466 Comments

Any good resources for entertaining and informative blogs on modern physics? Any suggested reading for someone who would like to learn more about the field as a dilettante? Right now Iā€™m just reading Wikipedia articles

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Given the amount of shit hitting the fan globally since the last OT, I think a new one is desperately needed.

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The concept of a "dry port" confuses me. It sounds like a fancy name for a big parking lot full of shipping containers, plus some cranes to move the containers around.

I know that modern seaports have large areas where many shipping containers are stored--often stacked on each other. Instead of building "dry ports" located far from the seaports, why don't the seaports just expand their own parking lot areas to fit in as many containers as they need to? It seems inefficient to build a dry port several (maybe dozens) of miles inland, and to have to ship the containers back and forth between it and the seaport over a road or railroad.

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Thoughts on universal DNR? I'm an ER doc and I'm sick of doing CPR on 87 year olds in terrible health. Seems like a national universal DNR with an option to opt-out would save the health system money. So much of what we do to these super elderly are efforts in futility. 80 seems like a reasonable age to me for universal DNR, again with the option to opt out for those that want "everything done" including CPR/intubation or simply feel they are still spry and could survive a cardiac arrest.

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Let's assume Thomas Piketty's thesis is right, and the owners of capital will keep getting richer while everyone else's share of the economic pie shrinks. For the sake of convenience, let's say 1% of the human race owns 100% of the world's capital right now, and let's call those people "The 1%." The others are "The 99%." Even though the 99% don't own any capital, they still have money and assets, so they own most of the economy.

1) I guess Piketty envisions the 1%'s share of the global economy will keep growing until one day, they own all assets while the 99% own none. Is that right?

2) If it is right, are we to assume the 99% will rent everything they use, and/or only own things that are worthless (e.g. - ripped, unstylish clothing no one else would pay anything for)?

3) Furthermore, does Piketty think the process of economic dispossession will ever stop? For example, let's again assume we've reached the day when the 1% own the whole economy. Do they call a truce at that point, and agree to preserve the distribution of assets as it is, or would the top 0.01% start using their advantages to gradually capture the assets of the bottom 0.99%?

4) Would that process proceed through several iterations until it reached its logical endpoint, with one person ("The 0.0000000001%") owned the whole economy?

5) Is that the actual logical endpoint of the process, or should we extend the X-axis out some more until zero people own the economy, in which case we can assume humanity is extinct and/or AIs have taken over?

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Can you give me examples of English words that have a completely different meaning in USA vs Europe? So far I have "liberal" and "football".

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The counter programming on Pravda dot Ru right now is fascinating. It can be viewed in English with a menu selection.

Edit

Take this headline for example:

ā€œRussian submarine with 160 nukes on board surfaces off US coastā€

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As events unfold in Ukraine (Russia is invading Ukraine), I would be very glad to see a discussion of this in the community.

Could someone point me to some relevant place, if such a discussion has already took place, or is currently going on LessWrong or maybe a good reddit thread?

Currently, to me it seems like Russia/Putin is trying to replace the Ukrainian government with a more Russia-favoring one, either through making the government resign in the chaos, executing a coup through special forces or forcing the government to relocate and then taking Kiev and recognizing a new government controlling the Eastern territories as the "official Ukraine".

I would be particularly interested in what this means for the future, eg:

- How Ukrainian refugees will change European politics? (I am from Hungary, and it seems like an important question.)

- What sanctions are likely to be put in place?

- How will said sanctions influence European economy? (Probably energy prices go up - what are the implications of that?)

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Feb 24, 2022Ā·edited Feb 24, 2022

Quantum computing is technically substrate-dependent. Theoretically, there could be other substrate-dependent computations. Theoretically, the brain could use them.

Without motivating this in any way, I'm curious how serious modern neuroscience takes this idea (if anyone here is familiar enough with the literature to answer that). Say on a scale from 0 to 10, with floating point numbers since the answer is probably <1?

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Feb 24, 2022Ā·edited Feb 24, 2022

Is it possible to edit my substack account to use my real name without putting my real name on comments I wrote in the past here?

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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/verified/id1497379527

A podcast series about the Russian Imperial Movement, an organization for unifying white nationalists worldwide. They're not well known in the US, probably because their violence tends to be against refugees in camps in other countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Imperial_Movement

So far, the podcast hasn't gotten into who's financing them-- the amount of money looks to me like a billionaire's hobby rather than a government, but I'm guessing.

Has anyone else here been keeping track of this group?

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From ā€œDreyerā€™s English An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Styleā€

The Celebrated Ending-a Sentence-with-a-Preposition Story

Two women are seated side by side at a posh dinner party, one a matron of the sort played in old Marx Brothers movies by Margaret Dumont, except frostier, the other an easy going southern gal, letā€™s say for the sake of visuals, wearing a very pink and very ruffled evening gown.

Southern Gal, amiably to Frosty Matron: So where yā€™all from?

Frosty Matron, no doubt giving Southern Gal a once over with a lorgnette: Iā€™m from a place where people donā€™t end their sentences with prepositions.

Southern Gal, sweetly, after a moments consideration: OK. So where yā€™all from, bitch.

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One more Substack comment problem.

Starting a week or two ago, Iā€™ve been having scrolling problems on my 4+ year old iPad Pro.

Iā€™ll get halfway into the comments, and suddenly they donā€™t want to scroll. I drag the page up, and it snaps down again. Eventually starts working again, but only after multiple attempts to scroll. The only other site where Iā€™ve seen this is Reddit - maybe they use the same stack?

Super annoyingā€¦today I just got tired of fighting with it and noped out.

Anyone else seeing this problem?

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Is anyone here experienced with parasomnias, in particular, has anyone figured out a successful strategy to manage them? Because evidence-based medicine apparently looks the other way and pretends they don't exist.

I suffer from psychopompic hallucinations and waking up with just half of a brain awake and disoriented, ie. confusional arousal (which I assure you is the correct term, and has nothing to do with confused boners). Might be genetic since there's some light somnabulism in my family, happens pretty much from birth. It's not an immediate threat to either myself or others, but it's stressful and understandably drives my partner up the wall.

The conventional answer is sleep hygiene, which I experimented with a bunch and if anything it makes the problem _worse_ (when I'm really tired the parasomnias happen rarely). The other conventional answer is chronic use of clonazepam, which I won't experiment with because I'd rather sleep alone for the rest of my life than get addicted to benzos.

I'm starting to rigorously track the influence of melatonin before sleep, because apparently for a small % of patients it helps. After that I'm out of ideas.

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Did Scott get rid of the even/odd politics/no-politics rule? That's probably good, as it didn't seem to do much. I never noticed a difference in topics between the two thread parities, and it certainly wasn't the case that one thread was completely overrun with political discussion

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Does the theories that short term and minor but fascinating items in the new are *intentional* distractions actually do any good? I think it's more likely that people are more interested in dramatic and human interest stories without any intention being needed.

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Imagine hypothetically that you have a magic pill that instantly cures every disease. How hard would it be to get FDA approval?

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Came across something that sounds even better than a charter city, a charter territory in Syria of all places:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Administration_of_North_and_East_Syria

which seems to be doing amazingly well:

> The supporters of the region's administration state that it is an officially secular polity[30][31][32] with direct democratic ambitions based on an anarchistic, feminist, and libertarian socialist ideology promoting decentralization, gender equality,[33][34] environmental sustainability, social ecology and pluralistic tolerance for religious, cultural and political diversity, and that these values are mirrored in its constitution, society, and politics, stating it to be a model for a federalized Syria as a whole, rather than outright independence.

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"I'm going to STRANGLE the next person who talks to me about the new Batman film!" said Christian, balefully.

"Ahh, I kid! I kid, man!" said Nicole, "just go with it!".

"I had no idea that training day at the distillery would be so laborious," said Denzel, washing the tun.

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Has anyone seen evidence on cases of reinfection with Omicron ā€” people who got Omicron twice? I believe there were cases with previous Covid varieties, and Omicron is more contagious which should make it more likely, but I don't know if it actually does.

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ā€œThis is a genuine nonspam messageā€

"And a test of how quick genuine spammers are"

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I predict that this appeal method: "If you want to appeal any decision, please write up your argument, start a conditional prediction market..." will work great. But not for any reason related to prediction markets.

From a prediction-market perspective it will be a complete failure. We are asking (suspected) trolls to create prediction-market questions on Manifold, but then the troll is the person who adjudicates the outcome. Everyone will reason: "this person is not that interested in the integrity of the prediction market; they are much more interested in rewarding people who help them get above 25% YES, and punishing people who interfere with this. So they're likely to resolve the market for YES regardless of what actually happens." No prediction market will go below 25%.

This will still work fine as a filter for ban appeals, because the effort involved in doing all this prediction-market stuff is so high that nobody will do this unless they're confident Scott will overturn the ban. (It would be much lower-effort to just create a new account.)

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Feb 22, 2022Ā·edited Feb 22, 2022

In 2013, Scott estimated lizardman's constant at 4% in https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/ .

Lizardman's constant is a very useful concept. It is quite helpful to understand that a certain percentage of crazy replies to a question are likely to be noise that can be safely ignored.

I get the feeling that now this value is a lot higher in the US, seeing that in all kinds of questionnaires people are required to answer questions that to most people feel ridiculous - e.g. to list pronouns not only for themselves and other grownup members of their family, but also for their infants and toddlers, and to pick their gender out of "Male, Female, Other". I get the feeling - I might be wrong - that having to answer questions that feel ridiculous also causes people to be less responsible about the rest of the questionnaire. I don't have any sense for whether this would extend to questionnaires without such questions.

I'm curious if anyone estimated the current lizardman's constant for questionnaires with and without such questions (since these are probably different numbers), or if someone thinks they know how high it might go.

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Feb 21, 2022Ā·edited Feb 21, 2022

Does anyone have any ideas concerning a mechanism for the "wood wide web"? I keep hearing about how trees use fungal networks to communicate and trade with one another. This comes up in podcasts (e.g., Radiolab, from Tree to Shining Tree), books (e.g., Entangled life by merlin sheldrake), netflix (fantastic fungi). I think scientists injected some radioactive substance into a tree, and then found that substance appeared in the tree's saplings that were connected to the tree via the fungal networks, but not in unrelated trees or unconnected saplings. But in all cases, the authors are vague about how exactly it works.

I gather that the fungi are basically little tubes that connect trees by drilling into its roots. The relationship between fungi and tree is symbiotic. The fungi are better at finding minerals the tree needs like phosphorus, they send these minerals into the trees' roots in exchange for glucose. But suppose a tree wants to send some mineral via a fungal network to a sapling. Of all the different fungi that have drilled into the tree's roots, how does the tree know which is also connected to a particular sapling? And how does the tree ensure that the fungus will pass the minerals on to its sapling, rather than somewhere else?

Is it possible the tree can recognize a "message" from a sapling, and reward the fungus for delivering it? Can trees train fungi that anything sent through one particular point of connection is intended to be delivered to another particular tree? If so, how?

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I have found a good use for crypto!

It's a decent starting word for 6-letter Hello Wordle.

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How long should a caffeine detox last in order to reset caffeine tolerance properly? I learned from Gwern that I could instead take nicotine in order to stay alert, but should I do this for one week? Two? I find it difficult to understand the processes involved and how long they take. So, has ACX done a caffeine detox before, and if so how was it?

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Every time either here or in a social setting, when anxiety / self-destructive behaviours / neurotic tendencies comes up, there's a chorus of agreement. Is this *actually* that widespread? There doesn't seem to be any real data here, or even a very good way of framing the question.

Am *I* the weirdo for not being particularly anxious or failure-avoidant (which seems to drive a lot of the self-sabotaging behaviour)? Do that many people actually regularly fantasise about spontaneous fame and fortune?

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What's everyone's thoughts on Adam Curtis? I quite enjoy his documentaries but the bold historical claims are constantly ringing alarm bells for me.

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Not sure if this is appropriate for an open thread so feel free to delete. Does anyone here have an in with the Polymarket team? I'm looking to get an interview with them.

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I'm a member of an Eastern mystery cult that teaches that God came to earth and was poor, ugly, rejected, and killed. We can still mystically eat his flesh and drink his blood, and one day he will return to make us his bride.

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Scott, have you read the Genetic Lottery by Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden? I'm in the middle of it and finding it extremely stimulating, kind of excavating the intersection of the thorny questions (in that they kick up a lot of feelings, even when the answers are morally clear) of genetics, IQ, meritocracy, progressivism, and its discontents.

Related, wishing there was a bespoke search engine for SSC, ACX, and all the comment threads. And maybe the adjacent blogosphere.

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Feb 21, 2022Ā·edited Feb 21, 2022

Probabilistic justice systems are fun! And sometimes scary.

My favourite one is described in a Russian story named ā€œGusi-Gusi, Ga-Ga-Gaā€ (itā€™s an untranslatable onomatopoeia, an imitation of sounds geese make, and also part of a childrenā€™s nursery rhyme) by Vladislav Krapivin. He describes a vaguely western utopian society where everyone has a chip which transponds their unique citizen identifier (a ā€œbiological indexā€) and this serves as your ID, medical record, bank account and everything. It also has a very special penitentiary system where every sentence is death. Depending on the conviction, the convict gets some chance of serving, and the court computer ā€œtosses the coinā€ for them. If the toss is successful, they are executed, if not, they walk away free. Chance is higher for more serious crimes.

The whole story is about a lowly paper-pusher who jaywalks, gets a one in a million chance of serving, and the toss succeeds. He comes to serve his execution, but the only executioner is ill and due to a system error, his biological index is already marked as belonging to an executed man, so he is put in a secret prison for unchipped indexless people, who are except him all children, and becomes their guardian.

In the end, turns out this was all a sick prank by his friend who somehow worked on the court computer. He gets a show trial with 99/100 chance of serving.

The darkly funny part is that in Russia Krapivin is usually understood as a childrenā€™s writer, and this story came out in a book with childrenā€™s stories. I can only imagine what it feels like when you are reading stories about value of friendship and how cool it is to escape home and build a ship, or something, and then you get hit with this.

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Has anyone had experience with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy? Specifically using MDMA?

What has your experience been like?

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About the prediction-market-based reviews: Maybe I'm overlooking something, but wouldn't this just be a voting, and if the results correlate with probabilities then they only do so because Scott likes prediction markets?

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Feb 21, 2022Ā·edited Feb 21, 2022

In response to the proposal to read "A Clinical Introduction To Lacanian Psychoanalysis": There are things like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that resemble psychoanalysis and have research apparently showing they are good for something. It seems to me that ideas that have research purporting to show they work should be investigated before ideas that have no such research. So learning more about Lacan is useful if either: Lacan's approach has research claiming that it works (I haven't found any), or we're out of competing ideas that have research claiming they work.

Otherwise, any fool can make a pile of vague ideas. If we then randomly fixate on them, that's a bad use of our time.

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Hi, I would like to share a project of mine I have been developing in my free time: https://valeriob88.github.io/EvoAgent/about.html

I have always been deeply drawn by evolutionary models, and I have worked a bit in the field ~10years ago, but then got sidestepped and involved in other businesses.

Nowadays everyone seems interested in deep models trained with gradient descent, and few people are considering alternative optimization approach. In my tool, a population of agents is compteting for food. Agents have a NN coded by a genome which is under the influence of natural selection. Depending on their environment setup, they could develop all kinds of behaviour. I will soon add sexual reproduction which will really spice things up.

With EvoAgent I plan to build the tool to simulate a wide variety of evolutionary phenomena (see the future project section in link above). I also plan to use this as a experimental/modelling suite for testing evolutionary hypothesis about populations. Who knows, maybe I'll manage to publish a couple of papers with this tool.

If anyone is interested in collaborating/donating, please follow the link or contact me (email in the page, or just comment here).

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What do people think about representing the actual practice of ruling in a strategy game? Not anemically like Royal Court in CK3 but robustly? Turn based obviously so that complex things don't disrupt flow. You'd have feasting and court, probably itinerant court as was more common in history, hunts and tournaments. Not quite a social calender but close. Personal relationships that are potentially strong, multi-generational loyalty/friendship. With a backdrop similar to a map game but maybe with more flexible diplomatic options.

So you might host a social occasion of some kind, costing money, resources, and time, but potentially helping you connect with vassals personally and impress them. Invite people, snub people. Etc.

Sort of like mixing a sim rpg into the broad context of a fully functional map painter.

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I was delighted by an aside in one of Scottā€™s recent posts where he described his longtime daydream of being a famous musical performer. I had just been telling someone that since Iā€™ve always struggled with quantitative subjects, when I fantasize about being someone else I usually daydream about being a brilliant physicist or mathematician. So now Iā€™m wondering: in what fields do other readers of this blog dream about being fabulously successful?

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Given the very small but non-zero chance of nuclear weapon exchange (mostly considering Putin's threats which stated it explicitly) and conditional on that, a sub-50% but still significant chance of attacking population/economic centers and not just tactical targets, has anyone in big cities in the US or other targets made some adjustments accordingly?

Adapting behavior to fluctuating covid risks is much easier than adapting behavior to an 0.05% chance of a successful nuclear strike on Boston, although the expected risk is comparable.

Has anyone here considered the practical aspects? Stocking on supplies, triggers to move somewhere else?

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Is it just me or is substack's comment linking system too bad to be able to actually find the comments people were banned for? most of the given links are to Scott saying "user was banned for this" without showing the parent comment; the "return to thread" button on them takes me to nothing in particular and i cannot search for either Scott's comment mentioning banning or the username of the person banned.

i guess it doesn't really matter, it's just sort of morbid curiousity. but if Scott's intention is to show off the kinds of things people get banned for around here, it's not working, at least for me.

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Feb 21, 2022Ā·edited Feb 21, 2022

I was just listening to a neuroethology podcast about mate attachment mechanisms (Huberman Lab episode 59, "The science of love, desire & attachment). Huberman began by saying that the brain uses the same systems for pair bonding as for familial bonding, which I found surprising and a little icky, but anyway. Part of this system, which is very active during sex, is called the autonomic matching system, which tries to match emotional state with another person (and I suppose ideally leads to simultaneous orgasms).

Then he mentioned John & Julie Gottman's "love lab", where they studied the behavior of couples and learned (they claim) to predict with very high accuracy whether couples will eventually break up. (Debunking of their work here: https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/03/a-dissection-of-john-gottman-s-love-lab.html. TLDR: they didn't make predictions; they waited long enough for some couples to break up, then built a model which "predicted" breakup. But no hold-outs or cross validation; no testing the model on anybody not used to construct the model.) But I don't think the "debunking" means that the behaviors they found predicted breakups most strongly don't, in fact, predict breakups. I think it just means we shouldn't take their "accuracy" figure seriously.

One of the strongest predictors of breakup (Huberman may have said "the strongest"; anyway, it was the one he singled out to discuss) was contempt, which he described as the "inversion" of the autonomic matching system. If person B feels contempt for person A, then when person B detects that X pleases person A, person B feels disgust for X rather than shared pleasure in X; and likewise is pleased by things that displease A.

Huberman didn't say whether anyone had verified that contempt uses the same neural circuits as autonomic attachment; but it would be redundant to build a second brain mechanism for contempt if it does just invert attachment. Particularly since there's no obvious /purpose/ for a dedicated contempt mechanism.

Presumably there is some adjustment, probably involving neurotransmitters, which ratchets attachment up. Perhaps contempt is a side-effect of this system: sufficiently low attractiveness adjusts a "match output" signal down so far that it produces repulsion.

If so, then contempt, human tribalism, and the generation of, and stability of, 2-party political systems, could be explained as a by-product of this brain mechanism for mating and simultaneous orgasms.

I think this theory would predict that status and sexual desirability should correlate with political agreement. So, for instance, people in a community would attune themselves politically with the high-status people they know, and should be biased to agree with high-status people and to disagree with people they perceive as low-status. Likewise, people should be biased to perceive people in an opposing political party as lower-status, and people in their party as higher-status.

A problem for this theory is that people have lots of relationships with people they don't regard as potential mates, and my impression is that they don't form revulsion as easily for people who aren't presenting as potential mates. Many people are happy to be friends with people who would repulse them as mates. But if non-potential mates provide no signal, while potential mates provide a signal, that should give signals strong enough for the entire population to divide into opposing belief systems.

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Feb 21, 2022Ā·edited Feb 21, 2022

I'm reserializing Anna Karenina at something like the original rate of publication (works out to ~2ch/wk) at this Substack: https://grafleotolstoy.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile

If people want to read along, I think this be will be a much more enjoyable way to read probably the world's greatest novel and a cool social reading experiment besides.

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Feb 21, 2022Ā·edited Feb 21, 2022

You know those times when you're futilely checking all your feeds for something interesting to read? I build a website for that last week: www.ReadSomethingInteresting.com. Would love to hear feedback or suggestions. If y'all enjoy, I'll put more links on.

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As an update to my versusgame adventure, I attempted to withdraw my winnings. I was presented with a $200 weekly withdrawal limit which I had not been informed of when signing up or depositing. I attempted to withdraw the maximum and was confronted with an error page telling me to try again on 2/22. However it appears that the weekly limit functionality will not let me attempt to withdraw at all until 2/26. I checked around and it appears that other users are having similar issues.

If it wasn't clear already, I strongly recommend everybody stay away from this platform. Fortunately I don't have too much on there but I do hope I am able to get it out eventually.

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The "Give Gift" button below comments seems new.

I don't suppose substack would allow you to create a new subscription tier that is $1 for 3 days, or $0.10 for seven-ish hours? A $10 gift seems like it would have to be a pretty stellar comment.

Maybe a version of 'reddit gold' here would have the same issues as upvotes and also other issues.

On the other hand, if we really ran with this, and integrated manifold, maybe people could solicit patronage in advance, with a promise to make quality contributions to future comment threads.

How do you tie such a promise to a measurable outcome to resolve the question though? I think you'd need a karma system to point to, which the community has already strongly voted against.

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This video is a two hour overview of the 2008 crash, crytpo, and NFTs. I'd been getting annoyed at youtubers who fill time with banter and repetition. Be careful what you ask for. This is quite an efficient video. (Well, efficient about bitcoin and NFTs., I'm not sure who the 2008 crash is connected to them.) You might want to listen in small chunks or read the transcript.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g&ab_channel=FoldingIdeas

Transcript:

https://downsub.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DYQ_xWvX1n9g

I went into this mildly pro-crypto. My feeling is that there are things wrong with fiat currency, though not so bad that fiat currency needs to be replaced. Hyperinflation is rare, but it's very bad when it happens. Sanctions can unjustly impoverish societies and don't work very well. Not everything that's illegal should be illegal.

However, crypto being generally valuable is dependent on it being useful for small transactions, and that doesn't seem to be happening, and it may be impossible for it to happen unless there's some major inspiration for a new structure.

Anyone want to argue that crypto is a valuable addition to the financial world?

I've seen crypto called a Ponzi scheme, and I'm not sure it started that way. It may have become one. Thoughts?

For a while, I was thinking "There's a lot of silly money out there. Why shouldn't I get some of it?" And I came up with TulipCoin (I think the name is taken), with the idea being to market it honestly-- "This is ridiculous, you could have fun spending money doing something ridiculous." However, my attention went to a tulip-breeding game to attract attention to the site. Maybe I should just work on a tulip-breeding game. I'm clearly not of the temperament to swim with the sharks.

If crypto and NFTs collapse, what effect would that have on the rest of the economy? If we're lucky, the apparent value is fairy gold which can disappear harmlessly. In a follow-up, Olsen says he thinks that a collapse of crypto will probably be harmless, but he doesn't know whether there's a hidden risk like some banks being substantially invested in crypto.

I'm dubious about the end of the video. I have trouble keeping track of my own subconscious, and I've become dubious about anyone's claims about large numbers of people's subconscious motivations.

Recently, I was writing about 1 Corinthians 13, and how there's no substitute for love, or at least good will. I think part of the problem with crypto is that it's an effort to substitute structure for trustworthiness, and if you've got deeply untrustworthy people, you just can't have machines supply your trustworthiness. Actually, I look at crypto and NFTs, and I wonder how anyone is making and selling anything that isn't crap. I think ethics and conscientiousness in the real world haven't been studied enough.

If the trustworthiness problem isn't substantially solved, I'm dubious about uploading one's consciousness into a computer. I was dubious about it anyway because I'm not sure you can get a person without a body, but even if you can, it may not be worth it if it's constantly under attack.

Crypto and NFTs seem to be extremely scammy ecosystems. There have been scammers and suckers for a very long time. Does it get worse when times are bad?

Paypal is offering to do $1 transactions in crypto, both buying and selling. I have no idea whether this works or makes any sense. While Paypal is unreliable (they can take your money at any time,and sometimes they do), I don't want it taken down unless something better is available.

https://billypenn.com/2022/02/12/phillycoin-cryptocurrency-philadelphia-citycoins-kenney-wheeler/

Philadelphia is considering a crypto lottery. I hope if they do it,that it's no worse than any other lottery.

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Is RationalWiki a reliable, responsible steward of information related to Rationalist discussion?

After having been directed to RationalWiki a few times recently via links in various essays and articles, I got the distinct impression that the site is contributed to/controlled by a relatively small number of very zealous individuals who seem to not make much effort at all to maintain balance or neutrality. It's as if the worst editorial practices of Wikipedia (page-camping, ax-grinding, very selective application of the "maintained by a community" maxim) have been shipped straight to RatWiki, but because the scope of the site is so much narrower the ratio of heat to light is way higher than it's parent site.

The degree to which this occurs seems to range from tongue-in-cheek expressions of a preference for leftist politics (see pages: Communism, AnCap); to needlessly snarky and self-defeating (see page: SJW) right through to almost-libellous slander and targetted personal abuse (see page: Emil Kirkegaard).

Given the structure and philosophy of Wikis in general, was it wrong to expect RatWiki to be immune (on the basis of their presumed rationality) to the same failure mechanisms as Wiki itself? What went wrong?

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It seems extremely hard to get good publicly available information about the military/naval aspects of a US conflict with China over Taiwan.

In this podcast, Steve thinks were the US to come to Taiwan's aid, naval carrier groups would be extremely vulnerable to chinese missile attack near Taiwan, and that breaking a naval blockage china imposed on Taiwan would be very dangerous.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-future-of-humanity-is-ivf-babies-and/id1548137490?i=1000551022938

Peter Zeihan recently publicly mocked the idea of a Chinese/US naval conflict, saying plainly that the chinese would lose terribly, and all we would have to do in the event of an amphibious invasion is send a few destroyers to the west coast of taiwan and shoot stuff down.

These seem like people who know what they're talking about disagreeing about some

pretty basic facts. anyone care to weigh in?

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Two random observations/questions on UKR/RUS:

1. if I'm reading them right, the prediction markets are giving a significant probability to an invasion happening but not going much further than the Donbas. Is this something knowledgeable commentators also think might happen? If so, is the implicit idea that formally occupying the Donbas (for some nominally "protective" reason) might let Putin claim a win at home without going far enough to actually incur much in the way of costs and consequences?

2. It occurs to me that Biden's strategy of preannouncing everything his intelligence has learned that Putin is planning, in an attempt to deprive him of excuses, is a very interesting instance of a state weaponizing transparency in a way that these days we usually see from non-state actors. Seems like Martin Gurri must be taking a considerable interest in this-- might it be a result of people in the administration actually learning something from _The Revolt of the Public_? Or is this kind of leak-everything tactic not so new as I think? It reminds me of the constant stream of TGIF leaks from mid-2010s Google (I keep expecting to see somebody livetweeting one of Putin's strategy meetings) but I'm sure others will have different associations with it.

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founding

A jury of peers for ban appeals? Scott can always overrule.

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I'm probably taking the numbers more literally than intended, but it seems hard to believe that any warning could be "1% of a ban". Scott was clearly annoyed enough at the comments to respond with a warning, and put it in the open thread. I find it hard to believe that a person could make comments that Scott finds that objectionable *19* more times, without being banned.

And if you consider the effect of this paired with more severe infractions, it would weaken any assumption of charity that Scott might make.

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Love this probabilistic, prediction-market-based justice system

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Feb 21, 2022Ā·edited Feb 21, 2022

Really really interested to see how the appeal efforts go in bullet four. On one hand I hope you donā€™t get enough data to get a really great answer because it would be annoying, but on the otherā€¦ this is the only type of high level scheme I think can work long-term for fair moderation.

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In https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-ukraine-cube-manifold?utm_source=url, Scott comments on a market predicting enhancement of human intellience by 2050.

The one thing that makes me thing this is possible is the discovery that some birds can pack in twice as many neurons per unit of mass:

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/26/7255

If someone could find the genes for that and transfer them to mammals, we might be onto something.

Of course, on the other side of the bet is the possibility of human extinction, due to some idiot letting the hyperintelligent rats escape.

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Where are people finding the best information regarding the Ukraine/Russia situation? Are there substacks I should be reading? Twitter users I should follow?

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A somewhat SSC/EA inspired cost-benefit analysis of train horn laws at US train crossings: https://statistagilfix.blogspot.com/2022/02/a-nation-at-crossroads-cost-benefit.html

TLDR Train horn laws seem to save around 200 lives a year (value: ~$3 billion), but the costs of their noise on health and quality of life are something like $20 billion a year

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Is there any steelman discussion or commentary on Landmark Forum or other transformational personal development programs written by Scott or the rationalist community writ large?

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founding

Came up with an unusual geopolitical move for Putin today - assassinate Lukashenko. Russian troops are already in Belarus, presumably wouldn't be hard to seize control in the ensuing chaos. He gets to enlarge Russia without worsening the conflict with the West.

Epistemic status: joke/wild speculation.

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deletedFeb 21, 2022Ā·edited Feb 21, 2022
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deletedFeb 21, 2022Ā·edited Feb 21, 2022
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