From a Heideggerian point of view, bias is another word for "care." It is impossible to overcome bias, because bias or care is constitutive of selfhood. It is the basis for any orientation whatsoever. Does "Overcoming bias" thus mean, minimizing the extent to which one is a Dasein? But what would this mean? And what would motivate Dasein to want to overcome the conditions that make it what it is?
In UNSONG, you quote a Dr. Seuss poem: "You say you have problems as great as my own / I am forced to admit it is true / But the thing is that my problems happen to me / Whereas yours only happen to you."
Which Dr. Seuss book were you quoting? I thought I was pretty well versed in his corpus, growing up, but that one has stumped me.
Ukraine situation seems getting quite bad. Hopefully I am just panicking and it is not going to end with Russian provocations, takeover of Ukrainian government and/or invasion but I am not hopeful.
"A housemate opened a market into whether she’ll get pregnant, and another housemate who helps with childcare is buying shares “as a hedge”"
I admit, this strikes me as odd. Surely the only one who decides when she'll get pregnant, assuming the use of birth control, is the prospective mother? I can see this working in a "everyone else thinks this is a good time in my life for me to have a baby, if I'm going to have a baby" for someone unsure if they should have a baby right now and then deciding you will try to get pregnant, but it really heavily depends on "people who know me and know my situation", and how is a market better than "I talked to them and got advice"?
Unless it's betting on "whoops, this was unexpected!"
Oh well, good luck if they're trying for a baba, and maybe also try a prayer to St. Anne!
In the last 10 years or so I have pretty much read all non-fiction books. I guess I am trying to learn something new, rather than reading as entertainment. Probably some psychological weirdness as well. At any rate one of my favorite non-fiction writers is David Deutsch. David is a specialist in quantum computing, but is knowledgeable across a wide breadth of science. He promotes the idea of the multiverse which is interesting, but he also is a big proponent of scientific optimism in that we will continue to progress and many of the problems of today will be solved. He likes Karl Popper's and Jacob Bronowski's take on scientific progress. David tweeted about a novel he enjoyed (A lot of authors promote each others books it seems) "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson so I shifted gears and gave it a try. Long story short I couldn't put it down and rapped up the 700 pages in a week! I can see Deutsch's enthusiasm for it as it is mostly about geo-engineering climate change mitigation about 10 years in the future. Lots of cool science included as part of the story with a strong connection to what is actually going on now. Not going to spoil it for those contemplating reading it, but it was interesting that Mount Pinatubo's eruption 30 years ago cooled the planet by pouring sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. So it would be somewhat predicable that doing the same thing with human initiative would cool things down as well. Here's an article about Deutsch's optimistic views:https://www.warpnews.org/premium-content/david-deutsch-optimism-pessimism-and-cynicism/?fbclid=IwAR3edlsvFU07_fLTKjtt__bnzZ2CPzL5foDXm7a_5xmcC3aY4t2UIKLoH70
I think most people would agree that as a general rule, it's bad to kill people. There might be exceptions, such as wars or self defence, but generally you shouldn't do it.
But why? Short of "because it's a base level assumption" I'm not sure I have a better explanation. So, if 1) you think killing people is bad and 2) you have an explanation beyond "it's an axiom" please lmk what your take is.
Suppose you (a doctor) will get 10 similar patients a year for the next 20 years who all report muscle pain. Suppose that, since the patients are similar, the best treatment is best for them all. And suppose that you can either do nothing or prescribe them painkillers, and that you initially think there is a 40% probability that painkillers are best and a 60% probability that doing nothing is best.
What should you do? What approach will lead to the best care for your patients?
Aella takes on one of those questions that is both difficult and unlikely to be addressed well in academic journals: what does the word "rape" actually mean?
I suppose this is mostly venting but perhaps someone has some wisdom to share with me on these matters.
Earlier this week I went to a movie with my roommate (her suggestion) and she wore a dress - it was pretty warm and that may be why, but long ago she told me “It doesn’t count as a date unless I wear a dress”, so first official date after so many restaurants, movies and concerts?
Yesterday morning as I was entering my car she chased after me wearing a white night dress to give me a gift to give my wife’s older son (who’s name she remembered!).
My first ever sight of her in a white dress immediately sparked thoughts of a wedding.
Since she’s been told that she very likely has multiple tumors and quite possibly cancer my roommate seems more affectionate - though she did ask for a memorial park bench so maybe she just knows that I’m the one who’ll give her that.
I’m still spending the weekends with my wife, of which my roommate said: “I'd like to ask u stay extra day but I know little one misses u”
My wife doesn’t talk of my roommate much but has asked some about her health, after I told her my wife said, resigningly, “You’ll be her caretaker”.
Of my relationship with my roommate my Mom said “She's lucky to have you as a friend”.
Fate is strange, if I wasn’t told in 2020 that I had an “80% chance of advanced lung cancer and after seeing my wife’s reaction (and lack of reaction) to that news I never would have moved in with my roommate, and now my roommate is hearing similar news and has suggested going to Mass together (something I’ve never done), meanwhile my wife has told me that if/when I leave her fully “I’ll probably start going to church”, something she’s never done in the 30+ years that I’ve known her; all this makes me think of blessings, curses, and larger meanings.
I fall more in love with my roommate every week but there are lines we don’t cross, at the same time I’ve been growing more forgiving of my wife and the thought of living with her full-time doesn’t fill me with the despair it once did, but I now feel guilty not being with my roommate.
My plans are to stay with my roommate until she gets well or dies, but still come back to the wife on weekends to be a Dad (I’ve started to teach the older boy how to drive).
If my roommate dies I imagine that I’ll return to my wife, but forever mourn my roommate, if she gets better than I really don’t know what will happen.
It’s also a possibility that she’ll stay in a twilight for a long time (she had a different form of cancer before, which made her empathize when I was told I likely did).
Surgery to remove her tumor had been scheduled for tomorrow (yes, on Valentine’s Day!), but she’s recently gotten and second opinion and now she’s scheduled a week full of tests and is likely to start chemo therapy to shrink what on the last scan look like multiple tumors before surgery.
Unlike a year ago my wife is pleasant to be with now, and I feel guilty not spending weekdays with the kids, but I miss my roommate when I’m not with her and feel guilty not being with her as well.
This morning she sent me the message: “Wish u were home cuz it's Super Bowl day lots of places will be empty!!!”, and despite a good day with the kids (and a not so bad day with my wife) I do long to be with my roommate.
Do Sam and Eric have a prediction for how many Lord of the Flies jokes get made on their account? And if they're busy doing the prediction contest, who's tending the signal fire?
There's something I don't understand about fears of superintelligence. Currently, there are two kinds of AIs that I'm aware of:
1) AIs that are only designed for a narrowly specific task with a simple utility function (e.g. chess-playing computers)
2) AIs that are designed to imitate humans, like GPT models
Most AI risk proponents, as far as I understand, don't think that 1) will ever lead to a super intelligence. 2) is what worries people. But that makes no sense -- if all a GPT machine does is imitate humans, then even an infinitely good GPT model would still only be equal to us in all domains, not ahead of us in anything. In order to have something that could plausibly lead to superintelligence, you need something that's not just quantitatively more powerful, but qualitatively different in its foundations from what we have now, and I don't understand why superintelligence advocates think looking at current technology will give them any reliable guide as to when that will happen. It's like looking at a chart showing how cars have been getting faster over time, and then trying to use that to predict when we'll have intergalactic travel. Can anyone explain to me why people think there's any point in discussing this right now?
I'm pretty skeptical of Ukraine's chance in a guerilla war post-invasion:
1. The age of the median Ukrainian male is 41. If Google is to be believed, the median age in Afghanistan is 18! Even if that's not 100% accurate (Afghan demographics must be a challenging job....), it seems very plausible it's somewhere in the 20s. Supposedly the median age in Iraq is 21. Not sure what it was in Vietnam in the 60s and 70s, but likely quite young. I don't see being median middle aged as a particularly great thing for protracted guerilla insurgency
2. Ukraine is mostly light forest, which seems much less ideal for cover than the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungle of Vietnam
3. Russia is literally..... next door to them, and shares a common ancestry. Guerilla wars the US has lost have typically involved force projection thousands of miles away from home- Russia can always easily move more troops over
BTW, has any country ever successfully defeated a guerilla insurgency? I seem to only ever hear of the guerillas winning in the end
11 years in mol bio labs and I just heard "back to the lab again" in the Lose Yourself lyrics after playing it during countless lab cleans over the years
Fun fact: Horses don't have rhythm perception so the making horses dance for the summer olympics thing is extra bizarre
Is it just me or has Substack made some recent changes that makes loading some posts freeze for a while, sometimes crashing my browser because it never recovers? I can't open the previous open thread anymore.
It also seems like they were A/B testing some infinite scroll for the main page.
I miss the SSC days where you could read thread comments without javascript.
I know it's kind of unlikely, but considering all kinds of people comment here: does anyone have a book/source suggestion for info on Belgium after WWII?
As an "AI in a box" benchmark, I did a GPT-3 generated dialog where Socrates tries to convince Scott that the goal of humanity should be to maximize N-GPUs. Prompt is up through the first "Socrates:". https://pastebin.com/AS3Nfn22
I've heard bilingual people say that English is less descriptive of emotional states than Spanish or Russian. Is English BETTER at conveying emotion than any other languages? Which ones?
What concretely stopped covid-related human challenge trials?
If some individual or organization had decided to fund on a human challenge trial of various covid questions, what would have stopped them? e.g. a trial of transmissibility under various conditions (vary ventilation, temperature, humidity, masking, etc.) would have been very useful and could have been done early in the pandemic.
Yes I know bioethicists will wail, grants won't get approved, some people think there's no benefit, etc. But there are a lot of people who do think there's a benefit and who have enough money that they don't need grants - why did no one step up and throw a couple million dollars at doing this? I presume there's some law that would be broken here but I don't know what it would be exactly.
You've heard about the Catholic priest who messed up all those baptisms, right? I don't understand what he got wrong.
The explanation I've read is that he said "we baptize", which is wrong, because it's Christ rather than the community who baptizes. But the correct version is "I baptize"; why is that not wrong, if it's not Christ saying it?
The year is 2040. Meet "Mr. Snoop." He is a retired cop living in a large American city, and he spends his days fighting crime. He does this by hanging out at various coffee shops, where he uses a smartphone sticking up from his shirt pocket to film other patrons. He'll pick one at random and wait for the person to finish eating or drinking. Then, he grabs their used coffee cups or eating utensils and puts them in his pockets. He follows the same people out into the street until they go into their homes or workplaces, and then he writes down the addresses of those places.
Mr. Snoop then uses Q-tips to remove the person's DNA from their old coffee cups or utensils, and mails them to a lab where they are sequenced for $50. He then sends several law enforcement agencies the information, linking the DNA samples with photos of the people they came from and the addresses of their homes or places of work.
Is Mr. Snoop doing anything illegal?
How do the law enforcement agencies react to Mr. Snoop?
In 2040, do you think people like Mr. Snoop will actually exist?
I am a Computer Science student about to graduate college and start a job search. I want to try and avoid working on web technologies due to a lack of interest and conflict with some personal beliefs. My intuition is that a lot of these jobs require higher levels of Mathematics backgrounds or education than I have. Is this correct? And if not, where can I look?
TIL about Saheli, a birth control pill that is only available in India because the FDA sucks.
From what I've read, it's far more convenient (only one pill per week) and has far fewer side effects than regular hormonal contraception, but it's slightly less effective. It's a selective estrogen receptor modulator.
I'd like to give my brother a book to persuade him that advanced artificial intelligence is inherently dangerous unless it's specifically made safe. Which is a more helpful book for a layman: Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom or Human Compatible by Stuart Russell? I've read both, I think the main point is the same, but Superintelligence goes into more detail while being more difficult to read, Human Compatible is easier to read and has more concrete examples and also gives an actual framework on how to make AIs safe.
In your "Why Do I Suck?" post, you falsely claimed that students were being forced to "chant prayers to Aztec gods". In fact, the chant in question is obviously not a prayer and merely uses the names of Aztec gods as a metaphor for abstract concepts like transformation and self-reliance.
"AD-36 is the only human adenovirus that has been linked with human obesity, present in 30% of obese humans and 11% of nonobese humans.[8] In addition, a study of obese Americans indicates that about 30% of the obese individuals and only 5% of non-obese individuals have antibodies to Ad-36.[3] Another study determined that children with the virus averaged 52 pounds heavier than those with no signs of it and obese children with the virus averaged 35 pounds heavier than obese children with no trace of the virus.[9] AD-36 also causes obesity in chickens, mice, rats, and monkeys.[8]"
Seems likely this virus is responsible for ~20% of all US obesity unless it has some weirdly specific vector that strongly correlates with obese people's lifestyles, which probably isn't the case. So if you could push some magic button that makes this virus disappear, the US obesity rate would probably drop from 42% to 34%, and the US TFR would probably increase noticeably because obesity makes it much more difficult to get a partner, to get pregnant, to have a healthy pregnancy, etc (wild guess because I can't find stats that aren't confounded by pregnancy causing obesity: increase TFR by 0.5 in the 8% affected = 0.04 in the US overall) which means increasing the population by 2% per generation (or shrinking by 2% less per generation).
I got the Bengals moneyline, Cupp to score, and Jamar Chase over 3.5 rushing yards.
From a Heideggerian point of view, bias is another word for "care." It is impossible to overcome bias, because bias or care is constitutive of selfhood. It is the basis for any orientation whatsoever. Does "Overcoming bias" thus mean, minimizing the extent to which one is a Dasein? But what would this mean? And what would motivate Dasein to want to overcome the conditions that make it what it is?
A question for you, Scott:
In UNSONG, you quote a Dr. Seuss poem: "You say you have problems as great as my own / I am forced to admit it is true / But the thing is that my problems happen to me / Whereas yours only happen to you."
Which Dr. Seuss book were you quoting? I thought I was pretty well versed in his corpus, growing up, but that one has stumped me.
PSA: If you enjoy prestige TV, the best investment you can make is a projector and a bigass screen. It's a treat, every time... Never gets old!
Ukraine situation seems getting quite bad. Hopefully I am just panicking and it is not going to end with Russian provocations, takeover of Ukrainian government and/or invasion but I am not hopeful.
"A housemate opened a market into whether she’ll get pregnant, and another housemate who helps with childcare is buying shares “as a hedge”"
I admit, this strikes me as odd. Surely the only one who decides when she'll get pregnant, assuming the use of birth control, is the prospective mother? I can see this working in a "everyone else thinks this is a good time in my life for me to have a baby, if I'm going to have a baby" for someone unsure if they should have a baby right now and then deciding you will try to get pregnant, but it really heavily depends on "people who know me and know my situation", and how is a market better than "I talked to them and got advice"?
Unless it's betting on "whoops, this was unexpected!"
Oh well, good luck if they're trying for a baba, and maybe also try a prayer to St. Anne!
Eurovision is coming in May, and here is the Latvian entry, a paean to going green, called "Eat Your Salad".
I won't say any more, I'll let you enjoy the fullness of the experience 😀
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx8dewrt1y4
In the last 10 years or so I have pretty much read all non-fiction books. I guess I am trying to learn something new, rather than reading as entertainment. Probably some psychological weirdness as well. At any rate one of my favorite non-fiction writers is David Deutsch. David is a specialist in quantum computing, but is knowledgeable across a wide breadth of science. He promotes the idea of the multiverse which is interesting, but he also is a big proponent of scientific optimism in that we will continue to progress and many of the problems of today will be solved. He likes Karl Popper's and Jacob Bronowski's take on scientific progress. David tweeted about a novel he enjoyed (A lot of authors promote each others books it seems) "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson so I shifted gears and gave it a try. Long story short I couldn't put it down and rapped up the 700 pages in a week! I can see Deutsch's enthusiasm for it as it is mostly about geo-engineering climate change mitigation about 10 years in the future. Lots of cool science included as part of the story with a strong connection to what is actually going on now. Not going to spoil it for those contemplating reading it, but it was interesting that Mount Pinatubo's eruption 30 years ago cooled the planet by pouring sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. So it would be somewhat predicable that doing the same thing with human initiative would cool things down as well. Here's an article about Deutsch's optimistic views:https://www.warpnews.org/premium-content/david-deutsch-optimism-pessimism-and-cynicism/?fbclid=IwAR3edlsvFU07_fLTKjtt__bnzZ2CPzL5foDXm7a_5xmcC3aY4t2UIKLoH70
Here's a link to Neal Stephenson's: Termination Shock: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0941WBTYL/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
I think most people would agree that as a general rule, it's bad to kill people. There might be exceptions, such as wars or self defence, but generally you shouldn't do it.
But why? Short of "because it's a base level assumption" I'm not sure I have a better explanation. So, if 1) you think killing people is bad and 2) you have an explanation beyond "it's an axiom" please lmk what your take is.
Hypothetical Question:
Suppose you (a doctor) will get 10 similar patients a year for the next 20 years who all report muscle pain. Suppose that, since the patients are similar, the best treatment is best for them all. And suppose that you can either do nothing or prescribe them painkillers, and that you initially think there is a 40% probability that painkillers are best and a 60% probability that doing nothing is best.
What should you do? What approach will lead to the best care for your patients?
Hey everybody, I’m starting a blog :) Only gonna promote this once on acx, but hopefully y’all’ll find it something to consider.
https://nicholasdecker.substack.com/p/information-as-public-good
Aella takes on one of those questions that is both difficult and unlikely to be addressed well in academic journals: what does the word "rape" actually mean?
https://aella.substack.com/p/the-rape-spectrum-survey-results
I suppose this is mostly venting but perhaps someone has some wisdom to share with me on these matters.
Earlier this week I went to a movie with my roommate (her suggestion) and she wore a dress - it was pretty warm and that may be why, but long ago she told me “It doesn’t count as a date unless I wear a dress”, so first official date after so many restaurants, movies and concerts?
Yesterday morning as I was entering my car she chased after me wearing a white night dress to give me a gift to give my wife’s older son (who’s name she remembered!).
My first ever sight of her in a white dress immediately sparked thoughts of a wedding.
Since she’s been told that she very likely has multiple tumors and quite possibly cancer my roommate seems more affectionate - though she did ask for a memorial park bench so maybe she just knows that I’m the one who’ll give her that.
I’m still spending the weekends with my wife, of which my roommate said: “I'd like to ask u stay extra day but I know little one misses u”
My wife doesn’t talk of my roommate much but has asked some about her health, after I told her my wife said, resigningly, “You’ll be her caretaker”.
Of my relationship with my roommate my Mom said “She's lucky to have you as a friend”.
Fate is strange, if I wasn’t told in 2020 that I had an “80% chance of advanced lung cancer and after seeing my wife’s reaction (and lack of reaction) to that news I never would have moved in with my roommate, and now my roommate is hearing similar news and has suggested going to Mass together (something I’ve never done), meanwhile my wife has told me that if/when I leave her fully “I’ll probably start going to church”, something she’s never done in the 30+ years that I’ve known her; all this makes me think of blessings, curses, and larger meanings.
I fall more in love with my roommate every week but there are lines we don’t cross, at the same time I’ve been growing more forgiving of my wife and the thought of living with her full-time doesn’t fill me with the despair it once did, but I now feel guilty not being with my roommate.
My plans are to stay with my roommate until she gets well or dies, but still come back to the wife on weekends to be a Dad (I’ve started to teach the older boy how to drive).
If my roommate dies I imagine that I’ll return to my wife, but forever mourn my roommate, if she gets better than I really don’t know what will happen.
It’s also a possibility that she’ll stay in a twilight for a long time (she had a different form of cancer before, which made her empathize when I was told I likely did).
Surgery to remove her tumor had been scheduled for tomorrow (yes, on Valentine’s Day!), but she’s recently gotten and second opinion and now she’s scheduled a week full of tests and is likely to start chemo therapy to shrink what on the last scan look like multiple tumors before surgery.
Unlike a year ago my wife is pleasant to be with now, and I feel guilty not spending weekdays with the kids, but I miss my roommate when I’m not with her and feel guilty not being with her as well.
This morning she sent me the message: “Wish u were home cuz it's Super Bowl day lots of places will be empty!!!”, and despite a good day with the kids (and a not so bad day with my wife) I do long to be with my roommate.
Do Sam and Eric have a prediction for how many Lord of the Flies jokes get made on their account? And if they're busy doing the prediction contest, who's tending the signal fire?
There's something I don't understand about fears of superintelligence. Currently, there are two kinds of AIs that I'm aware of:
1) AIs that are only designed for a narrowly specific task with a simple utility function (e.g. chess-playing computers)
2) AIs that are designed to imitate humans, like GPT models
Most AI risk proponents, as far as I understand, don't think that 1) will ever lead to a super intelligence. 2) is what worries people. But that makes no sense -- if all a GPT machine does is imitate humans, then even an infinitely good GPT model would still only be equal to us in all domains, not ahead of us in anything. In order to have something that could plausibly lead to superintelligence, you need something that's not just quantitatively more powerful, but qualitatively different in its foundations from what we have now, and I don't understand why superintelligence advocates think looking at current technology will give them any reliable guide as to when that will happen. It's like looking at a chart showing how cars have been getting faster over time, and then trying to use that to predict when we'll have intergalactic travel. Can anyone explain to me why people think there's any point in discussing this right now?
On the subject of prediction markets for personal relationships, SMBC was ahead of the curve:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2418
(Comic is from 10 years ago).
I'm pretty skeptical of Ukraine's chance in a guerilla war post-invasion:
1. The age of the median Ukrainian male is 41. If Google is to be believed, the median age in Afghanistan is 18! Even if that's not 100% accurate (Afghan demographics must be a challenging job....), it seems very plausible it's somewhere in the 20s. Supposedly the median age in Iraq is 21. Not sure what it was in Vietnam in the 60s and 70s, but likely quite young. I don't see being median middle aged as a particularly great thing for protracted guerilla insurgency
2. Ukraine is mostly light forest, which seems much less ideal for cover than the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungle of Vietnam
3. Russia is literally..... next door to them, and shares a common ancestry. Guerilla wars the US has lost have typically involved force projection thousands of miles away from home- Russia can always easily move more troops over
BTW, has any country ever successfully defeated a guerilla insurgency? I seem to only ever hear of the guerillas winning in the end
to whoever recommended Tilt by Bill Adams - thanks, a fun, complicated, and interesting read.
Did you know that the Substack team is really awesome?
https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more
11 years in mol bio labs and I just heard "back to the lab again" in the Lose Yourself lyrics after playing it during countless lab cleans over the years
Fun fact: Horses don't have rhythm perception so the making horses dance for the summer olympics thing is extra bizarre
I just did the prediction contest!
On an unrelated (I think) note, here's a decade-old poast by Scott that I recently found and which has been living rent-free in my mind for quite a while: https://www.gwern.net/docs/philosophy/epistemology/2012-alexander-thewiseststeelman.html
Is it just me or has Substack made some recent changes that makes loading some posts freeze for a while, sometimes crashing my browser because it never recovers? I can't open the previous open thread anymore.
It also seems like they were A/B testing some infinite scroll for the main page.
I miss the SSC days where you could read thread comments without javascript.
To survive a pandemic you just have to be BLUNT
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/to-survive-a-pandemic-you-just-have/comments
Eye of the Storm
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/eye-of-the-storm/comments
I know it's kind of unlikely, but considering all kinds of people comment here: does anyone have a book/source suggestion for info on Belgium after WWII?
As an "AI in a box" benchmark, I did a GPT-3 generated dialog where Socrates tries to convince Scott that the goal of humanity should be to maximize N-GPUs. Prompt is up through the first "Socrates:". https://pastebin.com/AS3Nfn22
Circling back to Links 9/17: "in order to preserve their patent on a popular eyedrop, Allergan transferred the intellectual property rights to the Mohawk Indians." Turns out, 10 months later, the USPTO invalidated the deal. https://www.ip-watch.org/2018/07/21/native-tribes-cant-shield-patents-uspto-review/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/25/links-917-hurly-burly/
I've heard bilingual people say that English is less descriptive of emotional states than Spanish or Russian. Is English BETTER at conveying emotion than any other languages? Which ones?
What concretely stopped covid-related human challenge trials?
If some individual or organization had decided to fund on a human challenge trial of various covid questions, what would have stopped them? e.g. a trial of transmissibility under various conditions (vary ventilation, temperature, humidity, masking, etc.) would have been very useful and could have been done early in the pandemic.
Yes I know bioethicists will wail, grants won't get approved, some people think there's no benefit, etc. But there are a lot of people who do think there's a benefit and who have enough money that they don't need grants - why did no one step up and throw a couple million dollars at doing this? I presume there's some law that would be broken here but I don't know what it would be exactly.
You've heard about the Catholic priest who messed up all those baptisms, right? I don't understand what he got wrong.
The explanation I've read is that he said "we baptize", which is wrong, because it's Christ rather than the community who baptizes. But the correct version is "I baptize"; why is that not wrong, if it's not Christ saying it?
The year is 2040. Meet "Mr. Snoop." He is a retired cop living in a large American city, and he spends his days fighting crime. He does this by hanging out at various coffee shops, where he uses a smartphone sticking up from his shirt pocket to film other patrons. He'll pick one at random and wait for the person to finish eating or drinking. Then, he grabs their used coffee cups or eating utensils and puts them in his pockets. He follows the same people out into the street until they go into their homes or workplaces, and then he writes down the addresses of those places.
Mr. Snoop then uses Q-tips to remove the person's DNA from their old coffee cups or utensils, and mails them to a lab where they are sequenced for $50. He then sends several law enforcement agencies the information, linking the DNA samples with photos of the people they came from and the addresses of their homes or places of work.
Is Mr. Snoop doing anything illegal?
How do the law enforcement agencies react to Mr. Snoop?
In 2040, do you think people like Mr. Snoop will actually exist?
I am a Computer Science student about to graduate college and start a job search. I want to try and avoid working on web technologies due to a lack of interest and conflict with some personal beliefs. My intuition is that a lot of these jobs require higher levels of Mathematics backgrounds or education than I have. Is this correct? And if not, where can I look?
TIL about Saheli, a birth control pill that is only available in India because the FDA sucks.
From what I've read, it's far more convenient (only one pill per week) and has far fewer side effects than regular hormonal contraception, but it's slightly less effective. It's a selective estrogen receptor modulator.
I'd like to give my brother a book to persuade him that advanced artificial intelligence is inherently dangerous unless it's specifically made safe. Which is a more helpful book for a layman: Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom or Human Compatible by Stuart Russell? I've read both, I think the main point is the same, but Superintelligence goes into more detail while being more difficult to read, Human Compatible is easier to read and has more concrete examples and also gives an actual framework on how to make AIs safe.
In your "Why Do I Suck?" post, you falsely claimed that students were being forced to "chant prayers to Aztec gods". In fact, the chant in question is obviously not a prayer and merely uses the names of Aztec gods as a metaphor for abstract concepts like transformation and self-reliance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenovirus_serotype_36
"AD-36 is the only human adenovirus that has been linked with human obesity, present in 30% of obese humans and 11% of nonobese humans.[8] In addition, a study of obese Americans indicates that about 30% of the obese individuals and only 5% of non-obese individuals have antibodies to Ad-36.[3] Another study determined that children with the virus averaged 52 pounds heavier than those with no signs of it and obese children with the virus averaged 35 pounds heavier than obese children with no trace of the virus.[9] AD-36 also causes obesity in chickens, mice, rats, and monkeys.[8]"
Seems likely this virus is responsible for ~20% of all US obesity unless it has some weirdly specific vector that strongly correlates with obese people's lifestyles, which probably isn't the case. So if you could push some magic button that makes this virus disappear, the US obesity rate would probably drop from 42% to 34%, and the US TFR would probably increase noticeably because obesity makes it much more difficult to get a partner, to get pregnant, to have a healthy pregnancy, etc (wild guess because I can't find stats that aren't confounded by pregnancy causing obesity: increase TFR by 0.5 in the 8% affected = 0.04 in the US overall) which means increasing the population by 2% per generation (or shrinking by 2% less per generation).