Im Ernst, ich wäre sehr vorsichtig mit solchen Sachen. Suchen Sie auf jeden Fall einen sachkundigen Arzt (nicht nur Ihren örtlichen Hausarzt), vielleicht sogar einen Endokrinologen, bevor Sie etwas einnehmen. Eine Testosteron-Supplementierung kann dazu führen, dass Ihr Körper aufhört, Testosteron zu produzieren, was bedeutet, dass Sie lebenslang darauf bleiben müssen.
Dieser Typ ist sehr gut zum Thema Nahrungsergänzung anzuhören. Lassen Sie sich nicht von dem albernen Namen abschrecken, er ist der wahre Deal: http://www.st4all.net
Today on Twitter he claims that post is "still unchallenged" and that "In fact IQ as a metric was invented to sift out those who believe in it and classify them as incompetent; hence limit them to jobs as psychology professors."
I think every sect out there right now, even the far right, ignores genetic class inequality. I'm convinced this is a huge mistake and understanding how people vary within a racial group is super enlightening when it comes to someone's understanding of politics.
To begin to understand class inequality, let's stretch what Jordan Peterson calls psychology's most secure and significant accomplishment: IQ. We want to map IQ ranging onto concrete, politically relevant abilities.
I want to start with HBD. How many people can actually understand it?
In 2006 the breakdown on what people thought on the question "How much to genes determine race differences in drive to succeed. math ability, criminality, and IQ?" was 50% not at all, 24% very little, 20% some, 6% a lot, 1% just about all. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3832063/
To understand the arguments in this field you should be able to get a 5, maybe less, on the AP Statistics exam, an extremely easy exam which is very light on dense theory like what you might find in Wasserman's textbook All of Statistics. It is generally considered to be equivalent to a 200 level business statistics course, not even a first introduction to math stat. In 2021 only 16 percent of the people who took the test got a 5. 42% failed. https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/about-ap-scores/score-distributions
Somewhere in between 58% and 16% (or less because of selection bias) of people can understand HBD themselves. The rest have to trust The Experts. That's at least 42% of people and potentially more than 84%. A large minority at the least. The IQ cutoff for understanding basic statistics and by extension HBD is somewhere between 97 and 115 or greater.
If we use this number and increase our standards for failure to where half of the 3s are given 2s we are looking for the 53rd percentile of an IQ distribution with a mean of 108. This is 72nd percentile overall.
The reading SAT is pretty easy, I get perfect scores on it, but getting 80% of the questions right is 95th percentile. I get all of the questions right. The average basically can't read and gets maybe half of the questions right https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/understanding-sat-scores.pdf
The bottom half of the population basically can't make an informed vote, and the bottom 85-95% are seriously disabled compared to the top 5%. People under the top 85% exhibit serious reading comprehension and mathematical deficits and this is in a society that wants to pass as many of those people as possible. You probably need to be at least in the top 5% to be a professor or a serious Substack pundit with a book and all of that. People the top 10% under that level might be able to sort through information they are given if they want to put in the effort, but they won't generate new culture or ideas. Under the 85 percentile people begin to struggle to understand even information that is given to them. It is likely that people under that level would not fully understand this post.
Now departing from IQ, there's some data on temeperament. There is this concept called conventional morality where what you think is righteous is just whatever the law happens to be at your place in time, you don't have the capacity to think normatively using your own moral principles. You are a follower. The majority of college students are like this and this is mostly independent from IQ https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746042.pdf .
So if 15% of people are smart enough to properly understand politics, and 25% of them can think using their own moral principles (very charitable assumptions), 3.75% of the population is politically autonomous.
This is skewed though. 27% read more than 11 per year, so 73% will not be very informed beyond The News. Also most of this is not nonfiction. Numbers are hard to come by but based on sales a good estimate is that 40% of this reading is nonfiction.
The average American therefore reads only 4 or 5 nonfiction books per year. This is skewed, like I said above, and assuming people tend to read either nonfiction or fiction, only 10% read 11 or more nonfiction books per year.
But what do they read? Are they reading Carl Schmitt? Tacitus? Public Choice Theory textbooks? Arthur Jensen?
This fabulous list includes top sellers like "Pain: A Love Story" by Serena Sterling, a book by Sam from iCarly, If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Atomic Habits, Token Black Girl, etc, etc.
It would be charitable to assume that 30% of that 3.75% have a good reading habit. That gives us 1.125%, an imprecise upper bound on the fraction of informed, agentic voters in the US.
"You see, the word idiot is etymologically derived from the Attic Greek word ἰδιώτης (idiṓtēs), which literally means 'a private person,' or 'a person who does not take part in the affairs of the polis.' It is derived from the word ἴδιος (ídios), meaning 'of one’s own,” which is also the root of our English word idiosyncratic. The word ἰδιώτης originally had no bearing whatsoever on how intelligent the person it was being used to refer to was. It merely indicated that the person did not take part in public affairs." https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2016/11/07/the-bizarre-origins-of-the-word-idiot/
We don't live in a democracy, where the majority of people think about politics independently and then vote to decide who wins the fight for power. We live in a world where the very few who are functionally literate and can understand politics fight over the votes of distracted, conventional, and uninformed ἰδιώτης.
Arestovych seems to be mostly known in these circles as the guy who predicted the Russian invasion of Ukraine with uncanny accuracy back in 2019, but he actually has a fascinating and original-minded political philosophy combining conservatism and futurism with a strong focus on individual freedom, and as a presidential advisor with friends in high places, one of the most popular people in a country in flux with the focus of the world on it, and someone who's built a lot of connections with the Russian opposition, he has some genuine ability to push for his ideas. I'm surprised he doesn't get more attention in these circles, between his positions and his extremely colorful character.
Someone just posted an overview essay about him and his political philosophy. Any thoughts?
Is development economics bogus? Are there any meaningful examples of development economic interventions resulting in both significant and lasting examples of growth in developing countries?
Has there ever even been an example of an officially designated developing country becoming 'developed'? Obviously all wealthy countries started poor, but as long as 'developing' countries have been an official designation, has this 'development' ever actually occurred? Perhaps in Asia, but it seems that most people interested in development economics neither accept any role of genetics in differences in economic development, nor do they seem especially interested in promoting the type of policies that have accompanies economic growth in these Asian countries.
They of course have an endless list of narratives to explain why the latest and greatest idea of theirs has failed to produce anything of value, but I'm certain that if a counterfactual Singapore or South Korea had identical policies as the real Singapore/South Korea but were still "developing", this would not be a cause of extreme confusion for these economists. They would have a bunch of reasons to say "Of COURSE those countries aren't developed". Which is to say, their model of reality is hopelessly wrong and they update their narratives instead of their model when they are wrong yet again.
I do city planning in Greenland and I'm curious if anyone here is curious to read and critique a project that I'm about to finish. My work is influenced heavily by James C Scott (Seeing like a State) and David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything). I waltz patiently with Moloch on a daily basis.
The project is called "Catalogue of Potentials in Qaqortoq"; Qaqortoq is a city of 3k people in southern Greenland. The project has a word count of 50k. It has 4 parts that each indicate a step in the double diamond method. English is not my vernacular. I've a bachelor's in arctic civil engineering, but my writign style or the genre of the project is weird; I've hardly used statistics at all. There's a lot of pictures. There might be an overfocus on semi-private spaces and other ideas from Jan Gehl. I have taken care to explore and convey the knowledge and visions of the people I've talked with. I've put care into talking with people. That's a teaser. Write me if you're interested.
Does anyone know if there's been more rigorous research on Scott's observation from "A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows" about how these these text-to-image generation models seem to get stuck in basins of attraction when a prompt is too reminiscent of a well-known archetype?
I've seen a quote that 97% of people enjoy being around other people similar to themselves, and only 3% enjoy being around those who are different. I have not been able to find the source of the quote, or published research supporting this. Does anyone recognize it?
A great deal of basic human flourishing has come from improved sanitation...simple things like cooking foods before eating, bathing, proper waste disposal, and so on. Even if no one knows all the mechanisms behind, say, the Gillian Flynn Effect or life expectancy increase, this is surely a large factor.
Have we* exhausted all the low-hanging $20 bills in this arena, such that there's not gonna be, like, a modern one-upping of hand washing? With diminishing returns or even negative second-order consequences (e.g. antibacterial soaps contributing to "superbugs"), is the world "clean enough"?
A great new pop-science book is out about long-lived species: Steven Austad's "Methuselah's Zoo"!
I think it'll be good and important for longevity research, because species differences are way bigger than what currently-heavily-studied interventions can do. (E.g. a calorically restricted mouse lives 3-5 years instead of 2-4; but naked mole-rats can live >30, bowhead whales >200, ocean quahogs >500.) Comparative biogerontology isn't the biggest field right now, but this book will help popularize it; and since we now have comparative genomics to generate hypotheses, and e.g. gene-editing to test them (on top of studying long-lived species' cells in culture), I bet it'll be able to get somewhere.
My book review of it, submitted to BioEssays, has been accepted! e-article version should be out in a couple weeks, final version should be out in November [it'll be at: doi.org/10.1002/bies.202200144].
To newcomers to aging/longevity bio, I'd recommend reading it second or third. First read Andrew Steele's "Ageless" [my goodreads review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4112868997], and/or Austad's earlier "Why We Age." If you're interested in the currently-heavily-studied stuff like caloric restriction mimetics, David Stipp's "The Youth Pill" is good. Aubrey de Grey's "Ending Aging" is more detailed but older than Steele's book, in its coverage of the directly-repair-damage approach.
I read this essay about the hard limits of human intelligence with interest. I'm still thinking about the implications of Wolpert's theses, but, yes, I think there's an upper limit for what human intelligence can comprehend and the problems that human intelligence can solve. Nor do I expect AI to move us forward much, because AI will still have the observational limitations our augmented wetware minds have. Part of the problem, which Wolpert doesn't seem to acknowledge (or perhaps he didn't think about it) is the physical constraints on what we can observe. For instance, there's a limit on how far back we can look into the history of the universe. And the majority of the universe (beyond 48 billion light years) will always be unobservable. Likewise, there are limits on how far into the high-energy states of matter we can observe. Wolpert spends a lot of time focused on new types of mathematics, but mathematics isn't very good when you can't create ways to apply them and test in reality.
For any ridiculously smart people with access to standardised test scores to prove it, did you have any idea about how smart you were before access to test scores?
I ask because my girlfriend has struggled with school her entire life despite working really hard. She scraped through university, really struggles with her job as an insurance broker, and her favourite thing to do in her spare time is watch YouTube clips of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders (those women are incredible by the way). She recently took 2 IQ tests under controlled conditions and received a genius score (>98th percentile) on both tests.
I love her to bits, genius or not, but I feel like all the people I know with these kinds of scores find school really easy and normally have a need for cognition to do a lot of active thinking about something that interests them in their spare time- my girlfriend definitely does not fit this description. Is my girlfriend just really weird? Or is this more normal than I think?
If you were given the following brief, how would you even start?
We are looking for ideas for a system to objectively grade ability.
The goal is an alternative to existing institutions that grade on a bell curve - instead we want an absolute yardstick that allows us to compare any two individuals worldwide (provide they have both gone through the process/taken the test.)
Crucially we also care about time invariance - we would like to compare someone to his great great grandfather with this metric and see who would have been the better hire.
Ideally the test (if there is one) can be taken multiple times by the same individual. It can be taken at any time by any individual. Very ideally, it is a simple process to organise/distribute, such that rich and poor communities alike can participate. But most important is that it cannot be cheated or gamed and end up lying about an individual's abilities.
This process might be applied to the academic fields or practical ones, but really we're interested in any area where skill, competence or knowledge need to be guaranteed.
Right now I'm thinking about procedurally generated challenges, and grading somehow (by time taken or quality of result) the way they get solved. But right away that limits the system to only those fields that can have challenges procedurally generated and algorithmically graded (like, for eg. GCSE-level Maths but not higher level Maths, and certainly not English.) It also probably allows a determined-but-stupid individual to simply take the test enough times to learn the shape of all possible problems by heart*.
*this isn't necessarily a problem if the space of generated problems maps perfectly onto the entire domain the subject was supposed to be learning - but that itself is a pretty big ask.
I feel like I'm probably missing other promising avenues though.
Some of Scott's older posts such as "Radicalizing the Romanceless", "Untitled", and his Nine Meditations, were primary inspirations for this piece. I imagine that many ACX readers may value reading it.
Impressions from others include:
* "This project by Elodes is emotional, masterfully-written, vulnerable, inspiring, necessary, and deeply, deeply important to me and potentially millions of other men and women."
* "[this] is the work that everyone should have a go at - I just started it and it's fire"
* "I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for creating that 300 ways post. I'm bawling my eyes out reading it because it resonates so hardcore"
* "In stereotypical male fashion, I am going to decline to talk about the many emotions this raised in me, and content myself with giving praise. The conclusion in particular was masterful writing. Synthetic, rigorous and tender. You should probably read this."
* "it's fucking amazing work. [...] You've done something incredibly valuable with this write-up."
* "holy freaking crap. this list should be required reading for every human on the face of the planet"
* "your writing is very lucid and your frame is refreshingly expansive. Kinda daunting in its length, but from what I’ve sampled it’s well worth investing the time to read in its entirety."
* "I've been crying for an hour at the feeling of being seen . Thanks for sharing all of this"
* "Words are not enough to describe how this resonated with me. [...] Reading this, as a proof that my suffering was and is real, not just an imagination in my head, means more than almost anything else someone has done for me. I can't even believe that a book can mean do much to me, and would not have believed anyone if they told me earlier it will mean so much."
I hope ACX readers will find it similarly valuable.
I'm starting as a new professor of Ethics, Law, AI in a research institution in Europe.
Since I don't have to worry about tenure, I am looking for broad suggestions for cool/impactful things to or advice you wish you had known at the start of your academic career.
I don't have a huge budget, but I am fairly free to do as I please.
I felt like I didn't "get" the Prophet and Caesar's Wife post. I usually really like Scott's fiction so it seemed like I was missing something. Anyone got any takes/elaboration on the point/joke?
What's the point in talking to people that don't have any intellectual achievements, eg contributions to human knowledge? Wouldn't the best forum in the world restrict its membership to just those people, particularly those whose contributions are in math or science or can at least be argued to be scientific (so an empirically minded historian could argue his way in but some Hegelian philosopher would rightfully stay excluded). It wouldn't have to be a big achievement, even a blog post with a lot of data or some sort of novel mathematics could qualify. Every professor/PhD grad save for grievance studies, English lit, etc would qualify on the basis of their thesis. This would help to ensure that forum members are smart enough and have the right temperament to produce new knowledge, potentially making the forum actually productive, while also hopefully ensuring that members are interesting people who have substantial things to say, something which is very hard to come by, as most forums are just people signalling at one another.
The main problem is that many people get some sort of intellectual achievement only because it's a money/status thing. Their whole mindset is still about status and consequently their politics remain stupid/irrational. So without giving a political test you could restrict this to people with some sort of achievement done without funding outside of an official institution, perhaps without expectation of pay. I think this would be an excellent filter for people who are truly devoted to rational knowledge.
Is Moneyball one of the worst things to happen to modern American intellectual life? It suggests that anyone smart can enter a field they know nothing about and dominate it with previously unused analytics/quantitative methods/Generally Being Smart. It falsely suggests that sabermetrics pushed the old qualitative scouting model out- in fact, modern teams use a mix of both together. Sabermetrics certainly added a lot to baseball, but it only complements existing methodology.
In general Moneyball, plus some kind of vague Silicon Valley worship, suggests that generally smart people don't need subject matter expertise or a qualitative background to enter a particular field- they can just Use Analytics. This is very appealing to engineers, finance types, etc.- they can arrogantly ignore people who have been in the field to date, those guys weren't smart enough to Use Analytics like I am, etc. My life experience suggests the opposite, that subject matter experts are in general much better than smart outsiders. In particular quantitative methods mean little if you're asking the wrong questions or starting with the wrong assumptions- garbage in, garbage out.
Kind of reminds me of the late 19th/early 20th century, when it was in vogue to call whatever you were doing Scientific. I.e. Communism had Scientifically Proven that they had the best approach to running a society, etc.
How do progressives reconcile the huge error term between their self-image of oppressed minorities and how corporations treat them ?
Yesterday, I was banned from HackerNews, probably the only social media I truly loved, because of my participation in the KiwiFarms vs. CloudFlare discussion. (Long Story Short : Forum makes fun of <bad people>, <bad people> organize a mob outrage campaign against CloudFlare which is a corporation which provides very vital protection to websites against a low-effort form of cyberattacks called DDoS, corporation first says no and yay free speech then capitulates.)
This, besides making me unimaginably angry with the progressive religion, <threat>, begin browsing kiwifarms, and generally ruining my day and lowering my already sea-level-low opinion of humanity further below the 0, made me think : How do those people think they're oppressed ?
Now, I'm aware of the famous general purpose reply here :
GPR1- The human brain is not a truth machine, every calculation it makes it is heavily optimized for survival. Specifically, this translates to outsized preference for threat false positives over threat false negatives (e.g. better to imagine the tiger there despite it not being there than to imagine it not there when *it's really* there).
GPR2- In the context of ingroup vs. outgroup confrontations, the above translates to deliberate sensory and memory bias for ingroup and against outgroup, such that ingroup always appears to be in danger and on the brink of annihilation and the outgroup always appears tyranical and unstoppable. In one memorable example from SSC (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/), Scott cites an example of what's called the " hostile media effect ", where Pro-Palestine and Pro-Israel both perceived the same documentary to be heavily biased against them and for the outgroup, despite that being apriori impossible.
This seems to explain my question, people in a literal war for survival can't agree on who's more oppressed, so of course the progressives can't see they're not oppressed, the literal opposite in fact. Neither is most of us and our ingroups for that matter.
But, general purpose algorithms and explanations are always less satisfying than domain-specific algorithms and explanations, my reptile brain is still not satisfied with this perfectly good answer.
1- Kiwifarms was dropped from the clearnet enitrely today's morning by it's *Russian* DDoS protection company, probably because it was more trouble than the company could handle (but of course, the company didn't forget to virtue signal in its announcement.). KF is now accessible only via tor (a convoluted technology that - in a nutshell and very loosely speaking - circumvents censorship via repeated re-routing.)
2- An Australian company that allocate IP addresses is being pressured to revoke allocation for KF, which - according to the forum's founder who is very law-savvy and internet-savvy in general - is "unprecedented in the history of the Internet".
How can a group that can, extra-legally, pressure companies against their customers in 3 continents and across all timezones and every habitable earth latitude possibly think it's the underdog ? Anyone who had dealt with this group extensively enough to know their thinking can illuminate me ?
Addendum : This comment and its username was edited because it contained insults that others found too insulting to merit a serious reply to the rest of my points, as well as a threat made out of hopeless anger and despair rather than any real malice. The edited section are between <> angular brackets and do not exceed a sentence in length. The heretical words used are linked to in interest of accountability and responsibility for words said.
Does anyone here have any experience with remote.com, both in general and from the perspective of a US employee looking to keep his US job but live/work outside the US?
Anybody know any good advice/articles (Please God nothing by Tony Robbins) about how to get better at sales? Any ideas about how to practice it would also be really useful.
My job has nothing to do with sales, but it feels like one of those versatile human traits that has really high returns if you can learn to do it well.
Any feline psychologists out there? The Warrior Princess is an indoor/outdoor cat that I raised from a kitten and is now eleven years old. Suddenly last week she decided that being inside makes her absolutely crazy—I mean yowling at the doors, scratching the window screens crazy!
The routine up to two weeks ago, was I would get up in the morning, feed her and her brother breakfast, then an hour or so later, let them out for the day. Between 5 and 6 pm, I'd clap my hands and call them in for dinner. They'd both come running, and they'd be indoors for the night.
Maybe a month ago, Princess started being a bit tardy for the dinner call, but she'd show up 15 or 20 minutes late and meow at the front door or the kitchen door to let me know she was there. This may be because she had been wandering further from my yard, but I'm not sure. Starting last week, she'd show up at my door but was reluctant to come in, so I'd grab her and bring her in for her dinner. After dinner, she'd be restless and she'd meow and then yowl to go back outside. Then she became rmotr and more reluctant to let me snag her, and the evenings became such restless high-drama of yowling and scratching at doors and screens (I couldn't get to sleep), that I gave in and let her out.
For the next several days, she'd stay 50 or so feet away from the door, and the only way I could snag her was by luring her close to me with Temptation cat treats. Now we've come to a compromise. When I step out to greet her, she'll come up to me to let me pet her. She allows me to snuggle with her a bit and carry her inside. She'll eat about half her food and then she'll make it quite clear to me that she wants to go back outside NOW!
Yesterday evening after I had let her out after her brief dinner, I was sitting outside on my back patio as the twilight settled in and she came by me to say hello and head butt me. She hopped up on my lap and we had a session of snuggling. I didn't try to bring her inside. She hopped down and trotted off into the shadows. This morning she allowed me to snag her without objecting, but after eating half her breakfast she made it clear that she wanted to get back outside.
BTW: breakfast & dinner are high-protein/low-carb cat foods(Blue Buffalo) for middle-age weight control. More for her brother (who was porking up) than for her. Also, over the past month, she was only eating half her normal food—even while she was still staying inside at night. But she hasn't been losing weight, so I assumed she was eating food that my neighbor puts out for the ferals in the neighborhood. My mom also has been coming by to put out food for a couple of ferals who she's bonded with, but I put that Purina Meow Mix away when I let my two cats out every morning—so they wouldn't get at the cheaper food with grain in it.
I was told by a vet that cat food with grain in it can cause kidney issues and one of the signs is that the cat gets moody. My current vet has told me that that's crap. But I'm wondering if my former vet wasn't on to something. Is my Warrior Princess eating grain-based kibble at the neighbor's house, and she's going psycho because of the food that she may be scarfing up around the neighborhood?
I have a cat-sitter who looks after my cats when I travel, but both of them would stay in the house while I was traveling so that my cat-sitter wouldn't have to look for them. I'll be going on a trip at some point in the next month, I can't deal with a semi-feral cat tearing my house apart while I'm away. The only alternative is to leave the Warrior Princess out to fend for herself for a week. There's plenty of food and water in the neighborhood (my street is like a Club Med for cats). But I don't like that idea.
I've been playing Fallout 4, there are a ton of side quests (including recurring missions to defend town from attack, to rescue abducted townspeople from other locations, and to kill groups of people who have been harassing the towns), and it got me thinking about how realistic they were. A fair place to start in my assessment is considering what types of problems the police typically deal with today. Here's a source I found: https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/police_dispatch_stats
With that in mind, I think a post-apocalyptic, open-world game would generate these types of side quests for the player, in this order of frequency:
1) Deal with transportation accidents. Either someone alerts you to an accident that just happened around the corner (e.g. - mule-driven cart flips over, motorcycle hits a kid, etc.), or you see it happen in front of you, and you decide whether to help. You would also have your own personal vehicle accidents. Maybe you give the victims medical help, fix their vehicles, or stop a fight between the involved parties.
2) Deal with heated arguments and fist fights between people. Such confrontations would auto-generate between NPCs in your vicinity at random intervals. This includes domestic violence. Some NPCs would also start arguments with you.
3) Deal with thefts. Maybe a store owner complains to you and you have to decide whether to track down the thief and retrieve the items (and punish them however you please). NPCs would also steal from you, and your perception / awareness level would determine whether you noticed before they fled.
4) Deal with trespassers, loiterers, etc. NPCs would ask you to help remove obstinate drunks from bars, homeless people from sidewalks, nonpaying tenants, etc. If you owned a house in the game, you would also periodically deal with these problems directly.
5) Deal with noise complaints. The lack of electronic music devices would make this a less common problem, though people would still complain about the loud bar next door, or noise from a machine shop or something.
6) OK, I'm tired of writing this. Just look at the list in the link.
Note: I omitted "Parking violations" because, in a post-apocalyptic world it probably wouldn't be an issue since there would be so few vehicles left.
Long time reader, first time poster feeling a bit weird that my first comment is basically an ad.
I’ve started a Substack where I plan to tackle some topics that I think ACX readers will likely be interested in. I’ve planned out one post every two weeks for the next few months. Today’s post is “All Poverty is Energy Poverty” (https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/all-poverty-is-energy-poverty). Would really appreciate any feedback you all can give- I’m aiming for something that is interesting to ACX types but also intelligible to normies.
Apropos of the "how much do billionaires deserve" thread (which I was way too late to comment on)--
Isn't all of that just what the 10th commandment was warning about? "Thou shalt not covet" and all of that? "I don't like how much money you have and want you to have less." That's the root of punitive taxation. And it's an awful, destructive tool, one that corrodes the body politic.
My answer is "as much as they earned while obeying the laws that existed at the time it was earned, minus the minimum amount of tax, as flat as possible, necessary to maintain the obligatory functions of the state, just like everyone else." If you want to penalize them, make new laws for money earned going forward. Subject to the normal democratic procedure, ideally without demagoguing about what they "deserve" or not.
Tax law should not be used to enforce social policy, because tax law *stinks* at doing so, and that makes it worse at its actual function, which is providing funding for the (necessary) operations of government. If you want to subsidize something, do so openly. If you want to penalize (civilly or criminally), something, make a law regarding that. Don't build loopholes and curlicues into the tax law. In part because those inevitably hit people you *didn't* intend to hit worse than those "big bad rich people"--rich people can structure their income (et al) to minimize the tax burden. Regular employees can't. So it mostly hurts people who *want to become* rich, not those who *already are rich*. And is just pure envy and spite.
I'll also note that this sort of flaw comes up with any attempt to centrally plan the economy. The society *most* captured by its elites I've ever seen[1] was the old Soviet Union. Once you put some people in charge of deciding how much everyone else deserves...well...the ones making that decision deserve the most for their hard work, of course.
[1] even a lot of feudal countries were less captured in practice, because of the complex web of obligations and the general poverty of the situation. Although often the Church was heavily corrupt and acted like a fully-captured elite. But I'm focusing on ones in relatively modern times.
So I have not seen anyone say this, but this seems like as good a place as any to bring it up.
We're told a lithium shortage is slowing the adoption of electric cars. If there's a scramble for lithium, how is that going to affect availability of lithium (carbonate) for treating bipolar disorder? I know the quantities are much smaller, but you can't make the element outside of a reactor, and then it would be radioactive if you get the wrong isotope, right? Do psychiatrists need to advocate for a strategic lithium reserve?
Scott's review of Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer is one of my favorite book reviews of his of all time. I finally got around to reading the book myself, and reviewed it on my blog: https://nicholasbruner.com/2022/09/05/what-im-reading-albions-seed/ If anybody were interested in reading it and wanted to leave a comment about what you think here, I would appreciate it. I am considering entering the next book review contest, and so would especially like to hear what changes or improvements I could make to a review like this to increase its chances of getting picked.
Any Kabbalistic significance to the word 'capital', having originally come from describing 'heads of cattle' and transmuting, in modern parlance, into a kind of 'economic control plane', where capital describes 'a system which makes choices as to the allocation of energy' - as the word 'capital' went from 'an organic reproductive force of nature' to 'a cerebral control mechanism' ?
I am trying to signin to remind everyone thatis putting away a boat,trailer, or RV today to please checkit THOROUGHLY for hitchhikers such as cats, squirrels, raccoons, etc. Look in cupboards/cabinets, drawers, j\luggage, appliances even if you don't remember them being open when youc leaned/aired out. Check stuffed furniture, big vases and buckets, tool/instrument cases, luggage....
It is becoming increasingly clear that the Covid lockdowns implemented in most countries have produced an almighty log jam and muddle in trading networks that had been built up over decades and were enormously complicated and very delicate (in the "just in time" sense). If that is so then what is the best way to untangle the mess, if the best solution is not to leave it to untangle itself over time?
Michael Shellenberger --former CA Gubernatorial candidate, whose book "Sanfransicko" Scott reviewed recently -- lobbied hard to keep CA's Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant from being shut down. Thank God it paid off. He celebrates a bit here:
High school student here. I plan to get a CS degree but it occured to me that CS may be attracting too much talent. No doubt it's a field with a bright future, but supply and demand.
I find most STEM subjects interesting (although CS is my favorite), and I consider myself good enough at math to handle any of them if I had to. So what major(or field of study) would you recommmend?
It doesn't sound like Central Europe is getting along well these days. I assume Poland is angry about Germany's pussyfooting regarding Ukraine.
I'm a bit angry at Germany too. Sorry, but they seem like a culture of conformists who goose-step to Nazis or liberal politics or Russians or whatever the fashion of the day is. That this overly conformist, fashion-sensitive culture is the most powerful polity in Europe concerns me.
Germany shouldn't pay reparations for something 70 years ago of course, but they should grow up and show they are a serious country. I'm a moron and don't know much about Germany and have no right to say that, so do educate me: In what way is Germany a serious country now? I characterize them above as a bunch of conformists. How is that characterization wrong?
So the general consensus of this blog is that MAOIs are pretty safe/underrated and that tyramine isn't that much of a concern.
But the first observation of serotonin syndrome was in patients on MAOIs (phenylpropanolamine 25 mg) given only 20 mg/kg of tryptophan [1]. That doesn't sound like that much. That's like a quart of milk[2] and half pound of chicken[3] which seems like not that unusual of a meal.
Am I missing something regarding absorption rates or just bad a math? Maybe this is less of a problem with selective MAO A/B inhibitors? This seems like a much more problematic thing than the tyramine reaction right?
I'm pretty sure I triggered this with a simple salmon dinner and drinking a bunch of milk.
Which hormones are billionaires taking and should I take them too? Recent pictures of Elon Musk showed that he seemingly took growth hormones (?) and if you look at before/after pictures of Jeff Bezos, it's clear he also took something, probably testosterone? It seems that growth hormones have an anti-aging effect? And testosterone gives you more energy as you're getting older? (And studies seem to show that testosterone doesn't actually make you more aggressive?)
I'm currently in my early thirties so I probably don't need to take anything, but should I in 10 years or so?
Does anyone here know anything about rituals of 'totemisation' among native peoples? Like, a sort of coming-of-age ritual where someone would have to complete one or more challenges and thereby gain a personal animal totem.
Some scouts groups in various countries have rituals like this, and many claim to have been inspired by Native American, African, or Aboriginal peoples. But while the idea of a totem is certainly derived from indigenous cultures, I haven’t been able to find an origin for the totemisation ritual from before the scouts, and am starting to suspect it was largely made up.
I feel like US politics is now a populist race to the bottom. Both parties want to outspend the other to buy votes from fools. I believe this will lead to a collapse of the USD over the next 30 years. (Yes, I am gradually shorting the dollar against other major currencies.)
"Benign" cancers: still worth treating if possible? Or the risk of medical intervention is simply too high vs. potential benefit? I'm thinking of stuff like moles or prolactinoma, not "elderly guy diagnosed with colon cancer which will kill him in another 10 years, which he doesn't have, so irrelevant".
I've lost at least four family members to cancer directly now, a couple "prematurely", so...feeling slightly more paranoid about tumorous tail risks than before.
Why don't politicians go after TicketMaster for anti-trust behavior? They are the poster boy for it, yet congress doesn't care. Why not? Wouldn't busting TicketMaster be popular with anyone who has ever bought tickets? I'd vote for any politician who wanted to destroy them.
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Something that's been bothering me and no one's been able to adequately explain. Putin's invasion in Ukraine is called Special Operation Z or the Z Operation or whatever. Z is the symbol at any rate. It's all over Russian propaganda. Here's the thing: Z is not a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. Why are they calling it that?
Would you like to take a short survey about your memory and thought process?
A while back I was extremely interested in an ACX book review (one of the non-winners but a finalist!), and it made me wonder if a specific hypothesis about memory and consciousness of self was true. I made a very short survey to try to answer the question and posted it on the ACX subreddit. The responses were very interesting and suggested, upon analysis, that my hypothesis was... more or less true, but that there was something else more important going on.
I also received some great suggestions and another related hypothesis to test. With these suggestions and taking into account the results of the first survey, I have created a new version of the survey, which should take about 7 minutes to complete. Here is the link, thank you so much if you choose to participate!
In the meetups thread, Scott mentioned reciprocity.io as “the rationalist friend-finder/dating site”. But if I understand it correctly, it looks like it only connects you with people you are already Facebook friends with? This seems very limited as a dating / friend-finder site. I want to find new people to meet.
Which got me thinking… why don’t we have some kind of site set up for this? I’d love to see an EA or rationalist dating site. I’ve seen a number of people sharing “date-me” docs, but surely there’s a better option than some scattered Google Drive docs. Is there no platform available that could accomplish something like that? Or if not, does anybody want to build a very simple version of it?
I know the gender ratios would be bad, but it still seems like it would be worthwhile to have and better than nothing.
At the end of Tyler Cowen's "Stubborn Attachments" he says that raising other people's (especially youths') ambitions is one of the best things you can do. For those of you who have been on the giving or receiving end of an interaction/relationship where this occurred, what was it like? How can we encourage more of these interactions?
Any thoughts on the social value of luxury cars? I’m interested in how the confer status signaling among peers and help form connections (romantic and otherwise). For a young single bachelor, the expected value from a luxury/expensive car might valuable? Or it might attract the wrong type of people?
What is the future outlook on quantum superweapons? For example something that could create a mini black hole that swallows the planet. Any good resources would be great.
Blutplättchentransfusionen bei Säuglingen
Im Ernst, ich wäre sehr vorsichtig mit solchen Sachen. Suchen Sie auf jeden Fall einen sachkundigen Arzt (nicht nur Ihren örtlichen Hausarzt), vielleicht sogar einen Endokrinologen, bevor Sie etwas einnehmen. Eine Testosteron-Supplementierung kann dazu führen, dass Ihr Körper aufhört, Testosteron zu produzieren, was bedeutet, dass Sie lebenslang darauf bleiben müssen.
Dieser Typ ist sehr gut zum Thema Nahrungsergänzung anzuhören. Lassen Sie sich nicht von dem albernen Namen abschrecken, er ist der wahre Deal: http://www.st4all.net
I wonder why, from an evolutionary perspective, beauty exists?
What survival value was gained by all of us finding certain things beautiful and others ugly?
We mostly see the same things as beautiful/ugly, so I think it has to be partly inherited.
Does anyone have experience using CBD for lower back pain? If so, what worked for you?
Any opinions on Nassim Taleb's 2019 post "IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle"? https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39
Today on Twitter he claims that post is "still unchallenged" and that "In fact IQ as a metric was invented to sift out those who believe in it and classify them as incompetent; hence limit them to jobs as psychology professors."
**Stuff on Class Inequality**
I think every sect out there right now, even the far right, ignores genetic class inequality. I'm convinced this is a huge mistake and understanding how people vary within a racial group is super enlightening when it comes to someone's understanding of politics.
To begin to understand class inequality, let's stretch what Jordan Peterson calls psychology's most secure and significant accomplishment: IQ. We want to map IQ ranging onto concrete, politically relevant abilities.
I want to start with HBD. How many people can actually understand it?
In 2006 the breakdown on what people thought on the question "How much to genes determine race differences in drive to succeed. math ability, criminality, and IQ?" was 50% not at all, 24% very little, 20% some, 6% a lot, 1% just about all. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3832063/
To understand the arguments in this field you should be able to get a 5, maybe less, on the AP Statistics exam, an extremely easy exam which is very light on dense theory like what you might find in Wasserman's textbook All of Statistics. It is generally considered to be equivalent to a 200 level business statistics course, not even a first introduction to math stat. In 2021 only 16 percent of the people who took the test got a 5. 42% failed. https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/about-ap-scores/score-distributions
An AP statistics practice test from 2012 gives a curve; a 70% is a 5 so under a 5 is a typical failure in a college class. a 3 is a 44%. https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap-statistics-practice-exam-2012.pdf?course=ap-statistics
Somewhere in between 58% and 16% (or less because of selection bias) of people can understand HBD themselves. The rest have to trust The Experts. That's at least 42% of people and potentially more than 84%. A large minority at the least. The IQ cutoff for understanding basic statistics and by extension HBD is somewhere between 97 and 115 or greater.
The average IQ of a college graduate is about 108. https://pumpkinperson.com/2017/01/17/iq-academic-success/
If we use this number and increase our standards for failure to where half of the 3s are given 2s we are looking for the 53rd percentile of an IQ distribution with a mean of 108. This is 72nd percentile overall.
Now for some reading. In 2003 NCES estimated that only 57% of adults are functionally literate. https://archive.ph/o/NZicZ/https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp
That's charitable, only 13% were in their top category where texts could be "dense."
Robin Hanson gives us a classic post with similar figures: https://archive.ph/MGAja
The reading SAT is pretty easy, I get perfect scores on it, but getting 80% of the questions right is 95th percentile. I get all of the questions right. The average basically can't read and gets maybe half of the questions right https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/understanding-sat-scores.pdf
Anatoly Karlin also gives some numbers like this: https://archive.ph/vxN69
The bottom half of the population basically can't make an informed vote, and the bottom 85-95% are seriously disabled compared to the top 5%. People under the top 85% exhibit serious reading comprehension and mathematical deficits and this is in a society that wants to pass as many of those people as possible. You probably need to be at least in the top 5% to be a professor or a serious Substack pundit with a book and all of that. People the top 10% under that level might be able to sort through information they are given if they want to put in the effort, but they won't generate new culture or ideas. Under the 85 percentile people begin to struggle to understand even information that is given to them. It is likely that people under that level would not fully understand this post.
Now departing from IQ, there's some data on temeperament. There is this concept called conventional morality where what you think is righteous is just whatever the law happens to be at your place in time, you don't have the capacity to think normatively using your own moral principles. You are a follower. The majority of college students are like this and this is mostly independent from IQ https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746042.pdf .
Lawrence Kohlberg found that about 85% of the population is like this. This correlates with IQ but not by much, it's about .3 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/016235329301600304
So if 15% of people are smart enough to properly understand politics, and 25% of them can think using their own moral principles (very charitable assumptions), 3.75% of the population is politically autonomous.
A final thing is intellectual habits. That 3.75% might not care for politics even if they aren't conventionalists. The average American reads 12 books per year https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-books-past.aspx
This is skewed though. 27% read more than 11 per year, so 73% will not be very informed beyond The News. Also most of this is not nonfiction. Numbers are hard to come by but based on sales a good estimate is that 40% of this reading is nonfiction.
The average American therefore reads only 4 or 5 nonfiction books per year. This is skewed, like I said above, and assuming people tend to read either nonfiction or fiction, only 10% read 11 or more nonfiction books per year.
But what do they read? Are they reading Carl Schmitt? Tacitus? Public Choice Theory textbooks? Arthur Jensen?
No, of course not, they're reading this: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Nonfiction/zgbs/digital-text/157325011
This fabulous list includes top sellers like "Pain: A Love Story" by Serena Sterling, a book by Sam from iCarly, If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Atomic Habits, Token Black Girl, etc, etc.
It would be charitable to assume that 30% of that 3.75% have a good reading habit. That gives us 1.125%, an imprecise upper bound on the fraction of informed, agentic voters in the US.
"You see, the word idiot is etymologically derived from the Attic Greek word ἰδιώτης (idiṓtēs), which literally means 'a private person,' or 'a person who does not take part in the affairs of the polis.' It is derived from the word ἴδιος (ídios), meaning 'of one’s own,” which is also the root of our English word idiosyncratic. The word ἰδιώτης originally had no bearing whatsoever on how intelligent the person it was being used to refer to was. It merely indicated that the person did not take part in public affairs." https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2016/11/07/the-bizarre-origins-of-the-word-idiot/
We don't live in a democracy, where the majority of people think about politics independently and then vote to decide who wins the fight for power. We live in a world where the very few who are functionally literate and can understand politics fight over the votes of distracted, conventional, and uninformed ἰδιώτης.
I wish your new blog still had tags. It was super useful to have a list of all AI-related posts on the old SSC at the click of a button.
So I just put down Faulkner’s “Go Down Moses” and picked up Erik Hoel’s The Revelations”.
Am I going to have to draw a crazy family tree with a bunch of ‘?’s in it for this one too?
Just checking. Getting low on scratch paper here. :)
Arestovych seems to be mostly known in these circles as the guy who predicted the Russian invasion of Ukraine with uncanny accuracy back in 2019, but he actually has a fascinating and original-minded political philosophy combining conservatism and futurism with a strong focus on individual freedom, and as a presidential advisor with friends in high places, one of the most popular people in a country in flux with the focus of the world on it, and someone who's built a lot of connections with the Russian opposition, he has some genuine ability to push for his ideas. I'm surprised he doesn't get more attention in these circles, between his positions and his extremely colorful character.
Someone just posted an overview essay about him and his political philosophy. Any thoughts?
https://justpaste.it/7h3q6
Is development economics bogus? Are there any meaningful examples of development economic interventions resulting in both significant and lasting examples of growth in developing countries?
Has there ever even been an example of an officially designated developing country becoming 'developed'? Obviously all wealthy countries started poor, but as long as 'developing' countries have been an official designation, has this 'development' ever actually occurred? Perhaps in Asia, but it seems that most people interested in development economics neither accept any role of genetics in differences in economic development, nor do they seem especially interested in promoting the type of policies that have accompanies economic growth in these Asian countries.
They of course have an endless list of narratives to explain why the latest and greatest idea of theirs has failed to produce anything of value, but I'm certain that if a counterfactual Singapore or South Korea had identical policies as the real Singapore/South Korea but were still "developing", this would not be a cause of extreme confusion for these economists. They would have a bunch of reasons to say "Of COURSE those countries aren't developed". Which is to say, their model of reality is hopelessly wrong and they update their narratives instead of their model when they are wrong yet again.
I do city planning in Greenland and I'm curious if anyone here is curious to read and critique a project that I'm about to finish. My work is influenced heavily by James C Scott (Seeing like a State) and David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything). I waltz patiently with Moloch on a daily basis.
The project is called "Catalogue of Potentials in Qaqortoq"; Qaqortoq is a city of 3k people in southern Greenland. The project has a word count of 50k. It has 4 parts that each indicate a step in the double diamond method. English is not my vernacular. I've a bachelor's in arctic civil engineering, but my writign style or the genre of the project is weird; I've hardly used statistics at all. There's a lot of pictures. There might be an overfocus on semi-private spaces and other ideas from Jan Gehl. I have taken care to explore and convey the knowledge and visions of the people I've talked with. I've put care into talking with people. That's a teaser. Write me if you're interested.
Does anyone know if there's been more rigorous research on Scott's observation from "A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows" about how these these text-to-image generation models seem to get stuck in basins of attraction when a prompt is too reminiscent of a well-known archetype?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design
I've seen a quote that 97% of people enjoy being around other people similar to themselves, and only 3% enjoy being around those who are different. I have not been able to find the source of the quote, or published research supporting this. Does anyone recognize it?
A great deal of basic human flourishing has come from improved sanitation...simple things like cooking foods before eating, bathing, proper waste disposal, and so on. Even if no one knows all the mechanisms behind, say, the Gillian Flynn Effect or life expectancy increase, this is surely a large factor.
Have we* exhausted all the low-hanging $20 bills in this arena, such that there's not gonna be, like, a modern one-upping of hand washing? With diminishing returns or even negative second-order consequences (e.g. antibacterial soaps contributing to "superbugs"), is the world "clean enough"?
*royal We, local conditions may differ
A great new pop-science book is out about long-lived species: Steven Austad's "Methuselah's Zoo"!
I think it'll be good and important for longevity research, because species differences are way bigger than what currently-heavily-studied interventions can do. (E.g. a calorically restricted mouse lives 3-5 years instead of 2-4; but naked mole-rats can live >30, bowhead whales >200, ocean quahogs >500.) Comparative biogerontology isn't the biggest field right now, but this book will help popularize it; and since we now have comparative genomics to generate hypotheses, and e.g. gene-editing to test them (on top of studying long-lived species' cells in culture), I bet it'll be able to get somewhere.
My book review of it, submitted to BioEssays, has been accepted! e-article version should be out in a couple weeks, final version should be out in November [it'll be at: doi.org/10.1002/bies.202200144].
To newcomers to aging/longevity bio, I'd recommend reading it second or third. First read Andrew Steele's "Ageless" [my goodreads review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4112868997], and/or Austad's earlier "Why We Age." If you're interested in the currently-heavily-studied stuff like caloric restriction mimetics, David Stipp's "The Youth Pill" is good. Aubrey de Grey's "Ending Aging" is more detailed but older than Steele's book, in its coverage of the directly-repair-damage approach.
I read this essay about the hard limits of human intelligence with interest. I'm still thinking about the implications of Wolpert's theses, but, yes, I think there's an upper limit for what human intelligence can comprehend and the problems that human intelligence can solve. Nor do I expect AI to move us forward much, because AI will still have the observational limitations our augmented wetware minds have. Part of the problem, which Wolpert doesn't seem to acknowledge (or perhaps he didn't think about it) is the physical constraints on what we can observe. For instance, there's a limit on how far back we can look into the history of the universe. And the majority of the universe (beyond 48 billion light years) will always be unobservable. Likewise, there are limits on how far into the high-energy states of matter we can observe. Wolpert spends a lot of time focused on new types of mathematics, but mathematics isn't very good when you can't create ways to apply them and test in reality.
https://aeon.co/essays/ten-questions-about-the-hard-limits-of-human-intelligence
For any ridiculously smart people with access to standardised test scores to prove it, did you have any idea about how smart you were before access to test scores?
I ask because my girlfriend has struggled with school her entire life despite working really hard. She scraped through university, really struggles with her job as an insurance broker, and her favourite thing to do in her spare time is watch YouTube clips of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders (those women are incredible by the way). She recently took 2 IQ tests under controlled conditions and received a genius score (>98th percentile) on both tests.
I love her to bits, genius or not, but I feel like all the people I know with these kinds of scores find school really easy and normally have a need for cognition to do a lot of active thinking about something that interests them in their spare time- my girlfriend definitely does not fit this description. Is my girlfriend just really weird? Or is this more normal than I think?
Yikes; here is what happens when liking or disliking a show (Rings of Power in this case) becomes a tribal identity marker:
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt7631058/ratings/?ref_=tt_ov_rt
Out of curiosity, does this crowd believe that either a 10 or a 1 rating is justified?
Is it just me or is Astral Codex Ten much slower to load than other Substacks?
- When I try to load the site it hangs for 30 seconds to a minute
- The first time I scroll down to the comments the site can hang for 2-3 minutes.
Does anyone else have this problem? I am reading in Safari on an IPad 9.
If you were given the following brief, how would you even start?
We are looking for ideas for a system to objectively grade ability.
The goal is an alternative to existing institutions that grade on a bell curve - instead we want an absolute yardstick that allows us to compare any two individuals worldwide (provide they have both gone through the process/taken the test.)
Crucially we also care about time invariance - we would like to compare someone to his great great grandfather with this metric and see who would have been the better hire.
Ideally the test (if there is one) can be taken multiple times by the same individual. It can be taken at any time by any individual. Very ideally, it is a simple process to organise/distribute, such that rich and poor communities alike can participate. But most important is that it cannot be cheated or gamed and end up lying about an individual's abilities.
This process might be applied to the academic fields or practical ones, but really we're interested in any area where skill, competence or knowledge need to be guaranteed.
Right now I'm thinking about procedurally generated challenges, and grading somehow (by time taken or quality of result) the way they get solved. But right away that limits the system to only those fields that can have challenges procedurally generated and algorithmically graded (like, for eg. GCSE-level Maths but not higher level Maths, and certainly not English.) It also probably allows a determined-but-stupid individual to simply take the test enough times to learn the shape of all possible problems by heart*.
*this isn't necessarily a problem if the space of generated problems maps perfectly onto the entire domain the subject was supposed to be learning - but that itself is a pretty big ask.
I feel like I'm probably missing other promising avenues though.
I've written a longread about men's suffering, titled "Three Hundred Ways It Can Hurt to Be a Man."
Introduction here: https://elodes.substack.com/p/three-hundred-ways-it-can-hurt-to?s=w
Index here: https://elodes.substack.com/p/three-hundred-ways-it-can-hurt-to-d1d?s=w
Find me on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/ElodesNL
Some of Scott's older posts such as "Radicalizing the Romanceless", "Untitled", and his Nine Meditations, were primary inspirations for this piece. I imagine that many ACX readers may value reading it.
Impressions from others include:
* "This project by Elodes is emotional, masterfully-written, vulnerable, inspiring, necessary, and deeply, deeply important to me and potentially millions of other men and women."
* "[this] is the work that everyone should have a go at - I just started it and it's fire"
* "I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for creating that 300 ways post. I'm bawling my eyes out reading it because it resonates so hardcore"
* "In stereotypical male fashion, I am going to decline to talk about the many emotions this raised in me, and content myself with giving praise. The conclusion in particular was masterful writing. Synthetic, rigorous and tender. You should probably read this."
* "it's fucking amazing work. [...] You've done something incredibly valuable with this write-up."
* "holy freaking crap. this list should be required reading for every human on the face of the planet"
* "your writing is very lucid and your frame is refreshingly expansive. Kinda daunting in its length, but from what I’ve sampled it’s well worth investing the time to read in its entirety."
* "I've been crying for an hour at the feeling of being seen . Thanks for sharing all of this"
* "Words are not enough to describe how this resonated with me. [...] Reading this, as a proof that my suffering was and is real, not just an imagination in my head, means more than almost anything else someone has done for me. I can't even believe that a book can mean do much to me, and would not have believed anyone if they told me earlier it will mean so much."
I hope ACX readers will find it similarly valuable.
In terms of carbon costs. Is eating at a restaurant more carbon friendly than cooking at home. Ignoring transport costs.
I'm starting as a new professor of Ethics, Law, AI in a research institution in Europe.
Since I don't have to worry about tenure, I am looking for broad suggestions for cool/impactful things to or advice you wish you had known at the start of your academic career.
I don't have a huge budget, but I am fairly free to do as I please.
I felt like I didn't "get" the Prophet and Caesar's Wife post. I usually really like Scott's fiction so it seemed like I was missing something. Anyone got any takes/elaboration on the point/joke?
What's the point in talking to people that don't have any intellectual achievements, eg contributions to human knowledge? Wouldn't the best forum in the world restrict its membership to just those people, particularly those whose contributions are in math or science or can at least be argued to be scientific (so an empirically minded historian could argue his way in but some Hegelian philosopher would rightfully stay excluded). It wouldn't have to be a big achievement, even a blog post with a lot of data or some sort of novel mathematics could qualify. Every professor/PhD grad save for grievance studies, English lit, etc would qualify on the basis of their thesis. This would help to ensure that forum members are smart enough and have the right temperament to produce new knowledge, potentially making the forum actually productive, while also hopefully ensuring that members are interesting people who have substantial things to say, something which is very hard to come by, as most forums are just people signalling at one another.
The main problem is that many people get some sort of intellectual achievement only because it's a money/status thing. Their whole mindset is still about status and consequently their politics remain stupid/irrational. So without giving a political test you could restrict this to people with some sort of achievement done without funding outside of an official institution, perhaps without expectation of pay. I think this would be an excellent filter for people who are truly devoted to rational knowledge.
Is Moneyball one of the worst things to happen to modern American intellectual life? It suggests that anyone smart can enter a field they know nothing about and dominate it with previously unused analytics/quantitative methods/Generally Being Smart. It falsely suggests that sabermetrics pushed the old qualitative scouting model out- in fact, modern teams use a mix of both together. Sabermetrics certainly added a lot to baseball, but it only complements existing methodology.
In general Moneyball, plus some kind of vague Silicon Valley worship, suggests that generally smart people don't need subject matter expertise or a qualitative background to enter a particular field- they can just Use Analytics. This is very appealing to engineers, finance types, etc.- they can arrogantly ignore people who have been in the field to date, those guys weren't smart enough to Use Analytics like I am, etc. My life experience suggests the opposite, that subject matter experts are in general much better than smart outsiders. In particular quantitative methods mean little if you're asking the wrong questions or starting with the wrong assumptions- garbage in, garbage out.
Kind of reminds me of the late 19th/early 20th century, when it was in vogue to call whatever you were doing Scientific. I.e. Communism had Scientifically Proven that they had the best approach to running a society, etc.
I'm a computer science professor moving into a new office and I am thinking about making the decor over the top rationalist stuff, inspired by seeing this: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/816709752452153374/1015712508566323320/20220903_155830.jpg
Anyone have any suggestions? Anyone have any good inspirational quotes, particularly good HPMOR fan art, or cool guides?
Full-service restaurants should suffer from Baumol's cost disease, right? Have they?
How do progressives reconcile the huge error term between their self-image of oppressed minorities and how corporations treat them ?
Yesterday, I was banned from HackerNews, probably the only social media I truly loved, because of my participation in the KiwiFarms vs. CloudFlare discussion. (Long Story Short : Forum makes fun of <bad people>, <bad people> organize a mob outrage campaign against CloudFlare which is a corporation which provides very vital protection to websites against a low-effort form of cyberattacks called DDoS, corporation first says no and yay free speech then capitulates.)
This, besides making me unimaginably angry with the progressive religion, <threat>, begin browsing kiwifarms, and generally ruining my day and lowering my already sea-level-low opinion of humanity further below the 0, made me think : How do those people think they're oppressed ?
Now, I'm aware of the famous general purpose reply here :
GPR1- The human brain is not a truth machine, every calculation it makes it is heavily optimized for survival. Specifically, this translates to outsized preference for threat false positives over threat false negatives (e.g. better to imagine the tiger there despite it not being there than to imagine it not there when *it's really* there).
GPR2- In the context of ingroup vs. outgroup confrontations, the above translates to deliberate sensory and memory bias for ingroup and against outgroup, such that ingroup always appears to be in danger and on the brink of annihilation and the outgroup always appears tyranical and unstoppable. In one memorable example from SSC (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/18/against-bravery-debates/), Scott cites an example of what's called the " hostile media effect ", where Pro-Palestine and Pro-Israel both perceived the same documentary to be heavily biased against them and for the outgroup, despite that being apriori impossible.
This seems to explain my question, people in a literal war for survival can't agree on who's more oppressed, so of course the progressives can't see they're not oppressed, the literal opposite in fact. Neither is most of us and our ingroups for that matter.
But, general purpose algorithms and explanations are always less satisfying than domain-specific algorithms and explanations, my reptile brain is still not satisfied with this perfectly good answer.
1- Kiwifarms was dropped from the clearnet enitrely today's morning by it's *Russian* DDoS protection company, probably because it was more trouble than the company could handle (but of course, the company didn't forget to virtue signal in its announcement.). KF is now accessible only via tor (a convoluted technology that - in a nutshell and very loosely speaking - circumvents censorship via repeated re-routing.)
2- An Australian company that allocate IP addresses is being pressured to revoke allocation for KF, which - according to the forum's founder who is very law-savvy and internet-savvy in general - is "unprecedented in the history of the Internet".
How can a group that can, extra-legally, pressure companies against their customers in 3 continents and across all timezones and every habitable earth latitude possibly think it's the underdog ? Anyone who had dealt with this group extensively enough to know their thinking can illuminate me ?
Addendum : This comment and its username was edited because it contained insults that others found too insulting to merit a serious reply to the rest of my points, as well as a threat made out of hopeless anger and despair rather than any real malice. The edited section are between <> angular brackets and do not exceed a sentence in length. The heretical words used are linked to in interest of accountability and responsibility for words said.
1- Insult in user name : shorturl.at/bzDEX
2- Insult in place of <bad people> : shorturl.at/QU159
Does anyone here have any experience with remote.com, both in general and from the perspective of a US employee looking to keep his US job but live/work outside the US?
Anybody know any good advice/articles (Please God nothing by Tony Robbins) about how to get better at sales? Any ideas about how to practice it would also be really useful.
My job has nothing to do with sales, but it feels like one of those versatile human traits that has really high returns if you can learn to do it well.
Any feline psychologists out there? The Warrior Princess is an indoor/outdoor cat that I raised from a kitten and is now eleven years old. Suddenly last week she decided that being inside makes her absolutely crazy—I mean yowling at the doors, scratching the window screens crazy!
The routine up to two weeks ago, was I would get up in the morning, feed her and her brother breakfast, then an hour or so later, let them out for the day. Between 5 and 6 pm, I'd clap my hands and call them in for dinner. They'd both come running, and they'd be indoors for the night.
Maybe a month ago, Princess started being a bit tardy for the dinner call, but she'd show up 15 or 20 minutes late and meow at the front door or the kitchen door to let me know she was there. This may be because she had been wandering further from my yard, but I'm not sure. Starting last week, she'd show up at my door but was reluctant to come in, so I'd grab her and bring her in for her dinner. After dinner, she'd be restless and she'd meow and then yowl to go back outside. Then she became rmotr and more reluctant to let me snag her, and the evenings became such restless high-drama of yowling and scratching at doors and screens (I couldn't get to sleep), that I gave in and let her out.
For the next several days, she'd stay 50 or so feet away from the door, and the only way I could snag her was by luring her close to me with Temptation cat treats. Now we've come to a compromise. When I step out to greet her, she'll come up to me to let me pet her. She allows me to snuggle with her a bit and carry her inside. She'll eat about half her food and then she'll make it quite clear to me that she wants to go back outside NOW!
Yesterday evening after I had let her out after her brief dinner, I was sitting outside on my back patio as the twilight settled in and she came by me to say hello and head butt me. She hopped up on my lap and we had a session of snuggling. I didn't try to bring her inside. She hopped down and trotted off into the shadows. This morning she allowed me to snag her without objecting, but after eating half her breakfast she made it clear that she wanted to get back outside.
BTW: breakfast & dinner are high-protein/low-carb cat foods(Blue Buffalo) for middle-age weight control. More for her brother (who was porking up) than for her. Also, over the past month, she was only eating half her normal food—even while she was still staying inside at night. But she hasn't been losing weight, so I assumed she was eating food that my neighbor puts out for the ferals in the neighborhood. My mom also has been coming by to put out food for a couple of ferals who she's bonded with, but I put that Purina Meow Mix away when I let my two cats out every morning—so they wouldn't get at the cheaper food with grain in it.
I was told by a vet that cat food with grain in it can cause kidney issues and one of the signs is that the cat gets moody. My current vet has told me that that's crap. But I'm wondering if my former vet wasn't on to something. Is my Warrior Princess eating grain-based kibble at the neighbor's house, and she's going psycho because of the food that she may be scarfing up around the neighborhood?
I have a cat-sitter who looks after my cats when I travel, but both of them would stay in the house while I was traveling so that my cat-sitter wouldn't have to look for them. I'll be going on a trip at some point in the next month, I can't deal with a semi-feral cat tearing my house apart while I'm away. The only alternative is to leave the Warrior Princess out to fend for herself for a week. There's plenty of food and water in the neighborhood (my street is like a Club Med for cats). But I don't like that idea.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
I want to plug this hilarious review of the game "Tom Clancy's The Division."
https://youtu.be/byoCgCrd_dI
I've been playing Fallout 4, there are a ton of side quests (including recurring missions to defend town from attack, to rescue abducted townspeople from other locations, and to kill groups of people who have been harassing the towns), and it got me thinking about how realistic they were. A fair place to start in my assessment is considering what types of problems the police typically deal with today. Here's a source I found: https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/police_dispatch_stats
With that in mind, I think a post-apocalyptic, open-world game would generate these types of side quests for the player, in this order of frequency:
1) Deal with transportation accidents. Either someone alerts you to an accident that just happened around the corner (e.g. - mule-driven cart flips over, motorcycle hits a kid, etc.), or you see it happen in front of you, and you decide whether to help. You would also have your own personal vehicle accidents. Maybe you give the victims medical help, fix their vehicles, or stop a fight between the involved parties.
2) Deal with heated arguments and fist fights between people. Such confrontations would auto-generate between NPCs in your vicinity at random intervals. This includes domestic violence. Some NPCs would also start arguments with you.
3) Deal with thefts. Maybe a store owner complains to you and you have to decide whether to track down the thief and retrieve the items (and punish them however you please). NPCs would also steal from you, and your perception / awareness level would determine whether you noticed before they fled.
4) Deal with trespassers, loiterers, etc. NPCs would ask you to help remove obstinate drunks from bars, homeless people from sidewalks, nonpaying tenants, etc. If you owned a house in the game, you would also periodically deal with these problems directly.
5) Deal with noise complaints. The lack of electronic music devices would make this a less common problem, though people would still complain about the loud bar next door, or noise from a machine shop or something.
6) OK, I'm tired of writing this. Just look at the list in the link.
Note: I omitted "Parking violations" because, in a post-apocalyptic world it probably wouldn't be an issue since there would be so few vehicles left.
Long time reader, first time poster feeling a bit weird that my first comment is basically an ad.
I’ve started a Substack where I plan to tackle some topics that I think ACX readers will likely be interested in. I’ve planned out one post every two weeks for the next few months. Today’s post is “All Poverty is Energy Poverty” (https://omnibudsman.substack.com/p/all-poverty-is-energy-poverty). Would really appreciate any feedback you all can give- I’m aiming for something that is interesting to ACX types but also intelligible to normies.
Apropos of the "how much do billionaires deserve" thread (which I was way too late to comment on)--
Isn't all of that just what the 10th commandment was warning about? "Thou shalt not covet" and all of that? "I don't like how much money you have and want you to have less." That's the root of punitive taxation. And it's an awful, destructive tool, one that corrodes the body politic.
My answer is "as much as they earned while obeying the laws that existed at the time it was earned, minus the minimum amount of tax, as flat as possible, necessary to maintain the obligatory functions of the state, just like everyone else." If you want to penalize them, make new laws for money earned going forward. Subject to the normal democratic procedure, ideally without demagoguing about what they "deserve" or not.
Tax law should not be used to enforce social policy, because tax law *stinks* at doing so, and that makes it worse at its actual function, which is providing funding for the (necessary) operations of government. If you want to subsidize something, do so openly. If you want to penalize (civilly or criminally), something, make a law regarding that. Don't build loopholes and curlicues into the tax law. In part because those inevitably hit people you *didn't* intend to hit worse than those "big bad rich people"--rich people can structure their income (et al) to minimize the tax burden. Regular employees can't. So it mostly hurts people who *want to become* rich, not those who *already are rich*. And is just pure envy and spite.
I'll also note that this sort of flaw comes up with any attempt to centrally plan the economy. The society *most* captured by its elites I've ever seen[1] was the old Soviet Union. Once you put some people in charge of deciding how much everyone else deserves...well...the ones making that decision deserve the most for their hard work, of course.
[1] even a lot of feudal countries were less captured in practice, because of the complex web of obligations and the general poverty of the situation. Although often the Church was heavily corrupt and acted like a fully-captured elite. But I'm focusing on ones in relatively modern times.
Small business owners of ACX, would you please share your best advice about customer acquisition?
So I have not seen anyone say this, but this seems like as good a place as any to bring it up.
We're told a lithium shortage is slowing the adoption of electric cars. If there's a scramble for lithium, how is that going to affect availability of lithium (carbonate) for treating bipolar disorder? I know the quantities are much smaller, but you can't make the element outside of a reactor, and then it would be radioactive if you get the wrong isotope, right? Do psychiatrists need to advocate for a strategic lithium reserve?
Scott's review of Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer is one of my favorite book reviews of his of all time. I finally got around to reading the book myself, and reviewed it on my blog: https://nicholasbruner.com/2022/09/05/what-im-reading-albions-seed/ If anybody were interested in reading it and wanted to leave a comment about what you think here, I would appreciate it. I am considering entering the next book review contest, and so would especially like to hear what changes or improvements I could make to a review like this to increase its chances of getting picked.
Any Kabbalistic significance to the word 'capital', having originally come from describing 'heads of cattle' and transmuting, in modern parlance, into a kind of 'economic control plane', where capital describes 'a system which makes choices as to the allocation of energy' - as the word 'capital' went from 'an organic reproductive force of nature' to 'a cerebral control mechanism' ?
Here's some interesting data based thoughts on automation: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/american-workers-need-lots-and-lots?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.
So, what are your thoughts on the recent developments in the Ukraine war ? Will the Ukrainian offensive amount to something significant ?
I am trying to signin to remind everyone thatis putting away a boat,trailer, or RV today to please checkit THOROUGHLY for hitchhikers such as cats, squirrels, raccoons, etc. Look in cupboards/cabinets, drawers, j\luggage, appliances even if you don't remember them being open when youc leaned/aired out. Check stuffed furniture, big vases and buckets, tool/instrument cases, luggage....
It is becoming increasingly clear that the Covid lockdowns implemented in most countries have produced an almighty log jam and muddle in trading networks that had been built up over decades and were enormously complicated and very delicate (in the "just in time" sense). If that is so then what is the best way to untangle the mess, if the best solution is not to leave it to untangle itself over time?
On covid nowadays :
1. What precautions do you take to avoid it now?
2. Which places are doing great research on longcovid?
3. It seems to me that data is murky but covid still seems to increase risk of serious and chronic problems long term. Would you agree?
Michael Shellenberger --former CA Gubernatorial candidate, whose book "Sanfransicko" Scott reviewed recently -- lobbied hard to keep CA's Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant from being shut down. Thank God it paid off. He celebrates a bit here:
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/creating-the-pro-nuclear-movement
This is a big win for common sense.
Is anyone aware of a study that compares increased surveillance camera coverage in cities with levels of crime?
This seems like an obvious and inexpensive way to deter crime and catch criminals.
Are there objections to doing so based on privacy or efficacy or cost?
High school student here. I plan to get a CS degree but it occured to me that CS may be attracting too much talent. No doubt it's a field with a bright future, but supply and demand.
I find most STEM subjects interesting (although CS is my favorite), and I consider myself good enough at math to handle any of them if I had to. So what major(or field of study) would you recommmend?
Hugo Awards are out. Any Thoughts or recommendations?
https://www.tor.com/2022/09/04/2022-hugo-award-winners/
São Paulo on Saturday too!
Scott, you really should read Alexandro's last article and correct your piece on ivermectin, it is starting to look embarrassing : https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/the-potemkin-argument-part-14-achilles
According to MR (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/09/that-was-then-this-is-now-37.htmlccc) , Poland now seeks 1.3 Trillion USD from Germany for reparations for WWII.
It doesn't sound like Central Europe is getting along well these days. I assume Poland is angry about Germany's pussyfooting regarding Ukraine.
I'm a bit angry at Germany too. Sorry, but they seem like a culture of conformists who goose-step to Nazis or liberal politics or Russians or whatever the fashion of the day is. That this overly conformist, fashion-sensitive culture is the most powerful polity in Europe concerns me.
Germany shouldn't pay reparations for something 70 years ago of course, but they should grow up and show they are a serious country. I'm a moron and don't know much about Germany and have no right to say that, so do educate me: In what way is Germany a serious country now? I characterize them above as a bunch of conformists. How is that characterization wrong?
So the general consensus of this blog is that MAOIs are pretty safe/underrated and that tyramine isn't that much of a concern.
But the first observation of serotonin syndrome was in patients on MAOIs (phenylpropanolamine 25 mg) given only 20 mg/kg of tryptophan [1]. That doesn't sound like that much. That's like a quart of milk[2] and half pound of chicken[3] which seems like not that unusual of a meal.
Am I missing something regarding absorption rates or just bad a math? Maybe this is less of a problem with selective MAO A/B inhibitors? This seems like a much more problematic thing than the tyramine reaction right?
I'm pretty sure I triggered this with a simple salmon dinner and drinking a bunch of milk.
[1] https://n.neurology.org/content/10/12/1076
[2] https://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/tryptophan-in-milk.php
[3] http://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/tryptophan-in-chicken-breast.php
Which hormones are billionaires taking and should I take them too? Recent pictures of Elon Musk showed that he seemingly took growth hormones (?) and if you look at before/after pictures of Jeff Bezos, it's clear he also took something, probably testosterone? It seems that growth hormones have an anti-aging effect? And testosterone gives you more energy as you're getting older? (And studies seem to show that testosterone doesn't actually make you more aggressive?)
I'm currently in my early thirties so I probably don't need to take anything, but should I in 10 years or so?
Does anyone here know anything about rituals of 'totemisation' among native peoples? Like, a sort of coming-of-age ritual where someone would have to complete one or more challenges and thereby gain a personal animal totem.
Some scouts groups in various countries have rituals like this, and many claim to have been inspired by Native American, African, or Aboriginal peoples. But while the idea of a totem is certainly derived from indigenous cultures, I haven’t been able to find an origin for the totemisation ritual from before the scouts, and am starting to suspect it was largely made up.
Any knowledge or resources would be appreciated!
I feel like US politics is now a populist race to the bottom. Both parties want to outspend the other to buy votes from fools. I believe this will lead to a collapse of the USD over the next 30 years. (Yes, I am gradually shorting the dollar against other major currencies.)
Why should I believe otherwise?
Assume starting with X immunity, get booster, then have Y immunity. Y presumably changes over time. How much time until:
a) Y > X
b) Y is maximum
c) Y = X again, immunity gone
Does anyone have a good idea?
"Benign" cancers: still worth treating if possible? Or the risk of medical intervention is simply too high vs. potential benefit? I'm thinking of stuff like moles or prolactinoma, not "elderly guy diagnosed with colon cancer which will kill him in another 10 years, which he doesn't have, so irrelevant".
I've lost at least four family members to cancer directly now, a couple "prematurely", so...feeling slightly more paranoid about tumorous tail risks than before.
Why don't politicians go after TicketMaster for anti-trust behavior? They are the poster boy for it, yet congress doesn't care. Why not? Wouldn't busting TicketMaster be popular with anyone who has ever bought tickets? I'd vote for any politician who wanted to destroy them.
Or does someone have a defense of TicketMaster?
Hi, I am a fully qualified counsellor and therapist and I carry out sessions on Zoom online and by telephone with clients from all over the world.
I provide a confidential, warm and safe environment where you will be listened to deeply. You will be helped to make sense of your feelings, reduce distress and to improve your sense of wellbeing and confidence. I teach clients useful tools and coping mechanisms which they can take away and use to manage your life more positively.
I specialise in helping those with anxiety and low self esteem and also those who wish to deepen their own personal growth and understanding of themselves and gain a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.
My training is in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Transpersonal Psychology and my therapeutic approach is integrative and includes elements of Positive Psychology, Mindfulness and Compassion Focussed Therapy.
You can contact me via my website (onlinecounsellingtherapist.com) where you will find more details about my qualifications, my approach and positive recommendations from previous clients. It’s £50/hour or £35/hour for those with a low income.
Something that's been bothering me and no one's been able to adequately explain. Putin's invasion in Ukraine is called Special Operation Z or the Z Operation or whatever. Z is the symbol at any rate. It's all over Russian propaganda. Here's the thing: Z is not a letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. Why are they calling it that?
TheMotte has a new home https://www.themotte.org/
The original "themotte" was a subreddit spinoff of the slatestarcodex subreddit.
So this new website is a spinoff of a spinoff.
Hello everyone,
Would you like to take a short survey about your memory and thought process?
A while back I was extremely interested in an ACX book review (one of the non-winners but a finalist!), and it made me wonder if a specific hypothesis about memory and consciousness of self was true. I made a very short survey to try to answer the question and posted it on the ACX subreddit. The responses were very interesting and suggested, upon analysis, that my hypothesis was... more or less true, but that there was something else more important going on.
I also received some great suggestions and another related hypothesis to test. With these suggestions and taking into account the results of the first survey, I have created a new version of the survey, which should take about 7 minutes to complete. Here is the link, thank you so much if you choose to participate!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfj2nV0JvmBC0hkDPaR4oP-mDoMg4tJEq4dj0RlTwFVlPf65w/viewform
PS: If you already took the previous survey on the ACX subreddit, it would be wonderful if you took this one too, as there are many new questions.
PPS I plan to publish the results of both surveys on the subreddit in a few weeks.
In the meetups thread, Scott mentioned reciprocity.io as “the rationalist friend-finder/dating site”. But if I understand it correctly, it looks like it only connects you with people you are already Facebook friends with? This seems very limited as a dating / friend-finder site. I want to find new people to meet.
Which got me thinking… why don’t we have some kind of site set up for this? I’d love to see an EA or rationalist dating site. I’ve seen a number of people sharing “date-me” docs, but surely there’s a better option than some scattered Google Drive docs. Is there no platform available that could accomplish something like that? Or if not, does anybody want to build a very simple version of it?
I know the gender ratios would be bad, but it still seems like it would be worthwhile to have and better than nothing.
At the end of Tyler Cowen's "Stubborn Attachments" he says that raising other people's (especially youths') ambitions is one of the best things you can do. For those of you who have been on the giving or receiving end of an interaction/relationship where this occurred, what was it like? How can we encourage more of these interactions?
The Mexico City ACX group is having a meetup in the context of the “ACX Meetups Everywhere”
event on Saturday 10th. See the details of the event on LW:
https://www.lesswrong.com/events/bejXvxGjQ7rYudF88/acx-cdmx-meetups-everywhere-1
Any thoughts on the social value of luxury cars? I’m interested in how the confer status signaling among peers and help form connections (romantic and otherwise). For a young single bachelor, the expected value from a luxury/expensive car might valuable? Or it might attract the wrong type of people?
What is the future outlook on quantum superweapons? For example something that could create a mini black hole that swallows the planet. Any good resources would be great.