I have been doing a lot of reading about trying to create an AI that has the somatic responses of human beings which I guess is the issue I’m hung up on. So I’ve been trying to educate myself to the state of the art. In light of this. I realize some of my comments are a little like a middle schooler sitting in on a PhD class and asking rather dopey questions. I’m a little embarrassed.
However I am struck by two threads in these comments; discussion of AGI And the questions about parenting and what might be the most effective way to raise one’s child.
That’s kind of fascinating in itself to me.
I have raised a couple of kids and some of the issues seem to really crossover
I'm frustrated and sad that good things I liked might end or might at least be different because people I liked did dumb shit.
Current Affairs was my favourite magazine, but then NJR handled the recent staff thing really badly (he flip flopped on how much authority he wanted, it blew up during a hiring decision between two great candidates—the biggest waste is that the candidate he liked would have been the staff's fave too he just didn't want the decision to be democratic anymore!). Now Lyta, Nate, and Adrian have all written open letters about it and the mainstream and conservative media are talking about it and not all publicity is good publicity, and who knows if the magazine'll even last.
Aubrey de Grey's the bearded longevity-research guy who founded the SENS foundation. Now there are sexual harassment allegations against him; who knows how it'll turn out, but also he idiotically interfered with the investigation (emailing a mutual of one of the allegers to persuade her to implicate someone else, instead of just talking to the investigator), so SENS obviously had to let him go. His idiotic decision is bad for himself of course but also bad for longevity research, which really needs to behave professionally to get respect and shake its image as just, idk, Peter Thiel's rich-people-out-of-touch-with-normal-people's-struggles-pipe-dream, and show that it's a safe and thriving place for young scientists including women to work.
David Sabatini, another big name longevity-research guy (an expert on rapamycin and mTOR) also just got let go from the Whitehead Institute for sexual harassment allegations, and in this case the reaction on twitter makes it sound like it was a really open secret so I'm guessing that they're true whatever they are (no details are public).
The pandemic has done disproportionate damage to worse-off people. What would pandemic response look like in a more egalitarian society? How would risky in-person work be handled?
> Oh come on. Where's the National Socialist German Worker's Party these days? What happened to Tojo? The Brits certainly fixed the Boer's wagon, home guerilla advantage notwithstanding. There are no Nationalists left in mainland China, and no followers of the late President Thieu bombing the occasional railroad bridge in Vietnam. It is certainly possible to win against a weaker opponent even if he's got the home-ground advantage, can melt into the countryside, is willing to live in caves and eat rats and don suicide bomb vests. It's entirely possible to wipe those people out, root and branch. But it requires focus and commitment, and quite often some pretty ugly decisions. You have to be damn sure that's what you want to do. Being half-assed about it, and not entirely certain what you're trying to achieve definitely doesn't work, and never has.
I don’t think that all of your cited examples are at all applicable.
Nazi Germany certainly not, China, certainly not.
The one exception is Vietnam, and we all know how that turned out.
Am I the only one that gets this issue, where I get an email that someone has replied to me and I hit reply and for a brief moment my comment is highlighted on my screen and then it defaults to some random place in the order of comments?
Sometimes people's blood pressure drops after eating. For some of those people, it drops into dangerous territory, but I wonder whether eating frequently would help some people lower high blood pressure.
I work as a contractor for the US Federal Government, and their rollout of the vaccine mandate has been troubled to say the least. A brief timeline:
2 weeks ago: They are developing a plan to implement Biden's executive order requiring vaccines or recent COVID testing to enter Federal facilities. More information will be released soon.
Yesterday: Starting two days from now, everyone must either sign a sworn affidavit saying they are fully vaccinated or provide a negative COVID test taken within the last 3 days. They aren't sharing vital details like who will pay for the tests, how security officers will evaluate COVID testing results, how they will verify who has signed the affidavit, and how this won't cause massive delays as hundreds of employees enter the building at the start of the shift. You still need a test even if you have received a vaccine if it has been less than two weeks since your last dose, providing an incentive to get J&J rather than Pfizer/Moderna. Most of this doesn't matter though, as most of the unvaccinated will just lie on the form knowing there probably won't be any negative consequences for doing so.
Today: Implementation of the mandate has been delayed. More information will be released soon.
Conclusion: Parachuting for charity costs more money than it raises, carries a high risk of serious personal injury and places a significant burden on health resources.
"The Deeper Crisis Behind the Afghan Rout: Observers abroad see the culmination of decades of American incompetence." By Walter Russel Mead | August 23, 2021
This isn’t a conventional credibility crisis of the kind President Obama faced when he backed down from his Syrian red line. America has demonstrated its commitment to Afghanistan for 20 years and had no treaty obligation to defend the former Afghan government. A competently executed withdrawal could have enhanced American credibility among some Pacific allies, especially if it was accompanied by clear steps to build up U.S. forces in East Asia.
The Afghan debacle doesn’t create a crisis of belief in American military credibility. Informed global observers don’t doubt our willingness to strike back if attacked. The debacle feeds something much more serious and harder to fix: the belief that the U.S. cannot develop—and stick to—policies that work.
Neither allies nor adversaries expected perfection in Afghanistan. Mr. Biden was right to say that the end of a war is inevitably going to involve a certain amount of chaos, and world leaders likely didn’t anticipate a seamless transition. They did, however, expect that after two decades of intimate cooperation with Afghan political and military forces, the U.S. wouldn’t be blindsided by a national collapse. They didn’t think Washington would stumble into a massive and messy evacuation crisis without a shadow of a plan. They didn’t expect the Biden team to have to beg the Taliban to help get Americans out.
It all fuels fears that the U.S. is incapable of persistent, competent policy making in ways that will be hard to reverse. It seems increasingly evident that despite, or perhaps because of, all the credentialed bureaucrats and elaborate planning processes in the Washington policy machine, the U.S. government isn’t good at producing foreign policy. “Dumkirk,” as the New York Post called the withdrawal, follows 20 years of incoherent Afghanistan policy making. Neither the past two decades nor the past two weeks demonstrate American wisdom or the efficacy of the byzantine bureaucratic ballet out of which U.S. policy emerges.
What cities in the US would approximately meet these criteria?
Deal makers/breaks:
- Must have good weather (= sunshine) almost round the year (e.g., Miami).
- No snow.
- Must not be in H(awaii)ST (Also, e.g., Miami)
- Must be located in an urban or urban-adjacent location (e.g., San Antonio, TX)
- Must not be poised to get a lot worse climate-wise over the next 10-20 years (excessive heat, more storms, more rains, or floods).
- Must not sit on a geographical fault-line that could going to go boom someday "soon" ;-) (e.g., SFO)
- The local politics must not be the "bubble" kind. That is, it can be right-leaning or left-leaning - but (a) it should not be extreme in either direction and (b) it shouldn't be filled with insular people who have no idea how to get along with 'the others'.
- Must have fiber optic internet generally and easily available.
Strong preferences:
- Should not be in EST (e.g., Miami, NYC are all too far away from the tech-coast, time-zone wise. Might work though).
- Should be near a major or a minor tech center (there used to be only 2.5 tech-centers in the US namely SFO, SEA, NYC, but there are more now). If any of FAANG has a local development office, that's a very good sign.
- Should be cheaper than SFO, SEA, NYC :-)
- Should have direct flights to SFO and SEA (this is just a corollary to 'should be near a minor tech center')
- Should have highbrow culture (theatre, music etc.).
- Should have Amazon Prime easily available in most places ;-)
- Should be low crime, culturally diverse, and expected to sustain these characteristics over the long term (20 year outlook).
ACX has covered progeria and aging before, so perhaps some will be interested in a new paper that helped co-author that investigated the underlying cause of disease. Hope you enjoy!
I'm in the UK and, like most, received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. It seems pretty clear that the UK government has given up any pretense of trying to control the disease, despite the country being solidly in the middle of a third wave of infections. I'm fortunate to have a job that can be done from home, and to have had family and friends to live with (so I've not died of loneliness), but until the pandemic my life completely revolved around the swing dance scene: I danced and taught classes several nights a week, and spent most of my annual leave travelling to dance events around the world.
Obviously everything was cancelled, and for a long time, but now dance events are beginning to appear in my calendar again and I'm trying to do the risk/benefit analysis of doing what I love vs. staying safe.
On the one hand, when I put some (pretty conservative) numbers into microcovid.org, it's clear that partner dancing—even on an outdoor, fairly sparsely-populated dance floor—is a REALLY bad idea right now, even at a 10%-per-year "risk mitigation" budget. On top of this, I know quite a number of friends (including one of my teaching partners) who were unlucky enough to catch COVID back in ~March 2020 (despite precautions) and have still not fully recovered from it.
On the other hand, catching colds is an occupational hazard for partner dancers and a risk I have alway been happy to accept—and so far everyone I know who's caught COVID post-vaccination has been either symptomless or has had a minor illness for a few days and then been fine.
It seems plausible that if a vaccine provides a good level of protection against serious illness then it might also greatly reduce the chance of suffering long-term effects. What does the science say?
What mechanism exists within the medical billing establishment to prevent hospitals, providers, or drug/device companies from generating arbitrary billing? E.g. anesthesiologists seem to always be sending us bills long after the fact, either from our children's c-sections or my umbilical hernia surgery, demanding payment. In the case of the c-sections I am certain the one claiming payment wasn't there. Likewise Apria just seems to periodically sprout new bills for a cpap machine long paid off every time I change insurance companies.
About as often as not we argue with the billing entity and they say "Whoops, I guess we screwed up", but the other times they threaten to send the bill to corrections. That of course has rather negative consequences down the road, even if you win in a small claims case. Anyway, getting off track, sorry.
So it seems that there is very little stopping a medical provider from just making up bills to send to people, either by mistake or malice, and very little one can do to fight those bills, despite there being no evidence that the bills are justified. Am I missing something here?
I've downloaded the entire Covid dataset from [ourworldindata](https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/tree/master/public/data), cut out all countries with <10000 overall cases, bucketed the remaining ones into three groups based on median age, and then made XY scatterplots, one data point per country, with X-value = total % fully vaccinated and Y-value = [avg new cases in the surrounding 5 day area]. (Both at a specific date only; I've tried 2021/06/01 and 2021/07/01.) The correlation is positive in all cases, i.e., countries with a higher % of people fully vaccinated have more cases. It remains positive if you add a 3 week delay to cases.
What's going on here? Anyone got a simple explanation? (Also, would you have expected this outcome?)
I've heard a lot of stories (including a recently popular twitter thread) about children claiming to remember past lives, down to factories they worked at, the names of their parents, or details about the past (a certain building that used to be a different building).
In Tibetan tradition, the Dalai Lama is chosen in part by having the candidate choose their toys from a previous incarnation. Of course, it's entirely possible that this process be manipulated. The number of adults who claim to remember anything about their previous lives is very small. A credulous defender may argue that society conditions people not to make claims like that.
My priors tell me that this should not be believed, but I'm curious: what's your take, not necessarily on reincarnation, but on memories from prior lives? What proof would convince you?
I’ve been trying to frame Afghanistan in terms of the trolley problem. Here is my result, and I’d like to hear comments/feedback. Obviously, it has two semi-intentional features-not-bugs, namely (a) it only captures a subset of the scenario and (b) it’s a bit reductive.
The Afghani Time Travel Trolley Problem
=====
There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks.
Ahead, on the tracks, there are a few thousand civilians tied to the tracks, as well as a couple of hundred soldiers, and 45 bn US dollars worth of arms + supplies. When the train reaches them, most of the civilians will die, the goods will perish, the arms will be stolen by enemies, but the vast majority of the soldiers will probably escape only with injuries.
You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks.
However, you notice that there are 20 million women tied to the other set of the tracks and unable to move. If you pull the lever, the trolley will switch to those other tracks and will head straight for them.
Instead of killing them, it will transport the women to 9th century. In the 9th century, these women will have to wear burqas, give up most of the common freedoms women have had in the 21st century, and become chattel slaves to the men in society. Many of them will die due to maladaptation and shock. But overall, most of them will live.
You have two options:
1. Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill a few thousand civilians, destroy 45 bn dollars of stuff and injure (or let die) many soldiers.
2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will make near-slaves out of 20 million women and their female progeny.
Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?
Who all remembers the SSC posts, "Legal systems different from ours, because I just made them up" and "Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism"? Inspired by those, and by the various ACX posts on ZEDEs, I set up a subreddit (r/archipelago)! Right now it only has a handful of seed posts by me intended to give a sense of the purpose of the subreddit, but I hope others contribute and it becomes a repository of many such ideas, ranging from the practical like ZEDEs to mere fictional amusements like the legal systems post.
Why? Some of us write such things for fun. Some of us write such things to explore the range of the politically possible, in hopes of developing ideas that will influence the future. I think it's potentially valuable for both purposes to have a publicly accessible collection of designs for alternative political systems. So if you agree, come on by https://www.reddit.com/r/archipelago/ and share your ideas!
New Parents / Expecting Parents discussion anyone? It seems like we've had a few in this group based on some past points.
Do you guys think there are certain innate differences in how babies respond to fathers vs. mothers? We have a 3 month old, and often she gets so tired that she starts getting more agitated and wound up, and as much as I try troubleshooting (diaper, food, burp, these are easy), I can't calm her down and get her past that high agitation state when she needs to sleep. My wife is very successful at it, even if it takes a while. She's had a lot more practice though, since she was off 12 weeks, and now she's left work.
Also daycare is such an incredible challenge, frustration and expense that we are now a one income household. With our baby struggling to gain weight and around the 6th percentile in weight at 3 months old, we couldn't stick it out with our daycare. They would barely try to feed her or deal with her little mannerisms that seem like she doesn't want to eat.
We live in a small city, but the wait time to sign up and expense of daycare is still quite bad, I can't imagine how it would be in a big city.
Does anyone know from where the (Christian) position that after death you will get to know everything (from the meaning of life to who ate your sandwich one day) comes from, or starts at? Is it there in the Old Testament or is it some human universal or what? Sorry, I know nothing about religions, I grew up in a mainly atheist society built on a previously Christian one, but all through my life I've vaguely noticed claims that if you reach Paradise you'll Know It All.
I have some doubts about the plan to throw so much money at the "global climate problem". Please explain to me where I go wrong or with which points you disagree the most:
1. So far, the world is ca 1 degree C warmer compared to the preindustrial era (leaving aside doubts about the precision of estimating preindustrial era temperatures). So far, nothing terrible is happening, extreme weather events are not more devastating. The damages as portion of GDP have plummeted and the number of "extreme weather deaths" too, despite the much bigger world population. I sort of don't expect following strong non-linearity to be true: compared to the preindustrial past, one degree up, nothing happens (or things even improve), another 1 or 2 degrees up, all hell breaks loose. Is there some magic number saying "this is the exactly correct global temperature"?
2. Some countries seem to actually benefit from modest, say 2 C, temperature increase. Canada, Sweden, Russia etc. There are surely some losers, but the net balance may even still be positive.
3. Even the IPCC, which overall sounds quite alarmist to me, estimates the GDP global loss from "untackled" global warming only at couple percentage points by 2100 (when the global GDP is expected to be 4 or many more times higher than today).
4. CO2 seems to be fairly beneficial in some ways: agricultural yields are estimated to be 15 percent higher compared to a situation with pre-industrial concentrations. It is the main plant food: some deserts are already shrinking, the planet is greening. Surely it is a good thing?
5. Global warming seems to be saving lives even now: the drop in deaths from cold is several times higher than the increase in deaths from heat. No one seems to care for this, though.
6. The green deals seem to be extremely expensive, with lot of the funds going as subsidies to inefficient technologies (solar, wind). If you argue that these technologies are already efficient, please explain why they need subsidies. This and new taxes have the potential to choke economic growth. I believe that my grandchildren would be better off in a world that is 4 times richer and 2 - 3 C warmer than in a world that is only 1 C warmer but economically stagnating. After all, rich Gulf countries have no problem operating in 50 C outside temperatures. And we are still talking about a difference of only 2 C, not going from 20 to 50 C. The necessary adjustment seems very minor to me, with plenty of time to adjust.
7. If things really seem to go bad, there are several geoengineering projects that might work. And these would be still two or more orders of magnitude cheaper than those green deals.
8. Many alarmist messages go hand in hand with subliminal or open "we have to end capitalism" or "our only chance is degrowth". Somehow I fear that for many people this might be the real agenda.
9. China, India etc still keep building coal power plants at a fast rate. What if they (as I expect) will not play along? Should the West economically suffer and let them outgrow us (when they emit the CO2 we save, undermining all the green deals of the world)? Will a much stronger China be kind to us?
I hear some people saying the US "should have waited longer" to leave Afghanistan, and other people saying "they waited 20 years, what good would another few months have done"?
Is there some reason the US didn't spend the past year or so evacuating all civilians who they wanted out of Afghanistan? Right now it seems like it would be nice to have another year to evacuate people, but what have we learned that we didn't know a year ago?
Also, are people who aren't evacuated quickly enough really in danger from the Taliban? Why would the Taliban want to kill Westerners and anger Western powers? Isn't it in their best interest to let all the Westerners leave in an orderly fashion?
I used a program where you type in something and an artificial Intelligence makes art based on what you typed. I typed in a bunch of movie titles and made a quiz. Can you guess the movie titles based on the art? This will test how well you understand how an AI thinks. Or how many movies you watch. There are no sequels or prequels.
In general I'm very sympathetic to Scott's views on education. I don't believe we've got any system that teaches kids more than basic numeracy and literacy. But I'm curious which of the following people think more plausible
1. People are plastic and develop intellectually in any stimulating environment. If they focus their attention on one area they'll develop pretty much to their potential in a few years.
2. We're just awful at teaching anything and getting people anywhere near their potential.
With than in mind, what level would Magnus Carlsen reach if he picked up chess at 15? Johnny von Neumann math at the same age? Simone Biles gymnastics at a decrepit 10?
Have any non-Europeans had experience traveling to the EU during COVID?
I know you can get into your first European country by showing proof of vaccination and a negative test at the airport, but what happens if you want to go to another country (eg from Portugal to Spain, or Spain to France)? Do you have to get another test? Or do they assume anyone coming in from friendly European countries is okay?
For +-30 year-olds, what is the better choice for Covid vaccines (we have J&J and Pfiser available to us)?
The primary consideration would be protection against possible long Covid, but other considerations (including potential side effects, infecting older, vaccinated, family members, etc.) are also factors.
I know nothing about the research an AI technically. I have no training in computer programming or mathematics so I will admit my ignorance. But I have a question. Is there an algorithm for what I will term
the will to live??
Bear with me.
Imagine your life under the most intolerable circumstances. You are in a concentration camp, you are in solitary confinement and subject to random torture and other abuse. The rational conclusion seems to me that you should just get out of it anyway you can. But human beings don’t seem to behave that way.
I started taking 400mg of SAM-e, based on the discussion in the depression post. I am seeing pretty dramatic results-- depression gone; much less anxiety; much less rigidity, ie more flexibility, more 'openness to trying new things'; also greater motivation, or, perhaps, less of a hump to get over to get myself to go do something; and, last but not least, greater happiness, and more enjoyment in life. A real life changer. Thank you.
I'm curious whether anyone caught Tesla's "AI Day". I did. They showed off their neural network, explain how they convert 8 camera video feeds into a 4D vector space, then have a planning engine on top of that they decides what to do. They also showed off their new from-Silicon up "Dojo" Neural Network training computer that is optimized for the task.
They also showed a new Tesla humanoid robot, and said they plan to build a prototype next year. The idea is that it can do basic and boring human tasks. Elon casually mentioned that long term, he supports UBI.
I'm curious if this causes any updates in people's thinking about AI risk timelines, and also people's thinking about UBI in general.
I have been looking into grad school for mathematics, in particular with the goal of eventually doing research. It looks like the job market for research positions is incredibly tight right now, but a large part of me wants to just study mathematics anyways. There are countless articles talking about how job prospects for pure math PhDs are actually okay, but most of the time they bring up examples of big data and marketing analytics, which I have something of an ethical opposition to. So I figured I would ask: What sorts of jobs can you get with pure math, other than data analytics?
Maybe it's naive, but I've been pretty surprised by how openly pro-war and pro-occupation much of the American elite class has revealed itself to be in the last week- especially our media elites. While I am normally not particularly enthused about the Greenwald/Taibbi left, I have to say that they do have some excellent points regarding how pro-national security state institutions like the NYT, WaPo, CNN etc. are. They are just openly clamoring for us to stay in Afghanistan, and against withdrawal. I guess I kinda vaguely knew this to be true, but their open pro-war cheerleading in the last week has been a bit astonishing. Makes me wonder how the inevitable war with China over Taiwan will go.
I would like to gently poke at people on the right who are convinced that the media establishment is uniformly leftist. When I was growing up, in a Nation-reading highly left-wing household, a huge part of the Left for us was being anti-war, any war, all wars. (I'm not saying that those are my views now- for example I was taught that the original Gulf War was Bad, whereas I now think it was justified- but I think being anti-war is like a core leftist value). The more complex/nuanced view is that the media is a series of elite institutions with its own worldview, which is mostly quite socially liberal, but not uniformly. I mean, they were in a constant state of hysteria about Trump for 5 years because it was great for ratings, which I know a lot of the Right confused with actually being anti-Trump. They loved the guy! You see all these stats about how much cable news viewership has declined in his absence, etc.
I see this almost uniform media elite consensus that leaving Afghanistan is Bad to be a pretty bad thing for Biden's approval rating/the midterms
To me the bones (not the proposed culprits) seem obviously right - it's got that nice feature of correct theories that it explains a whole bunch of niggling weirdnesses in a satisfying way. That said, I've been burned in this idea-space before, so if there's good pushback somewhere I'd like to read it.
I'm looking for recommendations of little-known but truly excellent songs from the classic rock era. These would be songs that – in some alternative universe – would have been smash hits, but for the flapping of a random butterfly's wings in some remote corner of the world. Thanks!
Re. the recent announcement that NYC will provide free education for 3-year-olds in 2023, and the $3.5 "stimulus" bill that passed in the US Senate on Aug. 12, including some large amount for free preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds in America. (I can't seem to find out how much, other than that it's part of a $726 billion allocation, and that an "expert" predicted preschool for 3+4 year olds would cost $60 billion (yearly?)).
Scott, or maybe someone else, has written posts showing that the consensus now is that pre-school for 3-year-olds has no lasting educational benefits.
Now Vox has an article (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/16/17928164/early-childhood-education-doesnt-teach-kids-fund-it) saying that it has no lasting educational benefits, but has lasting health benefits. It says that the studies showing no lasting educational benefits used control groups, while the studies showing lasting health benefits were longitudinal studies mostly without control groups. It suggests that the health benefits were due to the actual health-benefit portion the pre-K education, and maybe the educational part, which is much more expensive, isn't useful.
So it sounds to me like scientific consensus at the moment would say that Congress is throwing a lot of money away on preschool for 3 and 4 year-olds, or at best betting a lot of money on a hypothesis, blowing right past the US budget cap before we've even started on the $10-to-$100 trillion New Green Deal.
Smart Codex Readers: Convince me that COVID Vaccine Passports are a good Idea.
Currently against them as I find them
1) counterproductive and dissuade trust,
2) discriminatory and segregationist
3)Onerous for implementation
4) Seem to discount natural immunity
5) Inevitable Privacy Concerns
6) No Methodological Target for Removal . Fear that passport requirement will shift from unvax to 'undervaxed"
7) Herding Effect where unvax further congregate among themselves
8) Divisive and leads to distrust of public health institutions.
9) Seem to ignore majority of exposure occurs inter familiar and scape goats public spaces
10) COVID vaccines are not sterilizing making vaccine passports essentially worthless.
11) my libertarian bias where this feels wrong.
Looking for arguments in favor:
Should Hawaii where I live implement this policy?
Does a temporary health vaccine passport potentially raise vaccine rates, improve "public perception of safety" , lower hospitalizations/deaths divisive policies that could be ineffective, counterproductive and possibly lead to worse health outcomes and trust.
In the U.K. we recently had one of our first Incel terror attacks (if that’s how you want to call them), the killer was 22.
A few months ago (Feb) we also had a high profile case of a police officer kidnapping, raping and murdering a young woman that sparked a heated discussions about violence against women. The killer was 48.
What I find so interesting is that these two cases fit almost perfectly as examples of the bimodal distribution of mass killers, where younger mass killers have average age of 23 and older killers have average age of 41, but there aren’t that many 33 year old killers.
This is probably very much a solved/simple question, but for prediction markets, how should it be determined when a given prediction should be declared, if there is no simple algorithmic way to determine what happened without human testimony? (Think pretty much all political events outside of crypto and stock movements) Right now that sort of thing (like when it’s decided who won an election) seems to be decided by site admins, who are both dalliance and potentially quite corruptible by a determined billionare.
Can someone recommend a good active "analyzing fiction books I'm reading" blog / newsletter / substack / whatever? I run one at http://dreicafe.com but I've been skewing towards satire more than literary analysis, and I'd like to siphon the energies from someone good at the latter because I love such stuff. When I studied creative writing in ages past, they made us keep a 'reading journal' which is a phenom way to process books; reading other people's was super valuable. A lot to be said for seriously mulling on a novel after consuming it. There must be a few blogs like this around?
Does anyone here happen to be in PR, journalism, or anything relating to media relations? I would like to become more effective at reaching out to media/pitching stories more effectively, for both EA and personal reasons. If anyone prefers to talk privately about this rather than in the thread, I can be reached at yitzilitt (at) gmail (dot) com.
Just out of curiosity how many people on ACT think with words? I only think with words when I have to write something, or when I rehearse a speech, or when I replay a conversation in my head. Otherwise, I seem to making decisions and figuring things out without words. In fact when I speak to people, unless I'm carefully rehearsing what I'm going to say, I don't think the words before I vocalize them.
Bonus question. Subjectively, do you ever try to pin down where in your brain your internal speech is coming from? For me when I silently talk to myself, the talking seems to happening about where my premotor cortex is located — above and behind Broca's Area, which is the part of the brain associated with language. However when I vocalize words, they subjectively seem to be coming out of Wernicke's Area midpoint between my ears (which happens to the area associated with speech processing).
NB: After about ten years of doing Mahayana-style mindfulness meditation (including he basics of Dzogchen Rigpa meditation, which I never really mastered), I not only got used to observing my thoughts and feelings as they arose and passed away, but I became of aware of where in my head they subjectively arising from.
There will surely be an Afghanistan thread on this politics-allowed open thread, so I'll start one.
My only-slightly-controversial view: we should try to work with the Taliban. If they view themselves as good men and followers of Allah, presumably they won't engage in Khmer Rouge-style atrocities. If they don't do that, Iran and Pakistan will start fueling a resistance that isn't tainted with American imperialism.
What are some good examples of organizations learning from failure, and doing things better the next time around?
Two examples:
- I've recently been playing Skyward Sword. It's, well, disappointing, but I'm impressed by the degree to which Nintendo managed to notice the frustrating things about it (e.g. the lack of open-world feeling) and successfully turn them around by Breath of the Wild (while also successfully keeping/improving a lot of the things that did work in skyward sword).
- the US navy in WW2 seems to have consistently done this pretty well - e.g. they introduced damage control measures in their carriers after the battle of the Coral Sea that may have helped them in Midway (only one month later!)
If you live in a city where hospital beds and ICUs are full, what exactly happens to you if you need hospital care? Covid or non-covid, both scenarios. I'm trying to understand this for Austin, Texas. Quite scary to think about.
There's an article in the Aug. 23 New Yorker by Joshua Rothman about rationality. Though the article didn't mean to make this point, I thought it demonstrated the limits of a supposedly objective rationality in a lack of consideration of the difference between people's individual goals and personalities. Fuller discussion at http://kalimac.blogspot.com/2021/08/rationality.html
It showcases how getting numbers that tell us actual facts about the universe is much harder than is commonly imagined, and how our Big Data methods are deluding us. Gives some hope regarding AI, as it suggests we're nowhere near as close to superintelligence as some fear.
Also gets extra kudos for getting me to engage with David Chapman's work (Meaningness, In the Cells of the Eggplant, Vividness), whom I was aware of, but was sleeping on. Pretty interesting that Chapman practices Vajrayana Buddhism. His vision of the world as both charnel ground and pure land is quite haunting (https://vividness.live/charnel-ground and https://vividness.live/pure-land).
I've finally been able to put my fuzzy and vague skepticism about blockchain and NFT's into coherent words, and I call it the "Degraded Blockchain Problem"
Curious what others think. Are there any blockchain based apps that actually get around this issue?
There was a piece in The New Yorker this week about methane capture from the atmosphere (specifics weren't that interesting or important).
But, METHANE SHOULD BE TALKED ABOUT MORE!! Reducing methane emissions is the BEST lever we can pull to buy ourselves more time in the fight against climate change.
Methane's big unique ability, is that, unlike CO2, we can remove it from the atmosphere just by stopping new emissions! This means we don't have to develop methane capture technology!
What are the chances that, if God exists, he practices Bayesian reasoning? Does a perfect God update God’s priors? Or does a perfect God have perfect priors to begin with?
This week there was a cool new gene therapy paper that used human proteins (instead of viruses) to package mRNA. So far it's only been tested in cell culture but in my opinion it's very promising. I wrote about it here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/mrna-delivery-gone-non-viral
I've also continued my human herpesvirus series; this week's post is about varicella-zoster virus (which causes chickenpox and shingles). It's the only human herpesvirus for which effective vaccines exist. https://denovo.substack.com/p/varicella-zoster-virus-a-rare-success
Do we have any of Neumann's remains left for a sequencing? (I imagine the Manhattan Project members had regular blood work done, maybe some got stored?)
Any guesses of what would happen if an egg and a sperm both got rewritten with the relevant SNPs and other interesting alleles?
I have recently concluded, on the basis of a bunch of reading, that animal foods are basically bad for us. Or at least bad for people like me who are at high risk of a lot chronic diseases. I'm sort of confused by how I could have followed nutritional news pretty closely for years and years without having found this out before. Or maybe I'm confused now. Anyway, that's what's on my mind this week.
I have been doing a lot of reading about trying to create an AI that has the somatic responses of human beings which I guess is the issue I’m hung up on. So I’ve been trying to educate myself to the state of the art. In light of this. I realize some of my comments are a little like a middle schooler sitting in on a PhD class and asking rather dopey questions. I’m a little embarrassed.
However I am struck by two threads in these comments; discussion of AGI And the questions about parenting and what might be the most effective way to raise one’s child.
That’s kind of fascinating in itself to me.
I have raised a couple of kids and some of the issues seem to really crossover
THE WILL TO LIVE is a subject that I raised earlier in this thread, in the context of AGI.
I received some very instructive replies which I appreciated. As I mentioned in that post, I have no scientific or mathematical training.
Certain people were kind enough to indulge me and explain things to me.
The best lesson was someone pointing out to me that a self driving car behaved very much like something that had a will to live. That was very sharp.
So I’ve been pondering.
I would like to amend my inquiry:
The Will to Power.
How does that unfold in the pursuit of general artificial intelligence?
What if there is a trait such that
(1) net worth and STEM citations are strongly correlated with the trait
(2) the trait is strongly inheritable
(3) there are visible external characteristics correlated with the trait?
I suspect this might be true for IQ and to a lesser degree height. What should a moral society do at that point?
https://scitechdaily.com/inescapable-covid-19-antibody-discovery-neutralizes-all-known-sars-cov-2-strains/amp/
Is this nonsense or worth pating attention to?
I wonder if anyone's done further research into nBack intelligence.
When do you think people will develop the ability to artificially create zygotes with given nDNA and mtDNA?
So for example babies with Yoruba skin, Dutch height, Ashkenazi intelligence and Japanese eyes?
Also when do you think artificial wombs will be available?
has anyone else stopped getting emails of new posts?
I'm frustrated and sad that good things I liked might end or might at least be different because people I liked did dumb shit.
Current Affairs was my favourite magazine, but then NJR handled the recent staff thing really badly (he flip flopped on how much authority he wanted, it blew up during a hiring decision between two great candidates—the biggest waste is that the candidate he liked would have been the staff's fave too he just didn't want the decision to be democratic anymore!). Now Lyta, Nate, and Adrian have all written open letters about it and the mainstream and conservative media are talking about it and not all publicity is good publicity, and who knows if the magazine'll even last.
Aubrey de Grey's the bearded longevity-research guy who founded the SENS foundation. Now there are sexual harassment allegations against him; who knows how it'll turn out, but also he idiotically interfered with the investigation (emailing a mutual of one of the allegers to persuade her to implicate someone else, instead of just talking to the investigator), so SENS obviously had to let him go. His idiotic decision is bad for himself of course but also bad for longevity research, which really needs to behave professionally to get respect and shake its image as just, idk, Peter Thiel's rich-people-out-of-touch-with-normal-people's-struggles-pipe-dream, and show that it's a safe and thriving place for young scientists including women to work.
David Sabatini, another big name longevity-research guy (an expert on rapamycin and mTOR) also just got let go from the Whitehead Institute for sexual harassment allegations, and in this case the reaction on twitter makes it sound like it was a really open secret so I'm guessing that they're true whatever they are (no details are public).
The pandemic has done disproportionate damage to worse-off people. What would pandemic response look like in a more egalitarian society? How would risky in-person work be handled?
Responding to Carl Pham:
How long was it that the English tried to ride Herd on the Irish?
It’s not over yet but, let’s face it, you can’t say the BRITs walked away winning.
At the very least the Irish stole the English language and transcended it.
Totally tribal moment…
😆
> The Brits certainly fixed the Boer's wagon.
I don’t think that’s how it worked out in the end
> Oh come on. Where's the National Socialist German Worker's Party these days? What happened to Tojo? The Brits certainly fixed the Boer's wagon, home guerilla advantage notwithstanding. There are no Nationalists left in mainland China, and no followers of the late President Thieu bombing the occasional railroad bridge in Vietnam. It is certainly possible to win against a weaker opponent even if he's got the home-ground advantage, can melt into the countryside, is willing to live in caves and eat rats and don suicide bomb vests. It's entirely possible to wipe those people out, root and branch. But it requires focus and commitment, and quite often some pretty ugly decisions. You have to be damn sure that's what you want to do. Being half-assed about it, and not entirely certain what you're trying to achieve definitely doesn't work, and never has.
I don’t think that all of your cited examples are at all applicable.
Nazi Germany certainly not, China, certainly not.
The one exception is Vietnam, and we all know how that turned out.
That kind of war is a waiting game.
And a test of commitment.
Am I the only one that gets this issue, where I get an email that someone has replied to me and I hit reply and for a brief moment my comment is highlighted on my screen and then it defaults to some random place in the order of comments?
Sometimes people's blood pressure drops after eating. For some of those people, it drops into dangerous territory, but I wonder whether eating frequently would help some people lower high blood pressure.
I work as a contractor for the US Federal Government, and their rollout of the vaccine mandate has been troubled to say the least. A brief timeline:
2 weeks ago: They are developing a plan to implement Biden's executive order requiring vaccines or recent COVID testing to enter Federal facilities. More information will be released soon.
Yesterday: Starting two days from now, everyone must either sign a sworn affidavit saying they are fully vaccinated or provide a negative COVID test taken within the last 3 days. They aren't sharing vital details like who will pay for the tests, how security officers will evaluate COVID testing results, how they will verify who has signed the affidavit, and how this won't cause massive delays as hundreds of employees enter the building at the start of the shift. You still need a test even if you have received a vaccine if it has been less than two weeks since your last dose, providing an incentive to get J&J rather than Pfizer/Moderna. Most of this doesn't matter though, as most of the unvaccinated will just lie on the form knowing there probably won't be any negative consequences for doing so.
Today: Implementation of the mandate has been delayed. More information will be released soon.
Scott's recent "cost-benefit analysis are not done often enough" (paraphrased) made me think of this 1999 paper.
Parachuting for charity: is it worth the money? A 5-year audit of parachute injuries in Tayside and the cost to the NHS https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10476298/
Conclusion: Parachuting for charity costs more money than it raises, carries a high risk of serious personal injury and places a significant burden on health resources.
"The Deeper Crisis Behind the Afghan Rout: Observers abroad see the culmination of decades of American incompetence." By Walter Russel Mead | August 23, 2021
https://www.wsj.com/articles/afghan-rout-crisis-foreign-policy-forever-war-jihadist-taliban-biden-allies-moscow-beijing-11629750508
* * *
This isn’t a conventional credibility crisis of the kind President Obama faced when he backed down from his Syrian red line. America has demonstrated its commitment to Afghanistan for 20 years and had no treaty obligation to defend the former Afghan government. A competently executed withdrawal could have enhanced American credibility among some Pacific allies, especially if it was accompanied by clear steps to build up U.S. forces in East Asia.
The Afghan debacle doesn’t create a crisis of belief in American military credibility. Informed global observers don’t doubt our willingness to strike back if attacked. The debacle feeds something much more serious and harder to fix: the belief that the U.S. cannot develop—and stick to—policies that work.
Neither allies nor adversaries expected perfection in Afghanistan. Mr. Biden was right to say that the end of a war is inevitably going to involve a certain amount of chaos, and world leaders likely didn’t anticipate a seamless transition. They did, however, expect that after two decades of intimate cooperation with Afghan political and military forces, the U.S. wouldn’t be blindsided by a national collapse. They didn’t think Washington would stumble into a massive and messy evacuation crisis without a shadow of a plan. They didn’t expect the Biden team to have to beg the Taliban to help get Americans out.
It all fuels fears that the U.S. is incapable of persistent, competent policy making in ways that will be hard to reverse. It seems increasingly evident that despite, or perhaps because of, all the credentialed bureaucrats and elaborate planning processes in the Washington policy machine, the U.S. government isn’t good at producing foreign policy. “Dumkirk,” as the New York Post called the withdrawal, follows 20 years of incoherent Afghanistan policy making. Neither the past two decades nor the past two weeks demonstrate American wisdom or the efficacy of the byzantine bureaucratic ballet out of which U.S. policy emerges.
* * *
What cities in the US would approximately meet these criteria?
Deal makers/breaks:
- Must have good weather (= sunshine) almost round the year (e.g., Miami).
- No snow.
- Must not be in H(awaii)ST (Also, e.g., Miami)
- Must be located in an urban or urban-adjacent location (e.g., San Antonio, TX)
- Must not be poised to get a lot worse climate-wise over the next 10-20 years (excessive heat, more storms, more rains, or floods).
- Must not sit on a geographical fault-line that could going to go boom someday "soon" ;-) (e.g., SFO)
- The local politics must not be the "bubble" kind. That is, it can be right-leaning or left-leaning - but (a) it should not be extreme in either direction and (b) it shouldn't be filled with insular people who have no idea how to get along with 'the others'.
- Must have fiber optic internet generally and easily available.
Strong preferences:
- Should not be in EST (e.g., Miami, NYC are all too far away from the tech-coast, time-zone wise. Might work though).
- Should be near a major or a minor tech center (there used to be only 2.5 tech-centers in the US namely SFO, SEA, NYC, but there are more now). If any of FAANG has a local development office, that's a very good sign.
- Should be cheaper than SFO, SEA, NYC :-)
- Should have direct flights to SFO and SEA (this is just a corollary to 'should be near a minor tech center')
- Should have highbrow culture (theatre, music etc.).
- Should have Amazon Prime easily available in most places ;-)
- Should be low crime, culturally diverse, and expected to sustain these characteristics over the long term (20 year outlook).
ACX has covered progeria and aging before, so perhaps some will be interested in a new paper that helped co-author that investigated the underlying cause of disease. Hope you enjoy!
"Nuclear membrane ruptures underlie the vascular pathology in a mouse model of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome" Link: https://insight.jci.org/articles/view/151515
How effective are vaccines against long COIVD?
I'm in the UK and, like most, received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. It seems pretty clear that the UK government has given up any pretense of trying to control the disease, despite the country being solidly in the middle of a third wave of infections. I'm fortunate to have a job that can be done from home, and to have had family and friends to live with (so I've not died of loneliness), but until the pandemic my life completely revolved around the swing dance scene: I danced and taught classes several nights a week, and spent most of my annual leave travelling to dance events around the world.
Obviously everything was cancelled, and for a long time, but now dance events are beginning to appear in my calendar again and I'm trying to do the risk/benefit analysis of doing what I love vs. staying safe.
On the one hand, when I put some (pretty conservative) numbers into microcovid.org, it's clear that partner dancing—even on an outdoor, fairly sparsely-populated dance floor—is a REALLY bad idea right now, even at a 10%-per-year "risk mitigation" budget. On top of this, I know quite a number of friends (including one of my teaching partners) who were unlucky enough to catch COVID back in ~March 2020 (despite precautions) and have still not fully recovered from it.
On the other hand, catching colds is an occupational hazard for partner dancers and a risk I have alway been happy to accept—and so far everyone I know who's caught COVID post-vaccination has been either symptomless or has had a minor illness for a few days and then been fine.
It seems plausible that if a vaccine provides a good level of protection against serious illness then it might also greatly reduce the chance of suffering long-term effects. What does the science say?
What mechanism exists within the medical billing establishment to prevent hospitals, providers, or drug/device companies from generating arbitrary billing? E.g. anesthesiologists seem to always be sending us bills long after the fact, either from our children's c-sections or my umbilical hernia surgery, demanding payment. In the case of the c-sections I am certain the one claiming payment wasn't there. Likewise Apria just seems to periodically sprout new bills for a cpap machine long paid off every time I change insurance companies.
About as often as not we argue with the billing entity and they say "Whoops, I guess we screwed up", but the other times they threaten to send the bill to corrections. That of course has rather negative consequences down the road, even if you win in a small claims case. Anyway, getting off track, sorry.
So it seems that there is very little stopping a medical provider from just making up bills to send to people, either by mistake or malice, and very little one can do to fight those bills, despite there being no evidence that the bills are justified. Am I missing something here?
I've downloaded the entire Covid dataset from [ourworldindata](https://github.com/owid/covid-19-data/tree/master/public/data), cut out all countries with <10000 overall cases, bucketed the remaining ones into three groups based on median age, and then made XY scatterplots, one data point per country, with X-value = total % fully vaccinated and Y-value = [avg new cases in the surrounding 5 day area]. (Both at a specific date only; I've tried 2021/06/01 and 2021/07/01.) The correlation is positive in all cases, i.e., countries with a higher % of people fully vaccinated have more cases. It remains positive if you add a 3 week delay to cases.
What's going on here? Anyone got a simple explanation? (Also, would you have expected this outcome?)
I've heard a lot of stories (including a recently popular twitter thread) about children claiming to remember past lives, down to factories they worked at, the names of their parents, or details about the past (a certain building that used to be a different building).
In Tibetan tradition, the Dalai Lama is chosen in part by having the candidate choose their toys from a previous incarnation. Of course, it's entirely possible that this process be manipulated. The number of adults who claim to remember anything about their previous lives is very small. A credulous defender may argue that society conditions people not to make claims like that.
My priors tell me that this should not be believed, but I'm curious: what's your take, not necessarily on reincarnation, but on memories from prior lives? What proof would convince you?
I’ve been trying to frame Afghanistan in terms of the trolley problem. Here is my result, and I’d like to hear comments/feedback. Obviously, it has two semi-intentional features-not-bugs, namely (a) it only captures a subset of the scenario and (b) it’s a bit reductive.
The Afghani Time Travel Trolley Problem
=====
There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks.
Ahead, on the tracks, there are a few thousand civilians tied to the tracks, as well as a couple of hundred soldiers, and 45 bn US dollars worth of arms + supplies. When the train reaches them, most of the civilians will die, the goods will perish, the arms will be stolen by enemies, but the vast majority of the soldiers will probably escape only with injuries.
You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks.
However, you notice that there are 20 million women tied to the other set of the tracks and unable to move. If you pull the lever, the trolley will switch to those other tracks and will head straight for them.
Instead of killing them, it will transport the women to 9th century. In the 9th century, these women will have to wear burqas, give up most of the common freedoms women have had in the 21st century, and become chattel slaves to the men in society. Many of them will die due to maladaptation and shock. But overall, most of them will live.
You have two options:
1. Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill a few thousand civilians, destroy 45 bn dollars of stuff and injure (or let die) many soldiers.
2. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will make near-slaves out of 20 million women and their female progeny.
Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?
Is it a bad idea to get J&J after getting BioNTech?
Who all remembers the SSC posts, "Legal systems different from ours, because I just made them up" and "Archipelago and Atomic Communitarianism"? Inspired by those, and by the various ACX posts on ZEDEs, I set up a subreddit (r/archipelago)! Right now it only has a handful of seed posts by me intended to give a sense of the purpose of the subreddit, but I hope others contribute and it becomes a repository of many such ideas, ranging from the practical like ZEDEs to mere fictional amusements like the legal systems post.
Why? Some of us write such things for fun. Some of us write such things to explore the range of the politically possible, in hopes of developing ideas that will influence the future. I think it's potentially valuable for both purposes to have a publicly accessible collection of designs for alternative political systems. So if you agree, come on by https://www.reddit.com/r/archipelago/ and share your ideas!
OpenAI Codex live demo. GPT-3 writes code!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcjHTmGY&t=683s
Can't wait to see the post about the new health care transparency law and the wild data it's revealing about prices.
New Parents / Expecting Parents discussion anyone? It seems like we've had a few in this group based on some past points.
Do you guys think there are certain innate differences in how babies respond to fathers vs. mothers? We have a 3 month old, and often she gets so tired that she starts getting more agitated and wound up, and as much as I try troubleshooting (diaper, food, burp, these are easy), I can't calm her down and get her past that high agitation state when she needs to sleep. My wife is very successful at it, even if it takes a while. She's had a lot more practice though, since she was off 12 weeks, and now she's left work.
Also daycare is such an incredible challenge, frustration and expense that we are now a one income household. With our baby struggling to gain weight and around the 6th percentile in weight at 3 months old, we couldn't stick it out with our daycare. They would barely try to feed her or deal with her little mannerisms that seem like she doesn't want to eat.
We live in a small city, but the wait time to sign up and expense of daycare is still quite bad, I can't imagine how it would be in a big city.
Does anyone know from where the (Christian) position that after death you will get to know everything (from the meaning of life to who ate your sandwich one day) comes from, or starts at? Is it there in the Old Testament or is it some human universal or what? Sorry, I know nothing about religions, I grew up in a mainly atheist society built on a previously Christian one, but all through my life I've vaguely noticed claims that if you reach Paradise you'll Know It All.
I have some doubts about the plan to throw so much money at the "global climate problem". Please explain to me where I go wrong or with which points you disagree the most:
1. So far, the world is ca 1 degree C warmer compared to the preindustrial era (leaving aside doubts about the precision of estimating preindustrial era temperatures). So far, nothing terrible is happening, extreme weather events are not more devastating. The damages as portion of GDP have plummeted and the number of "extreme weather deaths" too, despite the much bigger world population. I sort of don't expect following strong non-linearity to be true: compared to the preindustrial past, one degree up, nothing happens (or things even improve), another 1 or 2 degrees up, all hell breaks loose. Is there some magic number saying "this is the exactly correct global temperature"?
2. Some countries seem to actually benefit from modest, say 2 C, temperature increase. Canada, Sweden, Russia etc. There are surely some losers, but the net balance may even still be positive.
3. Even the IPCC, which overall sounds quite alarmist to me, estimates the GDP global loss from "untackled" global warming only at couple percentage points by 2100 (when the global GDP is expected to be 4 or many more times higher than today).
4. CO2 seems to be fairly beneficial in some ways: agricultural yields are estimated to be 15 percent higher compared to a situation with pre-industrial concentrations. It is the main plant food: some deserts are already shrinking, the planet is greening. Surely it is a good thing?
5. Global warming seems to be saving lives even now: the drop in deaths from cold is several times higher than the increase in deaths from heat. No one seems to care for this, though.
6. The green deals seem to be extremely expensive, with lot of the funds going as subsidies to inefficient technologies (solar, wind). If you argue that these technologies are already efficient, please explain why they need subsidies. This and new taxes have the potential to choke economic growth. I believe that my grandchildren would be better off in a world that is 4 times richer and 2 - 3 C warmer than in a world that is only 1 C warmer but economically stagnating. After all, rich Gulf countries have no problem operating in 50 C outside temperatures. And we are still talking about a difference of only 2 C, not going from 20 to 50 C. The necessary adjustment seems very minor to me, with plenty of time to adjust.
7. If things really seem to go bad, there are several geoengineering projects that might work. And these would be still two or more orders of magnitude cheaper than those green deals.
8. Many alarmist messages go hand in hand with subliminal or open "we have to end capitalism" or "our only chance is degrowth". Somehow I fear that for many people this might be the real agenda.
9. China, India etc still keep building coal power plants at a fast rate. What if they (as I expect) will not play along? Should the West economically suffer and let them outgrow us (when they emit the CO2 we save, undermining all the green deals of the world)? Will a much stronger China be kind to us?
Any thoughts?
Dumb Afghanistan question:
I hear some people saying the US "should have waited longer" to leave Afghanistan, and other people saying "they waited 20 years, what good would another few months have done"?
Is there some reason the US didn't spend the past year or so evacuating all civilians who they wanted out of Afghanistan? Right now it seems like it would be nice to have another year to evacuate people, but what have we learned that we didn't know a year ago?
Also, are people who aren't evacuated quickly enough really in danger from the Taliban? Why would the Taliban want to kill Westerners and anger Western powers? Isn't it in their best interest to let all the Westerners leave in an orderly fashion?
I used a program where you type in something and an artificial Intelligence makes art based on what you typed. I typed in a bunch of movie titles and made a quiz. Can you guess the movie titles based on the art? This will test how well you understand how an AI thinks. Or how many movies you watch. There are no sequels or prequels.
https://thorsbyprojects.tumblr.com/post/660029925870518272/ai-generated-art-movie-quiz
Also here is the same thing for tv series: https://thorsbyprojects.tumblr.com/post/660032539928510464/ai-generated-art-tv-quiz
In general I'm very sympathetic to Scott's views on education. I don't believe we've got any system that teaches kids more than basic numeracy and literacy. But I'm curious which of the following people think more plausible
1. People are plastic and develop intellectually in any stimulating environment. If they focus their attention on one area they'll develop pretty much to their potential in a few years.
2. We're just awful at teaching anything and getting people anywhere near their potential.
With than in mind, what level would Magnus Carlsen reach if he picked up chess at 15? Johnny von Neumann math at the same age? Simone Biles gymnastics at a decrepit 10?
Have any non-Europeans had experience traveling to the EU during COVID?
I know you can get into your first European country by showing proof of vaccination and a negative test at the airport, but what happens if you want to go to another country (eg from Portugal to Spain, or Spain to France)? Do you have to get another test? Or do they assume anyone coming in from friendly European countries is okay?
For +-30 year-olds, what is the better choice for Covid vaccines (we have J&J and Pfiser available to us)?
The primary consideration would be protection against possible long Covid, but other considerations (including potential side effects, infecting older, vaccinated, family members, etc.) are also factors.
Are there any good resources on the prospect of genetically engineering higher IQs?
If anyone is looking for interesting content across tech, finance, art, media feel free to check this out: https://gokhansahin.substack.com/p/curated-content-for-busy-folk-45
I know nothing about the research an AI technically. I have no training in computer programming or mathematics so I will admit my ignorance. But I have a question. Is there an algorithm for what I will term
the will to live??
Bear with me.
Imagine your life under the most intolerable circumstances. You are in a concentration camp, you are in solitary confinement and subject to random torture and other abuse. The rational conclusion seems to me that you should just get out of it anyway you can. But human beings don’t seem to behave that way.
Would you call that they will have live?
I started taking 400mg of SAM-e, based on the discussion in the depression post. I am seeing pretty dramatic results-- depression gone; much less anxiety; much less rigidity, ie more flexibility, more 'openness to trying new things'; also greater motivation, or, perhaps, less of a hump to get over to get myself to go do something; and, last but not least, greater happiness, and more enjoyment in life. A real life changer. Thank you.
I'm curious whether anyone caught Tesla's "AI Day". I did. They showed off their neural network, explain how they convert 8 camera video feeds into a 4D vector space, then have a planning engine on top of that they decides what to do. They also showed off their new from-Silicon up "Dojo" Neural Network training computer that is optimized for the task.
They also showed a new Tesla humanoid robot, and said they plan to build a prototype next year. The idea is that it can do basic and boring human tasks. Elon casually mentioned that long term, he supports UBI.
I'm curious if this causes any updates in people's thinking about AI risk timelines, and also people's thinking about UBI in general.
I have been looking into grad school for mathematics, in particular with the goal of eventually doing research. It looks like the job market for research positions is incredibly tight right now, but a large part of me wants to just study mathematics anyways. There are countless articles talking about how job prospects for pure math PhDs are actually okay, but most of the time they bring up examples of big data and marketing analytics, which I have something of an ethical opposition to. So I figured I would ask: What sorts of jobs can you get with pure math, other than data analytics?
Maybe it's naive, but I've been pretty surprised by how openly pro-war and pro-occupation much of the American elite class has revealed itself to be in the last week- especially our media elites. While I am normally not particularly enthused about the Greenwald/Taibbi left, I have to say that they do have some excellent points regarding how pro-national security state institutions like the NYT, WaPo, CNN etc. are. They are just openly clamoring for us to stay in Afghanistan, and against withdrawal. I guess I kinda vaguely knew this to be true, but their open pro-war cheerleading in the last week has been a bit astonishing. Makes me wonder how the inevitable war with China over Taiwan will go.
I would like to gently poke at people on the right who are convinced that the media establishment is uniformly leftist. When I was growing up, in a Nation-reading highly left-wing household, a huge part of the Left for us was being anti-war, any war, all wars. (I'm not saying that those are my views now- for example I was taught that the original Gulf War was Bad, whereas I now think it was justified- but I think being anti-war is like a core leftist value). The more complex/nuanced view is that the media is a series of elite institutions with its own worldview, which is mostly quite socially liberal, but not uniformly. I mean, they were in a constant state of hysteria about Trump for 5 years because it was great for ratings, which I know a lot of the Right confused with actually being anti-Trump. They loved the guy! You see all these stats about how much cable news viewership has declined in his absence, etc.
I see this almost uniform media elite consensus that leaving Afghanistan is Bad to be a pretty bad thing for Biden's approval rating/the midterms
Has the been any serious pushback on SlimeMoldTimeMold's _A Chemical Hunger_ series? https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/
To me the bones (not the proposed culprits) seem obviously right - it's got that nice feature of correct theories that it explains a whole bunch of niggling weirdnesses in a satisfying way. That said, I've been burned in this idea-space before, so if there's good pushback somewhere I'd like to read it.
human are omnivores, that is partly why we occupy so many ecological niches.
May I offer the words of the poet Leonard Cohen
https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-they-locked-up-a-man-poem-a-person-who-eats-meat-intro-live-at-the-isle-of-wight-lyrics
I'm looking for recommendations of little-known but truly excellent songs from the classic rock era. These would be songs that – in some alternative universe – would have been smash hits, but for the flapping of a random butterfly's wings in some remote corner of the world. Thanks!
Re. the recent announcement that NYC will provide free education for 3-year-olds in 2023, and the $3.5 "stimulus" bill that passed in the US Senate on Aug. 12, including some large amount for free preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds in America. (I can't seem to find out how much, other than that it's part of a $726 billion allocation, and that an "expert" predicted preschool for 3+4 year olds would cost $60 billion (yearly?)).
Scott, or maybe someone else, has written posts showing that the consensus now is that pre-school for 3-year-olds has no lasting educational benefits.
Now Vox has an article (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/16/17928164/early-childhood-education-doesnt-teach-kids-fund-it) saying that it has no lasting educational benefits, but has lasting health benefits. It says that the studies showing no lasting educational benefits used control groups, while the studies showing lasting health benefits were longitudinal studies mostly without control groups. It suggests that the health benefits were due to the actual health-benefit portion the pre-K education, and maybe the educational part, which is much more expensive, isn't useful.
So it sounds to me like scientific consensus at the moment would say that Congress is throwing a lot of money away on preschool for 3 and 4 year-olds, or at best betting a lot of money on a hypothesis, blowing right past the US budget cap before we've even started on the $10-to-$100 trillion New Green Deal.
Would anyone care to elaborate on this?
Smart Codex Readers: Convince me that COVID Vaccine Passports are a good Idea.
Currently against them as I find them
1) counterproductive and dissuade trust,
2) discriminatory and segregationist
3)Onerous for implementation
4) Seem to discount natural immunity
5) Inevitable Privacy Concerns
6) No Methodological Target for Removal . Fear that passport requirement will shift from unvax to 'undervaxed"
7) Herding Effect where unvax further congregate among themselves
8) Divisive and leads to distrust of public health institutions.
9) Seem to ignore majority of exposure occurs inter familiar and scape goats public spaces
10) COVID vaccines are not sterilizing making vaccine passports essentially worthless.
11) my libertarian bias where this feels wrong.
Looking for arguments in favor:
Should Hawaii where I live implement this policy?
Does a temporary health vaccine passport potentially raise vaccine rates, improve "public perception of safety" , lower hospitalizations/deaths divisive policies that could be ineffective, counterproductive and possibly lead to worse health outcomes and trust.
Thanks!
In the U.K. we recently had one of our first Incel terror attacks (if that’s how you want to call them), the killer was 22.
A few months ago (Feb) we also had a high profile case of a police officer kidnapping, raping and murdering a young woman that sparked a heated discussions about violence against women. The killer was 48.
What I find so interesting is that these two cases fit almost perfectly as examples of the bimodal distribution of mass killers, where younger mass killers have average age of 23 and older killers have average age of 41, but there aren’t that many 33 year old killers.
Some of this is discussed here ( https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/hive-mind/201710/mass-killings-evolutionary-perspective ) but I find it really frustrating that things like this are never discussed in the aftermaths. So I’m posting here in case anyone finds it interesting.
This is probably very much a solved/simple question, but for prediction markets, how should it be determined when a given prediction should be declared, if there is no simple algorithmic way to determine what happened without human testimony? (Think pretty much all political events outside of crypto and stock movements) Right now that sort of thing (like when it’s decided who won an election) seems to be decided by site admins, who are both dalliance and potentially quite corruptible by a determined billionare.
Can someone recommend a good active "analyzing fiction books I'm reading" blog / newsletter / substack / whatever? I run one at http://dreicafe.com but I've been skewing towards satire more than literary analysis, and I'd like to siphon the energies from someone good at the latter because I love such stuff. When I studied creative writing in ages past, they made us keep a 'reading journal' which is a phenom way to process books; reading other people's was super valuable. A lot to be said for seriously mulling on a novel after consuming it. There must be a few blogs like this around?
Posted this for those interested in crypto/defi.
https://iz2020.substack.com/p/delta-neutral-positions-on-mirror
Who is the most interesting person from history who is not a household name?
Does anyone here happen to be in PR, journalism, or anything relating to media relations? I would like to become more effective at reaching out to media/pitching stories more effectively, for both EA and personal reasons. If anyone prefers to talk privately about this rather than in the thread, I can be reached at yitzilitt (at) gmail (dot) com.
Just out of curiosity how many people on ACT think with words? I only think with words when I have to write something, or when I rehearse a speech, or when I replay a conversation in my head. Otherwise, I seem to making decisions and figuring things out without words. In fact when I speak to people, unless I'm carefully rehearsing what I'm going to say, I don't think the words before I vocalize them.
Bonus question. Subjectively, do you ever try to pin down where in your brain your internal speech is coming from? For me when I silently talk to myself, the talking seems to happening about where my premotor cortex is located — above and behind Broca's Area, which is the part of the brain associated with language. However when I vocalize words, they subjectively seem to be coming out of Wernicke's Area midpoint between my ears (which happens to the area associated with speech processing).
NB: After about ten years of doing Mahayana-style mindfulness meditation (including he basics of Dzogchen Rigpa meditation, which I never really mastered), I not only got used to observing my thoughts and feelings as they arose and passed away, but I became of aware of where in my head they subjectively arising from.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pristine-inner-experience/201111/thinking-without-words
There will surely be an Afghanistan thread on this politics-allowed open thread, so I'll start one.
My only-slightly-controversial view: we should try to work with the Taliban. If they view themselves as good men and followers of Allah, presumably they won't engage in Khmer Rouge-style atrocities. If they don't do that, Iran and Pakistan will start fueling a resistance that isn't tainted with American imperialism.
What are some good examples of organizations learning from failure, and doing things better the next time around?
Two examples:
- I've recently been playing Skyward Sword. It's, well, disappointing, but I'm impressed by the degree to which Nintendo managed to notice the frustrating things about it (e.g. the lack of open-world feeling) and successfully turn them around by Breath of the Wild (while also successfully keeping/improving a lot of the things that did work in skyward sword).
- the US navy in WW2 seems to have consistently done this pretty well - e.g. they introduced damage control measures in their carriers after the battle of the Coral Sea that may have helped them in Midway (only one month later!)
What are some others?
If you live in a city where hospital beds and ICUs are full, what exactly happens to you if you need hospital care? Covid or non-covid, both scenarios. I'm trying to understand this for Austin, Texas. Quite scary to think about.
There's an article in the Aug. 23 New Yorker by Joshua Rothman about rationality. Though the article didn't mean to make this point, I thought it demonstrated the limits of a supposedly objective rationality in a lack of consideration of the difference between people's individual goals and personalities. Fuller discussion at http://kalimac.blogspot.com/2021/08/rationality.html
Gonna shill for this substack I found: Desystemize (https://desystemize.substack.com).
It showcases how getting numbers that tell us actual facts about the universe is much harder than is commonly imagined, and how our Big Data methods are deluding us. Gives some hope regarding AI, as it suggests we're nowhere near as close to superintelligence as some fear.
Also gets extra kudos for getting me to engage with David Chapman's work (Meaningness, In the Cells of the Eggplant, Vividness), whom I was aware of, but was sleeping on. Pretty interesting that Chapman practices Vajrayana Buddhism. His vision of the world as both charnel ground and pure land is quite haunting (https://vividness.live/charnel-ground and https://vividness.live/pure-land).
I've finally been able to put my fuzzy and vague skepticism about blockchain and NFT's into coherent words, and I call it the "Degraded Blockchain Problem"
Curious what others think. Are there any blockchain based apps that actually get around this issue?
https://www.fortressofdoors.com/the-degraded-blockchain-problem/
There was a piece in The New Yorker this week about methane capture from the atmosphere (specifics weren't that interesting or important).
But, METHANE SHOULD BE TALKED ABOUT MORE!! Reducing methane emissions is the BEST lever we can pull to buy ourselves more time in the fight against climate change.
Methane's big unique ability, is that, unlike CO2, we can remove it from the atmosphere just by stopping new emissions! This means we don't have to develop methane capture technology!
What are the chances that, if God exists, he practices Bayesian reasoning? Does a perfect God update God’s priors? Or does a perfect God have perfect priors to begin with?
This week there was a cool new gene therapy paper that used human proteins (instead of viruses) to package mRNA. So far it's only been tested in cell culture but in my opinion it's very promising. I wrote about it here: https://denovo.substack.com/p/mrna-delivery-gone-non-viral
I've also continued my human herpesvirus series; this week's post is about varicella-zoster virus (which causes chickenpox and shingles). It's the only human herpesvirus for which effective vaccines exist. https://denovo.substack.com/p/varicella-zoster-virus-a-rare-success
Do we have any of Neumann's remains left for a sequencing? (I imagine the Manhattan Project members had regular blood work done, maybe some got stored?)
Any guesses of what would happen if an egg and a sperm both got rewritten with the relevant SNPs and other interesting alleles?
I have recently concluded, on the basis of a bunch of reading, that animal foods are basically bad for us. Or at least bad for people like me who are at high risk of a lot chronic diseases. I'm sort of confused by how I could have followed nutritional news pretty closely for years and years without having found this out before. Or maybe I'm confused now. Anyway, that's what's on my mind this week.