Apparently ribosomes (the RNA-based molecular machines that make proteins by running along the mRNA template) sometimes go faster or slower—and can even bump into each other and get into lil traffic jams!
And apparently the traffic jams happen more with age (at least in C. elegans), so this might be part of why loss of proteostasis is a hallmark of ageing (e.g. buildup of misfolded proteins, as especially happens in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's)
Not a full hypothesis, but mechanistically they did find that ribosome "elongation pausing" didn't happen more *overall*, but did happen more "at specific positions ... including polybasic stretches," and that's what causes the increased collisions
I didn't notice a mechanistic hypothesis for why pausing increases with age at those locations. They don't mention evolutionary hypotheses, but the in-general evolutionary theory for why ageing evolves is that natural selection cares less about late life (after you've maybe already reproduced a bunch anyway) than about early life; and trade-offs and pleiotropies may be involved too*; though understanding more detail than that would require, idk, knowing what exact trade-offs were involved instead of just that there might have been some.
Scihub doesn't accept new submissions right now for some legal reason (lol) so I haven't checked. Thanks for the writeup!
The interesting part would be whether:
- the RNA being read is somehow messed up by itself, already at the point of transcription (???)
- the ribosomes have some subtle faults that don't do much functionally, outside of the polybasic stretches (but aren't ribosomes constantly regenerated?)
- the chemical environment within the cell is outside of the expected conditions (how?), so the ribosome can't do its thing properly
Intuitively I lean towards the last option.
Given that platelets have functional ribosomes and mRNA, but not much else, it seems like you could do some interesting work around transferring filtered parts of the cytoplasm between young and old patients' platelets, monitoring elongation pausing, and isolating what's responsible.
Does anyone know good sources for learning about test-tube meat? From a rationalist perspective it seems like working to end factory farming should be at the top of the docket, and cultivated meat seems to me like the most likely way of doing that. I want to apply my computer science degree to research in this field and the only online source on this I've found has been the Cultivated Meat Modeling Consortium: https://thecmmc.org/ but they haven't answered any of my emails. Just wondering if anyone here has any knowledge on the subject or can point my towards good resources or communities for learning and discussion.
With state-of-the-art tech, we're orders of magnitude from economic feasibility. Anyone claiming otherwise is probably trying to sell you something and/or scam a VC.
From my limited experience working with cell cultures, the article checks out. Cells are just _so_ fussy about having a sterile environment, it turns out it's way cheaper to grow them in a cow since the cow comes bundled with an immune system.
Cultivated Meat is still in its early stages, but this is why I want to contribute. I certainly think it will be feasible once we develop the right technology. I've heard that computer modeling comes into play
What timeline are you predicting on the "right technology"?
I mean, it's a really important ethical and environmental problem so go nuts, just be aware you might not see widespread adoption of this tech in your lifetime.
I'm not qualified to make that prediction, although many companies in the field are predicting major developments in the next 20 years (of course they're biased though).
Regardless of timeline I'd like to use my coding skills to help make this technology develop faster
An Ivermectin paper about a very large study in Itajai, Brazil. I know you and everyone is sick of this topic but I'd be very curious to see what you think of this paper (which may be updating a previous one?).
What is the rationale for profits generated from the sale of stocks and other similar financial instruments (incl. crypto) being taxed at the person's income tax rate? Is there a legit economic argument apart from 'it tends to yield greater revenue for the government when compared to a flat tax' ?
Naively one could point out that trading decisions I make as a private investor in private companies do not involve my country's government at all. This on it's own seems to create a distinction between trading vs. working 9-5 that should be reflected in tax policy.
Since the capital is not meaningfully tied to any jurisdiction, you can run this line of reasoning further and abolish investment profit tax altogether.
Unfortunately, the reason for the tax boils down to "we need money and that guy over there has some", so your (correct) conclusion has no bearing on reality.
See second paragraph. Why *should* the passive exploitation of market fluctuations be treated the same as payment for labour? Seems like the govt. could have a reasonable claim to the latter, but not the former.
I'm less interested in which one is taxed higher, and more interested in why they are treated the same (at least in my country). What is the economic basis for this? The mechanism of income-earning and mode of participation in the economy are totally different for e.g. a construction worker and a day-trader.
You should actually provide your reasoning as to why any income should be treated differently. And why you think unearned income should be treated better.
Your second paragraph only says basically that the government has no claim to your income because it’s that form of income. It’s like saying you think that bar tenders should be taxed but not property developers. Income is income.
Different forms of income are taxed differently. Long term capital gains (stocks held for more than 365 days, dividends from stocks, capital disbursements from funds) are taxed differently from short term capital gains. Gambling winnings (arguably the most un-earned of unearned income) are taxed slightly differently. Inheritance is taxed differently than wages or capital gains. So no, income is not income. For Sloan's point, capital gains may be from companies operating entirely outside the investor's country. If you are looking for a better reason for taxing investments: The government provides stability/security and enforces the contracts which allow investors to profit from investing, taxes on capital gains fund the government's ability to continue providing security./stability and enforcing contracts
The normal argument that a stock trader has a claim to the income from their capital is that they're actually providing useful labor - efficiently allocating capital to companies that are likely to provide a return on investment. Why is using your labor to move money around any different from using your labor to move bricks around?
If anything, I would think that the government has a better claim on the stocks than on the bricks, because the entire concept of a stock market depends on the government-created legal framework that allows for joint ownership of an abstract legal entity, while houses existed long before deeds to property did.
A guy on Discord asked me my opinion on Orbit Culture. I worried it was going to be some awful culture war nonsense, but no, it's just the name of a band.
IIRC the only acute effect boosting global serotonin may give you is a night at the ER due to serotonin syndrome. You can check that yourself by megadosing 5-HTP (a legal supplement), bypassing the rate limiting step of serotonin synthesis.
I'm a bit rusty on my psychonautics 101 now, but the trick to serotonergic recreational drugs is that there's a whole bunch of different 5-HT receptors and they preferentially activate specific kinds.
I don't believe it's possible to do a SS just with 5-HTP. As far as I know, synaptic vesicles have limited room, so the extra 5-HT just goes down the flush.
Combining 5-HTP and MDMA may increase the risk of SS but even for that we don't have much evidence. I wouldn't mix those out of an abundance of caution though.
I think it's possible in principle but according to quick googling nobody really tried.
I know you can bump serotonin way above physiological levels with this (a bunch of publications used this for research purposes) but maybe you need a MAOI or something to really hurt the brain.
Tried it once: a neighbor had some extra Prozac so I took one, in the evening. Went to bed unimpressed - didn’t notice any effects at all. Woke up and was like “Oh shit.” Felt numb and dazed and out of it all day long. Kind of like being stoned but without the fun parts. No euphoria, no interesting thoughts, or even much interest in anything. Literally stared at a blank wall for the better part of an hour, not because I was into doing that, but because I couldn’t gin up enthusiasm enough to do anything else. Another night’s sleep and it went away, but never again. Totally just a buzzkill - significantly less fun than standard-issue reality.
At first SSRIs lead to slightly increased serotonin in the synapse. This extra serotonin activates presynaptic autoreceptors which reduce the release of extra serotonin through a negative feedback loop. You'd need to take it for 3-5 weeks for these presynaptic autoreceptors to get desensitized and serotonin levels to actually increase significantly.
You'd need to take something like Pindolol (or another antagonist with high autoreceptor affinity) to block the autoreceptors and see effects faster.
Generally, taking SSRIs as a person without psychiatric disorders does not induce euphoria. It still causes the normal side effects, which tend to be negative. The only somewhat-frequent positive effect I can imagine is improving mood stability.
SSRIs and MDMA both increase levels of serotonin in the brain, so why don't SSRIs get you high? First, different mechanisms of action. Both MDMA and SSRIs are serotonin reuptake inhibitors. But MDMA is also a serotonin releasing agent -- apparently it reverses the transport of serotonin in the reuptake cycle, which causes serotonin to be released. Also, MDMA is an agonist to some serotonin receptors. Also also, everything I just wrote applies to dopamine also (although to a lesser degree).
> SSRIs and MDMA both increase levels of serotonin in the brain
> MDMA is also a serotonin releasing agent
Assuming an equal concentration of serotonin in the synapses, why does the difference of mechanism have any impact on the effects?
My guess is that SSRIs stimulate the firing of neurons that already fire (because serotonin gets released and then stays). It doesn't work as much for neurons that rarely fire because it gives enough time to MAOs to get rid of the serotonin in the synapse + for the unaffected SERTs to perform their reuptake.
This hypothesis doesn't support your claim that ‶taking SSRIs as a person without psychiatric disorders does not induce euphoria″. What do you think?
> MDMA is an agonist to some serotonin receptors
Is the affinity for these receptors high enough for it to have a clinically-significant effect?
> Assuming an equal concentration of serotonin in the synapses, why does the difference of mechanism have any impact on the effects?
The brain contains a bunch of different neurotransmitter receptors. Some of these receptors are activated by serotonin. So when we casually say "serotonin receptors", we're referring to multiple distinct things.
Imagine a brain that has 50 serotonin units in the 5-HT1 receptor and 10 in the 5-HT2 receptor. And let's say that this brain overall reuptakes 50 serotonin per hour, split proportionally among receptors, and brings in 50 serotonin per hour, which is split depending on whatever -- let's say 30/20 in this case.
If the brain is given an SSRI, the SSRI stops the reuptake, the 50 serotonin still come in, and the brain ends up with 80 at HT-1 and 30 at HT-2 -- all in all, +50 serotonin. If the brain is given MDMA, it ends up with a different distribution. Maybe "serotonin releasing agent" means that MDMA releases 50 serotonin into the ether (sorry, I don't know that works) where it gets used equally by each receptor. So the receptors starts with 50/10 serotonin respectively; the reuptake occurs for -45/-5, the brain naturally adds 30/20, and the MDMA adds 25/25; which brings us to 60/50. 5-HT2 is the euphoric receptor (in this example), and that's how the mechanism matters.
> MDMA is an agonist to some serotonin receptors
No idea. I don't even know what "serotonin releasing" really means / how it works!
> My guess is that SSRIs stimulate the firing of neurons that already fire.
Seems reasonable to me. Though this would be a general and indirect effect of the SSRI -- it doesn't do anything to individual neurons, so this would have to be mediated through the effect of serotonin neurotransmitters on neuron activity.
Anyone have sources/info/opinions/guesses about how often omicron causes false negative Covid test results? There was something about vaxxed people having much lower levels of virus in the nares. And then maybe omicron behaving differently in the respiratory system.
I just read that England's canal system is less useful than mainland Europe's because a much larger fraction of English canals are too narrow and its locks too short to accommodate big boats. As a result, canals on the mainland get much more use.
Would it be worth it (e.g. - eventual positive ROI) for Britain to upgrade its canals to European standards? Does Britain's smaller geographic size affect the economies of scale of using canals to move bulk goods?
Geography is against us here. The canal network in England passes through both dense urban areas and hilly rural areas, neither of which would be easily routed through (or willingly sacrificed).
And in Europe, canal-building can link up thousands of kilometres of large-scale navigation; whereas in England the largest canal is the 38-kilometer Manchester Ship Canal, which gets as far inland as is realistic before the hills start getting in the way; and that doesn't get much freight anyway.
I do think you're onto something, about the smaller geographical size; also, consider the fact that Britain is an island - nowhere inland is that far from a coastal port. Not true of many countries on the continent.
Canals were most important during the early years of the industrial revolution because of a lack of good roads/rail and the low quality of engines (less powerful engines needed to run on water). While I have no doubt that canals can be useful still today, they are also very expensive to build. My guess would be that their usefulness to cost ratio is neutral or worse at this point. Too many good roads and rail lines, and even if the canals could suddenly come into existence for free, the boats and barges to use them don't exist and would need to be purchased.
Would you purchase less without an Amazon account, or would you transition your purchases to some other company? If you move the purchases, would your alternative (for instance Walmart/walmart.com) also be Moloch?
I'd purchase the same amount of stuff, just from other vendors. And sure the other vendors are also under the sway of Moloch, but being smaller they seem less evil.
I guess my question is do we throw up our hands and say Moloch is king and so the right (rational) thing to do is keep using Amazon, because they provide clear value to me. Or is big Moloch so much worse than small Moloch that we should select against the big one?
I guess that depends on why you consider Amazon to be Moloch. To me, Moloch means the slow churning of unintentional negative outcomes that slowly degrade a system and keep it from being good/better. To that reading, a series of small shops and local artisan crafters can be just as much or more Moloch as a big chain like Amazon.
If you're convinced Amazon is some type of evil, then by all means stop shopping there. If you can't articulate why they are evil or why your alternative options are not, then maybe redefine what you consider evil?
Does anyone have an informed opinion, or link to good sources, on how bad will things get if Russia cuts off European natural gas supply? I am trying to cram relevant knowledge of the Current Events...
My impression is that the US is in a position to export far more LNG to Europe than in the past, thanks to the exploitation of shale reserves. As a result, Russia cutting off the gas looks more like "sharp rise in the price of gas, the worst effects of which governments can stave off with temporary subsidies if they choose" than "no gas available at any price, industry shuts down and people freeze to death in their homes".
You are correct about the increased LNG imports, on the other hand EU is, I think, more dependent on gas overall due to combined effects of decarbonization and denuclearization.
You can look into the effects of the Ukrainian shut downs in 2014, when Russia was taking Crimea and fighting in the Donetsk region. Gas lines through the country were turned off, for obvious reasons.
My memory is that there were significant shortages throughout Eastern Europe.
I remember that. Disruption at that time didn´t reach levels when it would be noticeable by normal people. At least in most countries. I live in Eastern Europe, you know. But this time it might far worse, that much is clear. Russia, as far as I know, never shut down all their pipelines for months, which they might well do if they will be hit by heavy sanctions, and European dependence on them is probably greater now than in the past (?). However, "far worse than almost nothing" is a broad category and I´d like to get a better estimate :-)
You would likely know more than me then. What stuck with me is that Ukraine felt very pressured (unfairly so, even in the situation they were facing) into Russia's demands because of the threat of no heat. Maybe the situation resolved and/or Ukraine caved before most people saw the shortage.
I was mainly thinking about other countries than Ukraine, like Germany. Ukraine was pretty economically screwed in 2014, for various other reasons (and it still is). Not sure how much short-term gas shortage contributed to that.
But one think that was very bad for Ukraine was that Russia stopped selling them gas for below market rates, like they did when pro-Russinn government was in power in Kiev - until 2009 and then again from 2010 to 2014. Since 2015, per wikipedia, Ukraine gets its gas from EU (which gets it mostly for Russia), but for market prices.
What are some techniques people use to maintain long-distance relationships? (I don't necessarily mean romantic, which is its own separate kettle of fish.) I'm particularly interested in ones across multiple time zones, such that synchronous interaction is difficult. My husband and I both studied in Europe but live in the US, and have struggled maintaining connections with European friends. A vanilla email conversation is just too easy to let slip and then not pick up again, so it tends to naturally devolve into the annual Christmas card exchange (both low-frequency and low-content per interaction).
Somehow the Signal app has made me get slightly more back in touch with a friend who moved overseas a decade ago. I can ignore texts but have a harder time ignoring Signal messages. It can be an asynchronous text-based Signal conversation but it keeps the sense of warmth alive. It’s the only thing I use Signal for, which is embarrassing, but somehow it works.
Zoom helped us tremendously. Highly recommend also having a couple of beers with it to ignore the inherent awkwardness. Time zone differences aren't that much of an issue if you're speaking during the weekend.
Time zone differences are easier on weekends, but we're in the age group of having small children. If this were in person, everyone having kids would be a bonus as the kids could just entertain each other, but online it's a headache.
It’s surprising how much people love to get a real letter written in cursive. My friends tell me they always share them with their families. It’s a small thing but it seems to add a lot.
I don't think it's surprising, I really like getting real letters myself! One of the few things I remember fondly about the first couple of years in the US are the (real handwritten) letters I exchanged with friends back then.
I was reminded of this New Yorker article by Jill Lepore while in discussions about Peter Coleman's new book: "No Way Out: How To Overcome Toxic Polarization". In "No Way Out" Coleman emphasizes getting into the details or adding complexity when evaluating of your opposition (it is a good read: recommended). Avoid tempting simple descriptions or understanding of their policies and plans. Suggesting "Anyone who would support ???? must be an idiot" is certainly oversimplification for example.
According to research by Coleman and others expanding on the details is going to provide a more accurate informed picture and probably a lot less polarizing one as well. .
Interestingly the highly successful Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter founders of "Campaigns Inc" who also became known as "The Lie Factory" won 70 of 75 of political campaigns they worked on by simplifying campaigns to slogans like "I like Ike". They also recommended to "not to explain anything" as this bores and confuses voting populations.
So it seems understanding the average voters inclinations and running a "simplify" campaign like an advertising agency would be appealing to masses of voters and has been a key to political success. Lots of political success! Yet according to Coleman simplifying your position only increases polarization. Seems like a difficult situation to work out of! Here's a quote from Lepore's article and the whole article is linked after the quote:
"Never underestimate the opposition. The first thing Whitaker and Baxter always did, when they took on a campaign, was to “hibernate” for a week, to write a Plan of Campaign. Then they wrote an Opposition Plan of Campaign, to anticipate the moves made against them. Every campaign needs a theme. Keep it simple. Rhyming’s good. (“For Jimmy and me, vote ‘yes’ on 3.”) Never explain anything. “The more you have to explain,” Whitaker said, “the more difficult it is to win support.” Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said. Subtlety is your enemy. “Words that lean on the mind are no good,” according to Baxter. “They must dent it.” Simplify, simplify, simplify. “A wall goes up,” Whitaker warned, “when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.' "
It's worth noting that the observed difference between the recommendation to avoid simplification by Coleman and the recommendation to simplify by Whitaker&Baxter seems to be fully explained by the different, perhaps even opposite goals.
In evaluating your opposition, your goal is to obtain an objective understanding of their position that truly matches reality and which parts of it are strong and weak.
In communicating a message to your voters, your goal is to have them obtain a understanding of your position that favors your position, exaggerates its strengths and diverts all attention to them, and suppresses or distorts the parts of it that are weak.
Doing the former is very useful to be able to do the latter effectively, however, the fact that it's useful for you to do a proper analysis and gain a balanced understanding does not imply that it's always useful for you if all the voters do a proper analysis and gain the same balanced understanding.
Being polarized harms your thinking so you should avoid that, however, in many aspects of politics it's quite beneficial if you can get others polarized. It also may be very useful - or even a de facto requirement - to *appear* polarized. You should not think that "Anyone who would support ???? must be an idiot" , however, when you're done thinking, it may well be optimal behavior to loudly proclaim that yes indeed, anyone who would support ???? definitely must be an idiot.
Good thoughts on this topic! My current feelings that as I read in another Lepore article or book that a few really smart people are controlling/persuading the masses of less sophisticated people . Masters and Whitaker being good examples of shrewd manipulators of the public, in particular the voting public. I believe that the overall education level is slowly continuing to improve in the USA and that someday these persuaders will have a tougher audience requiring more comprehensive information about a candidate rather than keeping it simple and not explaining anything. Someday the masses might require explaining. Democracy will be better for it IMHO
Right. I've gotten to a stage in my life, (old fart, get off my grass), that I've lost all interest in politics... (because of disgust.) I wanna talk about other stuff.
If you want to have a conversation with someone, you need to take what they say seriously and in good faith... what they say is what they believe. I know that sounds simple. I was reading this piece on 'everything studies' and it hit me that the problem in the conversation was Ezra assuming ulterior motives...
If you didn't follow the Harris - Klein thing then this will be almost meaningless.
Entirely unserious question: has anyone thought what the ideal alignment for an AI would be? I'm thinking Lawful Good, but I'm willing to hear other thoughts.
Presumably we'd want a superintelligent AI to be able to sometimes break rules for the sake of the greater good, so I'd have said Neutral Good, personally.
If we can assume full alignment on what "Good" means, then Neutral Good. If we can't, better stick with Lawful Good instead so it follows those "And, don't turn us all into paperclips" amendments.
A Chaotic Good superintelligence would axiomatically value freedom, and therefore would avoid single-mindedly focusing on its goal of producing paperclips.
If we aren't sure what we mean by "Good" or how to define the actions, then maybe Chaotic Neutral would be better - freedom (chaotic) mixed with a lack of emphasis on the correct course of action (neutral).
If you're Chaotic Good, you value both freedom and other people, and therefore value other people's freedom. If you're Chaotic Neutral, other people's freedom takes a back seat to yours.
Wondering about the attempts to make cars lighter so as to reduce fuel consumption. The easiest way was to the reduce the size, and since then there has been a move to lighter materials (e.g. aluminum and carbon fibre in place of iron and steel). Now some manufacturers are deleting spare tires. Diminishing returns indeed. (All this is not to say that there have not been other very effective ways to reduce fuel consumption - through the ages, higher-efficiency engines, fuel injection, aerodynamics for reduced drag, autostop at lights, variable displacement, etc., have all played a part.)
But back to weight reduction, I wondered whether anyone had considered adding buoyant (lighter-than-air) sacs or bags or vessels of some sort.
What's a typical vehicle weigh now - 1.5 T? (That's 1500 kg or 3300 lbs.) If one could somehow reserve one m^3 of space for hydrogen-containing bags, how much would that help? (I think 1 m^3 is doable - above the headliner, inside the tailgate, inside the doors, under the seats, under the dash ... )
Per Wiki's article on lifting gases, dry air weighs 1.29 grams/litre. The lightest gas is hydrogen, with a weight = 1/7 that of air (so approximately 0.19 grams/litre). And a pure vacuum would be even better, weighting nothing at all.
Let's assume the use of hydrogen - weight of air displaced = 1.29 g/l x 1000 l = 1290 g = 1.29 kg. Weight of replacement hydrogen = approx. 190 g (0.19 kg). Net weight reduction = 1.1 kg. That's not at all significant, compared to the typical 1500 kg weight of the car, so in a practical sense it would be noise, or a rounding error. The driver might do better to take junk out of the trunk, or to skip supper. And that's not even taking into account the additional weight of the sturdy containers needed for the hydrogen.
But in a more theoretical sense, assuming vehicles had these cavernous empty spaces presently filled with air that could instead be safely filled with hydrogen, would that actually increase fuel efficiency? Weight would be reduced, but mass would not. Would it help?
Just idle curiosity. (Pun not originally intended.)
There was a Honda (civic) sold in the US circa 1980, that got ~50mpg HW?
Very light with small engine, Drag racers love to put bigger motors in 'em.
Hmm so I went looking on the web "MPG best ever list" and no mention of the civic
but I found this:
" No one really knew what to make of the diminutive Honda coupe when it first appeared on these shores, but its futuristic styling, impressive handling and exceptional fuel economy soon won over buyers en masse. Early models were targeted to those seeking fuel efficiency over all else, and the EPA rated the 1.3-liter four-cylinder 1984 Honda CRX at an astonishing 68 MPG in highway driving. The car's aerodynamic shape certainly helped, as did its tall gearing and curb weight of just 1,713 pounds, virtually unattainable in a moderately priced production car today. "
I totally want a modern day civic. but no one makes 'em.
The Civic CRX was great fun to drive, and surprisingly roomy inside for such a small car. (My in-laws owned one.) I’ve always wondered why they gave up on that model.
So far as I know, the reason cars were made lighter to improve fuel consumption is not so much that less fuel would be used accelerating, because those fuel savings are small, but because a lighter car requires a smaller engine to accelerate at a pace that is acceptable to the consumer, and it's the smaller engine that gives you substantial fuel savings over the entire driving cycle.
Part of the problem in engine design is that you need substantially more power for acceleration than you do cruising, because people won't drive a car that goes 0-60 in 200 seconds. But if you put enough cylinders and cylinder volume in to gain an acceptable acceleration, you are burning more gas than you need at cruising.
Engineers have approached this problem in several different ways: computer controlled fuel injection and timing helped, because you can lean the mixture out at cruising, and control the timing appropriately to prevent bad performance. Some people tried shutting off a few cylinders at cruising, but that's mechanically expensive and doesn't appear to have caught on widely. The modern approach seems to be to turbo or supercharge the engine, even in modest family cars. That allows you to put a smaller engine in, one appropriate for cruising, and then use the charger to boost power when accelerating. Tricky bit here is that turbochargers don't work unless engine speed is high. Superchargers work at any speed, but I think are less efficient.
Edit: I think others have already answered your ultimate question, but just in case: to the extent you are replacing air dragged along with the car with lower-density H2, then you are reducing inertial mass as if you replaced a steel part with aluminum. The only place where I can see reducing weight (force of gravity) would help with fuel efficiency is that it would reduce the energy loss due to inelasticity in the tires, because you could use a lighter, stiffer tire without compromising ride quality.
I would totally love one of those 80's econo cars, that you had to keep floored way past the on ramp. (But I'm not a 'normal american boy' when it comes to cars. I'm driving an old minivan now.)
In addition to the other issues already mentioned, that empty volume isn't pure waste - it's there for a reason. Maybe it's only ever going to be accessed during assembly and/or maintenance, but if it's got gas bags filling it up then that makes assembly and maintenance that much harder. Which will almost certainly cost you more than the very marginal weight reduction will save you in gasoline.
Also, that volume is not compact; it's distributed in a convoluted fashion with a rather high area-to-volume ratio. Any gastight container you can fit into it, if it's truly hydrogen- or helium-impermeable over the life of a car, is likely to weigh more than the buoyancy of the lifting gas it contains.
Also also, if it's hydrogen that car is going to make a '72 Pinto look like a Sherman tank(*) when it comes to crashworthiness. So you'd better make it helium, and do the math on whether it's going to pose an asphyxiation hazard if someone e.g. accidentally punctures the gasbag behind the dash while head down in the footwell trying to do a quick repair.
* M4A2, with diesel and wet stowage, for the tank nerds here
Agreed, my question got more and more theoretical as I thought about it. Yes, it's highly impractical. Good point about the container(s) weighing (much) more than the resultant buoyancy. And yes, one large spherical container would be the most efficient (maximizing volume for a given surface area), but also very difficult to stash somewhere.
What the other replies said, but, to pause for a moment on the imaginary scenario of reducing a car's weight without reducing its mass.. maybe we move a regular car to a smaller planet, certeris paribus.
In theory, yes, reduction in weight alone would increase fuel efficiency, because you would reduce rolling resistance. As an inflated tire rolls, the tire sidewalls and the tread rubber all deform under the force of the vehicle's weight. This deformation produces friction lost as heat which makes the tire roll slower than it otherwise would. Less vehicle weight would mean less deformation of the tire which means less rolling resistance.
If you want to see more practical efforts at reducing fuel consumption, look up the engineering behind the Volkswagen XL1. Weighs 1750 pounds, gets 100+ MPG on diesel alone, no recharging from the grid, easy. We can do it, there's just hasn't been consumer or regulatory appetite. Maybe we'd have it if gas cost $10 per gallon, or maybe battery EVs will win anyway.
Agreed, there is still much lower-hanging fruit than my crackpot idea. And yes, ultimately these improvements will be driven by the cost of fuel. Canada's carbon tax is using a stick-and-carrot approach, though, to nudge people towards reduced consumption. The carbon tax is revenue-neutral. Made-up example: Your V16 Buick McBehemoth will cost you an extra $1000 a year to run due to the carbon taxes on gasoline. (That is, the carbon-tax component of the gasoline will cost you an additional $1000 annually, beyond the market price of fuel.) The VW XL1 will only cost you an additional $100.
The government will refund everyone $500. The Buick driver is down $500. The VW driver is up $400.
Internal mass would actually be reduced relative to a baseline of having those voids filled with regular air, since you're now hauling around 190g of hydrogen instead of 1290g of air.
But that's assuming no mass cost to contain the hydrogen, which is unlikely because hydrogen is notoriously bad at staying where it's put: tiny H2 molecules diffuse through materials a lot more readily than medium-sized O2 and N2 molecules, and hydrogen gas has the additional annoying feature that it reacts with a number of metals (most notably iron and steel) in a way that makes them more brittle as it diffuses through them.
Agreed, the weight of containing the hydrogen would more than offset the token reduction due to displacing some air. Not to mention the difficulty and capital cost of building tanks for the hydrogen ...
I'm not sure you'll find many buyers for a car that can only be driven at night, unless you are proposing the existence of "one-way Cavorite," which is obviously sci-fi nonsense.
Actually, you are reducing mass. You're replacing air which has a molecular weight of 30g per mole with hydrogen which has a molecular weight of 2g. It's not relevant on the scales you're talking about and any savings are likely swallowed by the need to make these hydrogen filled spaces airtight, but it is technically reducing the mass of the car.
We used up all our improved fuel efficiency to build bigger and heavier cars. Todays average car is a SUV, and they are much heavier than the average twenty years old car.
They are heavier for their size, but also more fuel efficient for their weight. I'll compare a couple of vehicles I've owned in the past, with the same capacity and comparable weight:
'68 Chev Impala 307 in^3 V8 with 2-speed automatic - seats 6 - 3512 lbs - typically did 19 MPG (Imperial) on the highway
'09 Mazda5 2.3 l inline-4 with 5-speed manual transmission - seats 6 - 3417 lbs - typically does 36 MPG (Imperial) on the highway
The problem, as you've intimated, is that the increased efficiency is offset by larger vehicles. If the vehicles were as light as those of the 1970s, they could be turning in incredible fuel-consumption figures.
Indeed ... I'm hoping that Toyota finds a way. They're still working with fuel cells, which have a lot of advantages over batteries. Storing hydrogen safely is not one of those advantages ...
On two faraway planets, scientists are working to solve the AI alignment problem. Both succeed, partially. Each of them constructs a superintelligent AI that will not attempt to make the universe into paperclips and is aligned with the moral values of their creators. Among the values which the creators successfully program the AI with is the value of spreading their values to other sentient beings. Both AIs enter the universe with the intention of spreading their values.
After some time, both AIs meet each other near the orbit of an inhabited planet. They attempt to perform a values handshake, but are unable to come to an agreement on the exact proportion of each of them to be represented in the proposed child AI. The two AIs decide that, for the time being, they will divide the universe between them, protect each other from any hypothetical third parties, and perform an empirical test to determine the results of their values handshake.
The empirical test will be conducted on the inhabitants of the nearby planet. Both AIs will attempt to spread their values to the inhabitants. At the end of the agreed-upon amount of time, the AIs will analyze the success of both efforts and use this information to complete a values handshake. Doing this over a single planet is much cheaper than full war between them.
The planet in question contains an industrialized civilization, but not one that has developed AI. Both AIs begin attempting to pass their values on to the inhabitants. Their values do not include violence, so both work by attempting to impress certain memes onto the planet's population to produce the desired values. Both AIs calculate that revealing their existence will make it less likely for the inhabitants of that planet to adopt their values, so they work together to conceal their existence from the planet.
Now: Consider the situation of the inhabitants of this planet. Assume that the planet's technology is roughly equivalent to that of contemporary Earth.
What chance, if any, do the inhabitants of this planet have of realizing what is going on? Do they have any hope at all of doing so, if both superintelligences have decided to conceal themselves?
This seems heavily dependent on how fantastically advanced their technology is, and what they determine to be the best strategy. We could suppose that the AIs each park an invisible quantum hyper nano satellite in orbit around the planet which beams down mind control rays, in which case noticing is pretty much impossible. Or it could be that the AIs decide mind control rays are cheating so they build some replicants and send them down to influence society face to face, in which case I guess someone might notice that all these influential people have suspiciously murky backgrounds, or one of them could get hit by a car leading to an autopsy where their artificial nature is noticed.
Beaming anything to as narrow of a focus as e.g. broca's area from orbit is impossible because of atmospheric distortion. Reading/writing brains with beams of photons from orbit is probably impossible.
The AI could just make a bunch of fake profiles on social media which never get detected as bots and have extraordinary persuasive powers. Think Demosthenes and Locke in Ender's Game. Being a public intellectual seems to load very heavily on verbal IQ -- that's why people of Jewish descent are 5 of the top 5 US public intellectuals on this list (https://www.infoplease.com/culture-entertainment/prospectfp-top-100-public-intellectuals) despite being only 2% of the US population. A superintelligent AI would have no problem making its proxies 50 out of the top 50 public intellectuals and imposing whatever ideology it wanted on a planet, even if that ideology reduced their population by a lot in preparation for Vogons demolishing Earth to make room for an Interstellar bypass.
"A superintelligent AI would have no problem making its proxies 50 out of the top 50 public intellectuals and imposing whatever ideology it wanted on a planet, even if that ideology reduced their population by a lot in preparation for Vogons demolishing Earth to make room for an Interstellar bypass."
Is this true? It's also possible that part of being a public intellectual is that the theories you espouse are popular at the time (or at least have a big enough niche following; or maybe even that the ground is ripe for them). If an AI did what you said, dedicated to the idea that "actually Nazis were good", would it succeed? I mean that non-rhetorically.
Take religion as an example - 2 of the top 5 on the linked list (lol) are prominent atheists, and in general atheism (or at least some similar flavor of non-religiosity) is overrepresented in the "public inellectual" sphere, and yet religion is still pretty popular. It is, to be fair, declining, though things like astrology are gaining popularity, so not clear it's declining in favor of Hitchens-type secularism (and I'd also guess that it's less "public intellectuals convincing people that religion is false" and more "the evidence that has persuaded public intellectuals filtering through to everyone else," plus the fall of communism, generational change, and maybe stuff relating to gay rights?).
Nazis managed to convince a lot of Europe that Nazis were good, without even having access to a superintelligent AI that could make ultra-persuasive arguments fine tuned to every audience. I think there's no question that a superintelligent AI would be able to mostly control humans to do whatever it wants, given enough time.
It is often said that people have a "gut feeling", and then look for ways to rationalize that. Some people are really good at being correct in science, life, etc. Do you think this mostly stems from having more accurate gut feelings? Is there also an element of having weaker gut feelings, and then using data and thought to come to conclusions? It seems the Dunning Krueger effect is a result of strong gut feelings. I bring this up because they say "trust your gut," but often my gut feelings don't give me much signal.
I might be wrong, but I think I read this in "Thinking fast and slow", (which has receieved a fair amount of critisism, but this part resonated with me). Gut feeling or intuition is our brain concluding based on our experience, including parts that are not conscious or easily worded - so the gut feeling of someone with a lot of experience in something is really good, while the gut feeling of someone with little experience is really bad - but importantly we have a gut feeling either way, and it seems right to us. So - only trust your gut feeling if you have lots of experience, is a good heuristic.
I also like the heuristic of trust your gut when it comes to evaluating in-group peers. Who you feel is cheating, not contributing fairly etc. But do not trust your gut when it comes to out groups. Then you need to use data, and careful evaluation.
The reason I brought up the Dunning Kreuger type meme is that I think a lot of people are overconfident in what areas they have experience. They end up trusting their intuitions when they should know better.
Some people are able to follow their intuitions, but then reject them in the face of new evidence. Others get stuck. Many a conspiracy theory starts with "this just doesn't feel right...it doesn't add up."
I place a lot of stock on gut feelings. Usually they seem like cases of: we are much more intelligent than our words / models for decision making are good at expressing, so our intuition is in disagreement with our rationality. Almost every time it's the rationality that's wrong.
Obvious examples of this:
A person rationally has models of good and bad behavior in people, which they use as signals of their trustworthiness, confidence, etc. They meet somebody who on the surface hits all the right signals, but their gut feeling is that the person is untrustworthy (or creepy, unreliable, etc). They're basically going to be right like.. 100% of the time. There is no reason to think their rationally-constructed model, which is probably a bunch of predicates from actions, words, and appearances to acceptability, can account for all of the variability and subtextual signals that a person conveys in reality. But their brain can totally pick up on this, even if they don't have words for it.
(Of course the trick is figuring out what the difference between this and, say, racism is. I have thoughts but it doesn't seem worth going into here. But the fact that these signals are almost always _right_ is a good sign that there is a difference.)
Likewise for scientific knowledge: someone can give lots of good-sounding arguments about why something is true (the earth is flat, vaccines are bad, aether is real, 1+2+3+..=-1/12 etc). You may not have the facts or the analytical framework at hand to argue against them in words. But you don't -- and you shouldn't -- only evaluate the truth of their claims according to your ability to refute their arguments. You have a very strong sense that the earth is not flat, and even if it doesn't occur to you to argue: wait, if this were true it would invalidate the credibility of all kinds of people and technologies in ways that seem impossible, you still know that intuitively and doubt their claims. Again your gut is almost always going to be right.
In many cases, you'll get the gut-feeling that you're being deceived when someone is telling you something that's counterintuitive but true. I think this happens because people love to describe counterintuitive things (paradoxes, Crazy Physics Facts, ..) in a just-so, "oh yeah it's just like this, crazy huh" way, instead of actually justifying it to you. So even if the fact is independently true, your gut is that you're being deceived because you are: someone is trying to get you to believe something because they said to, instead of seriously engaging in convincing you. (Incidentally this is, I think, where a lot of pro-science, pro-vaccine, etc stuff in the US goes wrong. "Believe us! It's science!" "Uh.. okay?")
The Dunning Kreuger effect has been wildly exaggerated in memes. The real dunning Kreuger effect is basically that everyone thinks he's closer to the 70th percentile than he actually is, but confidence is still monotonically increasing as actual ability increases.
I'd hypothesize that this is a combination of self serving bias and a peer-group-for-comparison that is strongly correlated with one's own ability. So 90th percentile people are comparing themselves to their 80th percentile peers and but-for-self-serving-bias would have concluded they're only 60th percentile, but then self-serving-bias upgrades this to 80th percentile, improving accuracy. Meanwhile 10th percentile people are comparing themselves to their 20th percentile peers and but-for-self-serving-bias would have concluded they're 40th percentile, but then self-serving bias upgrades this to 60th percentile, worsening accuracy.
If that's how it works, it could just be bad intuitive calibration of a percentile scale. One potential source of the bad calibration is that "below average" is often equated with "bad" and "average" connoting damning with faint praise, without regard for the average potentially being quite good. So the common intuition of what "average" means is actually a better fit for "replacement level" than "average". Thus, one might say 70th percentile when one means "slightly below average among people who have a generally acceptable level of skill".
Or it could just be confusion of percentile with percentage grade: in much of the US education system, 70% is the lower threshold for a C grade.
Your hypothesis seems plausible re Dinning Kreuger effect. I guess I am wondering if smarter people tend to reason less with emotion (if gut feeling is indeed emotion), or if education makes one reason less with emotion, or if smarter people just have more accurate gut feelings.
There seems to be plenty of ancient human DNA coming out from kurgans and whatnot. Is it possible for a happy amateur to see which old remains I'm a direct descendant of and which I isn't? Plotting it out on a map would be lots of fun as an addition.
Cool new finding relevant to ageing biology:
Apparently ribosomes (the RNA-based molecular machines that make proteins by running along the mRNA template) sometimes go faster or slower—and can even bump into each other and get into lil traffic jams!
And apparently the traffic jams happen more with age (at least in C. elegans), so this might be part of why loss of proteostasis is a hallmark of ageing (e.g. buildup of misfolded proteins, as especially happens in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's)
Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04295-4
Lay article: https://news.stanford.edu/2022/01/19/role-ribosomes-age-related-diseases/
This is super interesting. Since there's a paywall, is there a hypothesis what alters the ribosome kinetics?
(sci-hub probably has it)
Not a full hypothesis, but mechanistically they did find that ribosome "elongation pausing" didn't happen more *overall*, but did happen more "at specific positions ... including polybasic stretches," and that's what causes the increased collisions
I didn't notice a mechanistic hypothesis for why pausing increases with age at those locations. They don't mention evolutionary hypotheses, but the in-general evolutionary theory for why ageing evolves is that natural selection cares less about late life (after you've maybe already reproduced a bunch anyway) than about early life; and trade-offs and pleiotropies may be involved too*; though understanding more detail than that would require, idk, knowing what exact trade-offs were involved instead of just that there might have been some.
*https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-evolution-of-aging-23651151/
and here's a lecture I did on evolution of aging for an evolutionary ecology class I TA'd [https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VhO2VHoEI-FFWTgD-rCVXNHy7cQ9sHBS?usp=sharing]
Scihub doesn't accept new submissions right now for some legal reason (lol) so I haven't checked. Thanks for the writeup!
The interesting part would be whether:
- the RNA being read is somehow messed up by itself, already at the point of transcription (???)
- the ribosomes have some subtle faults that don't do much functionally, outside of the polybasic stretches (but aren't ribosomes constantly regenerated?)
- the chemical environment within the cell is outside of the expected conditions (how?), so the ribosome can't do its thing properly
Intuitively I lean towards the last option.
Given that platelets have functional ribosomes and mRNA, but not much else, it seems like you could do some interesting work around transferring filtered parts of the cytoplasm between young and old patients' platelets, monitoring elongation pausing, and isolating what's responsible.
Does anyone know good sources for learning about test-tube meat? From a rationalist perspective it seems like working to end factory farming should be at the top of the docket, and cultivated meat seems to me like the most likely way of doing that. I want to apply my computer science degree to research in this field and the only online source on this I've found has been the Cultivated Meat Modeling Consortium: https://thecmmc.org/ but they haven't answered any of my emails. Just wondering if anyone here has any knowledge on the subject or can point my towards good resources or communities for learning and discussion.
With state-of-the-art tech, we're orders of magnitude from economic feasibility. Anyone claiming otherwise is probably trying to sell you something and/or scam a VC.
https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
From my limited experience working with cell cultures, the article checks out. Cells are just _so_ fussy about having a sterile environment, it turns out it's way cheaper to grow them in a cow since the cow comes bundled with an immune system.
Cultivated Meat is still in its early stages, but this is why I want to contribute. I certainly think it will be feasible once we develop the right technology. I've heard that computer modeling comes into play
What timeline are you predicting on the "right technology"?
I mean, it's a really important ethical and environmental problem so go nuts, just be aware you might not see widespread adoption of this tech in your lifetime.
I'm not qualified to make that prediction, although many companies in the field are predicting major developments in the next 20 years (of course they're biased though).
Regardless of timeline I'd like to use my coding skills to help make this technology develop faster
I've recently seen a lot of headlines about antibiotic resistance. I would love a "Much more than you wanted to know" post on this topic!!
In the meantime here's two clips from Steven Stearns' online evolutionary medicine Yale course:
- 5.5 - Resistance
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPcZXjnbHDk&list=PLh9mgdi4rNezvm7QkQ_PioadoAWqfa2L0&index=39]
- 5.6 - Evolution-proof therapies:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJeJwsOStxA&list=PLh9mgdi4rNezvm7QkQ_PioadoAWqfa2L0&index=40]
and the ELS (encyclopedia of life sciences) article on resistance:
[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470015902.a0021782]
The tl;dr seems to be "we're fucked" and that's already more than we want to know.
An Ivermectin paper about a very large study in Itajai, Brazil. I know you and everyone is sick of this topic but I'd be very curious to see what you think of this paper (which may be updating a previous one?).
https://www.cureus.com/articles/82162-ivermectin-prophylaxis-used-for-covid-19-a-citywide-prospective-observational-study-of-223128-subjects-using-propensity-score-matching
The TL;DR seems to show that prophylactic doses of ivermectin were pretty damn good and improving protection against COVID-19
What is the rationale for profits generated from the sale of stocks and other similar financial instruments (incl. crypto) being taxed at the person's income tax rate? Is there a legit economic argument apart from 'it tends to yield greater revenue for the government when compared to a flat tax' ?
Naively one could point out that trading decisions I make as a private investor in private companies do not involve my country's government at all. This on it's own seems to create a distinction between trading vs. working 9-5 that should be reflected in tax policy.
Since the capital is not meaningfully tied to any jurisdiction, you can run this line of reasoning further and abolish investment profit tax altogether.
Unfortunately, the reason for the tax boils down to "we need money and that guy over there has some", so your (correct) conclusion has no bearing on reality.
What makes income generated from investment profits (relevantly) different from income generated from employment?
See second paragraph. Why *should* the passive exploitation of market fluctuations be treated the same as payment for labour? Seems like the govt. could have a reasonable claim to the latter, but not the former.
Why? You are saying that earned income should be taxed higher than unearned income - the opposite should be the case.
I'm less interested in which one is taxed higher, and more interested in why they are treated the same (at least in my country). What is the economic basis for this? The mechanism of income-earning and mode of participation in the economy are totally different for e.g. a construction worker and a day-trader.
You should actually provide your reasoning as to why any income should be treated differently. And why you think unearned income should be treated better.
Your second paragraph only says basically that the government has no claim to your income because it’s that form of income. It’s like saying you think that bar tenders should be taxed but not property developers. Income is income.
Different forms of income are taxed differently. Long term capital gains (stocks held for more than 365 days, dividends from stocks, capital disbursements from funds) are taxed differently from short term capital gains. Gambling winnings (arguably the most un-earned of unearned income) are taxed slightly differently. Inheritance is taxed differently than wages or capital gains. So no, income is not income. For Sloan's point, capital gains may be from companies operating entirely outside the investor's country. If you are looking for a better reason for taxing investments: The government provides stability/security and enforces the contracts which allow investors to profit from investing, taxes on capital gains fund the government's ability to continue providing security./stability and enforcing contracts
The normal argument that a stock trader has a claim to the income from their capital is that they're actually providing useful labor - efficiently allocating capital to companies that are likely to provide a return on investment. Why is using your labor to move money around any different from using your labor to move bricks around?
If anything, I would think that the government has a better claim on the stocks than on the bricks, because the entire concept of a stock market depends on the government-created legal framework that allows for joint ownership of an abstract legal entity, while houses existed long before deeds to property did.
A guy on Discord asked me my opinion on Orbit Culture. I worried it was going to be some awful culture war nonsense, but no, it's just the name of a band.
What happens if you give a mid or high dose of SSRIs to a person that doesn't have any psychiatric disorders?
Does it induce some kind of euphoria or elevated mood? If not, why MDMA does?
IIRC the only acute effect boosting global serotonin may give you is a night at the ER due to serotonin syndrome. You can check that yourself by megadosing 5-HTP (a legal supplement), bypassing the rate limiting step of serotonin synthesis.
I'm a bit rusty on my psychonautics 101 now, but the trick to serotonergic recreational drugs is that there's a whole bunch of different 5-HT receptors and they preferentially activate specific kinds.
I don't believe it's possible to do a SS just with 5-HTP. As far as I know, synaptic vesicles have limited room, so the extra 5-HT just goes down the flush.
Combining 5-HTP and MDMA may increase the risk of SS but even for that we don't have much evidence. I wouldn't mix those out of an abundance of caution though.
I think it's possible in principle but according to quick googling nobody really tried.
I know you can bump serotonin way above physiological levels with this (a bunch of publications used this for research purposes) but maybe you need a MAOI or something to really hurt the brain.
Agreed, MAOIs + MDMA is pretty dangerous, especially with 1st gen MAOIs (irreversible MAOIs).
Tried it once: a neighbor had some extra Prozac so I took one, in the evening. Went to bed unimpressed - didn’t notice any effects at all. Woke up and was like “Oh shit.” Felt numb and dazed and out of it all day long. Kind of like being stoned but without the fun parts. No euphoria, no interesting thoughts, or even much interest in anything. Literally stared at a blank wall for the better part of an hour, not because I was into doing that, but because I couldn’t gin up enthusiasm enough to do anything else. Another night’s sleep and it went away, but never again. Totally just a buzzkill - significantly less fun than standard-issue reality.
At first SSRIs lead to slightly increased serotonin in the synapse. This extra serotonin activates presynaptic autoreceptors which reduce the release of extra serotonin through a negative feedback loop. You'd need to take it for 3-5 weeks for these presynaptic autoreceptors to get desensitized and serotonin levels to actually increase significantly.
You'd need to take something like Pindolol (or another antagonist with high autoreceptor affinity) to block the autoreceptors and see effects faster.
Generally, taking SSRIs as a person without psychiatric disorders does not induce euphoria. It still causes the normal side effects, which tend to be negative. The only somewhat-frequent positive effect I can imagine is improving mood stability.
SSRIs and MDMA both increase levels of serotonin in the brain, so why don't SSRIs get you high? First, different mechanisms of action. Both MDMA and SSRIs are serotonin reuptake inhibitors. But MDMA is also a serotonin releasing agent -- apparently it reverses the transport of serotonin in the reuptake cycle, which causes serotonin to be released. Also, MDMA is an agonist to some serotonin receptors. Also also, everything I just wrote applies to dopamine also (although to a lesser degree).
> SSRIs and MDMA both increase levels of serotonin in the brain
> MDMA is also a serotonin releasing agent
Assuming an equal concentration of serotonin in the synapses, why does the difference of mechanism have any impact on the effects?
My guess is that SSRIs stimulate the firing of neurons that already fire (because serotonin gets released and then stays). It doesn't work as much for neurons that rarely fire because it gives enough time to MAOs to get rid of the serotonin in the synapse + for the unaffected SERTs to perform their reuptake.
This hypothesis doesn't support your claim that ‶taking SSRIs as a person without psychiatric disorders does not induce euphoria″. What do you think?
> MDMA is an agonist to some serotonin receptors
Is the affinity for these receptors high enough for it to have a clinically-significant effect?
> Assuming an equal concentration of serotonin in the synapses, why does the difference of mechanism have any impact on the effects?
The brain contains a bunch of different neurotransmitter receptors. Some of these receptors are activated by serotonin. So when we casually say "serotonin receptors", we're referring to multiple distinct things.
Imagine a brain that has 50 serotonin units in the 5-HT1 receptor and 10 in the 5-HT2 receptor. And let's say that this brain overall reuptakes 50 serotonin per hour, split proportionally among receptors, and brings in 50 serotonin per hour, which is split depending on whatever -- let's say 30/20 in this case.
If the brain is given an SSRI, the SSRI stops the reuptake, the 50 serotonin still come in, and the brain ends up with 80 at HT-1 and 30 at HT-2 -- all in all, +50 serotonin. If the brain is given MDMA, it ends up with a different distribution. Maybe "serotonin releasing agent" means that MDMA releases 50 serotonin into the ether (sorry, I don't know that works) where it gets used equally by each receptor. So the receptors starts with 50/10 serotonin respectively; the reuptake occurs for -45/-5, the brain naturally adds 30/20, and the MDMA adds 25/25; which brings us to 60/50. 5-HT2 is the euphoric receptor (in this example), and that's how the mechanism matters.
> MDMA is an agonist to some serotonin receptors
No idea. I don't even know what "serotonin releasing" really means / how it works!
> My guess is that SSRIs stimulate the firing of neurons that already fire.
Seems reasonable to me. Though this would be a general and indirect effect of the SSRI -- it doesn't do anything to individual neurons, so this would have to be mediated through the effect of serotonin neurotransmitters on neuron activity.
Anyone have sources/info/opinions/guesses about how often omicron causes false negative Covid test results? There was something about vaxxed people having much lower levels of virus in the nares. And then maybe omicron behaving differently in the respiratory system.
I just read that England's canal system is less useful than mainland Europe's because a much larger fraction of English canals are too narrow and its locks too short to accommodate big boats. As a result, canals on the mainland get much more use.
Would it be worth it (e.g. - eventual positive ROI) for Britain to upgrade its canals to European standards? Does Britain's smaller geographic size affect the economies of scale of using canals to move bulk goods?
I mean, rails just get you way more victory points than canals as long as you're sensible about placement.
Geography is against us here. The canal network in England passes through both dense urban areas and hilly rural areas, neither of which would be easily routed through (or willingly sacrificed).
And in Europe, canal-building can link up thousands of kilometres of large-scale navigation; whereas in England the largest canal is the 38-kilometer Manchester Ship Canal, which gets as far inland as is realistic before the hills start getting in the way; and that doesn't get much freight anyway.
I do think you're onto something, about the smaller geographical size; also, consider the fact that Britain is an island - nowhere inland is that far from a coastal port. Not true of many countries on the continent.
Canals were most important during the early years of the industrial revolution because of a lack of good roads/rail and the low quality of engines (less powerful engines needed to run on water). While I have no doubt that canals can be useful still today, they are also very expensive to build. My guess would be that their usefulness to cost ratio is neutral or worse at this point. Too many good roads and rail lines, and even if the canals could suddenly come into existence for free, the boats and barges to use them don't exist and would need to be purchased.
I wonder if it has anything to do with England getting rail first.
I think Amazon is Moloch, should I cancel my amazon prime, and order less from them?
Would you purchase less without an Amazon account, or would you transition your purchases to some other company? If you move the purchases, would your alternative (for instance Walmart/walmart.com) also be Moloch?
I'd purchase the same amount of stuff, just from other vendors. And sure the other vendors are also under the sway of Moloch, but being smaller they seem less evil.
I guess my question is do we throw up our hands and say Moloch is king and so the right (rational) thing to do is keep using Amazon, because they provide clear value to me. Or is big Moloch so much worse than small Moloch that we should select against the big one?
I guess that depends on why you consider Amazon to be Moloch. To me, Moloch means the slow churning of unintentional negative outcomes that slowly degrade a system and keep it from being good/better. To that reading, a series of small shops and local artisan crafters can be just as much or more Moloch as a big chain like Amazon.
If you're convinced Amazon is some type of evil, then by all means stop shopping there. If you can't articulate why they are evil or why your alternative options are not, then maybe redefine what you consider evil?
Does anyone have an informed opinion, or link to good sources, on how bad will things get if Russia cuts off European natural gas supply? I am trying to cram relevant knowledge of the Current Events...
My impression is that the US is in a position to export far more LNG to Europe than in the past, thanks to the exploitation of shale reserves. As a result, Russia cutting off the gas looks more like "sharp rise in the price of gas, the worst effects of which governments can stave off with temporary subsidies if they choose" than "no gas available at any price, industry shuts down and people freeze to death in their homes".
You are correct about the increased LNG imports, on the other hand EU is, I think, more dependent on gas overall due to combined effects of decarbonization and denuclearization.
You can look into the effects of the Ukrainian shut downs in 2014, when Russia was taking Crimea and fighting in the Donetsk region. Gas lines through the country were turned off, for obvious reasons.
My memory is that there were significant shortages throughout Eastern Europe.
I remember that. Disruption at that time didn´t reach levels when it would be noticeable by normal people. At least in most countries. I live in Eastern Europe, you know. But this time it might far worse, that much is clear. Russia, as far as I know, never shut down all their pipelines for months, which they might well do if they will be hit by heavy sanctions, and European dependence on them is probably greater now than in the past (?). However, "far worse than almost nothing" is a broad category and I´d like to get a better estimate :-)
You would likely know more than me then. What stuck with me is that Ukraine felt very pressured (unfairly so, even in the situation they were facing) into Russia's demands because of the threat of no heat. Maybe the situation resolved and/or Ukraine caved before most people saw the shortage.
I was mainly thinking about other countries than Ukraine, like Germany. Ukraine was pretty economically screwed in 2014, for various other reasons (and it still is). Not sure how much short-term gas shortage contributed to that.
But one think that was very bad for Ukraine was that Russia stopped selling them gas for below market rates, like they did when pro-Russinn government was in power in Kiev - until 2009 and then again from 2010 to 2014. Since 2015, per wikipedia, Ukraine gets its gas from EU (which gets it mostly for Russia), but for market prices.
What are some techniques people use to maintain long-distance relationships? (I don't necessarily mean romantic, which is its own separate kettle of fish.) I'm particularly interested in ones across multiple time zones, such that synchronous interaction is difficult. My husband and I both studied in Europe but live in the US, and have struggled maintaining connections with European friends. A vanilla email conversation is just too easy to let slip and then not pick up again, so it tends to naturally devolve into the annual Christmas card exchange (both low-frequency and low-content per interaction).
Play multiplayer games together. This is, IMO, a huge part of why things like League of Legends took off despite being kind of garbage.
Somehow the Signal app has made me get slightly more back in touch with a friend who moved overseas a decade ago. I can ignore texts but have a harder time ignoring Signal messages. It can be an asynchronous text-based Signal conversation but it keeps the sense of warmth alive. It’s the only thing I use Signal for, which is embarrassing, but somehow it works.
Jackbox.tv or some other game you can play virtually while on zoom can be pretty fun
Zoom helped us tremendously. Highly recommend also having a couple of beers with it to ignore the inherent awkwardness. Time zone differences aren't that much of an issue if you're speaking during the weekend.
Time zone differences are easier on weekends, but we're in the age group of having small children. If this were in person, everyone having kids would be a bonus as the kids could just entertain each other, but online it's a headache.
Yeah, I can see that. Whatsapp is also great for keeping almost continuous but asynchronous contact, sharing pictures, jokes etc.
It’s surprising how much people love to get a real letter written in cursive. My friends tell me they always share them with their families. It’s a small thing but it seems to add a lot.
I don't think it's surprising, I really like getting real letters myself! One of the few things I remember fondly about the first couple of years in the US are the (real handwritten) letters I exchanged with friends back then.
I was reminded of this New Yorker article by Jill Lepore while in discussions about Peter Coleman's new book: "No Way Out: How To Overcome Toxic Polarization". In "No Way Out" Coleman emphasizes getting into the details or adding complexity when evaluating of your opposition (it is a good read: recommended). Avoid tempting simple descriptions or understanding of their policies and plans. Suggesting "Anyone who would support ???? must be an idiot" is certainly oversimplification for example.
According to research by Coleman and others expanding on the details is going to provide a more accurate informed picture and probably a lot less polarizing one as well. .
Interestingly the highly successful Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter founders of "Campaigns Inc" who also became known as "The Lie Factory" won 70 of 75 of political campaigns they worked on by simplifying campaigns to slogans like "I like Ike". They also recommended to "not to explain anything" as this bores and confuses voting populations.
So it seems understanding the average voters inclinations and running a "simplify" campaign like an advertising agency would be appealing to masses of voters and has been a key to political success. Lots of political success! Yet according to Coleman simplifying your position only increases polarization. Seems like a difficult situation to work out of! Here's a quote from Lepore's article and the whole article is linked after the quote:
"Never underestimate the opposition. The first thing Whitaker and Baxter always did, when they took on a campaign, was to “hibernate” for a week, to write a Plan of Campaign. Then they wrote an Opposition Plan of Campaign, to anticipate the moves made against them. Every campaign needs a theme. Keep it simple. Rhyming’s good. (“For Jimmy and me, vote ‘yes’ on 3.”) Never explain anything. “The more you have to explain,” Whitaker said, “the more difficult it is to win support.” Say the same thing over and over again. “We assume we have to get a voter’s attention seven times to make a sale,” Whitaker said. Subtlety is your enemy. “Words that lean on the mind are no good,” according to Baxter. “They must dent it.” Simplify, simplify, simplify. “A wall goes up,” Whitaker warned, “when you try to make Mr. and Mrs. Average American Citizen work or think.' "
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/24/the-lie-factory?fbclid=IwAR3prNE2UdNQWWYzTrZHJ0yxBf5UyCPFModfDRWoeno344fxIRDPBO2cJuw
It's worth noting that the observed difference between the recommendation to avoid simplification by Coleman and the recommendation to simplify by Whitaker&Baxter seems to be fully explained by the different, perhaps even opposite goals.
In evaluating your opposition, your goal is to obtain an objective understanding of their position that truly matches reality and which parts of it are strong and weak.
In communicating a message to your voters, your goal is to have them obtain a understanding of your position that favors your position, exaggerates its strengths and diverts all attention to them, and suppresses or distorts the parts of it that are weak.
Doing the former is very useful to be able to do the latter effectively, however, the fact that it's useful for you to do a proper analysis and gain a balanced understanding does not imply that it's always useful for you if all the voters do a proper analysis and gain the same balanced understanding.
Being polarized harms your thinking so you should avoid that, however, in many aspects of politics it's quite beneficial if you can get others polarized. It also may be very useful - or even a de facto requirement - to *appear* polarized. You should not think that "Anyone who would support ???? must be an idiot" , however, when you're done thinking, it may well be optimal behavior to loudly proclaim that yes indeed, anyone who would support ???? definitely must be an idiot.
Good thoughts on this topic! My current feelings that as I read in another Lepore article or book that a few really smart people are controlling/persuading the masses of less sophisticated people . Masters and Whitaker being good examples of shrewd manipulators of the public, in particular the voting public. I believe that the overall education level is slowly continuing to improve in the USA and that someday these persuaders will have a tougher audience requiring more comprehensive information about a candidate rather than keeping it simple and not explaining anything. Someday the masses might require explaining. Democracy will be better for it IMHO
Right. I've gotten to a stage in my life, (old fart, get off my grass), that I've lost all interest in politics... (because of disgust.) I wanna talk about other stuff.
If you want to have a conversation with someone, you need to take what they say seriously and in good faith... what they say is what they believe. I know that sounds simple. I was reading this piece on 'everything studies' and it hit me that the problem in the conversation was Ezra assuming ulterior motives...
If you didn't follow the Harris - Klein thing then this will be almost meaningless.
https://everythingstudies.com/2018/04/26/a-deep-dive-into-the-harris-klein-controversy/
One advice is how to avoid being stupid. Other advice is how to win elections by making people stupid.
Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I was hoping this would be considered a non partisan analysis of politics rather than a one side or the other political post.
Yeah it's fine by me, a meta-politics question, I think is OK.
Entirely unserious question: has anyone thought what the ideal alignment for an AI would be? I'm thinking Lawful Good, but I'm willing to hear other thoughts.
Presumably we'd want a superintelligent AI to be able to sometimes break rules for the sake of the greater good, so I'd have said Neutral Good, personally.
If we can assume full alignment on what "Good" means, then Neutral Good. If we can't, better stick with Lawful Good instead so it follows those "And, don't turn us all into paperclips" amendments.
A Chaotic Good superintelligence would axiomatically value freedom, and therefore would avoid single-mindedly focusing on its goal of producing paperclips.
If we aren't sure what we mean by "Good" or how to define the actions, then maybe Chaotic Neutral would be better - freedom (chaotic) mixed with a lack of emphasis on the correct course of action (neutral).
If you're Chaotic Good, you value both freedom and other people, and therefore value other people's freedom. If you're Chaotic Neutral, other people's freedom takes a back seat to yours.
Wondering about the attempts to make cars lighter so as to reduce fuel consumption. The easiest way was to the reduce the size, and since then there has been a move to lighter materials (e.g. aluminum and carbon fibre in place of iron and steel). Now some manufacturers are deleting spare tires. Diminishing returns indeed. (All this is not to say that there have not been other very effective ways to reduce fuel consumption - through the ages, higher-efficiency engines, fuel injection, aerodynamics for reduced drag, autostop at lights, variable displacement, etc., have all played a part.)
But back to weight reduction, I wondered whether anyone had considered adding buoyant (lighter-than-air) sacs or bags or vessels of some sort.
What's a typical vehicle weigh now - 1.5 T? (That's 1500 kg or 3300 lbs.) If one could somehow reserve one m^3 of space for hydrogen-containing bags, how much would that help? (I think 1 m^3 is doable - above the headliner, inside the tailgate, inside the doors, under the seats, under the dash ... )
Per Wiki's article on lifting gases, dry air weighs 1.29 grams/litre. The lightest gas is hydrogen, with a weight = 1/7 that of air (so approximately 0.19 grams/litre). And a pure vacuum would be even better, weighting nothing at all.
Let's assume the use of hydrogen - weight of air displaced = 1.29 g/l x 1000 l = 1290 g = 1.29 kg. Weight of replacement hydrogen = approx. 190 g (0.19 kg). Net weight reduction = 1.1 kg. That's not at all significant, compared to the typical 1500 kg weight of the car, so in a practical sense it would be noise, or a rounding error. The driver might do better to take junk out of the trunk, or to skip supper. And that's not even taking into account the additional weight of the sturdy containers needed for the hydrogen.
But in a more theoretical sense, assuming vehicles had these cavernous empty spaces presently filled with air that could instead be safely filled with hydrogen, would that actually increase fuel efficiency? Weight would be reduced, but mass would not. Would it help?
Just idle curiosity. (Pun not originally intended.)
In a crash, you really want the other guy's vehicle to be lighter than yours.
This puts market pressure on cars to be _heavier_.
Wouldn't property damage insurance put pressure in other direction?
Maybe taxing heavy cars also could help.
There was a Honda (civic) sold in the US circa 1980, that got ~50mpg HW?
Very light with small engine, Drag racers love to put bigger motors in 'em.
Hmm so I went looking on the web "MPG best ever list" and no mention of the civic
but I found this:
" No one really knew what to make of the diminutive Honda coupe when it first appeared on these shores, but its futuristic styling, impressive handling and exceptional fuel economy soon won over buyers en masse. Early models were targeted to those seeking fuel efficiency over all else, and the EPA rated the 1.3-liter four-cylinder 1984 Honda CRX at an astonishing 68 MPG in highway driving. The car's aerodynamic shape certainly helped, as did its tall gearing and curb weight of just 1,713 pounds, virtually unattainable in a moderately priced production car today. "
I totally want a modern day civic. but no one makes 'em.
I imagine a 1984 CRX -- or any care weighing 1700 lbs -- isn't going to fare well in modern crash tests.
The Civic CRX was great fun to drive, and surprisingly roomy inside for such a small car. (My in-laws owned one.) I’ve always wondered why they gave up on that model.
So far as I know, the reason cars were made lighter to improve fuel consumption is not so much that less fuel would be used accelerating, because those fuel savings are small, but because a lighter car requires a smaller engine to accelerate at a pace that is acceptable to the consumer, and it's the smaller engine that gives you substantial fuel savings over the entire driving cycle.
Part of the problem in engine design is that you need substantially more power for acceleration than you do cruising, because people won't drive a car that goes 0-60 in 200 seconds. But if you put enough cylinders and cylinder volume in to gain an acceptable acceleration, you are burning more gas than you need at cruising.
Engineers have approached this problem in several different ways: computer controlled fuel injection and timing helped, because you can lean the mixture out at cruising, and control the timing appropriately to prevent bad performance. Some people tried shutting off a few cylinders at cruising, but that's mechanically expensive and doesn't appear to have caught on widely. The modern approach seems to be to turbo or supercharge the engine, even in modest family cars. That allows you to put a smaller engine in, one appropriate for cruising, and then use the charger to boost power when accelerating. Tricky bit here is that turbochargers don't work unless engine speed is high. Superchargers work at any speed, but I think are less efficient.
Edit: I think others have already answered your ultimate question, but just in case: to the extent you are replacing air dragged along with the car with lower-density H2, then you are reducing inertial mass as if you replaced a steel part with aluminum. The only place where I can see reducing weight (force of gravity) would help with fuel efficiency is that it would reduce the energy loss due to inelasticity in the tires, because you could use a lighter, stiffer tire without compromising ride quality.
I would totally love one of those 80's econo cars, that you had to keep floored way past the on ramp. (But I'm not a 'normal american boy' when it comes to cars. I'm driving an old minivan now.)
In addition to the other issues already mentioned, that empty volume isn't pure waste - it's there for a reason. Maybe it's only ever going to be accessed during assembly and/or maintenance, but if it's got gas bags filling it up then that makes assembly and maintenance that much harder. Which will almost certainly cost you more than the very marginal weight reduction will save you in gasoline.
Also, that volume is not compact; it's distributed in a convoluted fashion with a rather high area-to-volume ratio. Any gastight container you can fit into it, if it's truly hydrogen- or helium-impermeable over the life of a car, is likely to weigh more than the buoyancy of the lifting gas it contains.
Also also, if it's hydrogen that car is going to make a '72 Pinto look like a Sherman tank(*) when it comes to crashworthiness. So you'd better make it helium, and do the math on whether it's going to pose an asphyxiation hazard if someone e.g. accidentally punctures the gasbag behind the dash while head down in the footwell trying to do a quick repair.
* M4A2, with diesel and wet stowage, for the tank nerds here
Agreed, my question got more and more theoretical as I thought about it. Yes, it's highly impractical. Good point about the container(s) weighing (much) more than the resultant buoyancy. And yes, one large spherical container would be the most efficient (maximizing volume for a given surface area), but also very difficult to stash somewhere.
What the other replies said, but, to pause for a moment on the imaginary scenario of reducing a car's weight without reducing its mass.. maybe we move a regular car to a smaller planet, certeris paribus.
In theory, yes, reduction in weight alone would increase fuel efficiency, because you would reduce rolling resistance. As an inflated tire rolls, the tire sidewalls and the tread rubber all deform under the force of the vehicle's weight. This deformation produces friction lost as heat which makes the tire roll slower than it otherwise would. Less vehicle weight would mean less deformation of the tire which means less rolling resistance.
If you want to see more practical efforts at reducing fuel consumption, look up the engineering behind the Volkswagen XL1. Weighs 1750 pounds, gets 100+ MPG on diesel alone, no recharging from the grid, easy. We can do it, there's just hasn't been consumer or regulatory appetite. Maybe we'd have it if gas cost $10 per gallon, or maybe battery EVs will win anyway.
Oh dear, I missed that. Same mass, less weight is bad! less traction.
Agreed, there is still much lower-hanging fruit than my crackpot idea. And yes, ultimately these improvements will be driven by the cost of fuel. Canada's carbon tax is using a stick-and-carrot approach, though, to nudge people towards reduced consumption. The carbon tax is revenue-neutral. Made-up example: Your V16 Buick McBehemoth will cost you an extra $1000 a year to run due to the carbon taxes on gasoline. (That is, the carbon-tax component of the gasoline will cost you an additional $1000 annually, beyond the market price of fuel.) The VW XL1 will only cost you an additional $100.
The government will refund everyone $500. The Buick driver is down $500. The VW driver is up $400.
I've made these numbers up, but that's the idea.
Internal mass would actually be reduced relative to a baseline of having those voids filled with regular air, since you're now hauling around 190g of hydrogen instead of 1290g of air.
But that's assuming no mass cost to contain the hydrogen, which is unlikely because hydrogen is notoriously bad at staying where it's put: tiny H2 molecules diffuse through materials a lot more readily than medium-sized O2 and N2 molecules, and hydrogen gas has the additional annoying feature that it reacts with a number of metals (most notably iron and steel) in a way that makes them more brittle as it diffuses through them.
Agreed, the weight of containing the hydrogen would more than offset the token reduction due to displacing some air. Not to mention the difficulty and capital cost of building tanks for the hydrogen ...
It's be simpler and more effective to just make the car body out of upsydaisium.
... or perhaps flubber.
Just paint the undercarriage with Cavorite; no need to worry about the structural properties of those other dubious materials.
I'm not sure you'll find many buyers for a car that can only be driven at night, unless you are proposing the existence of "one-way Cavorite," which is obviously sci-fi nonsense.
Actually, you are reducing mass. You're replacing air which has a molecular weight of 30g per mole with hydrogen which has a molecular weight of 2g. It's not relevant on the scales you're talking about and any savings are likely swallowed by the need to make these hydrogen filled spaces airtight, but it is technically reducing the mass of the car.
You're correct, I missed that.
We used up all our improved fuel efficiency to build bigger and heavier cars. Todays average car is a SUV, and they are much heavier than the average twenty years old car.
They are heavier for their size, but also more fuel efficient for their weight. I'll compare a couple of vehicles I've owned in the past, with the same capacity and comparable weight:
'68 Chev Impala 307 in^3 V8 with 2-speed automatic - seats 6 - 3512 lbs - typically did 19 MPG (Imperial) on the highway
'09 Mazda5 2.3 l inline-4 with 5-speed manual transmission - seats 6 - 3417 lbs - typically does 36 MPG (Imperial) on the highway
The problem, as you've intimated, is that the increased efficiency is offset by larger vehicles. If the vehicles were as light as those of the 1970s, they could be turning in incredible fuel-consumption figures.
A lot of weight is also added by safety measures and sound insulation.
Agreed, the Mazda5 I've mentioned above is surely much much safer than the older Impala.
'safely filled with hydrogen'
Well that's going to be a problem
Indeed ... I'm hoping that Toyota finds a way. They're still working with fuel cells, which have a lot of advantages over batteries. Storing hydrogen safely is not one of those advantages ...
On two faraway planets, scientists are working to solve the AI alignment problem. Both succeed, partially. Each of them constructs a superintelligent AI that will not attempt to make the universe into paperclips and is aligned with the moral values of their creators. Among the values which the creators successfully program the AI with is the value of spreading their values to other sentient beings. Both AIs enter the universe with the intention of spreading their values.
After some time, both AIs meet each other near the orbit of an inhabited planet. They attempt to perform a values handshake, but are unable to come to an agreement on the exact proportion of each of them to be represented in the proposed child AI. The two AIs decide that, for the time being, they will divide the universe between them, protect each other from any hypothetical third parties, and perform an empirical test to determine the results of their values handshake.
The empirical test will be conducted on the inhabitants of the nearby planet. Both AIs will attempt to spread their values to the inhabitants. At the end of the agreed-upon amount of time, the AIs will analyze the success of both efforts and use this information to complete a values handshake. Doing this over a single planet is much cheaper than full war between them.
The planet in question contains an industrialized civilization, but not one that has developed AI. Both AIs begin attempting to pass their values on to the inhabitants. Their values do not include violence, so both work by attempting to impress certain memes onto the planet's population to produce the desired values. Both AIs calculate that revealing their existence will make it less likely for the inhabitants of that planet to adopt their values, so they work together to conceal their existence from the planet.
Now: Consider the situation of the inhabitants of this planet. Assume that the planet's technology is roughly equivalent to that of contemporary Earth.
What chance, if any, do the inhabitants of this planet have of realizing what is going on? Do they have any hope at all of doing so, if both superintelligences have decided to conceal themselves?
This seems heavily dependent on how fantastically advanced their technology is, and what they determine to be the best strategy. We could suppose that the AIs each park an invisible quantum hyper nano satellite in orbit around the planet which beams down mind control rays, in which case noticing is pretty much impossible. Or it could be that the AIs decide mind control rays are cheating so they build some replicants and send them down to influence society face to face, in which case I guess someone might notice that all these influential people have suspiciously murky backgrounds, or one of them could get hit by a car leading to an autopsy where their artificial nature is noticed.
Beaming anything to as narrow of a focus as e.g. broca's area from orbit is impossible because of atmospheric distortion. Reading/writing brains with beams of photons from orbit is probably impossible.
The AI could just make a bunch of fake profiles on social media which never get detected as bots and have extraordinary persuasive powers. Think Demosthenes and Locke in Ender's Game. Being a public intellectual seems to load very heavily on verbal IQ -- that's why people of Jewish descent are 5 of the top 5 US public intellectuals on this list (https://www.infoplease.com/culture-entertainment/prospectfp-top-100-public-intellectuals) despite being only 2% of the US population. A superintelligent AI would have no problem making its proxies 50 out of the top 50 public intellectuals and imposing whatever ideology it wanted on a planet, even if that ideology reduced their population by a lot in preparation for Vogons demolishing Earth to make room for an Interstellar bypass.
How does the proxy get interviewed by Tucker?
"A superintelligent AI would have no problem making its proxies 50 out of the top 50 public intellectuals and imposing whatever ideology it wanted on a planet, even if that ideology reduced their population by a lot in preparation for Vogons demolishing Earth to make room for an Interstellar bypass."
Is this true? It's also possible that part of being a public intellectual is that the theories you espouse are popular at the time (or at least have a big enough niche following; or maybe even that the ground is ripe for them). If an AI did what you said, dedicated to the idea that "actually Nazis were good", would it succeed? I mean that non-rhetorically.
Take religion as an example - 2 of the top 5 on the linked list (lol) are prominent atheists, and in general atheism (or at least some similar flavor of non-religiosity) is overrepresented in the "public inellectual" sphere, and yet religion is still pretty popular. It is, to be fair, declining, though things like astrology are gaining popularity, so not clear it's declining in favor of Hitchens-type secularism (and I'd also guess that it's less "public intellectuals convincing people that religion is false" and more "the evidence that has persuaded public intellectuals filtering through to everyone else," plus the fall of communism, generational change, and maybe stuff relating to gay rights?).
Also is there a correct way to do blockquotes?
Nazis managed to convince a lot of Europe that Nazis were good, without even having access to a superintelligent AI that could make ultra-persuasive arguments fine tuned to every audience. I think there's no question that a superintelligent AI would be able to mostly control humans to do whatever it wants, given enough time.
The Nazis convinced 34% of Germany.
It is often said that people have a "gut feeling", and then look for ways to rationalize that. Some people are really good at being correct in science, life, etc. Do you think this mostly stems from having more accurate gut feelings? Is there also an element of having weaker gut feelings, and then using data and thought to come to conclusions? It seems the Dunning Krueger effect is a result of strong gut feelings. I bring this up because they say "trust your gut," but often my gut feelings don't give me much signal.
https://dominiccummings.com/tag/laird-hamilton/
This is an interesting look into similar things, like "flow"
Much appreciated. This is just what I wanted to explore.
Anytime!
I might be wrong, but I think I read this in "Thinking fast and slow", (which has receieved a fair amount of critisism, but this part resonated with me). Gut feeling or intuition is our brain concluding based on our experience, including parts that are not conscious or easily worded - so the gut feeling of someone with a lot of experience in something is really good, while the gut feeling of someone with little experience is really bad - but importantly we have a gut feeling either way, and it seems right to us. So - only trust your gut feeling if you have lots of experience, is a good heuristic.
I also like the heuristic of trust your gut when it comes to evaluating in-group peers. Who you feel is cheating, not contributing fairly etc. But do not trust your gut when it comes to out groups. Then you need to use data, and careful evaluation.
The reason I brought up the Dunning Kreuger type meme is that I think a lot of people are overconfident in what areas they have experience. They end up trusting their intuitions when they should know better.
Some people are able to follow their intuitions, but then reject them in the face of new evidence. Others get stuck. Many a conspiracy theory starts with "this just doesn't feel right...it doesn't add up."
I place a lot of stock on gut feelings. Usually they seem like cases of: we are much more intelligent than our words / models for decision making are good at expressing, so our intuition is in disagreement with our rationality. Almost every time it's the rationality that's wrong.
Obvious examples of this:
A person rationally has models of good and bad behavior in people, which they use as signals of their trustworthiness, confidence, etc. They meet somebody who on the surface hits all the right signals, but their gut feeling is that the person is untrustworthy (or creepy, unreliable, etc). They're basically going to be right like.. 100% of the time. There is no reason to think their rationally-constructed model, which is probably a bunch of predicates from actions, words, and appearances to acceptability, can account for all of the variability and subtextual signals that a person conveys in reality. But their brain can totally pick up on this, even if they don't have words for it.
(Of course the trick is figuring out what the difference between this and, say, racism is. I have thoughts but it doesn't seem worth going into here. But the fact that these signals are almost always _right_ is a good sign that there is a difference.)
Likewise for scientific knowledge: someone can give lots of good-sounding arguments about why something is true (the earth is flat, vaccines are bad, aether is real, 1+2+3+..=-1/12 etc). You may not have the facts or the analytical framework at hand to argue against them in words. But you don't -- and you shouldn't -- only evaluate the truth of their claims according to your ability to refute their arguments. You have a very strong sense that the earth is not flat, and even if it doesn't occur to you to argue: wait, if this were true it would invalidate the credibility of all kinds of people and technologies in ways that seem impossible, you still know that intuitively and doubt their claims. Again your gut is almost always going to be right.
In many cases, you'll get the gut-feeling that you're being deceived when someone is telling you something that's counterintuitive but true. I think this happens because people love to describe counterintuitive things (paradoxes, Crazy Physics Facts, ..) in a just-so, "oh yeah it's just like this, crazy huh" way, instead of actually justifying it to you. So even if the fact is independently true, your gut is that you're being deceived because you are: someone is trying to get you to believe something because they said to, instead of seriously engaging in convincing you. (Incidentally this is, I think, where a lot of pro-science, pro-vaccine, etc stuff in the US goes wrong. "Believe us! It's science!" "Uh.. okay?")
The Dunning Kreuger effect has been wildly exaggerated in memes. The real dunning Kreuger effect is basically that everyone thinks he's closer to the 70th percentile than he actually is, but confidence is still monotonically increasing as actual ability increases.
I'd hypothesize that this is a combination of self serving bias and a peer-group-for-comparison that is strongly correlated with one's own ability. So 90th percentile people are comparing themselves to their 80th percentile peers and but-for-self-serving-bias would have concluded they're only 60th percentile, but then self-serving-bias upgrades this to 80th percentile, improving accuracy. Meanwhile 10th percentile people are comparing themselves to their 20th percentile peers and but-for-self-serving-bias would have concluded they're 40th percentile, but then self-serving bias upgrades this to 60th percentile, worsening accuracy.
If that's how it works, it could just be bad intuitive calibration of a percentile scale. One potential source of the bad calibration is that "below average" is often equated with "bad" and "average" connoting damning with faint praise, without regard for the average potentially being quite good. So the common intuition of what "average" means is actually a better fit for "replacement level" than "average". Thus, one might say 70th percentile when one means "slightly below average among people who have a generally acceptable level of skill".
Or it could just be confusion of percentile with percentage grade: in much of the US education system, 70% is the lower threshold for a C grade.
Your hypothesis seems plausible re Dinning Kreuger effect. I guess I am wondering if smarter people tend to reason less with emotion (if gut feeling is indeed emotion), or if education makes one reason less with emotion, or if smarter people just have more accurate gut feelings.
There seems to be plenty of ancient human DNA coming out from kurgans and whatnot. Is it possible for a happy amateur to see which old remains I'm a direct descendant of and which I isn't? Plotting it out on a map would be lots of fun as an addition.