If you really had the time machine, it could definitely be both. It just occurred to me the other day that most fiction is more concerned with travel to the past and back than travel to the future and back.
Are all of these things not pretty clearly all things that fall under the umbrella of online speech policing? Whether the mobs are directly involved, or if someone resigns before it gets that far, or because he or she thinks it MIGHT get that far, it's all kind of the same catalyst. It would probably be useful to limit this category to forms of career/personal life wrecking that have only existed for the past ~10 years. Your boss might have fired you in 1992 for streaking on tv at a baseball game (lol) but wouldn't for making racial jokes at the office because of a different set of social norms prevailed at that time. The specific set of norms that have existed for the past few years are clearly somewhat distinct from what came before.
It's definitely possible that, say, everyone the Roman Senate was richer than anyone in classical Greece, but the top 5% of Greeks were richer than the top 5% of Romans.
I dunno about the Greek reputation for knowledge being the result of Roman superfandom. Wouldn't the Romans naturally have tooted their own (Latin speaking) culture even more?
I've noticed a huge improvement in my mental and physical health and chess rating after switching multivitamins 3 days ago (from Pure Encapsulations O.N.E to 2/3 of the recommended dose of Alive Max3)
If, as Buddhists say, all life is suffering, and your goal should be to avoid reincarnation, why aren't they donating lots of money to help Yog Sothoth devour ALL the galaxies? If there's no life in the universe, there's no suffering. Is this a reductio ad absurdum of Buddhist doctrine?
Yes, it's about per capita wealth. What I found most interesting about it was that the richest Greeks were much richer than the richest Romans (assuming the analysis is correct). The richest Romans were vastly wealthier than the richest peoples in any medieval European society.
Did anyone else read this article? Tyler Cowen linked to it recently. In a nutshell, the idea is that while the Roman Empire was extremely rich compared to all of the other pre-modern societies (up through about 1700), Ancient Greece (pre-Roman conquest) was significantly richer. Evidence provided includes the size of house and lower population density in classical Greek towns, the high wages paid to unskilled Greek laborers and soldiers, and of course Ancient Greece's status as THE center of learning in the entire ancient world. Pretty cool article, and seemed plausible.
Does anyone find the notion of time travel to the future more interesting than time travel to the past? I haven't encountered a lot of people who do. It seems like humans are almost universally more interested in making their past selves rich using knowledge from the present than using knowledge from the future to make their present or "near future" selves rich. I wonder if this is a failure of imagination on all of our parts (not being able to envision the future in fine detail, we are more bored by it).
I'm confused by people who think all immigration restriction is deontologically immoral on libertarian priors. Jointly owned land (e.g., public roads) is still owned and hence it would be trespassing to enter it without express or implied permission from the owner (i.e., the government as the corporate entity representing all the citizens who jointly own it)
Thought experiment: Suppose 100 farmers individually own sovereign freehold farms. Clearly each of them has the individual right to keep trespassers off of his individual property. Now suppose these 100 farmers band together for mutual defense of their respective individual rights. IE they form a government. Suppose the contractual terms of joining the union require giving the union partial ownership of all your land, and delegating the right to eject trespassers. The delegated right to eject trespassers from jointly owned land would clearly give the union the right to restrict immigration. If sovereign individuals couldn't contractually agree to band together into a union with the right to restrict who else can enter/join the union, that would be a very serious violation of their freedom of association.
Which is great, and you should read it if you've read SMTM's Chemical Hunger, but leaves me with an interesting problem: I'm writing a series on this, and this post is basically what my last post was going to be (but much better than what I would have done).
I'm sort of at a loss now for how to continue the series - how lame is it to make a post that says "just go read this!"?
I remember reading an article awhile back which was called something like "The undefinability of computer largeness". It was essentially a parody of the claim that since there is no exact definition of intelligence, that it makes no sense to talk about intelligent machines and is impossible to make an intelligent machine. The article then took the same argument and applied it to computer largeness and came to absurd results.
I can't seem to find this article though, does anyone know what I am talking about?
After taking in the book review contest entry's on fusion predictions, maybe some here would be interested in contributing to forecasts on fusion?
There are a bunch of questions on it on Metaculus. One of them is on fusion ignition (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3727/when-will-a-fusion-reactor-reach-ignition/). Unfortunately IMO the resolution criterion is not ideal, as there seems to be no scientific consensus on what fusion ignition means precisely in different experimental settings.
Looking for a book to help someone who is having trouble with a change in work setting: She has a science Ph.D., and recently left academics for industry. New work setting is less friendly & collegial, much more corporate and competitive, with people who don't find ways to toot their own horn failing to get promotions or even respect. Her actual skills are fine -- she's not having any trouble with the work tasks themselves. I think a high-quality self-help book is what's called for. She is a gentle soul, and is not going to go for "learn how to be a shark too" kind of stuff. She needs something more moderate than that. Anyone know of anything?
Is there a hardware analog of neurons? I had a student job in an entomology lab where trichogrammas - tiny wasps, smaller than this bit of punctuation ‘.’ - were being tested as an alternative to pesticides. They like to eat the egg mass of European corn borers.
Per Wikipedia they have no more than 10,000 neurons yet they have fairly complex behavior. The males aggressively seek mates and they all are able to find the correct food for example. I’m wondering how 10,000 neurons would translate to computer hardware.
San Fransicko review made me think about polarization, political narratives, silencing and toxoplaxma of rage, once again.
It's interesting how people keep saying that the left silences uncomfortable truths and then, as example of such truths, proceed to say things which I, as a frequent leftist media consumer, is very well familiar with. Homeless people commiting crimes and taking drugs which contributes to their homelessness is one of such unimpressive revelation. Go listen to the activists for the rights of mentally ill. They will tell you how non-neurotypical people are more vulnerable to various bad outcomes, including drug use and poor economical conditions which can lead to homelessness and that's why we need more awareness, better social programs, universal health care, yadda yadda. On the other hand, some people are definetely being silenced and cancelled. So what's going on?
The answer, I think, is that people are usually opposed not for the ideas themselves, but for the narrative that is being pushed. Due to polarization, there are two Overton windows and you have to choose which one to fit in and which one you are against. Pick your side of the culture war. Either you appeal to progressives or to conservatives.
If the author just wanted to promote Amsterdam's model he didn't really need to attack housing first approach nor mainstream narrative. Indeed, mainstreem narrative assumes Amsterdam's model to be an example of harm reduction. Shellenberger had to define terms differently in order to oppose it! He could have easily talked in the framework of "housing first but not only". How mainstream ideas are mostly correct but can use some improvements. But he choosed not to, because he wanted to appeal to the different tribe and promote a different narrative.
And of course these dynamics are self sustaining. Talking about left censorship is a standard beat, while appealing to the red tribe up to the point where I struggle to see it as anything more than just pure signalling. And no surprise that I struggle, because left leaning people get inoculated from the idea of them shutting debates, seeing again and again how such claims are used in bad faith. And such situation is memetically advantageous for both narratives. Both leftists and rightists can this way ignore criticism and preserve their beliefs even if they are not correlated with reality.
Pleased to see people actually testing humans against the new bars for "intelligence" some people are rolling out for AI, like understanding conditional hypotheticals and following trains of logic with more than a couple of moving parts.
I wonder if some of the discussion around "human level intelligence" among AI people is distorted by the fact that AI people mostly interact with unusually intelligent humans? Once you've spent a while chatting to your HR department about why a contract is not what was originally promised when the job was offered, you'll very quickly find out how many humans don't remotely reach this level.
Not sure what the implications of this are, but maybe that AI is further up the scale than we thought already, but also progressing more slowly along it. Could actually be good from an AI risk perspective? Might just be that I'm really pissed at HR right now so can't really think clearly myself?
A question regarding the overturning of Roe v Wade: in general, it seems sketchy and undemocratic that laws can be created by an unelected judiciary (even worse, one full of lawyers!)
But can a country truly be called democratic if, after 50 years, its elected officials haven't written a broadly popular judicial opinion into law? If this is ok, wouldn't executives and legislators always prefer to do nothing, leaving everything up to the judiciary?
Has it changed to #e2edfc? I'm sure it was greener earlier. How about loading each time with a randomly generated background in the range #e0e0e0 to #ffffff and we can all vote on it?
Abstract: How could machines learn as efficiently as humans and animals? How could machines learn to reason and plan? How could machines learn representations of percepts and action plans at multiple levels of abstraction, enabling them to reason, predict, and plan at multiple time horizons? This position paper proposes an architecture and training paradigms with which to construct autonomous intelligent agents. It combines concepts such as configurable predictive world model, behavior driven through intrinsic motivation, and hierarchical joint embedding architectures trained with self-supervised learning.
I was referring to Melvin's comment "Would a six-month lockdown of gay men be justified?" Perhaps I just misunderstand the phrasing, but lockdown doesn't sound like a guideline to me.
As for governmental advisory or information, I am much more open to that. But I am very skeptical that the advice to remain abstinent for six months would be taken serious. Not at the current (low) level of personal threat and with milder and probably more effective options available (disease detection, contact tracing, vaccination). Also, the benefits are doubtful; a voluntary "lockdown" suffers from the free-riders problem, and there is no guarantee that enough people would comply to contain the disease.
EDIT: Sigh, the reply system is broken. This was supposed to be a reply to a post by Acymetric, but that post seems to be gone.
But as far as I can tell there's no actual way to get from there to the comment he was replying to. The "Return to thread" link just goes back to the full comments of the post.
Is there much in the way of empirical evidence that a skincare routine leads to better aesthetic outcomes in later years? Used to have acne when I used cleaning products, since I switched to rinsing with cold water I have none, and get complimented all the time. Intuitively I can make the connection that "moisturizing" could help, but I'm not convinced a chemical cocktail would necessarily outperform lots of water intake, a good diet and avoiding excess sun exposure, in the long-run.
Once upon a time (~6 months ago), somebody left a comment somewhere on ACX saying they were looking for work as a data/software person in corporate research. But the plot twist is, I now want to talk to a data/software person about corporate research.
If you fit this description, please let me know. Alternatively, if you are routinely scraping ACX comments and tagging them in a searchable way using ML... uh, maybe I should just talk to you.
Can someone give me a just-the-facts summary of the impact of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, with minimal editorializing, and emphasis on any points that are not likely to be covered by the standard culture-war hot-takes? Bonus points for Georgia- or Atlanta-specific information.
(context: I live in GA, don't particularly want kids, and am trying to determine whether I need to examine the fallout of the decision *right now* or can afford to wait until things settle before deciding if/what to do about it. I don't trust standard news sources to tell me what is useful information over whatever makes the punchiest story.)
I've been reading up a lot on the other contentious Supreme Court case that was published last week.
In the case of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association vs. Bruen, many organizations sent briefs supporting the action of striking down the law.
Among those organizations: many legal-aid agencies and minority-rights associations argued that the New York law about concealed-carry had a severely-disproportionate effect on minorities. A huge number of those arrested for illegal gun possession in New York were either Black or Latino. The lawyers of the Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defenders Services, and the Legal Aid Society all argued that gun rights were a 'legal fiction' for minorities under that law.
The opinion of the Supreme Court barely mentioned this factor.
Do you think that the racial-impact factors should have been considered in deciding this case?
I'm not an American and was trying to understand what difference the Roe v Wade overturning makes, but it's very difficult to get a clear picture.
Like, it would be nice to see something that tells me what percentage of American women of child bearing age are likely to have - no access to abortion at all, and what percentage have access till what gestational age e.g what percentage till 6, till 12, 18, 24 weeks etc.
I would have thought this should be the most basic statistic that anyone who wants to understand the impact of this ruling would want to look at first. Yet, it's nowhere to be found. Anyone here have any idea?
On some classified ad in the past year or so, someone posted about software for organizing collective action, allowing signatories of a petition anonymity until a certain threshold was reached.
I forget what it was called. Can someone point me to it?
*Visualizing good turns of phrase: shape rotator or wordcel thing?
*What would be the epistemic threshold for requiring belief in things that are instrumentally good, even if terminally false - Pascal's Minimum Wager?
*If a bait'n'switch-class fallacy is used as a witty verbal riposte, would that be an example of a Bon Mot and Bailey?
Meta actually-serious question: are rationalists capable of devising jokes* that non-Ingroup will grok, much less laugh at? I genuinely think this might be a hole in our collective maps, and contributes to above-average levels of below-average social eptitude.
*besides puns, which Samuel Johnson says are the lowest form of humour. Surely we can do better.
On the topic of why the shoplifting statistics in San Francisco seem so off (from your San Fransicko post), I can share an experience from 2 car break-ins I recently had in the city (one in December, one in May). In both cases I filed a police report immediately, and requested a copy for insurance purposes. The process involves filing a request through the SFPD Records website, which is supposed to get back to you within 10 business days. In both cases they did *not* get back to me within that time frame, and I had to call them to urge them to send the report. On one of the calls the officer told me that they were still processing reports from 3 months prior, i.e. there was a massive backlog. So they might only be selectively processing reports when someone makes a big enough stink about it.
If you are a Dutch rationalist or rationalist in NL, consider checking out our discord: https://discord.gg/XgfrXka8
We have a July meetup planned, an open DnD group, and a census doc to determine future events. We just started with this new setup and now have 36 members on the server with daily discussions on rationality. It's basically a local chapter for the Netherlands and currently looking to find where all the Dutch rats / rats in NL are, so hi! :D
Why is yudkowsky (and the rat-adjacent community) so sure about drexler nanotech?
Skimming ey latest on lw, he claim that the most plausible way agi can eliminate humanity is
> emails some DNA sequences to any of the many many online firms that will take a DNA sequence in the email and ship you back proteins, and bribes/persuades some human who has no idea they're dealing with an AGI to mix proteins in a beaker, which then form a first-stage nanofactory which can build the actual nanomachinery. (Back when I was first deploying this visualization, the wise-sounding critics said "Ah, but how do you know even a superintelligence could solve the protein folding problem, if it didn't already have planet-sized supercomputers?" but one hears less of this after the advent of AlphaFold 2, for some odd reason.) The nanomachinery builds diamondoid bacteria, that replicate with solar power and atmospheric CHON, maybe aggregate into some miniature rockets or jets so they can ride the jetstream to spread across the Earth's atmosphere, get into human bloodstreams and hide, strike on a timer.
This seems... unlikely? Had him stopped at an agi create a supervirus in a lab, well i could agree. But drexler vision of mechanical dry nanotech seems to not be particularly consistent with known physics and chemistry, let alone the bootstrapping of diamondoid (if they are even possible) nanobot from organic stuff (could it actually happen, evolution by natural selection would have already done it.)
In the smalley-drexler debate, well, the actual expert on the subject was smalley and he put forward good arguments. When you go at smaller scales physics behave differently and you cannot hope that your mechanical design will work as intended. Van der waals forces will make everything extremely sticky and oxidation will spell doom for your tiny diamonds. (Also, regarding that timer, i don't know how precise it can be. We now understand that there are thermodynamic limitations on the accuracy of clocks, but I am not an expert, so I could be wrong)
All in all it seems to me that the most plausible nanomachine design will be organic and biological, not diamondoid like. Tbf, I am not sure at all, but given that it seems to me that the community has never properly answered smalley concerns, should the rat community be that sure that drexlerian nanotech is possible?
Psych question: antipsychotics are dopamine antagonists and stimulants are dopamine agonists, and stimulant induced psychosis would be treated with antipsychotics, logically one would think they're opposites... Why is it then that they can work together without neutralising each other? What voodoo magic is at work?
Any EA folks out there that are either in edtech and/or avid readers willing to give feedback and/or advice?
I'm exploring creating a tool enabling people to share beautiful ranked booklists - with the goal of helping informal learners read better books sooner and helping communities like this identify and share what the canonical books are.
I'd love to get feedback on the prototype, get business advice, learn about your reading habits and needs etc. Thank you!!!
What's the point of a symbolic head of state in parliamentary systems? I get it when the system came out of a monarchy (or is still a constitutional monarchy), but not why you'd have a ceremonial-only President. It seems like a weird holdover from monarchy that you need an actual person to be The Embodiment and Avatar Of The State even in an openly democratic regime with a constitution with popular legitimacy.
If you haven't had a chance to read the first two parts on Construction Physics substack's series on nuclear power costs, I'd recommend them. TL;DR Nuclear plants are extremely complex and very sensitive to labor coordination problems and delays that come from the regulatory environment and design changing in the middle of constructions, plus the extremely low public tolerance for nuclear risk (an attempt by the NRC to qualify some level of radioactivity as safe caused a huge public backlash).
I have a friend who is deeply into NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming, not Natural Language Processing) and claims that it has been very useful to them. My inclination is to see it as a pseudoscience. I realize these two positions are not mutually exclusive (it could be a pseudoscience that happened to be useful for my friend but would not be equally useful for a random person, or it could include some generically useful self-help advice framed in a pseudoscientific way), but I'm curious if anyone has any experience with or thoughts on NLP.
Scott. this one seems to be in your wheelhouse. I note that it is in animal models now and no FDA trials have begun yet, but the claims are pretty big, if true:
"New Drug Could Help Stop Depression, Anxiety, Brain Injury, and Cognitive Disorders"
"The researchers showed that the systemic administration of the new drug alters neurobehavior in mice, reducing anxiety-like behavior. It also provides a promising landscape for future studies to assess whether the drug could help combat stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, cancer, and neurodegeneration."
"A new preclinical drug reported by James Bibb, Ph.D., and colleagues has the potential to combat depression, brain injury, and cognitive disorders. The drug, which is notable for being brain-permeable, works by inhibiting the kinase enzyme Cdk5.
"Cdk5 is an important signaling regulator in brain neurons. Over three decades of research, it has been linked to neuropsychiatric and degenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Knocking out the enzyme in mice makes them more resilient to stress, improves cognition, protects neurons from stroke and brain trauma, and slows neurodegeneration.
"While Cdk5 inhibitors may offer potential therapeutic benefits and new ways to study basic brain function, previous first- and second-generation anti-Cdk5 compounds largely get blocked at the blood-brain barrier, which restricts solute movement from the blood to the extracellular fluid of the central nervous system. So far, no Cdk5 inhibitor has been authorized for the treatment of any neuropsychiatric or degenerative condition."
Obviously we might come to a point where they pass tests like these and still fail other things, but as long as they're failing simple mathematical reasoning I think it's clear they don't understand what they're talking about in any meaningful way.
These IQ results are not particularly trustworthy:
"In the imputed ITT analysis, children in the intervention group had a 2.5-point (95% CI: −0.4, 5.4) higher mean FSIQ than children in the control group (Table 3). Adjusting for PTB increased the estimate to 2.8 points (95% CI: −0.1, 5.7), and after adjustment for both PTB and child’s sex the effect estimate was 3.0 points (95% CI: 0.2, 5.9). Excluding eight participants who incorrectly received or did not receive the HEPA cleaners had little effect on the estimate (2.5 points; 95% CI: −0.5, 5.4)."
Various ways to analyze the data produced mostly p > .05, they managed to find one method variation with p < .05. I compute it to be .025. Shrug tier. Nice study though.
Anyone have any thoughts about this? Apparently the CDC hasn't actually been monitoring COVID vaccine adverse events in spite of publishing a plan saying they would.
ACX Tweaks has stopped working for me, either something changed with substack or with Firefox (version 101.0.1) on a Mac. I tried deleting it and re-installing. Anyone have any ideas?
I'm not the first to mention any of this, but it seems to me like the two recent hot-button cases, on guns and abortion, are contradictory. Links to both:
They both look to history to ask whether a right to an abortion in one case, or a right to carry a gun in public (or some version of that) in the other case, existed historically.
But in the gun case, they make a lot of hay about looking specifically to the era of the founding fathers, heavily discounting other eras; in the abortion case they mostly rely on cases from the mid-1800s and onward. In addition, in the gun case they look to see whether carrying guns in public was *outlawed* as a stand-in for whether you had a *right* to do so; not outlawed == you have a right to it. But in the abortion case they specifically distinguish the two - just because abortion wasn't outlawed *doesn't mean* you had a right to it.
I think it's also clear that Supreme Court justices doing this sort of historical research isn't a good way of doing anything. Does anyone think that this sort of reasoning, or the similar reasoning you see on the other side when liberals do it, is any sort of evenhanded look at the history of whatever types of laws are at issue? It screams cherry picking and special pleading to me. If they're going to do it, they should at least commission a historian or take expert testimony or something; right now it seems like copying stuff from amicus briefs combined with clerks googling stuff.
A few other criticisms (and for the record I am pro-choice and don't have a strong opinion about the New York gun law at issue):
Alito's concurrence in the gun case is dumb. It's basically just him arguing about gun policy, makes overbroad statements that I don't think he even believes, and accuses the other side of policy-driven reasoning (i.e. not constitutional interpretation) when his entire concurrence is about policy.
For Alito's opinion in the abortion case, and to strike home the point about history, I think another person reading the same history he does and with the sort of cherry-picking they do, could easily reach the result that there *was* a right to pre-quickening abortion historically. Also, the assurance that this case doesn't affect other cases like Griswold or Obergefell falls flat; his argument clearly implies those decisions are wrong, and he says they aren't affected because they don't involve "potential life", but nothing about his reasoning with regards to abortion rests on whether there's a "potential life" involved.
For Thomas's opinion in the gun case, he claims that he's putting the second amendment on the same level as other rights like in the first amendment, but he is going beyond that. He repeatedly dismisses "means-end" analysis i.e. strict scrutiny, but the court always applies those things when deciding first amendment cases.
For Alito in the abortion case, he claims he isn't questioning anyone's motives, but also cites people on both sides who have claimed the other side has discriminatory motives, and disputes at length the idea that pro-lifers have discriminatory motives while also insinuating that pro-choicers do.
Has any parliamentary country ever tried a system where the head of government is *not* elected by the lower/people's house? I.e. you have most of the elements of a normal parliamentary system, the Prime Minister or whatever you would like to call them only governs by holding the confidence of the branch of government that elected them. It's just that in this case, the PM would be elected or subject to recall by maybe the upper house, in an attempt to make their system of government less vulnerable to populism. Upper houses in most countries are generally for longer terms & less subject to the popular vote. (Or possibly a joint session of the upper or lower houses, or even an Electoral College formed by some other means just for this one task).
If the objection is that the upper house couldn't function as a parliamentary body without snap or early elections, it's worth noting that Norway has done just that for over 200 years- has a Prime Minister, but the representatives serve a 4 year term with no snap elections possible. If they have to replace a PM the same body just finds a new candidate. Anyways, just curious if that's ever been tried anywhere
What do people think is going on with Havana Syndrome? The claim (according to the unreliable New Yorker) is that many cases are believed by the CIA to be actual attacks, most likely using pulsed microwave radiation, most likely by Russia.
Some excerpts from the year-old New Yorker article:
"(The CIA) discovered that what began with several dozen spies and diplomats in Havana now encompasses more than a hundred and thirty possible cases, from Colombia to Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to Austria, in addition to the United States and other countries. At least four of the cases involve Trump White House officials, two of whom say they had episodes on the Ellipse. The C.I.A. accounts for some fifty cases. The rest are mostly U.S. military and State Department personnel and their family members."
"Top officials in both the Trump and the Biden Administrations privately suspect that Russia is responsible for the Havana Syndrome. Their working hypothesis is that agents of the G.R.U., the Russian military’s intelligence service, have been aiming microwave-radiation devices at U.S. officials to collect intelligence from their computers and cell phones, and that these devices can cause serious harm to the people they target. Yet during the past four years U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to find any evidence to back up this theory, let alone sufficient proof to publicly accuse Russia."
"Several of Biden’s top advisers have said, in closed-door meetings, that they believe the C.I.A. will eventually be able to trace the Havana Syndrome to Russia."
Does anyone have any memorization tips? Currently studying for the bar exam, and I do not have enough time to create flashcards on anki for spaced repetition. Thank you!
Repeating my earlier comment that the book review in the previous post contains content that was plagiarized (from me). IMO a statement should be added to the post acknowledging this.
1. London sewage sampling has detected poliovirus. https://www.science.org/content/article/poliovirus-in-london-sewage-sparks-alarm I think this sort of sampling is highly useful for detecting pathogens and we need more of it. But right now we can only detect what we're looking for. The Nucleic Acid Observatory (to sequence everything, basically) should definitely be funded.
"The Committee was concerned about the potential for exacerbation of the stigmatization and infringement of human rights, including the rights to privacy, non-discrimination, physical and mental health, of affected population groups, which would further impede response efforts."
This is giving me strong early 2020 vibes . . . basically, "let's not declare an emergency to avoid stigmatization".
What's your go-to remedy for sore muscles and stiff joints? I've been upping my mileage per run lately. I'm back in the office three days a week so I can't fit in 4-5 mile runs five days a week anymore. So I've changed it to 8-10 mile runs three days a week.
I've been pleasantly surprised. I thought running fewer days a week would put me in a foul mood - nothing beats back depression like running - but the extra miles are really giving me a wonderful, long-lasting high. I want to stick with this program.
The problem is that I'm achy as hell. Knees, quads and feet in particular. I'm gimping around on my recovery days which makes chasing the kids around difficult. Stretching helps a tiny bit, walking - which fortunately I do a lot of - helps a bit more. But nothing comes close to "fixing" it, and I'm scared as hell about getting injured. I'm getting older - not "getting", I'm 48 and already there - and recovering from injuries from running or lifting is a nightmare these days.
So what are your cures? Would a trip to a sauna help? I'm not actually sure what a "sauna" is, but I'm sure I can find one. Would it be a decent cure? How about a massage? How about a CHEAP massage? I can't regularly drop $300 on this shit. How about something that's free? That would be ideal. How about something that I can install in my house? My wife isn't going to OK a hot tub, but anything less than that I can probably manage.
A well-reported story about why teachers in a major school district are burning out. Spoiler: "restorative justice" is a complete disaster and the students (and teachers) know it: https://whyy.org/episodes/schooled-teaching-on-the-brink/
One of the rare education stories that actually goes beyond just grabbing quotes from alleged experts and instead asks questions and compares the quotes to what's actually happening in schools.
Working on a premise for a story (that I hope to one day have time to write) and wanted some folks to kick it hard:
Killer AI scenario. However nobody knows for sure the killer AI exists. The only person who has noticed is an insurance adjuster who has noticed an uptick in highly unlikely deaths/a huge mortality spike among AI scientists.
Is there a way you can think of that this kind of data could be hidden/obfuscated?
Let's say everyone agrees to choose a Supreme Court judge randomly from some list of candidates. How could a random selection be setup in practice? All sides need to agree that the outcome is fair and not rigged. E.g. a coin toss is easy to rig, same for a ball blower from a bingo game (as depicted in Better Call Saul). Anything like "blockchain-powered RNG" is a no go cause math is hard and computers can be hacked.
My naive attempt:
1. Each candidate guesses a number, writes it down and puts away, hidden.
2. All candidates flip coins to get either 1 or 0.
3. Those values are summed up, a candidate with the closest guessed number wins, tie is a retry.
Assuming enough candidates who are split in two adversarial groups, e.g. R and D, both groups can collude, rig the coins, but that will spoil the outcome.
A few weeks ago there was a discussion about how Substack's format is unpopular compared to SlateStarCodex's. I recently became aware that Substack allows the author to recolor page backgrounds, albeit broadly and without much customization.
Some of the complaints about Substack (mine for one) touched on how it is currently pure white, which is rough on the eyes, while SlateStarCodex had a nice mix of blues and greys. Scott, have you considered recoloring the page to more closely match the old layout's color scheme?
Alternatively, does anybody know a good solution to force a different color scheme as a user?
Chen's whole article seems like the same willfully obtuse nonsense that AI apologists peddle a lot of (I'm reminded of the people on a Hacker News thread trying to obfuscate the difference between "do humans like, really deeply understand the philosophical concept of negation" and "when asked to draw a picture of a bowl with no apples, DALL-E 2 draws a bowl full of apples").
Yes, we get it, if you ask rando humans on the internet, sometimes they'll give nonsense answers. This is indeed why *obviously* deeply primitive AIs from a long time ago could "pass the Turing test," because sometimes humans say random bullshit that seems deeply unintelligent.
But that's uninteresting from an evaluation-of-an-AI-capabilities perspective, and we are interested in AI's "best effort" versus humans' best efforts.
A few people asked around here (and on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit) about sperm cryopreservation, so I wrote a practical guide to sperm: https://denovo.substack.com/p/know-your-sperm
If you wanted to do it yourself, the hardest part would be ensuring a constant supply of liquid nitrogen.
Edit to clarify: if you're serious about using the stored sperm to establish a pregnancy, don't DIY, find a fertility clinic.
I asked this in the hidden open thread but I'll try again: does anyone have any thoughts on the new paper claiming to show that COVID vaccines have dangerous side effects, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4125239 ? I can't find any obvious problems with it, but I'm skeptical on priors and confused about how this could have been missed until now.
AIUI Bitcoin has a use value (crime, privacy, remittances, etc) and a speculation value. Is there any way to tell what the use value is? That is, if God told us that Bitcoin would always be about the same percent of economic activity as it is now, what would determine the price?
My first answer was "supply and demand", but I'm having trouble understanding how this works. My demand might be "I want to send $10,000 in a digital way to my friend", but this is agnostic as to the price of Bitcoin - I'm equally fine sending 1 BTC or 10 BTC depending on their value. Also, if the sending process takes half an hour, it doesn't seem like I'm influencing the demand for very long.
Suppose there are 20 million Bitcoins and these can be used to make $20 billion extra profit (in crime, remittance savings, etc) per year. What else do I need to know in order to determine the use value of Bitcoin?
Has Michael responded to Scott’s review of San Fransicko? If so, I would be interested in his thoughts, especially on the “does he support sweeping deinstutionalization” controversy.
Speaking of pregnancy interventions, whatever happened to the huge drop in premature births during lockdown? I recall it was as high as 90% in Denmark.
One hypothesis was that the premature births were caused by an as yet unknown respiratory virus. When lockdown occurred, the R0 of the virus dropped below 1 and no one got it. Hence the reduction in premature births.
This seemed like a rather important observation. Does anyone have an update?
How do you distinguish wisdom from knowledge? Which is more difficult to attain? Why? Is wisdom a mushy term that fails a rational analysis or does it point to the idea that rationality is not enough, since the rub is in the application or embodiment of the knowledge in live time?
If you really had the time machine, it could definitely be both. It just occurred to me the other day that most fiction is more concerned with travel to the past and back than travel to the future and back.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2332427903704805/permalink/3355824498031802/
Analogies with AGI timeline estimates are left as an exercise for the reader.
Are all of these things not pretty clearly all things that fall under the umbrella of online speech policing? Whether the mobs are directly involved, or if someone resigns before it gets that far, or because he or she thinks it MIGHT get that far, it's all kind of the same catalyst. It would probably be useful to limit this category to forms of career/personal life wrecking that have only existed for the past ~10 years. Your boss might have fired you in 1992 for streaking on tv at a baseball game (lol) but wouldn't for making racial jokes at the office because of a different set of social norms prevailed at that time. The specific set of norms that have existed for the past few years are clearly somewhat distinct from what came before.
This makes a lot of sense to me.
It's definitely possible that, say, everyone the Roman Senate was richer than anyone in classical Greece, but the top 5% of Greeks were richer than the top 5% of Romans.
I dunno about the Greek reputation for knowledge being the result of Roman superfandom. Wouldn't the Romans naturally have tooted their own (Latin speaking) culture even more?
I've noticed a huge improvement in my mental and physical health and chess rating after switching multivitamins 3 days ago (from Pure Encapsulations O.N.E to 2/3 of the recommended dose of Alive Max3)
If, as Buddhists say, all life is suffering, and your goal should be to avoid reincarnation, why aren't they donating lots of money to help Yog Sothoth devour ALL the galaxies? If there's no life in the universe, there's no suffering. Is this a reductio ad absurdum of Buddhist doctrine?
Yes, it's about per capita wealth. What I found most interesting about it was that the richest Greeks were much richer than the richest Romans (assuming the analysis is correct). The richest Romans were vastly wealthier than the richest peoples in any medieval European society.
https://rafaelrguthmann.substack.com/p/on-the-prosperity-of-different-periods
Did anyone else read this article? Tyler Cowen linked to it recently. In a nutshell, the idea is that while the Roman Empire was extremely rich compared to all of the other pre-modern societies (up through about 1700), Ancient Greece (pre-Roman conquest) was significantly richer. Evidence provided includes the size of house and lower population density in classical Greek towns, the high wages paid to unskilled Greek laborers and soldiers, and of course Ancient Greece's status as THE center of learning in the entire ancient world. Pretty cool article, and seemed plausible.
Does anyone find the notion of time travel to the future more interesting than time travel to the past? I haven't encountered a lot of people who do. It seems like humans are almost universally more interested in making their past selves rich using knowledge from the present than using knowledge from the future to make their present or "near future" selves rich. I wonder if this is a failure of imagination on all of our parts (not being able to envision the future in fine detail, we are more bored by it).
I'm confused by people who think all immigration restriction is deontologically immoral on libertarian priors. Jointly owned land (e.g., public roads) is still owned and hence it would be trespassing to enter it without express or implied permission from the owner (i.e., the government as the corporate entity representing all the citizens who jointly own it)
Thought experiment: Suppose 100 farmers individually own sovereign freehold farms. Clearly each of them has the individual right to keep trespassers off of his individual property. Now suppose these 100 farmers band together for mutual defense of their respective individual rights. IE they form a government. Suppose the contractual terms of joining the union require giving the union partial ownership of all your land, and delegating the right to eject trespassers. The delegated right to eject trespassers from jointly owned land would clearly give the union the right to restrict immigration. If sovereign individuals couldn't contractually agree to band together into a union with the right to restrict who else can enter/join the union, that would be a very serious violation of their freedom of association.
Parrhesia pointed me to this objection to SMTM's chemical hunger: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7iAABhWpcGeP5e6SB/it-s-probably-not-lithium#fnrefpcialf566oj
Which is great, and you should read it if you've read SMTM's Chemical Hunger, but leaves me with an interesting problem: I'm writing a series on this, and this post is basically what my last post was going to be (but much better than what I would have done).
I'm sort of at a loss now for how to continue the series - how lame is it to make a post that says "just go read this!"?
I remember reading an article awhile back which was called something like "The undefinability of computer largeness". It was essentially a parody of the claim that since there is no exact definition of intelligence, that it makes no sense to talk about intelligent machines and is impossible to make an intelligent machine. The article then took the same argument and applied it to computer largeness and came to absurd results.
I can't seem to find this article though, does anyone know what I am talking about?
Enthusiasts, when streaming data mining operations do you use a cloud storage solution or found an open source way for storing teras?
I'm building some standardized architecture solutions but don't want to immediately pay monthly billing fees to CSPs...
For people anywhere near software engineer hiring, how has the game changed for you since the market crashed? Easier? Same?
So, I got offered a new job, quite interested in it, but they want me to take a Meyers Briggs Personality Test and a Four Tendencies Quiz first.
They said "there's no right or wrong answers" but they're using this as a screening tool; so clearly there are.
What are recruiters looking for with these tests?
Looks like Turkey is dropping its objections to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/28/politics/joe-biden-g7-nato/index.html
Anybody think there's another way this might get scuttled? And if not, what are the implications?
After taking in the book review contest entry's on fusion predictions, maybe some here would be interested in contributing to forecasts on fusion?
There are a bunch of questions on it on Metaculus. One of them is on fusion ignition (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3727/when-will-a-fusion-reactor-reach-ignition/). Unfortunately IMO the resolution criterion is not ideal, as there seems to be no scientific consensus on what fusion ignition means precisely in different experimental settings.
I have tried to lay out some of the problems in a comment (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3727/when-will-a-fusion-reactor-reach-ignition/#comment-95884), but I am a total lay person in this area. Contributions of people with expertise would be highly valuable in getting us better forecasts on fusion. Likewise editing the Wikipedia article on fusion ignition would be very useful in disseminating knowledge on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition?wprov=sfla1).
Fusion has the potential to be a major game changer for the future of humankind, so the quality of forecasts could have a major impact!
Just chipping in to say that the new look (of the ASC) is better than the old look. Let's counter negativity bias :-)
Strong vote against the blue background. It makes me not want to read at all.
Looking for a book to help someone who is having trouble with a change in work setting: She has a science Ph.D., and recently left academics for industry. New work setting is less friendly & collegial, much more corporate and competitive, with people who don't find ways to toot their own horn failing to get promotions or even respect. Her actual skills are fine -- she's not having any trouble with the work tasks themselves. I think a high-quality self-help book is what's called for. She is a gentle soul, and is not going to go for "learn how to be a shark too" kind of stuff. She needs something more moderate than that. Anyone know of anything?
Is there a hardware analog of neurons? I had a student job in an entomology lab where trichogrammas - tiny wasps, smaller than this bit of punctuation ‘.’ - were being tested as an alternative to pesticides. They like to eat the egg mass of European corn borers.
Per Wikipedia they have no more than 10,000 neurons yet they have fairly complex behavior. The males aggressively seek mates and they all are able to find the correct food for example. I’m wondering how 10,000 neurons would translate to computer hardware.
San Fransicko review made me think about polarization, political narratives, silencing and toxoplaxma of rage, once again.
It's interesting how people keep saying that the left silences uncomfortable truths and then, as example of such truths, proceed to say things which I, as a frequent leftist media consumer, is very well familiar with. Homeless people commiting crimes and taking drugs which contributes to their homelessness is one of such unimpressive revelation. Go listen to the activists for the rights of mentally ill. They will tell you how non-neurotypical people are more vulnerable to various bad outcomes, including drug use and poor economical conditions which can lead to homelessness and that's why we need more awareness, better social programs, universal health care, yadda yadda. On the other hand, some people are definetely being silenced and cancelled. So what's going on?
The answer, I think, is that people are usually opposed not for the ideas themselves, but for the narrative that is being pushed. Due to polarization, there are two Overton windows and you have to choose which one to fit in and which one you are against. Pick your side of the culture war. Either you appeal to progressives or to conservatives.
If the author just wanted to promote Amsterdam's model he didn't really need to attack housing first approach nor mainstream narrative. Indeed, mainstreem narrative assumes Amsterdam's model to be an example of harm reduction. Shellenberger had to define terms differently in order to oppose it! He could have easily talked in the framework of "housing first but not only". How mainstream ideas are mostly correct but can use some improvements. But he choosed not to, because he wanted to appeal to the different tribe and promote a different narrative.
And of course these dynamics are self sustaining. Talking about left censorship is a standard beat, while appealing to the red tribe up to the point where I struggle to see it as anything more than just pure signalling. And no surprise that I struggle, because left leaning people get inoculated from the idea of them shutting debates, seeing again and again how such claims are used in bad faith. And such situation is memetically advantageous for both narratives. Both leftists and rightists can this way ignore criticism and preserve their beliefs even if they are not correlated with reality.
Pleased to see people actually testing humans against the new bars for "intelligence" some people are rolling out for AI, like understanding conditional hypotheticals and following trains of logic with more than a couple of moving parts.
I wonder if some of the discussion around "human level intelligence" among AI people is distorted by the fact that AI people mostly interact with unusually intelligent humans? Once you've spent a while chatting to your HR department about why a contract is not what was originally promised when the job was offered, you'll very quickly find out how many humans don't remotely reach this level.
Not sure what the implications of this are, but maybe that AI is further up the scale than we thought already, but also progressing more slowly along it. Could actually be good from an AI risk perspective? Might just be that I'm really pissed at HR right now so can't really think clearly myself?
My lord ACX is blue now why is it blue?
A question regarding the overturning of Roe v Wade: in general, it seems sketchy and undemocratic that laws can be created by an unelected judiciary (even worse, one full of lawyers!)
But can a country truly be called democratic if, after 50 years, its elected officials haven't written a broadly popular judicial opinion into law? If this is ok, wouldn't executives and legislators always prefer to do nothing, leaving everything up to the judiciary?
Is/are there ACX in-person meetup groups in NYC? Or did the existing OB/LW group take its/their place?
Has anyone been attending the OB/LW group meetings? I just went to my first one in ... over a decade or something crazy. The meetup was fun!
Has it changed to #e2edfc? I'm sure it was greener earlier. How about loading each time with a randomly generated background in the range #e0e0e0 to #ffffff and we can all vote on it?
For those who are interested, Yann LeCun has posted A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence, https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf
Abstract: How could machines learn as efficiently as humans and animals? How could machines learn to reason and plan? How could machines learn representations of percepts and action plans at multiple levels of abstraction, enabling them to reason, predict, and plan at multiple time horizons? This position paper proposes an architecture and training paradigms with which to construct autonomous intelligent agents. It combines concepts such as configurable predictive world model, behavior driven through intrinsic motivation, and hierarchical joint embedding architectures trained with self-supervised learning.
I was referring to Melvin's comment "Would a six-month lockdown of gay men be justified?" Perhaps I just misunderstand the phrasing, but lockdown doesn't sound like a guideline to me.
As for governmental advisory or information, I am much more open to that. But I am very skeptical that the advice to remain abstinent for six months would be taken serious. Not at the current (low) level of personal threat and with milder and probably more effective options available (disease detection, contact tracing, vaccination). Also, the benefits are doubtful; a voluntary "lockdown" suffers from the free-riders problem, and there is no guarantee that enough people would comply to contain the disease.
EDIT: Sigh, the reply system is broken. This was supposed to be a reply to a post by Acymetric, but that post seems to be gone.
I want to complain again about the difficulty of finding the parents/context when linked to a specific comment. For example, in the discussion of the color change, someone linked to this comment by Scott: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-230/comment/7376659
But as far as I can tell there's no actual way to get from there to the comment he was replying to. The "Return to thread" link just goes back to the full comments of the post.
In short: Substack please fix your shit.
Is there much in the way of empirical evidence that a skincare routine leads to better aesthetic outcomes in later years? Used to have acne when I used cleaning products, since I switched to rinsing with cold water I have none, and get complimented all the time. Intuitively I can make the connection that "moisturizing" could help, but I'm not convinced a chemical cocktail would necessarily outperform lots of water intake, a good diet and avoiding excess sun exposure, in the long-run.
Once upon a time (~6 months ago), somebody left a comment somewhere on ACX saying they were looking for work as a data/software person in corporate research. But the plot twist is, I now want to talk to a data/software person about corporate research.
If you fit this description, please let me know. Alternatively, if you are routinely scraping ACX comments and tagging them in a searchable way using ML... uh, maybe I should just talk to you.
Can someone give me a just-the-facts summary of the impact of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, with minimal editorializing, and emphasis on any points that are not likely to be covered by the standard culture-war hot-takes? Bonus points for Georgia- or Atlanta-specific information.
(context: I live in GA, don't particularly want kids, and am trying to determine whether I need to examine the fallout of the decision *right now* or can afford to wait until things settle before deciding if/what to do about it. I don't trust standard news sources to tell me what is useful information over whatever makes the punchiest story.)
The new background colour is making the site take noticeably longer to load, including when expanding comments.
Something new with the turquoise background on the site today?
I've been reading up a lot on the other contentious Supreme Court case that was published last week.
In the case of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association vs. Bruen, many organizations sent briefs supporting the action of striking down the law.
Among those organizations: many legal-aid agencies and minority-rights associations argued that the New York law about concealed-carry had a severely-disproportionate effect on minorities. A huge number of those arrested for illegal gun possession in New York were either Black or Latino. The lawyers of the Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defenders Services, and the Legal Aid Society all argued that gun rights were a 'legal fiction' for minorities under that law.
The opinion of the Supreme Court barely mentioned this factor.
Do you think that the racial-impact factors should have been considered in deciding this case?
I'm not an American and was trying to understand what difference the Roe v Wade overturning makes, but it's very difficult to get a clear picture.
Like, it would be nice to see something that tells me what percentage of American women of child bearing age are likely to have - no access to abortion at all, and what percentage have access till what gestational age e.g what percentage till 6, till 12, 18, 24 weeks etc.
I would have thought this should be the most basic statistic that anyone who wants to understand the impact of this ruling would want to look at first. Yet, it's nowhere to be found. Anyone here have any idea?
How many more deaths will be caused now that Roe vs Wade is overturned? I haven't been able to find this statistic anywhere.
On some classified ad in the past year or so, someone posted about software for organizing collective action, allowing signatories of a petition anonymity until a certain threshold was reached.
I forget what it was called. Can someone point me to it?
[CW: ill-advised attempts at levity.]
*Visualizing good turns of phrase: shape rotator or wordcel thing?
*What would be the epistemic threshold for requiring belief in things that are instrumentally good, even if terminally false - Pascal's Minimum Wager?
*If a bait'n'switch-class fallacy is used as a witty verbal riposte, would that be an example of a Bon Mot and Bailey?
Meta actually-serious question: are rationalists capable of devising jokes* that non-Ingroup will grok, much less laugh at? I genuinely think this might be a hole in our collective maps, and contributes to above-average levels of below-average social eptitude.
*besides puns, which Samuel Johnson says are the lowest form of humour. Surely we can do better.
On the topic of why the shoplifting statistics in San Francisco seem so off (from your San Fransicko post), I can share an experience from 2 car break-ins I recently had in the city (one in December, one in May). In both cases I filed a police report immediately, and requested a copy for insurance purposes. The process involves filing a request through the SFPD Records website, which is supposed to get back to you within 10 business days. In both cases they did *not* get back to me within that time frame, and I had to call them to urge them to send the report. On one of the calls the officer told me that they were still processing reports from 3 months prior, i.e. there was a massive backlog. So they might only be selectively processing reports when someone makes a big enough stink about it.
If you are a Dutch rationalist or rationalist in NL, consider checking out our discord: https://discord.gg/XgfrXka8
We have a July meetup planned, an open DnD group, and a census doc to determine future events. We just started with this new setup and now have 36 members on the server with daily discussions on rationality. It's basically a local chapter for the Netherlands and currently looking to find where all the Dutch rats / rats in NL are, so hi! :D
Why is yudkowsky (and the rat-adjacent community) so sure about drexler nanotech?
Skimming ey latest on lw, he claim that the most plausible way agi can eliminate humanity is
> emails some DNA sequences to any of the many many online firms that will take a DNA sequence in the email and ship you back proteins, and bribes/persuades some human who has no idea they're dealing with an AGI to mix proteins in a beaker, which then form a first-stage nanofactory which can build the actual nanomachinery. (Back when I was first deploying this visualization, the wise-sounding critics said "Ah, but how do you know even a superintelligence could solve the protein folding problem, if it didn't already have planet-sized supercomputers?" but one hears less of this after the advent of AlphaFold 2, for some odd reason.) The nanomachinery builds diamondoid bacteria, that replicate with solar power and atmospheric CHON, maybe aggregate into some miniature rockets or jets so they can ride the jetstream to spread across the Earth's atmosphere, get into human bloodstreams and hide, strike on a timer.
This seems... unlikely? Had him stopped at an agi create a supervirus in a lab, well i could agree. But drexler vision of mechanical dry nanotech seems to not be particularly consistent with known physics and chemistry, let alone the bootstrapping of diamondoid (if they are even possible) nanobot from organic stuff (could it actually happen, evolution by natural selection would have already done it.)
In the smalley-drexler debate, well, the actual expert on the subject was smalley and he put forward good arguments. When you go at smaller scales physics behave differently and you cannot hope that your mechanical design will work as intended. Van der waals forces will make everything extremely sticky and oxidation will spell doom for your tiny diamonds. (Also, regarding that timer, i don't know how precise it can be. We now understand that there are thermodynamic limitations on the accuracy of clocks, but I am not an expert, so I could be wrong)
All in all it seems to me that the most plausible nanomachine design will be organic and biological, not diamondoid like. Tbf, I am not sure at all, but given that it seems to me that the community has never properly answered smalley concerns, should the rat community be that sure that drexlerian nanotech is possible?
Psych question: antipsychotics are dopamine antagonists and stimulants are dopamine agonists, and stimulant induced psychosis would be treated with antipsychotics, logically one would think they're opposites... Why is it then that they can work together without neutralising each other? What voodoo magic is at work?
Any EA folks out there that are either in edtech and/or avid readers willing to give feedback and/or advice?
I'm exploring creating a tool enabling people to share beautiful ranked booklists - with the goal of helping informal learners read better books sooner and helping communities like this identify and share what the canonical books are.
I'd love to get feedback on the prototype, get business advice, learn about your reading habits and needs etc. Thank you!!!
Why is ACX suddenly turquoise?
What's the point of a symbolic head of state in parliamentary systems? I get it when the system came out of a monarchy (or is still a constitutional monarchy), but not why you'd have a ceremonial-only President. It seems like a weird holdover from monarchy that you need an actual person to be The Embodiment and Avatar Of The State even in an openly democratic regime with a constitution with popular legitimacy.
If you haven't had a chance to read the first two parts on Construction Physics substack's series on nuclear power costs, I'd recommend them. TL;DR Nuclear plants are extremely complex and very sensitive to labor coordination problems and delays that come from the regulatory environment and design changing in the middle of constructions, plus the extremely low public tolerance for nuclear risk (an attempt by the NRC to qualify some level of radioactivity as safe caused a huge public backlash).
I have a friend who is deeply into NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming, not Natural Language Processing) and claims that it has been very useful to them. My inclination is to see it as a pseudoscience. I realize these two positions are not mutually exclusive (it could be a pseudoscience that happened to be useful for my friend but would not be equally useful for a random person, or it could include some generically useful self-help advice framed in a pseudoscientific way), but I'm curious if anyone has any experience with or thoughts on NLP.
Scott. this one seems to be in your wheelhouse. I note that it is in animal models now and no FDA trials have begun yet, but the claims are pretty big, if true:
"New Drug Could Help Stop Depression, Anxiety, Brain Injury, and Cognitive Disorders"
https://scitechdaily.com/new-drug-could-help-stop-depression-anxiety-brain-injury-and-cognitive-disorders/amp/
DOI: 10.3389/fphar.2022.863762
"The researchers showed that the systemic administration of the new drug alters neurobehavior in mice, reducing anxiety-like behavior. It also provides a promising landscape for future studies to assess whether the drug could help combat stress, anxiety, depression, addiction, cancer, and neurodegeneration."
"A new preclinical drug reported by James Bibb, Ph.D., and colleagues has the potential to combat depression, brain injury, and cognitive disorders. The drug, which is notable for being brain-permeable, works by inhibiting the kinase enzyme Cdk5.
"Cdk5 is an important signaling regulator in brain neurons. Over three decades of research, it has been linked to neuropsychiatric and degenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Knocking out the enzyme in mice makes them more resilient to stress, improves cognition, protects neurons from stroke and brain trauma, and slows neurodegeneration.
"While Cdk5 inhibitors may offer potential therapeutic benefits and new ways to study basic brain function, previous first- and second-generation anti-Cdk5 compounds largely get blocked at the blood-brain barrier, which restricts solute movement from the blood to the extracellular fluid of the central nervous system. So far, no Cdk5 inhibitor has been authorized for the treatment of any neuropsychiatric or degenerative condition."
I think there are much simpler and less ambiguous tests of AI intelligence, such as the ones I tried here:
https://outsidetheasylum.blog/testing-dall-e-2-mathematics-comprehension/
Obviously we might come to a point where they pass tests like these and still fail other things, but as long as they're failing simple mathematical reasoning I think it's clear they don't understand what they're talking about in any meaningful way.
These IQ results are not particularly trustworthy:
"In the imputed ITT analysis, children in the intervention group had a 2.5-point (95% CI: −0.4, 5.4) higher mean FSIQ than children in the control group (Table 3). Adjusting for PTB increased the estimate to 2.8 points (95% CI: −0.1, 5.7), and after adjustment for both PTB and child’s sex the effect estimate was 3.0 points (95% CI: 0.2, 5.9). Excluding eight participants who incorrectly received or did not receive the HEPA cleaners had little effect on the estimate (2.5 points; 95% CI: −0.5, 5.4)."
Various ways to analyze the data produced mostly p > .05, they managed to find one method variation with p < .05. I compute it to be .025. Shrug tier. Nice study though.
https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/EHP10302
Anyone have any thoughts about this? Apparently the CDC hasn't actually been monitoring COVID vaccine adverse events in spite of publishing a plan saying they would.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-vaers-covid-vaccine-safety/
ACX Tweaks has stopped working for me, either something changed with substack or with Firefox (version 101.0.1) on a Mac. I tried deleting it and re-installing. Anyone have any ideas?
OK arguing-about-Supreme-Court time.
I'm not the first to mention any of this, but it seems to me like the two recent hot-button cases, on guns and abortion, are contradictory. Links to both:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/20-843_7j80.pdf
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
They both look to history to ask whether a right to an abortion in one case, or a right to carry a gun in public (or some version of that) in the other case, existed historically.
But in the gun case, they make a lot of hay about looking specifically to the era of the founding fathers, heavily discounting other eras; in the abortion case they mostly rely on cases from the mid-1800s and onward. In addition, in the gun case they look to see whether carrying guns in public was *outlawed* as a stand-in for whether you had a *right* to do so; not outlawed == you have a right to it. But in the abortion case they specifically distinguish the two - just because abortion wasn't outlawed *doesn't mean* you had a right to it.
I think it's also clear that Supreme Court justices doing this sort of historical research isn't a good way of doing anything. Does anyone think that this sort of reasoning, or the similar reasoning you see on the other side when liberals do it, is any sort of evenhanded look at the history of whatever types of laws are at issue? It screams cherry picking and special pleading to me. If they're going to do it, they should at least commission a historian or take expert testimony or something; right now it seems like copying stuff from amicus briefs combined with clerks googling stuff.
A few other criticisms (and for the record I am pro-choice and don't have a strong opinion about the New York gun law at issue):
Alito's concurrence in the gun case is dumb. It's basically just him arguing about gun policy, makes overbroad statements that I don't think he even believes, and accuses the other side of policy-driven reasoning (i.e. not constitutional interpretation) when his entire concurrence is about policy.
For Alito's opinion in the abortion case, and to strike home the point about history, I think another person reading the same history he does and with the sort of cherry-picking they do, could easily reach the result that there *was* a right to pre-quickening abortion historically. Also, the assurance that this case doesn't affect other cases like Griswold or Obergefell falls flat; his argument clearly implies those decisions are wrong, and he says they aren't affected because they don't involve "potential life", but nothing about his reasoning with regards to abortion rests on whether there's a "potential life" involved.
For Thomas's opinion in the gun case, he claims that he's putting the second amendment on the same level as other rights like in the first amendment, but he is going beyond that. He repeatedly dismisses "means-end" analysis i.e. strict scrutiny, but the court always applies those things when deciding first amendment cases.
For Alito in the abortion case, he claims he isn't questioning anyone's motives, but also cites people on both sides who have claimed the other side has discriminatory motives, and disputes at length the idea that pro-lifers have discriminatory motives while also insinuating that pro-choicers do.
Has any parliamentary country ever tried a system where the head of government is *not* elected by the lower/people's house? I.e. you have most of the elements of a normal parliamentary system, the Prime Minister or whatever you would like to call them only governs by holding the confidence of the branch of government that elected them. It's just that in this case, the PM would be elected or subject to recall by maybe the upper house, in an attempt to make their system of government less vulnerable to populism. Upper houses in most countries are generally for longer terms & less subject to the popular vote. (Or possibly a joint session of the upper or lower houses, or even an Electoral College formed by some other means just for this one task).
If the objection is that the upper house couldn't function as a parliamentary body without snap or early elections, it's worth noting that Norway has done just that for over 200 years- has a Prime Minister, but the representatives serve a 4 year term with no snap elections possible. If they have to replace a PM the same body just finds a new candidate. Anyways, just curious if that's ever been tried anywhere
What do people think is going on with Havana Syndrome? The claim (according to the unreliable New Yorker) is that many cases are believed by the CIA to be actual attacks, most likely using pulsed microwave radiation, most likely by Russia.
Some excerpts from the year-old New Yorker article:
"(The CIA) discovered that what began with several dozen spies and diplomats in Havana now encompasses more than a hundred and thirty possible cases, from Colombia to Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to Austria, in addition to the United States and other countries. At least four of the cases involve Trump White House officials, two of whom say they had episodes on the Ellipse. The C.I.A. accounts for some fifty cases. The rest are mostly U.S. military and State Department personnel and their family members."
"Top officials in both the Trump and the Biden Administrations privately suspect that Russia is responsible for the Havana Syndrome. Their working hypothesis is that agents of the G.R.U., the Russian military’s intelligence service, have been aiming microwave-radiation devices at U.S. officials to collect intelligence from their computers and cell phones, and that these devices can cause serious harm to the people they target. Yet during the past four years U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to find any evidence to back up this theory, let alone sufficient proof to publicly accuse Russia."
"Several of Biden’s top advisers have said, in closed-door meetings, that they believe the C.I.A. will eventually be able to trace the Havana Syndrome to Russia."
Does anyone have any memorization tips? Currently studying for the bar exam, and I do not have enough time to create flashcards on anki for spaced repetition. Thank you!
Repeating my earlier comment that the book review in the previous post contains content that was plagiarized (from me). IMO a statement should be added to the post acknowledging this.
See here:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-public-choice-theory/comment/7349428
In recent infectious-disease news:
1. London sewage sampling has detected poliovirus. https://www.science.org/content/article/poliovirus-in-london-sewage-sparks-alarm I think this sort of sampling is highly useful for detecting pathogens and we need more of it. But right now we can only detect what we're looking for. The Nucleic Acid Observatory (to sequence everything, basically) should definitely be funded.
2. The WHO declined to assign the current monkeypox outbreak "public health emergency of international concern" status. Given that it shows >4000 cases with no signs of being contained, I predict (~80% confidence) that it will be declared a PHEIC within the near future (6 months). https://www.who.int/news/item/25-06-2022-meeting-of-the-international-health-regulations-(2005)-emergency-committee--regarding-the-multi-country-monkeypox-outbreak
"The Committee was concerned about the potential for exacerbation of the stigmatization and infringement of human rights, including the rights to privacy, non-discrimination, physical and mental health, of affected population groups, which would further impede response efforts."
This is giving me strong early 2020 vibes . . . basically, "let's not declare an emergency to avoid stigmatization".
My understanding of Roe vs Wade:
https://cozilikethinking.wordpress.com/2022/06/27/understanding-roe-vs-wade/
To my fellow runners:
What's your go-to remedy for sore muscles and stiff joints? I've been upping my mileage per run lately. I'm back in the office three days a week so I can't fit in 4-5 mile runs five days a week anymore. So I've changed it to 8-10 mile runs three days a week.
I've been pleasantly surprised. I thought running fewer days a week would put me in a foul mood - nothing beats back depression like running - but the extra miles are really giving me a wonderful, long-lasting high. I want to stick with this program.
The problem is that I'm achy as hell. Knees, quads and feet in particular. I'm gimping around on my recovery days which makes chasing the kids around difficult. Stretching helps a tiny bit, walking - which fortunately I do a lot of - helps a bit more. But nothing comes close to "fixing" it, and I'm scared as hell about getting injured. I'm getting older - not "getting", I'm 48 and already there - and recovering from injuries from running or lifting is a nightmare these days.
So what are your cures? Would a trip to a sauna help? I'm not actually sure what a "sauna" is, but I'm sure I can find one. Would it be a decent cure? How about a massage? How about a CHEAP massage? I can't regularly drop $300 on this shit. How about something that's free? That would be ideal. How about something that I can install in my house? My wife isn't going to OK a hot tub, but anything less than that I can probably manage.
Thanks in advance!
Is reproductive justice an EA issue? Thoughts from the ACX community on the SCOTUS Dodds decision overturning Roe?
If you live near Seattle, come to the in-person event on August 3rd: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zPw5WLaJ9f4QEfpyR/lw-acx-seattle-summer-meetup / https://www.facebook.com/events/749612359504536/
Why is wisdom high status relative to knowledge —beyond the fact that it might be harder to achieve? Or rarer?
A well-reported story about why teachers in a major school district are burning out. Spoiler: "restorative justice" is a complete disaster and the students (and teachers) know it: https://whyy.org/episodes/schooled-teaching-on-the-brink/
One of the rare education stories that actually goes beyond just grabbing quotes from alleged experts and instead asks questions and compares the quotes to what's actually happening in schools.
Working on a premise for a story (that I hope to one day have time to write) and wanted some folks to kick it hard:
Killer AI scenario. However nobody knows for sure the killer AI exists. The only person who has noticed is an insurance adjuster who has noticed an uptick in highly unlikely deaths/a huge mortality spike among AI scientists.
Is there a way you can think of that this kind of data could be hidden/obfuscated?
Let's say everyone agrees to choose a Supreme Court judge randomly from some list of candidates. How could a random selection be setup in practice? All sides need to agree that the outcome is fair and not rigged. E.g. a coin toss is easy to rig, same for a ball blower from a bingo game (as depicted in Better Call Saul). Anything like "blockchain-powered RNG" is a no go cause math is hard and computers can be hacked.
My naive attempt:
1. Each candidate guesses a number, writes it down and puts away, hidden.
2. All candidates flip coins to get either 1 or 0.
3. Those values are summed up, a candidate with the closest guessed number wins, tie is a retry.
Assuming enough candidates who are split in two adversarial groups, e.g. R and D, both groups can collude, rig the coins, but that will spoil the outcome.
A few weeks ago there was a discussion about how Substack's format is unpopular compared to SlateStarCodex's. I recently became aware that Substack allows the author to recolor page backgrounds, albeit broadly and without much customization.
Some of the complaints about Substack (mine for one) touched on how it is currently pure white, which is rough on the eyes, while SlateStarCodex had a nice mix of blues and greys. Scott, have you considered recoloring the page to more closely match the old layout's color scheme?
Alternatively, does anybody know a good solution to force a different color scheme as a user?
Chen's whole article seems like the same willfully obtuse nonsense that AI apologists peddle a lot of (I'm reminded of the people on a Hacker News thread trying to obfuscate the difference between "do humans like, really deeply understand the philosophical concept of negation" and "when asked to draw a picture of a bowl with no apples, DALL-E 2 draws a bowl full of apples").
Yes, we get it, if you ask rando humans on the internet, sometimes they'll give nonsense answers. This is indeed why *obviously* deeply primitive AIs from a long time ago could "pass the Turing test," because sometimes humans say random bullshit that seems deeply unintelligent.
But that's uninteresting from an evaluation-of-an-AI-capabilities perspective, and we are interested in AI's "best effort" versus humans' best efforts.
A few people asked around here (and on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit) about sperm cryopreservation, so I wrote a practical guide to sperm: https://denovo.substack.com/p/know-your-sperm
If you wanted to do it yourself, the hardest part would be ensuring a constant supply of liquid nitrogen.
Edit to clarify: if you're serious about using the stored sperm to establish a pregnancy, don't DIY, find a fertility clinic.
I asked this in the hidden open thread but I'll try again: does anyone have any thoughts on the new paper claiming to show that COVID vaccines have dangerous side effects, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4125239 ? I can't find any obvious problems with it, but I'm skeptical on priors and confused about how this could have been missed until now.
AIUI Bitcoin has a use value (crime, privacy, remittances, etc) and a speculation value. Is there any way to tell what the use value is? That is, if God told us that Bitcoin would always be about the same percent of economic activity as it is now, what would determine the price?
My first answer was "supply and demand", but I'm having trouble understanding how this works. My demand might be "I want to send $10,000 in a digital way to my friend", but this is agnostic as to the price of Bitcoin - I'm equally fine sending 1 BTC or 10 BTC depending on their value. Also, if the sending process takes half an hour, it doesn't seem like I'm influencing the demand for very long.
Suppose there are 20 million Bitcoins and these can be used to make $20 billion extra profit (in crime, remittance savings, etc) per year. What else do I need to know in order to determine the use value of Bitcoin?
Has Michael responded to Scott’s review of San Fransicko? If so, I would be interested in his thoughts, especially on the “does he support sweeping deinstutionalization” controversy.
Speaking of pregnancy interventions, whatever happened to the huge drop in premature births during lockdown? I recall it was as high as 90% in Denmark.
One hypothesis was that the premature births were caused by an as yet unknown respiratory virus. When lockdown occurred, the R0 of the virus dropped below 1 and no one got it. Hence the reduction in premature births.
This seemed like a rather important observation. Does anyone have an update?
How do you distinguish wisdom from knowledge? Which is more difficult to attain? Why? Is wisdom a mushy term that fails a rational analysis or does it point to the idea that rationality is not enough, since the rub is in the application or embodiment of the knowledge in live time?