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Does anyone know of a study looking at what are the best predictors of whether a public policy will get chosen and implemented ? My guts tell me it's public opinion aka how popular the policy is, but I wad wondering if someone looked at that quantitatively.
How do people find interesting books? I read Scott's review of "Sadly, Porn" and during a question in the back of my mind was how I might find more weird and interesting books like that in the mass of literature being produced.
Has anyone written a really high quality take down of antinatalism? I find it kind of "obviously" wrong and "edgy" but it would be easier to reject fully if I see a well articulated "case against antinatalism" article, if anyone has seen one. Thanks!
BEG: I recently saw a link and comment to a news story or article on AI and the Chinese Social Credit system with the comment on the link stating surprise at Chinas desire to have/not have AI manage the social credit system. Now I cannot find that post, I thought it was ACX, but also looked at ZVI and Marginal Revolution. Does anyone know or recognize this post and where I can find it? Thank you
I was watching Robert Miles last video on the "rational animation" yt channel. At a certain point he mention that we should not be concerned about well-aligned AGI stealing our jobs because it will accelerate progress, eliminate scarcity, extend life etc..
Leaving aside the fact that maybe scarcity of intellectual labour is not the bottleneck in the most sci-fi of those things, i still don't see why i shouldn't be scared of losing my job to a well-aligned AI. I have no problem believing that if you are in the top 1% IQ it is going to be great for you, but what about midwits like myself? As it stands, the "utopian" future sound really like we are going to be completely useless to economy and society and kept at bay by a monthly check (and a vr set on our head).
Yes, material conditions would be improving a lot in this scenario, but as rampant mental ilnesses in people of my age in first world countries are showing, material conditions are necessary but not sufficient. What good it is to have radical abundance and live meaningless boring lifes where all days look like sunday afternoon?
And even if there will be no superintelligent AI (indeed, i am pretty skeptical), the jobs that could be automated by evolutions of today AIs like GPT and DALLE are not menial jobs that make our life worse. Are precisely those creative jobs like artists, writer, that make life meaningful. I do not want to live in a world where all art is produced by a machine.
(And as a phd student, neither i want AI in science)
Can someone recommend a "popular art history" book? I read a fair bit of "popular science," and am looking for something similar but applied to (not-exceptionally-modern) art. Some examples of what I'd be interested in reading:
- where [time period / geographic location / school] sourced its materials, and how this is reflected in the visual qualities. E.g. the ways in which painting in tempera is different from painting in oil, or the way in which glass availability influences Byzantine mosaics.
- how [time period / geographic location / school] thought about religion, and how this is reflected in the art. I know some very broad things like "reformation => iconoclasm => fewer Virgin Mary statues" but would like some fine details like "canonical iconography in Eastern Orthodox representations of Virgin Mary".
- how backgrounds evolve. Flemish paintings of Biblical scenes are invariably set in, well, Flanders, which makes sense given that the goal is to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, but presumably traditions about how exactly you represent Palestine or Egypt evolved over time?
The above is pretty Western-European-Christian-painting-centric, largely because that's the tradition I know most about, but I'll take very tangentially related recommendations, too -- although e.g. the evolution of Quranic calligraphy might be tricky given how I don't read Arabic.
The State of Oregon passed Measure 110 almost two years ago, decriminalizing many, if not all street drugs. Is it possible to find an unbiased analysis of it's effects, if any?
The USA should limit presidents to single term only. Clearly the nation can't trust itself to not support wannabe dictators' bids for power. Single term executive branch would not prevent an overall single party rule from happening but that is still strictly better outcome than the governance captured by a single individual where merit becomes equal to the personal loyalty. Any cons?
We have a discord server for Dutch rationalists and rationalists in NL. Feel free to come join us! We're pretty active! Meetups and other activities are also organized there.
Could depression be a result of high self-confidence? (speculative)
After reading a couple of books on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, I have started questioning my interpretation of past events that have caused me trauma. This often causes me relief, as I am forced to interpret events in a new light. Prior to this, I used to have a very high confidence that my interpretations of past events were the "correct ones", and that alternate interpretations weren't possible. Hence, I would be stuck in a hell-hole of my own making.
This high confidence in beliefs also shows in other aspects of my life. I can be bad at solving puzzles because I often think that an arbitrary choice that I have made at some stage is the "correct one". My girlfriend, on the other hand, who is generally unsure about her choices, does not have any semblance of depression. I realize that this is an n=1 hypothesis, but every day I find more evidence for this proposition.
For some values of "forever" this would be possible, simply because the Russians have made it clear that their objectives are not primarily territorial. After the serious fighting is over, there will still be a "Ukraine", at perhaps two thirds of its current size, with a government of sorts and a limited military capability. It could commit itself politically to recovering the Donbas, refuse to sign a peace treaty and so forth, and in that sense the war would not be "over."
But it would be over in every other sense. I think that a new generation of pundits has come to think of Afghanistan as typical of what wars are like, and that war could indeed have gone on forever (it seemed to, to those of us who remember the beginning). But the war in Ukraine is not a low-intensity counter-insurgency, it's a modern high-intensity attrition war, and such a war is lost by the side whose military capability is destroyed the fastest. The Russians have opted to fight the war largely with missiles, artillery and airpower/drones, and have been targeting, according to their press statements, not just formed units, but more importantly HQs, repair depots, ammunition depots and training facilities. In other words, they are targeting the long-term capability of the Ukrainians to regenerate a serious military force. Most of the ground troops engaged have been locals from the Lugansk and Donetsk militias, and the Russians have kept their more modern, mobile forces in reserve for whatever the next phase is going to be. Western arms deliveries will slow this down slightly, but even western governments admit that its all they can do. the HIMARS system, for example, available in small numbers with limited ammunition, only makes up very partially for the similar Soviet and Russian-designed systems the UA had at the beginning of the war and which have mostly been destroyed.
I suspect that what will be decisive is the attitude of the West. If you read western statements carefully, they are much more downbeat than they were a couple of months ago, and no major western government now seriously believes in "victory" in the sense they described it earlier. Recent arms deliveries for example have been justified as "improving Ukraine's bargaining position." And the West is getting towards the end of what it is willing and able to send. I'm sure there are those, not least in Washington, who dream of embroiling the Russians in some kind of guerrilla war on the frontiers of the Russian-speaking areas, but how much continued appetite western governments have for this conflict isn't clear. So it really does depend on what you mean by "war" and "forever."
Here's a topic I'd love to explore in more depth - the impacts of pollutants on low birth rates. To be clear, I think scientists in the area have a VERY good grasp on this topic, but based on what I see in lay conversation, I don't think this knowledge has penetrated into society as a whole.
I see a lot of conversations about low birth rates which focus on economic and social factors as well as on access to birth control, which I'm not trying to contradict at all, but it seems odd that such conversations very rarely touch on the direct reductions in biological fertility for both men and women caused by environmental pollutants.
These effects are not small - for *individual* types of pollutants such as fertilizers we see results like:
"women who ate more than two servings of high-pesticide fruits or vegetables each day, compared with women who ate an average of one each day, were 18% less likely to become pregnant and 26% less likely to have a live birth than women with the lowest exposure."
"Women with the highest levels of PCBs have a serious 50% decrease in their ability to get pregnant5 and if become pregnant are much more likely to miscarry.6 In women farmers in Ontario, fertility decreased in proportion to pesticide use.7,8 The worst pesticides and herbicides appear to be dicamba (49% decrease in fertility), glyphosate (39%), 2,4-D (29%), organophosphates (25%), and thiocarbamates (24%). When infertile couples seek IVF, those with the highest levels of PCBs were much more unlikely to achieve pregnancy."
I find these figures somewhat alarming (especially having lived for years next to fields treated with glyphosate and 2,4-D!) but they don't seem to be the prevailing non-scientist opinion as to why birth rates are low. Thoughts?
MidJourney is an AI for making images from a text prompt that gets tiny fractions of the publicity that Dall-E does, but is available via a beta to the public right now, and in my testing is pretty good, better at some things than Dall-E.
I find the discord-based UI maddening, but the model is still worthwhile. I am in no way affiliated with the project.
The site isn't automatically updating the page with new comments as quickly as it used to. I have no idea whether it's a problem at my end or your end.
Sideways griping at the Powers That Be: it really is quite annoying that Substack sends notification emails for *both* replies and Likes, and those are bundled under the same account control setting. I care very much about the former and not at all about the latter. In fact it's quite alarming to wake up to several dozen unread emails on those rare occasions I write something likeable on a Substack that didn't default-disable that system. Sure makes maintaining Inbox Zero* a lot more annoying! This alone makes me appreciate Scott removing the functionality, and I hope that stays the policy indefinitely.
* (Wise People have told me not to pursue Inbox Zero. It's Sisyphean, they said. Unfortunately I'm just Neurotic enough that Plausibly-Achievable Perfections are not really things I can pass up without feeling really bad about it. Some rocks you just gotta roll, no matter what.)
For anyone who missed them buried at extremities of the last two Open Threads, and who'd like to be able to connect with fellow ACX regulars beyond these pages, my partners and I have released the waiting list for our new-friend-making platform, Surf.
I was thinking about your piece on the homicide spike and I have an alternate theory, a variant on the cabin fever theory. Basically my thinking is it's possible that cabin fever made people generally edgier and lowered their threshold for committing violence, and that combined with the ready availability of guns in the US was the powder keg that the BLM protests put a match to (and I say that as someone who thinks "shall not be infringed" should be interpreted literally). As I recall, until around May people were still taking the whole "stay inside" thing fairly seriously; after BLM everyone was going back out, either to protest or because it was clear that if people were protesting, covid must not be such a big deal. Close proximity+guns+cabin fever=homicide.
This theory makes some predictions. First of all, you'd expect to see increased domestic violence relative to baseline from the cabin fever aspect even before the loosening of lockdowns and BLM. Second of all, you'd expect in countries without easily available guns to still see an uptick in violent crime, just not necessarily homicide because it's not as easy to kill someone without a gun, and you'd expect those upticks to coincide with easing of lockdowns. Countries that had multiple lockdowns would be good case studies for this hypothesis. Third, you'd expect to see more of a spike in demographics that have higher levels of gun ownership. Fourth, as the cornerstone of the theory, you'd expect people to be willing to commit violence more easily than pre-lockdown, although I don't know if there's a good way to confirm that; I don't know what sort of data on "violence thresholds" pre and post-lockdown is out there.
I'm not sure yet if the data bears any of this out, but it strikes me as a plausible alternate theory. Maybe I'll write something up on it at some point.
In the 20 years since 9/11 (and before in Europe) why hasn’t the technology or procedure improved for airport security? It’s a matter of getting people on one side of the airport to the other. There’s ample space on the other side. Yet people wait hours, miss flights and so on. Why haven’t airports tried to get security times down to say 5 minutes per person even at busy times by the radical example of opening more security lanes, hiring more staff, upgrading scanning technology, even moving to a random searches and scans.
Chalk it up to even more examples of modern incompetence.
Has anyone else felt some small part of their brain being vindicated re: carbon tax feasibility, with inflation raising food prices and people still continuing to buy lots of groceries? I'm thinking of meat consumption in particular - can't speak for national trends, but shoppers in SF absolutely do still continue the covid-provoked "buy 6 family sized packages of chicken" thing, even 2.5 years later. This hasn't slowed down at all even as prices have gone up prodigiously.
Obviously I don't think this is a Good Thing(tm), we're not getting anything meaningful out of losing Value to inflation, and it's not a perfect natural experiment. But it gives me hope, or at least retroactive hope, that such works-on-paper ideas may indeed work in real life if conditions are different. People adjust to New Normals faster than they expect.
OK, I'm a believer. The stats I learned I understood well, but that was several decades ago and I have not kept up with advances. But I do grasp the concept of the need to adjust for multiple comparisons, and you sound like you have your head screwed on straight about what's the best way to do that.
I'm working for an open source Bayesian statistics project as part of the University of Cambridge. If you know anyone who works in media, please let me know! I've built an elections forecast to raise funds and awareness for our group, and I'm interested in working together with a media company to publish it. Details can be found here:
I recently heard about the Khan World School through an interview with it's found on the People I Mostly Admire podcast. It's being run by Sal Khan of Khan Academy of in coordination with the University of Chicago (to help design curriculum) and Arizona State University (to run and help finance it, I believe)
As a community that is generally interested in schooling and (in some cases) quite skeptical of traditional schooling, I'm wondering about people's thoughts on it.
Obviously it's too new to be able to say anything concrete, but to me it seems rather exciting and seems like a much bigger experiment/change than even most charter schools. Sal Khan had previously run a small lab school in CA that (despite a whole host of confounders) seemed rather promising.
Oh no! Deiseach got banned again? And I can't even see the comment that triggered it since it's in the subscriber only thread. Ah well, at least it's only for a month. I'm sure we'll all muddle through till then.
Along the lines of the BLM/Homicide spike there was a pretty similar debate occurring fifteen years ago that started with an Atlantic article titled American Murder Mystery that discussed an academic theory whereby knocking down traditional concentrated high rise housing projects and providing section 8 vouchers through the Federal Hope VI program just spread all the problems of concentrated ghetto housing onto working class neighborhoods. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american-murder-mystery/306872/
Many were not happy with this characterization and many efforts were made to discredit the entire theory:
I would love to see Scott apply his talent to this as well. On the one hand the theory passed the anecdotal/personal account explanation. Many civilians and police officers in various cities that were affected by this gave a similar account of the Hope VI program spreading the ghetto to low crime but poorish and vulnerable inner ring suburbs that, after ten or so years, just looked much more like the ghetto. I believe academic researchers later showed that while there were big spikes in violent crime in these communities that received the new residents, it couldn't be proven that the section 8 tenants were actually the criminal offenders.
If Democrats hadn't rigged the 2020 election, wouldn't they have insisted on an audit to prove their 81 million votes were genuine and true? At a minimum they would have taken steps to ensure future elections are more trustworthy and ease concerns in SOME small way no? Always watch what they are doing not what they are saying. When they accuse others of something there is a 99% chance they are doing that exact crime themselves and telling everyone to LOOK over there ELVIS!
I'm looking for a statistician who is experienced in a very specific kind of survey. All our statisticians have told us, basically, "This is a branch of stats I'm not comfortable working in." What are we doing? In general, we're trying to create a validated tool for making a medical assessment based on complex criteria. We have about 15 people who have completed the grading exercise, then they took a break of about 2 weeks and took the exercise again. Now we need to do some statistics comparing inter-rater reliability with pre-determined expected scores, as well as comparing intra-rater reliability.
A similar publication to ours, but in a different indication, used Kendall's tau and another test. I'm not experienced enough to understand the nuances, though. We need someone who understands the statistics well enough to help us understand what we're doing and how to ensure we don't run the wrong test. This would be for publication, but we can also compensate for time spent.
I know this isn't a classified thread, but I was hoping someone could point me to a good statistician who has worked on something like this in the past.
There's a sort of viral topic going around: Do people look younger than they used to?
All of the explanations I've seen offered - sunscreen, total sun exposure, and smoking - seem to indicate an interesting research question: Do nerds look younger than non-nerds?
Much of the gun discourse in the United States is focused on mass-shootings, which while gruesome, account for a miniscule number of deaths, comparable to the number of deaths-by-lightning-strike.
The vast majority of gun homicides are non-mass, non-police, non-accidental shootings (see 2nd BBC graphic), but I don't have a good sense for how all of this one-on-one violence breaks down. Is it mostly gang violence? Personal vendettas? Home invasions?
This seems like a key question to answer to be able to have any sort of factually-grounded gun control debate. (For the record, I agree that basic additional regulations like more in-depth background checks, are warranted.)
I’ve heard it claimed that some birds, like crows, are incredibly smart, perhaps on par with some of the smarter mammals. Since birds have somewhat different brain structure than mammals do, it may be the case that even if birds and mammals are similarly intelligent overall (for some definition of similar), they could have different intellectual strengths. Is this the case? Are there things that mammals tend to be good at intellectually, but not birds, and vice versa?
Another potential problem humans and possibly domesticated animals are facing.
Dysgenics (negative correlation between fertility and IQ and increasing mutational load in humans due to a low mortality rate) means we wont be solving future problems more quickly or cheaply. This is explained here -> https://qr.ae/pvMrj3. We need to solve the hard problems now.
"Yes, the human genome is degrading. This is a well-established, noncontroversial finding. This phenomenon is called “increasing mutational load” and is based on concepts developed by one of the great geneticists, H. Muller, roughly 70 years ago.[1]
The theory
Harmful mutations come into being all the time. The average newborn has 50–100 new mutations. Though most are harmless, about 1 to 4 of those are harmful.[2] Normally, natural selection causes people having those mutations to die out or not have children, so eventually, those mutations get eliminated.
But our lives aren’t natural anymore. At the beginning of the 20th century, people having genes predisposing them to diabetes would have died young. That’s the normal process of natural selection. Now, those people get life-saving insulin, so they live normal lives and have as many children as anyone else. (Type 1 diabetes, the kind that can appear before you start having children, is highly heritable.[3]) The children of diabetics inherit the genes that make one susceptible to diabetes, so those genes aren’t being eliminated.
The same thing is happening for many diseases that have a genetic component. People that would have died in the past now live nearly-normal lives, and pass on their genes to the next generation.
It’s scary
One investigator calculated that without natural selection, fitness will decline 1 to 3% per generation, and then went on to write the most frightening paragraph I have ever seen in a biological publication:
Thus, the preceding observations paint a rather stark picture. At least in highly industrialized societies, the impact of deleterious mutations is accumulating on a time scale that is approximately the same as that for scenarios associated with global warming ... Without a reduction in the germline transmission of deleterious mutations, the mean phenotypes of the residents of industrialized nations are likely to be rather different in just two or three centuries, with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels.[4]
If you don’t normally read biological publications, this paragraph may seem tame to you, but this is as alarmist as biologists ever get.
Not so scary
If medicine and biology keep advancing, they will always stay ahead of the increasing mutational load. Someday, there will be good treatments for asthma, Crohn’s disease, diabetes, obesity, and other genetic diseases, so it won’t matter if the genes causing them to become common.
But if civilization ever crashes, people with multiple genetic defects might not survive.
I would like to get some social-interaction advice.
I was waiting in an airport security line, which was quite long, a few days ago. When I was about 3/4 done a man cut in line directly next to me. I told him "Hey, the end of the line is back there." He just shrugged it off. I called him an unsocial a**hole, and he agreed on that, still standing in line.
What should one do in such a situation? I didn't contact any personel, because i was quite late to my flight.
Curious what y'all think of starmanning [1], an enhanced version of steelmanning.
My impression is that anyone steelmanning already has the forethought to starman. But one thing I see Scott doing is assuming the good intentions of his opponent even when _criticizing_ their ideas, which I think deserves it's own rhetorical category.
So one of my friends ( a fellow math grad student) raised the idea of holding a virtual math conference via minecraft (sort of like a fortnite concert I guess). As far as we can tell, this hasn’t been done before, and the idea is that there might be some combinatorial/applied math/topology problems that could be presented creatively using Minecraft, and some presenters might also be intrigued/amused by the setting.
So, I figured I’d ask here if anyone happens to know research/researchers that might fit well with such a setting.
Just to note, this is more to try and assess what the focus of the conference might be on rather than hunting for specific speakers at the moment. Thanks!
There’s a line in Kafka’s diaries that goes something like: “All social circles are united by a particular form of insanity and that insanity prevents the members of the circle from being aware of it.”
I always found that darkly funny without really understanding what it means. But I recently caught myself thinking about how I view a particular informal group as more or less The Voice of Reason and how if they find my thoughts on a subject reasonable then those thoughts probably are and vice/versa. Then I thought, wait, perhaps I deem this group reasonable precisely because they are unreasonable in the same kind of way I am, which is the real reason we all find each other so uncommonly sane and reasonable. Then I remembered the Kafka quote and realized I had likely discovered its meaning at long last.
It seems that we are all in the dark when it comes to determining what is reasonable.
I wrote "Long COVID Doesn't Affect 25% of Kids" which is an analysis of a recent meta-analysis that was widely circulated on social media. I appreciate any input and suggestions.
For many years I've wanted to kill myself. I have no dreams or interest in doing anything whatsoever. From an outsider's perspective I probably look like a leech upon society. It is in society's best interest to let me kill myself.
All needs and desires seem to stem from continued existence, while my only desire is to end this life.
Prior attempts at ending my life have all ended in failure. The only thing that fills me with hope is the knowledge that sooner or later I will succeed, or time will end me.
Why do so many people feel the need to impose their values and beliefs onto others, forcing them to live against their will?
Every tool and service related to suicide is setup to try and prevent you from engaging in this act, so they're useless to me.
When I post about this online, people usually report me as if that will actually help or do anything. It's the ultimate form of trying to brush someone off without doing anything to ease their suffering.
It gets to me that Effective Altruism is a reasonable effort to get good results from charity (and it's done some of that), but it's also led to a lot of people making themselves and each other miserable, not to mention a lot of wasted effort.
It doesn't seem quite like Moloch, and it's a bit subtle for Coyote's sense of humor. Maybe Murphy?
Suppose I find my girlfriend attractive but not as much as I’d like to. Suppose also that I can think of at least two things she could do that would make her more attractive to me, which require a small or large effort from her and none from me. Suppose further that she cares very much how attractive I find her - for her own sake as well as mine - and would likely be eager to put in considerable effort to maximise it, given the option. Suppose finally that finding out that I don’t already find her maximally attractive would be confirmation of her worst fear and would lead to considerable disutility on her part.
Hey! I understand that maybe interest in Ukrainian-Russian War is dwindling in the West, but maybe some people are interested in learning more about Ukraine, and if so - what do you want to know?
I am trying to improve my forecasting skills and I was looking for a tool that would allow me to design a graph/network where I could place some statement as a node with an attached probability (confidence level) and then the nodes can be linked so that I can automatically compute the joint or disjoint probability etc.
It seems such a tool could be quite useful, for a forecast with many inputs.
I am not sure if bayesian networks or influence graphs are what I am looking for or if they could be used for such scope. Nevertheless, I haven't exactly found a super user-friendly tool for either of them.
Do you know of a truly international news site? Sth. that has no specific geographical focus. Or can you recommend news outlets which cover one continent or some part of it?
I assume that a fairly large number of readers of ACX were brought into the Dall-E beta in the last week. Anyone have any big insights?
I have mostly been hoping to use Dall-E as a tool to assist with crafting collateral for tabletop RPGs -- for example, I hoped to make character portraits, evocative pictures of settings, and perhaps maps. Some experiences:
1. Dall-E's content filters for violence are a hindrance. Mentioning a weapon (like "war mace") will sometimes get your prompt thrown out, even if you are looking for a portrait of a single character just holding it.
2. I have not found it to be really able to create the kind of outfits that I'm looking for for classic D&D-style games from just a text prompt. It's much easier to use an image prompt to get it into the right general search space and then use the editing tools.
3. Dall-E had pretty strong biases against some of the "almost realistic, but with one feature that's fantastic" things that you commonly see in fantasy. For example, it doesn't really like to show people with pointy elf ears, and if you do a variant on a picture with pointy ears, my experience is that all the variants will have normal ears. I tried to get it to draw a fox with multiple tails with very little success -- Dall-E knows how many tails a fox has, and it's one!
4. I got a lot better results with portraits when I basically treated the face and the rest of the portrait as separate problems. Dall-E struggles with faces, so you're pretty unlikely to both get a good face and a good everything else you want in a single pass. Instead, I've learned to work on getting a good "everything else," then edit the image, erase the face (or the part of it that seems bad), and try a few passes at getting Dall-E to just create a good face.
8 % on Ukrainian victory (down from 10 % on June 20).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24, regardless of whether it is now directly controlled by Russia (Crimea), or by its proxies (Donetsk and Luhansk "republics”), without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
29 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 25 % on June 20).
63 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 65 % on June 20).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
It surely seems that predictions of Russia-doomers (like Kamil Galleev, but I have Twitter blocked, so don’t ask me for examples) how Russian collapse is just around the corner are not panning out.
Italian government collapsed and there will be new elections on September 25. Italy is third largest EU country, very important in its decision-making processes. I know little about Italian politics, but from foreign reporting it seems like ousted prime minister Draghi is, in Italian context, something like a Russia hawk, and among Italian parties there is almost no one who would want to do MORE to support Ukraine (unlike in Germany), so election are going to result in either “no changes” or a government with an attitude more conciliatory to Russia (happy to be corrected on this).
On the other hand, Ukraine, and Western support for it, is not on track to collapse either. Possible opening of Black sea ports might help Ukrainian economy. Since my previous update, fivethirtyeight.com unveiled their prediction of US congressional elections, with Democrats currently having 15 % chance to retain the House; that is higher than I guessed based on Biden's approval rating. I think that if Republicans win, probability that US gradually and subtly scales down its support for Ukraine increases, since Biden will look for ways to “change course”, as US pundits say. And it is rather unlikely that he would change course in the direction of more support for Ukraine.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of this year, that is.
I also suspect that "listening to my heart" may be a learnable skill that can give access/control over the stress response at least as it relates to heart rate variability. Unfortunately, when I "listen to my heart" through meditation, all I hear is ba-dump ba-dump ba-dump.
Has anyone had any luck with this? Is this a worthwhile direction to explore?
On his page in Lorien Psychiatry (https://lorienpsych.com/2021/06/05/depression/), Scott says that electroconvusive therapy has a basically-100% success rate in treating depression, the closest thing we have to a miracle cure. However, when I had ECT, it didn't help at all; I spent a month in a very confused state of mind, and then my depression returned in full force. Why could that happen? What are some of your hypotheses? Or was I just one of the year's unlucky 100 000?
We probably get better listening at to our guts as we get older because our stomach linings get thinner, and so we become more sensitive to changes in acidity
Any economist want to opine on whether raising interest rates is the best or fairest ways, these days, to fight an inflation that’s clearly not driven by wage increases. Is there really no other tool to fight inflation?
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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/30/world/americas/haiti-government-gangs.html
This frightening article about Haiti prompts me to repost something I wrote previously.
Rodes.pub/Haiti
Peter Rodes Robinson
Does anyone know of a study looking at what are the best predictors of whether a public policy will get chosen and implemented ? My guts tell me it's public opinion aka how popular the policy is, but I wad wondering if someone looked at that quantitatively.
How do people find interesting books? I read Scott's review of "Sadly, Porn" and during a question in the back of my mind was how I might find more weird and interesting books like that in the mass of literature being produced.
Has anyone written a really high quality take down of antinatalism? I find it kind of "obviously" wrong and "edgy" but it would be easier to reject fully if I see a well articulated "case against antinatalism" article, if anyone has seen one. Thanks!
BEG: I recently saw a link and comment to a news story or article on AI and the Chinese Social Credit system with the comment on the link stating surprise at Chinas desire to have/not have AI manage the social credit system. Now I cannot find that post, I thought it was ACX, but also looked at ZVI and Marginal Revolution. Does anyone know or recognize this post and where I can find it? Thank you
I was watching Robert Miles last video on the "rational animation" yt channel. At a certain point he mention that we should not be concerned about well-aligned AGI stealing our jobs because it will accelerate progress, eliminate scarcity, extend life etc..
Leaving aside the fact that maybe scarcity of intellectual labour is not the bottleneck in the most sci-fi of those things, i still don't see why i shouldn't be scared of losing my job to a well-aligned AI. I have no problem believing that if you are in the top 1% IQ it is going to be great for you, but what about midwits like myself? As it stands, the "utopian" future sound really like we are going to be completely useless to economy and society and kept at bay by a monthly check (and a vr set on our head).
Yes, material conditions would be improving a lot in this scenario, but as rampant mental ilnesses in people of my age in first world countries are showing, material conditions are necessary but not sufficient. What good it is to have radical abundance and live meaningless boring lifes where all days look like sunday afternoon?
And even if there will be no superintelligent AI (indeed, i am pretty skeptical), the jobs that could be automated by evolutions of today AIs like GPT and DALLE are not menial jobs that make our life worse. Are precisely those creative jobs like artists, writer, that make life meaningful. I do not want to live in a world where all art is produced by a machine.
(And as a phd student, neither i want AI in science)
Wondering how demining looks as an EA goal.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/4axwe3/wildfires-are-setting-off-100-year-old-bombs-on-wwi-battlefields
Can someone recommend a "popular art history" book? I read a fair bit of "popular science," and am looking for something similar but applied to (not-exceptionally-modern) art. Some examples of what I'd be interested in reading:
- where [time period / geographic location / school] sourced its materials, and how this is reflected in the visual qualities. E.g. the ways in which painting in tempera is different from painting in oil, or the way in which glass availability influences Byzantine mosaics.
- how [time period / geographic location / school] thought about religion, and how this is reflected in the art. I know some very broad things like "reformation => iconoclasm => fewer Virgin Mary statues" but would like some fine details like "canonical iconography in Eastern Orthodox representations of Virgin Mary".
- how backgrounds evolve. Flemish paintings of Biblical scenes are invariably set in, well, Flanders, which makes sense given that the goal is to make the scenes relatable to the contemporary audience, but presumably traditions about how exactly you represent Palestine or Egypt evolved over time?
The above is pretty Western-European-Christian-painting-centric, largely because that's the tradition I know most about, but I'll take very tangentially related recommendations, too -- although e.g. the evolution of Quranic calligraphy might be tricky given how I don't read Arabic.
The State of Oregon passed Measure 110 almost two years ago, decriminalizing many, if not all street drugs. Is it possible to find an unbiased analysis of it's effects, if any?
The USA should limit presidents to single term only. Clearly the nation can't trust itself to not support wannabe dictators' bids for power. Single term executive branch would not prevent an overall single party rule from happening but that is still strictly better outcome than the governance captured by a single individual where merit becomes equal to the personal loyalty. Any cons?
We have a discord server for Dutch rationalists and rationalists in NL. Feel free to come join us! We're pretty active! Meetups and other activities are also organized there.
Link: https://discord.gg/uDc8geEt
Self-promotion, but here's a blog about the General Factor of Personality. It has been debated since Galton but still no consensus about what it is or if it exists: https://vectors.substack.com/p/primary-factor-of-personality-part
Could depression be a result of high self-confidence? (speculative)
After reading a couple of books on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, I have started questioning my interpretation of past events that have caused me trauma. This often causes me relief, as I am forced to interpret events in a new light. Prior to this, I used to have a very high confidence that my interpretations of past events were the "correct ones", and that alternate interpretations weren't possible. Hence, I would be stuck in a hell-hole of my own making.
This high confidence in beliefs also shows in other aspects of my life. I can be bad at solving puzzles because I often think that an arbitrary choice that I have made at some stage is the "correct one". My girlfriend, on the other hand, who is generally unsure about her choices, does not have any semblance of depression. I realize that this is an n=1 hypothesis, but every day I find more evidence for this proposition.
For some values of "forever" this would be possible, simply because the Russians have made it clear that their objectives are not primarily territorial. After the serious fighting is over, there will still be a "Ukraine", at perhaps two thirds of its current size, with a government of sorts and a limited military capability. It could commit itself politically to recovering the Donbas, refuse to sign a peace treaty and so forth, and in that sense the war would not be "over."
But it would be over in every other sense. I think that a new generation of pundits has come to think of Afghanistan as typical of what wars are like, and that war could indeed have gone on forever (it seemed to, to those of us who remember the beginning). But the war in Ukraine is not a low-intensity counter-insurgency, it's a modern high-intensity attrition war, and such a war is lost by the side whose military capability is destroyed the fastest. The Russians have opted to fight the war largely with missiles, artillery and airpower/drones, and have been targeting, according to their press statements, not just formed units, but more importantly HQs, repair depots, ammunition depots and training facilities. In other words, they are targeting the long-term capability of the Ukrainians to regenerate a serious military force. Most of the ground troops engaged have been locals from the Lugansk and Donetsk militias, and the Russians have kept their more modern, mobile forces in reserve for whatever the next phase is going to be. Western arms deliveries will slow this down slightly, but even western governments admit that its all they can do. the HIMARS system, for example, available in small numbers with limited ammunition, only makes up very partially for the similar Soviet and Russian-designed systems the UA had at the beginning of the war and which have mostly been destroyed.
I suspect that what will be decisive is the attitude of the West. If you read western statements carefully, they are much more downbeat than they were a couple of months ago, and no major western government now seriously believes in "victory" in the sense they described it earlier. Recent arms deliveries for example have been justified as "improving Ukraine's bargaining position." And the West is getting towards the end of what it is willing and able to send. I'm sure there are those, not least in Washington, who dream of embroiling the Russians in some kind of guerrilla war on the frontiers of the Russian-speaking areas, but how much continued appetite western governments have for this conflict isn't clear. So it really does depend on what you mean by "war" and "forever."
Here's a topic I'd love to explore in more depth - the impacts of pollutants on low birth rates. To be clear, I think scientists in the area have a VERY good grasp on this topic, but based on what I see in lay conversation, I don't think this knowledge has penetrated into society as a whole.
I see a lot of conversations about low birth rates which focus on economic and social factors as well as on access to birth control, which I'm not trying to contradict at all, but it seems odd that such conversations very rarely touch on the direct reductions in biological fertility for both men and women caused by environmental pollutants.
These effects are not small - for *individual* types of pollutants such as fertilizers we see results like:
"women who ate more than two servings of high-pesticide fruits or vegetables each day, compared with women who ate an average of one each day, were 18% less likely to become pregnant and 26% less likely to have a live birth than women with the lowest exposure."
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/pesticides-produce-fertility-women/
"Women with the highest levels of PCBs have a serious 50% decrease in their ability to get pregnant5 and if become pregnant are much more likely to miscarry.6 In women farmers in Ontario, fertility decreased in proportion to pesticide use.7,8 The worst pesticides and herbicides appear to be dicamba (49% decrease in fertility), glyphosate (39%), 2,4-D (29%), organophosphates (25%), and thiocarbamates (24%). When infertile couples seek IVF, those with the highest levels of PCBs were much more unlikely to achieve pregnancy."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6396757/
I find these figures somewhat alarming (especially having lived for years next to fields treated with glyphosate and 2,4-D!) but they don't seem to be the prevailing non-scientist opinion as to why birth rates are low. Thoughts?
MidJourney is an AI for making images from a text prompt that gets tiny fractions of the publicity that Dall-E does, but is available via a beta to the public right now, and in my testing is pretty good, better at some things than Dall-E.
I find the discord-based UI maddening, but the model is still worthwhile. I am in no way affiliated with the project.
https://www.midjourney.com/home/
The site isn't automatically updating the page with new comments as quickly as it used to. I have no idea whether it's a problem at my end or your end.
Sideways griping at the Powers That Be: it really is quite annoying that Substack sends notification emails for *both* replies and Likes, and those are bundled under the same account control setting. I care very much about the former and not at all about the latter. In fact it's quite alarming to wake up to several dozen unread emails on those rare occasions I write something likeable on a Substack that didn't default-disable that system. Sure makes maintaining Inbox Zero* a lot more annoying! This alone makes me appreciate Scott removing the functionality, and I hope that stays the policy indefinitely.
* (Wise People have told me not to pursue Inbox Zero. It's Sisyphean, they said. Unfortunately I'm just Neurotic enough that Plausibly-Achievable Perfections are not really things I can pass up without feeling really bad about it. Some rocks you just gotta roll, no matter what.)
For anyone who missed them buried at extremities of the last two Open Threads, and who'd like to be able to connect with fellow ACX regulars beyond these pages, my partners and I have released the waiting list for our new-friend-making platform, Surf.
You can check it out here https://www.imsurf.in/
Lots of great requests, from ACX users and beyond, on there already!
I was thinking about your piece on the homicide spike and I have an alternate theory, a variant on the cabin fever theory. Basically my thinking is it's possible that cabin fever made people generally edgier and lowered their threshold for committing violence, and that combined with the ready availability of guns in the US was the powder keg that the BLM protests put a match to (and I say that as someone who thinks "shall not be infringed" should be interpreted literally). As I recall, until around May people were still taking the whole "stay inside" thing fairly seriously; after BLM everyone was going back out, either to protest or because it was clear that if people were protesting, covid must not be such a big deal. Close proximity+guns+cabin fever=homicide.
This theory makes some predictions. First of all, you'd expect to see increased domestic violence relative to baseline from the cabin fever aspect even before the loosening of lockdowns and BLM. Second of all, you'd expect in countries without easily available guns to still see an uptick in violent crime, just not necessarily homicide because it's not as easy to kill someone without a gun, and you'd expect those upticks to coincide with easing of lockdowns. Countries that had multiple lockdowns would be good case studies for this hypothesis. Third, you'd expect to see more of a spike in demographics that have higher levels of gun ownership. Fourth, as the cornerstone of the theory, you'd expect people to be willing to commit violence more easily than pre-lockdown, although I don't know if there's a good way to confirm that; I don't know what sort of data on "violence thresholds" pre and post-lockdown is out there.
I'm not sure yet if the data bears any of this out, but it strikes me as a plausible alternate theory. Maybe I'll write something up on it at some point.
I am taking magnesium for depression, I read that it is an NMDA blocker like ketamine but I can afford it, would this be a good idea?
In the 20 years since 9/11 (and before in Europe) why hasn’t the technology or procedure improved for airport security? It’s a matter of getting people on one side of the airport to the other. There’s ample space on the other side. Yet people wait hours, miss flights and so on. Why haven’t airports tried to get security times down to say 5 minutes per person even at busy times by the radical example of opening more security lanes, hiring more staff, upgrading scanning technology, even moving to a random searches and scans.
Chalk it up to even more examples of modern incompetence.
Has anyone else felt some small part of their brain being vindicated re: carbon tax feasibility, with inflation raising food prices and people still continuing to buy lots of groceries? I'm thinking of meat consumption in particular - can't speak for national trends, but shoppers in SF absolutely do still continue the covid-provoked "buy 6 family sized packages of chicken" thing, even 2.5 years later. This hasn't slowed down at all even as prices have gone up prodigiously.
Obviously I don't think this is a Good Thing(tm), we're not getting anything meaningful out of losing Value to inflation, and it's not a perfect natural experiment. But it gives me hope, or at least retroactive hope, that such works-on-paper ideas may indeed work in real life if conditions are different. People adjust to New Normals faster than they expect.
Would love a story on the Alzheimer's brouhaha.
Scott, not sure if you are looking into it. There have been some stories that make it seem like a Big Deal(TM). But I have no idea if it really is.
OK, I'm a believer. The stats I learned I understood well, but that was several decades ago and I have not kept up with advances. But I do grasp the concept of the need to adjust for multiple comparisons, and you sound like you have your head screwed on straight about what's the best way to do that.
Is there an adjective that means “likely to cause good memories despite being unpleasant in the moment”?
Nominations for books that aren’t so great while reading, but are great to have read? Mine are
Absalom, Absalom! -Faulkner
Blood Meridian -Cormac McCarthy
TV Shows? The Sopranos is one that I didn't enjoy while watching, but somehow it gets better and better in my memory with time.
I'm working for an open source Bayesian statistics project as part of the University of Cambridge. If you know anyone who works in media, please let me know! I've built an elections forecast to raise funds and awareness for our group, and I'm interested in working together with a media company to publish it. Details can be found here:
https://withdata.io/election/media/
I recently heard about the Khan World School through an interview with it's found on the People I Mostly Admire podcast. It's being run by Sal Khan of Khan Academy of in coordination with the University of Chicago (to help design curriculum) and Arizona State University (to run and help finance it, I believe)
As a community that is generally interested in schooling and (in some cases) quite skeptical of traditional schooling, I'm wondering about people's thoughts on it.
Obviously it's too new to be able to say anything concrete, but to me it seems rather exciting and seems like a much bigger experiment/change than even most charter schools. Sal Khan had previously run a small lab school in CA that (despite a whole host of confounders) seemed rather promising.
https://asuprep.asu.edu/khan-world-school/ (website for the school)
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-this-the-future-of-high-school/ (PIMA episode, contains a transcript of the interview)
Oh no! Deiseach got banned again? And I can't even see the comment that triggered it since it's in the subscriber only thread. Ah well, at least it's only for a month. I'm sure we'll all muddle through till then.
Misspelled `Remmelt`'s name
Along the lines of the BLM/Homicide spike there was a pretty similar debate occurring fifteen years ago that started with an Atlantic article titled American Murder Mystery that discussed an academic theory whereby knocking down traditional concentrated high rise housing projects and providing section 8 vouchers through the Federal Hope VI program just spread all the problems of concentrated ghetto housing onto working class neighborhoods. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/american-murder-mystery/306872/
Many were not happy with this characterization and many efforts were made to discredit the entire theory:
https://prospect.org/education/false-accusation/
https://shelterforce.org/2008/07/23/memphis_murder_mystery_no_just_mistaken_identity/
I would love to see Scott apply his talent to this as well. On the one hand the theory passed the anecdotal/personal account explanation. Many civilians and police officers in various cities that were affected by this gave a similar account of the Hope VI program spreading the ghetto to low crime but poorish and vulnerable inner ring suburbs that, after ten or so years, just looked much more like the ghetto. I believe academic researchers later showed that while there were big spikes in violent crime in these communities that received the new residents, it couldn't be proven that the section 8 tenants were actually the criminal offenders.
This topic is infinitely interesting to me.
If you live in the Seattle area, there's going to be an ACX meetup on Wednesday, August 3rd. Free pizza for all participants (until supplies run out).
Facebook link: https://www.facebook.com/events/749612359504536/
LW link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/zPw5WLaJ9f4QEfpyR/lw-acx-ea-seattle-summer-meetup
"I might or might not get around to writing a Highlights From The Comments On Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism"
surely you mean "Highlights Of Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism Of Criticism"
Dear coders of the world,
do you think anyone of average or above intelligence can learn to program?
Or is it something quite hard for most people to grasp?
If Democrats hadn't rigged the 2020 election, wouldn't they have insisted on an audit to prove their 81 million votes were genuine and true? At a minimum they would have taken steps to ensure future elections are more trustworthy and ease concerns in SOME small way no? Always watch what they are doing not what they are saying. When they accuse others of something there is a 99% chance they are doing that exact crime themselves and telling everyone to LOOK over there ELVIS!
I'm looking for a statistician who is experienced in a very specific kind of survey. All our statisticians have told us, basically, "This is a branch of stats I'm not comfortable working in." What are we doing? In general, we're trying to create a validated tool for making a medical assessment based on complex criteria. We have about 15 people who have completed the grading exercise, then they took a break of about 2 weeks and took the exercise again. Now we need to do some statistics comparing inter-rater reliability with pre-determined expected scores, as well as comparing intra-rater reliability.
A similar publication to ours, but in a different indication, used Kendall's tau and another test. I'm not experienced enough to understand the nuances, though. We need someone who understands the statistics well enough to help us understand what we're doing and how to ensure we don't run the wrong test. This would be for publication, but we can also compensate for time spent.
I know this isn't a classified thread, but I was hoping someone could point me to a good statistician who has worked on something like this in the past.
A guy named Roger Biles gets warned for an excessively dyspeptic comment? Sounds like our old friend, nominative determinism.
There's a sort of viral topic going around: Do people look younger than they used to?
All of the explanations I've seen offered - sunscreen, total sun exposure, and smoking - seem to indicate an interesting research question: Do nerds look younger than non-nerds?
> "to help process and organize grants relating to long-termism (eg AI, xrisk, forecasting, etc)"
I thought Scott is against treating AI risk as a long-termist cause?
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KDjEogAqWNTdddF9g/long-termism-vs-existential-risk
Much of the gun discourse in the United States is focused on mass-shootings, which while gruesome, account for a miniscule number of deaths, comparable to the number of deaths-by-lightning-strike.
The vast majority of gun homicides are non-mass, non-police, non-accidental shootings (see 2nd BBC graphic), but I don't have a good sense for how all of this one-on-one violence breaks down. Is it mostly gang violence? Personal vendettas? Home invasions?
This seems like a key question to answer to be able to have any sort of factually-grounded gun control debate. (For the record, I agree that basic additional regulations like more in-depth background checks, are warranted.)
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_States
https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-odds#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20NWS%20Storm,with%20various%20degrees%20of%20disability.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081
I’ve heard it claimed that some birds, like crows, are incredibly smart, perhaps on par with some of the smarter mammals. Since birds have somewhat different brain structure than mammals do, it may be the case that even if birds and mammals are similarly intelligent overall (for some definition of similar), they could have different intellectual strengths. Is this the case? Are there things that mammals tend to be good at intellectually, but not birds, and vice versa?
Another potential problem humans and possibly domesticated animals are facing.
Dysgenics (negative correlation between fertility and IQ and increasing mutational load in humans due to a low mortality rate) means we wont be solving future problems more quickly or cheaply. This is explained here -> https://qr.ae/pvMrj3. We need to solve the hard problems now.
"Yes, the human genome is degrading. This is a well-established, noncontroversial finding. This phenomenon is called “increasing mutational load” and is based on concepts developed by one of the great geneticists, H. Muller, roughly 70 years ago.[1]
The theory
Harmful mutations come into being all the time. The average newborn has 50–100 new mutations. Though most are harmless, about 1 to 4 of those are harmful.[2] Normally, natural selection causes people having those mutations to die out or not have children, so eventually, those mutations get eliminated.
But our lives aren’t natural anymore. At the beginning of the 20th century, people having genes predisposing them to diabetes would have died young. That’s the normal process of natural selection. Now, those people get life-saving insulin, so they live normal lives and have as many children as anyone else. (Type 1 diabetes, the kind that can appear before you start having children, is highly heritable.[3]) The children of diabetics inherit the genes that make one susceptible to diabetes, so those genes aren’t being eliminated.
The same thing is happening for many diseases that have a genetic component. People that would have died in the past now live nearly-normal lives, and pass on their genes to the next generation.
It’s scary
One investigator calculated that without natural selection, fitness will decline 1 to 3% per generation, and then went on to write the most frightening paragraph I have ever seen in a biological publication:
Thus, the preceding observations paint a rather stark picture. At least in highly industrialized societies, the impact of deleterious mutations is accumulating on a time scale that is approximately the same as that for scenarios associated with global warming ... Without a reduction in the germline transmission of deleterious mutations, the mean phenotypes of the residents of industrialized nations are likely to be rather different in just two or three centuries, with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels.[4]
If you don’t normally read biological publications, this paragraph may seem tame to you, but this is as alarmist as biologists ever get.
Not so scary
If medicine and biology keep advancing, they will always stay ahead of the increasing mutational load. Someday, there will be good treatments for asthma, Crohn’s disease, diabetes, obesity, and other genetic diseases, so it won’t matter if the genes causing them to become common.
But if civilization ever crashes, people with multiple genetic defects might not survive.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1716299/
https://www.pnas.org/content/107/3/961
https://www.dovepress.com/familial-aggregation-and-heritability-of-type-1-diabetes-mellitus-and--peer-reviewed-article-CLEP
https://www.pnas.org/content/107/3/961
[1] Our load of mutations
[2] Rate, molecular spectrum, and consequences of human mutation
[3] Familial aggregation and heritability of type 1 diabetes mellitus and | CLEP
[4] Rate, molecular spectrum, and consequences of human mutation"
I would like to get some social-interaction advice.
I was waiting in an airport security line, which was quite long, a few days ago. When I was about 3/4 done a man cut in line directly next to me. I told him "Hey, the end of the line is back there." He just shrugged it off. I called him an unsocial a**hole, and he agreed on that, still standing in line.
What should one do in such a situation? I didn't contact any personel, because i was quite late to my flight.
Curious what y'all think of starmanning [1], an enhanced version of steelmanning.
My impression is that anyone steelmanning already has the forethought to starman. But one thing I see Scott doing is assuming the good intentions of his opponent even when _criticizing_ their ideas, which I think deserves it's own rhetorical category.
[1] https://centerforinquiry.org/blog/how-to-star-man-arguing-from-compassion/
So one of my friends ( a fellow math grad student) raised the idea of holding a virtual math conference via minecraft (sort of like a fortnite concert I guess). As far as we can tell, this hasn’t been done before, and the idea is that there might be some combinatorial/applied math/topology problems that could be presented creatively using Minecraft, and some presenters might also be intrigued/amused by the setting.
So, I figured I’d ask here if anyone happens to know research/researchers that might fit well with such a setting.
Just to note, this is more to try and assess what the focus of the conference might be on rather than hunting for specific speakers at the moment. Thanks!
There’s a line in Kafka’s diaries that goes something like: “All social circles are united by a particular form of insanity and that insanity prevents the members of the circle from being aware of it.”
I always found that darkly funny without really understanding what it means. But I recently caught myself thinking about how I view a particular informal group as more or less The Voice of Reason and how if they find my thoughts on a subject reasonable then those thoughts probably are and vice/versa. Then I thought, wait, perhaps I deem this group reasonable precisely because they are unreasonable in the same kind of way I am, which is the real reason we all find each other so uncommonly sane and reasonable. Then I remembered the Kafka quote and realized I had likely discovered its meaning at long last.
It seems that we are all in the dark when it comes to determining what is reasonable.
I wrote "Long COVID Doesn't Affect 25% of Kids" which is an analysis of a recent meta-analysis that was widely circulated on social media. I appreciate any input and suggestions.
https://thecounterpoint.substack.com/p/long-covid-doesnt-affect-25-of-kids
Which ethical theory is most conducive to democracy? Least?
For many years I've wanted to kill myself. I have no dreams or interest in doing anything whatsoever. From an outsider's perspective I probably look like a leech upon society. It is in society's best interest to let me kill myself.
All needs and desires seem to stem from continued existence, while my only desire is to end this life.
Prior attempts at ending my life have all ended in failure. The only thing that fills me with hope is the knowledge that sooner or later I will succeed, or time will end me.
Why do so many people feel the need to impose their values and beliefs onto others, forcing them to live against their will?
Every tool and service related to suicide is setup to try and prevent you from engaging in this act, so they're useless to me.
When I post about this online, people usually report me as if that will actually help or do anything. It's the ultimate form of trying to brush someone off without doing anything to ease their suffering.
Hoping for the best: maybe dealing with computers and devices is a sort of cognitive exercise that helps fend off dementia.
It gets to me that Effective Altruism is a reasonable effort to get good results from charity (and it's done some of that), but it's also led to a lot of people making themselves and each other miserable, not to mention a lot of wasted effort.
It doesn't seem quite like Moloch, and it's a bit subtle for Coyote's sense of humor. Maybe Murphy?
Suppose I find my girlfriend attractive but not as much as I’d like to. Suppose also that I can think of at least two things she could do that would make her more attractive to me, which require a small or large effort from her and none from me. Suppose further that she cares very much how attractive I find her - for her own sake as well as mine - and would likely be eager to put in considerable effort to maximise it, given the option. Suppose finally that finding out that I don’t already find her maximally attractive would be confirmation of her worst fear and would lead to considerable disutility on her part.
What should I do?
Hey! I understand that maybe interest in Ukrainian-Russian War is dwindling in the West, but maybe some people are interested in learning more about Ukraine, and if so - what do you want to know?
I am trying to improve my forecasting skills and I was looking for a tool that would allow me to design a graph/network where I could place some statement as a node with an attached probability (confidence level) and then the nodes can be linked so that I can automatically compute the joint or disjoint probability etc.
It seems such a tool could be quite useful, for a forecast with many inputs.
I am not sure if bayesian networks or influence graphs are what I am looking for or if they could be used for such scope. Nevertheless, I haven't exactly found a super user-friendly tool for either of them.
Does anyone have any ideas on such a tool?
Do you know of a truly international news site? Sth. that has no specific geographical focus. Or can you recommend news outlets which cover one continent or some part of it?
I assume that a fairly large number of readers of ACX were brought into the Dall-E beta in the last week. Anyone have any big insights?
I have mostly been hoping to use Dall-E as a tool to assist with crafting collateral for tabletop RPGs -- for example, I hoped to make character portraits, evocative pictures of settings, and perhaps maps. Some experiences:
1. Dall-E's content filters for violence are a hindrance. Mentioning a weapon (like "war mace") will sometimes get your prompt thrown out, even if you are looking for a portrait of a single character just holding it.
2. I have not found it to be really able to create the kind of outfits that I'm looking for for classic D&D-style games from just a text prompt. It's much easier to use an image prompt to get it into the right general search space and then use the editing tools.
3. Dall-E had pretty strong biases against some of the "almost realistic, but with one feature that's fantastic" things that you commonly see in fantasy. For example, it doesn't really like to show people with pointy elf ears, and if you do a variant on a picture with pointy ears, my experience is that all the variants will have normal ears. I tried to get it to draw a fox with multiple tails with very little success -- Dall-E knows how many tails a fox has, and it's one!
4. I got a lot better results with portraits when I basically treated the face and the rest of the portrait as separate problems. Dall-E struggles with faces, so you're pretty unlikely to both get a good face and a good everything else you want in a single pass. Instead, I've learned to work on getting a good "everything else," then edit the image, erase the face (or the part of it that seems bad), and try a few passes at getting Dall-E to just create a good face.
I have a new update on my attempt to predict the outcome of Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous prediction here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-229/comment/7240004.
8 % on Ukrainian victory (down from 10 % on June 20).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24, regardless of whether it is now directly controlled by Russia (Crimea), or by its proxies (Donetsk and Luhansk "republics”), without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
29 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 25 % on June 20).
63 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 65 % on June 20).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
It surely seems that predictions of Russia-doomers (like Kamil Galleev, but I have Twitter blocked, so don’t ask me for examples) how Russian collapse is just around the corner are not panning out.
Italian government collapsed and there will be new elections on September 25. Italy is third largest EU country, very important in its decision-making processes. I know little about Italian politics, but from foreign reporting it seems like ousted prime minister Draghi is, in Italian context, something like a Russia hawk, and among Italian parties there is almost no one who would want to do MORE to support Ukraine (unlike in Germany), so election are going to result in either “no changes” or a government with an attitude more conciliatory to Russia (happy to be corrected on this).
On the other hand, Ukraine, and Western support for it, is not on track to collapse either. Possible opening of Black sea ports might help Ukrainian economy. Since my previous update, fivethirtyeight.com unveiled their prediction of US congressional elections, with Democrats currently having 15 % chance to retain the House; that is higher than I guessed based on Biden's approval rating. I think that if Republicans win, probability that US gradually and subtly scales down its support for Ukraine increases, since Biden will look for ways to “change course”, as US pundits say. And it is rather unlikely that he would change course in the direction of more support for Ukraine.
*Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of this year, that is.
Is it a fool's game to be a kind and decent person these days?
Apparently there's reason to believe that the whole edifice of Alzheimer's research has been built upon a fraudulent study.
Seems relevant to this blog, given the previous post about Aducanumab.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/22/2111914/-Two-decades-of-Alzheimer-s-research-may-be-based-on-deliberate-fraud-that-has-cost-millions-of-lives
https://wallstreetpro.com/2022/07/23/two-decades-of-alzheimers-research-was-based-on-deliberate-fraud-by-2-scientists-that-has-cost-billions-of-dollars-and-millions-of-lives/
https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
https://www.alzforum.org/news/community-news/sylvain-lesne-who-found-av56-accused-image-manipulation
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/w6wwxd/two_decades_of_alzheimers_research_was_based_on/
I suspect that heart metaphors like "listen to your heart" and "my heart is telling me ___" may be describing an actual phisiological phenomenon.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/
I also suspect that "listening to my heart" may be a learnable skill that can give access/control over the stress response at least as it relates to heart rate variability. Unfortunately, when I "listen to my heart" through meditation, all I hear is ba-dump ba-dump ba-dump.
Has anyone had any luck with this? Is this a worthwhile direction to explore?
On his page in Lorien Psychiatry (https://lorienpsych.com/2021/06/05/depression/), Scott says that electroconvusive therapy has a basically-100% success rate in treating depression, the closest thing we have to a miracle cure. However, when I had ECT, it didn't help at all; I spent a month in a very confused state of mind, and then my depression returned in full force. Why could that happen? What are some of your hypotheses? Or was I just one of the year's unlucky 100 000?
Epistemic status: fun speculation
We probably get better listening at to our guts as we get older because our stomach linings get thinner, and so we become more sensitive to changes in acidity
Any economist want to opine on whether raising interest rates is the best or fairest ways, these days, to fight an inflation that’s clearly not driven by wage increases. Is there really no other tool to fight inflation?