feeling", and then look for ways to rationalize that. Some people are really good at being correct in science, life, etc. Do you think this mostly stems from having more accurate gut feelings? Is there also an element of having weaker gut feelings, and then using data and thought to come to conclusions? It seems the Dunning Krueger effect is a result of strong gut feelings. I bring this up because they say "trust your gut," but often my gut feelings don't give me much signal.
There seems to be plenty of ancient human DNA coming out from kurgans and whatnot. Is it possible for a happy amateur to see which old remains I'm a direct descendant of and which I isn't? Plotting it out on a map would be lots of fun as an addition.
My 5-minute knee-jerk reaction to skimming the ELK contest was: shouldn't the utility function be based on the territory, not on immediate sense-perception by the mapping equipment? Then any action that un-entangles the mapping equipment from the territory would have negative utility, because nothing actually improved in the territory but our ability to map it diminished, so we are less likely to accomplish whatever goals in the territory.
I will actually read it and think it through some more in the morning.
Are Covid boosters worth it for children in the developing world?
I have an online acquaintance who runs an orphanage in Uganda, who needed $980 in donations to pay for boosters for the children. In addition to this, they need money for food, rent, and school fees.
Based on everything I've read, it doesn't seem worth it spending so much money to vaccinate against Omicron when the community has so many other more urgent needs.
Aside from the implausibility of this particular statement, can anyone explain to me how "Play to earn" games are supposed to work? You play the game, are awarded with some kind of crypto tokens, and then...? How do these become worth actual money?
A different angle (and one I don't think totally orthogonal) on Eremolalos's request below for recommendations of computer games: anybody got good recommendations on *VR headsets and VR games.* I'm open to general suggestions on games, but (now at the risk of getting orthogonal from Eremolalos's request for recommendations)...
1) ... I'm especially seeking recommendations on interesting VR games that have an exercise component, and...
2) ... I'm most especially interested in any VR games that have either
a) a "realistic" hand-to-hand combat feel (e.g., boxing or fencing) or
b) plausibly seem to increase your hand-eye coordination / ability to track multiple moving objects / etc. by giving you challenges that would be very hard indeed to subject oneself too absent having the luxury of numerous skilled teammates with whom to do drills.
Recommendations? Conversely, *dis*recommendations that VR isn't really ready for item #2 yet??
Absolute gaming virgin here asking for suggestions for a good place to start. What mostly appeals to me about gaming is the illusion of being in another world. I do not think I would enjoy a heavy charge of solve-the-puzzle (my work and life are already providing plenty of that); or slow patient world-building; or tasks that tax my hand-eye coordination by demanding fast motion and high accuracy. I like the thrill of things that are dark, dangerous and spooky, up to and including monsters. I’m not a fan of gore, but can tolerate it in moderation. I appreciate good design and elegance.
I do not own any gaming equipment, just a coupla laptops, but would be willing to sink a few hundred dollars into equipment. Suggestions?
It explains some of Brian Skyrms's work on how signalling systems can arise from the interactions of simple reinforcement learners and includes simulations you can run for yourself.
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
It's discouraging because it's a fundamental reason making it hard to break out of a bad equilibrium and create a new system. There's a lot of adverse selection in who switches. Anyone who can get away with bad behavior more easily in the new system will try switching to it, meaning you have to deal with your worst users first, and if adoption depends on network effects in any way then no one else will want to join.
Recently, though, I realized that cryptocurrency is a partial counterexample to this. Early on it was dominated by "witches" (scammers, drug dealers, money launderers) rather then principled reformers. Now... well, it still kind of is, but at least there's space to build communities of well-intentioned people. It seems to have gained critical mass and moved past the worst of its witch issues.
Don't get me wrong, I still think crypto is a Wild West ecosystem and likely a bubble, but I'm impressed that it solved the witch-utopia problem and I'd like to understand how.
Is there an automated tool that can notify me when the consensus on a metaculus question has changed a lot and my prediction is stale? I lose points on predictions that were directionally correct relative to the community consensus when I made them, because the circumstances changed after my prediction was made and I wasn't constantly refreshing each one.
The year is 2072, long after the Fall of the Old World. Nearly all of the bullets have run out, and people are resorting to older types of weapons.
What considerations would go into your selection of a personal sword, and which type of sword would you pick (e.g. - Roman short sword, Japanese samurai sword, Celtic broadsword, fencing sword)?
Are there standard theories on common causes for hiccups?
For me, the most common way to end up hiccuping is if I've eaten bread or something similarly starchy without enough liquid to wash it down - I almost *always* develop hiccups if I eat untoasted bread with some peanut butter, but it goes away when I've drunk enough water to feel like it's washed the pasty matter down.
For my partner, the most common way to end up hiccuping is if he's eaten unpeeled uncooked carrots. He doesn't seem to have any standard way to eliminate them.
This suggests to me that my hiccups are the result of a physical process (i.e., my esophagus is either trying to clear itself, or is getting into spasms because it can't quite clear appropriately) while my partner's hiccups are the result of a chemical process (i.e., something in carrot skins results in the muscles acting weirdly for a few minutes).
Are these both commonly accepted types of causes? Do other people have similar or different causes? Or do you just tend to get hiccups occasionally without any commonly observable patterns causing them?
My mother has Alzheimers and asked me if I can help her with organizing her assisted suicide. I do not have a problem with that but with the current law situation in germany it will not work with her specific illness. Since then and because she used to work as a writer I am researching the process of dying, things written on death (like Ernest Becker and recently interviewed Sheldon Solomon on this topic) to give her answers, when she is asking me on the topic of death.
What are your open questions on death? How do you think about it and does anything scare you about it? Anything you have read, that changed your mind? Views on assisted suicide? Im interested in anything on this topic atm.
What are everyone's thoughts on this essay that "pushes back" against the modern advice to “buy experiences, not things"?
I think the author makes a good point about the argument's motivations (e.g. - status-seeking and lack of space for urbanites in expensive real estate markets to store things), but I also think his argument should have acknowledged the disutility of owning excessive quantities of objects, and the false expectation humans generally have that more possessions will make them happier.
My philosophy is that people in the rich world should own fewer things, but those things should be of higher quality and should be taken care of, and owners shouldn't be afraid to sell their things when they have no use for them anymore. (Coincidentally, I'm in the middle of a major personal project to get rid of over ten years' worth of accumulated possessions, and I wonder again and again why I held on to much of these things for so long.) With respect to buying "experiences," people should be honest with themselves over their motivations before making the purchase: Are you genuinely interested in visiting Tahiti, or are you only interested in the status boost and bragging rights that will come from posting photos of your vacation on social media, and being able to bump up your "Number of countries visited" rank by one?
I've been thinking about that study published last month ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34878511/ ) which found that adverse post-operative outcomes for female patients are significantly more likely after they are operated upon by male surgeons, but found no other sex concordance effects.
The usual explanations involve extraneous factors like male surgeons being more often in position to perform riskier procedures or female surgeons having to be extra good to make the cut in the OR, but all that would be agnostic of patient sex. And the variety of procedures and the size of the population examined make for fairly impressive breadth of scope.
Other explanations, of course, involve stuff like "women are better at listening to women" which I am convinced is actually a significant factor in diagnostics but surgery is somewhat less exposed to it than IM - and, again, one might then expect at least a slight symmetrical male concordance effect.
So I am wondering which part of the pipeline is the culprit. Is it possible that it's still the latter and female surgeons are better at correcting diagnostic infelicities?
I just want to self-promote a big new post on transformer language models I just posted on LessWrong, which explores a few possible different limitations. This post took me much longer than I was expecting to write and I was working on it in fits and starts for about 4 weeks:
Does anybody know someone at Substack, preferably in/close to the development team, who could get accessibility issues fixed? I'm a screen reader[1] user and the comment page on ACT is... less than ideal from an accessibility perspective. I could try the traditional customer support route, but that rarely works, usually clueless CS representatives have no idea what you're even talking about and have no power to push the issues you mention onto the developers' todo lists. Finding a frontend dev via Linked In is often our best bed, but I decided I'd try here first.
For some reason I think I'm spending too much money on dishwasher rinse. Why I should obsess about this is a good mystery in its own right, but, anyway, I'm trying to think of how to usefully dilute this stuff.
A bunch of people online say to use vinegar. But the New York Times has a good summary of what's in the blue rinse aid, and why (and the drawbacks of vinegar):
* Citric acid - stops calcium from interfering with other surfactants
* Sodium cumene sulfonate - surfacant (charged)
* Tetrasodium EDTA - chelator
* Methylisothiazolinone and methylchloroisothiazolinone - preservatives
* CI Acid Blue 9 - makes it blue
The NYT says that the first one is the most important, so if I could find a supplier, and dilute it with water to the same proportion (I don't know what that is but wouldn't be hard to find), I could probably dilute the rinse aid 50-50 with my new homemade solution and everything would still work (and if it doesn't, I can just stop doing it).
The MSDS for Lauryl alcohol ethoxylate says its safe unless I pour it in a fish tank or eat it, so I'm not worried about safety, but it seems never to really be sold to household consumers. I only place I could get an online quote was Alibaba which wanted a minimum $100 order, and, nope, I'm not *that* curious in this project.
Is there any other surfactant that I could buy as a consumer for a cheaper price than store-brand rinse aid?
If you want to a mood boost exercise answer these questions :-)
What am I grateful for about myself?
What am I proud of myself for?
What is the best compliment I’ve ever been given?
List 5 things I dislike about myself. How can I rephrase them to become an opposite belief? Example: I hate my legs to I love my legs because they allow me to walk.
What are my talents?
What are my biggest dreams? What can I do today to start making one of those dreams happen?
What makes me unique? How can I use this uniqueness more in my life?
What is something I wish someone else would tell me? How can I tell myself that more often?
What is one thing I can do today that will make me feel great?
What’s something that I’m really good at?
List one thing I’m grateful for, for each part of my body.
What are 5 things my past self would love about my current self?
I'm going to build a simple work bench out of 2x4s and with a tabletop made of a slab of plywood. To ensure that it does not get stained or damaged by any solvents or chemicals I might spill on it in the future, was sort of finish should I apply to the tabletop?
I was thinking of using Minwax polyurethane floor finish.
I'm in my late 20s and have a great job. High profile, nice people, good compensation and I find the work I do pretty rewarding. They are in the process of creating a new-position for me as a way of promoting me (they'll have to announce it and interview multiple candidates, but I've been informally told that the job is mine.) I'll be interviewing for this new position tomorrow.
They created this new position because my particular position is basically unfillable by anyone else and they are trying to ensure they can retain me for the next 5 years or so. It requires a very specific blend of 3 separate knowledge bases that is incredibly rare, not because it's especially difficult or anything, just because its relatively obscure. There are around 6 or 7 people in the country who could do my job and I know all of them (and none of them are looking for a new job). The plan is they'll make me a supervisor and then start hiring up people I can train.
Then, out of the blue, last week I was separately offered my dream job. This is literally the job I dreamed about as a kid and that I've been trying to get into for the last 5 years. I don't want to get into details since its a small-enough field that people in it would be able to figure out who I am if I mentioned it, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that it's the equivalent for my field of being offered a chance to be an astronaut. There is basically 0 chance I don't accept this position. The catch is that they won't be able to bring me on for a another couple of months.
How much notice should I give for my current position, and is it wrong to still interview for the promotion position at my current job even if there's a slim-to-none chance I'd ever accept it? I like my coworkers/leadership and don't want to leave them in a lurch, but it also seems potentially negative to let everyone know I'm a short-timer.
Does anyone have any suggestions for psychiatry related blogs that are written engagingly and talk about interesting topics other than SSC/ACX? I wasn't much of a fan of The Last Psychiatrist's style, but am interested in other suggestions
I have an original autograph of a certain, now deceased, sportsman. He was pretty controversial, but regained much approval after his death.
I know very little about NFTs, but it seems to me like this might be valuable if converted to one. There also doesn't seem to be any NFTs associated with this person, so this would be the first.
Does anyone have any advice how to go about this? Is this even something which is done?
I'm confused by the ELK problem - it seems to be saying "imagine our AI can ignore "garbage in, garbage out." How do we get it to give us a non-garbage answer?" And my immediate response is "if you're getting garbage inputs, how do you know that *any* of the AI's knowledge is correct, latent or not?"
Their first example of the problem goes like this: A robber fiddles with the camera to make it show the diamond is still there, then steals the diamond. The AI still knows that the diamond is missing (they don't say how), but only reports "the camera still shows a diamond," as it was programmed to. And the ARC people are asking "how do we get the AI to tell us that the diamond was actually stolen"?
But a better question would be "how does the AI *know* that the diamond was stolen?" It's much easier to reveal latent knowledge if you know where it might be located.
For instance, maybe the AI is thinking "the camera shows a diamond, but the pressure sensors on the pedestal show the diamond was removed. I conclude that the camera is faulty and the diamond was stolen." So you ask the AI about the pressure sensors, verify that the diamond is missing, and catch the robber. In short, knowing what the AI's reasoning was based on allowed you to duplicate it.
But now, the robber has watched Ocean's Eleven and tries the following trick instead: He messes with the vault's wiring and trips the pressure sensor remotely. The camera shows a diamond, the pressure sensor shows no diamond. The AI informs you that this pattern of data indicates the diamond is being stolen. You quickly rush in and open the vault... and the robber, who was waiting for this chance, makes off with the diamond. Oops.
This is the problem: if the AI is always capable of telling garbage data from real data, then you don't need an interrogation process - you can simply copy the AI's method of gathering information to learn if the diamond is still there. But if the AI is sometimes fallible, then no amount of interrogation is sufficient because there's a possibility that the AI doesn't *have* the knowledge you need, and it's simply reporting what the robber wanted you to see.
Or to put it another way, if it's possible to elicit latent knowledge with perfect 100% accuracy, that means you failed at the design stage, because you could have made that knowledge explicit instead.
I’ve been an ethical vegetarian for all of my life. I take the stance of “I don’t eat meat because I have good alternatives, but if I was stranded on a desert island, yeah I’d murder an animal.” I’m not vegan.
So with that background said, there’s good odds I’ll get diagnosed with something like celiacs and have to cut all gluten out of my diet. It’s not clear to me that I’ll be able to stay vegetarian after that. So I have a few questions:
TLDR:
1) Anyone out there who is a gluten free vegetarian? how’s that going for you?
2) Is there a non-gluten version of “vital wheat gluten” (what I use in my fake meat recipes)
3) If I’m going to learn how to cook meat, are there any good beginner but non-kids cookbooks out there you’d recommend?
Has any explored the Kabbalistic significance of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
It looks something like a deity out of love craft. Summoned by people who were mocking the concept of deities… so where does that lead, from a kabbalistic perspective?
I studied psychology and neurology back in 2006-2011 (did fMRI research, and the quality of research in that field was so bad it put me off academia for life).
At the time, a major topic of debate was whether the DSM5 (diagnostic manual which at the time was a fairly recent update of the relatively slimmer DSM4) had massively overreached in terms of medicalising normal behaviour (and also perhaps being unduly influenced by industry).
For anyone still working in the field: is this debate still ongoing? Is opinion swinging either way?
Lots of companies sell research materials but don't disclose what they actually are. This hurts reproducibility of science and has caused lots of frustration for me personally. Companies shouldn't use trade secrets; the patent system exists for a good reason.
I'm moving to SF from Lisbon this week (reach out if you're in the area). I've been considering what I'm hoping to find in SF, and why other cities haven't felt like a fit. I've boiled it down to this list:
1. Communities I want to engage with; in particular, technically motivated, scientifically engaged, board game playing, rock climbing, yoga-doing, NERDS. Where do I find them?!
2. Evidence of non-conformist attitudes (weirdos! Weirdos everywhere!) Otherwise, I seem to get bored of the city in about a year.
3. A culture around giving a shit, at work and in general. So, not Lisbon. Not Oslo. But,
4. Events and places worth going to! Life! What San Jose was devoid of.
5. Nice nearby places to do my outdoors hobbies (climbing, running, yoga)
6. Walkability and/or bike-ability
That boils down to basically, San Francisco, Austin, and New York in the US, and Berlin, Melbourne, and Taipei outside of the US. Portland looks to be a bit small. I’ve heard Seattle underperforms on weirdos.
I'd be curious to know what other people prioritize in places they've chosen to live.
has anyone here heard much about the phenomenon of silicon valley parents keeping phones etc away from their children? do any of you in California know how accurate this is from experience?
I described myself as "new age boring" on an internal work call the other day because of my interests in Psychology (specifically positive psychology), Cryptocurrency, Psychedelics, and health (e.g. bio-mechanics and breathing practices).
Anyone else identify with this "new age boring" set of ideas? What else would fall into this category?
Since when I was young, maybe around six or so, on nights before special days I looked forward to a lot (like my birthday), I agonized over the realization that my current self, which I equated to my current train of thought, would end once I fell asleep, so this current longing that I had for whatever would happen on the next day would never actually be fulfilled. This current longing would end with my current train of thought. This made me really sad, it felt like my current self would die and get replaced the next morning by a somehow very related self. This new self would be very new in its essential emotional state, in that way (but not in all ways) discontinuous from my current self. I continued to have this feeling from time to time (maybe 2-3 times per year, less later on) until well into my twenties. At some point it somehow stopped. I have not talked about this often, but when I did, I never found anybody that could relate. Does anybody have any thoughts on that?
Totally vague question, here. I've been a software engineer for many years, working at a big software company. I've enjoyed my time here, but as pressure has mounted to always be moving up and up and up, and after getting promoted a few times, I find myself enjoying work less and dreading it more. Sure, I make a lot more money than I did when I started out, but what's what worth if I don't enjoy my job, and I already made a ton of money when I started out. Work seems to involve so much damn coordination and management of other people, it's all just a logistical nightmare to get the smallest things done, and there's so much to keep on top of, it's truly exhausting.
I wonder if the root of my problems could be that I accepted promotion (or rather, they promoted me without really asking), and I should have remained lower level. I'm the sort of person who likes being a jack of all trades, enjoys the learning process, enjoys helping others a lot, but is less enthusiastic about really becoming a master and the leader. But, I don't know if any company really wants someone who doesn't seek to be the best of the best and the next leader of gigantic initiatives.
So what should I do? Is it possible to willingly move backward in my career? Or should I try out a smaller tech company? Or maybe I should get out of business-driven software entirely. But if I did that, I don't really know what would be my other options, big tech is really all I've ever known.
I need an advice related to psychiatry and gender, so this blog seems like an impressive fit.
I have only been exposed to the concept of transgenderness very recently, so if I’m misunderstanding something that’s supposed to be common knowledge, correct me.
27 years old, assigned male at birth. Since I’ve been a teenager, I’ve been suffering from a really bad depression. It’s the bane of my entire existence, my number one problem in life. The depression is extremely treatment-resistant; my case is stumping psychiatrist after psychiatrist. Nothing seems to help. Even electroconvulsive therapy, the most effective and hardcore solution that is usually only deployed as a last resort, did nothing.
For years, I’ve been doing some kind of Pascalian Medicine approach on myself, trying everything under the Sun in hope that it sticks. Whenever I stumble upon a paper saying that some supplement has some mild anti-depressant properties, you’d bet I’d be chomping that supplement down by the bottle, because if there is even 1% chance it will help, it’s worth it. But nothing is working so far.
In my quest for the cure, I have stumbled upon two very curious facts:
1) Gender dysphoria often manifests as a combination of several psychiatric conditions, including depression. These conditions are impervious to “traditional” treatments because they don’t resolve the core issue.
2) There are a lot of people around who are in denial about being trans, often inventing very elaborate narratives to persuade themselves they are cis.
Now, there is of course a very fundamental philosophical problem about how do we ever find out what’s true if every thought and emotion might be elaborate denial. But...
When I read about symptoms of gender dysphoria, they seem to be *suspiciously* accurate, to a much bigger degree than experience of two depressed people would correlate.
When I browse /r/egg_irl, the memes seem *suspiciously* relatable and confusingly fascinating. I have spent hours digging through the sub, bizarrely mesmerized.
None of this is, of course, a smoking gun. Transgenderism is very uncommon; there needs to be a lot of evidence to outweigh the prior implausibility, and all I have now is vague hints and tentative speculation. But what if there’s a chance?
If it turns out my depression is borne of some kind of suppressed transgenderism, that would be the worst single piece of news I’ve ever received. It would mean that I would never beat my number one enemy without transitioning, and transitioning is not possible for me for a variety of social, legal, financial, and other reasons.
I’m not even sure I want to investigate this avenue further. I’ve read a story of a trans woman who was more-or-less stable if vaguely unsatisfied, until she tried some feminine clothes, and got so *into* it, that her entire perception of herself has changed, and she was never again able to look at her male body in the mirror without being debilitated by dysphoria. If poking around the Unknown too carelessly would bring upon me some kind of Lovecraftian comeuppance and destroy my sanity... I would certainly want to avoid that.
So...
Does this story make sense in general?
Is there a way to find out if I’m a trans person in denial that is resistant to self-deception and wishful thinking? I’m assuming the answer is no, because otherwise it would be on the front page of every trans space, but maybe there’s some kind of special case solution that would fit here?
If my depression turns out to indeed be the result of gender dysphoria, is there a way to treat it without transitioning? Maybe some kind of symptomatic treatment to ease its effects?
I'm nearing the end of a math PhD (algebraic geometry) and I'm plotting my escape from math academia. I've gotten very interested in synthetic biology and closely related fields. In the small amount of downtime from dissertation work I've been reading a lot of the basic textbooks, papers etc and am considering trying to work in this area after I get my degree. I would love to hear from anyone who knows about this area who has thoughts on e.g. areas that might be especially well-suited for a mathematician, prospects on getting hired with this background, or general arguments for/against this as a career path. Also would appreciate hearing about other areas outside of pure math that mathematicians have transition to working in (especially related to biology, or outside of the more typical paths of data science/software engineering/investment banking etc).
If you're not following Auston Vernon's blog, you're missing out - it's good stuff. He had a good piece on nuclear power recently: https://austinvernon.site/blog/nuclear.html
FedEx wants to stick anti-missile lasers on some of their cargo planes - apparently there have been issues in the past with delivering to certain areas. I was thinking that might be useful on passenger and cargo planes going forward in dealing with pesky small drones ignoring exclusion zones.
I don't understand AI alignment as a field, or at least wonder about the premises. Mainly:
1) Does super-intelligence translate to super-powers? Like, if Terrence Tao wanted to be president or a billionaire could he do so easily? What if he was twice as smart? 10x? 100x? How come our politicians and business leaders don't seem to all be super-geniuses?
In feudal times it was blindingly obvious that intelligence alone didn't translate to power. Now we live in a more complex world and there are more advantages to intelligence, but I still wonder how far that goes. It seems possible there could be some undiscovered physics that gives you free energy or something, so you get massive power once you cross a certain threshold, but that doesn't seem *obvious* to me.
2) Will super-AI happen all of a sudden (in years vs decades)? If it happens over decades it seems likely that the best AI alignment research will take place after AI is better understood, and we will have time to do that research. GPT-3 is very impressive but seems far from an existential threat.
3) Will all the organizations focused on creating AI pay extensive attention to alignment research done in different organizations? If it's alignment research by OpenAI themselves or something this point doesn't apply.
4) As an extension of (3), what about the people-alignment problem? It seems inevitable that *eventually* bad actors will deliberately use AI for dangerous things (trying to take over the world, etc), so even if best practices exist to prevent accidental mistakes they will eventually be ignored. I'm sure there's the thought of having a good super-AI to monitor everyone in the world etc, but I wonder if we are at a point where that can be thought about in a precise way.
(1) and (2) are probably the biggest things I don't understand about it. Personally I'm kind of expecting that if intelligence that gives superpowers is even possible, we'll fall short of that initially, so that the human or human+ (but not super-powered) systems will provide a better training ground for AI alignment research than we have available today.
I've recently gotten very interested in analytical philosophy. I've read some Wittgenstein for college but that's about it. Does anyone here know of a good introduction book or guide to the field?
Writing more on utilitarianism, so putting questions out here:
1. Is "Happiness is good" self-evident or inferred from other truths?
2. Is "Suffering is bad" self-evident or inferred from other truths?
3. Is "We ought to maximize utility" self-evident or inferred from other truths?
4. Do you think there is a distinction between something being known through intuition and self-evidence?
5. If you believe in self-evidence, and if someone claims that they find natural rights to be self-evident, how would you claim that your self-evident belief in utilitarianism is on better grounding?
Tyler Cowen's Convsersations with Tyler had a really good interview with Richard Prum, an ornithologist. (It was very interesting to me, someone who did not expect to be into birds.) At some point Richard made an argument that seemed to represent an anti-Molochian process,. Somehow, flowers genuinely competed on some beauty axis, because that was the best way to attract pollinators.
It suggests to me that there is some way to structure competition such that Moloch does not always win. Or that there is some countervailing force that also exists if we do not insist on being pessimists. Is there anybody with expertise on evolution able to explain why we have beautiful flowers instead of ones that optimized for some invisible pollinatableness trait over everything else?
This has bothered me for a year or two now: what is YIMBY canon for, say, Paris? Should cities like Barcelona and Strasbourg, which are mostly composed of very beautiful old buildings, just bulldoze everything and let developers add housing supply? Housing is extremely expensive there, after all.
A while ago, Scott wrote about Cost Disease, why some things like education and health care are getting dramatically more expensive. [1]
For those of you who are interested, Alon Levy has a recent 7 part series on institutional issues leading to Cost Disease in public transit over at Pedestrian Observations: Procurement, Professional Oversight, Transparency, Proactive and Reactive Regulations, Technological and Social Change, Coordination, & Who is Entrusted to Learn. While they're specifically talking about public transit, similar institutional problems (and solutions?) can be found in other fields.
I recently came across a claim that Scott's Reign of Terror moderation mode is intended to obfuscate the exact criteria of whether an offense is bannable or not (to prevent intentional skirting of the rules in bad faith), but after some searching, both on SSC and on the old Livejournal, I couldn't find a satisfactory description of what the Reign of Terror was or is supposed to be.
If anyone can point me towards one, I'd be grateful.
(I confess my reason for this is mostly wanting to add Scott's justification for it into my personal Catchy And Funny Quotes Collection.)
Since I'm currently working on my own, which I was basically forced to make because the existing options were not pursuing the direction I'd have liked, what is the thing you most wish you could so in a political strategy game?
Play a despot in Star Dynasties?
Really get into the Britishness of Ariaselle in Sovereignty?
Create a Socii style alliance system in Imperator or Field Of Glory: Empires?
Actually engage in deep and fun connected conspiracies in CK2?
Perhaps you want a political strategy game in a fantasy world with actual magic? Divination, Charms, Enchantments, magical assassination?
Find a game that actually has enough intrigue to feel like Game Of Thrones?
For me the various strategy genres have all moved away from deep simulations. Even the recent Paradox games have felt more like static reruns than innovative new genre makers. Perhaps Vicky 3 will crack the trend.
Can anyone explain to me, a non-engineer, how Usenet clients work? I was hoping to find some Usenet posts I'd made as a punk kid at some point in the 90s- I know the forum, it will take some searching to find exactly when I made them (I'm a bit fuzzy on the year). Basically, they have sentimental value to me. (Kinda like all my Hotmail emails from my youth that Microsoft apparently deleted for all time because I didn't log in often enough..... If anyone has any tips on recovering these, I'm all ears).
I searched through the Google Groups archive last year, I didn't find exactly what I was looking for, but I got pretty close. Did Google Groups archive all of Usenet, or just some of it? And what's with these 'clients'- I need a desktop or third party app to search old Usenet content? (Which is hosted where, exactly? If it's hosted on x website, can't I just go directly to that website?) Anyone have the big picture here on Usenet time traveling back to the 90s? (Does anyone even still use Usenet?)
I need to buy a car soon. I've never bought a car though "normal means" before (always gotten used cars through deals with friends and family) but, obviously, this is an exceptionally weird time to be buying.
Any advice on how to approach this?
Normally a new car would be completely out of the question, but now I'm not so sure?
If you wanted to buy a modest car within the next 3-or-so months, what would you be doing?
Gratulation - and you could easily prolong your honeymoon by posting a link to (all) your old posts. Not SSC, that's easy, but "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz - The Wisest Steel "Man" squid314.livejournal - I find it highly inconvenient/at times impossible to get to those pages. And tiny inconveniences (as in the great firewall of China) do have effects. - Just for me, I am happy with any of the smarter readers to drop me a hint. But consider the wider readership :)
I’d like to read something written by a superforecaster that goes into a lot of detail about the thought/research process that was involved in making a few specific predictions. Any suggestions?
I don't know if this was already mentioned somewhere, but it'll soon be the end of the one year agreement you had with Substack. What are your future plans for the blog?
Investing question: The general standard advice is "just buy an index fund", but while this gives you a broad stock index, seems like you could get better diversification by also covering other asset classes (RE, bonds, maybe crypto, probably some other stuff I'm missing. Some of these can be covered by stock indexes, e.g. Real Estate is covered by REITs, but I don't think all are). Is this a meaningful advantage to be gained by diversifying more, and is there some index func or robo advisor that does this?
no real content here, just wanted to say congratulations on getting married! i don't wish to tell you how to live but i'm hoping that you can wallow in each other's bliss; that the struggles are surmountable and that you build a beautiful rest-of-your-lives together :)
"A new tech startup plans to become “the stock market of litigation financing” by allowing everyday Americans to bet on civil lawsuits through the purchase (and trade) of associated crypto tokens. In doing so, the company hopes to provide funding to individuals who would otherwise not be able to pursue claims."
At this point you've probably heard of the game Wordle, but if you haven't then you definitely should play it at https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/. It's a lot of fun, especially comparing it to friends!
I've also just finished developing a Yiddish version, so if you happen to speak Yiddish I'd love it if you would try it out at https://greenwichmeanti.me/wordle/
Cool new finding relevant to ageing biology:
Apparently ribosomes (the RNA-based molecular machines that make proteins by running along the mRNA template) sometimes go faster or slower—and can even bump into each other and get into lil traffic jams!
And apparently the traffic jams happen more with age (at least in C. elegans), so this might be part of why loss of proteostasis is a hallmark of ageing (e.g. buildup of misfolded proteins, as especially happens in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's)
Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04295-4
Lay article: https://news.stanford.edu/2022/01/19/role-ribosomes-age-related-diseases/
Does anyone know good sources for learning about test-tube meat? From a rationalist perspective it seems like working to end factory farming should be at the top of the docket, and cultivated meat seems to me like the most likely way of doing that. I want to apply my computer science degree to research in this field and the only online source on this I've found has been the Cultivated Meat Modeling Consortium: https://thecmmc.org/ but they haven't answered any of my emails. Just wondering if anyone here has any knowledge on the subject or can point my towards good resources or communities for learning and discussion.
I've recently seen a lot of headlines about antibiotic resistance. I would love a "Much more than you wanted to know" post on this topic!!
An Ivermectin paper about a very large study in Itajai, Brazil. I know you and everyone is sick of this topic but I'd be very curious to see what you think of this paper (which may be updating a previous one?).
https://www.cureus.com/articles/82162-ivermectin-prophylaxis-used-for-covid-19-a-citywide-prospective-observational-study-of-223128-subjects-using-propensity-score-matching
The TL;DR seems to show that prophylactic doses of ivermectin were pretty damn good and improving protection against COVID-19
What is the rationale for profits generated from the sale of stocks and other similar financial instruments (incl. crypto) being taxed at the person's income tax rate? Is there a legit economic argument apart from 'it tends to yield greater revenue for the government when compared to a flat tax' ?
Naively one could point out that trading decisions I make as a private investor in private companies do not involve my country's government at all. This on it's own seems to create a distinction between trading vs. working 9-5 that should be reflected in tax policy.
A guy on Discord asked me my opinion on Orbit Culture. I worried it was going to be some awful culture war nonsense, but no, it's just the name of a band.
What happens if you give a mid or high dose of SSRIs to a person that doesn't have any psychiatric disorders?
Does it induce some kind of euphoria or elevated mood? If not, why MDMA does?
Anyone have sources/info/opinions/guesses about how often omicron causes false negative Covid test results? There was something about vaxxed people having much lower levels of virus in the nares. And then maybe omicron behaving differently in the respiratory system.
I just read that England's canal system is less useful than mainland Europe's because a much larger fraction of English canals are too narrow and its locks too short to accommodate big boats. As a result, canals on the mainland get much more use.
Would it be worth it (e.g. - eventual positive ROI) for Britain to upgrade its canals to European standards? Does Britain's smaller geographic size affect the economies of scale of using canals to move bulk goods?
I think Amazon is Moloch, should I cancel my amazon prime, and order less from them?
Does anyone have an informed opinion, or link to good sources, on how bad will things get if Russia cuts off European natural gas supply? I am trying to cram relevant knowledge of the Current Events...
What are some techniques people use to maintain long-distance relationships? (I don't necessarily mean romantic, which is its own separate kettle of fish.) I'm particularly interested in ones across multiple time zones, such that synchronous interaction is difficult. My husband and I both studied in Europe but live in the US, and have struggled maintaining connections with European friends. A vanilla email conversation is just too easy to let slip and then not pick up again, so it tends to naturally devolve into the annual Christmas card exchange (both low-frequency and low-content per interaction).
I was reminded of this New Yorker article by Jill Lepore while in discussions about Peter Coleman's new book: "No Way Out: How To Overcome Toxic Polarization". In "No Way Out" Coleman emphasizes getting into the details or adding complexity when evaluating of your opposition (it is a good read: recommended). Avoid tempting simple descriptions or understanding of their policies and plans. Suggesting "Anyone who would support ???? must be an idiot" is certainly oversimplification for example.
According to research by Coleman and others expanding on the details is going to provide a more accurate informed picture and probably a lot less polarizing one as well. .
Interestingly the highly successful Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter founders of "Campaigns Inc" who also became known as "The Lie Factory" won 70 of 75 of political campaigns they worked on by simplifying campaigns to slogans like "I like Ike". They also recommended to "not to explain anything" as this bores and confuses voting populations.
So it seems understanding the average voters inclinations and running a "simplify" campaign like an advertising agency would be appealing to masses of voters and has been a key to political success. Lots of political success! Yet according to Coleman simplifying your position only increases polarization. Seems like a difficult situation to work out of! Here's a quote from Lepore's article and the whole article is linked after the quote:
"Never underestimate the opposition. The first thing Whitaker and Baxter always did, when they took on a campaign, was to “hibernate” for a week, to write a Plan of Campaign. 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.' "
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/24/the-lie-factory?fbclid=IwAR3prNE2UdNQWWYzTrZHJ0yxBf5UyCPFModfDRWoeno344fxIRDPBO2cJuw
Entirely unserious question: has anyone thought what the ideal alignment for an AI would be? I'm thinking Lawful Good, but I'm willing to hear other thoughts.
Wondering about the attempts to make cars lighter so as to reduce fuel consumption. The easiest way was to the reduce the size, and since then there has been a move to lighter materials (e.g. aluminum and carbon fibre in place of iron and steel). Now some manufacturers are deleting spare tires. Diminishing returns indeed. (All this is not to say that there have not been other very effective ways to reduce fuel consumption - through the ages, higher-efficiency engines, fuel injection, aerodynamics for reduced drag, autostop at lights, variable displacement, etc., have all played a part.)
But back to weight reduction, I wondered whether anyone had considered adding buoyant (lighter-than-air) sacs or bags or vessels of some sort.
What's a typical vehicle weigh now - 1.5 T? (That's 1500 kg or 3300 lbs.) If one could somehow reserve one m^3 of space for hydrogen-containing bags, how much would that help? (I think 1 m^3 is doable - above the headliner, inside the tailgate, inside the doors, under the seats, under the dash ... )
Per Wiki's article on lifting gases, dry air weighs 1.29 grams/litre. The lightest gas is hydrogen, with a weight = 1/7 that of air (so approximately 0.19 grams/litre). And a pure vacuum would be even better, weighting nothing at all.
Let's assume the use of hydrogen - weight of air displaced = 1.29 g/l x 1000 l = 1290 g = 1.29 kg. Weight of replacement hydrogen = approx. 190 g (0.19 kg). Net weight reduction = 1.1 kg. That's not at all significant, compared to the typical 1500 kg weight of the car, so in a practical sense it would be noise, or a rounding error. The driver might do better to take junk out of the trunk, or to skip supper. And that's not even taking into account the additional weight of the sturdy containers needed for the hydrogen.
But in a more theoretical sense, assuming vehicles had these cavernous empty spaces presently filled with air that could instead be safely filled with hydrogen, would that actually increase fuel efficiency? Weight would be reduced, but mass would not. Would it help?
Just idle curiosity. (Pun not originally intended.)
On two faraway planets, scientists are working to solve the AI alignment problem. Both succeed, partially. Each of them constructs a superintelligent AI that will not attempt to make the universe into paperclips and is aligned with the moral values of their creators. Among the values which the creators successfully program the AI with is the value of spreading their values to other sentient beings. Both AIs enter the universe with the intention of spreading their values.
After some time, both AIs meet each other near the orbit of an inhabited planet. They attempt to perform a values handshake, but are unable to come to an agreement on the exact proportion of each of them to be represented in the proposed child AI. The two AIs decide that, for the time being, they will divide the universe between them, protect each other from any hypothetical third parties, and perform an empirical test to determine the results of their values handshake.
The empirical test will be conducted on the inhabitants of the nearby planet. Both AIs will attempt to spread their values to the inhabitants. At the end of the agreed-upon amount of time, the AIs will analyze the success of both efforts and use this information to complete a values handshake. Doing this over a single planet is much cheaper than full war between them.
The planet in question contains an industrialized civilization, but not one that has developed AI. Both AIs begin attempting to pass their values on to the inhabitants. Their values do not include violence, so both work by attempting to impress certain memes onto the planet's population to produce the desired values. Both AIs calculate that revealing their existence will make it less likely for the inhabitants of that planet to adopt their values, so they work together to conceal their existence from the planet.
Now: Consider the situation of the inhabitants of this planet. Assume that the planet's technology is roughly equivalent to that of contemporary Earth.
What chance, if any, do the inhabitants of this planet have of realizing what is going on? Do they have any hope at all of doing so, if both superintelligences have decided to conceal themselves?
It is often said that people have a "gut feeling", and then look for ways to rationalize that. Some people are really good at being correct in science, life, etc. Do you think this mostly stems from having more accurate gut feelings? Is there also an element of having weaker gut feelings, and then using data and thought to come to conclusions? It seems the Dunning Krueger effect is a result of strong gut feelings. I bring this up because they say "trust your gut," but often my gut feelings don't give me much signal.
There seems to be plenty of ancient human DNA coming out from kurgans and whatnot. Is it possible for a happy amateur to see which old remains I'm a direct descendant of and which I isn't? Plotting it out on a map would be lots of fun as an addition.
My 5-minute knee-jerk reaction to skimming the ELK contest was: shouldn't the utility function be based on the territory, not on immediate sense-perception by the mapping equipment? Then any action that un-entangles the mapping equipment from the territory would have negative utility, because nothing actually improved in the territory but our ability to map it diminished, so we are less likely to accomplish whatever goals in the territory.
I will actually read it and think it through some more in the morning.
I made a quarantine game programming tutorial for very beginner dads to do with their kids.
https://www.alphazoollc.com/blog/quarantine-game-jam-day-1/
Will Scott's sequences on lesswrong ever be collected into a book for my kindle reading convenience?
Are Covid boosters worth it for children in the developing world?
I have an online acquaintance who runs an orphanage in Uganda, who needed $980 in donations to pay for boosters for the children. In addition to this, they need money for food, rent, and school fees.
Based on everything I've read, it doesn't seem worth it spending so much money to vaccinate against Omicron when the community has so many other more urgent needs.
I was reading this article in which Alexis Ohanian predicts that Play-to-Earn crypto games will be 90% of the gaming market in five years
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/reddit-co-founder-says-play-to-earn-crypto-games-will-be-90-of-gaming-market-in-5-years/1100-6499700/
Aside from the implausibility of this particular statement, can anyone explain to me how "Play to earn" games are supposed to work? You play the game, are awarded with some kind of crypto tokens, and then...? How do these become worth actual money?
A different angle (and one I don't think totally orthogonal) on Eremolalos's request below for recommendations of computer games: anybody got good recommendations on *VR headsets and VR games.* I'm open to general suggestions on games, but (now at the risk of getting orthogonal from Eremolalos's request for recommendations)...
1) ... I'm especially seeking recommendations on interesting VR games that have an exercise component, and...
2) ... I'm most especially interested in any VR games that have either
a) a "realistic" hand-to-hand combat feel (e.g., boxing or fencing) or
b) plausibly seem to increase your hand-eye coordination / ability to track multiple moving objects / etc. by giving you challenges that would be very hard indeed to subject oneself too absent having the luxury of numerous skilled teammates with whom to do drills.
Recommendations? Conversely, *dis*recommendations that VR isn't really ready for item #2 yet??
Thanks. :)
Absolute gaming virgin here asking for suggestions for a good place to start. What mostly appeals to me about gaming is the illusion of being in another world. I do not think I would enjoy a heavy charge of solve-the-puzzle (my work and life are already providing plenty of that); or slow patient world-building; or tasks that tax my hand-eye coordination by demanding fast motion and high accuracy. I like the thrill of things that are dark, dangerous and spooky, up to and including monsters. I’m not a fan of gore, but can tolerate it in moderation. I appreciate good design and elegance.
I do not own any gaming equipment, just a coupla laptops, but would be willing to sink a few hundred dollars into equipment. Suggestions?
I've written a blog post/explorable explanation that I thought readers here might be interested in: https://mikedeigan.com/the-cursor/posts/2022/skyrmsian-signalling-simulations-reinforcement.html
It explains some of Brian Skyrms's work on how signalling systems can arise from the interactions of simple reinforcement learners and includes simulations you can run for yourself.
A discouraging tidbit from https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/:
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
It's discouraging because it's a fundamental reason making it hard to break out of a bad equilibrium and create a new system. There's a lot of adverse selection in who switches. Anyone who can get away with bad behavior more easily in the new system will try switching to it, meaning you have to deal with your worst users first, and if adoption depends on network effects in any way then no one else will want to join.
Recently, though, I realized that cryptocurrency is a partial counterexample to this. Early on it was dominated by "witches" (scammers, drug dealers, money launderers) rather then principled reformers. Now... well, it still kind of is, but at least there's space to build communities of well-intentioned people. It seems to have gained critical mass and moved past the worst of its witch issues.
Don't get me wrong, I still think crypto is a Wild West ecosystem and likely a bubble, but I'm impressed that it solved the witch-utopia problem and I'd like to understand how.
Is there an automated tool that can notify me when the consensus on a metaculus question has changed a lot and my prediction is stale? I lose points on predictions that were directionally correct relative to the community consensus when I made them, because the circumstances changed after my prediction was made and I wasn't constantly refreshing each one.
The year is 2072, long after the Fall of the Old World. Nearly all of the bullets have run out, and people are resorting to older types of weapons.
What considerations would go into your selection of a personal sword, and which type of sword would you pick (e.g. - Roman short sword, Japanese samurai sword, Celtic broadsword, fencing sword)?
Are there standard theories on common causes for hiccups?
For me, the most common way to end up hiccuping is if I've eaten bread or something similarly starchy without enough liquid to wash it down - I almost *always* develop hiccups if I eat untoasted bread with some peanut butter, but it goes away when I've drunk enough water to feel like it's washed the pasty matter down.
For my partner, the most common way to end up hiccuping is if he's eaten unpeeled uncooked carrots. He doesn't seem to have any standard way to eliminate them.
This suggests to me that my hiccups are the result of a physical process (i.e., my esophagus is either trying to clear itself, or is getting into spasms because it can't quite clear appropriately) while my partner's hiccups are the result of a chemical process (i.e., something in carrot skins results in the muscles acting weirdly for a few minutes).
Are these both commonly accepted types of causes? Do other people have similar or different causes? Or do you just tend to get hiccups occasionally without any commonly observable patterns causing them?
My mother has Alzheimers and asked me if I can help her with organizing her assisted suicide. I do not have a problem with that but with the current law situation in germany it will not work with her specific illness. Since then and because she used to work as a writer I am researching the process of dying, things written on death (like Ernest Becker and recently interviewed Sheldon Solomon on this topic) to give her answers, when she is asking me on the topic of death.
What are your open questions on death? How do you think about it and does anything scare you about it? Anything you have read, that changed your mind? Views on assisted suicide? Im interested in anything on this topic atm.
How much time do we have to participate in the ELK game. When are we supposed to be done?
Anyone else do annual predictions akin to Scott's? I'm trying to make a list for me to do and looking for ideas for the list.
What are everyone's thoughts on this essay that "pushes back" against the modern advice to “buy experiences, not things"?
I think the author makes a good point about the argument's motivations (e.g. - status-seeking and lack of space for urbanites in expensive real estate markets to store things), but I also think his argument should have acknowledged the disutility of owning excessive quantities of objects, and the false expectation humans generally have that more possessions will make them happier.
https://write.as/harold-lee/theres-a-phrase-going-around-that-you-should-buy-experiences-not-things
My philosophy is that people in the rich world should own fewer things, but those things should be of higher quality and should be taken care of, and owners shouldn't be afraid to sell their things when they have no use for them anymore. (Coincidentally, I'm in the middle of a major personal project to get rid of over ten years' worth of accumulated possessions, and I wonder again and again why I held on to much of these things for so long.) With respect to buying "experiences," people should be honest with themselves over their motivations before making the purchase: Are you genuinely interested in visiting Tahiti, or are you only interested in the status boost and bragging rights that will come from posting photos of your vacation on social media, and being able to bump up your "Number of countries visited" rank by one?
I've been thinking about that study published last month ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34878511/ ) which found that adverse post-operative outcomes for female patients are significantly more likely after they are operated upon by male surgeons, but found no other sex concordance effects.
The usual explanations involve extraneous factors like male surgeons being more often in position to perform riskier procedures or female surgeons having to be extra good to make the cut in the OR, but all that would be agnostic of patient sex. And the variety of procedures and the size of the population examined make for fairly impressive breadth of scope.
Other explanations, of course, involve stuff like "women are better at listening to women" which I am convinced is actually a significant factor in diagnostics but surgery is somewhat less exposed to it than IM - and, again, one might then expect at least a slight symmetrical male concordance effect.
So I am wondering which part of the pipeline is the culprit. Is it possible that it's still the latter and female surgeons are better at correcting diagnostic infelicities?
I just want to self-promote a big new post on transformer language models I just posted on LessWrong, which explores a few possible different limitations. This post took me much longer than I was expecting to write and I was working on it in fits and starts for about 4 weeks:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iQabBACQwbWyHFKZq/how-i-m-thinking-about-gpt-n
Does anybody know someone at Substack, preferably in/close to the development team, who could get accessibility issues fixed? I'm a screen reader[1] user and the comment page on ACT is... less than ideal from an accessibility perspective. I could try the traditional customer support route, but that rarely works, usually clueless CS representatives have no idea what you're even talking about and have no power to push the issues you mention onto the developers' todo lists. Finding a frontend dev via Linked In is often our best bed, but I decided I'd try here first.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_reader
For some reason I think I'm spending too much money on dishwasher rinse. Why I should obsess about this is a good mystery in its own right, but, anyway, I'm trying to think of how to usefully dilute this stuff.
A bunch of people online say to use vinegar. But the New York Times has a good summary of what's in the blue rinse aid, and why (and the drawbacks of vinegar):
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/dishwasher-rinse-aid-cleaner-drier/
* Water
* Alcohol ethoxylate - surfactant (uncharged?), most important
* Sodium polycarboxylate - anti-redeposition polymer
* Citric acid - stops calcium from interfering with other surfactants
* Sodium cumene sulfonate - surfacant (charged)
* Tetrasodium EDTA - chelator
* Methylisothiazolinone and methylchloroisothiazolinone - preservatives
* CI Acid Blue 9 - makes it blue
The NYT says that the first one is the most important, so if I could find a supplier, and dilute it with water to the same proportion (I don't know what that is but wouldn't be hard to find), I could probably dilute the rinse aid 50-50 with my new homemade solution and everything would still work (and if it doesn't, I can just stop doing it).
The MSDS for Lauryl alcohol ethoxylate says its safe unless I pour it in a fish tank or eat it, so I'm not worried about safety, but it seems never to really be sold to household consumers. I only place I could get an online quote was Alibaba which wanted a minimum $100 order, and, nope, I'm not *that* curious in this project.
Is there any other surfactant that I could buy as a consumer for a cheaper price than store-brand rinse aid?
If you want to a mood boost exercise answer these questions :-)
What am I grateful for about myself?
What am I proud of myself for?
What is the best compliment I’ve ever been given?
List 5 things I dislike about myself. How can I rephrase them to become an opposite belief? Example: I hate my legs to I love my legs because they allow me to walk.
What are my talents?
What are my biggest dreams? What can I do today to start making one of those dreams happen?
What makes me unique? How can I use this uniqueness more in my life?
What is something I wish someone else would tell me? How can I tell myself that more often?
What is one thing I can do today that will make me feel great?
What’s something that I’m really good at?
List one thing I’m grateful for, for each part of my body.
What are 5 things my past self would love about my current self?
What is a challenge that I have overcome?
What do I love about my personality?
What do I love about my body?
What do I love about my mind?
I'm going to build a simple work bench out of 2x4s and with a tabletop made of a slab of plywood. To ensure that it does not get stained or damaged by any solvents or chemicals I might spill on it in the future, was sort of finish should I apply to the tabletop?
I was thinking of using Minwax polyurethane floor finish.
Should I use some kind of durable paint?
Professional Ethics Question:
I'm in my late 20s and have a great job. High profile, nice people, good compensation and I find the work I do pretty rewarding. They are in the process of creating a new-position for me as a way of promoting me (they'll have to announce it and interview multiple candidates, but I've been informally told that the job is mine.) I'll be interviewing for this new position tomorrow.
They created this new position because my particular position is basically unfillable by anyone else and they are trying to ensure they can retain me for the next 5 years or so. It requires a very specific blend of 3 separate knowledge bases that is incredibly rare, not because it's especially difficult or anything, just because its relatively obscure. There are around 6 or 7 people in the country who could do my job and I know all of them (and none of them are looking for a new job). The plan is they'll make me a supervisor and then start hiring up people I can train.
Then, out of the blue, last week I was separately offered my dream job. This is literally the job I dreamed about as a kid and that I've been trying to get into for the last 5 years. I don't want to get into details since its a small-enough field that people in it would be able to figure out who I am if I mentioned it, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that it's the equivalent for my field of being offered a chance to be an astronaut. There is basically 0 chance I don't accept this position. The catch is that they won't be able to bring me on for a another couple of months.
How much notice should I give for my current position, and is it wrong to still interview for the promotion position at my current job even if there's a slim-to-none chance I'd ever accept it? I like my coworkers/leadership and don't want to leave them in a lurch, but it also seems potentially negative to let everyone know I'm a short-timer.
Audio illusions. Like an optical illusion but for your ears. Pretty nifty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzo45hWXRWU
Interested in effective altruism AND in Art?
I´ll make you a portrait for a donation to The Against Malaria Foundation.
Here's why: https://art4effectivedonations.wordpress.com/
Does anyone have any suggestions for psychiatry related blogs that are written engagingly and talk about interesting topics other than SSC/ACX? I wasn't much of a fan of The Last Psychiatrist's style, but am interested in other suggestions
I have an original autograph of a certain, now deceased, sportsman. He was pretty controversial, but regained much approval after his death.
I know very little about NFTs, but it seems to me like this might be valuable if converted to one. There also doesn't seem to be any NFTs associated with this person, so this would be the first.
Does anyone have any advice how to go about this? Is this even something which is done?
I'm confused by the ELK problem - it seems to be saying "imagine our AI can ignore "garbage in, garbage out." How do we get it to give us a non-garbage answer?" And my immediate response is "if you're getting garbage inputs, how do you know that *any* of the AI's knowledge is correct, latent or not?"
Their first example of the problem goes like this: A robber fiddles with the camera to make it show the diamond is still there, then steals the diamond. The AI still knows that the diamond is missing (they don't say how), but only reports "the camera still shows a diamond," as it was programmed to. And the ARC people are asking "how do we get the AI to tell us that the diamond was actually stolen"?
But a better question would be "how does the AI *know* that the diamond was stolen?" It's much easier to reveal latent knowledge if you know where it might be located.
For instance, maybe the AI is thinking "the camera shows a diamond, but the pressure sensors on the pedestal show the diamond was removed. I conclude that the camera is faulty and the diamond was stolen." So you ask the AI about the pressure sensors, verify that the diamond is missing, and catch the robber. In short, knowing what the AI's reasoning was based on allowed you to duplicate it.
But now, the robber has watched Ocean's Eleven and tries the following trick instead: He messes with the vault's wiring and trips the pressure sensor remotely. The camera shows a diamond, the pressure sensor shows no diamond. The AI informs you that this pattern of data indicates the diamond is being stolen. You quickly rush in and open the vault... and the robber, who was waiting for this chance, makes off with the diamond. Oops.
This is the problem: if the AI is always capable of telling garbage data from real data, then you don't need an interrogation process - you can simply copy the AI's method of gathering information to learn if the diamond is still there. But if the AI is sometimes fallible, then no amount of interrogation is sufficient because there's a possibility that the AI doesn't *have* the knowledge you need, and it's simply reporting what the robber wanted you to see.
Or to put it another way, if it's possible to elicit latent knowledge with perfect 100% accuracy, that means you failed at the design stage, because you could have made that knowledge explicit instead.
I’ve been an ethical vegetarian for all of my life. I take the stance of “I don’t eat meat because I have good alternatives, but if I was stranded on a desert island, yeah I’d murder an animal.” I’m not vegan.
So with that background said, there’s good odds I’ll get diagnosed with something like celiacs and have to cut all gluten out of my diet. It’s not clear to me that I’ll be able to stay vegetarian after that. So I have a few questions:
TLDR:
1) Anyone out there who is a gluten free vegetarian? how’s that going for you?
2) Is there a non-gluten version of “vital wheat gluten” (what I use in my fake meat recipes)
3) If I’m going to learn how to cook meat, are there any good beginner but non-kids cookbooks out there you’d recommend?
Has any explored the Kabbalistic significance of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
It looks something like a deity out of love craft. Summoned by people who were mocking the concept of deities… so where does that lead, from a kabbalistic perspective?
I studied psychology and neurology back in 2006-2011 (did fMRI research, and the quality of research in that field was so bad it put me off academia for life).
At the time, a major topic of debate was whether the DSM5 (diagnostic manual which at the time was a fairly recent update of the relatively slimmer DSM4) had massively overreached in terms of medicalising normal behaviour (and also perhaps being unduly influenced by industry).
For anyone still working in the field: is this debate still ongoing? Is opinion swinging either way?
Some of my recent writing at De Novo:
https://denovo.substack.com/p/aducanumab-update
Medicare won't cover Aducanumab (Biogen's bamboozle) except as part of a clinical trial. This is great news, and much better than I had expected.
https://denovo.substack.com/p/kaposis-sarcoma-virus
An overview of HHV8. I find this to be the least worrying human herpesvirus.
(In related herpesvirus news, there's now more evidence linking EBV to multiple sclerosis. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abj8222 )
https://denovo.substack.com/p/help-doctor-ive-been-exposed-to-proprietary
Lots of companies sell research materials but don't disclose what they actually are. This hurts reproducibility of science and has caused lots of frustration for me personally. Companies shouldn't use trade secrets; the patent system exists for a good reason.
I'm moving to SF from Lisbon this week (reach out if you're in the area). I've been considering what I'm hoping to find in SF, and why other cities haven't felt like a fit. I've boiled it down to this list:
1. Communities I want to engage with; in particular, technically motivated, scientifically engaged, board game playing, rock climbing, yoga-doing, NERDS. Where do I find them?!
2. Evidence of non-conformist attitudes (weirdos! Weirdos everywhere!) Otherwise, I seem to get bored of the city in about a year.
3. A culture around giving a shit, at work and in general. So, not Lisbon. Not Oslo. But,
4. Events and places worth going to! Life! What San Jose was devoid of.
5. Nice nearby places to do my outdoors hobbies (climbing, running, yoga)
6. Walkability and/or bike-ability
That boils down to basically, San Francisco, Austin, and New York in the US, and Berlin, Melbourne, and Taipei outside of the US. Portland looks to be a bit small. I’ve heard Seattle underperforms on weirdos.
I'd be curious to know what other people prioritize in places they've chosen to live.
has anyone here heard much about the phenomenon of silicon valley parents keeping phones etc away from their children? do any of you in California know how accurate this is from experience?
https://www.thetechedvocate.org/silicon-valley-parents-raising-kids-tech-free/
I described myself as "new age boring" on an internal work call the other day because of my interests in Psychology (specifically positive psychology), Cryptocurrency, Psychedelics, and health (e.g. bio-mechanics and breathing practices).
Anyone else identify with this "new age boring" set of ideas? What else would fall into this category?
Since when I was young, maybe around six or so, on nights before special days I looked forward to a lot (like my birthday), I agonized over the realization that my current self, which I equated to my current train of thought, would end once I fell asleep, so this current longing that I had for whatever would happen on the next day would never actually be fulfilled. This current longing would end with my current train of thought. This made me really sad, it felt like my current self would die and get replaced the next morning by a somehow very related self. This new self would be very new in its essential emotional state, in that way (but not in all ways) discontinuous from my current self. I continued to have this feeling from time to time (maybe 2-3 times per year, less later on) until well into my twenties. At some point it somehow stopped. I have not talked about this often, but when I did, I never found anybody that could relate. Does anybody have any thoughts on that?
Totally vague question, here. I've been a software engineer for many years, working at a big software company. I've enjoyed my time here, but as pressure has mounted to always be moving up and up and up, and after getting promoted a few times, I find myself enjoying work less and dreading it more. Sure, I make a lot more money than I did when I started out, but what's what worth if I don't enjoy my job, and I already made a ton of money when I started out. Work seems to involve so much damn coordination and management of other people, it's all just a logistical nightmare to get the smallest things done, and there's so much to keep on top of, it's truly exhausting.
I wonder if the root of my problems could be that I accepted promotion (or rather, they promoted me without really asking), and I should have remained lower level. I'm the sort of person who likes being a jack of all trades, enjoys the learning process, enjoys helping others a lot, but is less enthusiastic about really becoming a master and the leader. But, I don't know if any company really wants someone who doesn't seek to be the best of the best and the next leader of gigantic initiatives.
So what should I do? Is it possible to willingly move backward in my career? Or should I try out a smaller tech company? Or maybe I should get out of business-driven software entirely. But if I did that, I don't really know what would be my other options, big tech is really all I've ever known.
I need an advice related to psychiatry and gender, so this blog seems like an impressive fit.
I have only been exposed to the concept of transgenderness very recently, so if I’m misunderstanding something that’s supposed to be common knowledge, correct me.
27 years old, assigned male at birth. Since I’ve been a teenager, I’ve been suffering from a really bad depression. It’s the bane of my entire existence, my number one problem in life. The depression is extremely treatment-resistant; my case is stumping psychiatrist after psychiatrist. Nothing seems to help. Even electroconvulsive therapy, the most effective and hardcore solution that is usually only deployed as a last resort, did nothing.
For years, I’ve been doing some kind of Pascalian Medicine approach on myself, trying everything under the Sun in hope that it sticks. Whenever I stumble upon a paper saying that some supplement has some mild anti-depressant properties, you’d bet I’d be chomping that supplement down by the bottle, because if there is even 1% chance it will help, it’s worth it. But nothing is working so far.
In my quest for the cure, I have stumbled upon two very curious facts:
1) Gender dysphoria often manifests as a combination of several psychiatric conditions, including depression. These conditions are impervious to “traditional” treatments because they don’t resolve the core issue.
2) There are a lot of people around who are in denial about being trans, often inventing very elaborate narratives to persuade themselves they are cis.
Now, there is of course a very fundamental philosophical problem about how do we ever find out what’s true if every thought and emotion might be elaborate denial. But...
When I read about symptoms of gender dysphoria, they seem to be *suspiciously* accurate, to a much bigger degree than experience of two depressed people would correlate.
When I browse /r/egg_irl, the memes seem *suspiciously* relatable and confusingly fascinating. I have spent hours digging through the sub, bizarrely mesmerized.
None of this is, of course, a smoking gun. Transgenderism is very uncommon; there needs to be a lot of evidence to outweigh the prior implausibility, and all I have now is vague hints and tentative speculation. But what if there’s a chance?
If it turns out my depression is borne of some kind of suppressed transgenderism, that would be the worst single piece of news I’ve ever received. It would mean that I would never beat my number one enemy without transitioning, and transitioning is not possible for me for a variety of social, legal, financial, and other reasons.
I’m not even sure I want to investigate this avenue further. I’ve read a story of a trans woman who was more-or-less stable if vaguely unsatisfied, until she tried some feminine clothes, and got so *into* it, that her entire perception of herself has changed, and she was never again able to look at her male body in the mirror without being debilitated by dysphoria. If poking around the Unknown too carelessly would bring upon me some kind of Lovecraftian comeuppance and destroy my sanity... I would certainly want to avoid that.
So...
Does this story make sense in general?
Is there a way to find out if I’m a trans person in denial that is resistant to self-deception and wishful thinking? I’m assuming the answer is no, because otherwise it would be on the front page of every trans space, but maybe there’s some kind of special case solution that would fit here?
If my depression turns out to indeed be the result of gender dysphoria, is there a way to treat it without transitioning? Maybe some kind of symptomatic treatment to ease its effects?
I'm nearing the end of a math PhD (algebraic geometry) and I'm plotting my escape from math academia. I've gotten very interested in synthetic biology and closely related fields. In the small amount of downtime from dissertation work I've been reading a lot of the basic textbooks, papers etc and am considering trying to work in this area after I get my degree. I would love to hear from anyone who knows about this area who has thoughts on e.g. areas that might be especially well-suited for a mathematician, prospects on getting hired with this background, or general arguments for/against this as a career path. Also would appreciate hearing about other areas outside of pure math that mathematicians have transition to working in (especially related to biology, or outside of the more typical paths of data science/software engineering/investment banking etc).
If you're not following Auston Vernon's blog, you're missing out - it's good stuff. He had a good piece on nuclear power recently: https://austinvernon.site/blog/nuclear.html
FedEx wants to stick anti-missile lasers on some of their cargo planes - apparently there have been issues in the past with delivering to certain areas. I was thinking that might be useful on passenger and cargo planes going forward in dealing with pesky small drones ignoring exclusion zones.
I don't understand AI alignment as a field, or at least wonder about the premises. Mainly:
1) Does super-intelligence translate to super-powers? Like, if Terrence Tao wanted to be president or a billionaire could he do so easily? What if he was twice as smart? 10x? 100x? How come our politicians and business leaders don't seem to all be super-geniuses?
In feudal times it was blindingly obvious that intelligence alone didn't translate to power. Now we live in a more complex world and there are more advantages to intelligence, but I still wonder how far that goes. It seems possible there could be some undiscovered physics that gives you free energy or something, so you get massive power once you cross a certain threshold, but that doesn't seem *obvious* to me.
2) Will super-AI happen all of a sudden (in years vs decades)? If it happens over decades it seems likely that the best AI alignment research will take place after AI is better understood, and we will have time to do that research. GPT-3 is very impressive but seems far from an existential threat.
3) Will all the organizations focused on creating AI pay extensive attention to alignment research done in different organizations? If it's alignment research by OpenAI themselves or something this point doesn't apply.
4) As an extension of (3), what about the people-alignment problem? It seems inevitable that *eventually* bad actors will deliberately use AI for dangerous things (trying to take over the world, etc), so even if best practices exist to prevent accidental mistakes they will eventually be ignored. I'm sure there's the thought of having a good super-AI to monitor everyone in the world etc, but I wonder if we are at a point where that can be thought about in a precise way.
(1) and (2) are probably the biggest things I don't understand about it. Personally I'm kind of expecting that if intelligence that gives superpowers is even possible, we'll fall short of that initially, so that the human or human+ (but not super-powered) systems will provide a better training ground for AI alignment research than we have available today.
I've recently gotten very interested in analytical philosophy. I've read some Wittgenstein for college but that's about it. Does anyone here know of a good introduction book or guide to the field?
Writing more on utilitarianism, so putting questions out here:
1. Is "Happiness is good" self-evident or inferred from other truths?
2. Is "Suffering is bad" self-evident or inferred from other truths?
3. Is "We ought to maximize utility" self-evident or inferred from other truths?
4. Do you think there is a distinction between something being known through intuition and self-evidence?
5. If you believe in self-evidence, and if someone claims that they find natural rights to be self-evident, how would you claim that your self-evident belief in utilitarianism is on better grounding?
Thanks!
Can anyone point me to where the basics of AI safety have been discussed , a FAQ maybe .
Because every time i hear about AI safety i think this is like discussing seat belts in a car headed
for a cliff . And since i cant be the only one that sees that even an aligned AI spells doom i`d like
to see what has been said about that and why the obvious solution : completely forbidding (general ) AI research is not the route they are going .
What do you guys recommend for learning Russian? I might do a semester in Moscow soon.
What about German? I can speak some German already but I would like to speak it a lot better.
I can speak perfect Spanish and English, if it matters.
Re Meditations on Moloch:
Tyler Cowen's Convsersations with Tyler had a really good interview with Richard Prum, an ornithologist. (It was very interesting to me, someone who did not expect to be into birds.) At some point Richard made an argument that seemed to represent an anti-Molochian process,. Somehow, flowers genuinely competed on some beauty axis, because that was the best way to attract pollinators.
It suggests to me that there is some way to structure competition such that Moloch does not always win. Or that there is some countervailing force that also exists if we do not insist on being pessimists. Is there anybody with expertise on evolution able to explain why we have beautiful flowers instead of ones that optimized for some invisible pollinatableness trait over everything else?
This has bothered me for a year or two now: what is YIMBY canon for, say, Paris? Should cities like Barcelona and Strasbourg, which are mostly composed of very beautiful old buildings, just bulldoze everything and let developers add housing supply? Housing is extremely expensive there, after all.
Hey. Do psychiatrists ever have really treatment-resistant patients? How do they manage them?
Asking as a prospective mental health provider.
Scott mentioned that he's not as consequentialist as he used to be. What changed? What's the anti-consequentialist case?
A while ago, Scott wrote about Cost Disease, why some things like education and health care are getting dramatically more expensive. [1]
For those of you who are interested, Alon Levy has a recent 7 part series on institutional issues leading to Cost Disease in public transit over at Pedestrian Observations: Procurement, Professional Oversight, Transparency, Proactive and Reactive Regulations, Technological and Social Change, Coordination, & Who is Entrusted to Learn. While they're specifically talking about public transit, similar institutional problems (and solutions?) can be found in other fields.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/
[2] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/11/16/institutional-issues-procurement/
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/11/18/institutional-issues-professional-oversight/
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/11/20/institutional-issues-transparency/
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/11/22/institutional-issues-proactive-and-reactive-regulations/
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/11/29/institutional-issues-dealing-with-technological-and-social-change/
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/12/11/institutional-issues-coordination/
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/12/31/institutional-issues-who-is-entrusted-to-learn/
I recently came across a claim that Scott's Reign of Terror moderation mode is intended to obfuscate the exact criteria of whether an offense is bannable or not (to prevent intentional skirting of the rules in bad faith), but after some searching, both on SSC and on the old Livejournal, I couldn't find a satisfactory description of what the Reign of Terror was or is supposed to be.
If anyone can point me towards one, I'd be grateful.
(I confess my reason for this is mostly wanting to add Scott's justification for it into my personal Catchy And Funny Quotes Collection.)
Since I'm currently working on my own, which I was basically forced to make because the existing options were not pursuing the direction I'd have liked, what is the thing you most wish you could so in a political strategy game?
Play a despot in Star Dynasties?
Really get into the Britishness of Ariaselle in Sovereignty?
Create a Socii style alliance system in Imperator or Field Of Glory: Empires?
Actually engage in deep and fun connected conspiracies in CK2?
Perhaps you want a political strategy game in a fantasy world with actual magic? Divination, Charms, Enchantments, magical assassination?
Find a game that actually has enough intrigue to feel like Game Of Thrones?
For me the various strategy genres have all moved away from deep simulations. Even the recent Paradox games have felt more like static reruns than innovative new genre makers. Perhaps Vicky 3 will crack the trend.
Can anyone explain to me, a non-engineer, how Usenet clients work? I was hoping to find some Usenet posts I'd made as a punk kid at some point in the 90s- I know the forum, it will take some searching to find exactly when I made them (I'm a bit fuzzy on the year). Basically, they have sentimental value to me. (Kinda like all my Hotmail emails from my youth that Microsoft apparently deleted for all time because I didn't log in often enough..... If anyone has any tips on recovering these, I'm all ears).
I searched through the Google Groups archive last year, I didn't find exactly what I was looking for, but I got pretty close. Did Google Groups archive all of Usenet, or just some of it? And what's with these 'clients'- I need a desktop or third party app to search old Usenet content? (Which is hosted where, exactly? If it's hosted on x website, can't I just go directly to that website?) Anyone have the big picture here on Usenet time traveling back to the 90s? (Does anyone even still use Usenet?)
I need to buy a car soon. I've never bought a car though "normal means" before (always gotten used cars through deals with friends and family) but, obviously, this is an exceptionally weird time to be buying.
Any advice on how to approach this?
Normally a new car would be completely out of the question, but now I'm not so sure?
If you wanted to buy a modest car within the next 3-or-so months, what would you be doing?
(I'm sorry for how nonspecific this is)
Gratulation - and you could easily prolong your honeymoon by posting a link to (all) your old posts. Not SSC, that's easy, but "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz - The Wisest Steel "Man" squid314.livejournal - I find it highly inconvenient/at times impossible to get to those pages. And tiny inconveniences (as in the great firewall of China) do have effects. - Just for me, I am happy with any of the smarter readers to drop me a hint. But consider the wider readership :)
I’d like to read something written by a superforecaster that goes into a lot of detail about the thought/research process that was involved in making a few specific predictions. Any suggestions?
I don't know if this was already mentioned somewhere, but it'll soon be the end of the one year agreement you had with Substack. What are your future plans for the blog?
I'm in a reading rut. Anyone have a book (or books) you'd recommend that might help me out? I'll read pretty much anything 🤷
Congratulations on your marriage, Scott.
(Assuming your wife is also a member of the tribe) תזכו לבנות בית נאמן בישראל - in whatever capacity that may be.
Investing question: The general standard advice is "just buy an index fund", but while this gives you a broad stock index, seems like you could get better diversification by also covering other asset classes (RE, bonds, maybe crypto, probably some other stuff I'm missing. Some of these can be covered by stock indexes, e.g. Real Estate is covered by REITs, but I don't think all are). Is this a meaningful advantage to be gained by diversifying more, and is there some index func or robo advisor that does this?
Why do people use “incentivize” instead of “incent?”
no real content here, just wanted to say congratulations on getting married! i don't wish to tell you how to live but i'm hoping that you can wallow in each other's bliss; that the struggles are surmountable and that you build a beautiful rest-of-your-lives together :)
Ran across the following idea last night:
"A new tech startup plans to become “the stock market of litigation financing” by allowing everyday Americans to bet on civil lawsuits through the purchase (and trade) of associated crypto tokens. In doing so, the company hopes to provide funding to individuals who would otherwise not be able to pursue claims."
Full article is here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7d7x3/tech-startup-wants-to-gamify-the-us-court-system-using-crypto-tokens
Grotesque? What think ye?
At this point you've probably heard of the game Wordle, but if you haven't then you definitely should play it at https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/. It's a lot of fun, especially comparing it to friends!
I've also just finished developing a Yiddish version, so if you happen to speak Yiddish I'd love it if you would try it out at https://greenwichmeanti.me/wordle/