I'm looking for an NLP program that can match pronouns in a sentence to the noun they refer to. I don't need anything else, just that. Does anyone know if there's one available that's not too expensive?
This look wonderful, thank you. Do you know of one that can also match up the verbs? For example:
"Amy walks to the store for Nancy and buys her a flower, which she appreciates."
In this sentence, "walks" and "buys" are both being carried out by Amy, while "appreciates" is being carried out by Nancy.
(Out of curiosity I just tested this sentence in neuralcoref and it incorrectly believes that "she" is referring to Amy. Seems to do pretty well with sentences I didn't intentionally design to be difficult though.)
I knew Ukraine wasn't about to lose any major cities, but after hearing bad news about Ukraine for awhile, my confidence that they would take back territory in the next year (on net) fell to 60%. Now it's back to ~88%. [edit: err... make that 80%]
Why? the last two weeks of tweets & retweets by @TrentTelenko, who predicted both that Russia would invade #Ukraine and fail to take over the whole country, and who knows tons of military trivia. I don't know if Trent is holding back any info that reduces Ukraine's chances, but he offers quite a barrage of good signs.
Here I focus on facts I didn't know before, but at the end I'll have some bonus facts that are also instructive.
*Edit* (June 10): very bad news today lowers my confidence all the way down to 60%[1].
- Larger quantities of artillery shells are being sent to Ukraine than I thought: https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1530038089799946240 Edit: somehow I misinterpreted the number "208,000 155mm rounds allocated for Ukraine" from the U.S.; the number felt bigger than it is, though still higher than I knew about before. Google/Bing wouldn't tell me how many shells Russia is using, but I seem to recall somebody claiming Russia uses 30,000 shells per day and Denys Davydov saying Russia fires 20 shells for every shell fired by Ukraine. It should be noted though that much of Russia's artillery is imprecise and slow to configure (basically 'Uragan and Smerch' is lousy, see https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1531012132975910912, and by contrast I've seen some impressive videos of precise Ukrainian artillery). It seems like the Russians have just dumped a lot of their shells indiscriminately on cities until Ukraine has "nothing left to defend", and the spread-out shelling patterns on Ukrainian trenches also demonstrate low precision. As Small Wars Journal noted in 2020 (discussing 2015), "Ukrainians claimed that for every salvo they fired, they received 10 to 15 salvos in return". So it's not entirely clear that Ukraine will get as much gear as they need, and I have to suspect I'm missing some info that is favorable to Russia. On the other hand Russia doesn't seem to use its artillery effectively and I don't think I weighted partisan/guerilla fighting enough. Overall I'm reducing my confidence to 80%.
- Early signs Russia is running low on equipment seem to have been confirmed by more recent signs (the partial retaking of Severodonetsk and Zelensky's visit to Lysychansk) that Ukrainians in Donbas are not on the verge of collapse: https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1530828743832440832 (that's in addition to Russia's deployment of old T-62s and Ukraine knowing about this in advance, as if you needed more confirmation of their good intel https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1529517640053661699) BTW: Russia has lost far more tanks than heavy artillery, but artillery is their weapon of choice. However, when RU runs short on tanks and BMPs, I expect it'll be easier for Ukrainian footsoldiers to advance despite that artillery, especially as their numbers increase.
- *Before* Ukraine's apparent offensive north of Kherson stalled out, @TrentTelenko judged it to be a "shaping operation" rather than a real offensive, which would make the "stall" something to be expected. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1531814609908383744
- Russian losses should mainly be infantry, and their losses are so large that Trent thinks they've "hit a wall"—their infantry is nearly gone after accounting for both dead and wounded. Supporting evidence: RU deployed 25 BTGs to Severodonetsk and is still failing there. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533491373604802561
There is one thing I don't get about Trent: he evidently takes the Ukrainian claim for Russian troops KIA (30,500 dead) at face value, to reach a conclusion that Russia has taken 79,000 casualties with 80% being infantry. I'm not sure why one would trust that 30K number, but on the flip side he uses a low ratio of wounded to killed on the RU side, as compared to what is typical in wars, so maybe it balances out, almost.
[1] June 10: the reported casualty rate has risen to ~150 Ukrainian soldiers killed per day. This is probably higher than Russia's casualty rate and certainly higher than the rate of losses for Russian nationals. Since Ukraine is mostly in a defensive posture, this should not be happening. In fact, I've decided that even though I earn minimum wage (and can't get a tax deduction for Ukrainian charities), I will donate $1000 today. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/ukraine-casualty-rate-russia-war-tipping-point ... June 30: I suspect Ukraine's high casualty rate is related to the continuing artillery imbalance, in which Russia just has far more shells with which to bomb Ukraine. I can only hope that Ukraine's rapid failure around Lysychansk is more about Ukraine trying to reduce casualties than about Ukrainian forces "collapsing".
A counterpoint is the coverage from "War in Ukraine" that is more pessimistic for Ukraine.[1]
A problem with this source (like so many other sources) is that they don't report where they are getting their information from. Although they're probably pro-Ukraine, I know that in one case they said that the Russians has destroyed a third of Ukraine's M777 artillery, and they had a whole segment of the show about this topic[2], but this is just a Russian distortion: a *Russian* source said "The Armed Forces of Ukraine are losing a third of the M777 howitzers transferred from the United States in battles with Russian artillerymen, said Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Denis Sharapov", and I couldn't find any non-Russian sources saying this. I did find sources indicating that about one third of m777 had been damaged from *firing too quickly*, and so had to be repaired.
Similarly I've decided that while Trent Telenko is a very knowledgeable and useful source, he is too biased toward optimism in Ukraine's favor.
This report is also interesting[1]. Key takeaways:
• Americans genuinely deserve to be proud of this: the USA is giving more aid to Ukraine than ALL European countries combined... despite the fact that the EU has a much larger population than the U.S.!
• Total support from the US is about €42.7 billion, over half of which is military aid; the rest of the world combined is giving almost the same amount.
• Well over half of committed military aid has been delivered (figure 7). This tells me that we should be able to tell in the next couple of months whether that aid is enough to allow Ukraine to stop Russian advances and take back territory. I'm guessing they need a little more time for training. Edit: this is misleading, see below.
• Other democracies near Russia also give outsized donations. Destroying Russian weapons of death in Ukraine isn't just the right thing to do — it also bolsters the security of other countries in the region, and will allow refugees to return home from these countries, which also generally took in the most refugees.
Edit: I am confused about something though. The figure 7 chart shows about €4.2 billion committed military aid from USA, but one of the main-page charts[1] shows about €24 billion committed military aid from USA! I am asking them about this and they seem responsive[2]. Most likely the remaining €19.8 billion is undelivered aid, in which case Ukraine is far from having the hardware it needs.
Yes, the Ukrainian army is clearly having a tough time of it. Unfortunately we don't have the same level of insight into the Russian army. That they can't make more than the most minor advances with all the numbers and firepower they have brought to bear, suggests that things are going very poorly indeed on their side - but which army is closest to breaking is unknowable, until it happens.
I'm not even going to try to predict this one beyond saying it's basically a coin toss.
God, I hope. If the Ukraine war ends favorably for Russia I expect that my country will be a candidate for next on the chopping block. Here's to optimism. Cheers!
As you may or may not be aware, there's currently a market on Manifold for whether anyone will take you up on your ban appeals process. As prediction markets tend to do, this creates an incentive for someone to get banned from your blog.
You're one of my favorite writers, so I'd prefer to not actually say anything inappropriate in your comments section, and would appreciate it if you just banned me without that being necessary. :)
In a sense, Michael Shellenberger getting 95000 votes (with only "50%" of ballots in) is a triumph. Jesus only needed twelve, Shellenberger has literally thousands of times more support.
In a more practical sense, fourth place is the second loser. And 3% of the vote is a country mile away from the 15% obtained by the second-place finisher.
Thomas Carlyle, who in life was extremely dismissive of Spirtualism, was made to go through his paces in the afterlife, where he had completely changed his views - according to this book, "What Spiritualism Really Is, By Thomas Carlyle In the Spirit-World, And Through the Impressional Brain of Dr. WM. J. Bryan" written by a doctor in 1919.
Apart from this example of how you can be made to say anything once you're dead, it's why the starry-eyed ideals around AI and Transhumanism don't impress me that much. Spirtualism, too, denied it was a religion; it was nothing like those musty, hoary old relics. You didn't have to take anything on faith. Spiritualism could be examined and tested, it produced results, and reproducible results. Eminent and respectable people like doctors and scientists backed it. This wasn't pie-in-the-sky based on texts from thousands of years ago, you too could go to a séance today and have independent confirmation of contact with the dead.
So faint demurrals of "but we're nothing like a religion, we never demand you take anything on faith!" are not that convincing to me about the latest New Scientific Wonderment.
Isn't there a big difference between a starry-eyed ideal and a belief system? Transhumanism might be moral or immoral, plausible or implausible, but it's an ideal, not a set of truth statements. It does not claim that human-machine hybrids already exist, but that they would be desirable. Spiritualism and religion makes claims about the existence of supernatural entities in the here and now.
That's true. It is also reasonable to at least sort-of include a guess that transhuman modifications will become feasible as part of the set of ideas considered to be in transhumanism. ( Yeah, fuzzy, I know. )
"the starry-eyed ideals around AI and Transhumanism don't impress me that much. Spirtualism, too, denied it was a religion; it was nothing like those musty, hoary old relics. You didn't have to take anything on faith. Spiritualism could be examined and tested, it produced results, and reproducible results. "
Yes, you have a good point. (re AI) There is always a worry about whether existing results are being extrapolated beyond what the algorithms can actually deliver. To mangle a traditional line: "The hype we have always with us" :-)
- Brains are sometimes surprisingly flexible. Maybe just adding more neurons will work.
- Brains have lots of anatomically distinct regions (order of 180?). If those didn't provide some advantage why did evolution select for them? Is it _really_ possible to match human capabilities without explicitly coding the equivalent of each of those regions?
Lighting the Ivermectin data on fire and seeing if the smoke cures Covid seems likely to provide identical results as any of the more statistics based tests.
Yes Ref, no matter what test you choose the signal of benefit will always be there. Scott’s gotta choose a statistical method sooner or later, may as well choose G M-K’s. It will show a signal of benefit as well then we can finally put it to bed, IVM works, just like Scott said in his article
'Meta-study demonstrates that dry-smoke inhalation delivers more of active ingredient than wet-steam, aerosol via inhaler, or sticking it up your jumper!'
(Belated) Congratulations to Scott on this title, which was apparently fully decodable (once I found the referenced piece) without reading the article:
"Current Affairs' Marxist Critique Of Toddler Show Blippi Isn't Marxist Enough"
(My reading: the anti-industrialism and the white cringe strike me as fundamentally at odds with Marxist thought, suggesting that Robinson is just name-dropping Marx for leftist cred rather than actually being Marxist.)
Considering Wikipedia lists Nathan Robinson in its "American Anti-Communists" category and he considers that to be an accurate label for himself, he's very obviously not an actual Marxist, no.
Abortions are being performed up to six weeks, not any later than that. The number of abortions performed in Texas has been about cut in half, but many women are leaving the state (if they can) or taking mail-order abortion pills (though there are new laws restricting the pill as well). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/upshot/texas-abortion-women-data.html
Of course, others are unable to access abortion and are being forced to carry their unwanted pregnancies to term.
A couple of other side effects: some pharmacies are afraid of getting sued under the bounty law, and therefore are refusing to sell miscarriage treatments (since the medicines used post-miscarriage and for abortion are the same). Wait times for abortion clinics in nearby states (and not-that-nearby states) are rising due to the influx of patients from Texas, forcing some women to get abortions later in their pregnancies. And ironically, some women are getting abortions that they might have ultimately decided not to get under a less restrictive law, because they legally only have 1-2 days to make a decision after finding out that they're pregnant, so they're pressured into making a snap decision without having time to explore any alternatives.
All that said, I'm not aware of any bounties being paid out. The threat of them seems to be enough.
TracingWoodgrains, late of r/TheSchism which is a spin-off of a spin-off of the SSC reddit site, did a similar stunt with persuading LibsofTikTok that there was an agenda to get furrydom (furriness?) taught in elementary school. Again, this was a hoax, and an extremely detailed one:
That one was way more controversial when he informed the various disapora about it on r/TheMotte etc. He did *too* good a job and became the story, not just reported on it.
Don't believe everything you read on social media, especially when rationalists/rationalist-adjacent people of this parish may be involved!
The bounty hunters subreddit was a joke, sure, but, like... Texas *did* pass a law that allowed civilians to sue those involved in abortions, correct? What effect did that have?
I just use my (mostly cotton) shirt to clean off the dirt about 1-2 times a day when i notice them getting dirty. When i get a bunch of gunk or dirt on them i clean em with a microfiber cloth. Maybe once every 6 months i'll actually run them under water and carefully clean them.
Been doing this for ~10 years now and it works just fine.
Don't use a microfiber cloth if you value having scratch-free glasses. The correct way to clean glasses is simple: with soap and water. First, wash your hands thoroughly. Then gently rinse any grime / particulates off with just the stream of water. Last, if there's any oils / fingerprints / smudges left, lather up some more soap on your fingers and gently clean them off the lenses. You can shake off 80% of the water, and the rest will evaporate within minutes, leaving your glasses perfectly clear.
Modern glasses are 99% likely to be made from materials that won't corrode (plastic, titanium, aluminum, etc), and this method avoids the micro-scratches which are an inevitable part of rubbing them with a cloth. The cloth, microfiber or not, is packed with microscopic particulates that are substantially harder than the polycarbonate modern glasses are almost always made of, and especially harder than the various coatings the lenses almost always have applied.
Long ago, I would use a microfiber cloth like I'd been told, and invariably my glasses would be a scratched up mess within a year. Since developing this method, my glasses have been crystal clear and scratch free for years at a time. The last time I was in, my optometrist referred to the state of my lenses as "remarkable", given their age.
Yes, this is why I pay extra and wait long times to get lenses made of genuine optical glass. Whoever sold the general public on polycarbonate lenses should get the Nobel Prize in Marketing. Far cheaper and easier to manufacture, and don't last as long, pretty much a massive boost to the profit margin. Freaking brilliant, in a sort of evil twisted way.
This is a sign that either you insufficiently broke down any oils with soap, or that your water contains quite a lot of non-water stuff - like calcium, that dries as visible deposits.
Has anyone here read Erik Hoel's The Revelations? I found Kierk Soren to be a really interesting character. I'd like book recommendations with main characters like Kierk Soren.
One more thing, any advise and book recommendations for a 23 year old that's about to embark on his intellectual journey? Thanks.
I know nothing about Erik Hoel or this novel; but there absolutely must be a connection to the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. You don't hit on that name by accident. Kierkegaard's books are really good, but hard to understand right if you don't have a pretty deep background in philosophy.
Read The Republic. Everybody should read The Republic.
Find some poetry that you genuinely like. Like, it gives you pleasure to read it. Go deep into that genre/form/movement/school.
Erik Hoel is a fantastic writer. He has a substack publication called The Intrinsic Perspective.
Haha, I noticed that as well. Tried searching 'Kierk Soren' one time on Google and the first result was Søren Kierkegaard. I'll try and check him out despite my shallow background in philosophy.
Thanks. I'll check it out.
Regarding the poetry advice, it's been difficult. Do you have any anthologies that I can check out? Thanks.
Hmmm, I was introduced to most of the poetry that I love either at school, or pulling random books off the shelf at Barnes & Noble, or poetry collections my parents kept on the bookshelf when I was a kid. It looks like you want an anthology. You can often get old editions of textbooks for cheap. For instance: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=9780393979206&n=100121503&cm_sp=mbc-_-ISBN-_-used
Thanks for the Great Books list. A lot of homework for me, when I`ll be finished with the sagas. Laxness may be overdue for me. I would expect the English translation to be much better than the German after my experiences with Mikael Niemi, though the German translator for Icelandic surely is not the one they hired for Finnish-Swedish texts. I just suspect a general pattern. Are there any other minority language speakers here who also saw better English translations of foreign texts than those to their language?
I can't help with your first issue. As for book recommendations, there are lots of literary canons out there. Don't skip The Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. Get into Shakespeare. My personal hints would be the Maqroll novels by A. Mutis, Musil's Man without Qualities and Amos Oz.
Well, I did, once. At least I thought so. Just checked my fine bilingual and commented edition, there's a bookmark at page 19. Maybe I stopped there. It's some years ago...
Thanks a lot. I've read some Houllebecq. I don't know if you have read The Elementary Particles, that book is astounding, as well as riveting. I have plans to reread it. An unforgettable reading experience for me, I'd say.
I have a question about where the reasonable deductions that can be made about how AI inputs are related to outputs ends and the "black box" of artificial intelligence begins. I often see posts about AI where the author sort of resigns themself to believing that AI is an impenetrable black box while also making reasonable deductions about why it is behaving in a certain way. I would love some clarity/links to papers about why the consensus is that most of what is happening is opaque and not something that can be understood through the development of the field. I would also love links to any papers or books about like meta-AI studies. I don't mean Meta the company but rather the AI equivalent to meta-physics.
I've asked this question myself for a while now, albeit in slighly different terms, while trying to find how to classify computers in the intelligence/consciousness space.
We're pretty sure computers aren't conscious and do not take explicit decisions to piss us off, yet I'm hearing a lot of people using peculiar words to describe them. Specifically, "the computer do not *want* to do what I ask" or "my computer didn't *listen* to me".
All anthropomorphism apart, I found the words used to be pretty insightful about how we think about computers and systems in general.
A rule of thumb I use for myself is the percieved complexity of a system. If a system is simple enough for someone to be able to hold it in their mind without issue, then there are no intelligence involved.
If a system is too complex to have a complete grasp on it, because (for instance) of too many moving parts, then it's considered intelligent. This is the case for our brain: it is a physical process going through a tremendous amount of neurons and subtle connections, and we consider ourselves intelligent. Our brain cannot grasp our brain.
It seems to me that we classify as "intelligent" any system complex enough to not be trivialized by our own brain. According to this definition, people used to some systems will end up trivializing them, therefore stripping them of their intelligence.
If we apply this definition to neural networks, I'd say your NN is AI as soon as you give up on the idea of understanding their insides. As Kindly stated, we haven't yet grasped why specific weights on specific neurons encode the recognition of dogs. Most people in the AI field aren't interested in finding out how it works, but rather to find empirical configurations producing better results than other configurations (at least that was the case during my PhD).
Part of the source of this belief is the understanding that neural networks behave in this way. Even just with image recognition, we have trouble figuring how all the various weights encode the essence of what a dog looks like.
I've found it depends a lot on the area - in China where many were banned, people from all of them gathered around the ones that existed and cooperated. Where many thrive, they compete more, but usually competing in who does more charity, has more members, throws more parties, things like that.
I'm in Rotary club, and looking to connect to those in other groups, thanks for reaching out. You can find me on nesicdusan.com for LinkedIn and we can connect from there.
Some Free Masons do look down on Catholics. Don’t worry about it. Just stupid snobbery from these fellas that imagine themselves enlightened. As if. Bigotry is a pretty reliable signal for ignorance.
Hangover from Continental Freemasonry, which was vehemently anti-clerical (which meant anti-Catholic) and pro-freethinking, which in the 18th century meant dressing up and pretending to carry out Genuine Mystical Secret Oriental Occult Ceremonies.
The occult ceremonies bit was also what pissed off the Church. So it was associated with magic and revolutions, not popular with the status quo.
English Freemasonry was a bit different and developed into more of a fraternal/benevolent organisation (and jokes about if you wanted a promotion in the police, you should join the Masons) though the Secret Wisdom bit still lingered on, e.g. references in ghost (ish) stories by H.G. Wells. From the story "The Inexperienced Ghost":
"Complicated series of gestures and passes with the hands. That's how he had come in and that's how he had to get out again. Lord! what a business I had!"
"But how could any series of passes——" I began.
"My dear man," said Clayton, turning on me and putting a great emphasis on certain words, "you want everything clear. I don't know how. All I know is that you do—that he did, anyhow, at least. After a fearful time, you know, he got his passes right and suddenly disappeared."
"Did you," said Sanderson, slowly, "observe the passes?"
…He stood up without heeding me, took the middle of the hearthrug, and faced me. For a moment he regarded his feet thoughtfully, and then for all the rest of the time his eyes were on the opposite wall, with an intent expression. He raised his two hands slowly to the level of his eyes and so began. .
Now, Sanderson is a Freemason, a member of the lodge of the Four Kings, which devotes itself so ably to the study and elucidation of all the mysteries of Masonry past and present, and among the students of this lodge Sanderson is by no means the least. He followed Clayton's motions with a singular interest in his reddish eye. "That's not bad," he said, when it was done. "You really do, you know, put things together, Clayton, in a most amazing fashion. But there's one little detail out."
"I know," said Clayton. "I believe I could tell you which."
"Well?"
"This," said Clayton, and did a queer little twist and writhing and thrust of the hands.
"Yes."
"That, you know, was what he couldn't get right," said Clayton. "But how do you——?"
"Most of this business, and particularly how you invented it, I don't understand at all," said Sanderson, "but just that phase—I do." He reflected. "These happen to be a series of gestures—connected with a certain branch of esoteric Masonry—— Probably you know. Or else—— How?" He reflected still further. "I do not see I can do any harm in telling you just the proper twist. After all, if you know, you know; if you don't."
"I know nothing," said Clayton, "except what the poor devil let out last night."
"Well, anyhow," said Sanderson, and placed his churchwarden very carefully upon the shelf over the fireplace. Then very rapidly he gesticulated with his hands.
"So?" said Clayton, repeating.
"So," said Sanderson, and took his pipe in hand again.
"Ah, now," said Clayton, "I can do the whole thing—right."
…Well—the simple fact before us could very well wait our convenience; there was no hurry for us to comprehend. It lay there for an hour; it lies athwart my memory, black and amazing still, to this day. Clayton had, indeed, passed into the world that lies so near to and so far from our own, and he had gone thither by the only road that mortal man may take. But whether he did indeed pass there by that poor ghost's incantation, or whether he was stricken suddenly by apoplexy in the midst of an idle tale—as the coroner's jury would have us believe—is no matter for my judging; is just one of those inexplicable riddles that must remain unsolved until the final solution of all things shall come. All I certainly know is that, in the very moment, in the very instant, of concluding these passes he changed, and staggered and fell down before us-dead!
As far as I’m aware, it’s the Catholic church that forbids masonic membership. There’s nothing against Catholicism in freemasonry--we’re open to all religions, as long as you believe in a higher power.
I come from a family of Catholics, albeit non-practicing anymore, so I certainly have nothing against them! I like the KoC and would love to connect with anyone involved there too. Different groups, more-or-less similar missions.
Yeah the Masons were totally open to letting me join. I understand the Church’s ban but I’m hoping the Pope revisits that sooner or later. The Masons seem to have pretty much let go to the anticlericalism at this point. The deistic aspects are pretty pro-forma.
Really depends org to org, and I can only speak for the masons.
Membership in masonry requires that you be 18, male, and believe in a supreme being. If that disqualifies you there are other orgs that might fit the bill, depending on which part disqualified you haha.
The generic answer in masonry is “to be one, ask one.” Ideally you find someone who is already a mason and ask them. If you don’t know any or are new to the area like I was, you usually will have to email your local lodge, which you should be able to find pretty easily online. There are over 300 lodge in my home state of Virginia. Process for joining usually involves meeting with a few members so they can make sure you’re not crazy, getting a few to sign your petition, then they vote on your admission.
But yes, most members are on the older side and membership has been declining pretty rapidly. But honestly I think that just means it’s ripe for a new generation to step in and take over for a while, maybe make some changes. Pretty perfect opportunity if you ask me.
Activities differ lodge to lodge. Some are better than others. But masons tend to lean heavily into the theatrical and ceremonial side of things. Lots of esoteric talk about King Solomon and geometry and all that.
Get in contact with a lodge or two in your area; while you can't participate in the ceremonies until you're initiated, most would love to have you come to Festive Board (drinks and/or meal held either pre- or post- meeting). If you're able to socialize with strangers easily, you'll find out whether you fit in fairly quickly.
Not really. Only “advice” would be that every lodge can be quite different. And there are no rules that say which lodge you have to belong to. So shop around! See which group of guys you mesh with the best. The r/freemasonry subreddit can actually be pretty useful for newcomers.
My wife was recently diagnosed with gestational diabetes and put on a low glycemic index diet. As far as I can tell the major risk of gestational diabetes is high birth weight but the literature all seems to suggest that high birth weight is a positive predictor of outcomes such as IQ all the way up to about 12lbs (our baby is only predicted to be at ~66th percentile of birth weight which is far below that). Is there a reason why you should want to treat the gestational diabetes and reduce the birth weight or is this just a way to make the obstetrician's life easier during the delivery?
I wouldn't fuck with it. My last kid was born to mom with GD, and she went to heroic efforts to control it, but he was still born a bit premature, had his sugar crash immediately after birth, and got jaundice. All quite treatable, and he's right as rain 18 years later, but who needs that stress?
Personally I'd say if you're considering running *any* kind of health risk for maybe possibly a few IQ points you're misinformed as to the priorities. Birth is a massive physical stress on both mother and child, even in the 21st century, and the list of things that can go drastically wrong in a flash with lifelong consequences is sobering. Give them both every advantage you can, however small. What you want is a healthy normal baby and a mom that bounces back in a day or two. If you can have both of these, take the money and run, give praise to your deity of choice, and be glad you aren't among the ~1 in 33 families for which the outcome is sad in some way or another.
I have a four and a half month old baby and a wife who had Gestational Diabetes. I did a pretty deep dive on this topic about 8 months ago but between the time and the sleep deprivation between now and then I can't cite how I got to these conclusions. Carbs seem to pretty directly correlate to birth weight which also correlated with IQ - goodness etc. But... high blood sugar damages a bunch of things and is more likely to get you a baby with an iffy pancreas and/or other things (nerves?). Resulting in a higher risk of obesity and (more than you would expect from the increased obesity) diabetes. I think there was also an increase in other health risks.
I think this was the most recent good study on the topic and it recommends a much higher carbohydrate threshold than historical recommendations (>175g/day) https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/8/2599
I don't remember all of why, but I thought they were too aggressive and concluded that a floor of 100g/day of carbs and a ceiling of about 200. We also switched to only complex carbs so she could eat more of them without spiking her blood sugar as much.
One of the issues with a low carb diet is that it has higher risks for nutritional issues, use a high quality prenatal and this issue should be moot. I used Life Extension because I respect the way they do research and update their formulas to reflect new findings (I'm not affiliated but I regularly buy their multivitamins and fish oil).
My baby was born at 6 lbs flat and one day after the cutoff to be early. He was small enough that the birth was not terribly damaging to his mother. He's now 3rd percentile for height, 8th percentile for weight, 35th percentile for head size, and 1 - 3 months ahead on basically all his milestones (and amazingly delightful in every way).
Thanks, that's useful additional context. One of my concerns reading through some of the gestational diabetes literature is that a lot of the papers control for birth weight in their models, which is a classic example of conditioning on a collider. i.e. if you control for an outcome of the diabetes you get a (badly calculated) version of the unmediated effect only, when what you want is the total effect (i.e. the effect that goes via any pathway including birth weight). So I'm a bit worried that the literature might be giving a misleading view on this.
Having diabetes isn't nice. Is the alternate plan to just not treat the diabetes and let the blood sugar run wild? She's gonna be pretty miserable doing that.
There's a large continuum between let the blood sugar run wild and tightly control it by cutting out almost all simple carbs.
Her original diagnosis was only barely over the diagnostic criteria (and wouldn't have met the criteria used 15 years ago). At the moment we have been controlling it very well with diet (i.e. her blood sugar readings look like someone without diabetes) but the baby has gone from 76th to 66th percentile size in that time which does raise the question is whether we're actually doing the right thing by controlling it as closely as we are. The doctors seem happy about the size decrease but I'm concerned about whether those recommendations are reliable given the literature on the positive effects of birth weight. The BMJ piece suggests ~0.5 IQ points per additional 100g birthweight (including in normal weight babies).
Well, the baby getting stuck is suboptimal for both kid and mom. Besides that, gestational diabetes is a pathologic process, not well understood in humans for experiment - blocking reasons which are probably pretty obvious. As said lower down, don't fret but do get the GD as under control as possible.
Quoting my wife, who has had GD: "High birth weight, in the abstract, is good because it's better than low birth weight. Low birth weight is correlated with a whole bunch of negative things (and often a result of smoking or poor nutrition during pregnancy). But HBW associated with GD is itself correlated with a risk of diabetes later in the child's life. Bottom line, don't focus on/obsess over birth weight, but do get the GD under control."
I would add that, in my wife's particular case, she found a bizarre magic-bullet cure for all her problems (constipation, anemia, hyperglycemia, swelling) by switching to an all-red-meat diet. Basically she subsisted off pure beef for a while. YMMV, only one data point, etc, but the effect was striking and essentially overnight. The child of that pregnancy (our third) was almost a pound heavier at birth and is now on track to be the tallest of our kids as an adult, but also totally healthy. None of our kids is anything like overweight; the elder two are rather skinny, like me.
Most pregnancy studies are pretty problematic but it looks to me like birth weight effects continue on into normal weight as well as just being about avoiding low birth weight. e.g. this sibling study published in BMJ of birth weight on IQ within the normal weight range:
Given the recommended amounts of vitamins pregnant women are supposed to take having such an unbalanced diet seems like a v bad idea. Except for iron I guess.
I wonder how we changed psychologically in the last hundred years or so due to mass empathy, caused by mass media. Before radio, TV and internet, the only emotions we came into contact with were our own and those of the people around us. Of course there were books and group gatherings, but nothing like now, where you get bombarded with other people's - real and fictional - emotions. And those generate empathy; a scary movie wouldn't be scary without empathy. So all day I 'feel' other people's emotions, from my friends on Facebook to fictional drug dealers in the Ozarks. Does anybody know if there has been anything written about how that changed us?
There were, of course, newspapers before radio, TV and internet, where you could read about the real-life sufferings of someone you didn't know.
But old-style newspaper articles tended to be much more "just the facts" while modern newspaper articles seem designed to weaponise our empathy against us, always starting with the "human interest" part of the story before talking about the big picture.
The obvious difference is that in pre-mass media days, you interacted very frequently and profoundly with your neighbours and your extended family. In a community of five hundred people, you would probably know nearly everyone by sight, and almost all of you would spend nearly all your time interacting with each other - at Church for example. Moreover, many of you would be related or would have known each other for decades, so the level of empathy *as you experienced it in everyday life* would have been a lot higher than anything you find today.
Which seems... unhealthy to me. I've been happier since I joined a church, started building those real world connections as well as I'm able to approximate in the 21st century and ditched youtube.
I think you're selling pre-mass-media short. The appeal of theatre and opera was certainly running on empathy, to hew as close to your modern examples as possible; but beyond that, I think you'd be wrong to dismiss prose and even oral storytelling out of hand.
You're probably right about the appeal of pre-mass-media. However, I doubt it can compare to modern mass media in terms of volume and accessibility. Storytelling and prose definitely appeal to empathy, often on a deeper level than other media. But if I spend 20 minutes on the internet, the sheer number of viewpoints and emotions I am asked to empathize with, is a completely different experience, I think.
Say that I'm a woman on the curvier side. I'm happy with my breasts and hips but would like to slim down my waist a bit once or twice a month during parties and formal events. It looks like shapewear/corsets would be the thing I need, but it's a jungle out there. There's plenty of low-cost, low-quality (I assume) trash. The most vocal corset people seem to be BDSM cultists, not average gals that want to look a bit thinner sometimes. Thus me asking here.
Does anyone have a good beginners guide to shapewear? What are some quality brands that I can trust? Should I just bite the bullet and get a >$400 corset (money is not an issue anyway) and try to avoid getting sucked in by the vortex of "tight lacing" and "waist training" that seem to make up 95% of online corset discussion?
There is a quite big historical fashion community who discuss corsets in a very sensible and realistic way. In general, they all stress that a historical corset that fits your body should not be uncomfortable. So I guess wearing such a corset once in a while should not be a problem.
The difference between historical corsets and contemporary fashion/sexy underwear corsets is that historical corsets are used solely to achieve a specific body shape, they are never to be seen. Contemporary fashion corsets on the other hand are made to be seen, so they are not designed for changing your body shape/silhouette most efficiently.
The question is probably, what exact shape/silhouette you want to achieve. There are some videos that compare the effect of different historical corsets (https://youtu.be/PSvy8N61YnI and https://youtu.be/ZzKUI0TwgFM). Without knowing what kind of clothes you wear exactly, it's hard to recommend anything specific.
For buying corsets, I think the best strategy is to find someone on Etsy who makes historical corsets, and to discuss with them what you want.
All of her corsets are custom made for your exact measurements, and she works with every client individually to ensure you're getting exactly what you need. She only uses high quality materials so they last a lifetime.
Thanks for the recommendations, but these designs seem very goth/burlesque/bdsm (e.g. the name). I just want something slimming to wear under my regular clothes. I guess she can make those as well though...
You could opt for a bodysuit. Keeps things tight and contained, but not as severely as a corset. Relatively inexpensive. You'd wear it under your clothing of choice, can be found in various colors including beige. If you're new to these and want to test the waters it is probably a good place to start.
As an informal information source, I would recommend The Lingerie Addict's articles on corsetry. I used to be really Into Corsets (from a fashion perspective as well as a history perspective) and skimming through a couple of their articles again, they're consistent with my knowledge. They also seem to acknowledge that there's a midpoint between "cheap fashion corset" and "tightlacing down ten inches" which, hopefully, will address your needs. Here's an article that might be useful: https://www.thelingerieaddict.com/2014/09/much-spend-corset.html
They mention specific brands, including Orchard Corset, which is the only one of those mentioned that I've personally bought from and that I have known other people to wear. I agree with the writer's assessment that it's a good balance between "cheap corset that has no real shaping" and "expensive corset for everyday wear."
I have no problem with buying a quality corset to use infrequently. I just have a hard time finding information about the use pattern I envision: most corset people seem to only talk about everyday wear, tight lacing etc. Where's the guide for "how to wear a corset infrequently"?
For the last two years, I've been doubting myself and spending a ridiculous amount of time finding the most optimal career path for me. My conclusion is that all roads lead to Software Engineering.
I plan to work on AI safety in the long term, but first, I need to start my career and focus on earning enough financial freedom.
The fastest route to getting a well-paid job in the IT field is learning Full Stack Web Development, so I'm doing that through The Odin Project.
About me: 123 IQ score (Raven's 2). Asperger's. 99th percentile for Extraversion, 98th Openness, 31st Conscientiousness (understandmyself.com). English level C1.
https://francisquinn.substack.com/p/newcombs-paradox-and-metaphysics?s=w
I'm looking for an NLP program that can match pronouns in a sentence to the noun they refer to. I don't need anything else, just that. Does anyone know if there's one available that's not too expensive?
Hugging face has a library called neuralcoref. It uses spacy and is free
This look wonderful, thank you. Do you know of one that can also match up the verbs? For example:
"Amy walks to the store for Nancy and buys her a flower, which she appreciates."
In this sentence, "walks" and "buys" are both being carried out by Amy, while "appreciates" is being carried out by Nancy.
(Out of curiosity I just tested this sentence in neuralcoref and it incorrectly believes that "she" is referring to Amy. Seems to do pretty well with sentences I didn't intentionally design to be difficult though.)
I knew Ukraine wasn't about to lose any major cities, but after hearing bad news about Ukraine for awhile, my confidence that they would take back territory in the next year (on net) fell to 60%. Now it's back to ~88%. [edit: err... make that 80%]
Why? the last two weeks of tweets & retweets by @TrentTelenko, who predicted both that Russia would invade #Ukraine and fail to take over the whole country, and who knows tons of military trivia. I don't know if Trent is holding back any info that reduces Ukraine's chances, but he offers quite a barrage of good signs.
Here I focus on facts I didn't know before, but at the end I'll have some bonus facts that are also instructive.
*Edit* (June 10): very bad news today lowers my confidence all the way down to 60%[1].
- Key M270 and M142 MLRS systems (which can threaten Russian supply lines to Izyum) are being sent to Ukraine (I heard this already but it's good to have confirmation, plus Trent says it's a "game changer" https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1531822945911328768): https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1531012132975910912
-- Ukraine is even getting quality stuff from Germany: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533576265847955456 (Germany still drags its heels though https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1534615136467550209)
-- "80 Russian artillery pieces have been destroyed with less than 12 Caesar SPH in a few days" https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534291040357830656
-- Spain to supply 40 KMW Leopard 2A4 MBTs: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534341808687308800
. -- Update: Ukraine WON'T get enough ammo for their new long-range GMLRSs: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1537131753441214465
- Larger quantities of artillery shells are being sent to Ukraine than I thought: https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1530038089799946240 Edit: somehow I misinterpreted the number "208,000 155mm rounds allocated for Ukraine" from the U.S.; the number felt bigger than it is, though still higher than I knew about before. Google/Bing wouldn't tell me how many shells Russia is using, but I seem to recall somebody claiming Russia uses 30,000 shells per day and Denys Davydov saying Russia fires 20 shells for every shell fired by Ukraine. It should be noted though that much of Russia's artillery is imprecise and slow to configure (basically 'Uragan and Smerch' is lousy, see https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1531012132975910912, and by contrast I've seen some impressive videos of precise Ukrainian artillery). It seems like the Russians have just dumped a lot of their shells indiscriminately on cities until Ukraine has "nothing left to defend", and the spread-out shelling patterns on Ukrainian trenches also demonstrate low precision. As Small Wars Journal noted in 2020 (discussing 2015), "Ukrainians claimed that for every salvo they fired, they received 10 to 15 salvos in return". So it's not entirely clear that Ukraine will get as much gear as they need, and I have to suspect I'm missing some info that is favorable to Russia. On the other hand Russia doesn't seem to use its artillery effectively and I don't think I weighted partisan/guerilla fighting enough. Overall I'm reducing my confidence to 80%.
- Early signs Russia is running low on equipment seem to have been confirmed by more recent signs (the partial retaking of Severodonetsk and Zelensky's visit to Lysychansk) that Ukrainians in Donbas are not on the verge of collapse: https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1530828743832440832 (that's in addition to Russia's deployment of old T-62s and Ukraine knowing about this in advance, as if you needed more confirmation of their good intel https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1529517640053661699) BTW: Russia has lost far more tanks than heavy artillery, but artillery is their weapon of choice. However, when RU runs short on tanks and BMPs, I expect it'll be easier for Ukrainian footsoldiers to advance despite that artillery, especially as their numbers increase.
- There are indications Russian casualty rates are higher than Ukraine while Ukraine mobilizes faster: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1532823278699663360
- Russian artillery is manpower-heavy, lowering Russian efficiency: https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1528024733983424512 (see also https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1530567969889300482)
- Unconfirmed good news for Ukraine https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1530027464990277650
- Unconfirmed advanced cancer and assassination plot for Putin: https://twitter.com/Archer83Able/status/1532367395964309504
- Apparent Russian tank losses are confirmed accurate: https://twitter.com/partizan_oleg/status/1526199389764874240 (a loss rate dramatically higher than that of Ukraine https://twitter.com/Lee__Drake/status/1529870039167315969)
- *Before* Ukraine's apparent offensive north of Kherson stalled out, @TrentTelenko judged it to be a "shaping operation" rather than a real offensive, which would make the "stall" something to be expected. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1531814609908383744
- Russian losses should mainly be infantry, and their losses are so large that Trent thinks they've "hit a wall"—their infantry is nearly gone after accounting for both dead and wounded. Supporting evidence: RU deployed 25 BTGs to Severodonetsk and is still failing there. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533491373604802561
-- Related tweets on Severodonetsk: (1) UA tactical advantage: height https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1533249952809463809) (2) LNR is out of troops: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533556977674117122
-- Related 🧵: 'I think the" Culminating Point" for Russian offensive operations in Ukraine is almost upon us.' https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534291035924340736
-- Related: "Ghost Troop" corruption means Russia had less soldiers than it thought https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534700521633857536
-- Followup 🧵: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534700516843864065
- And some minor evidence.
-- Ukrainians are more motivated and produce new hardware that Russia possibly wouldn't (https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533516137992007681 https://twitter.com/UAWeapons/status/1532816735996346370)
-- Russian 122mm MLRS destroyed close to the front (https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1533521893969612800)
-- Ukraine still attacking snake island (https://twitter.com/raging545/status/1534248225632358401)
- And a little counterevidence: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1534412330330636289
- "Butcher of Syria" General Dvornikov seems to have been fired, suggesting that Putin was unhappy with Russia's performance and is trying a useless "Hail Mary" https://euroweeklynews.com/2022/06/05/putin-has-relieved-general-alexandr-dvornikov-as-commander-in-ukraine/
Plus here's some stuff I already knew:
- Russia still loses Generals ocasionally: https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1533518405042589697 https://twitter.com/anders_aslund/status/1533523990312099845
- More bad tactics from Russia https://twitter.com/mdmitri91/status/1532689797269045248
- Some pro-Russian milbloggers are changing their tune https://twitter.com/mdmitri91/status/1533505067881533441
Bonuses:
- a long 🧵 on the history of Russian political and strategic goals in Ukraine: https://twitter.com/John_A_Ridge/status/1529262545521020928
- partisan/guerilla warfare is another point in Ukraine's favor, e.g. https://twitter.com/cliffordlevy/status/1533934971722817542
- the most important bonus: powerpoint videos by Perun: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q/featured
- Forecasts from understandingwar.org have been pretty consistently optimistic for Ukraine, and pretty consistently correct too
- Fun fact: Russia is happy to starve third-worlders to death if it hurts Ukraine. Let's hope Ukraine wins quickly! https://twitter.com/vcdgf555/status/1533557914954178560
- Fun fact: visual representation of estimated density of Russian BTGs (via uawardata.com): https://twitter.com/HN_Schlottman/status/1533917743375859712
- Anyone know where to get English versions of these POW videos? The ones English ones I have seen have been fantastically entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/c/VolodymyrZolkin/videos
There is one thing I don't get about Trent: he evidently takes the Ukrainian claim for Russian troops KIA (30,500 dead) at face value, to reach a conclusion that Russia has taken 79,000 casualties with 80% being infantry. I'm not sure why one would trust that 30K number, but on the flip side he uses a low ratio of wounded to killed on the RU side, as compared to what is typical in wars, so maybe it balances out, almost.
[1] June 10: the reported casualty rate has risen to ~150 Ukrainian soldiers killed per day. This is probably higher than Russia's casualty rate and certainly higher than the rate of losses for Russian nationals. Since Ukraine is mostly in a defensive posture, this should not be happening. In fact, I've decided that even though I earn minimum wage (and can't get a tax deduction for Ukrainian charities), I will donate $1000 today. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/ukraine-casualty-rate-russia-war-tipping-point ... June 30: I suspect Ukraine's high casualty rate is related to the continuing artillery imbalance, in which Russia just has far more shells with which to bomb Ukraine. I can only hope that Ukraine's rapid failure around Lysychansk is more about Ukraine trying to reduce casualties than about Ukrainian forces "collapsing".
Ugh, okay, Trent Telenko is uh ... wow. I am dumbfounded that he didn't pick up on this video being obviously fake. Kudos that he owned up to the mistake, at least. https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1542604260420067328
It's also clear he was wrong about Russian forces being close to exhaustion.
A counterpoint is the coverage from "War in Ukraine" that is more pessimistic for Ukraine.[1]
A problem with this source (like so many other sources) is that they don't report where they are getting their information from. Although they're probably pro-Ukraine, I know that in one case they said that the Russians has destroyed a third of Ukraine's M777 artillery, and they had a whole segment of the show about this topic[2], but this is just a Russian distortion: a *Russian* source said "The Armed Forces of Ukraine are losing a third of the M777 howitzers transferred from the United States in battles with Russian artillerymen, said Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Denis Sharapov", and I couldn't find any non-Russian sources saying this. I did find sources indicating that about one third of m777 had been damaged from *firing too quickly*, and so had to be repaired.
Similarly I've decided that while Trent Telenko is a very knowledgeable and useful source, he is too biased toward optimism in Ukraine's favor.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P23DCGiChbU
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sepZO-bYSnk
This report is also interesting[1]. Key takeaways:
• Americans genuinely deserve to be proud of this: the USA is giving more aid to Ukraine than ALL European countries combined... despite the fact that the EU has a much larger population than the U.S.!
• Total support from the US is about €42.7 billion, over half of which is military aid; the rest of the world combined is giving almost the same amount.
• Well over half of committed military aid has been delivered (figure 7). This tells me that we should be able to tell in the next couple of months whether that aid is enough to allow Ukraine to stop Russian advances and take back territory. I'm guessing they need a little more time for training. Edit: this is misleading, see below.
• Other democracies near Russia also give outsized donations. Destroying Russian weapons of death in Ukraine isn't just the right thing to do — it also bolsters the security of other countries in the region, and will allow refugees to return home from these countries, which also generally took in the most refugees.
• Also worth noting that more generally, aid delivered lags far behind aid committed: https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1537234675369816064
Edit: I am confused about something though. The figure 7 chart shows about €4.2 billion committed military aid from USA, but one of the main-page charts[1] shows about €24 billion committed military aid from USA! I am asking them about this and they seem responsive[2]. Most likely the remaining €19.8 billion is undelivered aid, in which case Ukraine is far from having the hardware it needs.
[1] https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/?cookieLevel=not-set
Tweeted: https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1537222054344175618
[2] https://twitter.com/DPiepgrass/status/1537445028670283781
Yes, the Ukrainian army is clearly having a tough time of it. Unfortunately we don't have the same level of insight into the Russian army. That they can't make more than the most minor advances with all the numbers and firepower they have brought to bear, suggests that things are going very poorly indeed on their side - but which army is closest to breaking is unknowable, until it happens.
I'm not even going to try to predict this one beyond saying it's basically a coin toss.
God, I hope. If the Ukraine war ends favorably for Russia I expect that my country will be a candidate for next on the chopping block. Here's to optimism. Cheers!
What is "the AK47 of paintball guns" and what is "the AR15 of paintball guns"?
As you may or may not be aware, there's currently a market on Manifold for whether anyone will take you up on your ban appeals process. As prediction markets tend to do, this creates an incentive for someone to get banned from your blog.
You're one of my favorite writers, so I'd prefer to not actually say anything inappropriate in your comments section, and would appreciate it if you just banned me without that being necessary. :)
https://manifold.markets/EnopoletusHarding/will-so-much-as-a-single-banned-pos
> Market Manipulator (Banned)
> You're one of my favorite writers
There you go, running your mouth off again
In a sense, Michael Shellenberger getting 95000 votes (with only "50%" of ballots in) is a triumph. Jesus only needed twelve, Shellenberger has literally thousands of times more support.
In a more practical sense, fourth place is the second loser. And 3% of the vote is a country mile away from the 15% obtained by the second-place finisher.
We've had a discussion before about spiritualism, so here is an article from the Public Domain Review:
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/what-spiritualism-really-is
Thomas Carlyle, who in life was extremely dismissive of Spirtualism, was made to go through his paces in the afterlife, where he had completely changed his views - according to this book, "What Spiritualism Really Is, By Thomas Carlyle In the Spirit-World, And Through the Impressional Brain of Dr. WM. J. Bryan" written by a doctor in 1919.
Apart from this example of how you can be made to say anything once you're dead, it's why the starry-eyed ideals around AI and Transhumanism don't impress me that much. Spirtualism, too, denied it was a religion; it was nothing like those musty, hoary old relics. You didn't have to take anything on faith. Spiritualism could be examined and tested, it produced results, and reproducible results. Eminent and respectable people like doctors and scientists backed it. This wasn't pie-in-the-sky based on texts from thousands of years ago, you too could go to a séance today and have independent confirmation of contact with the dead.
So faint demurrals of "but we're nothing like a religion, we never demand you take anything on faith!" are not that convincing to me about the latest New Scientific Wonderment.
Isn't there a big difference between a starry-eyed ideal and a belief system? Transhumanism might be moral or immoral, plausible or implausible, but it's an ideal, not a set of truth statements. It does not claim that human-machine hybrids already exist, but that they would be desirable. Spiritualism and religion makes claims about the existence of supernatural entities in the here and now.
That's true. It is also reasonable to at least sort-of include a guess that transhuman modifications will become feasible as part of the set of ideas considered to be in transhumanism. ( Yeah, fuzzy, I know. )
"the starry-eyed ideals around AI and Transhumanism don't impress me that much. Spirtualism, too, denied it was a religion; it was nothing like those musty, hoary old relics. You didn't have to take anything on faith. Spiritualism could be examined and tested, it produced results, and reproducible results. "
Yes, you have a good point. (re AI) There is always a worry about whether existing results are being extrapolated beyond what the algorithms can actually deliver. To mangle a traditional line: "The hype we have always with us" :-)
Now, the existing results are what they are, and have exceeded what some skeptics expected to be possible with no change in architecture (Scott describes the cycle in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-flubs?s=r).
I know that I don't know:
- Brains are sometimes surprisingly flexible. Maybe just adding more neurons will work.
- Brains have lots of anatomically distinct regions (order of 180?). If those didn't provide some advantage why did evolution select for them? Is it _really_ possible to match human capabilities without explicitly coding the equivalent of each of those regions?
edit: boosted brain region count: https://theconversation.com/mapping-the-brain-scientists-define-180-distinct-regions-but-what-now-62972
Looks like a pretty tough way to read 230 pages. One buck plus 10 cents postage in 1920?
Why don’t you ask Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz which test is best to do on the Ivermectin data then do that test?
Lighting the Ivermectin data on fire and seeing if the smoke cures Covid seems likely to provide identical results as any of the more statistics based tests.
Yes Ref, no matter what test you choose the signal of benefit will always be there. Scott’s gotta choose a statistical method sooner or later, may as well choose G M-K’s. It will show a signal of benefit as well then we can finally put it to bed, IVM works, just like Scott said in his article
'Meta-study demonstrates that dry-smoke inhalation delivers more of active ingredient than wet-steam, aerosol via inhaler, or sticking it up your jumper!'
(Belated) Congratulations to Scott on this title, which was apparently fully decodable (once I found the referenced piece) without reading the article:
"Current Affairs' Marxist Critique Of Toddler Show Blippi Isn't Marxist Enough"
(My reading: the anti-industrialism and the white cringe strike me as fundamentally at odds with Marxist thought, suggesting that Robinson is just name-dropping Marx for leftist cred rather than actually being Marxist.)
Robinson has never claimed to be a Marxist. The association between the two is Scott's invention.
Robinson did name-drop Karl Marx in the article, so I wouldn't call it "Scott's invention".
(Article here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-dead-world-of-blippi )
Considering Wikipedia lists Nathan Robinson in its "American Anti-Communists" category and he considers that to be an accurate label for himself, he's very obviously not an actual Marxist, no.
There are, I am afraid, very few actual marxists around these days. Expecially in the leftist side of the world
Freddie de Boer self-describes as a Marxist.
Well, I didn't say there aren't any at all
What's the current status of abortions in Texas? Are abortions still being performed? Are bounties being paid out?
Abortions are being performed up to six weeks, not any later than that. The number of abortions performed in Texas has been about cut in half, but many women are leaving the state (if they can) or taking mail-order abortion pills (though there are new laws restricting the pill as well). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/upshot/texas-abortion-women-data.html
Of course, others are unable to access abortion and are being forced to carry their unwanted pregnancies to term.
A couple of other side effects: some pharmacies are afraid of getting sued under the bounty law, and therefore are refusing to sell miscarriage treatments (since the medicines used post-miscarriage and for abortion are the same). Wait times for abortion clinics in nearby states (and not-that-nearby states) are rising due to the influx of patients from Texas, forcing some women to get abortions later in their pregnancies. And ironically, some women are getting abortions that they might have ultimately decided not to get under a less restrictive law, because they legally only have 1-2 days to make a decision after finding out that they're pregnant, so they're pressured into making a snap decision without having time to explore any alternatives.
All that said, I'm not aware of any bounties being paid out. The threat of them seems to be enough.
The "Texas abortion bounty hunters" was an operation by r/Drama. They set out to make a bait site, and they succeeded:
https://tracingwoodgrains.medium.com/how-one-tight-knit-circle-of-internet-troublemakers-convinced-professional-journalists-they-were-ac05459aa4c5
TracingWoodgrains, late of r/TheSchism which is a spin-off of a spin-off of the SSC reddit site, did a similar stunt with persuading LibsofTikTok that there was an agenda to get furrydom (furriness?) taught in elementary school. Again, this was a hoax, and an extremely detailed one:
https://www.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/uenyis/how_i_convinced_libs_of_tiktok_to_publish_a_false/
That one was way more controversial when he informed the various disapora about it on r/TheMotte etc. He did *too* good a job and became the story, not just reported on it.
Don't believe everything you read on social media, especially when rationalists/rationalist-adjacent people of this parish may be involved!
The bounty hunters subreddit was a joke, sure, but, like... Texas *did* pass a law that allowed civilians to sue those involved in abortions, correct? What effect did that have?
> the studies aren’t homogenous
Not homogenous, "from the same origin", or not homogeneous, "of the same kind"?
Yes, but it is common to drop the extra 'e' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homogeneity_and_heterogeneity#Etymology_and_spelling
After a decade of being glasses-free after LASIK, I need glasses again (I can still see 20/20, but I need prism correction and blue-light blocking).
It is strange that I have forgotten things like "how do I keep glasses clean".
How do I keep glasses clean?
I wash them with water and wipe it with a towel. Never had a scratch I could see.
I just use my (mostly cotton) shirt to clean off the dirt about 1-2 times a day when i notice them getting dirty. When i get a bunch of gunk or dirt on them i clean em with a microfiber cloth. Maybe once every 6 months i'll actually run them under water and carefully clean them.
Been doing this for ~10 years now and it works just fine.
Don't use a microfiber cloth if you value having scratch-free glasses. The correct way to clean glasses is simple: with soap and water. First, wash your hands thoroughly. Then gently rinse any grime / particulates off with just the stream of water. Last, if there's any oils / fingerprints / smudges left, lather up some more soap on your fingers and gently clean them off the lenses. You can shake off 80% of the water, and the rest will evaporate within minutes, leaving your glasses perfectly clear.
Modern glasses are 99% likely to be made from materials that won't corrode (plastic, titanium, aluminum, etc), and this method avoids the micro-scratches which are an inevitable part of rubbing them with a cloth. The cloth, microfiber or not, is packed with microscopic particulates that are substantially harder than the polycarbonate modern glasses are almost always made of, and especially harder than the various coatings the lenses almost always have applied.
Long ago, I would use a microfiber cloth like I'd been told, and invariably my glasses would be a scratched up mess within a year. Since developing this method, my glasses have been crystal clear and scratch free for years at a time. The last time I was in, my optometrist referred to the state of my lenses as "remarkable", given their age.
Yes, this is why I pay extra and wait long times to get lenses made of genuine optical glass. Whoever sold the general public on polycarbonate lenses should get the Nobel Prize in Marketing. Far cheaper and easier to manufacture, and don't last as long, pretty much a massive boost to the profit margin. Freaking brilliant, in a sort of evil twisted way.
I'm now imagining that a Nobel Prize for Marketing would consist of a lit stick of dynamite.
Not using a microfiber cloth is strange, i've been using them for many years and i've never once had it scratch my glasses, not even a bit.
I second the superiority of soap and water (personally I use tissues soaked in them) over microfiber
I've found that when my glasses get wet and it evaporates, it leaves obvious, visible residue.
This is a sign that either you insufficiently broke down any oils with soap, or that your water contains quite a lot of non-water stuff - like calcium, that dries as visible deposits.
You don't. Fortunately you'll start having floaters soon, and dirty glasses will be the least of your problems.
Microfiber cloth in your back pocket ?
Scott, where did you get your characterization of Shellenberger?
From his Rogan clip?
That's not the last word, but neither is it an error.
Hello everyone.
Has anyone here read Erik Hoel's The Revelations? I found Kierk Soren to be a really interesting character. I'd like book recommendations with main characters like Kierk Soren.
One more thing, any advise and book recommendations for a 23 year old that's about to embark on his intellectual journey? Thanks.
I've read some of it, but I feel like too much of its effort is going into sounding literary-ish, to the detriment of flow and readability.
I know nothing about Erik Hoel or this novel; but there absolutely must be a connection to the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. You don't hit on that name by accident. Kierkegaard's books are really good, but hard to understand right if you don't have a pretty deep background in philosophy.
Read The Republic. Everybody should read The Republic.
Find some poetry that you genuinely like. Like, it gives you pleasure to read it. Go deep into that genre/form/movement/school.
If you want to be well-read in the Western canon, you can't do better than the Great Books list from St. John's College: https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list
Erik Hoel is a fantastic writer. He has a substack publication called The Intrinsic Perspective.
Haha, I noticed that as well. Tried searching 'Kierk Soren' one time on Google and the first result was Søren Kierkegaard. I'll try and check him out despite my shallow background in philosophy.
Thanks. I'll check it out.
Regarding the poetry advice, it's been difficult. Do you have any anthologies that I can check out? Thanks.
> Find some poetry that you genuinely like. Like, it gives you pleasure to read it. Go deep into that genre/form/movement/school.
Is there something like compilations of different styles of poetry with "what to read next" and explanations to find something that you like?
Hmmm, I was introduced to most of the poetry that I love either at school, or pulling random books off the shelf at Barnes & Noble, or poetry collections my parents kept on the bookshelf when I was a kid. It looks like you want an anthology. You can often get old editions of textbooks for cheap. For instance: https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?isbn=9780393979206&n=100121503&cm_sp=mbc-_-ISBN-_-used
Thanks for the Great Books list. A lot of homework for me, when I`ll be finished with the sagas. Laxness may be overdue for me. I would expect the English translation to be much better than the German after my experiences with Mikael Niemi, though the German translator for Icelandic surely is not the one they hired for Finnish-Swedish texts. I just suspect a general pattern. Are there any other minority language speakers here who also saw better English translations of foreign texts than those to their language?
I can't help with your first issue. As for book recommendations, there are lots of literary canons out there. Don't skip The Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. Get into Shakespeare. My personal hints would be the Maqroll novels by A. Mutis, Musil's Man without Qualities and Amos Oz.
Ulysses is good but has anyone actually read Finnegans Wake?
Well, I did, once. At least I thought so. Just checked my fine bilingual and commented edition, there's a bookmark at page 19. Maybe I stopped there. It's some years ago...
I’ve tried. Never made it very far.
Thanks a lot.
Get into Shakespeare on stage, if at all possible. The read version isn't the same.
Thanks a lot. I've read some Houllebecq. I don't know if you have read The Elementary Particles, that book is astounding, as well as riveting. I have plans to reread it. An unforgettable reading experience for me, I'd say.
I have a question about where the reasonable deductions that can be made about how AI inputs are related to outputs ends and the "black box" of artificial intelligence begins. I often see posts about AI where the author sort of resigns themself to believing that AI is an impenetrable black box while also making reasonable deductions about why it is behaving in a certain way. I would love some clarity/links to papers about why the consensus is that most of what is happening is opaque and not something that can be understood through the development of the field. I would also love links to any papers or books about like meta-AI studies. I don't mean Meta the company but rather the AI equivalent to meta-physics.
I've asked this question myself for a while now, albeit in slighly different terms, while trying to find how to classify computers in the intelligence/consciousness space.
We're pretty sure computers aren't conscious and do not take explicit decisions to piss us off, yet I'm hearing a lot of people using peculiar words to describe them. Specifically, "the computer do not *want* to do what I ask" or "my computer didn't *listen* to me".
All anthropomorphism apart, I found the words used to be pretty insightful about how we think about computers and systems in general.
A rule of thumb I use for myself is the percieved complexity of a system. If a system is simple enough for someone to be able to hold it in their mind without issue, then there are no intelligence involved.
If a system is too complex to have a complete grasp on it, because (for instance) of too many moving parts, then it's considered intelligent. This is the case for our brain: it is a physical process going through a tremendous amount of neurons and subtle connections, and we consider ourselves intelligent. Our brain cannot grasp our brain.
It seems to me that we classify as "intelligent" any system complex enough to not be trivialized by our own brain. According to this definition, people used to some systems will end up trivializing them, therefore stripping them of their intelligence.
If we apply this definition to neural networks, I'd say your NN is AI as soon as you give up on the idea of understanding their insides. As Kindly stated, we haven't yet grasped why specific weights on specific neurons encode the recognition of dogs. Most people in the AI field aren't interested in finding out how it works, but rather to find empirical configurations producing better results than other configurations (at least that was the case during my PhD).
Part of the source of this belief is the understanding that neural networks behave in this way. Even just with image recognition, we have trouble figuring how all the various weights encode the essence of what a dog looks like.
I don't have anything so formal as a paper to link to, but here is an AI StackExchange post I found: https://ai.stackexchange.com/questions/1479/do-scientists-know-what-is-happening-inside-artificial-neural-networks This is about ways that we can try to peek inside the ANN black box, which can give you an idea of how opaque that box really is. You may be interested in the links in some of the answers.
Any fellow Freemasons here? Or anyone involved in civic/service/fraternal orders or clubs? Would love to connect!
I've been a member of lodges in Canada and Australia; three years removed from being WM of my current lodge.
Hey Jeff! I'm in the US, but would love to connect anyway. My email is brandon.quintin@outlook.com
There's an Odd Fellows meeting house near my work; do all of these fraternal organizations compete, or is there general cooperation?
I've found it depends a lot on the area - in China where many were banned, people from all of them gathered around the ones that existed and cooperated. Where many thrive, they compete more, but usually competing in who does more charity, has more members, throws more parties, things like that.
Some people are members of multiple organizations, depending on how much free time they have haha.
Odd fellows are pretty rare! Hard to find active odd fellows groups.
I'm in Rotary club, and looking to connect to those in other groups, thanks for reaching out. You can find me on nesicdusan.com for LinkedIn and we can connect from there.
Thanks! I’ll reach out!
Currently joining Knights of Columbus, but I think that may make us enemies.
Some Free Masons do look down on Catholics. Don’t worry about it. Just stupid snobbery from these fellas that imagine themselves enlightened. As if. Bigotry is a pretty reliable signal for ignorance.
In fairness to Masons, my Deacon also told me not to join. So the antipathy runs both ways...
Hangover from Continental Freemasonry, which was vehemently anti-clerical (which meant anti-Catholic) and pro-freethinking, which in the 18th century meant dressing up and pretending to carry out Genuine Mystical Secret Oriental Occult Ceremonies.
The occult ceremonies bit was also what pissed off the Church. So it was associated with magic and revolutions, not popular with the status quo.
English Freemasonry was a bit different and developed into more of a fraternal/benevolent organisation (and jokes about if you wanted a promotion in the police, you should join the Masons) though the Secret Wisdom bit still lingered on, e.g. references in ghost (ish) stories by H.G. Wells. From the story "The Inexperienced Ghost":
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Story_of_the_Inexperienced_Ghost
"Passes," said Clayton.
"Passes?"
"Complicated series of gestures and passes with the hands. That's how he had come in and that's how he had to get out again. Lord! what a business I had!"
"But how could any series of passes——" I began.
"My dear man," said Clayton, turning on me and putting a great emphasis on certain words, "you want everything clear. I don't know how. All I know is that you do—that he did, anyhow, at least. After a fearful time, you know, he got his passes right and suddenly disappeared."
"Did you," said Sanderson, slowly, "observe the passes?"
…He stood up without heeding me, took the middle of the hearthrug, and faced me. For a moment he regarded his feet thoughtfully, and then for all the rest of the time his eyes were on the opposite wall, with an intent expression. He raised his two hands slowly to the level of his eyes and so began. .
Now, Sanderson is a Freemason, a member of the lodge of the Four Kings, which devotes itself so ably to the study and elucidation of all the mysteries of Masonry past and present, and among the students of this lodge Sanderson is by no means the least. He followed Clayton's motions with a singular interest in his reddish eye. "That's not bad," he said, when it was done. "You really do, you know, put things together, Clayton, in a most amazing fashion. But there's one little detail out."
"I know," said Clayton. "I believe I could tell you which."
"Well?"
"This," said Clayton, and did a queer little twist and writhing and thrust of the hands.
"Yes."
"That, you know, was what he couldn't get right," said Clayton. "But how do you——?"
"Most of this business, and particularly how you invented it, I don't understand at all," said Sanderson, "but just that phase—I do." He reflected. "These happen to be a series of gestures—connected with a certain branch of esoteric Masonry—— Probably you know. Or else—— How?" He reflected still further. "I do not see I can do any harm in telling you just the proper twist. After all, if you know, you know; if you don't."
"I know nothing," said Clayton, "except what the poor devil let out last night."
"Well, anyhow," said Sanderson, and placed his churchwarden very carefully upon the shelf over the fireplace. Then very rapidly he gesticulated with his hands.
"So?" said Clayton, repeating.
"So," said Sanderson, and took his pipe in hand again.
"Ah, now," said Clayton, "I can do the whole thing—right."
…Well—the simple fact before us could very well wait our convenience; there was no hurry for us to comprehend. It lay there for an hour; it lies athwart my memory, black and amazing still, to this day. Clayton had, indeed, passed into the world that lies so near to and so far from our own, and he had gone thither by the only road that mortal man may take. But whether he did indeed pass there by that poor ghost's incantation, or whether he was stricken suddenly by apoplexy in the midst of an idle tale—as the coroner's jury would have us believe—is no matter for my judging; is just one of those inexplicable riddles that must remain unsolved until the final solution of all things shall come. All I certainly know is that, in the very moment, in the very instant, of concluding these passes he changed, and staggered and fell down before us-dead!
Then there’s Herman Hesse’s take on an Eastern enlightenment secret society
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_East
Oh boy. I don’t know what to tell you. Two benevolent orders that despise each other. I’d avoid them both.
As far as I’m aware, it’s the Catholic church that forbids masonic membership. There’s nothing against Catholicism in freemasonry--we’re open to all religions, as long as you believe in a higher power.
I come from a family of Catholics, albeit non-practicing anymore, so I certainly have nothing against them! I like the KoC and would love to connect with anyone involved there too. Different groups, more-or-less similar missions.
Yeah the Masons were totally open to letting me join. I understand the Church’s ban but I’m hoping the Pope revisits that sooner or later. The Masons seem to have pretty much let go to the anticlericalism at this point. The deistic aspects are pretty pro-forma.
Okay. I stand corrected. :)
Really depends org to org, and I can only speak for the masons.
Membership in masonry requires that you be 18, male, and believe in a supreme being. If that disqualifies you there are other orgs that might fit the bill, depending on which part disqualified you haha.
The generic answer in masonry is “to be one, ask one.” Ideally you find someone who is already a mason and ask them. If you don’t know any or are new to the area like I was, you usually will have to email your local lodge, which you should be able to find pretty easily online. There are over 300 lodge in my home state of Virginia. Process for joining usually involves meeting with a few members so they can make sure you’re not crazy, getting a few to sign your petition, then they vote on your admission.
But yes, most members are on the older side and membership has been declining pretty rapidly. But honestly I think that just means it’s ripe for a new generation to step in and take over for a while, maybe make some changes. Pretty perfect opportunity if you ask me.
Activities differ lodge to lodge. Some are better than others. But masons tend to lean heavily into the theatrical and ceremonial side of things. Lots of esoteric talk about King Solomon and geometry and all that.
I've been thinking about it.Might just take the plunge this summer.Any advice?
Get in contact with a lodge or two in your area; while you can't participate in the ceremonies until you're initiated, most would love to have you come to Festive Board (drinks and/or meal held either pre- or post- meeting). If you're able to socialize with strangers easily, you'll find out whether you fit in fairly quickly.
Not really. Only “advice” would be that every lodge can be quite different. And there are no rules that say which lodge you have to belong to. So shop around! See which group of guys you mesh with the best. The r/freemasonry subreddit can actually be pretty useful for newcomers.
Awakening the Ancestors - a sci-fan-fic pastoral pastiche in 7 movements, submitted for EA Post Prize #1: The World in 2072 (it didn't win) - how many references can you spot? https://pathfindings.substack.com/p/awakening-the-ancestors?s=w
Pregnancy advice question.
My wife was recently diagnosed with gestational diabetes and put on a low glycemic index diet. As far as I can tell the major risk of gestational diabetes is high birth weight but the literature all seems to suggest that high birth weight is a positive predictor of outcomes such as IQ all the way up to about 12lbs (our baby is only predicted to be at ~66th percentile of birth weight which is far below that). Is there a reason why you should want to treat the gestational diabetes and reduce the birth weight or is this just a way to make the obstetrician's life easier during the delivery?
I wouldn't fuck with it. My last kid was born to mom with GD, and she went to heroic efforts to control it, but he was still born a bit premature, had his sugar crash immediately after birth, and got jaundice. All quite treatable, and he's right as rain 18 years later, but who needs that stress?
Personally I'd say if you're considering running *any* kind of health risk for maybe possibly a few IQ points you're misinformed as to the priorities. Birth is a massive physical stress on both mother and child, even in the 21st century, and the list of things that can go drastically wrong in a flash with lifelong consequences is sobering. Give them both every advantage you can, however small. What you want is a healthy normal baby and a mom that bounces back in a day or two. If you can have both of these, take the money and run, give praise to your deity of choice, and be glad you aren't among the ~1 in 33 families for which the outcome is sad in some way or another.
There are many reasons why you want to control gestational diabetes.
Adverse health effects of uncontrolled maternal diabetes include:
-Shoulder dystocia (baby gets stuck, can lead to broken shoulder, oxygen deprivation)
-Greater risk of early preterm delivery
-Hypoglycemia(can't regulate blood sugar when born)(this is a common reason for full term babies to be in the NICU)
-Baby lung hypoplasia (baby can't breathe right)
-Baby has hypocalcemia (baby can get seizures)
-Baby more likely to have jaundice
I have a four and a half month old baby and a wife who had Gestational Diabetes. I did a pretty deep dive on this topic about 8 months ago but between the time and the sleep deprivation between now and then I can't cite how I got to these conclusions. Carbs seem to pretty directly correlate to birth weight which also correlated with IQ - goodness etc. But... high blood sugar damages a bunch of things and is more likely to get you a baby with an iffy pancreas and/or other things (nerves?). Resulting in a higher risk of obesity and (more than you would expect from the increased obesity) diabetes. I think there was also an increase in other health risks.
I think this was the most recent good study on the topic and it recommends a much higher carbohydrate threshold than historical recommendations (>175g/day) https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/8/2599
I don't remember all of why, but I thought they were too aggressive and concluded that a floor of 100g/day of carbs and a ceiling of about 200. We also switched to only complex carbs so she could eat more of them without spiking her blood sugar as much.
One of the issues with a low carb diet is that it has higher risks for nutritional issues, use a high quality prenatal and this issue should be moot. I used Life Extension because I respect the way they do research and update their formulas to reflect new findings (I'm not affiliated but I regularly buy their multivitamins and fish oil).
My baby was born at 6 lbs flat and one day after the cutoff to be early. He was small enough that the birth was not terribly damaging to his mother. He's now 3rd percentile for height, 8th percentile for weight, 35th percentile for head size, and 1 - 3 months ahead on basically all his milestones (and amazingly delightful in every way).
Thanks, that's useful additional context. One of my concerns reading through some of the gestational diabetes literature is that a lot of the papers control for birth weight in their models, which is a classic example of conditioning on a collider. i.e. if you control for an outcome of the diabetes you get a (badly calculated) version of the unmediated effect only, when what you want is the total effect (i.e. the effect that goes via any pathway including birth weight). So I'm a bit worried that the literature might be giving a misleading view on this.
Having diabetes isn't nice. Is the alternate plan to just not treat the diabetes and let the blood sugar run wild? She's gonna be pretty miserable doing that.
There's a large continuum between let the blood sugar run wild and tightly control it by cutting out almost all simple carbs.
Her original diagnosis was only barely over the diagnostic criteria (and wouldn't have met the criteria used 15 years ago). At the moment we have been controlling it very well with diet (i.e. her blood sugar readings look like someone without diabetes) but the baby has gone from 76th to 66th percentile size in that time which does raise the question is whether we're actually doing the right thing by controlling it as closely as we are. The doctors seem happy about the size decrease but I'm concerned about whether those recommendations are reliable given the literature on the positive effects of birth weight. The BMJ piece suggests ~0.5 IQ points per additional 100g birthweight (including in normal weight babies).
Well, the baby getting stuck is suboptimal for both kid and mom. Besides that, gestational diabetes is a pathologic process, not well understood in humans for experiment - blocking reasons which are probably pretty obvious. As said lower down, don't fret but do get the GD as under control as possible.
Quoting my wife, who has had GD: "High birth weight, in the abstract, is good because it's better than low birth weight. Low birth weight is correlated with a whole bunch of negative things (and often a result of smoking or poor nutrition during pregnancy). But HBW associated with GD is itself correlated with a risk of diabetes later in the child's life. Bottom line, don't focus on/obsess over birth weight, but do get the GD under control."
I would add that, in my wife's particular case, she found a bizarre magic-bullet cure for all her problems (constipation, anemia, hyperglycemia, swelling) by switching to an all-red-meat diet. Basically she subsisted off pure beef for a while. YMMV, only one data point, etc, but the effect was striking and essentially overnight. The child of that pregnancy (our third) was almost a pound heavier at birth and is now on track to be the tallest of our kids as an adult, but also totally healthy. None of our kids is anything like overweight; the elder two are rather skinny, like me.
Most pregnancy studies are pretty problematic but it looks to me like birth weight effects continue on into normal weight as well as just being about avoiding low birth weight. e.g. this sibling study published in BMJ of birth weight on IQ within the normal weight range:
https://www.bmj.com/content/323/7308/310.full?casa_token=GZxhLtd1x7wAAAAA%3AuQbq_vHAsjCCmrpzgSfh4m7uTlGRobirug5kKvf0N_wdS1H1_3xghjqJoiHbJtW-ZiOWnEcXYjo
Given the recommended amounts of vitamins pregnant women are supposed to take having such an unbalanced diet seems like a v bad idea. Except for iron I guess.
Several months ago there was a bounty announcement for a compilation of Robin Hansons best blog posts: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QaDwBio8MLqRvTREH/usd10k-bounty-read-and-compile-robin-hanson-s-best-posts
Does anybody know if that resulted in anything?
I wonder how we changed psychologically in the last hundred years or so due to mass empathy, caused by mass media. Before radio, TV and internet, the only emotions we came into contact with were our own and those of the people around us. Of course there were books and group gatherings, but nothing like now, where you get bombarded with other people's - real and fictional - emotions. And those generate empathy; a scary movie wouldn't be scary without empathy. So all day I 'feel' other people's emotions, from my friends on Facebook to fictional drug dealers in the Ozarks. Does anybody know if there has been anything written about how that changed us?
There were, of course, newspapers before radio, TV and internet, where you could read about the real-life sufferings of someone you didn't know.
But old-style newspaper articles tended to be much more "just the facts" while modern newspaper articles seem designed to weaponise our empathy against us, always starting with the "human interest" part of the story before talking about the big picture.
The obvious difference is that in pre-mass media days, you interacted very frequently and profoundly with your neighbours and your extended family. In a community of five hundred people, you would probably know nearly everyone by sight, and almost all of you would spend nearly all your time interacting with each other - at Church for example. Moreover, many of you would be related or would have known each other for decades, so the level of empathy *as you experienced it in everyday life* would have been a lot higher than anything you find today.
So maybe the main difference would be that now more/most of your empathy is spent on strangers and fictional characters.
Which seems... unhealthy to me. I've been happier since I joined a church, started building those real world connections as well as I'm able to approximate in the 21st century and ditched youtube.
I think you're selling pre-mass-media short. The appeal of theatre and opera was certainly running on empathy, to hew as close to your modern examples as possible; but beyond that, I think you'd be wrong to dismiss prose and even oral storytelling out of hand.
You're probably right about the appeal of pre-mass-media. However, I doubt it can compare to modern mass media in terms of volume and accessibility. Storytelling and prose definitely appeal to empathy, often on a deeper level than other media. But if I spend 20 minutes on the internet, the sheer number of viewpoints and emotions I am asked to empathize with, is a completely different experience, I think.
Say that I'm a woman on the curvier side. I'm happy with my breasts and hips but would like to slim down my waist a bit once or twice a month during parties and formal events. It looks like shapewear/corsets would be the thing I need, but it's a jungle out there. There's plenty of low-cost, low-quality (I assume) trash. The most vocal corset people seem to be BDSM cultists, not average gals that want to look a bit thinner sometimes. Thus me asking here.
Does anyone have a good beginners guide to shapewear? What are some quality brands that I can trust? Should I just bite the bullet and get a >$400 corset (money is not an issue anyway) and try to avoid getting sucked in by the vortex of "tight lacing" and "waist training" that seem to make up 95% of online corset discussion?
There is a quite big historical fashion community who discuss corsets in a very sensible and realistic way. In general, they all stress that a historical corset that fits your body should not be uncomfortable. So I guess wearing such a corset once in a while should not be a problem.
The difference between historical corsets and contemporary fashion/sexy underwear corsets is that historical corsets are used solely to achieve a specific body shape, they are never to be seen. Contemporary fashion corsets on the other hand are made to be seen, so they are not designed for changing your body shape/silhouette most efficiently.
The question is probably, what exact shape/silhouette you want to achieve. There are some videos that compare the effect of different historical corsets (https://youtu.be/PSvy8N61YnI and https://youtu.be/ZzKUI0TwgFM). Without knowing what kind of clothes you wear exactly, it's hard to recommend anything specific.
For buying corsets, I think the best strategy is to find someone on Etsy who makes historical corsets, and to discuss with them what you want.
I guess I've been overestimating how outfit-independent corsets are. I guess there's no magic "look good in every situation bullet" then. :(
I can personally recommend this corsetiere: https://www.asphyxiacouture.com/corsets
All of her corsets are custom made for your exact measurements, and she works with every client individually to ensure you're getting exactly what you need. She only uses high quality materials so they last a lifetime.
Thanks for the recommendations, but these designs seem very goth/burlesque/bdsm (e.g. the name). I just want something slimming to wear under my regular clothes. I guess she can make those as well though...
You could opt for a bodysuit. Keeps things tight and contained, but not as severely as a corset. Relatively inexpensive. You'd wear it under your clothing of choice, can be found in various colors including beige. If you're new to these and want to test the waters it is probably a good place to start.
The pro corset people say that shapewear only smooths. But I guess they're biased. Spanx seems to be the gold standard, is it a good lace to start?
It's a decent brand I hear, but plus size stores also have some, e.g. - https://www.penningtons.com/on/demandware.store/Sites-Penningtons_CA-Site/default/Search-Show?q=bodysuit
I think you'll be pleased with one, even if you do opt for a corset eventually.
edit: btw, if you or anyone knows of a source for plus-size lingerie worth checking out, I would like to know :/
As an informal information source, I would recommend The Lingerie Addict's articles on corsetry. I used to be really Into Corsets (from a fashion perspective as well as a history perspective) and skimming through a couple of their articles again, they're consistent with my knowledge. They also seem to acknowledge that there's a midpoint between "cheap fashion corset" and "tightlacing down ten inches" which, hopefully, will address your needs. Here's an article that might be useful: https://www.thelingerieaddict.com/2014/09/much-spend-corset.html
They mention specific brands, including Orchard Corset, which is the only one of those mentioned that I've personally bought from and that I have known other people to wear. I agree with the writer's assessment that it's a good balance between "cheap corset that has no real shaping" and "expensive corset for everyday wear."
I have no problem with buying a quality corset to use infrequently. I just have a hard time finding information about the use pattern I envision: most corset people seem to only talk about everyday wear, tight lacing etc. Where's the guide for "how to wear a corset infrequently"?
Hi! I'm 20 years old and from Argentina.
For the last two years, I've been doubting myself and spending a ridiculous amount of time finding the most optimal career path for me. My conclusion is that all roads lead to Software Engineering.
I plan to work on AI safety in the long term, but first, I need to start my career and focus on earning enough financial freedom.
The fastest route to getting a well-paid job in the IT field is learning Full Stack Web Development, so I'm doing that through The Odin Project.
About me: 123 IQ score (Raven's 2). Asperger's. 99th percentile for Extraversion, 98th Openness, 31st Conscientiousness (understandmyself.com). English level C1.
Any advice?
Hi David, not sure if you've seen this from Alexey Guzey, but might be useful in your situation... https://guzey.com/personal/what-should-you-do-with-your-life/
Yep, I did. But thanks tho.
Work on moving to the US.
Australia and New Zealand seem like better options.
How? The USA seems to be the best place for a well paid job in IT.
Yep, but it's much harder to get a Visa there being Argentinian; also, it's not cheap country to live, and my goal is to save money.