Victoria Australia uses a type of voting where you can get instant runoff or just side with a party's preferences by checking only one box. 92.7% of voters just used the simpler method, checking only one box.
Some people in the 7% are really angry about it.
Possibly difficult cognitive dissonance for election wonks to craft a technically robust system then democratically find almost no interest in it from the electorate.
"People express different preferences than me because they are responding to incentives in a flawed system" can sometimes be true. But it is always worth considering whether people simply disagree with you, as an Occam's prior.
As full genome testing is down to 300 dollars it seems like that would make more sense but it's hard to know what reports they provide and seems like a better deal than genesight (cheaper and full genome) though the wait is 12-14 weeks right now versus quite quick from genesight. I imagine that one could probably do one's own analysis a la https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/12/how-to-use-23andme-irresponsibly/ but I'm not sure what the state of the art is. Anyone done (full) genome testing or know more about it? Surely there are open source tools out there?
Since the Ukraine invasion started I've enjoyed five Russian vloggers on YouTube. All just ordinary people, except they know English.
Now all five of them have left Russia. Two left soon after the invasion started; the other three left after Putin announced mobilization. Their stories:
(The next problem: most of them left on visitor visas, so presumably will have to return eventually.)
Edit: actually wait, there's also 1420 who hasn't left, but his whole channel is about interviewing Russians on the street, so if he leaves he'd have to reinvent himself. https://www.youtube.com/c/1420channel
I'm a mathematics graduate student, and will probably be applying for tech jobs in the Spring. I am looking for referrals to FAANG companies. Thanks! I can talk about programming experience more if needed. I apologize if this is not suitable for the open thread.
I've heard this as well, and I do wonder how much direct research examines moneypox in this way. Even if there were no difference between various sex acts in terms of chafing/tearing, it stands to reason that an orifice that gets 5-10x the action is going to have a disproportionate amount of both.
Does anyone know how I could find a thread on twitter that had 200+ instances of beautiful architecture each from a different country with explanations?
I've seen people say that **analogies** are, blanketly, a bad thing to use to try to prove a point. Is anyone aware of a good writeup/steelman of this belief?
Asking because I find analogies extremely useful, at least in education. Of course, I've had the experience, in debate, of analogies backfiring such that I slightly regret using them. Though I've never completely regretted it. It is loosely my suspicion that anti-analogy people just want a way to indulge glaring inconsistencies in their behaviour/beliefs.
My understanding is that some people think they're bad in *any* form of debate - not just un-persuasive.
The ongoing Magnus Carlsen / Hans Niemann chess cheating scandal seems tailor-made to teach Bayesian reasoning. Incomplete evidence, reasoning under uncertainty, important prior-shifting updates - there's even a formally defined, precisely calculable base rate! Anyway, Niemann definitely did it.
The part I didn’t get in the Georgism posts was why the land tax wasn’t supposed to increase housing prices. It seemed to be a fully general argument that taxes never increase any price, but that seems to be untrue for, say, gas prices that are much higher in regions with high taxes. What was different about land?
Something I haven't seen mentioned in all the ACX discussions on Georgism (maybe it was mentioned and I missed it) is an alternative system proposed by Glen Weyl called Plural Property, or SALSA: https://www.radicalxchange.org/concepts/plural-property/
The gist is that there would be a land tax (with "land" understood rather expansively, a la Henry George), but instead of government assessors of land's value, the owner of some land would be required to publicly proclaim a price at which they would be willing to sell their land at any time. Then two things happen:
1) They are taxed as a percentage of their own proclaimed price, maybe around 30% per year;
2) Anyone who is willing to buy at the proclaimed price may offer to do so at any time, and the owner is then legally obligated to sell to them at that price.
The idea is that if the tax rate is set correctly, the optimal strategy for a selfish land owner is proclaim their price honestly, that is, as what the land is actually worth to them; the price at which they are indifferent between getting the money and keeping the land. Weyl and his coauthors have game-theoretic proofs to this effect. This avoids the need in George's LVT scheme for a skilled and honest government assessment team, an element often attacked by critics of LVT.
I'm intrigued by both LVT and SALSA, and I'm not sure which would be better, but I thought I'd bring it up here so others can learn about it.
I remember once coming across a wordpress blog from the early 10s where a guy reads books and posts his reactions chapter by chapter. I remember reading his series on The Lord of the Rings, and remember that for the last chapter of Fellowship, he included a bunch of photos of himself making faces while talking to the characters. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name or much else about it. It's a bit of a longshot, but does anyone know what I'm talking about?
2 weeks ago in the open thread I posted about Trafalgar polling and what it means for the midterm Senate elections. Below is a list of my predictions based on the polls at the time:
JD Vance 49% in Trafalgar poll - loses
Mehmet Oz 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
H. Walker 47% in Trafalgar poll - loses
A. Laxalt 47% in Trafalgar poll - loses
B. Masters 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
Ted Budd 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
R Johnson 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
T Smiley 46% in Trafalgar poll - loses
New Trafalgar polls have since been released for 6 of these races. Still now Florida or NH poll but seems pretty clear NH will be a Dem win in any case.
Here are the new numbers:
Smiley 46.5%(+0.2%) Sep 1-Sep 24
Laxalt 47.1%(+0.4%) Aug 18-Sep 20
Johnson 48.7%(+1.6%) Aug 25-Sep 19
Masters 45.4%(+1.2%) Aug 27-Sep 17
Mehmet 45.9%(+2.5%) Aug 18-Sep 15
Budd 46.6%(-1.0%) Jul 1-Sep 4
The Dem numbers typically change inverse to the R gain which is not unexpected. Sometimes they went down by a few points even as the R number didn't change. Trafalgarian Augury would expect this because the theory is that Trafalgar hits the R vote share dead on and fudges the Dem number to suit the narrative.
We are still waiting for new Vance/Walker polls. Expect them to come out later this week, prob before Sunday. No idea if we'll get NH or FL polls soon. Trafalgar polled NH before the R primary, but that was in Dec 2021. I'd expect a new NC poll soon since that is the oldest poll by a month in both original and recent poll time.
If Cahaly starts showing the R candidate 49+ that would be a bad sign for Dems. He said he'd have 4-5 more polls for each competitive race. As long as he continues to show most Republicans below 47% I'd expect him to get that right compared to the election even though many people think having WA poll similarly to GA or even PA is weird.
We're sufficiently past the Picketty Wars that maybe there's a summary of them out there? I was wondering about r > g. My understanding is that there was lots of criticism of Picketty from various angles, but doesn't it seem pretty trivially true that we do in fact think that r > g? And if that continues in the long run, it implies that capital has dominance over other forms of getting money? Is that broadly accepted and it's like the specific details and the modes of it that are contested, or do some people think that actually r <= g, at least in the long run?
Let's suppose you strongly believe that your favourite stock will go up, by a lot. Unless you're a very naive investor, you don't invest your whole net worth in it, because you understand that you might be wrong. Instead you put together a sensible-looking portfolio which includes an overweighting of your favourite stock along with a bunch of other assets.
Since ethicists are apparently less sophisticated than finance types, they don't do this. Instead they pick their favourite ethical and value system, assume it to be correct with 100% confidence, and follow it all the way through to some diverging-tails logical conclusion which usually winds up with either killing everybody or tiling the universe with simulated Singapores.
Meta-ethics seems like the antidote to this; instead of assuming one ethical system is one hundred percent right you can have a portfolio of ethical systems with various different weightings. This ought to discourage you from doing things which only appear sensible in one ethical system (tiling the universe with anything) while encouraging the things that all sensible ethical systems agree on (being nice to people and not stealing)
My question is: has there ever been any work to formalise this sort of idea into some kind of a portfolio theory of meta-ethics?
Like clearly this is an "action market" where a significant chunk of the predictors of the market can directly control the outcome - someone with an existing LW account can predict YES and then go make that happen.
Interestingly, the reaction seems to have been for people who don't want the site taken down to immediately buy as much YES (i.e. the site goes down) as possible to try to take the profit motive off the table. (Or more cynically to get the potential profit themselves)
It seems like there might be a real-world analogue to this: if there were a real-money "Bezos is assassinated" market, they (or their family and friends, or generally, people who don't want them assassinated) might buy a bunch of "YES" shares to prevent the profit motive. Which would in effect make the prediction some interesting combination of life-insurance and protection racket.
Granted, in that case, the "real" probability is much lower - the site going down is a fairly likely event, while an assassination is a fairly unlikely event - so it would be much harder to significantly move the prediction. (The Bezos family and friends would essentially have to out-spend the entire rest of the market to keep the profit motive off-the-table)
But it does seem like this sort of "strategic predicting" can be a meaningful effect on the stated probability. "Predict things I don't want to happen so that it's a win-win if they do happen" seems like a real force in a prediction market, more so than in a financial market: in a financial market, I'm generally hedging against other financial bets, so my hedge and other positions to some degree "cancel out", rather than hedging against "real-world" outcomes which don't reflect in the prediction market at all.
---
The *other* interesting twist is that the site *did* go down due to a programming error, leading to a debate that essentially boils down to how literally the prediction market should be interpreted. There's a minimum (decreasing) Karma threshold, and a programming error allowed a 0 Karma user to take the site down.
So in a literal sense, "will the button be used to take down the site" definitely happened, so the market would resolve YES. But if you interpreted the market as "Will the button be used to take down the site... per the stated rules for the event", the answer is (currently still) NO.
Regardless of which way you think this should go (assuming someone doesn't make this debate a moot point soon), I think the general take-away here is that there's a "Loophole Constant" with prediction markets, like a Lizardman Constant - if you see a 5% prediction of something, you don't know if that's a real 5% prediction or a "1% prediction + 4% prediction that someone finds a loophole causing this to resolve as YES".
I've heard that the recent Monkeypox outbreak is primarily affecting sexually active gay men. *But*, I've also heard that it's harder to get tested for it if you aren't a sexually active gay man because it spreads through prolonged skin contact and so those who aren't sexually active, gay, or men are less likely to have it. It feels like there's potential there for sampling bias. All it takes is one bisexual guy for it to break out of that sub-group.
Have there been any write-ups on this? Am I missing something that makes this a negligible issue?
Scott's mentioned several times how much of a problem high time preference/akrasia/impatience is in peoples lives and that he suffers from it himself, and this is definitely a major issue in my own life, I think he even joked some one with perfect self control would end up as world emperor or something, which I totally can believe.
I can't help feeling Scott has achieved way more than most people ever will, e.g.. this blog, working 100hour medical internships etc. He kinda strikes me as someone with exceptionally low time preference.
Are there any posts where he discusses this stuff/does anyone think he might have achieved those things but still have high time preference somehow?
Say you have a child who's among the youngest for their class, i.e. they're born in December, almost January. Are the disadvantages acute enough to warrant holding back a year (e.g. grading by teachers, social life), or conversely, are they in an advantageous position? Or is it a wash? What about a negative stigma?
How's the evidence for 'Covid vaccines prevent transmission' looking these days? (Sorry if this is like an ultra hot button issue or what have you). I say this as someone who's extremely vaccinated (I lied to get an extra vaccine shot of a different type before boosters were widespread, as an example. I will take a new booster the second that it's available to me). It seems that both the public and private sectors in the US have gradually pulled back on vaccine requirements.
My understanding of requiring others to be vaccinated is that it theoretically prevented Covid transmission to others. Herd immunity, etc. etc. This was the big discussion around vaccine requirements pre-2020- that requiring children to have MMR ones prevented transmission overall, and so on. Pre-Covid I had never thought to question any of the science behind that- these days, I would not say that the public health sector has come out of this looking particularly great.
As again someone who's heavily vaccinated, I don't really feel any need to force others to get one if it only affects them. (I mean, I would also probably support de-prioritizing them for emergency care if they catch Covid and the hospitals are full- consequences of your actions, and so on. I understand that this is probably not realistic). So, do the Covid vaccines prevent transmission to others, or not? How about other, non-Covid vaccines?
Questions for people who have studied or taken pure mathematics courses: Did you understand everything during lectures? How did you study to be able to really understand the subject in depth (complicated proofs etc), while at the same time studying for other courses?
Im taking a measure theory course and im finding it challenging to understand everything thats happening at the pace my professor is teaching it. Adding to that, because of how abstract everything is, you need a lot of time to grasp the concepts, and having other courses at the same time makes this very challenging. Im very good at managing my time, but I tend to lose confidence when I go to classes and I cant understand whats going on (and therefore I cant ask questions).
An idea I've seen around these parts (can't remember which commenter originated the idea, sorry) is that Niche Group X enjoys substantial and improving favour and approval...but a good chunk of that is due to state-backed coercion, lots and lots of money (e.g. imperilment of funding), etc. Rather than an organic bubbling-up of support.
It got me thinking that...well...price controls are bad, right? Yet the described scenario could plausibly be called subsidizing X. Rather than let X compete freely and fairly on the "market of groups", there's a not-insignificant thumb on the scales in its favour. And this is particularly notable given the tiny size of X relative to other small groups (since many groups get aid of some kind...that's just politics).
I suppose a left-economic lens would view this as How It Should Be. Little guys get crushed by amoral vicissitudes of markets, and that's not always just or fair! They never had a fair shot, and are worth saving, so advantages are warranted to level the playing field. Whereas a right-economic lens would say, no, things have value based on what the market is willing to pay...if X can't get a foothold on its own merits, without vast external backing, then it doesn't deserve more than a tiny fraction of marketshare. Government shouldn't be in the business of market interventions, by default, because it often makes more a mess of aggregating true preferences than is worth it.
Anyway, just a proto-model that's been kicking around in my head. I guess it's kind of bloodless, since people aren't products and don't get traded in markets...except they totally do, like in dating. Or abstractly, like competing "personal brands", or status games.
I was surprised to find that as far as I know nobody here pointed out that suddenly palmistry is not charlatanism now that the Huberman lab has correlated index finger length to various cognitive functions among many complex correlations between embodiment and emotions. I would like to know how a rationalist explains this to him/herself given the standard ridiculing of palmistry. Serious AND friendly question.
Why is really excellent food a big deal for people? I doubt it's about nutrition, it's not like food from a great meal is all that nutritionally different from food from a very good meal. I'll not that great food has its effect in the mouth, well before it lands on the the metabolism.
I'm reasonably sure the effect isn't *just* about showing off, though that would be hard to prove.
I think great food has some aspects of losing track of time, though it obviously isn't the right level of challenge involved in flow. And great food is apt to be memorable.
There is one thing that I can not understand in conservative narrative and every time I ask about it in a conversation I don't get a direct reply.
The narrative claims that academia was captured by ideologically motivated leftists, thus justifying dismissing anything from social science that conservative do not like. But how and when did it actually happen?
Consider the obvious case of propaganda being spread as "science" in Soviet Union. There we see an ideologically motivated government that came to power via revolution, that enforced the line of the party through violence. The causal chain is clear here.
With western academia I can't see it. If there were no actual violent takeover, how did the leftist infiltrated presumably properly working academia if not due to the merits of their scientific works? Critical legal studies are 50 years old. Was the academia already taken over back then? Alan Turing was chemically castrated for being a homosexual in the fifties. So did the infiltration happened somewhere inbetween these two dates? Does anybody have a gear level model of this belief?
Several reasons have been suggested for why our ape like ancestors started walking upright: To see above grass, minimise heating from the sun on their backs, carry things such as infants or sticks, or perhaps a combination of all these.
I would like to propose another significant reason which I'm not aware has yet been considered. What is more, as I explain, this suggestion could in some degree be confirmed by experiment today!
At the time these small apes lived there were fierce eagles patrolling the sky, far larger than any around today, and I believe many skulls excavated of small animals and apes from that period have a pair of puncture marks from a giant beak.
But a small ape, and more so a group of them, moving across an open savanna might be able to perplex and deter a circling eagle by walking upright and swinging their arms. Eagles presumably are not that bright, and they might find the unnatural appearance of swinging arms offputting.
Over time, perhaps a million years or more, this walking on two legs and arm swinging became second nature, and a natural reflex, especially in the presence of large eagles. and I maintain that surprisingly it persists to a degree today!
Of course I realise arm swinging is necessary when walking on two legs, to provide a counterbalance to moving legs. But I am referring to extra exaggerated motion over and above that needed just to maintain balance.
Think how many armies over time have used eagle banners and totems, the Romans, Nazis, ethnic Americans with their eagle head dresses. Perhaps this was in part a subconscious acknowledgement that people still have a vestige of an arm swinging reflex, and the eagles in a sense motivate and "energize" soldiers, especially when marching or (in earlier times) war-dancing etc.
So I propose a simple experiment whereby a psychologist could test for this reflex, not that it would help much in directly establishing whether early humans relied on it to deter eagles. But it would confirm or otherwise whether, as I maintain, the reflex still exists today.
Find a busy street, and erect a large poster of a fierce looking "Uncle Sam wants you!" style eagle glaring at the viewer. Then I conjecture that most passing pedestrians would noticeably increase the amount of arm swinging! This could be filmed and analyzed, and I bet you anything a significant increase would be observed.
Is the concept of "access concentration", or at least its popularity, relatively new? I don't remember seeing a lot of it in articles from 20 years ago, nor do I know a Pali or Sanskrit equivalent. Did Ingram make it famous?
Among all the other reasons I decided to wrap the articles up into a book, is that I want to resolve a personal question about what the role of the non-fiction book is in the age of "Can't I just reach a bunch of people just by writing articles on the internet?"
My hypothesis is that more actual humans will read the articles than will ever buy the book, but that being a published author that has sold enough copies of a book will open some doors that would have otherwise remained closed to me in terms of outreach about these ideas. I'll report back with the results in six months or so. Even if you think Georgism is lame, I figure some of you will be interested in that angle of things.
In the interests of pre-registration, I posted a Manifold market about how many copies the book will sell in the first month:
I posted a bunch of quantitative stats there for context, but here's the highlights: Scott says the articles collectively had 300,000+ views, and I found a quote by an NPD bookscan lady who says that out of books by top 10 publishers, 66% sell less than 1,000 copies in the first 52 weeks. Given my publisher is super tiny and this is my debut book and I'd be lying if said I had a highly organized promotional plan, that would suggest the deck is stacked against me. On the other hand I've gotten a lot of high profile endorsements, and the articles themselves were pretty popular.
I figure this will be an interesting experiment. Place your bets and put your fake money on the line!
EDIT: I have made the following changes in response to feedback.
- Updated note about intl' shipping + email form
- Replaced confusing paypal buttons with better links to the store itself
The Future Fund's contest reminds me of the criticizing EA contest from a bit ago. Has that ended? I checked the posting page and saw it closed on 9/1 so I imagine it wouldn't have yet, but I'm not sure where it would be announced beyond another forum post.
I'm curious if people's concerns, myself included, end up being validated
Why exactly are the Scandinavian countries so wealthy? Most of them have a higher GDP per capita close to that of the US, which would then be much higher than the European average. For instance Norway averages $67k, the US $63k, Britain $40k, France $38k, and Germany $45k. I do understand that Norway has oil money, but Sweden at $51k and Finland at $49k still puts them comfortably ahead of Europe, and I don't believe that they do oil extraction. Denmark is at $60k, so quite a bit higher. Iceland's at $59.
How did this state of affairs come about? Are there particular industries that the Nordic countries dominate? Most American commentary about these countries focuses on their social welfare programs, but I don't find it exceptional that small wealthy countries (that were homogenous at the time that the programs were created) were able to fund generous benefits. I'd be more interested in understanding how they became wealthy to begin with
I haven't read much about AI safety, so I'm not sure if this is a new idea: When you create an super intelligent AI first you put it in a simulation of the world and tell it it is in the real world. (Like a person in the Matrix.) To see if it behaves as it is supposed to or to see if it tries to exterminate all humans or something.
I realize this does not solve all the problems. A super intelligent AI might realize it is in a simulation and pretend to be nice until they let it out in the real world. Or it might realize it is in a simulation and somehow try to influence the real people looking at the output. Maybe try to hypnotize them or something. Or lie and say it has deduced there is great danger to the world and only the AI can stop it.
The US treasury has two Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) issued at 5 and 10 year maturities parallel to non-inflation protected securities. Comparing the two rates gives an implicit marker rate f inflation expectations. FRED has done the arithmetic and publishes the break-even rates. Wouldn't it be a good idea for the Treasury to issue TIPS with other maturities, say 1,2, 3 and 7 years. It would be useful to the Fed to know what markets think, no? So why doesn't the Treasury do this?
Likewise, why doesn't the Treasury issue a security indexed to the nominal GDP (TGIS)at various maturities in the future. Comparing these to TIPS would show market expectation of real GDP growth. So why not do it?
This may be a longshot but does any one of you guys work at/know of a company looking to hire machine learning interns ? Unless you're Montreal it will have to be remote. Let me know
Has there been any interesting recent discussion of cryonics? Most of what I can find is from 10-15 years ago.
In particular, I'd like to see writing (either in favor or against) by cryogenics or neuroscience professionals. Too much of what I've found thus far are general information-theoretic arguments by people with no domain-specific expertise.
Why do children sleep so much more deeply than adults? I can pick up and move my sleeping kids from one place to another. You could never do something like that with a grown-up.
Why do people find this admirable/virtuous (in regards to immigration)? Doesn't the thief who steals your car also do this for a (however marginally) better life? Not to say that immigration is strictly comparable to car theft, but simply that doing something to improve one's life is obviously insufficient for a behavior to be considered positive. If immigrants improve the country (in a way car thiefs do not), then that is why immigration is virtuous, not the incidental improvement to their own lives.
What even is the alternative to "for a better life" as a reason to immigrate? If their coming here "for a better life" is a pro-immigration argument, then that means that coming here for the opposite reason should constitute an anti-immigration argument. So where's the inverse of "for a better life"? If that's the "good" type of immigration, what's the "bad" type? Coming here for a worse life? Does anyone do that? *Would* anyone ever do that? If there's no inverse to "coming here for a better life", then it's just being used as a lazy platitude used to deflect criticism of immigration despite it containing no actual substance.
I mean, in thoery I suppose people *could* immigrate here to tirelessly serve America in a way that makes themselves less happy or something? But, would this be considered the opposite of the virtuous "better life" immigration? Ought we oppose immigration if it involved immigrants willingly making America (ostensibly) better off at their own expense instead of trying to be personally happier? That seems kind of weird.
None of this means we should reduce immigration per se - I'm just genuinely trying to understand what people mean by this and why it's considered valid in the defense of immigration.
And I mean, wouldn't the actually admirable thing to do be staying in your home country and working to improve it, even if that sacrifices the likely quality of your life? This is not even directly an argument against immigration. It seems like you can think immigration is a good thing without thinking that immigrants are somehow behaving virtuously by coming here (and using that to defend against anti-immigration arguments).
One of my favorite lexical upgrades from the Rationalists is the phrase "in expectation." Can we come up with something more concise? For example, I want to say, "I arrived on time in expectation," meaning that I arrived on time in 90% of universes. Maybe something like, "I arrived on time-x." (Colloquially, we would say, "I arrived on time, but it was close.")
Is there any economic writing on speakers' fees? I've always been puzzled by how much a well known person can make by saying stuff that can probably be found in their $19.95 hardcovers, and that half the audience will be too blitzed to remember anyway. Is it just conspicuous consumption, to brag that you had Bill Clinton or Malcolm Gladwell at your business's dinner, or is there something else I'm missing?
Gauging interest here, but if I created a San Francisco meetup for fans of Philosophy Bear's Substack, would people attend? Philosophy Bear, a.k.a. depony sum, is a blog I discovered via ACX. I would describe his writing as vaguely part of the "Rationalist Left" (not a real thing).
https://twitter.com/AntonyGreenElec/status/1575697214495916032?t=umsDFFbDrtIkn-Cb8gDU6w
Victoria Australia uses a type of voting where you can get instant runoff or just side with a party's preferences by checking only one box. 92.7% of voters just used the simpler method, checking only one box.
Some people in the 7% are really angry about it.
Possibly difficult cognitive dissonance for election wonks to craft a technically robust system then democratically find almost no interest in it from the electorate.
"People express different preferences than me because they are responding to incentives in a flawed system" can sometimes be true. But it is always worth considering whether people simply disagree with you, as an Occam's prior.
Anyone know if there of any updates to this post on genetic testing for medication sensitivity? https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/06/antidepressant-pharmacogenomics-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
As full genome testing is down to 300 dollars it seems like that would make more sense but it's hard to know what reports they provide and seems like a better deal than genesight (cheaper and full genome) though the wait is 12-14 weeks right now versus quite quick from genesight. I imagine that one could probably do one's own analysis a la https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/12/how-to-use-23andme-irresponsibly/ but I'm not sure what the state of the art is. Anyone done (full) genome testing or know more about it? Surely there are open source tools out there?
I'm curious if other people are alarmed by a tweet like this: https://twitter.com/MichaelEMann/status/1575151147312095233
To save a click, it is a "famous" climate scientist saying:
> "cautioning against linking climate change to any one event," is the new denier talking point.
Does this jibe with people's sense of reality? Or have we gone over the edge?
Since the Ukraine invasion started I've enjoyed five Russian vloggers on YouTube. All just ordinary people, except they know English.
Now all five of them have left Russia. Two left soon after the invasion started; the other three left after Putin announced mobilization. Their stories:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vQUXH-uLzdA
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VfDV9E79y_U
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dRoAXbOQhDI
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pgf1tcbdIFo
https://youtube.com/watch?v=43YNPB8py1s
(The next problem: most of them left on visitor visas, so presumably will have to return eventually.)
Edit: actually wait, there's also 1420 who hasn't left, but his whole channel is about interviewing Russians on the street, so if he leaves he'd have to reinvent himself. https://www.youtube.com/c/1420channel
I'm a mathematics graduate student, and will probably be applying for tech jobs in the Spring. I am looking for referrals to FAANG companies. Thanks! I can talk about programming experience more if needed. I apologize if this is not suitable for the open thread.
I've heard this as well, and I do wonder how much direct research examines moneypox in this way. Even if there were no difference between various sex acts in terms of chafing/tearing, it stands to reason that an orifice that gets 5-10x the action is going to have a disproportionate amount of both.
Does anybody know anyone or know any interesting writings related to cooperative housing? Bonus points if it's about the UK.
Heard someone mention it to me this weekend and would like to learn more
Does anyone know how I could find a thread on twitter that had 200+ instances of beautiful architecture each from a different country with explanations?
I've seen people say that **analogies** are, blanketly, a bad thing to use to try to prove a point. Is anyone aware of a good writeup/steelman of this belief?
Asking because I find analogies extremely useful, at least in education. Of course, I've had the experience, in debate, of analogies backfiring such that I slightly regret using them. Though I've never completely regretted it. It is loosely my suspicion that anti-analogy people just want a way to indulge glaring inconsistencies in their behaviour/beliefs.
My understanding is that some people think they're bad in *any* form of debate - not just un-persuasive.
The ongoing Magnus Carlsen / Hans Niemann chess cheating scandal seems tailor-made to teach Bayesian reasoning. Incomplete evidence, reasoning under uncertainty, important prior-shifting updates - there's even a formally defined, precisely calculable base rate! Anyway, Niemann definitely did it.
The part I didn’t get in the Georgism posts was why the land tax wasn’t supposed to increase housing prices. It seemed to be a fully general argument that taxes never increase any price, but that seems to be untrue for, say, gas prices that are much higher in regions with high taxes. What was different about land?
Something I haven't seen mentioned in all the ACX discussions on Georgism (maybe it was mentioned and I missed it) is an alternative system proposed by Glen Weyl called Plural Property, or SALSA: https://www.radicalxchange.org/concepts/plural-property/
The gist is that there would be a land tax (with "land" understood rather expansively, a la Henry George), but instead of government assessors of land's value, the owner of some land would be required to publicly proclaim a price at which they would be willing to sell their land at any time. Then two things happen:
1) They are taxed as a percentage of their own proclaimed price, maybe around 30% per year;
2) Anyone who is willing to buy at the proclaimed price may offer to do so at any time, and the owner is then legally obligated to sell to them at that price.
The idea is that if the tax rate is set correctly, the optimal strategy for a selfish land owner is proclaim their price honestly, that is, as what the land is actually worth to them; the price at which they are indifferent between getting the money and keeping the land. Weyl and his coauthors have game-theoretic proofs to this effect. This avoids the need in George's LVT scheme for a skilled and honest government assessment team, an element often attacked by critics of LVT.
I'm intrigued by both LVT and SALSA, and I'm not sure which would be better, but I thought I'd bring it up here so others can learn about it.
I remember once coming across a wordpress blog from the early 10s where a guy reads books and posts his reactions chapter by chapter. I remember reading his series on The Lord of the Rings, and remember that for the last chapter of Fellowship, he included a bunch of photos of himself making faces while talking to the characters. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name or much else about it. It's a bit of a longshot, but does anyone know what I'm talking about?
2 weeks ago in the open thread I posted about Trafalgar polling and what it means for the midterm Senate elections. Below is a list of my predictions based on the polls at the time:
JD Vance 49% in Trafalgar poll - loses
Mehmet Oz 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
H. Walker 47% in Trafalgar poll - loses
A. Laxalt 47% in Trafalgar poll - loses
B. Masters 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
Ted Budd 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
R Johnson 44% in Trafalgar poll - loses
T Smiley 46% in Trafalgar poll - loses
New Trafalgar polls have since been released for 6 of these races. Still now Florida or NH poll but seems pretty clear NH will be a Dem win in any case.
Here are the new numbers:
Smiley 46.5%(+0.2%) Sep 1-Sep 24
Laxalt 47.1%(+0.4%) Aug 18-Sep 20
Johnson 48.7%(+1.6%) Aug 25-Sep 19
Masters 45.4%(+1.2%) Aug 27-Sep 17
Mehmet 45.9%(+2.5%) Aug 18-Sep 15
Budd 46.6%(-1.0%) Jul 1-Sep 4
The Dem numbers typically change inverse to the R gain which is not unexpected. Sometimes they went down by a few points even as the R number didn't change. Trafalgarian Augury would expect this because the theory is that Trafalgar hits the R vote share dead on and fudges the Dem number to suit the narrative.
We are still waiting for new Vance/Walker polls. Expect them to come out later this week, prob before Sunday. No idea if we'll get NH or FL polls soon. Trafalgar polled NH before the R primary, but that was in Dec 2021. I'd expect a new NC poll soon since that is the oldest poll by a month in both original and recent poll time.
If Cahaly starts showing the R candidate 49+ that would be a bad sign for Dems. He said he'd have 4-5 more polls for each competitive race. As long as he continues to show most Republicans below 47% I'd expect him to get that right compared to the election even though many people think having WA poll similarly to GA or even PA is weird.
We're sufficiently past the Picketty Wars that maybe there's a summary of them out there? I was wondering about r > g. My understanding is that there was lots of criticism of Picketty from various angles, but doesn't it seem pretty trivially true that we do in fact think that r > g? And if that continues in the long run, it implies that capital has dominance over other forms of getting money? Is that broadly accepted and it's like the specific details and the modes of it that are contested, or do some people think that actually r <= g, at least in the long run?
Portfolio theory and meta-ethics:
Let's suppose you strongly believe that your favourite stock will go up, by a lot. Unless you're a very naive investor, you don't invest your whole net worth in it, because you understand that you might be wrong. Instead you put together a sensible-looking portfolio which includes an overweighting of your favourite stock along with a bunch of other assets.
Since ethicists are apparently less sophisticated than finance types, they don't do this. Instead they pick their favourite ethical and value system, assume it to be correct with 100% confidence, and follow it all the way through to some diverging-tails logical conclusion which usually winds up with either killing everybody or tiling the universe with simulated Singapores.
Meta-ethics seems like the antidote to this; instead of assuming one ethical system is one hundred percent right you can have a portfolio of ethical systems with various different weightings. This ought to discourage you from doing things which only appear sensible in one ethical system (tiling the universe with anything) while encouraging the things that all sensible ethical systems agree on (being nice to people and not stealing)
My question is: has there ever been any work to formalise this sort of idea into some kind of a portfolio theory of meta-ethics?
Sooo there's been a lot more talk of nuclear war risk in the past couple weeks. how worried should we be? looking for all kinds of input here
LW is doing a "Petrov Day" today, where anyone above a certain, decreasing Karma threshold can "launch the nukes" and take down the site for the day. (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KTEciTeFwL2tTujZk/lw-petrov-day-2022-monday-9-26 - this might be a dead link depending on when you click it)
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But I'm more interested in the prediction market - https://manifold.markets/Multicore/will-less-wrongs-big-red-button-be - which is managing to hit a lot of the "prediction market quirks".
Like clearly this is an "action market" where a significant chunk of the predictors of the market can directly control the outcome - someone with an existing LW account can predict YES and then go make that happen.
Interestingly, the reaction seems to have been for people who don't want the site taken down to immediately buy as much YES (i.e. the site goes down) as possible to try to take the profit motive off the table. (Or more cynically to get the potential profit themselves)
It seems like there might be a real-world analogue to this: if there were a real-money "Bezos is assassinated" market, they (or their family and friends, or generally, people who don't want them assassinated) might buy a bunch of "YES" shares to prevent the profit motive. Which would in effect make the prediction some interesting combination of life-insurance and protection racket.
Granted, in that case, the "real" probability is much lower - the site going down is a fairly likely event, while an assassination is a fairly unlikely event - so it would be much harder to significantly move the prediction. (The Bezos family and friends would essentially have to out-spend the entire rest of the market to keep the profit motive off-the-table)
But it does seem like this sort of "strategic predicting" can be a meaningful effect on the stated probability. "Predict things I don't want to happen so that it's a win-win if they do happen" seems like a real force in a prediction market, more so than in a financial market: in a financial market, I'm generally hedging against other financial bets, so my hedge and other positions to some degree "cancel out", rather than hedging against "real-world" outcomes which don't reflect in the prediction market at all.
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The *other* interesting twist is that the site *did* go down due to a programming error, leading to a debate that essentially boils down to how literally the prediction market should be interpreted. There's a minimum (decreasing) Karma threshold, and a programming error allowed a 0 Karma user to take the site down.
So in a literal sense, "will the button be used to take down the site" definitely happened, so the market would resolve YES. But if you interpreted the market as "Will the button be used to take down the site... per the stated rules for the event", the answer is (currently still) NO.
Regardless of which way you think this should go (assuming someone doesn't make this debate a moot point soon), I think the general take-away here is that there's a "Loophole Constant" with prediction markets, like a Lizardman Constant - if you see a 5% prediction of something, you don't know if that's a real 5% prediction or a "1% prediction + 4% prediction that someone finds a loophole causing this to resolve as YES".
I've heard that the recent Monkeypox outbreak is primarily affecting sexually active gay men. *But*, I've also heard that it's harder to get tested for it if you aren't a sexually active gay man because it spreads through prolonged skin contact and so those who aren't sexually active, gay, or men are less likely to have it. It feels like there's potential there for sampling bias. All it takes is one bisexual guy for it to break out of that sub-group.
Have there been any write-ups on this? Am I missing something that makes this a negligible issue?
Thanks, just published this argument that most people are underestimating the likelihood that instrumental convergence implies rough alignment:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xJ2ifnbN5PtJxtnsy/you-are-underestimating-the-likelihood-that-convergent
Scott's mentioned several times how much of a problem high time preference/akrasia/impatience is in peoples lives and that he suffers from it himself, and this is definitely a major issue in my own life, I think he even joked some one with perfect self control would end up as world emperor or something, which I totally can believe.
I can't help feeling Scott has achieved way more than most people ever will, e.g.. this blog, working 100hour medical internships etc. He kinda strikes me as someone with exceptionally low time preference.
Are there any posts where he discusses this stuff/does anyone think he might have achieved those things but still have high time preference somehow?
Say you have a child who's among the youngest for their class, i.e. they're born in December, almost January. Are the disadvantages acute enough to warrant holding back a year (e.g. grading by teachers, social life), or conversely, are they in an advantageous position? Or is it a wash? What about a negative stigma?
How's the evidence for 'Covid vaccines prevent transmission' looking these days? (Sorry if this is like an ultra hot button issue or what have you). I say this as someone who's extremely vaccinated (I lied to get an extra vaccine shot of a different type before boosters were widespread, as an example. I will take a new booster the second that it's available to me). It seems that both the public and private sectors in the US have gradually pulled back on vaccine requirements.
My understanding of requiring others to be vaccinated is that it theoretically prevented Covid transmission to others. Herd immunity, etc. etc. This was the big discussion around vaccine requirements pre-2020- that requiring children to have MMR ones prevented transmission overall, and so on. Pre-Covid I had never thought to question any of the science behind that- these days, I would not say that the public health sector has come out of this looking particularly great.
As again someone who's heavily vaccinated, I don't really feel any need to force others to get one if it only affects them. (I mean, I would also probably support de-prioritizing them for emergency care if they catch Covid and the hospitals are full- consequences of your actions, and so on. I understand that this is probably not realistic). So, do the Covid vaccines prevent transmission to others, or not? How about other, non-Covid vaccines?
Questions for people who have studied or taken pure mathematics courses: Did you understand everything during lectures? How did you study to be able to really understand the subject in depth (complicated proofs etc), while at the same time studying for other courses?
Im taking a measure theory course and im finding it challenging to understand everything thats happening at the pace my professor is teaching it. Adding to that, because of how abstract everything is, you need a lot of time to grasp the concepts, and having other courses at the same time makes this very challenging. Im very good at managing my time, but I tend to lose confidence when I go to classes and I cant understand whats going on (and therefore I cant ask questions).
An idea I've seen around these parts (can't remember which commenter originated the idea, sorry) is that Niche Group X enjoys substantial and improving favour and approval...but a good chunk of that is due to state-backed coercion, lots and lots of money (e.g. imperilment of funding), etc. Rather than an organic bubbling-up of support.
It got me thinking that...well...price controls are bad, right? Yet the described scenario could plausibly be called subsidizing X. Rather than let X compete freely and fairly on the "market of groups", there's a not-insignificant thumb on the scales in its favour. And this is particularly notable given the tiny size of X relative to other small groups (since many groups get aid of some kind...that's just politics).
I suppose a left-economic lens would view this as How It Should Be. Little guys get crushed by amoral vicissitudes of markets, and that's not always just or fair! They never had a fair shot, and are worth saving, so advantages are warranted to level the playing field. Whereas a right-economic lens would say, no, things have value based on what the market is willing to pay...if X can't get a foothold on its own merits, without vast external backing, then it doesn't deserve more than a tiny fraction of marketshare. Government shouldn't be in the business of market interventions, by default, because it often makes more a mess of aggregating true preferences than is worth it.
Anyway, just a proto-model that's been kicking around in my head. I guess it's kind of bloodless, since people aren't products and don't get traded in markets...except they totally do, like in dating. Or abstractly, like competing "personal brands", or status games.
I was surprised to find that as far as I know nobody here pointed out that suddenly palmistry is not charlatanism now that the Huberman lab has correlated index finger length to various cognitive functions among many complex correlations between embodiment and emotions. I would like to know how a rationalist explains this to him/herself given the standard ridiculing of palmistry. Serious AND friendly question.
https://youtu.be/VrhA_KLoQyM
Why is really excellent food a big deal for people? I doubt it's about nutrition, it's not like food from a great meal is all that nutritionally different from food from a very good meal. I'll not that great food has its effect in the mouth, well before it lands on the the metabolism.
I'm reasonably sure the effect isn't *just* about showing off, though that would be hard to prove.
I think great food has some aspects of losing track of time, though it obviously isn't the right level of challenge involved in flow. And great food is apt to be memorable.
I'm willing to be a test subject.
There is one thing that I can not understand in conservative narrative and every time I ask about it in a conversation I don't get a direct reply.
The narrative claims that academia was captured by ideologically motivated leftists, thus justifying dismissing anything from social science that conservative do not like. But how and when did it actually happen?
Consider the obvious case of propaganda being spread as "science" in Soviet Union. There we see an ideologically motivated government that came to power via revolution, that enforced the line of the party through violence. The causal chain is clear here.
With western academia I can't see it. If there were no actual violent takeover, how did the leftist infiltrated presumably properly working academia if not due to the merits of their scientific works? Critical legal studies are 50 years old. Was the academia already taken over back then? Alan Turing was chemically castrated for being a homosexual in the fifties. So did the infiltration happened somewhere inbetween these two dates? Does anybody have a gear level model of this belief?
Several reasons have been suggested for why our ape like ancestors started walking upright: To see above grass, minimise heating from the sun on their backs, carry things such as infants or sticks, or perhaps a combination of all these.
I would like to propose another significant reason which I'm not aware has yet been considered. What is more, as I explain, this suggestion could in some degree be confirmed by experiment today!
At the time these small apes lived there were fierce eagles patrolling the sky, far larger than any around today, and I believe many skulls excavated of small animals and apes from that period have a pair of puncture marks from a giant beak.
But a small ape, and more so a group of them, moving across an open savanna might be able to perplex and deter a circling eagle by walking upright and swinging their arms. Eagles presumably are not that bright, and they might find the unnatural appearance of swinging arms offputting.
Over time, perhaps a million years or more, this walking on two legs and arm swinging became second nature, and a natural reflex, especially in the presence of large eagles. and I maintain that surprisingly it persists to a degree today!
Of course I realise arm swinging is necessary when walking on two legs, to provide a counterbalance to moving legs. But I am referring to extra exaggerated motion over and above that needed just to maintain balance.
Think how many armies over time have used eagle banners and totems, the Romans, Nazis, ethnic Americans with their eagle head dresses. Perhaps this was in part a subconscious acknowledgement that people still have a vestige of an arm swinging reflex, and the eagles in a sense motivate and "energize" soldiers, especially when marching or (in earlier times) war-dancing etc.
So I propose a simple experiment whereby a psychologist could test for this reflex, not that it would help much in directly establishing whether early humans relied on it to deter eagles. But it would confirm or otherwise whether, as I maintain, the reflex still exists today.
Find a busy street, and erect a large poster of a fierce looking "Uncle Sam wants you!" style eagle glaring at the viewer. Then I conjecture that most passing pedestrians would noticeably increase the amount of arm swinging! This could be filmed and analyzed, and I bet you anything a significant increase would be observed.
Is the concept of "access concentration", or at least its popularity, relatively new? I don't remember seeing a lot of it in articles from 20 years ago, nor do I know a Pali or Sanskrit equivalent. Did Ingram make it famous?
Assuming the AIs are broadly capable, much like humans, but smarter. Why does it matter if they annihilate and replace us?
Has Scott written anything in depth on the usefulness of pharmacogenetic testing for psychiatric medication?
Thanks for the shout-out about the book, Scott!
Among all the other reasons I decided to wrap the articles up into a book, is that I want to resolve a personal question about what the role of the non-fiction book is in the age of "Can't I just reach a bunch of people just by writing articles on the internet?"
My hypothesis is that more actual humans will read the articles than will ever buy the book, but that being a published author that has sold enough copies of a book will open some doors that would have otherwise remained closed to me in terms of outreach about these ideas. I'll report back with the results in six months or so. Even if you think Georgism is lame, I figure some of you will be interested in that angle of things.
In the interests of pre-registration, I posted a Manifold market about how many copies the book will sell in the first month:
https://manifold.markets/LarsDoucet/how-many-copies-of-my-book-land-is
I posted a bunch of quantitative stats there for context, but here's the highlights: Scott says the articles collectively had 300,000+ views, and I found a quote by an NPD bookscan lady who says that out of books by top 10 publishers, 66% sell less than 1,000 copies in the first 52 weeks. Given my publisher is super tiny and this is my debut book and I'd be lying if said I had a highly organized promotional plan, that would suggest the deck is stacked against me. On the other hand I've gotten a lot of high profile endorsements, and the articles themselves were pretty popular.
I figure this will be an interesting experiment. Place your bets and put your fake money on the line!
EDIT: I have made the following changes in response to feedback.
- Updated note about intl' shipping + email form
- Replaced confusing paypal buttons with better links to the store itself
The Future Fund's contest reminds me of the criticizing EA contest from a bit ago. Has that ended? I checked the posting page and saw it closed on 9/1 so I imagine it wouldn't have yet, but I'm not sure where it would be announced beyond another forum post.
I'm curious if people's concerns, myself included, end up being validated
Why exactly are the Scandinavian countries so wealthy? Most of them have a higher GDP per capita close to that of the US, which would then be much higher than the European average. For instance Norway averages $67k, the US $63k, Britain $40k, France $38k, and Germany $45k. I do understand that Norway has oil money, but Sweden at $51k and Finland at $49k still puts them comfortably ahead of Europe, and I don't believe that they do oil extraction. Denmark is at $60k, so quite a bit higher. Iceland's at $59.
How did this state of affairs come about? Are there particular industries that the Nordic countries dominate? Most American commentary about these countries focuses on their social welfare programs, but I don't find it exceptional that small wealthy countries (that were homogenous at the time that the programs were created) were able to fund generous benefits. I'd be more interested in understanding how they became wealthy to begin with
I haven't read much about AI safety, so I'm not sure if this is a new idea: When you create an super intelligent AI first you put it in a simulation of the world and tell it it is in the real world. (Like a person in the Matrix.) To see if it behaves as it is supposed to or to see if it tries to exterminate all humans or something.
I realize this does not solve all the problems. A super intelligent AI might realize it is in a simulation and pretend to be nice until they let it out in the real world. Or it might realize it is in a simulation and somehow try to influence the real people looking at the output. Maybe try to hypnotize them or something. Or lie and say it has deduced there is great danger to the world and only the AI can stop it.
Well, I will do my best to throttle my child-like sense of humor and give my best answers for how to have a good future to that EA contest.
The US treasury has two Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) issued at 5 and 10 year maturities parallel to non-inflation protected securities. Comparing the two rates gives an implicit marker rate f inflation expectations. FRED has done the arithmetic and publishes the break-even rates. Wouldn't it be a good idea for the Treasury to issue TIPS with other maturities, say 1,2, 3 and 7 years. It would be useful to the Fed to know what markets think, no? So why doesn't the Treasury do this?
Likewise, why doesn't the Treasury issue a security indexed to the nominal GDP (TGIS)at various maturities in the future. Comparing these to TIPS would show market expectation of real GDP growth. So why not do it?
Does anyone know a really well-written (and hopefully accurate) book on the history of the industrial revolution?
This may be a longshot but does any one of you guys work at/know of a company looking to hire machine learning interns ? Unless you're Montreal it will have to be remote. Let me know
Has there been any interesting recent discussion of cryonics? Most of what I can find is from 10-15 years ago.
In particular, I'd like to see writing (either in favor or against) by cryogenics or neuroscience professionals. Too much of what I've found thus far are general information-theoretic arguments by people with no domain-specific expertise.
Why do children sleep so much more deeply than adults? I can pick up and move my sleeping kids from one place to another. You could never do something like that with a grown-up.
"They came here for a better life"
Why do people find this admirable/virtuous (in regards to immigration)? Doesn't the thief who steals your car also do this for a (however marginally) better life? Not to say that immigration is strictly comparable to car theft, but simply that doing something to improve one's life is obviously insufficient for a behavior to be considered positive. If immigrants improve the country (in a way car thiefs do not), then that is why immigration is virtuous, not the incidental improvement to their own lives.
What even is the alternative to "for a better life" as a reason to immigrate? If their coming here "for a better life" is a pro-immigration argument, then that means that coming here for the opposite reason should constitute an anti-immigration argument. So where's the inverse of "for a better life"? If that's the "good" type of immigration, what's the "bad" type? Coming here for a worse life? Does anyone do that? *Would* anyone ever do that? If there's no inverse to "coming here for a better life", then it's just being used as a lazy platitude used to deflect criticism of immigration despite it containing no actual substance.
I mean, in thoery I suppose people *could* immigrate here to tirelessly serve America in a way that makes themselves less happy or something? But, would this be considered the opposite of the virtuous "better life" immigration? Ought we oppose immigration if it involved immigrants willingly making America (ostensibly) better off at their own expense instead of trying to be personally happier? That seems kind of weird.
None of this means we should reduce immigration per se - I'm just genuinely trying to understand what people mean by this and why it's considered valid in the defense of immigration.
And I mean, wouldn't the actually admirable thing to do be staying in your home country and working to improve it, even if that sacrifices the likely quality of your life? This is not even directly an argument against immigration. It seems like you can think immigration is a good thing without thinking that immigrants are somehow behaving virtuously by coming here (and using that to defend against anti-immigration arguments).
One of my favorite lexical upgrades from the Rationalists is the phrase "in expectation." Can we come up with something more concise? For example, I want to say, "I arrived on time in expectation," meaning that I arrived on time in 90% of universes. Maybe something like, "I arrived on time-x." (Colloquially, we would say, "I arrived on time, but it was close.")
Is there any economic writing on speakers' fees? I've always been puzzled by how much a well known person can make by saying stuff that can probably be found in their $19.95 hardcovers, and that half the audience will be too blitzed to remember anyway. Is it just conspicuous consumption, to brag that you had Bill Clinton or Malcolm Gladwell at your business's dinner, or is there something else I'm missing?
Gauging interest here, but if I created a San Francisco meetup for fans of Philosophy Bear's Substack, would people attend? Philosophy Bear, a.k.a. depony sum, is a blog I discovered via ACX. I would describe his writing as vaguely part of the "Rationalist Left" (not a real thing).
I am interested in making causal inferences from historical data. Does anybody know any relevant books/conferences/case studies/etc?
Does anyone have experience applying to mech eng internships in the uk? I’m kinda lost on the best ways to go about doing it
How do people think inflation is likely to end?