This listing is for a FT position. But if your colleagues over there might also occasionally work with freelancers on an ad hoc basis, on various research editing tasks or projects, I'd be glad to be listed among those in their contact list. I have a background spanning IT, marketing (including copywriting), and personal investing, as well as nascent interests in the crypto/Web3 space. Feel free to share this inquiry with any colleague you know over on that side of Messari. Thanks!
Hi Arbor, I have a couple questions if you don't mind - do you adjust pay based on country, and can people work their own hours or does everyone have to work within a certain window? Thanks!
I'm looking at finding an internship/entry-level position in the crypto-/software engineering space. Don't know if Messari is looking at hiring or on-boarding anyone in those kinds of positions right now, I'm not in a rush and could spend some time increasing my skillset to make myself more attractive. Would love to hear your thoughts if you see this post!
Otherwise, I'll try again in the next classifieds thread!
I would like to ask for advice from anyone who's made a transition from consulting (specifically life science consulting) to the pharmaceutical / biotech industry. Please email me at (ROT13) gbz.uraarffrl@tznvy.pbz if you have time to connect for me to pick your brain a bit. And thank you!
As someone who's interested to transition from biotech to life science consulting, do you mind sharing a little bit about your reasons for jumping ship?
I’ll start by talking about all the things I really like about life science consulting because I don’t think this is a bad place to start a career (or continue one) at all.
1) I really enjoy the people I work with, it reminds me of graduate school in that there are a bunch of very smart folk crammed together under high pressure and no small amount of alcohol, it can make for a marvelous alchemy
2) I really enjoy the work I do, it’s interesting, varied, and feels like I can make a difference both in economic terms and patient’s lives e.g.:
a) Worked on an asset screen for maybe half a year for a top 5 global pharma company, a few months after rolling off I open the WSG and see that they bought out our #1 pick for many many billions of dollars
b) Worked for a 3D printer manufacturer that wanted to explore the bioprinting space, I learned a ton from our industrials practice and again heard they wound up acquiring a company we’d highlighted
c) Worked for the last year helping a vaccine manufacturer which uh…yeah
3) I really enjoy the money, it’s many many times what I made in grad school and indeed I suspect at this point, or pretty soon anyway, I’ll have earned as much in consulting as I did in my entire non-consulting working life.
So yeah there’s a lot to recommend to it, and I do recommend exploring the possibility to anyone who’s at all curious
But of course, there’s a few factors that are kind of blowing me the other direction:
1) It’s a hell of a lot of hours most weeks, which is a product of both the amount of work to do in a short time and of hiring a lot of insecure overachievers, my family is expanding and so this feels like it’s not going to be sustainable forever. The longer I’ve worked here the better I’ve gotten at working efficiently and protecting my time, but sometimes it’s just going to be a lot. Also I know there’s a lot of family men and women in our firm who can make it work, so it’s certainly possible, but I don’t think it’s easy.
2) I want to see something through to the finish line. I think this is a side effect of that varied work I mentioned above as a positive. After a couple weeks or months we’re off to a new thing, and over time that’s started to bug me. I feel like even on the longest projects I’m only skimming the surface and offering advice to our clients. Someday I’d rather be the one actually responsible for making decisions
3) As much as I enjoy my coworkers, COVID has suuuuuuuuuuuucked in terms of building and maintaining group camaraderie and any kind of firm culture. I expect it will bounce back as cases wane and offices reopen but still, it’s been rough. Naturally working from home has a lot of positives, the expanding family for instance, wherever I wind up I think I’ll place a very high value on at least having the option for some type of hybrid office / WFH
If you’d like to know more about plusses and minuses feel free to email me, I can also pass your resume on to our experienced hire recruiters if you feel ready to give it a go
I'm making a native voice-conversion application that uses machine learning to convert a user's voice in real time with low latency. I'm a bit overwhelmed with managing too many areas of it at once and am open to having a highly-technical co-founder or first employee (or if you're a VC and want to fund us!) with a passion for the area and some great machine learning skills (preferably with a focus on audio engineering and real-time performance). If this sounds extremely exciting to you and you'd be an amazing fit, reach out to me at hi@koe.ai! Thanks
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to build, but it sounds similar to YourTTS, something that just got highlighted on a popular machine learning youtube channel. Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVKiMh2vEWQ&t=580s. Even if it's not exactly what you're going for, maybe you can reach out to the people behind YourTTs to see if they can help you out.
I recently did my PhD on a semiconductor device that enables battery-free sensing. I am having trouble negotiating with the university as my team lacks a strong business background. If you do have some, and would be potentially interested in being a co-founder, please message me at dmehta@freedynamics.tech
Probably a weird place for this, but I'm giving it a shot. Finishing up my second year of medical school, have been lurking on here for about a year now. I'm at a rural MD program and want to go into psychiatry. I've tried dozens of avenues to get involved with semi-interesting research with no luck. Publishing one fluff COVID vaccine reaction paper but that is it. If you have anything that I could help with remotely, please let me know and I'd love to talk with you. I'll work for free. Psychiatry tangential stuff would be best, but I'm really open to anything interesting.
Hey, I have lots of collaborators who work on research with me as volunteers as there's no money in clinical methods research. I work in evidence synthesis methodology. Check out my work here
I might have some ideas or opportunities! Former academic psychotherapy researcher, now in industry but still publishing. Feel free to set up a meeting: Calendly.com/Sam-Bernecker
We make software that helps power grid operators manage the transition to a zero-carbon grid. It's interesting work, helps fight climate change, and builds more resilient and efficient critical infrastructure. The team is dedicated, skilled, focused, and remote-friendly.
We are especially looking for a couple of distinctive skillsets:
2. Frontend engineering all-rounder: the ideal candidate here would be an experienced tech lead capable of doing both "traditional" web-based frontend development and mobile app development, plus enough backend server coding to help unlock frontend capabilities.
I know both of these types of people exist, but neither is super easy to find, thus this widening of the net. If you're interested, email me at nweininger (at) camus (dot) energy or just apply on our website.
We're building a platform to help SOC analysts, malware researches, and other security professionals detect and prevent intrusion. YOU DO NOT NEED TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT SECURITY TO APPLY. Our work consists mostly of normal software engineering, but we do have a modern code base and tech stack. (People I know at other workplaces have expressed envy over it!) We're fully remote, we have a great team, and we're building a really cool product. If you want to ask me questions about it, feel free to email me at vmnnx.jrvff@tznvy.pbz (rot13)
Hey everyone! I'm looking for a software engineer in the greater Boston area with 2 or more years of experience. Here's my pitch!
I manage Amazon Alexa’s data lake team. We develop the systems that store all of the data used by other Alexa teams to train their machine learning models. Our systems handle a staggering throughput, and we try to do it all really cost effectively. There's a vast array of systems we own that tackle issues such as upholding Alexa's customer privacy promises, ensuring data is accessible in a secure but scalable way to Alexa's ML modelling systems and data annotators, etc. We optimize for many different use cases, and each of our systems have to scale to be used by hundreds of customers each with thousands of transactions per second.
We’re currently trying to find new team members that can come in and not only take ownership of our systems and projects, but also help newer, less experienced engineers to find their footing.
Please let me know if you're at all interested, I'd love to talk with you about anything related to the job! You can reach me at (ROT13) whfgva.nznmba.qngnynxr@tznvy.pbz
Come join me in developing GitHub Copilot (http://copilot.github.com), the AI programming assistant everyone's talking about! The job posting (https://boards.greenhouse.io/github/jobs/3645017) may sound pretty specific, but honestly if you've got a great head on your shoulders, are easy to communicate with, and have written good server software, I'd love to hear from you :D
The team is fully remote and distributed all over the world. We are a small team but punch above our weight thanks to strong collaborations with Microsoft, Open AI, etc., and a lot of experience using the product ourselves every day. Come build the new (safe & aligned) AI overlords with us!
I don’t know if I have the qualifications, but is it cool if I still connect with you on LinkedIn/somewhere else? Could use more software friends and would love to hear more about your work :)
Cool! I really like Copilot but I would like it to have better integration with intellisense in vs code. At the least to decide if function signatures match the recommendations.
Hi everyone! I'm thinking of changing jobs soon, and want to transition into something more experimental/researchy/startupy. SSC feels like one of the best places to find employers/cofounders with similar interests, so I'm posting here, feel free to reach out, whether you want to pay me money in exchange for code, or just to chat!
My main interests are in the intersection of ML and formal systems:
- AI that does (formalized) math
- program synthesis (why write programs when you can write programs that write programs?)
- AI that finds vulnerabilities in programs
etc. Aside from that, I'm also interested in startups that try to apply technology to industries in a transformative way: biotech, manufacturing, blockchain etc. My main requirement for a position is that I work on problems to which I don't already know the solution 🙂
I currently live in Boston but I'm possibly open to relocating. Professionally, I've spent a few years at a FAANG as a software engineer, focusing on 1) statistical pipelines and 2) database internals.
I'm applying (and heavily modifying) the DreamCoder neurally-guided program synthesis system from MIT to the Abstraction and Reasoning Challenge from @fchollet. It's basically about making a system capable of recognizing combinations of complex abstract patterns from very few examples and generating a program that would perform the required transformation.
Although, it's not an employment opportunity, since I'm currently living off my savings myself. But if you (or anybody else here) is interested in discussing and/or collaborating, I would be happy to do so!
I might be interested in discussion and collaboration. I'm working on Bayesian program synthesis (where probabilistic programs are synthesized using MCMC), but I want to apply a neural guide/proposal, as in DreamCoder. I also find DreamCoder itself and the ARC challenge very inspiring, so would love to hear about your approach and maybe contribute. Let me know :)
Formalised maths and security vulnerabilities have one thing in common: the interesting signal is sparse, meaning you have a rather unpleasant search space to traverse. Program synthesis looks promising, but program synthesis as we do it currently is slow (unlike the GeMM we use in training and inference of NNs). The open problem in my opinion is speeding up program synthesis by at least 4 orders of magnitude, ideally more.
There is a problem that we don't already know the solution for.
i'm an animator/illustrator open for gigs-- i drew all the character frames for this short film + animated nearly all the scenes (other artists designed the characters + drew the backgrounds):
I am hiring a lab assistant near Portland, OR, for work on brain preservation research at Nectome (see https://nectome.com/the-case-for-glutaraldehyde-structural-encoding-and-preservation-of-long-term-memories/). I can teach most of the specific skills; I'm mainly looking for general competence in performing lab work. If you can read scientific papers, implement protocols, are interested in brain preservation, and able to physically work in our lab in Vancouver, WA, then this might be a good job for you. College degree not required. $70,000 / yr salary plus stock. If you're interested please email me at (ROT13) e@arpgbzr.pbz.
I'm looking for ML researchers who are willing to help with informational interviews and career advice for a neuroscience/ML postdoc.
My areas of expertise are unsupervised learning and explainability / interpretability, with publications in ML conferences and neuroscience and cell biology journals. I'm considering my options both in academia and in the industry, and COVID made it difficult for me to develop a professional network in the US where I do my research, so maybe this avenue will work better!
Please contact me via (ROT13) zvpunry.qbeba@tznvy.pbz.
Could you possibly try again? That part is maintained by a vendor (Lever) so if something is persistently wrong with it, we'll want to raise it with them.
Looking for Computer Science related internship (SWE, research, etc).
Hi! I'm a rising senior at a college in the Denver area studying Computer Science and Philosophy. I'm currently in the search process for a Summer internship. This seems like a good place to ask for open positions, because I'm sure I'm not the only undergraduate Comp Sci ACX reader. If you know of any interesting openings, please reply with the best way to apply and where to find more info.
Hi! If you're interested in summer internships, we're hiring for Google Summer of Code at Turing.jl. Turing.jl is an open-source package in Julia for Bayesian statistical computing. You can find more info at https://turing.ml . If you're interested, you can contact me on Slack here:
F / 32 / prefer-mono / Boston / rip.my.inbox at gmail
——————
Woman seeking human for romance etc! Serious relationship preferred, but also open to friendship.
Strong preferences:
- I’m open to all genders, but people capable of siring kids are preferred (ie cis men or pre-transition trans women — I’m a cis woman).
- My age (32), +/-5 years.
- I like people who are very honest and very kind. Smart is cool or whatever, but compassion, integrity, and grace are a lot more important to me.
Dealbreakers:
- Must want to have children (I have none, but would like them in the next few years)
- Must be okay with living in New England long-term (I’m currently in Boston)
Bonus points if you’re:
- An effective altruist
- An atheist
- Mostly or entirely sober (I’m an occasional social drinker, but that’s it)
- Interested in group houses / communal living
- Monogamous (I’m kinda sorta open to poly with people who do it extremely carefully, but I mostly prefer not to add that complexity to my life)
- Someone who likes other people + likes being alive
More about me: I’m a tall software engineer who lives in a group house with my childhood best friend. I like reading, cooking, hanging out with my siblings and niblings, solving riddles and word games, learning to juggle, starting and not finishing knitting projects, and (some) board games.
If you want to introduce yourself, you can email me at rip.my.inbox at gmail. No need to send anything too long — I’d prefer to meet up in person rather than go through a ton of back-and-forth online.
(If you want ideas, you could introduce yourself with any of the following:
Hi, I'm James (M, 29, Austin TX / California Bay Area)
Currently the cofounder of Manifold Markets (https://manifold.markets) which won an ACX grant last month! Previously cofounder of https://throne.live, and a Google engineer out of college.
Seems we're compatible, and I'm in Austin, but I'm a straight male, so I feel like I shouldn't enter my phone number with no additional context. I do enjoy board games, though, and fun fact: my brother is currently Manifold's top creator.
I had trouble with the drink question. I don't care about furthering "justice", but seemed like it might make the party more enjoyable for most people. 🙂
Hi I'm Carole, f/52/straight/Squamish, BC, Canada.I'm an avid rock climber and backcountry skier. Looking for a fit straight male into similar types of adventures for romance and life long relationship. I'm a research methodolist working remotely.
tl;dr: long-term, looking for marriage & kid(s) w/compatible personality. I'm a mostly but not exclusively indoor person, enjoy good food, ballroom dance, helping people actualize their potential, and the company of friends.
Instead of a dating profile, here is a webpage with links to my coolest stories. I promise they aren't boring! One of them was linkposted by Scott Alexander and another one was curated by Less Wrong.
Male, 27, looking for a woman, goal is ~marriage (with or without the actual contract). I want kids, ideally starting in the next 3-5 years but I know that might have to be flexible. I live a bit south of the SF bay area, open to the south bay, but the northern half of Monterey Bay would be perfect. Historically mostly mono but I'm a fan of poly in a "one primary partner, various additional partners" sort of structure.
I love the outdoors, especially biking (especially mountain and gravel). I really enjoy camping and backpacking. Trying to get into climbing again but we'll see if an old injury derails it again. Novice hobbyist woodworker. Fan of professional sports (football in general, and the Cubs). Finishing up a hard science PhD, trying to figure out what comes next - vague probabilities for various careers: 20% professor at undergrad-only school, 20% teach high school, 10% research career, 20% generic programming job, 30% something else. The deeper I've gotten into my PhD, the more I've realized I don't have it in me to live for my career, which is why I put it second in this paragraph, and why I'm honestly not that worried about how uncertain it is.
I'm generally about as nerdy and analytic as you'd expect from someone who hangs out around these parts, and I'd like a partner who enjoys the sort of conversations that ACX posts and thinking inspire (I was introduced to SSC by an ex who I'm still friendly with). Vaguely typical grey tribe beliefs (leaning a bit traditional left). Secular Jew.
Happy to share more! email me at cubecumbered@gmail.com or DM me on twitter @cubecumbered
Edit, a few other details inspired by Freya downthread:
- I live in a group house now that will probably split up pretty soon, and I love it. I don't know quite what the model of having kids in a group house looks like, but I'd love to always live in one if there's a good way to do it, or some sort of shared housing complex if not.
- In recent years I've become a lot more comfortable with... myself... basically beating lifelong anxiety and just being able to be basically happy most of the time, and I love it. I've also come to realize I'm an extrovert (me from 10 years ago would laugh at that accusation) and I like just generally being around people, specific activity (board games? casual sports? going biking? deep heartfelt conversation?) or not. I'd love to be with someone who can help amplify and vibe with both of those.
Hi Peter! Unrelated to this thread, but as I saw that you're in Cape Town and your profile pic is of climbing, I was wondering if you'd be up for a meet up sometime in the middle of Feb? My husband, John, and I are huge ACX fans, avid climbers and we're headed to South Africa on the 5th so we'd be in your neck of the woods and would love to meet a local!
Check out this new post on my blog, Good Optics (as seen in the ACX blogroll!): https://goodoptics.wordpress.com/2022/01/28/original-appropriation-and-divine-command/ it is about how John Locke's argument for property rights depends on theological assumptions, and how it is hard to make deontological libertarianism work without those assumptions.
There are non-theological justifications for the non-aggression principle. If you're particularly interested, you can look at Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty where he tries to ground it and you can see Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics. I don't think either are correct but they are both non-theological. Ultimately, Rothbard was convinced by Hoppe. I don't want to summarize his whole argument but it rests on the idea that to attempt to refute libertarian self-ownership is a performative contradiction. (I don't think he's correct.)
I think that Locke has a non-theological element to his objection to Bruenig's argument, which is the "Was it a robbery thus to assume to himself what belonged to all in common? If such a consent as that was necessary, man had starved..."
Which is the point that if you don't believe in legitimate first acquisition, what is the alternative? Can nobody consume anything until they have consent from everyone? To object that it is depriving others of liberty doesn't make sense to me because they do not actually own it. I cannot steal from you if you do not own something and you are not entitled to everything, otherwise how would anyone own anything?
Some libertarians believe that natural rights and consequentialism are approximately the same. I've heard this from libertarians, but I don't know which libertarians take this view. I think the more sophisticated libertarians are ethical intuitionists like Michael Huemer and Parrhesia. ;)
Without the theological argument, it is just a consequentialist argument. And while consequentialism no doubt rules out the grab world idea, it doesn't get you all the way to libertarianism without a ton of other work. Grant that the basis of property rights is consequences, and you end up arguing about the effect of the minimum wage in Indonesia, in July 1987, when it was raining, blah blah blah.
I think I most strongly object to the idea that natural rights and consequentialism should be the same. If God planned things out, you can see why that would be true. Otherwise, why would they be the same? It seems very suspiciously convenient.
I think a possible candidate explanation for why they should be the same is some argument involving decision theory. But I, personally, am yet to here that argument.
> Grant that the basis of property rights is consequences, and you end up arguing about the effect of the minimum wage in Indonesia, in July 1987, when it was raining, blah blah blah.
Nope, you don't have to do this if you also account for computational infeasibility of actually having knowledge here.
If we _did_ know this kind of thing with perfect accuracy, the world would be be a very different place. But it's impossible to know the state of the future, with any reasonable accuracy, without doing some computation. And computation requires private property:
Not sure if this is a response to me but if so: by appropriating something at T2 that was unowned at T1, I diminish your liberty. This is because you now cannot use or appropriate that thing which you previously had the right to use or appropriate.
This isn't a blog, but I think it's closer than that then to a product / service! I work on a comic where each strip is based on a popular fantasy or science fiction novel. Literally no one reads it, but we keep making them sporadically because they make us laugh. Last time I posted this link on here a few people enjoyed it, so here we go: https://involuntarybookclub.thecomicseries.com/
At the bottom is a drop down menu where they're organized by book. Most of them won't make a ton of sense unless you've read the book in question.
(1) What's with the rise. I tend to agree with Marten et al. that the rise is definitely real, and it is associated the Weber's theory of the "cage of rationality" that appears in his Protestant Ethic book.
(2) What's with the fall. Here I think the evidence is more mixed. Marten et al. marshall a lot of evidence that there is a crash that begins in 1980, and accelerates in the social media age (2010+). I agree that there is a crash, but I think we disagree about the causes, and the extent to which it happens everywhere and at the same time.
(3) What kind of work is this anyway? Can we do psychology with large-scale archives? Or is this just more social-science/Foucalt/discourse analysis, etc? (This is the largest part of my response.)
I have a podcast covering optical and biomedical research, with about a 90/10 coverage respectively. If you've ever wanted to learn more about what goes into optical physics research we cover the details! (I know optics/photonics sounds niche but I assure you everything around you centers around it, from vision to fiber optics, semiconductor production, medical imaging, defense, etc etc. We have a joke "optics is everywhere")
I'm talking a lot about utilitarianism--trying to make a sord've slimemoldtimemold-esque cumulative case (epic phrasing). Consider this a very extended consequentialism FAQ. Also, reading my blog allegedly cures blindness, cancer, most other diseases, and gives people the ability to fly and read minds :) .
I went onto your blog, started with your blog about theism, read your "positive claim rant" and immediately resolved to become a reader. That has always irritated me, too!
Isn't signal-boosting that study also bad? You've both brought it to my attention and handily linked to it- luckily, I don't want to engineer a covid variant, but can you say the same for all readers of your blog/ACX?
I made a movie: anexquisitemeal.com. It's a small, low-budget comedy about identity and narcissism. It's weird, dark, and a bit surreal. And it's only 60 minutes.
Just watched the trailer. Made me laugh. Quick question: it looks like there are several different ways to rent it, but I am curious which one of them routes the most money back to you?
If you haven't heard the "we can induce something like anorexia in animals pretty easily" thing, then this will explain a bit of that.
What was new for me: why drug treatments for AN might be useful (because they would lead people to think of it more like diabetes than voluntary addiction).
I had this idea over a year ago about the concept of a view synthesis. We often watch or read debates and discussions, and think both parties made some reasonable points, but we don’t properly lay out what the different aspects of the conversation were, try to resolve each one, and then put it back altogether.
That’s the concept I wanted to explore with my blog View Synthesis: https://viewsynthesis.substack.com/. I’ve synthesized debates on the reliability of experts, Black Lives Matter, and identity politics. Check it out!
I haven’t updated the blog in a long while due to other commitments, but am planning to get back to it soon. Subscribe if you like the concept and want to see more.
I like the concept and I was able to get through an entire two culture-war articles without cringe-quitting, which is more than I've done with any non-Scott blog in the last year. Tentatively subscribed.
Two suggestions:
1. Explain who are the proponents for each view you're synthesizing and why you chose them. This was done well in the most recent post but less so in the earlier two, as measured by me knowing the names + backgrounds of the people you were reviewing within 3 paragraphs.
2. You should know that there were a couple of throwaway lines that _almost_ made me close the tab - e.g. "America [is] one of the least racist countries in the world today" in the BLM article got my eyes rolling. As a reader I would grant more charity if you clearly marked or annotated which are your conclusions or editorial comments as opposed to the writers you're summarizing. Remember that I don't know you and you don't have very much work published for me to judge your trustworthiness as a synthesizer.
The fifth season of Hi-Phi Nation is almost over, with one episode to go. This season we did a four part series on the life and works of David Lewis, known for his theses about possible worlds, the invention of linguistic semantics and pragmatics, and theories of time travel. We also have episodes on de-extinction ethics, altruistic kidney donation, and more recently, vampires, zombies, and cannibals. https://hiphination.org/season-5/
IDK if this is relevant, but recently came across a couple of interesting techniques for trying to make sense of controversies where there's a lot of contradictory information swirling around, potentially some of it credible, across two or more possible takes? (Much as with opponent process theory versus trichromacy?)
* Ground Truth Challenges. (This feels a bit like a variation on formal debates at the US high school and college level?) These addressed some COVID-related claims, and some participants seem to be from contrarian backgrounds, but the technique itself seems interesting, more generally. https://www.betterskeptics.com/how-does-the-ground-truth-challenge-work/
The most obvious thing missing here is consideration of the physical mechanism that must occur before color perception: detection of light at certain wavelengths. Blueish-yellow is going to be grey or white since it combines all three primary colors; red-green is going to be yellow (because red and green are not opposites; red and turqoise are opposites, and the inverse American flag at the top should really be using a turqoise/teal/cyan color rather than green, because the inverse of the green-striped flag is in fact tinted purple, unlike the real American flag).
These important physical considerations were easier to figure out because they are based on physics and do not require an understanding of how the brain works (information about how the brain works is much harder to gather, if only for ethical reasons.) But also, nobody studying how the brain works is realistically going to figure out how color perception works without first understanding basic ideas like primary colors.
Presenting only the incorrect diagram of "Opponent process theory" (without correction) is a weird decision. Do not assume your audience is following so closely that they can both spot the error and figure out what the correct diagram would have looked like.
I still don't know how color perception works in the brain and this article doesn't tell me anything about that, nor does it suggest answers to the meta-level of how to go about finding answers, so I don't see what it's good for.
High Sierra Showerheads is a small, family-owned business in the California mountains near Yosemite.
They make kick-ass low-flow shower heads that don't feel a thing like low-flow, yet save up to 40-50% on water and energy over most others. We've happily used ours in two bathrooms at home since 2014; their spray is still as terrific as it was when we installed them on Day One. (Disclaimer, after being thrilled as a customer, I now consult with them part-time.)
This company profile on Crunchbase has links to many of the reviews of their products, in places like Wirecutter, CNET, CNN Underscored, and Popular Science. It also mentions just a few of their famous customers, which include Ohio State, Purdue, Penn State, Yale, the US Air Force Academy, Fort Bragg (the USA's largest Army base), and Planet Fitness (in 200+ of their locations).
P.S. Thanks, Scott, for your newsletter and this classifieds opportunity! Loved reading your thoughts on Star Slate Codex, back in the day, and thrilled you've continued on with Astral Codex Ten.
I got a showerhead and took my first shower with it this morning and I love it! You wouldn't think that such a narrow showerhead would produce a full cone of water, but it does and does it much better than the showerhead that was already installed.
It's been a while since I mentioned these. I have published four novels and a collection of short stories by my late brother-in-law Bill Adams, who died in October of 2019. You can see them all on his Amazon author page https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Adams/e/B000APMCL0. They are priced not to make money but to share Bill's work, which I love. They are all available as Kindles or in paperback.
"Tilt", his first SF novel, an epic tale of love, triumph, betrayal and redemption. It's long enough that the paperback version is two volumes. This one is my favorite.
"The Unwound Way" and "The End of Fame", two SF novels about Evan Larkspur, a poet and playwright who finds, after a century in space and cold-sleep, that his works have become both revered and seditious. (Originally published by Ballantine/Del Rey Books.)
"Dead Sirius", a modern-day thriller set in and around Boston. Bret Ambler, a perennial student, successful inventor, and energetic slacker, is marked as the fall guy in a mysterious plot involving the new Russian President, credulous neo-Nazis, and South American assassins.
"13 Quick Tricks (And a Few Long Cons)": A collection of two dozen short stories, mostly mysteries, including the thirteen published around 1980 in Ellery Queen's and Alfred Hitchcock's under the name T. M. Adams. Ellery Queen's called "A Very Short Week" a "tour-de-force", but all of them are delightful.
I am inordinately proud of how these books have turned out. I wish Bill could have seen them. The Kindle versions of the four novels are thoroughly X-ray enabled. The paperbacks are just gorgeous. Most have front covers that Bill drew himself, which I have artistically incorporated into the larger wraparound covers required for a physical book.
Thanks for this. I picked up The Unwound Way by serendipity when it was new, loved it, and though had long ago given up hope for a third volume, appreciate the closure and wish you the best reviving these novels.
I think both novels stand on their own well enough, but yeah, I always wanted the third volume, too! The idea was to use Moby Dick as the touch story, the way the first used The Tempest and the second used Don Juan. "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” But it never happened, sigh.
I teach people how to fold a single sheet of paper into repeating geometric patterns, called origami tessellations. If you're looking to train your pattern matching and/or patience, this may be the art for you! Learn more at https://training.gatheringfolds.com
Lovely! I'd seen some tessellation masks & artwork online, but hadn't thought there would be accessible steps to learning the art form!
I'll repost in a FB group where the Qualia Research folks hang out - I bet they'd also like this as practice for recognizing wallpaper groups in psychedelic experiences!
Thanks Sarah! There's several books now that teach specific patterns and some theory and one monster of a textbook on the math behind everything as well as quite a few pattern-specific YouTube tutorials, but as far as I'm aware I'm the only one teaching general theory and practice through videos.
Hi Madonna - I lurked through several sessions of your last intro to tessellations class advertised here a couple months ago, and I just wanted to share (and point out to all you other readers) how helpful, comprehensive, and conscientious your teaching was. It was clear you were coming from a lot of love and devotion to the topic, and I felt really lucky to listen in. Thank you!
We at the Guild of the Rose are building an organization for education, community, and service. We provide online classes on a variety of topics and we foster carefully designed group collaborations to enable real friendships to flourish amongst the members. Most of the current membership is rationalist or rationalist-adjacent, but we are not limited to those populations. If you're curious, visit https://guildoftherose.org/ for more details.
In some regards, the Guild can be considered the answer to anyone who ever wanted to attend CFAR, but couldn't afford it, didn't want to travel, or didn't see how a one-time experience could translate into meaningful change.
Given the alarming number of rationalist-adjacent organizations that fall into cult-like failure modes, we were concerned about this from the beginning. We looked into the failure modes of organizations that trend toward abuse and toxicity, and we continually make sure that we aren't doing those things.
1. A toxic organization usually involves a commitment to a charismatic leader or ideology. The Guild has no single leader or primary charismatic figure, but rather was started by five people with directionally similar goals. The Guild also has no ideological commitments. Some of our members are distinctly not "rationalist" and their voice is heard just as loudly as anyone's.
2. In practice, toxic organizations tend to undermine the personal relationships of the members through various means, while providing a replacement social structure. The net result is the the org becomes the member's sole source of social connection. We do provide a social structure, but intentionally counteract insularity by emphasizing courses and activities that encourage/require local community interaction. (We are in the process of rolling out a more formal local community service protocol, but it isn't active yet.) In any case, since it is a fully online community, if you try it and don't like it you can (and should!) just leave and never look back, unlike many toxic orgs where you will be, for example, physically living with the other org members.
As for other potential concerns: it's probably fair to say that the Guild does involve peer pressure to do Guild activities. Perhaps this sort of thing makes you uncomfortable, I don't know. I would point out that pretty much every organization in existence has some background level of ineffable social influence. If this post didn't assuage your concerns, perhaps you could elaborate on what in our marketing materials concerns you.
Thanks, that's helpful. It was not one thing in particular, the further I went down the front page the more it pattern-matched to some unsavory things.
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It's a tile-based puzzle game built around turning combinations of beans into monsters (and sometimes turning monsters back into beans) which can both help you or get in your way. There are eight different monsters and over 180 hand-crafted puzzles which require creative thinking, careful resource management, and clever geometric reasoning.
Beeminder! We're the quintessential rationalist startup. Well, second to CFAR I suppose. And we're over 10 years old now so "startup" is a stretch. In case you don't know about Beeminder, let me quote Scott:
> Beeminder's an evidence-based willpower augmentation
> tool that collects quantifiable data about your life, then
> helps you organize it into commitment mechanisms so
> you can keep resolutions.
Specifically, you create a quantified, graphable commitment like "get 10k steps per day as measured by Fitbit" or "get 10 XP per day on Duolingo" or "get to inbox zero by Christmas as reported by Gmail" or anything else you can dream up if you're willing to manually enter the data (we have apps and bots and things to make that easier). Then Beeminder plots your progress and a bright red line on the graph. If your datapoints cross that line, we charge your credit card. Also we redraw the line to get you back on track. It's extremely motivating!
We've put an enormous amount of thought into it. An exponential pledge schedule for how the stakes increase each time you derail (though you can cap that), and an akrasia horizon before which you can't make changes to your commitment (with total flexibility beyond that horizon), zeno-polling for reminders, etc etc.
Also our community is pretty great, if I do say so myself. Highly nerdy and quantified-self-y and rationality-oriented. And we have lots of nice rationality fare on the blog. Reviews of behavioral economics books and ACX posts and primers on things like loss aversion. I guess I'll save that part for an entry in the READ MY BLOG section!
I've been using Beeminder for about 3 months and I really enjoy this product. I always found that I do better when I write a goal down and treat it seriously and this is the ultimate tool for doing that. Visualizing the data and feeling happy adding progress and reflecting on it makes it very fun. You're able to gamify the process.
In order to establish and maintain habits, it is really important to not completely derail and just stop doing it. The penalties are sufficient enough to keep you on track and there are enough tools to modify/archive the goal (with 1 week delay) that you won't just drain your wallet.
I think this is a top tier product that people should definitely try. I am new but I expect to use it for a long time and accomplish a lot more. One goal I've already stuck to is reading more than 500 pages per week which is something that I imagine would be too ambitious without beeminder!
I abandoned Beeminder a few years ago after observing that the primary cause for breaking my Beeminder pledges was not actually breaking the commitment (in which case there were all kinds of options possible) but keeping the commitment but failing to fill in that data in Beeminder - especially because all kinds of situations that were good for me and also my commitments correlated with not using (or being unable to use, sometimes unexpectedly) my phone or other connected devices at all for a prolonged time, especially if I'm away from devices because I'm focusing on the commitments that then I get penalized for "breaking".
Manifold Markets (formerly Mantic Markets) is a platform for user-created prediction markets. We recently won an ACX grant (Scott: "If every existing prediction market is Lawful Good, [Manifold] proposes the Chaotic Evil version"), and have a small but passionate community of ACX readers creating and trading on markets.
We're offering a sign up bonus of the play money equivalent of $10 for people who sign up now! Consume our product slash service here: https://manifold.markets
I take portrait photos and have already done so for many people in the rationalist community, including Scott and Linch. I'm based in the Bay Area; my rates for portrait photos are usually in the $200-$300 range depending on the specific ask.
I wrote Protocall (https://protocall.dev), which is the gRPC & protobuf api client that does ~everything I wanted and couldn't find in existing solutions. To wit:
- Automatically imports & resolves all proto dependencies with zero configuration; all you need to do is link a Github repository with your proto files
- Provides structured input fields, which are dynamically rendered based on the message type (aren't you sick of switching windows constantly to check how to spell some field name? or, god forbid, trying to construct a complicated message with a bunch of nested fields by writing it as a raw JSON string?)
- Supports Any fields (by dynamically importing the relevant message given the type url in the local namespace, and providing the same structured inputs)
- Supports bytes fields (by accepting base64-encoded strings as input)
- Supports hitting traditional http/1.1 endpoints with protobuf-encoded messages, not just gRPC, using the same app, protos, inputs, etc.
Would really appreciate any user feedback! There's a no-time-limit free version so you don't need to plug in your credit card details to try it.
Surely you - or someone you know - desperately wants to learn calculus from a crisp, concise, infinitesimal-based textbook with a punchy title. Try 'Full Frontal Calculus' for free here:
Thanks for the suggestion. I can and will consider this. What comes of the consideration will depend on how onerous the conversion process is. I suspect it will be pretty awkward given the many formatting kludges in the original document. Still, well worth looking into.
Thanks, Seth! Just read the first five pages of FFC. Your writing style is excellent – very clear – and your circle/polygon example is readily comprehensible.
(I'm an oldster who never got past algebra and geometry in high school more than four decades ago - no trig, no calculus – but am hoping to once again dip into subsequent pages and see how far I can travel, with your assistance, before getting lost.)
Thanks for the kind words, Aron. There are certainly some thickets in calculus in which one can get tangled, but in contrast to a lot of the basic high school math you mentioned, calculus has a strong narrative arc, which means that you're unlikely to lose your bearings altogether.
A blitz-review from someone who has just briefly looked at the first quarter of the book.
* It uses infinitesmals instead of limits and epsilons and deltas. Idk what advantages this approach has, but it sure has one big disadvantage - your knowledge obtained from this textbook will be not very compatible with all the other textbooks.
* It's written in a style that's something inbetween a math textbook style and a normal book style. So, it probably doesn't require too much mathematical maturity.
* Non-rigorous. For example, the first definition is of a derivative of a function, and it's its local slope at the point. The definition doesn't say for what kinds of functions it exists.
* The main content is 170 pages long with large margins and pretty large font size.
Thanks (?) for the blitz review of FFC. Regarding the bullet points you've fired at it...
* A slower review would reveal the advantages of the infinitesimal approach. In broad overview, I mention some in the "Preface for Teachers" (p. vii) and the early section "Resurrection" (p. 6). More importantly, these advantages reveal themselves in proofs, which can now actually convey mathematical insight, as opposed to mere tight-laced mathematical rigor. They explain *why* a result holds as opposed to simply confirming *that* it does. For a characteristic example, try the infinitesimal-based derivation of sine's derivative (p. 28) and compare it to the typical convoluted treatment you'll find a more traditional book. As for the disadvantage you mention, I don't believe this is true. I *do* discuss limits in an intuitive way (introduced in Chapter Pi), but you are correct that I - quite deliberately - do not discuss deltas and epsilons. If I were teaching piano lessons or driver's ed, I would not discuss the fine points of acoustics or the physics of the internal combustion engine. Same story here. And just as my fictional piano or driving students surely would not suffer from that lack, neither do calculus students. For what it's worth, very few freshman calculus classes these days (and "these days" now extends several decades into the past) bother with epsilontics at all, which are better reserved for students in, say, a real analysis course, who have the mathematical maturity to appreciate that depth.
* Yes, the book eschews the usual dry-as-dust textbook format. And *of course* it "doesn't require much mathematical maturity". It's an introduction to freshman calculus. By definition, it is written for people without much knowledge of mathematics.
* To quote G.F. Simmons, whose own calculus text is one of the best of the traditional doorstopper variety, "Mathematical rigor is like clothing; in its style it ought to suit the occasion, and it diminishes comfort and restricts freedom of movement if it is either too loose or too tight." For someone who has never met the concept of a derivative, the main thing is to understand intuitively what a derivative *is*. Questions about the precise conditions under which a derivative exists need not be presented all at once, in the concept's very definition, before it has even occurred to a reader to wonder about such things. Far too many mathematics textbooks are written in this bizarre style, in which rigorous answers are provided to questions that the reader had never thought to ask in the first place and is in no position to appreciate.
* Yes, the book is short. That, I hope, is a virtue!
I agree. It's not a coincidence that 2/2 inventors of calculus used infinitesimals. It is the more intuitive way. Only much later was it made rigorous but beforehand hardly anything in math was rigorous anyway. I think Berkeley really derailed progress. Stochastic calculus without infinitesimals is a nightmare.
I took a look at this for the sake of some young smart people I know who are coming up on calculus. And my conclusion is that it would be unsuitable as a first textbook. Please don't take this the wrong way, I am not trying to be unkind, but rather trying to be helpful by suggesting moving this book a few shelves over in the Library of Congress classification. The book seem to me to be written from a viewpoint that is in love with language, and words, and history, and philosophy, and perhaps the foundations of math -- but not with math qua math, at least at the level of basic one-variable calculus. It doesn't have the simplicity and and focus of the best elementary textbooks, nor burgeon with the simple closely-related examples which greatly assist the newbie.
Contrariwise what it does have, that a first textbook doesn't, is an enthusiasm for language and the curious implications and applications of fundamental concepts in calculus (and infinitismals per se). In just the first few pages the excursion into optics, the magnifying the curve to see how it kinda sorta turns into a straight line, are brilliant and well executed (although some improved and larger art could help).
So what I am suggesting is that instead of positioning this book as a textbook, maybe consider positioning it as a calculus *companion* book. You could really let yourself go in terms of imagining novel ways to look at the foundational concepts, at their historical origins, their relationship to natural philosophy. You could not bother with trying to cover every practical tool and concept required of a core textbook. You could break it into bite-size morsels.
With that repositioning I can readily see an instructor being happy to consume it himself or herself *and* using the bite-size chunks with a class to break up the monotony of basic instruction -- give the students some kind of breath of fresh air, a small window in which to sit back, take a break from the grind of just mastering the practical tools, and think about "what it all means" and form some kind of beginning appreciation for the beauty and philosophical depth of this aspect of math. From the practical point of view, by positioning the book as a companion book (and not pricing it too high), you would not compete with but be in partnership with the regular textbooks and regular curriculum, which could make for an easier path to business growth.
I genuinely appreciate this nuanced review of FFC, even if, unsurprisingly, we disagree in several places.
As a business proposition, I find your marketing suggestion eminently sensible. Truth be told, though, that's a low-order consideration for me. I wrote the book for my own calculus students, who seem to learn just fine from it, because I was tired of "teaching against the grain" of more traditional textbooks. (If I can sell a few copies now and again, so much the better, but I've never lost a minute's sleep over sales and marketing. I'm not sure that game is worth the candle.)
I think we may have opposite notions about the textbooks and "companion books". To my mind, most books marketed as textbooks are reference books, which are, by nature, companion books: wonderful to have on the bookshelf for consultation, but not really the sort of thing from which one derives much real learning.
I fully grant you that that sort of opinion makes me, not you, the odd duck, and it surely goes a long way towards explaining what impelled me to write a somewhat nonstandard calculus book.
Thanks again for your comments, Carl - and for noticing a few of the book's strengths even if it ultimately does not suit your purposes.
Unlike Seth, I'm not in a position to evaluate your critique of his book, and this marketing / positioning suggestion for it, but you've made your cases for both of these very clear!
Personally my taste would be for science/math/physics/logic/economics classes to have a bit of history and philosophy in them, and then to drop some of the pure liberal arts classes which cover aspects of religion/culture/philosophy/politics which frankly have gone nowhere in the last few hundreds or thousands of years.
Trains of thought that weren't in some way or another on the causal pathway towards iphones should at this point be garbage collected from the standard educational repertoire.
I agree the history of technology (or science) is given less shrift that it might ideally get. In part that's the fault of the field itself, since when we discover improvements to our understanding we tend to shuck off the superseded ideas as so much dross, never to be considered again. But there is indeed some real value in learning the path by which we got from there to here. It tells you a lot about how human beings approach problems, and gives you a better sense for where the strengths and weaknesses in modern understanding may lie.
Besides which, some of the historical artifacts are just plain fascinating. At some point in the alchemical past that it was surmised that it could not be a coincidence that there were seven metals (gold, silver, mercury, copper, iron, tin, and lead) and seven naked-eye heavenly bodies (the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), so the hypothesis was floated that each heavenly body emitted special rays that acted on plain earth (supplied by the Earth, naturally) and turned them slowly into the matching metal. The history of science is stuffed with weird gems like this.
I had a peek out of curiosity. This is some engaging writing. Maybe I could use a review. Oh hell, I’ve always thought the word infinitesimal is cool. I bought a copy. Enjoy your cup of chai!
At a skim I like it. I was in the minority of students who find infinitesimal calculus more intuitive. I also found many-worlds descriptions of quantum mechanics more intuitive, and I wonder if there's a correlation there.
One suggestion is to explicitly introduce non-trivial but easier to conceptualize (linear) operators first, such as g(x)=f(x)+f(x+1) so that readers have a reason to believe that functions are worthy as first-class objects of study, rather than merely representing uncertainty about a numerical value of interest. Then derivatives as (linear) operators will be less of a cognitive leap, differing only in their use of epsilons.
I dare say I am even more pleasantly surprised at encountering someone here who was *already* reading the book before this "Classified Thread" went up.
I just finished working through PMD in preparation for FFC (calculus and I are kind of frenemies). I liked the way you did it. Made things fit together. I kind of went, "Wow" on page 130:
Etymologically, trigonometry means “triangle measurement” (from ancient Greek).
But why should triangles have their own special niche in the mathematics curriculum?
Is this the work of the powerful triangle lobby? It is not. Triangles are fundamental.
They are the building blocks from which all other polygons are assembled. To analyze
an octagon, we do not need “octagonometry”. Instead, we triangulate the octagon
(as in the figure at right), and then study the triangular pieces with trigonometry.
Once we understand triangles, we understand all polygons.
Trigonometry is also concerned with circles. This is because triangle measurement involves angle measurement, which itself is inherently circular: 360° is a full circular rotation, while any smaller angle represents a portion of a circular rotation. Trigonometry’s circular aspects will appear in later chapters. For now, I’ll just note that circular rotation – a point endlessly orbiting a circle’s center – is taken as the fundamental example of periodic behavior (continuous repetition) in science and mathematics.* Trigonometry’s link with periodicity makes it indispensable in the study of rotations, vibrations, and wave motions, including sound waves and light waves.
Part of my goal in PMD was to delineate how those "precalculus pieces", which can feel like they've been drawn from a disconnected hodgepodge of topics, fit together. Thanks for letting me know that it's working for you!
I hope that FFC will make your relationship with calculus more friendly and less adversarial.
Grokked – thanks, Seth! "I kind of went, "Wow" on page 130: ..." This is elegant writing on your part, and appreciated Roger's sharing of this excerpt.
Hey Seth, Always nice to see new attempts at teaching core mathematical ideas! Had a very quick skim of the textbooks, and my gut instinct is that they will work well for people who are already 'mathematically minded' and curious (similar to how feynmans lecture series are good for people who already think like a physicist).
I say this as somebody who used to teach people all of precalculus, and found that there are lots of fundamental notions that I take for granted which held back many of my students, e.g. valuing precision, aiming for perfection, having an 'aesthetic' for nice ideas or arguments, etc. Other thing I noticed is huge gaping holes in fundamentals in arithmetic. E.g. I had students who could do long multiplication just fine, but could not say what 37*9 is equal to after being told what 36*9 was.
Anyway, as tone is hard to convey in writing, want to emphasise that I like what you have done with this, despite my reservations. Maybe we can even geek out some time and share anecdotes and thoughts about pedagogy.
Thanks for having a look, Lovkush. If I've managed to write the mathematical analogue of Feynman's Lectures on Physics, I'm perfectly content. 😎
I'd like to think my books help my readers *develop* the sense of "mathematical mindedness" of which you speak. At the same time, there's no denying that they do make some special demands of them as well. As I described one of the books (on its back cover), "A rarity among books covering this material, 𝘗𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘶𝘴 𝘔𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘋𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵 presumes that its readers are literate, interested, capable people - who just happen not to know much mathematics yet."
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If you'd like a review of mathematical/technical writing (and, by extension, its contents),
if you'd like some tutoring on math, ML (maybe), or related subjects, or just guidance on what/how to study, on university-to-graduate-level (I will tell you if I feel comfortable teaching you),
We'll figure out a rate that feels fair and achievable to both of us, this depends on your life situation. I match your EA contribution, up to 20 % of what you pay me.
When I work for you and we agree on some rate of X$, you can state any percentage p<=20% and we donate p*X$ each to a charity selected according to EA principles. We'll pinky-swear not to offset this from our general donation budgets; you'll probably have the final say on the choice of charity as long as I feel it's reasonable.
I am advising a startup that has built an integrated realtime analytics platform with an unorthodox architecture that provides disruptive functionality. The developers are 'game devs', so the primary use case is for games. The secondary use case (as of now) is block chain. A short way to describe it is that it offers the best of graph database, time-series database, and process mining functionalities, with UI that is vastly more capable than Tableau or Looker, at speeds significantly faster than RedShift.
If anybody on here is in the games industry, we'd like to pitch you.
If anybody on here is an Angel/VC, we're raising a seed round.
- Are you interested in running very wide bitslice logic on GPUs?
- Are you interested in GPU programing, particularly RDNA2?
- Are you familiar with AIG optimizers?
- Do you dislike floating point?
If you answer yes to any of these, I'd love to talk with you! I can't promise that you will get any money out of it, and it may be that I do not know anything that you do not already know, but I'd love to hear what you have to say, and perhaps I have some ideas you can steal.
I'm pretty in favor of more angry polemics by Scott. Maybe this is undesirable from a broader standpoint, but I really enjoyed reading articles like untitled, lies damned lies and facebook, and contra hallquist on scientific rationality. I feel like they've been less common on astral codex 10 than they were on slate star codex. Perhaps the article about healthcare systems was more educational than some of the others, but I personally derived far more enjoyment from the more polemical ones. Whether that's the majority view is an empirical question, but take this as very weak bayesian evidence.
About untitled: I read it relatively frequently (once every few months) because during hard times it's nice to know that you're not alone in this. It may look like an angry rant for some people, but to me it's a rare expression of empathy by someone that's not trying to manipulate me into buying supplements or go into a whole ideology (Hello MGTOW/PUA community!).
This seems to be an issue with most substackers that go beyond a certain number of readers: they don't want to lose what they have so they start self-censoring more and more to avoid anything controversial.
This is why the less-read substackers are almost always the best ones.
I want to make devices: computers, tablets, cell phones, etc. for baby boomers, with user interfaces that feel right to people whose first computer ran windows 3.1, or MsDos, or Version 7 Unix, or one of the older mainframe operating systems.
I believe there's an untapped market opportunity here. Just about any baby boomer I talk to doesn't like modern devices, and finds them difficult and counter intuitive, no matter how much experience they have with digital technology. They also don't much appreciate dumbed down "easy to use" interfaces apparently designed for the clueless, stupid, and senile, and often marketed more to their caretakers than to the intended users.
I think many would buy new devices - rather than keeping ancient machines running as long as possible, and refusing any and all software upgrades - if only they actually liked the devices they were offered.
The big tech companies appear completely uninterested. Their target user appears to be a much younger person whose first computer was a cell phone. I tried to generate interest in such a project when I worked at Apple, and failed utterly.
I can't do this alone. No single person could provide the multitude of frameworks and apps required for a competitive (i.e. useful) modern product, let alone the hardware to run it on.
I'm looking for other people who'd like to do the same thing, or a pre-existing project I could join.
As I envisage it, this would probably be an open source, volunteer project, not a profit-seeking startup, for mostly practical reasons. And it would probably run on existing hardware, rather than design its own - again, for practical reasons involving money and lead time. But I'm open to alternatives, if someone can show me how they could be made workable. (And yes, if you are a venture capitalist who wants to fund a soup-to-nuts tech-for-boomers project, I'd love to talk to you.)
How is this different from/superior to simply running the old OS on a more modern machine? You can still run Windows 3.1 or 98 or whatever. In terms of hardware I don't think there's much difference from a user perspective.
This is potentially brilliant, at least for the computer end of things.
I haven't tried running older windows OSes on recent machines, but I would expect to have problems with missing device drivers unless I ran the older windows as a virtual machine. If that can be worked around somehow - in a manner not involving the user starting a second career as a techie - that would solve a good chunk of the problem.
One solution for windows users might be to simply distribute older releases, packaged to be easily installable on modern hardware, or to sell intel/amd hardware with older releases pre-installed. The trick would be to make it as easy as installing a game from "good old games" (www.gog.com), where it comes complete with a pre-configured dos box, etc. etc. So if there was a virtual machine involved, it would have to be pre-tuned or self-tuning and kept mostly out of sight.
What this probably wouldn't do is give access to modern web pages, or the ability to run lots of useful modern programs. I keep an older machine (a mac) around for running retro games, and it currently can barely handle modern email; most modern web pages are beyond it. (It cannot, for example, interact with substack - it's strictly read-but-not-post.)
Sadly, it also won't help for small form factor devices, i.e. PDAs, tablets, phones etc. There simply isn't an earlier version available for any modern hardware, and the hardware that ran things like the Palm Pilot simply isn't available.
But the principle might work - take an early version of Android, when it still had a "menu" button rather than an imitation hamburger, and give it a browser that can handle modern html, etc. Also give it a complete set of security updates, without any of the UI updates.
I'd really prefer a PDA with a keyboard, or a stylus, and suspect many of my age peers feel the same way. Some of the more technical would also prefer peer-to-peer networking and backups, rather than having their data in an unreliable and insecure "cloud". But without the ability to create our own hardware, that's unlikely to happen. (OTOH, there are couple of devices on the market that could in principle be adapted...)
> So if there was a virtual machine involved, it would have to be pre-tuned or self-tuning and kept mostly out of sight.
Right. I have made things like that. I have an interest in the history of computers. I've even got an old Soviet BESM working at one point. It really would be little trouble to get a computer or phone or whatever running most old OS's.
> What this probably wouldn't do is give access to modern web pages, or the ability to run lots of useful modern programs.
It will run them minus the modern features many people rely on as you said. In most cases the issue is not a fundamental incapacity but simply that they haven't been updated. Rather than writing a new program you'd probably want to do something low level so that they can effectively run modern versions. While that would require some programming know how it would be significantly less than spinning up your own program. Also, some pretty old OS's are still in common use. Windows XP is still pretty common in some places iirc.
> Sadly, it also won't help for small form factor devices, i.e. PDAs, tablets, phones etc. There simply isn't an earlier version available for any modern hardware, and the hardware that ran things like the Palm Pilot simply isn't available.
Well, not specifically the Palm Pilot no. But if you want something like one then yes, that's very much available. Especially outside the US.
If you do this, please be certain to keep the boxes air-gapped from the internet lest they become part of some botnet. Of course, this will severely limit their use - not only no web, but also no email. (Also, I started using Windows with 98 and am puzzled why anyone would long for that particular version. Personally, if I found myself time-transported to that era, I would give linux 2.0 a try instead.)
Personally, I would go for a gnu/linux distribution (probably ubuntu LTS for their longish mean time between upgrades required, debian if you can't stomach ubuntu) and just use an appropriate window manager. On shared systems, I find Mate (technically a desktop environment) to be tolerable for both me and my colleagues. https://wiki.debian.org/WindowManager lists some which are pretty minimalistic. I use windowmaker.
Generally, I find that (formerly popular) for *nix software lives very long. A person who used pine for mail in 1995 can now simply install alpine on Debian and will probably get a rather similar interface. Command line utilities are also very much alive and kicking, if one used cp/mv/rm/ls and so on in the good old unix days one will probably feel right at home in a modern day xterm running on gnu/linux or bsd.
On the other hand, the user interfaces of neither Windows nor KDE nor Gnome nor Android ever converge, but constantly try to innovate. Some of the stuff they add is probably better, but lot's of it is also just different.
The UI options on mobile are much more limited. While you can run an X-server and use browser from your distribution, this will probably both be painful to set up and non-ideal to use. So if you want to surf the web (or use 'Apps'), you basically get to pick between Apple and Android (optionally without the Google stuff).
Regarding VMs/emulators specifically to play ancient video games, one challenge is to run pre-OS X Mac games (which do not run on x86). A decade ago, I found sheepshaver to be a neat way to accomplish that and was able to replay the Spectrum Holobyte (e.g. pre-Nintendo) version of Tetris.
Interesting idea, but I find "adults" usually complain out of habit and their arguments don't have much rhyme or reason. The more motivated ones already seem to have switched to something like xface ubuntu style OSes.
I'd be interest to hear what "features" e.g. windows 3.1 has over something like a minimalist ubuntu.
I'm at a disadvantage of not being familiar with today's minimalist ubuntu; my old ubuntu system is still running an excrescence of a window manager known as "unity", which was the default when I installed it.
General advantages of windows 3.1: Text (rather than icons), menus that don't change depending on context, and familiarity of style as well as of specifics. Controls that stay visible, and similar. Also, state changes only occur when you ask for them; saves are explicit; the whole thing feels like the computer does what it's told, rather than doing things you might or might not want on its own initiative.
Generally, finding a menu item should not be like finding a secret treasure in a computer game.
I especially hate the mobile apps, when you sometimes find a secret menu by holding a finger for several seconds in some place with no visual indicator that "this is where you should hold your finger for a few seconds to get a secret menu". Clickable places should be *obviously* clickable.
This is not a new thing; it was started by Apple back in the early '80s when they went for a one-button mouse.
The PARC Alto mouse had three buttons specifically because it made for three obvious affordances for the three basic actions you could do with it. The original Mac had only two actions (select and activate), but rather than have one button for each they used one button for both actions, hiding the second one under a "double click." (The double click was an unknown interface at the time; through the '80s how many devices with buttons can you think of where clicking twice, with or without specific timing, does something other than do the same action twice?)
Eventually the double click spread widely enough that it became cultural common knowledge, but Apple has continued to hide things under a too-simplistic surface. (Consider their trackpad gestures, if you know them.) It's like an industrial designer removing the handle from a coffee pot because it makes the lines cleaner, without really considering how one might pick up a hot coffee pot that has no handle. One of the early Apple UI designers, Bruce Tognazzini, has had a _lot_ to say about Apple's designs over the past decade or two. Search for "ask Tog."
From your description, the MATE desktop may be a useful starting point https://mate-desktop.org/ Its a bunch of GTK2 desktop programs that are still being maintained. GTK3 is when they went the mobile-looking UI route (because they wanted to make a uniform UI for desktop and mobile; a failure IMO since its not great on either).
It runs on multiple Linux distros so you can take your pick.
Love the idea! Would be doing it myself if I had the resources.
How about an OS which doesn't require a gigabyte of memory to load? While memory has gotten enormously cheaper over the years, bus bandwidth has not kept up. The result is sluggish responses on supposedly fast computers. The fastest GUI I ever experienced was SunOS 4 with the SunView windowing system on a Sparcstation 1. Windows would pop up instantaneously.
Or how about a wide flip phone with a one-handed keyboard? I loathe touchscreens for typing. I'd rather learn Morse Code. And, for the record, far sightedness cuts in LONG before senility. Someone needs to tell the marketers at Jitterbug that little bit of info.
If not, it's a single-man project that's been going for many years now, that the person started with no commercial intent, originally to give him something to do in order to help recover from alcoholism (where the name comes from), and then he eventually received enough funding to be able to work on it full-time. It's sort of what you're talking about. Not targeting boomers, exactly, but a throwback to 90s UIs.
One thing worth mentioning - if you control the OS, you can to an extent change the look and feel of the apps running on it, without touching their source code. Very few apps write their own code for common functions - they use code from libraries/frameworks.
So when an app on a modern mac wants a scrollbar, it normally gets one that's completely invisible until the user guesses that the window might be scrollable, and moves their mouse to where a scrollbar might be, to find out whether one appears.
Replace the library/framework, and the app can be given an always-visible scroll bar. Or the user can be given a control that allows them to choose traditional (always visible) or small-screen (usually invisible) behaviour.
Ditto for most other standard controls - replace the library, and the user gets text labels, or tool tips, or icons, or some combination.
IMO, modern invisible-till-moused-over controls are a major problem for older users, and totally unnecessary on a decent sized screen. But 95% of them can be fixed without touching the apps that use them.
Are you referring to rebuilding an app using a new set of libraries, or trying to swap out DLLs found by an already built executable? I've done the former a couple of times; I'm rather intimidated by the latter.
One problem I do see with this approach is the fact that many modern apps are written in inefficient languages. You are lucky if the language merely makes all method calls virtual (which is significantly slower than direct calls). Objective C has such an extremely roundabout means of calling methods that I refused to write anything for the Mac.
It might be possible to properly compile C# code into true executables. (Maybe it has already been done; haven't checked.) The difference between managed code and truly compiled code is huge. The first .NET version of Visual Studio was basically unusable -- and that was after Microsoft had turned off a bunch of features by default in order attempt useability.
Definitely the latter. I haven't done this on any Microsoft OS, but it's standard on all Apple OS, Linux, and FreeBSD, etc. Every time there's a new release, or an upgrade, the OS does this; compatibility at the ABI level means that the App neither knows nor cares.
Actually, for this purpose, the virtual methods are a feature rather than a bug - it means it's really easy to hook in whatever code you want. It's not so great for performance, and in my prior role as a performance engineer at Apple I got the "fun" of dealing with such things. And it also has implications for security - sane OS developers don't let random 3rd party developers replace their libraries, except for their own apps. But for UI replacement - and for fixing library or framework bugs without forcing app developers to recompile - it's wonderful.
Hmmm, for top level widgets in X, there is simply the option of changing window managers. I miss good old FVWM...
But X (which means all Linux) was always a horrible system at the developer level. It's a virus which escaped from MIT. Applications need to query what kind of drawable they are working with, and there is no connection between screen API and printer API. (Most applications today hide X behind Gnome or Qt.)
Regarding the linked to DLLs, welcome to hell, DLL hell. The number of combinations of DLLs required to make many applications work is astronomical. Web developers routinely create an environment within an OS using containers like Docker. The Python world is particularly terrible when it comes to requiring the correct DLLs.
The Win32 API is much more stable at the GUI level. But it's a big API. There is a project working on cloning it: ReactOS.
Personally, I think starting with the stable UNIX clone core of Linux is the way to go. Just change the graphics and printer API into something sane and coherent. Might look into what they started with Plan 9.
Speaking of Plan 9, this is a delightful set of rants on DLLs.
It's been perhaps too long since I've used Windows. I've forgotten some of the pain points, which you are now reminding me of. I have very unhappy memories of coping with the multiple versions of Quickdraw which various games required, before MS finally made it part of the OS.
My original thought was to create a linux/android-based system, simply because it's open source, and has far more pre-existing code than other open source OSes.
The UI would be designed according to the principles used back in the day - not exactly mimicking any particular OS, though perhaps having configuration options to make it more like each individual's old favorite. And once implemented, it would never change, except for adding features; no more forcing people to choose between skipping security fixes and being converted from power user to clueless newb.
The downside would be the lack of key apps. E.g. I like being able to run TurboTax, and don't want to use their browser-based version that stores my data on their site. Probably most of my age-mates aren't quite as concerned about privacy, and will be willing to use vendors' web-based offerings. In which case all we need to do is give them a good browser.
The other downside is the number of suppliers who have a good app for phones/tablets, accompanied by a lousy web site that really doesn't do the job very well. If your doctor, or dentist, or library, or grocery store is one of those, but you hate modern cellphones with a burning passion, you are currently pretty much screwed. Ideally, I'd like to be able to run Android apps on both desktop and small form factor versions of this OS, to work around this too common problem. (But what I know about developing for Android is minimal; I use Android, but all my developer knowledge is for iOS. This may or may not even be possible.)
I don't. I upgraded to fvwm2 about ten years ago and haven't looked back since!
(And BTW, that "less harmful" page is on crack. One of the first things I noticed is that he considers a language regularly written and read by humans that doesn't allow comments to be less harmful than one that does. And saying "Go is better than Python" is like saying "Java is better than Lisp." I think the guy has an extremely limited range of programming language knowledge. It says something that he never mentions Lisp there, and all languages with compile-time type checking he mentions have laughably primitive type systems. I'm not even talking lack of generics, I'm talking lack of ADTs! (And yes, I'm looking at you, Go, in particular.))
To some extend, this is true. OTOH, thunderbird currently insists to reduce the menu bar to a mobilish three-bar button, probably to save screen space (after all, the desktop only has some eight million pixels). It certainly does not do that because the desktop environment suggests it, and changing it would probably require patching the source code.
Hidden stuff annoys me to no end. "Swipe from the left border of the screen to open the menu" was en vogue with Android at some point, but luckily seems mostly to be a thing of the past. UIs should be usable, first and foremost. If someone can also make them look neat without reducing functionality, great. But certainly no neatness at the cost of usability.
"...with user interfaces that feel right to people whose first computer ran windows 3.1, or MsDos, or Version 7 Unix, or one of the older mainframe operating systems."
This seems confused to me. 7th Edition Unix was purely text based, used on CRT-based or printing terminals. (Very little required an addressable cursor; it was perfectly reasonable to use it on a glass TTY or printing terminal.) This is entirely unlike Windows, which is pretty near unusable without a mouse, much less without using GUI programs.
As someone who grew up on 8-bit microcomputers and Unix (and Gen-X, I might note, not a boomer) and whose first serious use of Windows was in the 90s, GUI systems to me are for a completely different generation of users than those comfortable with command-line Unix, CP/M or even MS-DOS.
I can tolerate using a GUI-focused system such as Windows if it's well designed, but that certainly doesn't describe Windows 3.1. In fact it was not until Windows 10 that I felt it had become reasonably usable. But I am still very text-based in my usual day-to-day computer usage, as would probably be obvious if you saw my simple window manager that's used for little more than managing terminal windows.
My experience with younger people whose first system was a GUI system is that they have an irrational fear of the command line; even many programmers I know will spend several extra days working on a web or GUI interface to something to avoid having to use their program at a command line in a terminal window.
I think people are most comfortable with exactly what they started with, and after that with either things based on similar design principles, or whatever they encountered next. The more revisions they've experienced, and the more changes to design principles, the less comfortable they get, until they reach the point where the interface appears to be undiscoverable, behaviour seems random and/or designed for maximum aggravation, and they flatly refuse to use one of those damned new-fangled things.
My mother - born too early to be a baby boomer - hit her limit at about the stage of windows 95 - she made it to windows 3.1, but unhappily, bitching about GUI programs and the impossibility of knowing exactly what one had just done, by looking at the scrollback.
I am personally a "late" baby boomer, and I made it to cell phones and tablets, increasingly unhappy with every new release. I balked at voice control, familiar household appliances with touch screens, and the internet of things.
A friend born a month before me, who didn't spend her life in tech, but was a fairly early adopter, made it to windows XP + flip phones, and now refuses to upgrade.
I think it's slightly more subtle. I started with VAX/VMS on VT100 terminals to write FORTRAN programs. I miss neither. Later it was Berkely flavored UNIX on VT52 screens, followed by Sun workstations.
I prefer GUIs for some applications and command line terminals for others. I write documents and make images in Windows 7. I do recreational programming and web page development in linux.
What I, and most any older person, dislike is throwing away hard won knowledge and having to learn something new which isn't better enough to justify the learning curve. Also, some new things are objectively stupid. For example, Microsoft tried to unify desktop and phone operating systems and produced the abomination known as Windows 8. After years of lusting after ever bigger monitors, you want to get rid of the desktop and go to these tiled apps???
Ditto for text messaging over email. I went through the effort of learning how to touch type and now you want me to single finger type on a touch screen keyboard on keys smaller than my fingertips?? I'd rather learn Morse Code.
I wrote my doctoral dissertation using troff/eqn. For editing a document, a WYSIWYG word processor is greatly superior. But for managing complicated equations, eqn is vastly superior to a point an grunt based equation editor. Order of magnitude superior at least. (Three orders of magnitude better than MathML, BTW)
Second response - I didn't want to blur two very different points.
Yes, command line and GUI systems are clearly different tech generations. And yes, many of those who started with GUIs react to command lines with something approaching phobic behaviour. I often want to mock younger programmers who appear to despise me for having trouble with undocumented interfaces designed for cell phones, while recoiling in horror from the very idea of a command line - or, for that matter, from the idea of doing explicit memory management. THAT, they insist, is legitimately far too difficult, whereas the latest fad - controls invisible until you mouse over the spot they will appear - is trivial and obvious.
This is probably one reason why tech company designers refuse to give older people what they want - the youngsters might well recoil in horror at the thought of having text labels on their controls, not to mention at having those controls actually visible. And the idea of having their device request permission for changes, e.g. for creating "memories" out of their photos, for emphasizing "faces" when taking pictures [of waterfalls?!], for shipping files off device into the cloud, etc. etc. probably looks like unpleasant micromanagement to them, rather than like having a device one can actually control.
Of course the other reason appears to be that the designers are all quite young, and farthermore have been trained to emphasize (1) aesthetics and (2) novelty ahead of anything else. And of course it's common knowledge with them that older people don't buy their products very often - as has been explained to me, citing an imaginary lack of disposable income as the reason.
Do you want to help out with AI alignment, but don't have the time or skills to become a researcher or dedicate a large amount of effort to it? I have just the project for you!
Rob Miles's team is working on an interactive FAQ which explains AI alignment (https://stampy.ai/wiki/Stampy), and we need volunteer writers. Minimal experience required, since even if you don't know the answers you can still write questions.
If you want to help I'll give you an invite to the Patron Discord where we're working, email me at elliotbrown2 <at> gmail.com. We're keen to get feedback on the onboarding process, so please let us know about any UI or other challenges you encounter.
I currently live in Toronto, Canada in a large one bed room apartment located in a central location.
I'm looking to spend 2-4 weeks in either Austin or Denver later this year. If anyone in either of those cities wants to do either a home-exchange, or has an extra room/can rent their apartment, that would be really great :)
I live in a 2/1 in Austin and am looking to be elsewhere for as much of the summer as I can talk my wife into. This is the worst time to be in Austin and maybe the best to be in Toronto, but if you were interested and wanted to cover rent while you were here, I’d be happy to talk some more. There isn’t any DM capability on Substack, is there?
Announcing a workshop on the Moral Foundations of Progress Studies.
The progress studies community has had a lot of discussion about technology, economics, history, and politics. However, there is no consensus on the moral basis for valuing or pursuing “progress,” and there are key open questions about how progress is to be judged and measured, who should benefit from it, and what type of progress we should pursue.
The goal of this workshop is to reach a consensus on what major moral/ethical questions are at the foundations of a study of progress, and what broad answers to these questions have been proposed. A few designated attendees will take notes and draft a short article afterwards summarizing the discussion. (We’re currently looking for the appropriate place to publish this; it may be in a journal or on a blog.)
I'm looking to try out using a collection of tools I've gathered to provide "life coaching". Essentially, it would be CBT and mindfulness inspired nagging aimed at providing external motivation and discipline to people with inattentive-like traits in the form of daily or weekly planning and accountability calls. If you're someone who starts projects but doesn't finish them, puts off tasks for silly amounts of time, feels like you have a lot of mental clutter that a few hours a day of focused work could solve, or generally has big goals that require long term commitment, I'm looking for you!
Is this a service you think you might find valuable? Have you used a service (or had a more informal relationship) like this before? If anyone would be interested in trying this out with me for free for a few weeks in exchange for your feedback, or just has thoughts on what would make this sort of arrangement valuable to you, shoot me an email jcait98 at yahoo.com
**Note: I absolutely don't intend this to be a substitute for mental health counseling
My experience with voluntary nagging systems is that I think they’re good ideas beforehand and then I get annoyed by the nagger in the moment and usually a) arrange to stop being nagged or b) ignore the nagger. I suspect my response isn’t uncommon. Do you have any suggestions to get around this disagreement between present-lazy-me and past-ambitious-me?
I do. I suggest the problem is *past* you, not present you. That is, past you has set up impossible goals for present you, which he (present you) rightly rejects when it comes time to execute. But when that happens too often, present you becomes entirely contemptuous of past you's promises to self, which means even the things you really can and should do get dropped.
That means the solution is *not* allowing past you to exert yet more force on present you, which present you will resent, and twist and turn to avoid, but rather for present you to teach past you a lesson about moderation.
What works for me is therefore to actually keep *each and every* promise past me makes to self, in a certain category, for a time -- no matter how painful or absurd the promises have become. What rapidly happens is that past me starts become much more cautious about making promises, because he remembers the pain of carrying them out when it was unexpectedly difficult or idiotic. That restores balance to the force, so to speak: past me tends to make only such promises as present me is actually realistically willing to carry out. Past me is of course ambitious, so he will tend to ramp up the promises over time anyway, but the requirement that I execute them no matter what tends to make that ambition creep up manageably.
And in the end the metabenefit is that I feel pleased because I execute my promises to self more reliably.
I'm looking for a non-romantic friendship over email. I'm 34 and (as you might guess) male.
I don't consider myself an EA, but I definitely lean EA and think in both short-termist and longtermist ways.
I am religious. I currently "run" Christianity (as though an OS), what I was raised in ("the default that came pre-installed from the vendor"?). I am "bootstrapping" a rationalistic religion, which (maybe or maybe not surprisingly) "boots" Biblical Christianity (of a certain sort), but can "run" independent of the Bible. Currently I find the more Jewish aspects of the Bible more personally engaging than the post-Jewish parts, but I want to support the whole canon. (This is an unresolved issue for me.)
That makes me sound like an engineer, but I also see religion from a personal perspective and consider truth-seeking to be important. (Religion is not just something engineered for human benefit.)
That's "work". If I had to describe myself in more human ways, I would say: thoughtful, dry, musical. I probably could qualify as schizoid, and "undifferentiated" according to the Bem OSRI.
If interested, my email is banks at 10v24 dot net.
I'm female, 38, live in Ramat Gan. Divorced+2+Remarried. Day job is saving the world from AI apocalypse. Avid reader: mostly scifi and fantasy, a special weakness for romance.
Contact me at rot13 of uvtucevrfgrffbsryhn@tznvy.pbz
Aristillus is a forum for the 'American tech right', mostly peripheral to the twitter ingroup. You might also call it 'frontierist', or 'preactionary'. It leans religious though more as an implicit result of its posters rather than its mission; it leans conservatarian though other less libertarian or less conservative views are present; it is decidedly red/grey tribe.
My Mastodon feed is sad and lonely since the few people I follow seem to have stopped posting for a bit. Who are some interesting people to follow? I'm particularly interested in people who make physical things and talk about how it's done.
(And sure, Twitter too I suppose, though my Twitter account isn't lacking for traffic.)
Oh, hey! I'm just now seeing this. I'm at a mastodon low point right now, but hope to rally in my yearly "use alternate social media" January. I'm also resolving the end of literal and metaphorical house fires and will hopefully be building more stuff soon.
Heh. Honestly my Mastodon use has been very low since I posted that over 2 years ago. I'm sorry to hear about the fires! (I did a tour of your mansion like ~2 years ago)
I don't see the "like" heart underneath comments in this substack. I assumed that feature was just turned off for this substack, but I just got an e-mail message saying one of my comments here had been liked. Can someone explain to me what's up? (I've seen plenty of comments on this substack that I'd like to like, if I can.)
The emails sent out to people still have a like button in them and the functionality itself still exists, the button is just hidden on the site itself. The likes you've gotten will almost surely have come from people clicking the heart icon in their email notifications.
meta: unsure to what extent this can be changed by Scott, but getting an email for every response to one of his comments (if you've responded to it first) is definitely excessive. There's a 'mute thread' option but I'm unsure if this also mutes responses to my own comments
Yes. There's already a sea of open threads to wade through to get to actual content. Adding like five classified posts whenever they come out is just that much more cruft.
I haven't tried it, but replies to your comments say "blah replied to your comment" and replies to other people say "blah replied to blahblah's comment", so I wonder if you could make a gmail filter for "replied to AND 's comment" to only filter for replies not to you?
(after some searching) Looks like they aren't real filters, like procmail - just ways to search one's INBOX, if you use their interface. (No use at all if you use gmail only as a server, and bring your own client, to avoid relearning their user interface periodically.)
To those baffled - go to your account on gmail. The box labelled "search mail" in the center top of the web page has a magnifying glass icon to the left, and a stack of broken lines to the right. (I don't know what to call the icon, or what it represents.) If you click on that meaningless icon, you get a form with two buttons at the bottom - one, bright blue and probably usable, says "search". The other says "Create filter".
So I guess it's some kind of search option. Maybe there's some way to save filters, and invoke them later, like a canned search - presumably by clicking on some other meaning-free hieroglyph. (There's no visible way to say what to do if the filter is satisfied, so either that appears only after filling in some fields - to make the button active - and clicking it - or there's no way to have the filter automatically do something. And a competent UI designer wouldn't have buried the UI in search if it *could* do procmail style filtering, so guess which I expect.)
You have to actually click "Create filter" before it shows you actions you can do to matched emails. Yes this is terrible UI, it took me a while to figure it out also. But at least using their interface (no clue how it works with other clients) you can automatically delete/tag/whatever emails as they come in.
Also, the icon appears to be three stylized sliders, I guess to represent configuration.
I'm not looking to sell anything, but I am looking to start a movement of sorts, and I'd love to get advice and support where interests align.
I'm looking to challenge the status quo and lead a rationalist reboot around how we think about, talk about, and treat the condition we currently refer to as diabetes.
When I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2019, I experienced a remarkably incompetent system of healthcare that initially led me to being depressed.
Thanks in part to an initial misdiagnosis (many adult-onset type 1s are misdiagnosed as type 2), I decided to dig deep into the details of the various physiological conditions, the healthcare dynamics at play, as well as the mental models employed within the diabetes arena, and came away with a completely new outlook.
I've documented my journey, findings, outlook, and suggestions in something I call The Type A Diabetic Manifesto ( http://TypeADiabetic.com ).
In this manifesto, I attempt to use rational thinking as an approach to not just deconstruct existing problems with the current state, but construct new mental models that I hope allow everyone -- ranging from medical practitioners to people with the condition to people who think they don't have the condition but probably do -- to look at insulin disorders and glucose toxicity with a fresh set of eyes.
Unfortunately, some find this way of approaching a sensitive topic quite problematic. For example, the moderators of the diabetes Reddit forums have banned this document, claiming that it peddles in "toxic positivity" and "internalized ableism." The same moderators are on Discord, where they banned me personally from those topics for peddling "dangerous rhetoric." In other forums where it has not been banned, it has been well-received.
Again, any insights, suggestions, or help in getting the word out would be greatly appreciated.
I think removing some of the coachy self-help fluff would help a lot in not coming across as toxically positive. On the other hand, "internalized ableism" is the kind of phrase that tells me the writer/speaker's opinion should be discarded immediately.
I agree with your point in general - lumping T1 and T2 diabetes is an unfortunate historical accident, and changing the nomenclature is probably a good idea.
I appreciate the feedback. This is tricky because while I agree with you notionally, the personal feedback I've received as a result of the self-help fluff has been so great to see that it's hard to pull that out. Perhaps I can re-style it to be less self-help-y. Very open to suggestions.
This is my first manifesto. I am definitely learning here.
I apologize. My crank alarm bells are going crazy but I don’t have the energy to respond point by point. I’d recommend reading a standard review article like this one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4478580/
Then figure out specifically what you disagree with.
Would you mind being a bit more specific about what sets off your "crank alarm bells"?
To answer your question, this snippet in the link you included is simply incorrect: "Diabetes mellitus is a group of metabolic diseases..."
Type 2 is a metabolic disease, Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. Both lead to challenges in regulating blood glucose, but from completely different vectors.
This is at the core of the problem in diabetes. The labeling is misleading, inaccurate, and unhelpful... even as experts try to define it.
Yeah, I looked at this and it didn't look "rationalist" to me at all, at least not in the "LessWrong" sense.
Let's take as an example the page "Should We Call the Condition Diabetes? 👊 No." linked to from the title "It's Time to Stop Calling it Diabetes".
It complains that the etymology of "diabetes" comes from peeing - a fact which I did not know and do not need to know. For example it says:
> People who are currently managing their diabetes are called diabetics (i.e., “those who pee a lot”). Yet, if they are effective in treating and managing their condition, they no longer pee a lot. Houston, we have a problem."
> isn’t it a bit ridiculous that people willingly label themselves diabetics, which is to say that they are the “people who pee far too much sweet urine”? Yes, of course it’s ridiculous.
A LW rationalist would point straight to the lessons of A Human's Guide to Words, e.g. some of the "37 Ways that Words can be Wrong":
16. You think a word has a meaning, as a property of the word itself; rather than there being a label that your brain associates to a particular concept. When someone shouts, "Yikes! A tiger!", evolution would not favor an organism that thinks, "Hm... I have just heard the syllables 'Tie' and 'Grr' which my fellow tribemembers associate with their internal analogues of my own tiger concept and which aiiieeee CRUNCH CRUNCH GULP." So the brain takes a shortcut, and it seems that the meaning of tigerness is a property of the label itself. People argue about the correct meaning of a label like "sound". (Feel the Meaning.)
17. You argue over the meanings of a word, even after all sides understand perfectly well what the other sides are trying to say. The human ability to associate labels to concepts is a tool for communication. When people want to communicate, we're hard to stop; if we have no common language, we'll draw pictures in sand. When you each understand what is in the other's mind, you are done. (The Argument From Common Usage.)
Most relevant here, I would argue that it is a mistake to argue that a word is "bad" because of how you personally think about it, when most other people don't think of it that way. Since the rest of us don't think of diabetes as "peeing too much sweet urine", the argument that diabetes is a wrong-word because it means "peeing too much sweet urine" just falls flat.
To me, and to most other people, I think, diabetes doesn't mean "peeing a lot of sweet urine" nor does it mean "experiencing glucose toxicity". It means "having to waste time on annoying shit every day, like pricking body parts with needles". The annoying shit keeps happening regardless of whether or not the glucose/insulin is under control; thus diabetes is a chronic condition even when there are no active symptoms.
The article correctly points out that English is inconsistent. For example, I personally keep doing a certain time-consuming daily treatment on myself to prevent recurrence of a painful chronic condition that may or may not be genetic in nature (I don't happen to know to what extent it's genetic and to what extent it is environmental) ... but there is no special word for this, it's just "preventative treatment", and I am "a person with an obscure medical issue (that I don't care to explain here)" rather than "a person with ___________".
But oh well, human language is often like that. For example, we have an adverb "probably" for "having a high chance" but no corresponding word for "having a low chance" or "having a medium chance", so we need clumsier phrases like "is unlikely to be" and "is as likely as not to be". Rationalists are not prone to treat gaps and inconsistencies in our language as a moral crusade; we mostly just use the longer phrases as necessary, and suggest shorter phrases if we think it might aid discourse.
I'm concerned that if someone reading your manifesto actually *changes their own thinking* to resemble your article, it will probably cause them anxiety to think about how millions of people keep carelessly talking about "peeing too much sweet urine". But this is simply an error, because people talking about diabetes are, in fact, NOT talking about peeing too much sweet urine. So this change in thought pattern seems not to be beneficial, and perhaps harmful, to the person doing it. And if a lot of people change their thought pattern in this way, I think it would probably lead to a lot of annoying word policing.
You say it should be called "insulin disorder". I say that's all well and good, but (1) it's weird how this isn't even mentioned in the article because the entire article is just a polemic and one must visit a separate article to learn about your proposed replacement term; (2) the word "diabetes" is shorter so it communicates more quickly, and if most people are okay with the status quo, then so am I.
The article does raise some good points that any fan of A Human's Guide to Words could agree with. But that article, and the site as a whole, often breaks the written and unwritten rules of rationalist discussion and analysis.
Thanks for the thorough critique. It's true; I didn't write the manifesto from a rationalist perspective, as I wasn't even aware of this movement when I wrote. It's a pure retcon.
In terms of my definition of diabetes being "people who pee a lot" - that's just the etymology. It's not how people define it today. But as you might have read in the first chapter, nobody defines it the same way, nor well. Incredibly, not even the expert class. So I'd argue that there is no common meaning or definition, which makes it a fail from an effective communication perspective.
Diabetes may mean "sticking oneself with lots of needles" but in fact, the vast majority of people, diabetes means "I got too fat and now I will hurt myself by continuing to eating the way that got me fat." This is so bad and wrong and unhelpful that it creates what we have: an epidemic that is needlessly costing the healthcare hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
Rationally, we'd call the condition what it is (an insulin disorder), treat the root cause (looking at it as a functional carbohydrate allergy that at times requires hormone therapy), and reduce the personal and societal impacts of the condition (by aiming for gluco-normal status for all diabetics).
Currently, we are doing none of the above.
I've successfully hacked "diabetes" by following my own manifesto's credo, my glucose is as normal as anyone else without the condition, and I don't need shots. But what I do need is data, a sustainable mental model, and self-control.
I want others to see what I see, so that they, too, have the opportunity to avoid being in a diabetic state, so that this condition doesn't have any negative impact on their long-term health and life longevity.
Again, thanks for taking the time to provide your insights.
That sounds admirable. I'm curious how detailed your knowledge is of the science around diabetes and to what extent it is universal ... (a general pattern I've noticed about humans is that they are highly variable, so treatments that work for one person often don't work for another ... and I prefer to listen to people who can show their understanding of this.)
> This is so bad and wrong and unhelpful that it creates what we have: an epidemic that is needlessly costing the healthcare hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
I don't understand how the thought "I got too fat" translates into needless health-care costs. Dieting is like, hard, though, so I for one have been letting the pot belly grow (good thing I don't have <s>diabetes</s>an insulin disorder!)
I am a computer scientist by training, not a medical scientist. So I do come at the physiological dynamics from a programmatic lens.
My knowledge of the dynamics at play is fairly strong, but I do not have molecular-level knowledge. I know enough to understand what's broken and how to analyze and mitigate, but I do not know enough to develop a potential cure.
re: "I got too fat" vis-a-vis healthcare costs --
The vast majority of so-called diabetics are what we currently label "type 2 diabetics" -- those who have insulin resistance disorders. These folks have a metabolic disorder that is generally painless yet puts its victims into a state of glucose toxicity. Glucose toxicity leads to what the experts call "diabetic complications" (a more accurate term would be glucose toxicity complications). And it's these complications that lead to hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare expenditures that could be avoided if the nearly 1/2 billion diabetics better understood their condition and had better training so that they could halt the destructive process that glucose toxicity enables.
The current mental model for many (most? I haven't done surveys myself) type 2 diabetics is: "I am fat so I became diabetic as a punishment for being fat." These people are in no condition to transform their eating and drinking habits as required because any change will be associated with a punishment. Punishing regimens aren't sustainable.
New mental models are required so that these people don't feel victimized, and so that the mitigation strategies don't feel like punishments.
Have you actually read the post you're responding to?
Any "standard review article" agrees with most points raised by Jon. What doesn't is public perception, and lazy doctors who aren't up to date on their literature.
My child has T1 - and I wrote this: https://zby.medium.com/rational-patient-community-6d3617dffcfe It is also a musing on a 'movement of sorts' for people with medical conditions, based on the rationalists credo. But actually don't agree with most of your points :(
If I gave the impression that it's the number one problem, then I didn't do my job. What I do think is that the terminology represents -- and enables -- a mental model problem.
And I think how we think about the condition(s) informs how we talk about it, and, ultimately, how we treat it.
That said, I do not think the terminology impacts research into cures and prescription therapies all that much. I think those tracks are in fine shape finally, all things being equal.
I'm late to the party here but I am also a T1D, diagnosed as an adult. Despite the numerous people here who seem upset with your thoughts, I find a number of the main points in your manifesto to resonate. Particularly the feeling that diabetic disease management by the medical industry seems to generalize too much.
One piece of feedback I have (especially after years of exploring alternative treatments and thoughts on diabetes) is to avoid confronting the medical industry as wrong. As an example, statements that read like "this is ACTUALLY an allergy" will get rejected and probably undermine your real message. I recognize that you're simply suggesting to THINK of it as an allergy, but I think finding a way to frame this more as a state of mind versus a diagnosis may help you. In my experience, these kind of things piss off doctors and researchers because it implies that for decades the medical industry has missed something obvious that you have uncovered.
I know you know this but ultimately diabetes (especially Type 1) iss 100% patient managed and understood. A doctor that sees you less than 60 minutes / year and collects mostly point-in-time data cannot possibly know your experience. This is especially true given the minute-to-minute management that T1D requires. So I think materials like this have to be framed as a means of supporting struggling diabetics in managing their disease. Framing that suggests the medical industry is wrong is likely to be rejected by many.
Just my initial reaction to the manifesto but I'd like to review these materials in more detail soon.
It's so interesting that you bring up the allergy example. I've had several people accuse me of "ignoring science" by trying to introduce the allergy mental model. I struggle here because in no place to I ever suggest it's "actually an allergy" yet to your point, it's perceived that way nonetheless.
It's apparently hard at least for me to try to introduce a new thinking paradigm without being misconstrued.
I also try really hard not to frame the medical industry as wrong, per se, but not designed to effectively treat and support people with insulin disorders (or perhaps conditions that require continual management beyond taking a pill) in general.
Yet, this still seems to be the perception! This is why I wanted to reach out to the rationalist community to get some pointers on how to convey these *assessments* while not being construed as *judgements*.
Zikora is my 1-year old daughter, that came down with acute bacteria meningitis with complications of hearing loss and vision loss. The doctors here in Nigeria have recommended cochlear implant which I cannot afford. I am a junior faculty with no insurance and poor salary. Cochlear implant is not performed in Nigeria.
Please if anyone knows of any charity or foundation that can accept to help with supporting Zikora please email me at eennadi@gmail.com or eennadi@plasu.edu.ng.
If you will like to support her cochlear implant, you can use the Gofundme me link or email me for more details.
Maybe this isn’t true of everyone, but I read your post as “I want to get rid of human rights so that I can force people to get vaccinated” when the your blogpost seems to be saying the opposite
Reading the comments over the last first months, I see that lots of people working in software read this substack.
This year I am taking a proactive approach to finding software engineering data, which is very hard to find. Previously, I mostly emailed researchers after reading their data oriented paper
The data is out there, we need to find the (few) people who have it, and ask them (my experience is that people don't realise what a gold mine they are sitting on).
When you are talking to those actively involved in software development, don't forget to ask if they have any data that they would be willing to publicly share (I offer a free analysis of software data that can be made public in anonymized form, but am not interested in paid work).
An example of detailed analysis of Agile estimation data
My book Evidence-based Software Engineering discusses what is currently known about software engineering, based on an analysis of all the publicly available data; pdf+code+all data freely available here:
Looking for a co-founder. Don't have an idea, just want to work with someone who is curious and wants to solve a hard problem. I've built 2 unicorns, working with a friend on a third. I'll probably be here for another year or so but for the right idea and person I'd be open to doubling down on something sooner.
Me: Op, strategy and people savvy. Can do Sales too.
The important thing is our personalities complement one another so I expect a few zoom calls getting to know one another before delving into the other pieces.
If you've built two/three unicorns, even as one of the first ten employees, you should have tens of millions of dollars. If you were a founder you should be worth hundreds of millions. So I'm seconding Timothy that my interest is piqued but I'm somewhat skeptical. Most people I know with three successful exits are semi-retired/board members or working on their own projects for the challenge.
Lorentz Bio is an early-stage, well-funded cryopreservation company. We're hiring a biologist to help develop and evaluate cryopreservation protocols. This role will start in Boston and may relocate to SF in the next year. We are also hiring for several other positions! https://jobs.lever.co/lorentz.bio/df59acae-afe1-44a5-92e3-a0e9d27495e9
If you are interested in a project that can advance the fight against drug resistance in Africa, using phages please contact me via eennadi@gmail.com
Background
Antimicrobial resistance(AMR) is one of the greatest threats we face as a global community. An essential global public health objective is lowering the burden of infection-related mortality. Previous research has calculated the number of fatalities brought on by drug-resistant infections and sepsis and discovered that infections continue to be the world's leading cause of mortality. The WHO has predicted that by 2030 (https://www.who.int/news/item/29-04-2019-new-report-calls-for-urgent-action-to-avert-antimicrobial-resistance-crisis), antimicrobial resistance could force up to 24 million people into extreme poverty. According to the UK Government-commissioned Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, AMR might result in the yearly death of 10 million people by 2050. It is predicted that 90% of these deaths will occur in Africa and Asia.
According to a recent report published in the Lancet, which estimated deaths and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) attributable to and associated with bacterial AMR for 23 pathogens and 88 pathogen–drug combinations in 204 countries and territories in 2019. The study predicted that in 2019, there were an estimated 4·95 million (3·62–6·57) deaths associated with bacterial AMR including 1·27 million (95% UI 0·911–1·71) deaths attributable to bacterial AMR. Six leading pathogens for deaths associated with resistance (Escherichia coli, followed by Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa) were responsible for 929 000 (660 000–1 270 000) deaths attributable to AMR and 3·57 million (2·62–4·78) deaths associated with AMR in 2019. The full report can be found here.
A case for sub-Saharan Africa
Based on the report, analysis based on regions of the world, Western sub-Saharan Africa had the highest burden, with 27·3 deaths per 100 000 (20·9–35·3) attributable to AMR and 114·8 deaths per 100 000 (90·4–145·3) associated with AMR, while Australasia had the lowest AMR burden in 2019, with 6·5 deaths per 100 000 (95% UI 4·3–9·4) attributable to AMR and 28·0 deaths per 100 000 (18·8–39·9) associated with AMR in 2019. In Nigeria, communicable diseases accounted for 66% of morbidity in 2015 There is an urgent need to address this problem in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Phages as an alternative to antibiotics
Phages have been proposed as an alternative to drug resistance. While phages have been used successfully in Europe, Australia and the USA. No report on phage therapy use in Africa. Phage research is neglected in Africa. A recent survey of phage scientists under the Africa phage forum showed that funding, lack of skill sets and infrastructure are the major setbacks preventing success in phage research in Africa.
To stimulate phage research as an alternative to antibiotics in Africa, I propose coordinated and strategic support. This support should focus on:
1 Influencing policy that will allow for the adoption and use of phage therapy in Africa. No country within Africa has a framework for the adoption of phage therapy
2 Address the infrastructure problem. This can be done by setting up phage banks in regions of Africa. In Nigeria, I am currently building a phage bank that can isolate, characterize and purify phages for use as phage therapy against the WHO priority pathogens. We can encourage this kind of phage banks across Africa. Funding has been a major challenge even for the phage bank in Nigeria.
3 Training, Phages for global health have supported the training of phage researchers in Africa. They can be encouraged to do more
------------------------------ Section divider: EMPLOYMENT ------------------------------
Thanks, Arbor!
Was intrigued by this job at Messari, not in dev work but rather in the content space:
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/2862571839/
This listing is for a FT position. But if your colleagues over there might also occasionally work with freelancers on an ad hoc basis, on various research editing tasks or projects, I'd be glad to be listed among those in their contact list. I have a background spanning IT, marketing (including copywriting), and personal investing, as well as nascent interests in the crypto/Web3 space. Feel free to share this inquiry with any colleague you know over on that side of Messari. Thanks!
Thanks, Arbor - I'll apply and mention that interest! (And will be glad to ping you when I've done that.)
Hi Arbor! I assume this is only for US citizens right? Otherwise I would be really interested (based in EU myself).
Nice. I will send you my CV.
Hi Arbor, I have a couple questions if you don't mind - do you adjust pay based on country, and can people work their own hours or does everyone have to work within a certain window? Thanks!
Hey, Arbor,
I'm looking at finding an internship/entry-level position in the crypto-/software engineering space. Don't know if Messari is looking at hiring or on-boarding anyone in those kinds of positions right now, I'm not in a rush and could spend some time increasing my skillset to make myself more attractive. Would love to hear your thoughts if you see this post!
Otherwise, I'll try again in the next classifieds thread!
Thanks! I accidently submitted my application without mentioning this post. Seems like a fascinating opportunity and would love to hear more.
I would like to ask for advice from anyone who's made a transition from consulting (specifically life science consulting) to the pharmaceutical / biotech industry. Please email me at (ROT13) gbz.uraarffrl@tznvy.pbz if you have time to connect for me to pick your brain a bit. And thank you!
As someone who's interested to transition from biotech to life science consulting, do you mind sharing a little bit about your reasons for jumping ship?
Grass is always greener eh?
I’ll start by talking about all the things I really like about life science consulting because I don’t think this is a bad place to start a career (or continue one) at all.
1) I really enjoy the people I work with, it reminds me of graduate school in that there are a bunch of very smart folk crammed together under high pressure and no small amount of alcohol, it can make for a marvelous alchemy
2) I really enjoy the work I do, it’s interesting, varied, and feels like I can make a difference both in economic terms and patient’s lives e.g.:
a) Worked on an asset screen for maybe half a year for a top 5 global pharma company, a few months after rolling off I open the WSG and see that they bought out our #1 pick for many many billions of dollars
b) Worked for a 3D printer manufacturer that wanted to explore the bioprinting space, I learned a ton from our industrials practice and again heard they wound up acquiring a company we’d highlighted
c) Worked for the last year helping a vaccine manufacturer which uh…yeah
3) I really enjoy the money, it’s many many times what I made in grad school and indeed I suspect at this point, or pretty soon anyway, I’ll have earned as much in consulting as I did in my entire non-consulting working life.
So yeah there’s a lot to recommend to it, and I do recommend exploring the possibility to anyone who’s at all curious
But of course, there’s a few factors that are kind of blowing me the other direction:
1) It’s a hell of a lot of hours most weeks, which is a product of both the amount of work to do in a short time and of hiring a lot of insecure overachievers, my family is expanding and so this feels like it’s not going to be sustainable forever. The longer I’ve worked here the better I’ve gotten at working efficiently and protecting my time, but sometimes it’s just going to be a lot. Also I know there’s a lot of family men and women in our firm who can make it work, so it’s certainly possible, but I don’t think it’s easy.
2) I want to see something through to the finish line. I think this is a side effect of that varied work I mentioned above as a positive. After a couple weeks or months we’re off to a new thing, and over time that’s started to bug me. I feel like even on the longest projects I’m only skimming the surface and offering advice to our clients. Someday I’d rather be the one actually responsible for making decisions
3) As much as I enjoy my coworkers, COVID has suuuuuuuuuuuucked in terms of building and maintaining group camaraderie and any kind of firm culture. I expect it will bounce back as cases wane and offices reopen but still, it’s been rough. Naturally working from home has a lot of positives, the expanding family for instance, wherever I wind up I think I’ll place a very high value on at least having the option for some type of hybrid office / WFH
If you’d like to know more about plusses and minuses feel free to email me, I can also pass your resume on to our experienced hire recruiters if you feel ready to give it a go
I'm making a native voice-conversion application that uses machine learning to convert a user's voice in real time with low latency. I'm a bit overwhelmed with managing too many areas of it at once and am open to having a highly-technical co-founder or first employee (or if you're a VC and want to fund us!) with a passion for the area and some great machine learning skills (preferably with a focus on audio engineering and real-time performance). If this sounds extremely exciting to you and you'd be an amazing fit, reach out to me at hi@koe.ai! Thanks
I'm not quite sure what you're trying to build, but it sounds similar to YourTTS, something that just got highlighted on a popular machine learning youtube channel. Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVKiMh2vEWQ&t=580s. Even if it's not exactly what you're going for, maybe you can reach out to the people behind YourTTs to see if they can help you out.
I recently did my PhD on a semiconductor device that enables battery-free sensing. I am having trouble negotiating with the university as my team lacks a strong business background. If you do have some, and would be potentially interested in being a co-founder, please message me at dmehta@freedynamics.tech
Like RFID sensors where the power comes from the scanner?
The power for reading out the data comes from the scanner. The power for sensing comes from a small pre-charged capacitor on the chip itself.
Probably a weird place for this, but I'm giving it a shot. Finishing up my second year of medical school, have been lurking on here for about a year now. I'm at a rural MD program and want to go into psychiatry. I've tried dozens of avenues to get involved with semi-interesting research with no luck. Publishing one fluff COVID vaccine reaction paper but that is it. If you have anything that I could help with remotely, please let me know and I'd love to talk with you. I'll work for free. Psychiatry tangential stuff would be best, but I'm really open to anything interesting.
Hey, I have lots of collaborators who work on research with me as volunteers as there's no money in clinical methods research. I work in evidence synthesis methodology. Check out my work here
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Lunny+c
We are going to be starting another study in a few months you could join. Email me if you're interested at Carole dot Lunny at ubc dot ca
I might have some ideas or opportunities! Former academic psychotherapy researcher, now in industry but still publishing. Feel free to set up a meeting: Calendly.com/Sam-Bernecker
Come work with me at Camus Energy! camus.energy/careers
We make software that helps power grid operators manage the transition to a zero-carbon grid. It's interesting work, helps fight climate change, and builds more resilient and efficient critical infrastructure. The team is dedicated, skilled, focused, and remote-friendly.
We are especially looking for a couple of distinctive skillsets:
1. Power systems optimization. If you have professional experience with optimal power flow for three-phase distribution circuits, you might well be a fit for this job. Details at https://www.camus.energy/careers/job-openings?gh_jid=4305064004
2. Frontend engineering all-rounder: the ideal candidate here would be an experienced tech lead capable of doing both "traditional" web-based frontend development and mobile app development, plus enough backend server coding to help unlock frontend capabilities.
I know both of these types of people exist, but neither is super easy to find, thus this widening of the net. If you're interested, email me at nweininger (at) camus (dot) energy or just apply on our website.
Camus Energy: Does it really matter?
We must choose to believe that it does!
(and our biweekly social Zoom is called the "Imagine Sisyphus Happy Hour." Yes, really.)
Stairwell - Software Engineers & Sales mostly, but send us a resume if you think what you do would be valuable to a mid-stage startup.
https://boards.greenhouse.io/stairwell
We're building a platform to help SOC analysts, malware researches, and other security professionals detect and prevent intrusion. YOU DO NOT NEED TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT SECURITY TO APPLY. Our work consists mostly of normal software engineering, but we do have a modern code base and tech stack. (People I know at other workplaces have expressed envy over it!) We're fully remote, we have a great team, and we're building a really cool product. If you want to ask me questions about it, feel free to email me at vmnnx.jrvff@tznvy.pbz (rot13)
Hey everyone! I'm looking for a software engineer in the greater Boston area with 2 or more years of experience. Here's my pitch!
I manage Amazon Alexa’s data lake team. We develop the systems that store all of the data used by other Alexa teams to train their machine learning models. Our systems handle a staggering throughput, and we try to do it all really cost effectively. There's a vast array of systems we own that tackle issues such as upholding Alexa's customer privacy promises, ensuring data is accessible in a secure but scalable way to Alexa's ML modelling systems and data annotators, etc. We optimize for many different use cases, and each of our systems have to scale to be used by hundreds of customers each with thousands of transactions per second.
We’re currently trying to find new team members that can come in and not only take ownership of our systems and projects, but also help newer, less experienced engineers to find their footing.
Please let me know if you're at all interested, I'd love to talk with you about anything related to the job! You can reach me at (ROT13) whfgva.nznmba.qngnynxr@tznvy.pbz
Come join me in developing GitHub Copilot (http://copilot.github.com), the AI programming assistant everyone's talking about! The job posting (https://boards.greenhouse.io/github/jobs/3645017) may sound pretty specific, but honestly if you've got a great head on your shoulders, are easy to communicate with, and have written good server software, I'd love to hear from you :D
The team is fully remote and distributed all over the world. We are a small team but punch above our weight thanks to strong collaborations with Microsoft, Open AI, etc., and a lot of experience using the product ourselves every day. Come build the new (safe & aligned) AI overlords with us!
I don’t know if I have the qualifications, but is it cool if I still connect with you on LinkedIn/somewhere else? Could use more software friends and would love to hear more about your work :)
Edit: open invitation to anyone else as well. Email aaron@aaronsimpson.org
Cool! I really like Copilot but I would like it to have better integration with intellisense in vs code. At the least to decide if function signatures match the recommendations.
I am fascinated by this and have been forever. I applied.
My biotech start-up is hiring a Chief of Staff, you can check it out here:
https://boards.greenhouse.io/weatherwaxbio/jobs/4284835004 :)
I presume relocation is required for the job?
"Looking for job" post:
Hi everyone! I'm thinking of changing jobs soon, and want to transition into something more experimental/researchy/startupy. SSC feels like one of the best places to find employers/cofounders with similar interests, so I'm posting here, feel free to reach out, whether you want to pay me money in exchange for code, or just to chat!
My main interests are in the intersection of ML and formal systems:
- AI that does (formalized) math
- program synthesis (why write programs when you can write programs that write programs?)
- AI that finds vulnerabilities in programs
etc. Aside from that, I'm also interested in startups that try to apply technology to industries in a transformative way: biotech, manufacturing, blockchain etc. My main requirement for a position is that I work on problems to which I don't already know the solution 🙂
I currently live in Boston but I'm possibly open to relocating. Professionally, I've spent a few years at a FAANG as a software engineer, focusing on 1) statistical pipelines and 2) database internals.
Email: <my username> at fastmail dot com
OpenAI has (had?) some folks working on AI for theorem proving. Christian Szegedy's team at Google works on this, too.
Hey, I'm working on a program synthesis project.
I'm applying (and heavily modifying) the DreamCoder neurally-guided program synthesis system from MIT to the Abstraction and Reasoning Challenge from @fchollet. It's basically about making a system capable of recognizing combinations of complex abstract patterns from very few examples and generating a program that would perform the required transformation.
Although, it's not an employment opportunity, since I'm currently living off my savings myself. But if you (or anybody else here) is interested in discussing and/or collaborating, I would be happy to do so!
Hi Andrey,
I might be interested in discussion and collaboration. I'm working on Bayesian program synthesis (where probabilistic programs are synthesized using MCMC), but I want to apply a neural guide/proposal, as in DreamCoder. I also find DreamCoder itself and the ARC challenge very inspiring, so would love to hear about your approach and maybe contribute. Let me know :)
Cool! You can drop me a line to NameLastname at gmail dot com
Formalised maths and security vulnerabilities have one thing in common: the interesting signal is sparse, meaning you have a rather unpleasant search space to traverse. Program synthesis looks promising, but program synthesis as we do it currently is slow (unlike the GeMM we use in training and inference of NNs). The open problem in my opinion is speeding up program synthesis by at least 4 orders of magnitude, ideally more.
There is a problem that we don't already know the solution for.
i'm an animator/illustrator open for gigs-- i drew all the character frames for this short film + animated nearly all the scenes (other artists designed the characters + drew the backgrounds):
https://youtu.be/VjsvBFznJfo
contact: @goblinodds on twitter is most reliable (but if you want an email address lmk)
I am hiring a lab assistant near Portland, OR, for work on brain preservation research at Nectome (see https://nectome.com/the-case-for-glutaraldehyde-structural-encoding-and-preservation-of-long-term-memories/). I can teach most of the specific skills; I'm mainly looking for general competence in performing lab work. If you can read scientific papers, implement protocols, are interested in brain preservation, and able to physically work in our lab in Vancouver, WA, then this might be a good job for you. College degree not required. $70,000 / yr salary plus stock. If you're interested please email me at (ROT13) e@arpgbzr.pbz.
I'm looking for ML researchers who are willing to help with informational interviews and career advice for a neuroscience/ML postdoc.
My areas of expertise are unsupervised learning and explainability / interpretability, with publications in ML conferences and neuroscience and cell biology journals. I'm considering my options both in academia and in the industry, and COVID made it difficult for me to develop a professional network in the US where I do my research, so maybe this avenue will work better!
Please contact me via (ROT13) zvpunry.qbeba@tznvy.pbz.
Thank you!
We want to make substack better. Come help! https://substack.com/jobs
Yes please! Join the many lovely ACX readers among our ranks
When I click that link on Chrome (Win 10) I see "Join our growing team
Failed to load postings. Something went wrong"
That's why they need the help 😁
Could you possibly try again? That part is maintained by a vendor (Lever) so if something is persistently wrong with it, we'll want to raise it with them.
Ah, that would explain it, I checked my script blocker to make sure Substack was allowed, but the issue arises because it's blocking Lever calls.
Looking for Computer Science related internship (SWE, research, etc).
Hi! I'm a rising senior at a college in the Denver area studying Computer Science and Philosophy. I'm currently in the search process for a Summer internship. This seems like a good place to ask for open positions, because I'm sure I'm not the only undergraduate Comp Sci ACX reader. If you know of any interesting openings, please reply with the best way to apply and where to find more info.
Thanks for your time!
https://jobs.lever.co/substackinc/9ee9153d-0a4c-4709-a3c1-d7069f12b135 just saying
Thanks, I don't know how I missed this. Definitely adding it to my list and will apply soon!
Hi! If you're interested in summer internships, we're hiring for Google Summer of Code at Turing.jl. Turing.jl is an open-source package in Julia for Bayesian statistical computing. You can find more info at https://turing.ml . If you're interested, you can contact me on Slack here:
https://julialang.slack.com/archives/CCYDC34A0
Hello -- Interested in this but having trouble accessing the Slack channel. Let me know if I can contact via email!
Highly recommend Palantir, we just moved the HQ to Denver and have a great crew here! Email me at pete.wilz@gmail.com if you wanna chat.
------------------------------ Section divider: DATING ------------------------------
I have a dating profile! Copying Scott's basic info format, I'm Jalex (m* / 25 / poly** / NYC***)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x1_6G5ZjmqbKMYYEMe9efMjnHyspD3DPrVTJ7ZsQZJM/edit?usp=sharing
* Some flavor of genderqueer but seem to be in the target demographic of typical straight women.
** I'm currently single and open to a monogamous relationship.
*** I'm 20% likely to move to Berkeley in March for a job.
I love your hair and you look great to me. But I'm not a match in gender and many other dimensions. Still, wishing you hotness and happiness.
I'm interested in you, but not match your gender.
M/40/Poly*/Worldwide
*Interested in co-parenting
I think the custom is to link to a "dating profile" with contact info + more context bout who you're looking for and who might be looking for you
Thank you! https://freedomfighter.shop/blogs/news/transhuman-governance
So you run this business? Where do I send an email if I want to go on a date you?
I do, links to all my socials are on the bottom, but I think I need to add an email. I appreciate your help
May as well throw this in here https://drethelin.com/romance/
I like your photos (the ones of animals).
Not *exactly* a classified ad, but here is a Facebook group meant for advertising / matchmaking and discussion of dating.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/898553654177315/
Gruffydd (m / 20 / straight / [London/Lancaster])
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Dzz5aWLyhEaOv6N1MsZwTyt0zGOuzgapxQW79LT4-BM/edit?usp=sharing
Not even just for dating, I don't know anyone in the rationalism/ACX/EA sphere really so feel free to message me for whatever reason
F / 32 / prefer-mono / Boston / rip.my.inbox at gmail
——————
Woman seeking human for romance etc! Serious relationship preferred, but also open to friendship.
Strong preferences:
- I’m open to all genders, but people capable of siring kids are preferred (ie cis men or pre-transition trans women — I’m a cis woman).
- My age (32), +/-5 years.
- I like people who are very honest and very kind. Smart is cool or whatever, but compassion, integrity, and grace are a lot more important to me.
Dealbreakers:
- Must want to have children (I have none, but would like them in the next few years)
- Must be okay with living in New England long-term (I’m currently in Boston)
Bonus points if you’re:
- An effective altruist
- An atheist
- Mostly or entirely sober (I’m an occasional social drinker, but that’s it)
- Interested in group houses / communal living
- Monogamous (I’m kinda sorta open to poly with people who do it extremely carefully, but I mostly prefer not to add that complexity to my life)
- Someone who likes other people + likes being alive
More about me: I’m a tall software engineer who lives in a group house with my childhood best friend. I like reading, cooking, hanging out with my siblings and niblings, solving riddles and word games, learning to juggle, starting and not finishing knitting projects, and (some) board games.
If you want to introduce yourself, you can email me at rip.my.inbox at gmail. No need to send anything too long — I’d prefer to meet up in person rather than go through a ton of back-and-forth online.
(If you want ideas, you could introduce yourself with any of the following:
- a link to your blog / Reddit profile
- a book recommendation
- a link to your favorite Wikipedia article
- a link to a dating profile
- a project you’ve done or code you’ve written
- a controversial opinion you have
- an unappealing fact about yourself
- a good riddle
- a bad riddle
- any of the above, but ciphered)
Thanks for reading all this!
M/39/South Jersey/Poly4poly
Dating profile: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w2jH3CRis1b8G8yuBEZnXLIc-wWCbpc_jr-rYOvcHvU/edit?usp=drivesdk
Not exactly a dating profile, but here's me: https://arman.do
M/33/mono. I live in SF but am not super tied to it long-term, am straight, and am looking for someone who also wants to have kids :)
Hi, I'm James (M, 29, Austin TX / California Bay Area)
Currently the cofounder of Manifold Markets (https://manifold.markets) which won an ACX grant last month! Previously cofounder of https://throne.live, and a Google engineer out of college.
I love trying to understand the world, playing board games, hiking, and you can try my compatibility quiz here (https://jamesgrugett.com). Email me at grugett.james@gmail.com.
Seems we're compatible, and I'm in Austin, but I'm a straight male, so I feel like I shouldn't enter my phone number with no additional context. I do enjoy board games, though, and fun fact: my brother is currently Manifold's top creator.
I had trouble with the drink question. I don't care about furthering "justice", but seemed like it might make the party more enjoyable for most people. 🙂
Cool! What part of Austin are you in? Shoot me an email: grugett.james@gmail.com
Hi I'm Carole, f/52/straight/Squamish, BC, Canada.I'm an avid rock climber and backcountry skier. Looking for a fit straight male into similar types of adventures for romance and life long relationship. I'm a research methodolist working remotely.
Email me at Carole dot Lunny at Gmail dot come
M / 29 / Los Angeles / Straight / Monogamous
tl;dr: long-term, looking for marriage & kid(s) w/compatible personality. I'm a mostly but not exclusively indoor person, enjoy good food, ballroom dance, helping people actualize their potential, and the company of friends.
Extended profile: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KQdDKB8QY-0X2kqIy2oKjhssX_3nYFOM9qgjovzrA80/edit?usp=sharing
M / 29 / Seattle
Instead of a dating profile, here is a webpage with links to my coolest stories. I promise they aren't boring! One of them was linkposted by Scott Alexander and another one was curated by Less Wrong.
https://www.lsusr.com/dating.html
I'm single, childless and STI-free. I'm looking for meet woman nerds for low-pressure coffee. If we get along we can go salsa dancing.
Hello, yes, here is my profile: https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Drew-Schorno-Dating-Profile--Ba2cJccvnF_dnBccQ95VX8vpAg-amNKJuShTKeuFNackmmCE
Gay man seeking similar :)
I live in Vancouver BC currently but I have a dual US/Canada citizenship and I'm not very tied to this location
your walk podcast is really calming
ha hey thanks! I'm sorry I did not see this until now lmao
M / 28 / currently poly but also comfortable with monogamy / Vanlife (typically Austin TX but delightfully portable) / Julian.w.wise (at) gmail.com
Best way to learn about me is probably to peruse my blog. https://julianwise.com/category/all-posts/general-gabbing/
Male, 27, looking for a woman, goal is ~marriage (with or without the actual contract). I want kids, ideally starting in the next 3-5 years but I know that might have to be flexible. I live a bit south of the SF bay area, open to the south bay, but the northern half of Monterey Bay would be perfect. Historically mostly mono but I'm a fan of poly in a "one primary partner, various additional partners" sort of structure.
I love the outdoors, especially biking (especially mountain and gravel). I really enjoy camping and backpacking. Trying to get into climbing again but we'll see if an old injury derails it again. Novice hobbyist woodworker. Fan of professional sports (football in general, and the Cubs). Finishing up a hard science PhD, trying to figure out what comes next - vague probabilities for various careers: 20% professor at undergrad-only school, 20% teach high school, 10% research career, 20% generic programming job, 30% something else. The deeper I've gotten into my PhD, the more I've realized I don't have it in me to live for my career, which is why I put it second in this paragraph, and why I'm honestly not that worried about how uncertain it is.
I'm generally about as nerdy and analytic as you'd expect from someone who hangs out around these parts, and I'd like a partner who enjoys the sort of conversations that ACX posts and thinking inspire (I was introduced to SSC by an ex who I'm still friendly with). Vaguely typical grey tribe beliefs (leaning a bit traditional left). Secular Jew.
Happy to share more! email me at cubecumbered@gmail.com or DM me on twitter @cubecumbered
Edit, a few other details inspired by Freya downthread:
- I live in a group house now that will probably split up pretty soon, and I love it. I don't know quite what the model of having kids in a group house looks like, but I'd love to always live in one if there's a good way to do it, or some sort of shared housing complex if not.
- In recent years I've become a lot more comfortable with... myself... basically beating lifelong anxiety and just being able to be basically happy most of the time, and I love it. I've also come to realize I'm an extrovert (me from 10 years ago would laugh at that accusation) and I like just generally being around people, specific activity (board games? casual sports? going biking? deep heartfelt conversation?) or not. I'd love to be with someone who can help amplify and vibe with both of those.
Are you rationalist /adjacent and live in Cape Town? Let's chat!
Hi Peter! Unrelated to this thread, but as I saw that you're in Cape Town and your profile pic is of climbing, I was wondering if you'd be up for a meet up sometime in the middle of Feb? My husband, John, and I are huge ACX fans, avid climbers and we're headed to South Africa on the 5th so we'd be in your neck of the woods and would love to meet a local!
Oh cool! Shoot me an email: p.sr.courtney (at) g m a I l dot c o m
------------------------------ Section divider: READ MY BLOG ------------------------------
Check out this new post on my blog, Good Optics (as seen in the ACX blogroll!): https://goodoptics.wordpress.com/2022/01/28/original-appropriation-and-divine-command/ it is about how John Locke's argument for property rights depends on theological assumptions, and how it is hard to make deontological libertarianism work without those assumptions.
There are non-theological justifications for the non-aggression principle. If you're particularly interested, you can look at Rothbard's Ethics of Liberty where he tries to ground it and you can see Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics. I don't think either are correct but they are both non-theological. Ultimately, Rothbard was convinced by Hoppe. I don't want to summarize his whole argument but it rests on the idea that to attempt to refute libertarian self-ownership is a performative contradiction. (I don't think he's correct.)
I think that Locke has a non-theological element to his objection to Bruenig's argument, which is the "Was it a robbery thus to assume to himself what belonged to all in common? If such a consent as that was necessary, man had starved..."
Which is the point that if you don't believe in legitimate first acquisition, what is the alternative? Can nobody consume anything until they have consent from everyone? To object that it is depriving others of liberty doesn't make sense to me because they do not actually own it. I cannot steal from you if you do not own something and you are not entitled to everything, otherwise how would anyone own anything?
Some libertarians believe that natural rights and consequentialism are approximately the same. I've heard this from libertarians, but I don't know which libertarians take this view. I think the more sophisticated libertarians are ethical intuitionists like Michael Huemer and Parrhesia. ;)
Without the theological argument, it is just a consequentialist argument. And while consequentialism no doubt rules out the grab world idea, it doesn't get you all the way to libertarianism without a ton of other work. Grant that the basis of property rights is consequences, and you end up arguing about the effect of the minimum wage in Indonesia, in July 1987, when it was raining, blah blah blah.
I think I most strongly object to the idea that natural rights and consequentialism should be the same. If God planned things out, you can see why that would be true. Otherwise, why would they be the same? It seems very suspiciously convenient.
I think a possible candidate explanation for why they should be the same is some argument involving decision theory. But I, personally, am yet to here that argument.
I think Roderick Long's essay "Why Does Justice Have Good Consequences" has a lot to say on this very topic: https://praxeology.net/whyjust.htm
> Grant that the basis of property rights is consequences, and you end up arguing about the effect of the minimum wage in Indonesia, in July 1987, when it was raining, blah blah blah.
Nope, you don't have to do this if you also account for computational infeasibility of actually having knowledge here.
If we _did_ know this kind of thing with perfect accuracy, the world would be be a very different place. But it's impossible to know the state of the future, with any reasonable accuracy, without doing some computation. And computation requires private property:
https://apxhard.com/2020/08/20/private-property-and-social-hierarchies-as-concurrency-control-mechanisms/
Why would I not be entitled to everything, if you are (= you can grab whatever's not claimed) ?
Not sure if this is a response to me but if so: by appropriating something at T2 that was unowned at T1, I diminish your liberty. This is because you now cannot use or appropriate that thing which you previously had the right to use or appropriate.
I just read this. I like it, though I don't have much background knowledge on libertarianism.
This isn't a blog, but I think it's closer than that then to a product / service! I work on a comic where each strip is based on a popular fantasy or science fiction novel. Literally no one reads it, but we keep making them sporadically because they make us laugh. Last time I posted this link on here a few people enjoyed it, so here we go: https://involuntarybookclub.thecomicseries.com/
At the bottom is a drop down menu where they're organized by book. Most of them won't make a ton of sense unless you've read the book in question.
Very enjoyable especially the one for Terra Ignota.
Thank you! That one took more time than every one of the rest put together both to write and draw. One of my favorite pieces : )
I haven't read enough books to get all of these, but the ones I did get were funny!
I've only read one of these books, but the comic was wryly funny.
Which one!
Same — Fifth Season. I enjoyed the corresponding comic quite a bit!
Wonderful read! I'll be coming back to it often.
Laughed hard at the one about Outer Wilds. Very concise.
Piranesi made me laugh out loud. Well done.
I wrote a short story about a library with an unusual method of organization and the secrets it contains: https://markmywords.substack.com/p/short-fiction-the-library-of-eristat
(content warning: suicide) I also wrote a story about quantum suicide: https://markmywords.substack.com/p/short-fiction-quantum-roulette
Heard some positive feedback on past work here before, would love to hear any thoughts!
Really enjoyed the quantum roulette story!
Is PNAS a blog? We have a new piece out in there, on the rise (and possible fall) of rationality in the West. https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/deciphering-large-scale-patterns-written-record is a quick guide to the debate.
There are two articles. Marten, Ingrid, Els, and Johan's is at https://www.pnas.org/content/118/51/e2107848118
Then there is a commentary from me at https://www.pnas.org/content/119/4/e2121300119 / https://sites.santafe.edu/~simon/DeDeo_PNAS_Cognition.pdf (Open Access PDF)
The big questions in play are:
(1) What's with the rise. I tend to agree with Marten et al. that the rise is definitely real, and it is associated the Weber's theory of the "cage of rationality" that appears in his Protestant Ethic book.
(2) What's with the fall. Here I think the evidence is more mixed. Marten et al. marshall a lot of evidence that there is a crash that begins in 1980, and accelerates in the social media age (2010+). I agree that there is a crash, but I think we disagree about the causes, and the extent to which it happens everywhere and at the same time.
(3) What kind of work is this anyway? Can we do psychology with large-scale archives? Or is this just more social-science/Foucalt/discourse analysis, etc? (This is the largest part of my response.)
Happy to chat further about what's in play.
I have a podcast covering optical and biomedical research, with about a 90/10 coverage respectively. If you've ever wanted to learn more about what goes into optical physics research we cover the details! (I know optics/photonics sounds niche but I assure you everything around you centers around it, from vision to fiber optics, semiconductor production, medical imaging, defense, etc etc. We have a joke "optics is everywhere")
Of particular interest , I interviewed a medical doctor using ketamine for pain management in sickle cell anemia patients, who typically require high dose opiate treatment for pain management: https://anchor.fm/the-spotlight-report/episodes/Dr--Cooper-Sood-on-using-Ketamine-for-Pain-Management-in-Sickle-Cell-Anemia-Patients-eaijf1
Anarchist Propaganda https://freedomfighter.shop/blogs/news/transhuman-governance
Thoughts on the systems and societal aspects of the project of eliminating greenhouse emissions from the economy:
https://climateer.substack.com/
If you like machine learning and/or cute anime girls, you'd probably love this post: https://nearcyan.com/this-anime-does-not-exist/
Good to see someone talking about LETFs! Hope you're right about SOXL. I think EA should buy LETFS cause they should be risk-neutral and not have time preference with some caveats. (https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/should-effective-altruists-make-risky)
That is a cool link.
I blog at De Novo, generally about biology-related things.
My most recent post is about a paper from last year that provided a detailed method for engineering SARS-CoV-2 variants. https://denovo.substack.com/p/how-to-make-your-own-sars-cov-2-variants
This is an example of academic publication incentives being misaligned with what's good for society.
Taking the opportunity to advertise whatever I want and advertising my substack. https://benthams.substack.com/
I'm talking a lot about utilitarianism--trying to make a sord've slimemoldtimemold-esque cumulative case (epic phrasing). Consider this a very extended consequentialism FAQ. Also, reading my blog allegedly cures blindness, cancer, most other diseases, and gives people the ability to fly and read minds :) .
I went onto your blog, started with your blog about theism, read your "positive claim rant" and immediately resolved to become a reader. That has always irritated me, too!
1) I appreciate that.
2) Yeah the positive claim rant is so dumb.
This is a good blog. ^
Thanks.
Thanks!
Isn't signal-boosting that study also bad? You've both brought it to my attention and handily linked to it- luckily, I don't want to engineer a covid variant, but can you say the same for all readers of your blog/ACX?
I estimated that signal-boosting this study (which is bad but not horrendous) is worth it if it prevents even worse ones in the future.
I made a movie: anexquisitemeal.com. It's a small, low-budget comedy about identity and narcissism. It's weird, dark, and a bit surreal. And it's only 60 minutes.
Just watched the trailer. Made me laugh. Quick question: it looks like there are several different ways to rent it, but I am curious which one of them routes the most money back to you?
they all end up being about the same, so I would go with whatever's most convenient for you!
On the lines of Scott's "Give yourself Gout for Fame and Profit" - Give yourself IBS to Ace your Midterms: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/s2qa8y/give_yourself_ibs_to_ace_your_midterms/ https://medium.com/@Abu_Ibrahim/give-yourself-ibs-to-ace-your-midterms-307487d746c3
The Rush of it All (Nature, man in nature, the nature of man...) sample essay here: https://www.rushofitall.com/posts/local-visiting-vs-knowing and “Writing the Rush” - a newsletter companion - Insider meta (and some beta) on my writing: https://rushofitall.substack.com/
I interviewed a researcher who studies anorexia-like conditions in animals, particularly Activity Based Anorexia:
https://sites.google.com/view/the-no-nonsense-guide/guide/interview-with-stephanie-dulawa-ph-d
If you haven't heard the "we can induce something like anorexia in animals pretty easily" thing, then this will explain a bit of that.
What was new for me: why drug treatments for AN might be useful (because they would lead people to think of it more like diabetes than voluntary addiction).
I had this idea over a year ago about the concept of a view synthesis. We often watch or read debates and discussions, and think both parties made some reasonable points, but we don’t properly lay out what the different aspects of the conversation were, try to resolve each one, and then put it back altogether.
That’s the concept I wanted to explore with my blog View Synthesis: https://viewsynthesis.substack.com/. I’ve synthesized debates on the reliability of experts, Black Lives Matter, and identity politics. Check it out!
I haven’t updated the blog in a long while due to other commitments, but am planning to get back to it soon. Subscribe if you like the concept and want to see more.
I like the concept and I was able to get through an entire two culture-war articles without cringe-quitting, which is more than I've done with any non-Scott blog in the last year. Tentatively subscribed.
Two suggestions:
1. Explain who are the proponents for each view you're synthesizing and why you chose them. This was done well in the most recent post but less so in the earlier two, as measured by me knowing the names + backgrounds of the people you were reviewing within 3 paragraphs.
2. You should know that there were a couple of throwaway lines that _almost_ made me close the tab - e.g. "America [is] one of the least racist countries in the world today" in the BLM article got my eyes rolling. As a reader I would grant more charity if you clearly marked or annotated which are your conclusions or editorial comments as opposed to the writers you're summarizing. Remember that I don't know you and you don't have very much work published for me to judge your trustworthiness as a synthesizer.
Commenting here to say i'm immediately interested. Will reply here once i've read some.
The fifth season of Hi-Phi Nation is almost over, with one episode to go. This season we did a four part series on the life and works of David Lewis, known for his theses about possible worlds, the invention of linguistic semantics and pragmatics, and theories of time travel. We also have episodes on de-extinction ethics, altruistic kidney donation, and more recently, vampires, zombies, and cannibals. https://hiphination.org/season-5/
Readers might be interested in seeing if they can make sense of a small scientific controversy: https://muireall.space/opponent/
Cool!
"But I’m really interested in sensemaking ..."
IDK if this is relevant, but recently came across a couple of interesting techniques for trying to make sense of controversies where there's a lot of contradictory information swirling around, potentially some of it credible, across two or more possible takes? (Much as with opponent process theory versus trichromacy?)
* Steelmanning. A post here describing the technique, noting how difficult it is to to do well, and providing tips on doing exactly that. https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/08/09/against-steelmanning/
* Ground Truth Challenges. (This feels a bit like a variation on formal debates at the US high school and college level?) These addressed some COVID-related claims, and some participants seem to be from contrarian backgrounds, but the technique itself seems interesting, more generally. https://www.betterskeptics.com/how-does-the-ground-truth-challenge-work/
The most obvious thing missing here is consideration of the physical mechanism that must occur before color perception: detection of light at certain wavelengths. Blueish-yellow is going to be grey or white since it combines all three primary colors; red-green is going to be yellow (because red and green are not opposites; red and turqoise are opposites, and the inverse American flag at the top should really be using a turqoise/teal/cyan color rather than green, because the inverse of the green-striped flag is in fact tinted purple, unlike the real American flag).
These important physical considerations were easier to figure out because they are based on physics and do not require an understanding of how the brain works (information about how the brain works is much harder to gather, if only for ethical reasons.) But also, nobody studying how the brain works is realistically going to figure out how color perception works without first understanding basic ideas like primary colors.
Presenting only the incorrect diagram of "Opponent process theory" (without correction) is a weird decision. Do not assume your audience is following so closely that they can both spot the error and figure out what the correct diagram would have looked like.
I still don't know how color perception works in the brain and this article doesn't tell me anything about that, nor does it suggest answers to the meta-level of how to go about finding answers, so I don't see what it's good for.
------------------------------ Section divider: CONSUME MY PRODUCT/SERVICE------------------------------
High Sierra Showerheads is a small, family-owned business in the California mountains near Yosemite.
They make kick-ass low-flow shower heads that don't feel a thing like low-flow, yet save up to 40-50% on water and energy over most others. We've happily used ours in two bathrooms at home since 2014; their spray is still as terrific as it was when we installed them on Day One. (Disclaimer, after being thrilled as a customer, I now consult with them part-time.)
This company profile on Crunchbase has links to many of the reviews of their products, in places like Wirecutter, CNET, CNN Underscored, and Popular Science. It also mentions just a few of their famous customers, which include Ohio State, Purdue, Penn State, Yale, the US Air Force Academy, Fort Bragg (the USA's largest Army base), and Planet Fitness (in 200+ of their locations).
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/high-sierra-showerheads
P.S. Thanks, Scott, for your newsletter and this classifieds opportunity! Loved reading your thoughts on Star Slate Codex, back in the day, and thrilled you've continued on with Astral Codex Ten.
I got a showerhead and took my first shower with it this morning and I love it! You wouldn't think that such a narrow showerhead would produce a full cone of water, but it does and does it much better than the showerhead that was already installed.
It's been a while since I mentioned these. I have published four novels and a collection of short stories by my late brother-in-law Bill Adams, who died in October of 2019. You can see them all on his Amazon author page https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Adams/e/B000APMCL0. They are priced not to make money but to share Bill's work, which I love. They are all available as Kindles or in paperback.
"Tilt", his first SF novel, an epic tale of love, triumph, betrayal and redemption. It's long enough that the paperback version is two volumes. This one is my favorite.
"The Unwound Way" and "The End of Fame", two SF novels about Evan Larkspur, a poet and playwright who finds, after a century in space and cold-sleep, that his works have become both revered and seditious. (Originally published by Ballantine/Del Rey Books.)
"Dead Sirius", a modern-day thriller set in and around Boston. Bret Ambler, a perennial student, successful inventor, and energetic slacker, is marked as the fall guy in a mysterious plot involving the new Russian President, credulous neo-Nazis, and South American assassins.
"13 Quick Tricks (And a Few Long Cons)": A collection of two dozen short stories, mostly mysteries, including the thirteen published around 1980 in Ellery Queen's and Alfred Hitchcock's under the name T. M. Adams. Ellery Queen's called "A Very Short Week" a "tour-de-force", but all of them are delightful.
I am inordinately proud of how these books have turned out. I wish Bill could have seen them. The Kindle versions of the four novels are thoroughly X-ray enabled. The paperbacks are just gorgeous. Most have front covers that Bill drew himself, which I have artistically incorporated into the larger wraparound covers required for a physical book.
thanks - I'll give his work a go
Thanks for this. I picked up The Unwound Way by serendipity when it was new, loved it, and though had long ago given up hope for a third volume, appreciate the closure and wish you the best reviving these novels.
I think both novels stand on their own well enough, but yeah, I always wanted the third volume, too! The idea was to use Moby Dick as the touch story, the way the first used The Tempest and the second used Don Juan. "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” But it never happened, sigh.
I teach people how to fold a single sheet of paper into repeating geometric patterns, called origami tessellations. If you're looking to train your pattern matching and/or patience, this may be the art for you! Learn more at https://training.gatheringfolds.com
Lovely! I'd seen some tessellation masks & artwork online, but hadn't thought there would be accessible steps to learning the art form!
I'll repost in a FB group where the Qualia Research folks hang out - I bet they'd also like this as practice for recognizing wallpaper groups in psychedelic experiences!
Thanks Sarah! There's several books now that teach specific patterns and some theory and one monster of a textbook on the math behind everything as well as quite a few pattern-specific YouTube tutorials, but as far as I'm aware I'm the only one teaching general theory and practice through videos.
Hi Madonna - I lurked through several sessions of your last intro to tessellations class advertised here a couple months ago, and I just wanted to share (and point out to all you other readers) how helpful, comprehensive, and conscientious your teaching was. It was clear you were coming from a lot of love and devotion to the topic, and I felt really lucky to listen in. Thank you!
Thank you so much Evan! To be honest, I really needed to hear that right now. <3
For those who would like to watch the replays of that intro to tessellations class, you can get them for free at https://training.gatheringfolds.com/start :)
We at the Guild of the Rose are building an organization for education, community, and service. We provide online classes on a variety of topics and we foster carefully designed group collaborations to enable real friendships to flourish amongst the members. Most of the current membership is rationalist or rationalist-adjacent, but we are not limited to those populations. If you're curious, visit https://guildoftherose.org/ for more details.
In some regards, the Guild can be considered the answer to anyone who ever wanted to attend CFAR, but couldn't afford it, didn't want to travel, or didn't see how a one-time experience could translate into meaningful change.
What would you say to reassure someone who's put off by how culty this seems?
Given the alarming number of rationalist-adjacent organizations that fall into cult-like failure modes, we were concerned about this from the beginning. We looked into the failure modes of organizations that trend toward abuse and toxicity, and we continually make sure that we aren't doing those things.
1. A toxic organization usually involves a commitment to a charismatic leader or ideology. The Guild has no single leader or primary charismatic figure, but rather was started by five people with directionally similar goals. The Guild also has no ideological commitments. Some of our members are distinctly not "rationalist" and their voice is heard just as loudly as anyone's.
2. In practice, toxic organizations tend to undermine the personal relationships of the members through various means, while providing a replacement social structure. The net result is the the org becomes the member's sole source of social connection. We do provide a social structure, but intentionally counteract insularity by emphasizing courses and activities that encourage/require local community interaction. (We are in the process of rolling out a more formal local community service protocol, but it isn't active yet.) In any case, since it is a fully online community, if you try it and don't like it you can (and should!) just leave and never look back, unlike many toxic orgs where you will be, for example, physically living with the other org members.
As for other potential concerns: it's probably fair to say that the Guild does involve peer pressure to do Guild activities. Perhaps this sort of thing makes you uncomfortable, I don't know. I would point out that pretty much every organization in existence has some background level of ineffable social influence. If this post didn't assuage your concerns, perhaps you could elaborate on what in our marketing materials concerns you.
Thanks, that's helpful. It was not one thing in particular, the further I went down the front page the more it pattern-matched to some unsavory things.
The invitation page mentions that the first session will start September 1st. Is this accurate (since the alpha cohort has already happened)?
https://guildoftherose.org/articles/you-are-invited-to-apply-to-rose
That was for Sept. 1 of 2021. The article isn't dated correctly. Apologies.
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My team and I released a video game last December, and it's 33% off on Steam for the next week! It's called Bean and Nothingness, and you can get it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1706090/Bean_and_Nothingness/.
It's a tile-based puzzle game built around turning combinations of beans into monsters (and sometimes turning monsters back into beans) which can both help you or get in your way. There are eight different monsters and over 180 hand-crafted puzzles which require creative thinking, careful resource management, and clever geometric reasoning.
Great title! Is 'Bean and Time' in the works?
Didn't think of that one :)! "The Unbearable Lightness of Bean" was a candidate for the title for a bit though.
I'm a puzzle designer and I award this the Looks Fun stamp of tentative recommendation that people check it out
Beeminder! We're the quintessential rationalist startup. Well, second to CFAR I suppose. And we're over 10 years old now so "startup" is a stretch. In case you don't know about Beeminder, let me quote Scott:
> Beeminder's an evidence-based willpower augmentation
> tool that collects quantifiable data about your life, then
> helps you organize it into commitment mechanisms so
> you can keep resolutions.
Specifically, you create a quantified, graphable commitment like "get 10k steps per day as measured by Fitbit" or "get 10 XP per day on Duolingo" or "get to inbox zero by Christmas as reported by Gmail" or anything else you can dream up if you're willing to manually enter the data (we have apps and bots and things to make that easier). Then Beeminder plots your progress and a bright red line on the graph. If your datapoints cross that line, we charge your credit card. Also we redraw the line to get you back on track. It's extremely motivating!
We've put an enormous amount of thought into it. An exponential pledge schedule for how the stakes increase each time you derail (though you can cap that), and an akrasia horizon before which you can't make changes to your commitment (with total flexibility beyond that horizon), zeno-polling for reminders, etc etc.
Also our community is pretty great, if I do say so myself. Highly nerdy and quantified-self-y and rationality-oriented. And we have lots of nice rationality fare on the blog. Reviews of behavioral economics books and ACX posts and primers on things like loss aversion. I guess I'll save that part for an entry in the READ MY BLOG section!
Delighted to answer any questions here too.
I've been using Beeminder for about 3 months and I really enjoy this product. I always found that I do better when I write a goal down and treat it seriously and this is the ultimate tool for doing that. Visualizing the data and feeling happy adding progress and reflecting on it makes it very fun. You're able to gamify the process.
In order to establish and maintain habits, it is really important to not completely derail and just stop doing it. The penalties are sufficient enough to keep you on track and there are enough tools to modify/archive the goal (with 1 week delay) that you won't just drain your wallet.
I think this is a top tier product that people should definitely try. I am new but I expect to use it for a long time and accomplish a lot more. One goal I've already stuck to is reading more than 500 pages per week which is something that I imagine would be too ambitious without beeminder!
Beeminder changed my life and continues to do so. Product support is simply outstanding. Highly recommend.
I abandoned Beeminder a few years ago after observing that the primary cause for breaking my Beeminder pledges was not actually breaking the commitment (in which case there were all kinds of options possible) but keeping the commitment but failing to fill in that data in Beeminder - especially because all kinds of situations that were good for me and also my commitments correlated with not using (or being unable to use, sometimes unexpectedly) my phone or other connected devices at all for a prolonged time, especially if I'm away from devices because I'm focusing on the commitments that then I get penalized for "breaking".
I have done this a bunch of times too! But I just put in the data point after the fact and email support, and they fix it right away.
Beeminder helped me write my dissertation, thank you!
Manifold Markets (formerly Mantic Markets) is a platform for user-created prediction markets. We recently won an ACX grant (Scott: "If every existing prediction market is Lawful Good, [Manifold] proposes the Chaotic Evil version"), and have a small but passionate community of ACX readers creating and trading on markets.
We're offering a sign up bonus of the play money equivalent of $10 for people who sign up now! Consume our product slash service here: https://manifold.markets
Consume my musicks! https://memphisharmony.bandcamp.com/
Thank-you! Beautiful!
I love this!
I take portrait photos and have already done so for many people in the rationalist community, including Scott and Linch. I'm based in the Bay Area; my rates for portrait photos are usually in the $200-$300 range depending on the specific ask.
My portfolio is https://rachelshu.myportfolio.com/portraiture, and I can be reached at hello@rachelshu.com . Right now my earliest available bookings in the Bay are for late February; I'll also be in Austin around vibecamp.
I wrote Protocall (https://protocall.dev), which is the gRPC & protobuf api client that does ~everything I wanted and couldn't find in existing solutions. To wit:
- Automatically imports & resolves all proto dependencies with zero configuration; all you need to do is link a Github repository with your proto files
- Provides structured input fields, which are dynamically rendered based on the message type (aren't you sick of switching windows constantly to check how to spell some field name? or, god forbid, trying to construct a complicated message with a bunch of nested fields by writing it as a raw JSON string?)
- Supports Any fields (by dynamically importing the relevant message given the type url in the local namespace, and providing the same structured inputs)
- Supports bytes fields (by accepting base64-encoded strings as input)
- Supports hitting traditional http/1.1 endpoints with protobuf-encoded messages, not just gRPC, using the same app, protos, inputs, etc.
Would really appreciate any user feedback! There's a no-time-limit free version so you don't need to plug in your credit card details to try it.
Surely you - or someone you know - desperately wants to learn calculus from a crisp, concise, infinitesimal-based textbook with a punchy title. Try 'Full Frontal Calculus' for free here:
https://www.bravernewmath.com/
If you like it - or its prequel, 'Precalculus Made Difficult', available at the same website - you can buy a bound copy on Amazon for a pittance.
I'll convert it if Seth wants and doesn't want to do it himself (Calibre does a fair job on default settings and one can get quite creative in Sigil)
Thanks for the offer, Jo. I may get back to you about this...
Thanks for the suggestion. I can and will consider this. What comes of the consideration will depend on how onerous the conversion process is. I suspect it will be pretty awkward given the many formatting kludges in the original document. Still, well worth looking into.
Thanks, Seth! Just read the first five pages of FFC. Your writing style is excellent – very clear – and your circle/polygon example is readily comprehensible.
(I'm an oldster who never got past algebra and geometry in high school more than four decades ago - no trig, no calculus – but am hoping to once again dip into subsequent pages and see how far I can travel, with your assistance, before getting lost.)
Thanks for the kind words, Aron. There are certainly some thickets in calculus in which one can get tangled, but in contrast to a lot of the basic high school math you mentioned, calculus has a strong narrative arc, which means that you're unlikely to lose your bearings altogether.
Interesting, thanks!
I’m working my way through Precalculus made difficult now. I’m teaching college precalc and might add it as a resource for students
Excellent! Thanks for taking a look, Mystik.
A blitz-review from someone who has just briefly looked at the first quarter of the book.
* It uses infinitesmals instead of limits and epsilons and deltas. Idk what advantages this approach has, but it sure has one big disadvantage - your knowledge obtained from this textbook will be not very compatible with all the other textbooks.
* It's written in a style that's something inbetween a math textbook style and a normal book style. So, it probably doesn't require too much mathematical maturity.
* Non-rigorous. For example, the first definition is of a derivative of a function, and it's its local slope at the point. The definition doesn't say for what kinds of functions it exists.
* The main content is 170 pages long with large margins and pretty large font size.
Thanks (?) for the blitz review of FFC. Regarding the bullet points you've fired at it...
* A slower review would reveal the advantages of the infinitesimal approach. In broad overview, I mention some in the "Preface for Teachers" (p. vii) and the early section "Resurrection" (p. 6). More importantly, these advantages reveal themselves in proofs, which can now actually convey mathematical insight, as opposed to mere tight-laced mathematical rigor. They explain *why* a result holds as opposed to simply confirming *that* it does. For a characteristic example, try the infinitesimal-based derivation of sine's derivative (p. 28) and compare it to the typical convoluted treatment you'll find a more traditional book. As for the disadvantage you mention, I don't believe this is true. I *do* discuss limits in an intuitive way (introduced in Chapter Pi), but you are correct that I - quite deliberately - do not discuss deltas and epsilons. If I were teaching piano lessons or driver's ed, I would not discuss the fine points of acoustics or the physics of the internal combustion engine. Same story here. And just as my fictional piano or driving students surely would not suffer from that lack, neither do calculus students. For what it's worth, very few freshman calculus classes these days (and "these days" now extends several decades into the past) bother with epsilontics at all, which are better reserved for students in, say, a real analysis course, who have the mathematical maturity to appreciate that depth.
* Yes, the book eschews the usual dry-as-dust textbook format. And *of course* it "doesn't require much mathematical maturity". It's an introduction to freshman calculus. By definition, it is written for people without much knowledge of mathematics.
* To quote G.F. Simmons, whose own calculus text is one of the best of the traditional doorstopper variety, "Mathematical rigor is like clothing; in its style it ought to suit the occasion, and it diminishes comfort and restricts freedom of movement if it is either too loose or too tight." For someone who has never met the concept of a derivative, the main thing is to understand intuitively what a derivative *is*. Questions about the precise conditions under which a derivative exists need not be presented all at once, in the concept's very definition, before it has even occurred to a reader to wonder about such things. Far too many mathematics textbooks are written in this bizarre style, in which rigorous answers are provided to questions that the reader had never thought to ask in the first place and is in no position to appreciate.
* Yes, the book is short. That, I hope, is a virtue!
I agree. It's not a coincidence that 2/2 inventors of calculus used infinitesimals. It is the more intuitive way. Only much later was it made rigorous but beforehand hardly anything in math was rigorous anyway. I think Berkeley really derailed progress. Stochastic calculus without infinitesimals is a nightmare.
I took a look at this for the sake of some young smart people I know who are coming up on calculus. And my conclusion is that it would be unsuitable as a first textbook. Please don't take this the wrong way, I am not trying to be unkind, but rather trying to be helpful by suggesting moving this book a few shelves over in the Library of Congress classification. The book seem to me to be written from a viewpoint that is in love with language, and words, and history, and philosophy, and perhaps the foundations of math -- but not with math qua math, at least at the level of basic one-variable calculus. It doesn't have the simplicity and and focus of the best elementary textbooks, nor burgeon with the simple closely-related examples which greatly assist the newbie.
Contrariwise what it does have, that a first textbook doesn't, is an enthusiasm for language and the curious implications and applications of fundamental concepts in calculus (and infinitismals per se). In just the first few pages the excursion into optics, the magnifying the curve to see how it kinda sorta turns into a straight line, are brilliant and well executed (although some improved and larger art could help).
So what I am suggesting is that instead of positioning this book as a textbook, maybe consider positioning it as a calculus *companion* book. You could really let yourself go in terms of imagining novel ways to look at the foundational concepts, at their historical origins, their relationship to natural philosophy. You could not bother with trying to cover every practical tool and concept required of a core textbook. You could break it into bite-size morsels.
With that repositioning I can readily see an instructor being happy to consume it himself or herself *and* using the bite-size chunks with a class to break up the monotony of basic instruction -- give the students some kind of breath of fresh air, a small window in which to sit back, take a break from the grind of just mastering the practical tools, and think about "what it all means" and form some kind of beginning appreciation for the beauty and philosophical depth of this aspect of math. From the practical point of view, by positioning the book as a companion book (and not pricing it too high), you would not compete with but be in partnership with the regular textbooks and regular curriculum, which could make for an easier path to business growth.
I genuinely appreciate this nuanced review of FFC, even if, unsurprisingly, we disagree in several places.
As a business proposition, I find your marketing suggestion eminently sensible. Truth be told, though, that's a low-order consideration for me. I wrote the book for my own calculus students, who seem to learn just fine from it, because I was tired of "teaching against the grain" of more traditional textbooks. (If I can sell a few copies now and again, so much the better, but I've never lost a minute's sleep over sales and marketing. I'm not sure that game is worth the candle.)
I think we may have opposite notions about the textbooks and "companion books". To my mind, most books marketed as textbooks are reference books, which are, by nature, companion books: wonderful to have on the bookshelf for consultation, but not really the sort of thing from which one derives much real learning.
I fully grant you that that sort of opinion makes me, not you, the odd duck, and it surely goes a long way towards explaining what impelled me to write a somewhat nonstandard calculus book.
Thanks again for your comments, Carl - and for noticing a few of the book's strengths even if it ultimately does not suit your purposes.
Interesting and cogent, Carl!
Unlike Seth, I'm not in a position to evaluate your critique of his book, and this marketing / positioning suggestion for it, but you've made your cases for both of these very clear!
Personally my taste would be for science/math/physics/logic/economics classes to have a bit of history and philosophy in them, and then to drop some of the pure liberal arts classes which cover aspects of religion/culture/philosophy/politics which frankly have gone nowhere in the last few hundreds or thousands of years.
Trains of thought that weren't in some way or another on the causal pathway towards iphones should at this point be garbage collected from the standard educational repertoire.
I agree the history of technology (or science) is given less shrift that it might ideally get. In part that's the fault of the field itself, since when we discover improvements to our understanding we tend to shuck off the superseded ideas as so much dross, never to be considered again. But there is indeed some real value in learning the path by which we got from there to here. It tells you a lot about how human beings approach problems, and gives you a better sense for where the strengths and weaknesses in modern understanding may lie.
Besides which, some of the historical artifacts are just plain fascinating. At some point in the alchemical past that it was surmised that it could not be a coincidence that there were seven metals (gold, silver, mercury, copper, iron, tin, and lead) and seven naked-eye heavenly bodies (the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), so the hypothesis was floated that each heavenly body emitted special rays that acted on plain earth (supplied by the Earth, naturally) and turned them slowly into the matching metal. The history of science is stuffed with weird gems like this.
I had a peek out of curiosity. This is some engaging writing. Maybe I could use a review. Oh hell, I’ve always thought the word infinitesimal is cool. I bought a copy. Enjoy your cup of chai!
Before my first sip, I shall raise it aloft and solemnly intone "to Gunflint!"
Many thanks for the purchase - and for the compliment.
At a skim I like it. I was in the minority of students who find infinitesimal calculus more intuitive. I also found many-worlds descriptions of quantum mechanics more intuitive, and I wonder if there's a correlation there.
One suggestion is to explicitly introduce non-trivial but easier to conceptualize (linear) operators first, such as g(x)=f(x)+f(x+1) so that readers have a reason to believe that functions are worthy as first-class objects of study, rather than merely representing uncertainty about a numerical value of interest. Then derivatives as (linear) operators will be less of a cognitive leap, differing only in their use of epsilons.
I've been working through this on my own for a bit, and am pleasantly surprised to hear you read ACX. Thank you so much for writing this.
I dare say I am even more pleasantly surprised at encountering someone here who was *already* reading the book before this "Classified Thread" went up.
You are very welcome, and you've made my night!
I just finished working through PMD in preparation for FFC (calculus and I are kind of frenemies). I liked the way you did it. Made things fit together. I kind of went, "Wow" on page 130:
Etymologically, trigonometry means “triangle measurement” (from ancient Greek).
But why should triangles have their own special niche in the mathematics curriculum?
Is this the work of the powerful triangle lobby? It is not. Triangles are fundamental.
They are the building blocks from which all other polygons are assembled. To analyze
an octagon, we do not need “octagonometry”. Instead, we triangulate the octagon
(as in the figure at right), and then study the triangular pieces with trigonometry.
Once we understand triangles, we understand all polygons.
Trigonometry is also concerned with circles. This is because triangle measurement involves angle measurement, which itself is inherently circular: 360° is a full circular rotation, while any smaller angle represents a portion of a circular rotation. Trigonometry’s circular aspects will appear in later chapters. For now, I’ll just note that circular rotation – a point endlessly orbiting a circle’s center – is taken as the fundamental example of periodic behavior (continuous repetition) in science and mathematics.* Trigonometry’s link with periodicity makes it indispensable in the study of rotations, vibrations, and wave motions, including sound waves and light waves.
Part of my goal in PMD was to delineate how those "precalculus pieces", which can feel like they've been drawn from a disconnected hodgepodge of topics, fit together. Thanks for letting me know that it's working for you!
I hope that FFC will make your relationship with calculus more friendly and less adversarial.
Thanks, Roger - enjoyed your takes here!
To be clear, everything in Roger's post above (starting with the word "Etymologically") is a quotation from PMD.
Grokked – thanks, Seth! "I kind of went, "Wow" on page 130: ..." This is elegant writing on your part, and appreciated Roger's sharing of this excerpt.
Hey Seth, Always nice to see new attempts at teaching core mathematical ideas! Had a very quick skim of the textbooks, and my gut instinct is that they will work well for people who are already 'mathematically minded' and curious (similar to how feynmans lecture series are good for people who already think like a physicist).
I say this as somebody who used to teach people all of precalculus, and found that there are lots of fundamental notions that I take for granted which held back many of my students, e.g. valuing precision, aiming for perfection, having an 'aesthetic' for nice ideas or arguments, etc. Other thing I noticed is huge gaping holes in fundamentals in arithmetic. E.g. I had students who could do long multiplication just fine, but could not say what 37*9 is equal to after being told what 36*9 was.
Anyway, as tone is hard to convey in writing, want to emphasise that I like what you have done with this, despite my reservations. Maybe we can even geek out some time and share anecdotes and thoughts about pedagogy.
Thanks for having a look, Lovkush. If I've managed to write the mathematical analogue of Feynman's Lectures on Physics, I'm perfectly content. 😎
I'd like to think my books help my readers *develop* the sense of "mathematical mindedness" of which you speak. At the same time, there's no denying that they do make some special demands of them as well. As I described one of the books (on its back cover), "A rarity among books covering this material, 𝘗𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘶𝘴 𝘔𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘋𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘵 presumes that its readers are literate, interested, capable people - who just happen not to know much mathematics yet."
Two services this time:
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Second:
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If you'd like a review of mathematical/technical writing (and, by extension, its contents),
if you'd like some tutoring on math, ML (maybe), or related subjects, or just guidance on what/how to study, on university-to-graduate-level (I will tell you if I feel comfortable teaching you),
consider contacting fi1wXconsulting@outlook.com, with the X replaced by a +. I have few references so far, but am happy to provide them on request. A current project of mine is at github.com/qudent/RhoPaths.
We'll figure out a rate that feels fair and achievable to both of us, this depends on your life situation. I match your EA contribution, up to 20 % of what you pay me.
Can you explain the matching EA contribution? I love the sound of this idea.
When I work for you and we agree on some rate of X$, you can state any percentage p<=20% and we donate p*X$ each to a charity selected according to EA principles. We'll pinky-swear not to offset this from our general donation budgets; you'll probably have the final say on the choice of charity as long as I feel it's reasonable.
This is brilliant; thank you for sharing.
I am advising a startup that has built an integrated realtime analytics platform with an unorthodox architecture that provides disruptive functionality. The developers are 'game devs', so the primary use case is for games. The secondary use case (as of now) is block chain. A short way to describe it is that it offers the best of graph database, time-series database, and process mining functionalities, with UI that is vastly more capable than Tableau or Looker, at speeds significantly faster than RedShift.
If anybody on here is in the games industry, we'd like to pitch you.
If anybody on here is an Angel/VC, we're raising a seed round.
Those interested, please contact: protopiacone@gmail.com
------------------------------ Section divider: OTHER ------------------------------
- Are you interested in running very wide bitslice logic on GPUs?
- Are you interested in GPU programing, particularly RDNA2?
- Are you familiar with AIG optimizers?
- Do you dislike floating point?
If you answer yes to any of these, I'd love to talk with you! I can't promise that you will get any money out of it, and it may be that I do not know anything that you do not already know, but I'd love to hear what you have to say, and perhaps I have some ideas you can steal.
isaac@isaacleonard.com
I'm pretty in favor of more angry polemics by Scott. Maybe this is undesirable from a broader standpoint, but I really enjoyed reading articles like untitled, lies damned lies and facebook, and contra hallquist on scientific rationality. I feel like they've been less common on astral codex 10 than they were on slate star codex. Perhaps the article about healthcare systems was more educational than some of the others, but I personally derived far more enjoyment from the more polemical ones. Whether that's the majority view is an empirical question, but take this as very weak bayesian evidence.
About untitled: I read it relatively frequently (once every few months) because during hard times it's nice to know that you're not alone in this. It may look like an angry rant for some people, but to me it's a rare expression of empathy by someone that's not trying to manipulate me into buying supplements or go into a whole ideology (Hello MGTOW/PUA community!).
This seems to be an issue with most substackers that go beyond a certain number of readers: they don't want to lose what they have so they start self-censoring more and more to avoid anything controversial.
This is why the less-read substackers are almost always the best ones.
Even before the end of SSC, I felt a decline in the number of "things I'll regret writing", maybe for one year before.
I agree that it's one of the primary thing I like reading, that and fiction/humor posts. Which also have become rarer.
I want to make devices: computers, tablets, cell phones, etc. for baby boomers, with user interfaces that feel right to people whose first computer ran windows 3.1, or MsDos, or Version 7 Unix, or one of the older mainframe operating systems.
I believe there's an untapped market opportunity here. Just about any baby boomer I talk to doesn't like modern devices, and finds them difficult and counter intuitive, no matter how much experience they have with digital technology. They also don't much appreciate dumbed down "easy to use" interfaces apparently designed for the clueless, stupid, and senile, and often marketed more to their caretakers than to the intended users.
I think many would buy new devices - rather than keeping ancient machines running as long as possible, and refusing any and all software upgrades - if only they actually liked the devices they were offered.
The big tech companies appear completely uninterested. Their target user appears to be a much younger person whose first computer was a cell phone. I tried to generate interest in such a project when I worked at Apple, and failed utterly.
I can't do this alone. No single person could provide the multitude of frameworks and apps required for a competitive (i.e. useful) modern product, let alone the hardware to run it on.
I'm looking for other people who'd like to do the same thing, or a pre-existing project I could join.
As I envisage it, this would probably be an open source, volunteer project, not a profit-seeking startup, for mostly practical reasons. And it would probably run on existing hardware, rather than design its own - again, for practical reasons involving money and lead time. But I'm open to alternatives, if someone can show me how they could be made workable. (And yes, if you are a venture capitalist who wants to fund a soup-to-nuts tech-for-boomers project, I'd love to talk to you.)
How is this different from/superior to simply running the old OS on a more modern machine? You can still run Windows 3.1 or 98 or whatever. In terms of hardware I don't think there's much difference from a user perspective.
This is potentially brilliant, at least for the computer end of things.
I haven't tried running older windows OSes on recent machines, but I would expect to have problems with missing device drivers unless I ran the older windows as a virtual machine. If that can be worked around somehow - in a manner not involving the user starting a second career as a techie - that would solve a good chunk of the problem.
One solution for windows users might be to simply distribute older releases, packaged to be easily installable on modern hardware, or to sell intel/amd hardware with older releases pre-installed. The trick would be to make it as easy as installing a game from "good old games" (www.gog.com), where it comes complete with a pre-configured dos box, etc. etc. So if there was a virtual machine involved, it would have to be pre-tuned or self-tuning and kept mostly out of sight.
What this probably wouldn't do is give access to modern web pages, or the ability to run lots of useful modern programs. I keep an older machine (a mac) around for running retro games, and it currently can barely handle modern email; most modern web pages are beyond it. (It cannot, for example, interact with substack - it's strictly read-but-not-post.)
Sadly, it also won't help for small form factor devices, i.e. PDAs, tablets, phones etc. There simply isn't an earlier version available for any modern hardware, and the hardware that ran things like the Palm Pilot simply isn't available.
But the principle might work - take an early version of Android, when it still had a "menu" button rather than an imitation hamburger, and give it a browser that can handle modern html, etc. Also give it a complete set of security updates, without any of the UI updates.
I'd really prefer a PDA with a keyboard, or a stylus, and suspect many of my age peers feel the same way. Some of the more technical would also prefer peer-to-peer networking and backups, rather than having their data in an unreliable and insecure "cloud". But without the ability to create our own hardware, that's unlikely to happen. (OTOH, there are couple of devices on the market that could in principle be adapted...)
> So if there was a virtual machine involved, it would have to be pre-tuned or self-tuning and kept mostly out of sight.
Right. I have made things like that. I have an interest in the history of computers. I've even got an old Soviet BESM working at one point. It really would be little trouble to get a computer or phone or whatever running most old OS's.
> What this probably wouldn't do is give access to modern web pages, or the ability to run lots of useful modern programs.
It will run them minus the modern features many people rely on as you said. In most cases the issue is not a fundamental incapacity but simply that they haven't been updated. Rather than writing a new program you'd probably want to do something low level so that they can effectively run modern versions. While that would require some programming know how it would be significantly less than spinning up your own program. Also, some pretty old OS's are still in common use. Windows XP is still pretty common in some places iirc.
> Sadly, it also won't help for small form factor devices, i.e. PDAs, tablets, phones etc. There simply isn't an earlier version available for any modern hardware, and the hardware that ran things like the Palm Pilot simply isn't available.
Well, not specifically the Palm Pilot no. But if you want something like one then yes, that's very much available. Especially outside the US.
If you do this, please be certain to keep the boxes air-gapped from the internet lest they become part of some botnet. Of course, this will severely limit their use - not only no web, but also no email. (Also, I started using Windows with 98 and am puzzled why anyone would long for that particular version. Personally, if I found myself time-transported to that era, I would give linux 2.0 a try instead.)
Personally, I would go for a gnu/linux distribution (probably ubuntu LTS for their longish mean time between upgrades required, debian if you can't stomach ubuntu) and just use an appropriate window manager. On shared systems, I find Mate (technically a desktop environment) to be tolerable for both me and my colleagues. https://wiki.debian.org/WindowManager lists some which are pretty minimalistic. I use windowmaker.
Generally, I find that (formerly popular) for *nix software lives very long. A person who used pine for mail in 1995 can now simply install alpine on Debian and will probably get a rather similar interface. Command line utilities are also very much alive and kicking, if one used cp/mv/rm/ls and so on in the good old unix days one will probably feel right at home in a modern day xterm running on gnu/linux or bsd.
On the other hand, the user interfaces of neither Windows nor KDE nor Gnome nor Android ever converge, but constantly try to innovate. Some of the stuff they add is probably better, but lot's of it is also just different.
The UI options on mobile are much more limited. While you can run an X-server and use browser from your distribution, this will probably both be painful to set up and non-ideal to use. So if you want to surf the web (or use 'Apps'), you basically get to pick between Apple and Android (optionally without the Google stuff).
Regarding VMs/emulators specifically to play ancient video games, one challenge is to run pre-OS X Mac games (which do not run on x86). A decade ago, I found sheepshaver to be a neat way to accomplish that and was able to replay the Spectrum Holobyte (e.g. pre-Nintendo) version of Tetris.
Interesting idea, but I find "adults" usually complain out of habit and their arguments don't have much rhyme or reason. The more motivated ones already seem to have switched to something like xface ubuntu style OSes.
I'd be interest to hear what "features" e.g. windows 3.1 has over something like a minimalist ubuntu.
I'm at a disadvantage of not being familiar with today's minimalist ubuntu; my old ubuntu system is still running an excrescence of a window manager known as "unity", which was the default when I installed it.
General advantages of windows 3.1: Text (rather than icons), menus that don't change depending on context, and familiarity of style as well as of specifics. Controls that stay visible, and similar. Also, state changes only occur when you ask for them; saves are explicit; the whole thing feels like the computer does what it's told, rather than doing things you might or might not want on its own initiative.
Windows 3.1 also had .ini files instead of that awful beast known as the Registry.
Generally, finding a menu item should not be like finding a secret treasure in a computer game.
I especially hate the mobile apps, when you sometimes find a secret menu by holding a finger for several seconds in some place with no visual indicator that "this is where you should hold your finger for a few seconds to get a secret menu". Clickable places should be *obviously* clickable.
This is not a new thing; it was started by Apple back in the early '80s when they went for a one-button mouse.
The PARC Alto mouse had three buttons specifically because it made for three obvious affordances for the three basic actions you could do with it. The original Mac had only two actions (select and activate), but rather than have one button for each they used one button for both actions, hiding the second one under a "double click." (The double click was an unknown interface at the time; through the '80s how many devices with buttons can you think of where clicking twice, with or without specific timing, does something other than do the same action twice?)
Eventually the double click spread widely enough that it became cultural common knowledge, but Apple has continued to hide things under a too-simplistic surface. (Consider their trackpad gestures, if you know them.) It's like an industrial designer removing the handle from a coffee pot because it makes the lines cleaner, without really considering how one might pick up a hot coffee pot that has no handle. One of the early Apple UI designers, Bruce Tognazzini, has had a _lot_ to say about Apple's designs over the past decade or two. Search for "ask Tog."
From your description, the MATE desktop may be a useful starting point https://mate-desktop.org/ Its a bunch of GTK2 desktop programs that are still being maintained. GTK3 is when they went the mobile-looking UI route (because they wanted to make a uniform UI for desktop and mobile; a failure IMO since its not great on either).
It runs on multiple Linux distros so you can take your pick.
Love the idea! Would be doing it myself if I had the resources.
How about an OS which doesn't require a gigabyte of memory to load? While memory has gotten enormously cheaper over the years, bus bandwidth has not kept up. The result is sluggish responses on supposedly fast computers. The fastest GUI I ever experienced was SunOS 4 with the SunView windowing system on a Sparcstation 1. Windows would pop up instantaneously.
Or how about a wide flip phone with a one-handed keyboard? I loathe touchscreens for typing. I'd rather learn Morse Code. And, for the record, far sightedness cuts in LONG before senility. Someone needs to tell the marketers at Jitterbug that little bit of info.
Are you familiar with Serenity OS? (https://serenityos.org)
If not, it's a single-man project that's been going for many years now, that the person started with no commercial intent, originally to give him something to do in order to help recover from alcoholism (where the name comes from), and then he eventually received enough funding to be able to work on it full-time. It's sort of what you're talking about. Not targeting boomers, exactly, but a throwback to 90s UIs.
No I'm not; thank you very much for the pointer.
One thing worth mentioning - if you control the OS, you can to an extent change the look and feel of the apps running on it, without touching their source code. Very few apps write their own code for common functions - they use code from libraries/frameworks.
So when an app on a modern mac wants a scrollbar, it normally gets one that's completely invisible until the user guesses that the window might be scrollable, and moves their mouse to where a scrollbar might be, to find out whether one appears.
Replace the library/framework, and the app can be given an always-visible scroll bar. Or the user can be given a control that allows them to choose traditional (always visible) or small-screen (usually invisible) behaviour.
Ditto for most other standard controls - replace the library, and the user gets text labels, or tool tips, or icons, or some combination.
IMO, modern invisible-till-moused-over controls are a major problem for older users, and totally unnecessary on a decent sized screen. But 95% of them can be fixed without touching the apps that use them.
Are you referring to rebuilding an app using a new set of libraries, or trying to swap out DLLs found by an already built executable? I've done the former a couple of times; I'm rather intimidated by the latter.
One problem I do see with this approach is the fact that many modern apps are written in inefficient languages. You are lucky if the language merely makes all method calls virtual (which is significantly slower than direct calls). Objective C has such an extremely roundabout means of calling methods that I refused to write anything for the Mac.
It might be possible to properly compile C# code into true executables. (Maybe it has already been done; haven't checked.) The difference between managed code and truly compiled code is huge. The first .NET version of Visual Studio was basically unusable -- and that was after Microsoft had turned off a bunch of features by default in order attempt useability.
Definitely the latter. I haven't done this on any Microsoft OS, but it's standard on all Apple OS, Linux, and FreeBSD, etc. Every time there's a new release, or an upgrade, the OS does this; compatibility at the ABI level means that the App neither knows nor cares.
Actually, for this purpose, the virtual methods are a feature rather than a bug - it means it's really easy to hook in whatever code you want. It's not so great for performance, and in my prior role as a performance engineer at Apple I got the "fun" of dealing with such things. And it also has implications for security - sane OS developers don't let random 3rd party developers replace their libraries, except for their own apps. But for UI replacement - and for fixing library or framework bugs without forcing app developers to recompile - it's wonderful.
Hmmm, for top level widgets in X, there is simply the option of changing window managers. I miss good old FVWM...
But X (which means all Linux) was always a horrible system at the developer level. It's a virus which escaped from MIT. Applications need to query what kind of drawable they are working with, and there is no connection between screen API and printer API. (Most applications today hide X behind Gnome or Qt.)
Regarding the linked to DLLs, welcome to hell, DLL hell. The number of combinations of DLLs required to make many applications work is astronomical. Web developers routinely create an environment within an OS using containers like Docker. The Python world is particularly terrible when it comes to requiring the correct DLLs.
The Win32 API is much more stable at the GUI level. But it's a big API. There is a project working on cloning it: ReactOS.
https://reactos.org/
I have not tried it.
Personally, I think starting with the stable UNIX clone core of Linux is the way to go. Just change the graphics and printer API into something sane and coherent. Might look into what they started with Plan 9.
Speaking of Plan 9, this is a delightful set of rants on DLLs.
http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/
It's been perhaps too long since I've used Windows. I've forgotten some of the pain points, which you are now reminding me of. I have very unhappy memories of coping with the multiple versions of Quickdraw which various games required, before MS finally made it part of the OS.
My original thought was to create a linux/android-based system, simply because it's open source, and has far more pre-existing code than other open source OSes.
The UI would be designed according to the principles used back in the day - not exactly mimicking any particular OS, though perhaps having configuration options to make it more like each individual's old favorite. And once implemented, it would never change, except for adding features; no more forcing people to choose between skipping security fixes and being converted from power user to clueless newb.
The downside would be the lack of key apps. E.g. I like being able to run TurboTax, and don't want to use their browser-based version that stores my data on their site. Probably most of my age-mates aren't quite as concerned about privacy, and will be willing to use vendors' web-based offerings. In which case all we need to do is give them a good browser.
The other downside is the number of suppliers who have a good app for phones/tablets, accompanied by a lousy web site that really doesn't do the job very well. If your doctor, or dentist, or library, or grocery store is one of those, but you hate modern cellphones with a burning passion, you are currently pretty much screwed. Ideally, I'd like to be able to run Android apps on both desktop and small form factor versions of this OS, to work around this too common problem. (But what I know about developing for Android is minimal; I use Android, but all my developer knowledge is for iOS. This may or may not even be possible.)
"I miss good old FVWM...."
I don't. I upgraded to fvwm2 about ten years ago and haven't looked back since!
(And BTW, that "less harmful" page is on crack. One of the first things I noticed is that he considers a language regularly written and read by humans that doesn't allow comments to be less harmful than one that does. And saying "Go is better than Python" is like saying "Java is better than Lisp." I think the guy has an extremely limited range of programming language knowledge. It says something that he never mentions Lisp there, and all languages with compile-time type checking he mentions have laughably primitive type systems. I'm not even talking lack of generics, I'm talking lack of ADTs! (And yes, I'm looking at you, Go, in particular.))
To some extend, this is true. OTOH, thunderbird currently insists to reduce the menu bar to a mobilish three-bar button, probably to save screen space (after all, the desktop only has some eight million pixels). It certainly does not do that because the desktop environment suggests it, and changing it would probably require patching the source code.
Hidden stuff annoys me to no end. "Swipe from the left border of the screen to open the menu" was en vogue with Android at some point, but luckily seems mostly to be a thing of the past. UIs should be usable, first and foremost. If someone can also make them look neat without reducing functionality, great. But certainly no neatness at the cost of usability.
"...with user interfaces that feel right to people whose first computer ran windows 3.1, or MsDos, or Version 7 Unix, or one of the older mainframe operating systems."
This seems confused to me. 7th Edition Unix was purely text based, used on CRT-based or printing terminals. (Very little required an addressable cursor; it was perfectly reasonable to use it on a glass TTY or printing terminal.) This is entirely unlike Windows, which is pretty near unusable without a mouse, much less without using GUI programs.
As someone who grew up on 8-bit microcomputers and Unix (and Gen-X, I might note, not a boomer) and whose first serious use of Windows was in the 90s, GUI systems to me are for a completely different generation of users than those comfortable with command-line Unix, CP/M or even MS-DOS.
I can tolerate using a GUI-focused system such as Windows if it's well designed, but that certainly doesn't describe Windows 3.1. In fact it was not until Windows 10 that I felt it had become reasonably usable. But I am still very text-based in my usual day-to-day computer usage, as would probably be obvious if you saw my simple window manager that's used for little more than managing terminal windows.
My experience with younger people whose first system was a GUI system is that they have an irrational fear of the command line; even many programmers I know will spend several extra days working on a web or GUI interface to something to avoid having to use their program at a command line in a terminal window.
I think people are most comfortable with exactly what they started with, and after that with either things based on similar design principles, or whatever they encountered next. The more revisions they've experienced, and the more changes to design principles, the less comfortable they get, until they reach the point where the interface appears to be undiscoverable, behaviour seems random and/or designed for maximum aggravation, and they flatly refuse to use one of those damned new-fangled things.
My mother - born too early to be a baby boomer - hit her limit at about the stage of windows 95 - she made it to windows 3.1, but unhappily, bitching about GUI programs and the impossibility of knowing exactly what one had just done, by looking at the scrollback.
I am personally a "late" baby boomer, and I made it to cell phones and tablets, increasingly unhappy with every new release. I balked at voice control, familiar household appliances with touch screens, and the internet of things.
A friend born a month before me, who didn't spend her life in tech, but was a fairly early adopter, made it to windows XP + flip phones, and now refuses to upgrade.
I think it's slightly more subtle. I started with VAX/VMS on VT100 terminals to write FORTRAN programs. I miss neither. Later it was Berkely flavored UNIX on VT52 screens, followed by Sun workstations.
I prefer GUIs for some applications and command line terminals for others. I write documents and make images in Windows 7. I do recreational programming and web page development in linux.
What I, and most any older person, dislike is throwing away hard won knowledge and having to learn something new which isn't better enough to justify the learning curve. Also, some new things are objectively stupid. For example, Microsoft tried to unify desktop and phone operating systems and produced the abomination known as Windows 8. After years of lusting after ever bigger monitors, you want to get rid of the desktop and go to these tiled apps???
Ditto for text messaging over email. I went through the effort of learning how to touch type and now you want me to single finger type on a touch screen keyboard on keys smaller than my fingertips?? I'd rather learn Morse Code.
I wrote my doctoral dissertation using troff/eqn. For editing a document, a WYSIWYG word processor is greatly superior. But for managing complicated equations, eqn is vastly superior to a point an grunt based equation editor. Order of magnitude superior at least. (Three orders of magnitude better than MathML, BTW)
Fashion happens.
Second response - I didn't want to blur two very different points.
Yes, command line and GUI systems are clearly different tech generations. And yes, many of those who started with GUIs react to command lines with something approaching phobic behaviour. I often want to mock younger programmers who appear to despise me for having trouble with undocumented interfaces designed for cell phones, while recoiling in horror from the very idea of a command line - or, for that matter, from the idea of doing explicit memory management. THAT, they insist, is legitimately far too difficult, whereas the latest fad - controls invisible until you mouse over the spot they will appear - is trivial and obvious.
This is probably one reason why tech company designers refuse to give older people what they want - the youngsters might well recoil in horror at the thought of having text labels on their controls, not to mention at having those controls actually visible. And the idea of having their device request permission for changes, e.g. for creating "memories" out of their photos, for emphasizing "faces" when taking pictures [of waterfalls?!], for shipping files off device into the cloud, etc. etc. probably looks like unpleasant micromanagement to them, rather than like having a device one can actually control.
Of course the other reason appears to be that the designers are all quite young, and farthermore have been trained to emphasize (1) aesthetics and (2) novelty ahead of anything else. And of course it's common knowledge with them that older people don't buy their products very often - as has been explained to me, citing an imaginary lack of disposable income as the reason.
Any rationalists in Norfolk VA, or in the general area that want to meet up? I’d love to make some local connections :)
Check out https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/e2FrJwcsHB4bPz7rJ/i-will-organize-meetups-in-norfolk-virginia-hampton-roads — Willa has been hoping to get something started in Norfolk for a while and would probably love to hear from you!
Do you want to help out with AI alignment, but don't have the time or skills to become a researcher or dedicate a large amount of effort to it? I have just the project for you!
Rob Miles's team is working on an interactive FAQ which explains AI alignment (https://stampy.ai/wiki/Stampy), and we need volunteer writers. Minimal experience required, since even if you don't know the answers you can still write questions.
If you want to help I'll give you an invite to the Patron Discord where we're working, email me at elliotbrown2 <at> gmail.com. We're keen to get feedback on the onboarding process, so please let us know about any UI or other challenges you encounter.
Programmers and designers are also very welcome!
I currently live in Toronto, Canada in a large one bed room apartment located in a central location.
I'm looking to spend 2-4 weeks in either Austin or Denver later this year. If anyone in either of those cities wants to do either a home-exchange, or has an extra room/can rent their apartment, that would be really great :)
I live in a 2/1 in Austin and am looking to be elsewhere for as much of the summer as I can talk my wife into. This is the worst time to be in Austin and maybe the best to be in Toronto, but if you were interested and wanted to cover rent while you were here, I’d be happy to talk some more. There isn’t any DM capability on Substack, is there?
Announcing a workshop on the Moral Foundations of Progress Studies.
The progress studies community has had a lot of discussion about technology, economics, history, and politics. However, there is no consensus on the moral basis for valuing or pursuing “progress,” and there are key open questions about how progress is to be judged and measured, who should benefit from it, and what type of progress we should pursue.
The goal of this workshop is to reach a consensus on what major moral/ethical questions are at the foundations of a study of progress, and what broad answers to these questions have been proposed. A few designated attendees will take notes and draft a short article afterwards summarizing the discussion. (We’re currently looking for the appropriate place to publish this; it may be in a journal or on a blog.)
Get details and apply here: https://rootsofprogress.org/moral-foundations-of-progress-studies-workshop
I'm looking to try out using a collection of tools I've gathered to provide "life coaching". Essentially, it would be CBT and mindfulness inspired nagging aimed at providing external motivation and discipline to people with inattentive-like traits in the form of daily or weekly planning and accountability calls. If you're someone who starts projects but doesn't finish them, puts off tasks for silly amounts of time, feels like you have a lot of mental clutter that a few hours a day of focused work could solve, or generally has big goals that require long term commitment, I'm looking for you!
Is this a service you think you might find valuable? Have you used a service (or had a more informal relationship) like this before? If anyone would be interested in trying this out with me for free for a few weeks in exchange for your feedback, or just has thoughts on what would make this sort of arrangement valuable to you, shoot me an email jcait98 at yahoo.com
**Note: I absolutely don't intend this to be a substitute for mental health counseling
My experience with voluntary nagging systems is that I think they’re good ideas beforehand and then I get annoyed by the nagger in the moment and usually a) arrange to stop being nagged or b) ignore the nagger. I suspect my response isn’t uncommon. Do you have any suggestions to get around this disagreement between present-lazy-me and past-ambitious-me?
I do. I suggest the problem is *past* you, not present you. That is, past you has set up impossible goals for present you, which he (present you) rightly rejects when it comes time to execute. But when that happens too often, present you becomes entirely contemptuous of past you's promises to self, which means even the things you really can and should do get dropped.
That means the solution is *not* allowing past you to exert yet more force on present you, which present you will resent, and twist and turn to avoid, but rather for present you to teach past you a lesson about moderation.
What works for me is therefore to actually keep *each and every* promise past me makes to self, in a certain category, for a time -- no matter how painful or absurd the promises have become. What rapidly happens is that past me starts become much more cautious about making promises, because he remembers the pain of carrying them out when it was unexpectedly difficult or idiotic. That restores balance to the force, so to speak: past me tends to make only such promises as present me is actually realistically willing to carry out. Past me is of course ambitious, so he will tend to ramp up the promises over time anyway, but the requirement that I execute them no matter what tends to make that ambition creep up manageably.
And in the end the metabenefit is that I feel pleased because I execute my promises to self more reliably.
I'm looking for a non-romantic friendship over email. I'm 34 and (as you might guess) male.
I don't consider myself an EA, but I definitely lean EA and think in both short-termist and longtermist ways.
I am religious. I currently "run" Christianity (as though an OS), what I was raised in ("the default that came pre-installed from the vendor"?). I am "bootstrapping" a rationalistic religion, which (maybe or maybe not surprisingly) "boots" Biblical Christianity (of a certain sort), but can "run" independent of the Bible. Currently I find the more Jewish aspects of the Bible more personally engaging than the post-Jewish parts, but I want to support the whole canon. (This is an unresolved issue for me.)
That makes me sound like an engineer, but I also see religion from a personal perspective and consider truth-seeking to be important. (Religion is not just something engineered for human benefit.)
That's "work". If I had to describe myself in more human ways, I would say: thoughtful, dry, musical. I probably could qualify as schizoid, and "undifferentiated" according to the Bem OSRI.
If interested, my email is banks at 10v24 dot net.
Looking for female/enby friends in Israel.
I'm female, 38, live in Ramat Gan. Divorced+2+Remarried. Day job is saving the world from AI apocalypse. Avid reader: mostly scifi and fantasy, a special weakness for romance.
Contact me at rot13 of uvtucevrfgrffbsryhn@tznvy.pbz
Aristillus is a forum for the 'American tech right', mostly peripheral to the twitter ingroup. You might also call it 'frontierist', or 'preactionary'. It leans religious though more as an implicit result of its posters rather than its mission; it leans conservatarian though other less libertarian or less conservative views are present; it is decidedly red/grey tribe.
https://tripetto.app/run/LGGOVPRYN3
Here's the signup link. Applications get reviewed semi-regularly.
My Mastodon feed is sad and lonely since the few people I follow seem to have stopped posting for a bit. Who are some interesting people to follow? I'm particularly interested in people who make physical things and talk about how it's done.
(And sure, Twitter too I suppose, though my Twitter account isn't lacking for traffic.)
You can follow me, but I'm not currently using although I like the concept of decentralized social media (https://mastodon.social/web/@delton)
you should follow this dude, he builds stuff and is active on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/web/@sparr (he's on Twitter too https://twitter.com/sparr0 )
Oh, hey! I'm just now seeing this. I'm at a mastodon low point right now, but hope to rally in my yearly "use alternate social media" January. I'm also resolving the end of literal and metaphorical house fires and will hopefully be building more stuff soon.
Heh. Honestly my Mastodon use has been very low since I posted that over 2 years ago. I'm sorry to hear about the fires! (I did a tour of your mansion like ~2 years ago)
I must say, the blogroll on https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ is a great list of suggestions.
I don't see the "like" heart underneath comments in this substack. I assumed that feature was just turned off for this substack, but I just got an e-mail message saying one of my comments here had been liked. Can someone explain to me what's up? (I've seen plenty of comments on this substack that I'd like to like, if I can.)
The emails sent out to people still have a like button in them and the functionality itself still exists, the button is just hidden on the site itself. The likes you've gotten will almost surely have come from people clicking the heart icon in their email notifications.
meta: unsure to what extent this can be changed by Scott, but getting an email for every response to one of his comments (if you've responded to it first) is definitely excessive. There's a 'mute thread' option but I'm unsure if this also mutes responses to my own comments
+1. with this commenting system, 4 different top level posts would be better than trying to split it up in the comments.
That would be irritating for those not participating, which is surely a greater number than those who are.
is it that irritating? is the current post irritating?
Yes. There's already a sea of open threads to wade through to get to actual content. Adding like five classified posts whenever they come out is just that much more cruft.
+1. At the point Scott has to start with 5 classified posts at a time, it’s time for acx.craigslist.org
I haven't tried it, but replies to your comments say "blah replied to your comment" and replies to other people say "blah replied to blahblah's comment", so I wonder if you could make a gmail filter for "replied to AND 's comment" to only filter for replies not to you?
gmail has filters?!
(after some searching) Looks like they aren't real filters, like procmail - just ways to search one's INBOX, if you use their interface. (No use at all if you use gmail only as a server, and bring your own client, to avoid relearning their user interface periodically.)
To those baffled - go to your account on gmail. The box labelled "search mail" in the center top of the web page has a magnifying glass icon to the left, and a stack of broken lines to the right. (I don't know what to call the icon, or what it represents.) If you click on that meaningless icon, you get a form with two buttons at the bottom - one, bright blue and probably usable, says "search". The other says "Create filter".
So I guess it's some kind of search option. Maybe there's some way to save filters, and invoke them later, like a canned search - presumably by clicking on some other meaning-free hieroglyph. (There's no visible way to say what to do if the filter is satisfied, so either that appears only after filling in some fields - to make the button active - and clicking it - or there's no way to have the filter automatically do something. And a competent UI designer wouldn't have buried the UI in search if it *could* do procmail style filtering, so guess which I expect.)
You have to actually click "Create filter" before it shows you actions you can do to matched emails. Yes this is terrible UI, it took me a while to figure it out also. But at least using their interface (no clue how it works with other clients) you can automatically delete/tag/whatever emails as they come in.
Also, the icon appears to be three stylized sliders, I guess to represent configuration.
I'm not looking to sell anything, but I am looking to start a movement of sorts, and I'd love to get advice and support where interests align.
I'm looking to challenge the status quo and lead a rationalist reboot around how we think about, talk about, and treat the condition we currently refer to as diabetes.
When I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2019, I experienced a remarkably incompetent system of healthcare that initially led me to being depressed.
Thanks in part to an initial misdiagnosis (many adult-onset type 1s are misdiagnosed as type 2), I decided to dig deep into the details of the various physiological conditions, the healthcare dynamics at play, as well as the mental models employed within the diabetes arena, and came away with a completely new outlook.
I've documented my journey, findings, outlook, and suggestions in something I call The Type A Diabetic Manifesto ( http://TypeADiabetic.com ).
In this manifesto, I attempt to use rational thinking as an approach to not just deconstruct existing problems with the current state, but construct new mental models that I hope allow everyone -- ranging from medical practitioners to people with the condition to people who think they don't have the condition but probably do -- to look at insulin disorders and glucose toxicity with a fresh set of eyes.
Unfortunately, some find this way of approaching a sensitive topic quite problematic. For example, the moderators of the diabetes Reddit forums have banned this document, claiming that it peddles in "toxic positivity" and "internalized ableism." The same moderators are on Discord, where they banned me personally from those topics for peddling "dangerous rhetoric." In other forums where it has not been banned, it has been well-received.
Again, any insights, suggestions, or help in getting the word out would be greatly appreciated.
I think removing some of the coachy self-help fluff would help a lot in not coming across as toxically positive. On the other hand, "internalized ableism" is the kind of phrase that tells me the writer/speaker's opinion should be discarded immediately.
I agree with your point in general - lumping T1 and T2 diabetes is an unfortunate historical accident, and changing the nomenclature is probably a good idea.
I appreciate the feedback. This is tricky because while I agree with you notionally, the personal feedback I've received as a result of the self-help fluff has been so great to see that it's hard to pull that out. Perhaps I can re-style it to be less self-help-y. Very open to suggestions.
This is my first manifesto. I am definitely learning here.
I apologize. My crank alarm bells are going crazy but I don’t have the energy to respond point by point. I’d recommend reading a standard review article like this one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4478580/
Then figure out specifically what you disagree with.
Would you mind being a bit more specific about what sets off your "crank alarm bells"?
To answer your question, this snippet in the link you included is simply incorrect: "Diabetes mellitus is a group of metabolic diseases..."
Type 2 is a metabolic disease, Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease. Both lead to challenges in regulating blood glucose, but from completely different vectors.
This is at the core of the problem in diabetes. The labeling is misleading, inaccurate, and unhelpful... even as experts try to define it.
Yeah, I looked at this and it didn't look "rationalist" to me at all, at least not in the "LessWrong" sense.
Let's take as an example the page "Should We Call the Condition Diabetes? 👊 No." linked to from the title "It's Time to Stop Calling it Diabetes".
It complains that the etymology of "diabetes" comes from peeing - a fact which I did not know and do not need to know. For example it says:
> People who are currently managing their diabetes are called diabetics (i.e., “those who pee a lot”). Yet, if they are effective in treating and managing their condition, they no longer pee a lot. Houston, we have a problem."
> isn’t it a bit ridiculous that people willingly label themselves diabetics, which is to say that they are the “people who pee far too much sweet urine”? Yes, of course it’s ridiculous.
A LW rationalist would point straight to the lessons of A Human's Guide to Words, e.g. some of the "37 Ways that Words can be Wrong":
16. You think a word has a meaning, as a property of the word itself; rather than there being a label that your brain associates to a particular concept. When someone shouts, "Yikes! A tiger!", evolution would not favor an organism that thinks, "Hm... I have just heard the syllables 'Tie' and 'Grr' which my fellow tribemembers associate with their internal analogues of my own tiger concept and which aiiieeee CRUNCH CRUNCH GULP." So the brain takes a shortcut, and it seems that the meaning of tigerness is a property of the label itself. People argue about the correct meaning of a label like "sound". (Feel the Meaning.)
17. You argue over the meanings of a word, even after all sides understand perfectly well what the other sides are trying to say. The human ability to associate labels to concepts is a tool for communication. When people want to communicate, we're hard to stop; if we have no common language, we'll draw pictures in sand. When you each understand what is in the other's mind, you are done. (The Argument From Common Usage.)
Most relevant here, I would argue that it is a mistake to argue that a word is "bad" because of how you personally think about it, when most other people don't think of it that way. Since the rest of us don't think of diabetes as "peeing too much sweet urine", the argument that diabetes is a wrong-word because it means "peeing too much sweet urine" just falls flat.
To me, and to most other people, I think, diabetes doesn't mean "peeing a lot of sweet urine" nor does it mean "experiencing glucose toxicity". It means "having to waste time on annoying shit every day, like pricking body parts with needles". The annoying shit keeps happening regardless of whether or not the glucose/insulin is under control; thus diabetes is a chronic condition even when there are no active symptoms.
The article correctly points out that English is inconsistent. For example, I personally keep doing a certain time-consuming daily treatment on myself to prevent recurrence of a painful chronic condition that may or may not be genetic in nature (I don't happen to know to what extent it's genetic and to what extent it is environmental) ... but there is no special word for this, it's just "preventative treatment", and I am "a person with an obscure medical issue (that I don't care to explain here)" rather than "a person with ___________".
But oh well, human language is often like that. For example, we have an adverb "probably" for "having a high chance" but no corresponding word for "having a low chance" or "having a medium chance", so we need clumsier phrases like "is unlikely to be" and "is as likely as not to be". Rationalists are not prone to treat gaps and inconsistencies in our language as a moral crusade; we mostly just use the longer phrases as necessary, and suggest shorter phrases if we think it might aid discourse.
I'm concerned that if someone reading your manifesto actually *changes their own thinking* to resemble your article, it will probably cause them anxiety to think about how millions of people keep carelessly talking about "peeing too much sweet urine". But this is simply an error, because people talking about diabetes are, in fact, NOT talking about peeing too much sweet urine. So this change in thought pattern seems not to be beneficial, and perhaps harmful, to the person doing it. And if a lot of people change their thought pattern in this way, I think it would probably lead to a lot of annoying word policing.
You say it should be called "insulin disorder". I say that's all well and good, but (1) it's weird how this isn't even mentioned in the article because the entire article is just a polemic and one must visit a separate article to learn about your proposed replacement term; (2) the word "diabetes" is shorter so it communicates more quickly, and if most people are okay with the status quo, then so am I.
The article does raise some good points that any fan of A Human's Guide to Words could agree with. But that article, and the site as a whole, often breaks the written and unwritten rules of rationalist discussion and analysis.
Thanks for the thorough critique. It's true; I didn't write the manifesto from a rationalist perspective, as I wasn't even aware of this movement when I wrote. It's a pure retcon.
In terms of my definition of diabetes being "people who pee a lot" - that's just the etymology. It's not how people define it today. But as you might have read in the first chapter, nobody defines it the same way, nor well. Incredibly, not even the expert class. So I'd argue that there is no common meaning or definition, which makes it a fail from an effective communication perspective.
Diabetes may mean "sticking oneself with lots of needles" but in fact, the vast majority of people, diabetes means "I got too fat and now I will hurt myself by continuing to eating the way that got me fat." This is so bad and wrong and unhelpful that it creates what we have: an epidemic that is needlessly costing the healthcare hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
Rationally, we'd call the condition what it is (an insulin disorder), treat the root cause (looking at it as a functional carbohydrate allergy that at times requires hormone therapy), and reduce the personal and societal impacts of the condition (by aiming for gluco-normal status for all diabetics).
Currently, we are doing none of the above.
I've successfully hacked "diabetes" by following my own manifesto's credo, my glucose is as normal as anyone else without the condition, and I don't need shots. But what I do need is data, a sustainable mental model, and self-control.
I want others to see what I see, so that they, too, have the opportunity to avoid being in a diabetic state, so that this condition doesn't have any negative impact on their long-term health and life longevity.
Again, thanks for taking the time to provide your insights.
That sounds admirable. I'm curious how detailed your knowledge is of the science around diabetes and to what extent it is universal ... (a general pattern I've noticed about humans is that they are highly variable, so treatments that work for one person often don't work for another ... and I prefer to listen to people who can show their understanding of this.)
> This is so bad and wrong and unhelpful that it creates what we have: an epidemic that is needlessly costing the healthcare hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
I don't understand how the thought "I got too fat" translates into needless health-care costs. Dieting is like, hard, though, so I for one have been letting the pot belly grow (good thing I don't have <s>diabetes</s>an insulin disorder!)
I am a computer scientist by training, not a medical scientist. So I do come at the physiological dynamics from a programmatic lens.
My knowledge of the dynamics at play is fairly strong, but I do not have molecular-level knowledge. I know enough to understand what's broken and how to analyze and mitigate, but I do not know enough to develop a potential cure.
re: "I got too fat" vis-a-vis healthcare costs --
The vast majority of so-called diabetics are what we currently label "type 2 diabetics" -- those who have insulin resistance disorders. These folks have a metabolic disorder that is generally painless yet puts its victims into a state of glucose toxicity. Glucose toxicity leads to what the experts call "diabetic complications" (a more accurate term would be glucose toxicity complications). And it's these complications that lead to hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare expenditures that could be avoided if the nearly 1/2 billion diabetics better understood their condition and had better training so that they could halt the destructive process that glucose toxicity enables.
The current mental model for many (most? I haven't done surveys myself) type 2 diabetics is: "I am fat so I became diabetic as a punishment for being fat." These people are in no condition to transform their eating and drinking habits as required because any change will be associated with a punishment. Punishing regimens aren't sustainable.
New mental models are required so that these people don't feel victimized, and so that the mitigation strategies don't feel like punishments.
Have you actually read the post you're responding to?
Any "standard review article" agrees with most points raised by Jon. What doesn't is public perception, and lazy doctors who aren't up to date on their literature.
Thank you. Good dog. :)
My child has T1 - and I wrote this: https://zby.medium.com/rational-patient-community-6d3617dffcfe It is also a musing on a 'movement of sorts' for people with medical conditions, based on the rationalists credo. But actually don't agree with most of your points :(
Thanks for sharing. Care to further share what you don't agree with, and why?
I don't agree that terminology is the number one problem here.
If I gave the impression that it's the number one problem, then I didn't do my job. What I do think is that the terminology represents -- and enables -- a mental model problem.
And I think how we think about the condition(s) informs how we talk about it, and, ultimately, how we treat it.
That said, I do not think the terminology impacts research into cures and prescription therapies all that much. I think those tracks are in fine shape finally, all things being equal.
I'm late to the party here but I am also a T1D, diagnosed as an adult. Despite the numerous people here who seem upset with your thoughts, I find a number of the main points in your manifesto to resonate. Particularly the feeling that diabetic disease management by the medical industry seems to generalize too much.
One piece of feedback I have (especially after years of exploring alternative treatments and thoughts on diabetes) is to avoid confronting the medical industry as wrong. As an example, statements that read like "this is ACTUALLY an allergy" will get rejected and probably undermine your real message. I recognize that you're simply suggesting to THINK of it as an allergy, but I think finding a way to frame this more as a state of mind versus a diagnosis may help you. In my experience, these kind of things piss off doctors and researchers because it implies that for decades the medical industry has missed something obvious that you have uncovered.
I know you know this but ultimately diabetes (especially Type 1) iss 100% patient managed and understood. A doctor that sees you less than 60 minutes / year and collects mostly point-in-time data cannot possibly know your experience. This is especially true given the minute-to-minute management that T1D requires. So I think materials like this have to be framed as a means of supporting struggling diabetics in managing their disease. Framing that suggests the medical industry is wrong is likely to be rejected by many.
Just my initial reaction to the manifesto but I'd like to review these materials in more detail soon.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
It's so interesting that you bring up the allergy example. I've had several people accuse me of "ignoring science" by trying to introduce the allergy mental model. I struggle here because in no place to I ever suggest it's "actually an allergy" yet to your point, it's perceived that way nonetheless.
It's apparently hard at least for me to try to introduce a new thinking paradigm without being misconstrued.
I also try really hard not to frame the medical industry as wrong, per se, but not designed to effectively treat and support people with insulin disorders (or perhaps conditions that require continual management beyond taking a pill) in general.
Yet, this still seems to be the perception! This is why I wanted to reach out to the rationalist community to get some pointers on how to convey these *assessments* while not being construed as *judgements*.
Thanks again.
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If you will like to support her cochlear implant, you can use the Gofundme me link or email me for more details.
The proposed removal of Human Rights in the UK for the Greater Good
And how it could apply to unvaccinated citizens
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/the-proposed-removal-of-human-rights
Maybe this isn’t true of everyone, but I read your post as “I want to get rid of human rights so that I can force people to get vaccinated” when the your blogpost seems to be saying the opposite
The government is proposing to remove human rights and I disagree with it
Why is the narrative changing? And in lockstep
Whilst case numbers are rising
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/why-is-the-narrative-changing-and
Reading the comments over the last first months, I see that lots of people working in software read this substack.
This year I am taking a proactive approach to finding software engineering data, which is very hard to find. Previously, I mostly emailed researchers after reading their data oriented paper
https://shape-of-code.com/2017/02/02/i-have-been-reading-your-interesting-paper/
Now I'm promoting the crowdsourcing the search for people who look as if they might have interesting data, e.g., company CTOs, and Agile coaches
https://shape-of-code.com/2022/01/09/join-a-crowdsourced-search-for-software-engineering-data/
The data is out there, we need to find the (few) people who have it, and ask them (my experience is that people don't realise what a gold mine they are sitting on).
When you are talking to those actively involved in software development, don't forget to ask if they have any data that they would be willing to publicly share (I offer a free analysis of software data that can be made public in anonymized form, but am not interested in paid work).
An example of detailed analysis of Agile estimation data
https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01621
My book Evidence-based Software Engineering discusses what is currently known about software engineering, based on an analysis of all the publicly available data; pdf+code+all data freely available here:
http://knosof.co.uk/ESEUR/
Looking for a co-founder. Don't have an idea, just want to work with someone who is curious and wants to solve a hard problem. I've built 2 unicorns, working with a friend on a third. I'll probably be here for another year or so but for the right idea and person I'd be open to doubling down on something sooner.
Me: Op, strategy and people savvy. Can do Sales too.
You: ideally technical/analytical, product-oriented.
The important thing is our personalities complement one another so I expect a few zoom calls getting to know one another before delving into the other pieces.
My curiosity is piqued by this, but I would like to see some validation of your credentials. What's a good way to contact you directly?
If you've built two/three unicorns, even as one of the first ten employees, you should have tens of millions of dollars. If you were a founder you should be worth hundreds of millions. So I'm seconding Timothy that my interest is piqued but I'm somewhat skeptical. Most people I know with three successful exits are semi-retired/board members or working on their own projects for the challenge.
Also skeptical but interested.
Glad the terminally online have found a place to date/eventually murder each other
Lorentz Bio is an early-stage, well-funded cryopreservation company. We're hiring a biologist to help develop and evaluate cryopreservation protocols. This role will start in Boston and may relocate to SF in the next year. We are also hiring for several other positions! https://jobs.lever.co/lorentz.bio/df59acae-afe1-44a5-92e3-a0e9d27495e9
If you are interested in a project that can advance the fight against drug resistance in Africa, using phages please contact me via eennadi@gmail.com
Background
Antimicrobial resistance(AMR) is one of the greatest threats we face as a global community. An essential global public health objective is lowering the burden of infection-related mortality. Previous research has calculated the number of fatalities brought on by drug-resistant infections and sepsis and discovered that infections continue to be the world's leading cause of mortality. The WHO has predicted that by 2030 (https://www.who.int/news/item/29-04-2019-new-report-calls-for-urgent-action-to-avert-antimicrobial-resistance-crisis), antimicrobial resistance could force up to 24 million people into extreme poverty. According to the UK Government-commissioned Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, AMR might result in the yearly death of 10 million people by 2050. It is predicted that 90% of these deaths will occur in Africa and Asia.
According to a recent report published in the Lancet, which estimated deaths and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) attributable to and associated with bacterial AMR for 23 pathogens and 88 pathogen–drug combinations in 204 countries and territories in 2019. The study predicted that in 2019, there were an estimated 4·95 million (3·62–6·57) deaths associated with bacterial AMR including 1·27 million (95% UI 0·911–1·71) deaths attributable to bacterial AMR. Six leading pathogens for deaths associated with resistance (Escherichia coli, followed by Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa) were responsible for 929 000 (660 000–1 270 000) deaths attributable to AMR and 3·57 million (2·62–4·78) deaths associated with AMR in 2019. The full report can be found here.
A case for sub-Saharan Africa
Based on the report, analysis based on regions of the world, Western sub-Saharan Africa had the highest burden, with 27·3 deaths per 100 000 (20·9–35·3) attributable to AMR and 114·8 deaths per 100 000 (90·4–145·3) associated with AMR, while Australasia had the lowest AMR burden in 2019, with 6·5 deaths per 100 000 (95% UI 4·3–9·4) attributable to AMR and 28·0 deaths per 100 000 (18·8–39·9) associated with AMR in 2019. In Nigeria, communicable diseases accounted for 66% of morbidity in 2015 There is an urgent need to address this problem in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Phages as an alternative to antibiotics
Phages have been proposed as an alternative to drug resistance. While phages have been used successfully in Europe, Australia and the USA. No report on phage therapy use in Africa. Phage research is neglected in Africa. A recent survey of phage scientists under the Africa phage forum showed that funding, lack of skill sets and infrastructure are the major setbacks preventing success in phage research in Africa.
To stimulate phage research as an alternative to antibiotics in Africa, I propose coordinated and strategic support. This support should focus on:
1 Influencing policy that will allow for the adoption and use of phage therapy in Africa. No country within Africa has a framework for the adoption of phage therapy
2 Address the infrastructure problem. This can be done by setting up phage banks in regions of Africa. In Nigeria, I am currently building a phage bank that can isolate, characterize and purify phages for use as phage therapy against the WHO priority pathogens. We can encourage this kind of phage banks across Africa. Funding has been a major challenge even for the phage bank in Nigeria.
3 Training, Phages for global health have supported the training of phage researchers in Africa. They can be encouraged to do more