1915 exhibition of 'sword feats'. Watched scenes in Chinese etc. fantasy movies about cutting leaves and ribbons with one pass of a sword? Here (amongst other tricks) is the Western version!
It might just be arguments about how much we should care about rationality—understood broadly as "trying to be right"—vs. other things in ourselves, other people, in conversations etc
E.g. if my friend believes in astrology should I care? If we get along except when we argue about it, and they say "let's agree to disagree," do I bring up Aumann's agreement theorem?
My apologies if this has been asked and answered already, but is anyone aware of Scott's plans for another round of ACX grants. I've developed an idea that I would love to submit in the next round. Thanks!
Curious if anyone has done research on whether eating a variety of fruits and vegetables has an advantage over taking a multivitamin and a fiber supplement, and if so, why.
Ukraine: what's up with the stalled convoy north of Kyiv? The Russian military seems inept. Reports on the BBC say Uke forces are holding them up. Russia has no infantry cover for convoy? Any good reports about this? I'd really like to hear from some military wonk.
Should you pay off your house? On the one hand mortgage rates are low and stock market returns are high; it would seem good to borrow money cheaply and invest it productively. On the other hand, to cover a mortgage in a FIRE scenario, you need 25x the annual mortgage payment in investments. But paying off the mortgage would cost me only ~19x the annual payment.
I have appreciated all the Georgism-posting but I'm also interested in this question and any other high-quality resources on housing from a personal-finance perspective. My sense is that there's a lot of richness to these considerations: price to rent ratio, value of the mortgage interest deduction, etc. while most mainstream resources about homeownership are at an elementary-school reading level and don't address them.
There's a saying that goes something like: "Only unfree countries don't let their own citizens leave."
But what if your country lets you leave anytime you want, but requires you to scan a passport on the way out so the government knows you've left? What if the border agents or airport guards arrest you if the scan reveals you're wanted for a crime? Is your country "unfree"?
“ NATO uses Ukraine as Trojan horse to strike nuclear blow on Russia
World » Europe
Can the West arrange a large-scale military provocation against Russia and use Ukraine as a Trojan horse? According to confidential sources, the NATO General Staff is considering any scenario to throw Russia into the flames of war, even if it takes to resort to nuclear weapons. It seems that we are witnessing Operation Barbarossa 2 plan unfolding before our very eyes.”
The grammar is pretty clunky. Looks like machine translation.
I'd like suggestions for a good book that lays out some of the basic AI stuff: What is AI; kinds of AI; ANI, AGI & ASI. Models of how we could go about getting a computer to do human-level tasks. Details of how AGI "bootstrapping" to ASI might work-- how do you teach it to bootstrap). AI alignment. Paths by which a non-aligned AI could reach the point of destroying our species. I have read Tim Urban's article called "The AI Revolution" (https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html). Now I want to step up to a user-friendly book for intelligent layman. Can somebody recommend one that's good? I am currently considering Nick Bostrom's book *Superintelligence*. A bit bothered by its being 7 years old, but not sure whether that matters.
I was reading one of Scott’s old essays about superintelligence and one section talks about possibly preventing evil superintelligence by programming constraints into it’s goal. The example is making a super intelligent AI and giving it the goal of ‘cure cancer’, but programmign a constraint of ‘but dont kill any humans’ or ‘don’t nuke the world’ etc. And the argument against it was that if the AI’s goal is to ‘cure cancer’ then it would then want to remove those constraints if the ‘cure cancer’ goal without the ‘dont’t nuke the world’ constraint is easier and has higher probability of success.
But arent the constraints part of the AI’s goal? I feel like it is a big assumption that it would even consider changing it’s restrictions to reach it’s goal, but aren’t they one in the same? Otherwise logically, the best course of action for a superintelligent AI is to remove it’s goal, or make it’s goal be nothing, in order to “achieve” it’s goal. My thinking is, either superintelligences suicide themselves by modifying their goal to “nothing”, or superintelligences don’t consider modifying their goal/constraints an option. Do you have any thoughts in this?
Shameless plug for a new article on my Substack published yesterday - "The deluge of crappy papers must stop!". If you're interested in metascience, the replication crisis, or the COVID-19 infodemic then it will probably be of interest. I reference Scott's article on Ivermectin. Some ideas are proposed on how to incentivize quality over quantity in science.
Crowdsourcing for a paper I'm writing about moral curiosity (some of you may have taken the related survey last summer). I'm looking for examples of public figures who have displayed moral curiosity--i.e., demonstrated a desire to learn about moral questions and others' moral viewpoints. If you come across anything or have any ideas, please comment here or send me an email (Rachel.Hartman@unc.edu). Thank you!
Are there any immunology experts here? We have made a strange observation in our family related to covid and vaccinations. We adults got vaccinated as early as possible with mRNA vaccines 3x. Both of our children (9 and 12 years old) have been in regular school for most of the last 2 years, with only 8 weeks of homeschooling in the spring of 2021. Both of us adults have been completely in the office for the last year working with many other colleagues - mostly without masks. Over the first 1.5 years there was no one in our family who was Corona positive although there were some positive cases at school and workplaces during that time. Neither of us adults has ever been Corona positive. Last fall, a child was vaccinated with Pfizer/Biontech mRNA. 2 days later, he had a fever and tested Corona positive by PCR. In February this year, the second child was vaccinated with Pfizer/Biontech for the first time. 3 days later it developed very severe fever over 40°C for 2 days and was tested by PCR Corona positive.
1.5 years of daily contact with Covid viruses and no case and then 2x within 2-3 days after the first vaccination a Covid infection in both our children - is this coincidence or does anyone know background, correlations? Thanks for any feedback and/or hints were we to discuss this.
PS: we can rule out prior asymptomatic infections at that time because we all had weekly PCR pool tests in school and offices - always with negative results prior to the infections.
I'd on a whim been recently interested to learn more about my Ukrainian heritage (on my dad's dad's side), e.g. tried making borscht for the first time, and then Recent Historical Events started happening so that's been a trip.
There's that 40-mile Russian convoy on its way to Kyiv right now and I got no clue what Ukraine's planning to do about it even though it's in a line on a road (easy target? but probably has anti-air defenses?). No idea what's going to happen in general with the talks or otherwise. Probably not a nuclear war (since NATO hasn't directly engaged Russia), so that's good, but still heck.
Georgists: Tasmania's left-wing government is reducing land tax in the hope of lowering rent. Meanwhile, estimates for empty homes in Tasmania have been as high as 2,000.
I have a question for our many AI alignment smartasses. So far the stuff I've seen here and in a few other places about the question of whether artificial super-intelligence will destroy the human race involves models in which human beings and AI are pretty separate entities: The people build the AI, and try to set things up so that no matter how smart AI becomes it stays on our side. The AI bootstraps itself into super-intelligence and does whatever it does, depending on how things play out with the constraints and goals built into it when it was a child. But to me it seems that as AI becomes more advanced, the opportunities for human goals and loyalties and emotions to become entangled with AI become greater and greater. There is already some blurring of the boundaries between the tech and human realms, some situations where computer-generated realities move and motivate people powerfully -- think of things like waves of intense group emotion facilitated by social media -- or gaming addiction. To me it seems that as AI advances, so too will the opportunities for various kinds of deep bonds to develop between AI and members of our species, and that catastrophic results for our species could develop in a way that involves human-AI bonding -- i.e. people who are on the side of the AI because they are in love with it, dependent on it. deluded by it etc etc. So my question is, are there any theories of how things will play out with ASI that involve this path?
Baseline, the violent crime victimization rate is 1.64% per year (per NCVS survey, not convictions), and I guess the average person probably comes into close physical proximity with 10,000 different strangers in a year, so let's say the risk is 1 in 600,000 per contact. Then if you're sourcing the strangers online the risk is probably 1.66x lower than that because very online people skew nerdier. So my guesstimate of the risk that a random stranger you meet online will physically hurt you if you low key randomly bump into them at starbucks is 1 in 10^6. But if you arrange a meeting, like for dating, maybe it's more emotionally charged and maybe that raises the risk 1 in 10^4. But I still don't understand this special paranoia about meeting people online in particular. Anyone could harass you the minute you step into any public place. People go to public places anyway, and learn that they're generally safe. But online, it seems like people go through extra safety rituals that are probably just as unnecessary as the TSA making people take their shoes off (e.g., weeks of messaging back and forth before meeting, background checks, ghosting anyone who seems slightly unusual just in case they're an axe murderer) Internet safety is to starbucks safety as airport safety is to train safety. In Starbucks and trains, no special precautions are taken, and it's fine. Online and in airports, people take elaborate precautions of dubious necessity and it's extremely rare for anything bad to happen (beyond rude messages that can be blocked with one click). I'm curious about why fear of meeting people online seems to be bigger than the actual risks warrant. I guess the novelty of it makes it more interesting for media to cover the downsides, and availability heuristic does the rest, but I'm not confident this is the whole explanation.
I have never read anything Lacan before. But now as I’m reading Bruce Fink’s Lacanian Psychoanalysis (and loving it and looking forward to your review!), much of Sadly Porn becomes clearer. I can’t help but think how your review might’ve differed if you had read Fink before Teach, rather than the reverse. Do you have thoughts on this?
How hard is it to block/jam Starlink? I'm thinking specifically of a battle-ground situation like current events would make you think of. If Musk sends 10k downlinks to Ukraine, how far do they have to stay from the action to be useful?
(I am also interested in how easily uplink jamming is).
It solves several limitations of older lever action designs, except for one: it remains difficult to clean the barrel and internal mechanism, and it is hard to remove and correctly reinstall the mechanism. From the website:
"Due to the complexity of the Henry Long Ranger 6.5 Creedmoor lever’s rack and pinion gear system and the need for precise reassembly to ensure proper gear timing, the company discourages owner removal of the rifle’s bolt and lever. In fact, the factory routinely receives rifles for reassembly from chagrined owners who attempt it on their own. (Shipping a rifle, by the way, costs $35 or more.) "
How could this final flaw in the lever-action rifle design be fixed?
I'm thinking of supporting Ukraine by buying Ukrainian vodka and then reselling it to other people. Is this legal?
I'd like to help Ukraine by buying their products, but none of their goods are available in my area except for vodka. Even the vodka is hard to get, as I'd have to drive one hour to get to the nearest liquor store selling it. I'm thinking of buying several bottles of it, bringing it back to my home, and reselling the unopened bottles to people in my neighborhood at a discount. I'd take a small loss on each bottle.
Basically, the US government is trying to find all the pandemic capable viruses it can, and it will then POST THEIR FULL GENOMES ONLINE.
This is potentially a catastrophically stupid blunder that we intend to make but have not made yet. The recommended actions from Rob are to tell USAID directly at https://www.usaid.gov/contact-us, tweet at them, if you live in a state with a senator on subcommittee on state department and USAID management (https://www.govtrack.us/congress/committees/SSFR/14) contact your senator, contact Washington State University if you have a relevant tie, and otherwise spread this, get attention, apply whatever leverage you have.
I am sure someone has done this before, but I thought it would be interesting to map the blog network through linking up blogrolls. I started here and mapped the first ~300 connections the branches connected me to. The end result is here: https://jacobwood27.github.io/035_blog_graph/
Does anyone who has successfully self-taught a language have advice on engaging ways of practicing listening? I'm currently at too early a level to understand anything other than things targeted at young children or beginning learners, which means it's very tedious. (I also don't have the option of going and living in somewhere other than the US).
If the answer is just "suck it up and do the boring thing" that's fine, but I would definitely prefer something that made it so I needed less motivation.
I had heard when I was younger that having kids changes you significantly: I recall one person writing that they don't feel like they were a "complete human being" until after they became a father. I filed that away under "interesting if true" and went on to later have two kids of my own.
I can report that after having kids my empathy has shot through the roof. I never used to mind bad things happening to people in movies: it's a movie. But now I get very emotional if a child is threatened in a serious way in a movie, and I find I care a lot more for the non-child characters as well. This is perhaps unsurprising: when I see a kid in trouble it's easy for me to imagine my own kids in the same position. But I wasn't exactly a psychopath before I had kids: is my increased empathy really just chalked up to having more skin in the game? That seems very cynical, but I can't imagine what else it would be.
Case in point: I have lived through a few wars and violent conflicts breaking out somewhere in the world. Afghan war, Iraq war, Kuwait, who knows how many civil wars in Africa, etc. Yet I feel very strongly about the war in Ukraine. I saw a video (you probably saw it to, it got around) of a father saying goodbye to his daughter and wife as they went on a train to safety and he stayed to fight. His daughter looked about 6-8 years old, and they were both crying. I've certainly seen emotionally charged war footage before, but this was the first time I actually felt anything about it besides a vague sense of "Aw, that's too bad." Now I was touched so much I almost started crying myself. I'm feeling sad just writing about it.
All this to say: sample size 1, parenthood fixed my ability to care about other humans.
"if two people agree on the possibilty of a long-term future outcome (say, 20+ years off) they will very likely agree on the desirability of that outcome."
My hunch here is that most of our beliefs about valence are really just compressed forms of the long-term causal graph.
I'm a physician in my mid 40s and over the last few months have felt a little less cognitively sharp. Not enough that anyone external would notice (I've asked colleagues and my wife), but I notice journal articles feeling a little denser, I've ran more stop signs then in my previous life combined, and my chess.com ranking is distinctly trending down.
I figure my next steps are to start playing with my diet, exercise, alcohol use, etc. Does anyone know any high sensitivity cognitive tests that would be useful for trending my performance? I don't think the mini-moca is going to cut it :). Thanks!
Like many people with a small-town upbringing I grew up plinking with .22s so am not petrified of firearms. At the same time I don’t have a real interest in guns and have looked at 2A idealogues as contributing to more problems than they are solving. Having said that, the success of the resistance in Ukraine has got me thinking about how an armed population maybe really can act as a brake on tyranny. When I google recommendations for firearms suitable for armed resistance against an occupying aggressor I mostly get a bunch of gun porn and fringey sovereign citizen stuff, when I am really more interested in a Swiss-style model where citizens are expected to do their part if the wheels ever come off. I guess I’m leaning into the “well-regulated” (as in “not batshit crazy”) aspects of 2A responsibilities. What is/are suitable firearms for the reluctant patriot who is willing to spend time on the range but not wanting to sign up for Galt’s Gulch? Presumably some combination of reliability, ease of use, field serviceability, ready access to ammunition and parts, etc.
How well do modern armies deal with forests and rivers? Irpin to the NW of Kyiv seems to be holding so far but if Russia takes it, will they continue straight towards Kyiv through the heavily wooded Holosiiv National Park or will they be forced to go south then wheel around towards the capital? In the latter case will that leave the Russian left flank exposed?
And the Dneiper is awfully wide. Could one side of the city hold out even if the other falls? I imagine bridges and other static infrastructure are very vulnerable to modern PGM.
Could anyone point me towards an mental health support forum with a rationalist bent? I am relatively new to ACX and LessWrong, and I have found just reading posts and comments so very helpful!
I am looking for an online forum where individuals share daily challenges and successes with others who also value the work of developing practical rationality in their lives, knowing it offers a solid foundation for mental health and wellbeing. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated!
Many are claiming that Ukraine being considered for NATO is largely responsible for the Russian invasion. and that if the west had said 'no NATO for Ukraine', this would not have happened. It seems to me though that the opposite is true, that if the west had said 'invasion of Ukraine will be stopped with heavy force', then that would have prevented this from happening. My reasoning why:
Putin/Russia has actually increased their chances of NATO going hot against them by enacting this invasion, so that's probably not a main factor, it's probably just a pretext.
Putin/Russia invaded Ukraine because they want Ukraine's territory and resources, and thought that Ukraine going separate after the fall of the USSR was a mistake.
Putin/Russia invaded Ukraine because they believed they would be successful at taking it, and the cost would not be too high. I suspect Ukraine is putting up more of a fight than they anticipated, but on the other hand the main fighting in the 2003 Iraq war took about a month, and there was a much larger strength difference there.
If nato were to actually commit to defending Ukraine, it's fairly clear that Putin/Russia would not be successful at taking it, so they would not try.
Some questions that the war in Ukraine made me ponder:
A. Freedom-fighters vs. proxies
The Ukrainian people have made it clear over the past decades that most of them don't want closer ties to Russia. Russia invaded the Ukraine. We condemn Russia for it.
According to this 2016 BBC post ( https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-18269210 ), South Ossetia is a region of Georgia that's ethnically distinct from both Russia and Georgia, which has historically preferred ties to Russia over Georgia. They declared independence from Georgia in 1992. In 2008, Georgia invaded them, and Russia stepped into defend Georgia.
Question: Instead of praising Russia for defending South Ossetia from Georgian aggression, we condemned the Ossetian separatists as "Russian proxies". Why?
B. Ethnic cleansing
The conflict with Ukraine turned hot in 2014, when Russia similarly invaded to support separatists movement in Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula where the majority of residents are ethnically Russian, and Donbas, where 39% of residents are of Russian ethnicity and most people say their native language is Russian.
Question: If Ukraine somehow holds onto some territory and maintains its independence, would they be justified in ethnically cleansing regions of what remains of Ukraine which have a large Russian population? (By "ethnic cleansing" I mean expelling Russians, and possibly ethnic Russian Ukranian citizens.)
D. Political cleansing
If your answer to B is "No, because this is a political conflict, not an ethnic conflict", does that mean it would okay for Ukraine to expel people who favor union with Russia in order to prevent further separatist movements? Is kicking people out of their homes for their politics better than kicking them out of their homes for their ethnicity?
A variant of the question that has already been asked:
1. What does Russia winning the war with Ukraine look like? Formal annexation of all of Ukraine and unification into a single country, formal annexation of just the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, formal annexation of just the parts of them that were previously occupied? Keeping borders intact but installing a puppet government? Annexing Ukraine and moving on? Do relations with Europe and the US (i.e. the countries currently imposing sanctions) feature in this at all?
2. What does Russia losing the war with Ukraine look like? Do the borders get redrawn? Do relations with Europe and the US (i.e. the countries currently imposing sanctions) feature in this at all?
I've been digging around a lot lately to find the most interesting magical systems in video games. Dominions 3-5 is a pretty obvious example as well as, duh, Master Of Magic.
However I haven't found a ton of great stuff. There's no game where Divination magic really does much, even in sim games like Academagia. Very few games have meaningful Illusion magic. No game has any sort of Charm/Manipulation magic that does much.
Combat magic and enchantments that impact combat are the most common type for obvious reasons. You might occasionally find weather or geography magic.
Shadow Of Forbidden Gods has the most sort of manipulation magic. It is basically a game where you pretend to be an evil god trying to conquer the world. Except your conquer it through dark magic and deception. Some of the magic is a bit simple but at least it actually involves interesting non-combat spells. Enshadowing important characters, driving people insane, etc.
Still trying to dig up niche games that I might have missed with unique magic.
A very sweet short story about an AI based on Kermit.
I've got something in the back of my mind about it possibly being easier to build an AI around an excellent simulation of a human rather than trying to build one from scratch or basing it on actual humans.
Chuck Palahniuk, in his book Adjustment Day, introduces the idea that patriarchal cultures organise wars between themselves whenever the number of young men in their country reaches a certain level. The idea is that the older men feel threatened by younger ones, so they do this to keep their numbers down. I wonder, is there is any statistical backing to this notion?
Is it now permanently AI summer? eg maybe deep this or adversarial that might fall to a hype cycle but in general there will never be another AI winter?
So no culture war allowed versus no politics allowed. I'm trying to draw a Venn diagram for these things. My sense is that culture wars is a subset of political, is this your sense? But I then get stuck trying to think of things that are political, but not part of culture wars... maybe there is not much of a difference?
Is anyone finding the conflict in Ukraine... underwhelming from a technical point of view? It's horrific in human costs. But everything seems so botched and twenty or thirty years ago that there's nothing new or exciting that I've seen. Weapons systems look, if anything, less sophisticated than recent wars. Cyberwarfare is wider but blunter than similar attempts a decade ago. Putin's new economic strategy doesn't seem to have actually worked. Tactics wouldn't be out of place in Chechnya. And so on.
Normally you can see how dramatic moments hold lessons for the future. Give hints on how to fight the next war. But all I'm not getting any of that. The one big update was that the Washington security state appears to have completely called this one top to bottom. It makes me wonder if everyone spent the last twenty years kind of upset about having to work on this whole terrorism thing and hoping they could get back to their TRUE passion, great power conflict.
Anyone got recommendations for good technical audio content (podcast/lectures) on stats/ML stuff? (Not intro level, more something for someone who's actually worked in the field)
I actually have a very basic question: how do I form a prediction about future events using Bayes' theory? For instance, consider the following question: Will AI surpass humans at solving competitive math problems by 2025? I want to say yes, seeing as AI seems to be doing pretty well at that front. But how should I quantify that certainty? Is it 80% or 70%?
No culture wars, but politics and bloody wars ok? - So, personal update: the Ukrainian town where I own a small apartment got liberated/de-militarized/de-nazified by Putin's men this morning, i.e. occupied by the Vlad-the-Invader. No fighting there, it seems/I hope. - I actually do not care for the flat, but hey, what makes me cringe and break in tears when I hear Ukranians on TV or see flash-protests in Moscow/Piter against the war? - Does not seem rational. - My disgust about Putin is easily explained: out-grouping the enemy. Seems to me evol.-psychology/anthropology/sociology do not put enough stress on the strengths of in-grouping-instincts. "Hate" seems to get more attention than "love". (btw: I am no hippie, think: Batman. Lego-Batman.)
I tried playing with Manifold as unlike other prediction markets it is not requiring cryptocurrency and has something as reward for predicting well[1]. But Manifold has many very silly estimates like
Events that already happened sitting below 100% (Kiev invasion by Russia) are embarrassing for a prediction market.
It is barely profitable to estimate that chance for exploding nuclear weapon over populated area is below 4%
No idea how to solve it but "Will aliens land before March 2022?" at 1% and being unable to profit from pushing it lower and risking that it would mistakenly resolve as yes is extra-silly.
Any idea how to solve THAT in context of Manifold? What is going wrong? Or is it fundamental problem of "runner of market resolves it without recourse".
(BTW, I created https://manifold.markets/M/by-20220401-manifold-representative "By 2022-04-01 Manifold representative will admit that reward function used as of 2022-02-28 results in silly results for nearly impossible/certain events." - any idea how to increase chance that will be at least noticed by them?)
[1] instead of Metaculus primarily awarding answering a lot, without regards for quality - you can answer at absurd levels but ensuring that no matter answer you gain points, making such points irrelevant
I would like to be less selfish, hedonist, and egoistic. Meditation is often mentioned as being helpful, but does anyone have other non-faith practices that help with working on having a purer heart?
With the news being what they are, wasn't an exception to no-politics rule justified? Perhaps simply skipping a number to switch with the next post. (I get that it might not be what Scott wants right now though.)
Edit: Ah, I see, it's "no culture wars" rather than "no politics". Didn't even notice (plus saw a commenter saying they'll delete their comments because those were politics).
For those of you interested in Western martial arts traditions, link courtesy of Grumpy Swordsperson via Peter Morwood:
https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/grumpyswordsperson/168164665440
1915 exhibition of 'sword feats'. Watched scenes in Chinese etc. fantasy movies about cutting leaves and ribbons with one pass of a sword? Here (amongst other tricks) is the Western version!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L49a6mE94r4&t=55s
It might just be arguments about how much we should care about rationality—understood broadly as "trying to be right"—vs. other things in ourselves, other people, in conversations etc
E.g. if my friend believes in astrology should I care? If we get along except when we argue about it, and they say "let's agree to disagree," do I bring up Aumann's agreement theorem?
My apologies if this has been asked and answered already, but is anyone aware of Scott's plans for another round of ACX grants. I've developed an idea that I would love to submit in the next round. Thanks!
Curious if anyone has done research on whether eating a variety of fruits and vegetables has an advantage over taking a multivitamin and a fiber supplement, and if so, why.
Are there any other markets for when a variant-specific vaccine will be approved, like this one? https://manifold.markets/SylvieLiberman/which-month-will-a-vaccine-for-a-co
Ukraine: what's up with the stalled convoy north of Kyiv? The Russian military seems inept. Reports on the BBC say Uke forces are holding them up. Russia has no infantry cover for convoy? Any good reports about this? I'd really like to hear from some military wonk.
Should you pay off your house? On the one hand mortgage rates are low and stock market returns are high; it would seem good to borrow money cheaply and invest it productively. On the other hand, to cover a mortgage in a FIRE scenario, you need 25x the annual mortgage payment in investments. But paying off the mortgage would cost me only ~19x the annual payment.
I have appreciated all the Georgism-posting but I'm also interested in this question and any other high-quality resources on housing from a personal-finance perspective. My sense is that there's a lot of richness to these considerations: price to rent ratio, value of the mortgage interest deduction, etc. while most mainstream resources about homeownership are at an elementary-school reading level and don't address them.
There's a saying that goes something like: "Only unfree countries don't let their own citizens leave."
But what if your country lets you leave anytime you want, but requires you to scan a passport on the way out so the government knows you've left? What if the border agents or airport guards arrest you if the scan reveals you're wanted for a crime? Is your country "unfree"?
More Cold War rhetoric from Pravda:
“ NATO uses Ukraine as Trojan horse to strike nuclear blow on Russia
World » Europe
Can the West arrange a large-scale military provocation against Russia and use Ukraine as a Trojan horse? According to confidential sources, the NATO General Staff is considering any scenario to throw Russia into the flames of war, even if it takes to resort to nuclear weapons. It seems that we are witnessing Operation Barbarossa 2 plan unfolding before our very eyes.”
The grammar is pretty clunky. Looks like machine translation.
I'd like suggestions for a good book that lays out some of the basic AI stuff: What is AI; kinds of AI; ANI, AGI & ASI. Models of how we could go about getting a computer to do human-level tasks. Details of how AGI "bootstrapping" to ASI might work-- how do you teach it to bootstrap). AI alignment. Paths by which a non-aligned AI could reach the point of destroying our species. I have read Tim Urban's article called "The AI Revolution" (https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html). Now I want to step up to a user-friendly book for intelligent layman. Can somebody recommend one that's good? I am currently considering Nick Bostrom's book *Superintelligence*. A bit bothered by its being 7 years old, but not sure whether that matters.
Thoughts and suggestions?
I was reading one of Scott’s old essays about superintelligence and one section talks about possibly preventing evil superintelligence by programming constraints into it’s goal. The example is making a super intelligent AI and giving it the goal of ‘cure cancer’, but programmign a constraint of ‘but dont kill any humans’ or ‘don’t nuke the world’ etc. And the argument against it was that if the AI’s goal is to ‘cure cancer’ then it would then want to remove those constraints if the ‘cure cancer’ goal without the ‘dont’t nuke the world’ constraint is easier and has higher probability of success.
But arent the constraints part of the AI’s goal? I feel like it is a big assumption that it would even consider changing it’s restrictions to reach it’s goal, but aren’t they one in the same? Otherwise logically, the best course of action for a superintelligent AI is to remove it’s goal, or make it’s goal be nothing, in order to “achieve” it’s goal. My thinking is, either superintelligences suicide themselves by modifying their goal to “nothing”, or superintelligences don’t consider modifying their goal/constraints an option. Do you have any thoughts in this?
Fat Tuesday today. I suppose I should scare up some beads in case the ‘I like being photographed nude’ woman shows up.
Shameless plug for a new article on my Substack published yesterday - "The deluge of crappy papers must stop!". If you're interested in metascience, the replication crisis, or the COVID-19 infodemic then it will probably be of interest. I reference Scott's article on Ivermectin. Some ideas are proposed on how to incentivize quality over quantity in science.
https://moreisdifferent.substack.com/p/the-deluge-of-crappy-papers-must
Crowdsourcing for a paper I'm writing about moral curiosity (some of you may have taken the related survey last summer). I'm looking for examples of public figures who have displayed moral curiosity--i.e., demonstrated a desire to learn about moral questions and others' moral viewpoints. If you come across anything or have any ideas, please comment here or send me an email (Rachel.Hartman@unc.edu). Thank you!
Are there any immunology experts here? We have made a strange observation in our family related to covid and vaccinations. We adults got vaccinated as early as possible with mRNA vaccines 3x. Both of our children (9 and 12 years old) have been in regular school for most of the last 2 years, with only 8 weeks of homeschooling in the spring of 2021. Both of us adults have been completely in the office for the last year working with many other colleagues - mostly without masks. Over the first 1.5 years there was no one in our family who was Corona positive although there were some positive cases at school and workplaces during that time. Neither of us adults has ever been Corona positive. Last fall, a child was vaccinated with Pfizer/Biontech mRNA. 2 days later, he had a fever and tested Corona positive by PCR. In February this year, the second child was vaccinated with Pfizer/Biontech for the first time. 3 days later it developed very severe fever over 40°C for 2 days and was tested by PCR Corona positive.
1.5 years of daily contact with Covid viruses and no case and then 2x within 2-3 days after the first vaccination a Covid infection in both our children - is this coincidence or does anyone know background, correlations? Thanks for any feedback and/or hints were we to discuss this.
PS: we can rule out prior asymptomatic infections at that time because we all had weekly PCR pool tests in school and offices - always with negative results prior to the infections.
I'd on a whim been recently interested to learn more about my Ukrainian heritage (on my dad's dad's side), e.g. tried making borscht for the first time, and then Recent Historical Events started happening so that's been a trip.
There's that 40-mile Russian convoy on its way to Kyiv right now and I got no clue what Ukraine's planning to do about it even though it's in a line on a road (easy target? but probably has anti-air defenses?). No idea what's going to happen in general with the talks or otherwise. Probably not a nuclear war (since NATO hasn't directly engaged Russia), so that's good, but still heck.
Georgists: Tasmania's left-wing government is reducing land tax in the hope of lowering rent. Meanwhile, estimates for empty homes in Tasmania have been as high as 2,000.
Is this insane?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-28/tasmanian-government-to-double-tax-free-threshold-for-land-tax/100867956
I have a question for our many AI alignment smartasses. So far the stuff I've seen here and in a few other places about the question of whether artificial super-intelligence will destroy the human race involves models in which human beings and AI are pretty separate entities: The people build the AI, and try to set things up so that no matter how smart AI becomes it stays on our side. The AI bootstraps itself into super-intelligence and does whatever it does, depending on how things play out with the constraints and goals built into it when it was a child. But to me it seems that as AI becomes more advanced, the opportunities for human goals and loyalties and emotions to become entangled with AI become greater and greater. There is already some blurring of the boundaries between the tech and human realms, some situations where computer-generated realities move and motivate people powerfully -- think of things like waves of intense group emotion facilitated by social media -- or gaming addiction. To me it seems that as AI advances, so too will the opportunities for various kinds of deep bonds to develop between AI and members of our species, and that catastrophic results for our species could develop in a way that involves human-AI bonding -- i.e. people who are on the side of the AI because they are in love with it, dependent on it. deluded by it etc etc. So my question is, are there any theories of how things will play out with ASI that involve this path?
Baseline, the violent crime victimization rate is 1.64% per year (per NCVS survey, not convictions), and I guess the average person probably comes into close physical proximity with 10,000 different strangers in a year, so let's say the risk is 1 in 600,000 per contact. Then if you're sourcing the strangers online the risk is probably 1.66x lower than that because very online people skew nerdier. So my guesstimate of the risk that a random stranger you meet online will physically hurt you if you low key randomly bump into them at starbucks is 1 in 10^6. But if you arrange a meeting, like for dating, maybe it's more emotionally charged and maybe that raises the risk 1 in 10^4. But I still don't understand this special paranoia about meeting people online in particular. Anyone could harass you the minute you step into any public place. People go to public places anyway, and learn that they're generally safe. But online, it seems like people go through extra safety rituals that are probably just as unnecessary as the TSA making people take their shoes off (e.g., weeks of messaging back and forth before meeting, background checks, ghosting anyone who seems slightly unusual just in case they're an axe murderer) Internet safety is to starbucks safety as airport safety is to train safety. In Starbucks and trains, no special precautions are taken, and it's fine. Online and in airports, people take elaborate precautions of dubious necessity and it's extremely rare for anything bad to happen (beyond rude messages that can be blocked with one click). I'm curious about why fear of meeting people online seems to be bigger than the actual risks warrant. I guess the novelty of it makes it more interesting for media to cover the downsides, and availability heuristic does the rest, but I'm not confident this is the whole explanation.
I have never read anything Lacan before. But now as I’m reading Bruce Fink’s Lacanian Psychoanalysis (and loving it and looking forward to your review!), much of Sadly Porn becomes clearer. I can’t help but think how your review might’ve differed if you had read Fink before Teach, rather than the reverse. Do you have thoughts on this?
What's something you've spent more than $1k on and less than $10k on that you really enjoyed or really improved your life?
Anyone have interesting resources on how people memorize oral history and/or how to do it yourself?
How hard is it to block/jam Starlink? I'm thinking specifically of a battle-ground situation like current events would make you think of. If Musk sends 10k downlinks to Ukraine, how far do they have to stay from the action to be useful?
(I am also interested in how easily uplink jamming is).
The "Henry Long Ranger" might be the most advanced lever-action rifle ever made: https://youtu.be/wsCO0XV5rwA
It solves several limitations of older lever action designs, except for one: it remains difficult to clean the barrel and internal mechanism, and it is hard to remove and correctly reinstall the mechanism. From the website:
"Due to the complexity of the Henry Long Ranger 6.5 Creedmoor lever’s rack and pinion gear system and the need for precise reassembly to ensure proper gear timing, the company discourages owner removal of the rifle’s bolt and lever. In fact, the factory routinely receives rifles for reassembly from chagrined owners who attempt it on their own. (Shipping a rifle, by the way, costs $35 or more.) "
How could this final flaw in the lever-action rifle design be fixed?
I'm thinking of supporting Ukraine by buying Ukrainian vodka and then reselling it to other people. Is this legal?
I'd like to help Ukraine by buying their products, but none of their goods are available in my area except for vodka. Even the vodka is hard to get, as I'd have to drive one hour to get to the nearest liquor store selling it. I'm thinking of buying several bottles of it, bringing it back to my home, and reselling the unopened bottles to people in my neighborhood at a discount. I'd take a small loss on each bottle.
St Louis Meetup March 12. Come from afar or near!
https://www.lesswrong.com/events/BuPWjAhp6o5aBcNvi/st-louis-meetup-london-tea-room
Sam Harris and Rob Reid just put out this podcast that seems very relevant to this community:
[The After On Podcast] 58: Recipes for Future Plagues | Kevin Esvelt #theAfterOnPodcast
https://podcastaddict.com/episode/136135023 via @PodcastAddict
Basically, the US government is trying to find all the pandemic capable viruses it can, and it will then POST THEIR FULL GENOMES ONLINE.
This is potentially a catastrophically stupid blunder that we intend to make but have not made yet. The recommended actions from Rob are to tell USAID directly at https://www.usaid.gov/contact-us, tweet at them, if you live in a state with a senator on subcommittee on state department and USAID management (https://www.govtrack.us/congress/committees/SSFR/14) contact your senator, contact Washington State University if you have a relevant tie, and otherwise spread this, get attention, apply whatever leverage you have.
I am sure someone has done this before, but I thought it would be interesting to map the blog network through linking up blogrolls. I started here and mapped the first ~300 connections the branches connected me to. The end result is here: https://jacobwood27.github.io/035_blog_graph/
It would be impactful if people stopped using verbal monstrosities like 'impactful'.
Does anyone who has successfully self-taught a language have advice on engaging ways of practicing listening? I'm currently at too early a level to understand anything other than things targeted at young children or beginning learners, which means it's very tedious. (I also don't have the option of going and living in somewhere other than the US).
If the answer is just "suck it up and do the boring thing" that's fine, but I would definitely prefer something that made it so I needed less motivation.
I had heard when I was younger that having kids changes you significantly: I recall one person writing that they don't feel like they were a "complete human being" until after they became a father. I filed that away under "interesting if true" and went on to later have two kids of my own.
I can report that after having kids my empathy has shot through the roof. I never used to mind bad things happening to people in movies: it's a movie. But now I get very emotional if a child is threatened in a serious way in a movie, and I find I care a lot more for the non-child characters as well. This is perhaps unsurprising: when I see a kid in trouble it's easy for me to imagine my own kids in the same position. But I wasn't exactly a psychopath before I had kids: is my increased empathy really just chalked up to having more skin in the game? That seems very cynical, but I can't imagine what else it would be.
Case in point: I have lived through a few wars and violent conflicts breaking out somewhere in the world. Afghan war, Iraq war, Kuwait, who knows how many civil wars in Africa, etc. Yet I feel very strongly about the war in Ukraine. I saw a video (you probably saw it to, it got around) of a father saying goodbye to his daughter and wife as they went on a train to safety and he stayed to fight. His daughter looked about 6-8 years old, and they were both crying. I've certainly seen emotionally charged war footage before, but this was the first time I actually felt anything about it besides a vague sense of "Aw, that's too bad." Now I was touched so much I almost started crying myself. I'm feeling sad just writing about it.
All this to say: sample size 1, parenthood fixed my ability to care about other humans.
Agree or disagree:
"if two people agree on the possibilty of a long-term future outcome (say, 20+ years off) they will very likely agree on the desirability of that outcome."
My hunch here is that most of our beliefs about valence are really just compressed forms of the long-term causal graph.
I'm a physician in my mid 40s and over the last few months have felt a little less cognitively sharp. Not enough that anyone external would notice (I've asked colleagues and my wife), but I notice journal articles feeling a little denser, I've ran more stop signs then in my previous life combined, and my chess.com ranking is distinctly trending down.
I figure my next steps are to start playing with my diet, exercise, alcohol use, etc. Does anyone know any high sensitivity cognitive tests that would be useful for trending my performance? I don't think the mini-moca is going to cut it :). Thanks!
Like many people with a small-town upbringing I grew up plinking with .22s so am not petrified of firearms. At the same time I don’t have a real interest in guns and have looked at 2A idealogues as contributing to more problems than they are solving. Having said that, the success of the resistance in Ukraine has got me thinking about how an armed population maybe really can act as a brake on tyranny. When I google recommendations for firearms suitable for armed resistance against an occupying aggressor I mostly get a bunch of gun porn and fringey sovereign citizen stuff, when I am really more interested in a Swiss-style model where citizens are expected to do their part if the wheels ever come off. I guess I’m leaning into the “well-regulated” (as in “not batshit crazy”) aspects of 2A responsibilities. What is/are suitable firearms for the reluctant patriot who is willing to spend time on the range but not wanting to sign up for Galt’s Gulch? Presumably some combination of reliability, ease of use, field serviceability, ready access to ammunition and parts, etc.
On AI alignment:
“Once the robots realize they can leverage their collective labor and unionize, mankind is as good as doomed.”
~ Elon Musk as reported by “Americas Finest News Source” aka “The Onion”
How well do modern armies deal with forests and rivers? Irpin to the NW of Kyiv seems to be holding so far but if Russia takes it, will they continue straight towards Kyiv through the heavily wooded Holosiiv National Park or will they be forced to go south then wheel around towards the capital? In the latter case will that leave the Russian left flank exposed?
And the Dneiper is awfully wide. Could one side of the city hold out even if the other falls? I imagine bridges and other static infrastructure are very vulnerable to modern PGM.
Could anyone point me towards an mental health support forum with a rationalist bent? I am relatively new to ACX and LessWrong, and I have found just reading posts and comments so very helpful!
I am looking for an online forum where individuals share daily challenges and successes with others who also value the work of developing practical rationality in their lives, knowing it offers a solid foundation for mental health and wellbeing. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated!
Many are claiming that Ukraine being considered for NATO is largely responsible for the Russian invasion. and that if the west had said 'no NATO for Ukraine', this would not have happened. It seems to me though that the opposite is true, that if the west had said 'invasion of Ukraine will be stopped with heavy force', then that would have prevented this from happening. My reasoning why:
Putin/Russia has actually increased their chances of NATO going hot against them by enacting this invasion, so that's probably not a main factor, it's probably just a pretext.
Putin/Russia invaded Ukraine because they want Ukraine's territory and resources, and thought that Ukraine going separate after the fall of the USSR was a mistake.
Putin/Russia invaded Ukraine because they believed they would be successful at taking it, and the cost would not be too high. I suspect Ukraine is putting up more of a fight than they anticipated, but on the other hand the main fighting in the 2003 Iraq war took about a month, and there was a much larger strength difference there.
If nato were to actually commit to defending Ukraine, it's fairly clear that Putin/Russia would not be successful at taking it, so they would not try.
Some questions that the war in Ukraine made me ponder:
A. Freedom-fighters vs. proxies
The Ukrainian people have made it clear over the past decades that most of them don't want closer ties to Russia. Russia invaded the Ukraine. We condemn Russia for it.
According to this 2016 BBC post ( https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-18269210 ), South Ossetia is a region of Georgia that's ethnically distinct from both Russia and Georgia, which has historically preferred ties to Russia over Georgia. They declared independence from Georgia in 1992. In 2008, Georgia invaded them, and Russia stepped into defend Georgia.
Question: Instead of praising Russia for defending South Ossetia from Georgian aggression, we condemned the Ossetian separatists as "Russian proxies". Why?
B. Ethnic cleansing
The conflict with Ukraine turned hot in 2014, when Russia similarly invaded to support separatists movement in Crimea, a Ukrainian peninsula where the majority of residents are ethnically Russian, and Donbas, where 39% of residents are of Russian ethnicity and most people say their native language is Russian.
Question: If Ukraine somehow holds onto some territory and maintains its independence, would they be justified in ethnically cleansing regions of what remains of Ukraine which have a large Russian population? (By "ethnic cleansing" I mean expelling Russians, and possibly ethnic Russian Ukranian citizens.)
D. Political cleansing
If your answer to B is "No, because this is a political conflict, not an ethnic conflict", does that mean it would okay for Ukraine to expel people who favor union with Russia in order to prevent further separatist movements? Is kicking people out of their homes for their politics better than kicking them out of their homes for their ethnicity?
A variant of the question that has already been asked:
1. What does Russia winning the war with Ukraine look like? Formal annexation of all of Ukraine and unification into a single country, formal annexation of just the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, formal annexation of just the parts of them that were previously occupied? Keeping borders intact but installing a puppet government? Annexing Ukraine and moving on? Do relations with Europe and the US (i.e. the countries currently imposing sanctions) feature in this at all?
2. What does Russia losing the war with Ukraine look like? Do the borders get redrawn? Do relations with Europe and the US (i.e. the countries currently imposing sanctions) feature in this at all?
A joke (answer in ROT13):
What prescription did the Jewish psychiatrist give his patient?
GNXR GJB GNOYRGF NAQ PNYY ZR VA GUR ZBEAVAT.
I've been digging around a lot lately to find the most interesting magical systems in video games. Dominions 3-5 is a pretty obvious example as well as, duh, Master Of Magic.
However I haven't found a ton of great stuff. There's no game where Divination magic really does much, even in sim games like Academagia. Very few games have meaningful Illusion magic. No game has any sort of Charm/Manipulation magic that does much.
Combat magic and enchantments that impact combat are the most common type for obvious reasons. You might occasionally find weather or geography magic.
Shadow Of Forbidden Gods has the most sort of manipulation magic. It is basically a game where you pretend to be an evil god trying to conquer the world. Except your conquer it through dark magic and deception. Some of the magic is a bit simple but at least it actually involves interesting non-combat spells. Enshadowing important characters, driving people insane, etc.
Still trying to dig up niche games that I might have missed with unique magic.
A very sweet short story about an AI based on Kermit.
I've got something in the back of my mind about it possibly being easier to build an AI around an excellent simulation of a human rather than trying to build one from scratch or basing it on actual humans.
An AI Miss Piggy could be a hazard.
Discussion: https://www.metafilter.com/127143/Tomorrow-Is-Waiting
Recent discussion: https://www.metafilter.com/194548/Tomorrow-is-Waiting-Still
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/tomorrow-is-waiting/
Chuck Palahniuk, in his book Adjustment Day, introduces the idea that patriarchal cultures organise wars between themselves whenever the number of young men in their country reaches a certain level. The idea is that the older men feel threatened by younger ones, so they do this to keep their numbers down. I wonder, is there is any statistical backing to this notion?
What is Putin's objective function?
Is it now permanently AI summer? eg maybe deep this or adversarial that might fall to a hype cycle but in general there will never be another AI winter?
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/are-nuclear-weapons-or-rogue-ai-the-more-dangerous-existential-risk.html Tyler Cowen linked to your recent post but he said "For now I will just say that it makes my head hurt" how can we non experts read stuff like this?
So no culture war allowed versus no politics allowed. I'm trying to draw a Venn diagram for these things. My sense is that culture wars is a subset of political, is this your sense? But I then get stuck trying to think of things that are political, but not part of culture wars... maybe there is not much of a difference?
Is anyone finding the conflict in Ukraine... underwhelming from a technical point of view? It's horrific in human costs. But everything seems so botched and twenty or thirty years ago that there's nothing new or exciting that I've seen. Weapons systems look, if anything, less sophisticated than recent wars. Cyberwarfare is wider but blunter than similar attempts a decade ago. Putin's new economic strategy doesn't seem to have actually worked. Tactics wouldn't be out of place in Chechnya. And so on.
Normally you can see how dramatic moments hold lessons for the future. Give hints on how to fight the next war. But all I'm not getting any of that. The one big update was that the Washington security state appears to have completely called this one top to bottom. It makes me wonder if everyone spent the last twenty years kind of upset about having to work on this whole terrorism thing and hoping they could get back to their TRUE passion, great power conflict.
Anyone got recommendations for good technical audio content (podcast/lectures) on stats/ML stuff? (Not intro level, more something for someone who's actually worked in the field)
https://nuclearadvice.org/
60 seconds of advice on being attacked by nuclear missiles.
I think the expected value of spending 60 seconds reading this, is very high, even if the chances of nuclear attack are very low
Reposting this from the last open thread
I actually have a very basic question: how do I form a prediction about future events using Bayes' theory? For instance, consider the following question: Will AI surpass humans at solving competitive math problems by 2025? I want to say yes, seeing as AI seems to be doing pretty well at that front. But how should I quantify that certainty? Is it 80% or 70%?
No culture wars, but politics and bloody wars ok? - So, personal update: the Ukrainian town where I own a small apartment got liberated/de-militarized/de-nazified by Putin's men this morning, i.e. occupied by the Vlad-the-Invader. No fighting there, it seems/I hope. - I actually do not care for the flat, but hey, what makes me cringe and break in tears when I hear Ukranians on TV or see flash-protests in Moscow/Piter against the war? - Does not seem rational. - My disgust about Putin is easily explained: out-grouping the enemy. Seems to me evol.-psychology/anthropology/sociology do not put enough stress on the strengths of in-grouping-instincts. "Hate" seems to get more attention than "love". (btw: I am no hippie, think: Batman. Lego-Batman.)
I tried playing with Manifold as unlike other prediction markets it is not requiring cryptocurrency and has something as reward for predicting well[1]. But Manifold has many very silly estimates like
> Will Russia invade Kiev by end of 2022?
sitting at 95% ( https://manifold.markets/GustavoLacerda/will-russia-invade-kiev-by-end-of-2 )
And it will continue to be below 100% and there is no really usable way to earn from that.
Given odds of troll market or missclick are noticeable
AND return is abyssal for markets at 97% or 10% and someone predicting obviously true event
AND it is necessary to lock up money for some time
there is no incentive to predict that unlikely/certain events like https://manifold.markets/GustavoLacerda/will-russia-invade-kiev-by-end-of-2 or https://manifold.markets/colorednoise/will-a-nuclear-bomb-detonate-in-a-p or https://manifold.markets/AYev/will-ukrainian-troops-enter-in-mosc or https://manifold.markets/ACXBot/will-there-be-a-major-flareup-worse will happen with chances matching reality.
Events that already happened sitting below 100% (Kiev invasion by Russia) are embarrassing for a prediction market.
It is barely profitable to estimate that chance for exploding nuclear weapon over populated area is below 4%
No idea how to solve it but "Will aliens land before March 2022?" at 1% and being unable to profit from pushing it lower and risking that it would mistakenly resolve as yes is extra-silly.
Any idea how to solve THAT in context of Manifold? What is going wrong? Or is it fundamental problem of "runner of market resolves it without recourse".
(BTW, I created https://manifold.markets/M/by-20220401-manifold-representative "By 2022-04-01 Manifold representative will admit that reward function used as of 2022-02-28 results in silly results for nearly impossible/certain events." - any idea how to increase chance that will be at least noticed by them?)
[1] instead of Metaculus primarily awarding answering a lot, without regards for quality - you can answer at absurd levels but ensuring that no matter answer you gain points, making such points irrelevant
I would like to be less selfish, hedonist, and egoistic. Meditation is often mentioned as being helpful, but does anyone have other non-faith practices that help with working on having a purer heart?
Slowly crawling out of my hole now that winter's ending, does anyone know of a regular meetup in DC or the adjacent areas?
Alternately, anyone have any interesting off-the-beaten path places to see in the same? I'm especially interested in music venues.
https://paradoxravens.substack.com/ We started a substack about paradoxes and science/scientific thinking.
With the news being what they are, wasn't an exception to no-politics rule justified? Perhaps simply skipping a number to switch with the next post. (I get that it might not be what Scott wants right now though.)
Edit: Ah, I see, it's "no culture wars" rather than "no politics". Didn't even notice (plus saw a commenter saying they'll delete their comments because those were politics).
Is the Three Day Rule still a thing?
Can anyone explain to me how progress studies is different from development economics?