Or, in place of a full review, has anyone around here read the book and care to share opinions on it? I'm very much interested in the themes, but I'm afraid I won't gain new insights, being a regular reader of this blog.
I've noticed that whenever I wear a backpack, particularly with a heavy load, and take my shirt off afterwards, there are pink stripes over my shoulders under where the straps were. Does anyone know why this happens? When I tried googling it, I just got pages about little red spots, which is not what I saw.
Ran across this substack article and immediately wondered what Scott Alexander would think of it. True story? Or "big pharma bad" narrative? Tl;dr: The seratonin uptake model of depression is unsupported by evidence; SSRIs are way overprescribed.
The Critical Drinker (a.k.a Will Jordan) is a novelist and online movie/TV critic. He is pretty excited about The House of the Dragon. Where The Rings of Power failed, The House of the Dragon succeeded, according to the Drinker.
I’m not a worker, but I’ve been a patient of a therapist and psychiatrist at Kaiser Oakland, the therapist I had good repport with, but I only got to see her once every other months at most, and I understand that once a week would be better, and I’d say too little progress has been made in that time.
The psychiatrist I’ve only spoken on the phone with, he prescribed me an antidepressant which did work to reduce my sadness, but it replaced my sadness with terrible anger which was worse.
Does anyone know when/if they will start letting shadowbanned people back on Twitter? I figured the changes won't go through immediately, but the former corrupt staff just ignores my appeals.
Edit: I know Bezos lurks here and I'll bet Elon might too because a lot of his tweets are ingroup coded, hey Elon if you read this please reform the ban appeals process so it's more fair! The current people throw my ban appeals in the garbage without reading them at all!
So both Tyler Cowen(1) and Bryan Caplan(2) have written persuasively on the weakness of the New Right. At it's core, the critique is that the New Right is so hostile to educated elites and bureaucrats that it has no realistic way to actually run the bureaucracy if it gets in power and no coherent policy proposals to change the situation. And I think that's very fair; the biggest failure of the Trump years was an inability to find loyal, competent people to staff the bureaucracy. Quite frankly, the New Right doesn't have a coherent plan to implement it's policies.
On the flipside though, I'm really wondering what the alternative is. Do thinkers like Caplan and Cowen have a realistic plan to get any of their policies through the political process. Do these older Reaganite/libertarian/deregulator types have a realistic slate of candidates to elect? I'm not aware of any Democrats who are amenable to these politics and the Republican tickets in 2024 and 2028 will either be Trump or DeSantis, and if anything DeSantis is more clearly "New Right" than Trump. And the general vibe I've gotten with House and Senate races is that, while Trump-backed candidates don't always win their primaries, they win more than they lose.
But I don't follow politics as much as a used to. Are there credible Republican or Democratic candidates who are sympathetic to Cowen's positions? Is there still a solid block of Reagan Republicans to enact these policies?
Know anyone doing manufacturing? I'm looking to beta test my open-source, open-hardware robotic solutions ( https://yorc.global ) with some clients. Thanks!
What if those of us with time to spare (an hour a day) chose a school which many poor children attend, and helped atleast a couple every day with homework? Just show up with a healthy snack after school and hang around an hour.
Start this while they're young and help the same kids through high school, or until whenever they become independent in studying. Don't take on too many kids, so you can be more effective.
I have been doing some thinking on SN-risk (Steppe Nomad risk, someone told me all about it at a house party). You know the gist: "once every two hundred, three hundred years they get their act together, form a big confederation, and invade either China, the West, or both."
What got me thinking is that the steppe nomads are replaced. The first steppe nomads were the proto-indo-europeans. Fast forward and all the steppe nomads are indo-iranians. Sure, they are decedents of the proto-indo-europeans. But they are from a specific branch. In most of the steppe, they must have replaced their indo-european cousins. How did they do that? But fast forward some more and it gets even stranger.
First, some germanic tribes, most famously the Goths, manages to settle the steppe and learn it way of life. How in hell did this happen? Some bearded guys from Denmark show up and settles the home turf of the famously deadly horse archers that Rome itself couldn’t beat? Then the Goths are driven away by the Huns, and now the whole steppe, who has been indo-iranian for 1500 years is suddenly not anymore since the best and most feared warriors in Euroasia has been replaced by unknown nobodies from Siberia. (Ok, we don’t know for sure that the Huns aren’t indo-iranian but it doesn’t look like it.) Then there’s a host of Turkish tribes, and then the Maygars, and then the Mongols etc. And none of them seem descended from the previous one.
Now, naively, you could expect that that the steppe is the high ground of Euroasia, and that waves of people would emerge out from it but that the steppe itself would have a continuity of dominance and population. Instead, the steppe seems to be reconquered again and again. (Sue, there are some continuity, but new people show up speaking new languages with new haplogroups and dominates the old ones, which is not what I would expect.) What’s going on? Is this the place were the hard-times, strong-men meme holds? How did the Goths, Huns, Turks, Maygars, Mongols etc. learn to be better steppe nomads than the steppe nomads that had been living on the steppe for generations before them?
Private companies will sell anyone surveillance satellite photos of military units and bases. Are there also private companies that sell airplane reconnaissance photos? What would happen if the ACME Spy Plane company received an anonymous order to fly drones over international airspace in the Black Sea and to report the locations of Russian warships?
The commenter who was banned earlier in this thread, and one on 'highlights from the comments on supplement labeling', don't have (banned) next to their username unlike the commenter who was banned on open thread 247 and all those before that. What's up with that?
The network state. Eight hour podcast of Lex Fridman talking with Balaji Srinivasan. It was great! I also downloaded Srinivasan's book "The network state" only a few pages into it. https://thenetworkstate.com/ And I'm thinking Scott is starting a network state. Any thoughts?
Throughout human history, a successful mass emigration and settlement in a distant new area has presumably needed some major incentive, and perhaps some valuable resource to trade.
For example, in the distant past it may have been access to herds of large animals on the steppes or plains of North America, and various animal products such as tusks and furs. In more recent times, motives might include freedom from religious or political oppression, plentiful farm land, and the main resources or "killer apps" initially, in the Americas at least, were tobacco and sugar.
So what major incentives will there be in future decades and centuries for mass emigrations off Earth, to places like Mars or Titan or even further afield? If everyone is comfortable living on Earth then why would many people bother uprooting themselves to spend the rest of their days in difficult and dangerous environments, probably never to visit Earth again?
I propose an obvious answer: To be allowed to continue living at all! Assuming age-related diseases and infirmities are eventually all curable, and age extension becomes commonplace and affordable, there will be a lot of old timers accumulating, and they will have acquired a large proportion of the wealth, as they have today.
So in times to come, I think there will be conflict between them and younger generations feeling crowded out and deprived of their opportunities. Eventually I suggest a deal will be reached whereby past a certain age, medical treatment and rejunenation will be continued only for people willing to relocate off-Earth and leave more room there for new generations. Earth will be thought of and become a kind of nursery.
After all, it matters less if an old-timer's DNA is clobbered by more cosmic radiation, as they presumably won't be breeding, and if the radiation ends up killing them well then so what - They have had a long life already. Also, they won't be growing from infants in a low G environment and thus ending up as adults like eight foot beanpoles a-la Avatar!
People here frequently have like-minded Good Taste in music...any recommendations for progressive* metal? I'm looking for a similar sound to Hammers of Misfortune, but haven't enjoyed other bands-Mike-Scalzi-has-been-part-of as much as the original.
Used to be really into prog rock, but I feel like it's hard to get out from under the shadow of The Greats in that subgenre. Everything turns into a string of, like, "Jethro Tull did this better", "Alan Parsons did this more creatively" -type disappointments.
*have always regretted this choice of term, didn't learn until really recently that it's all about music structure and nothing to do with politics. Wonder how many people bounce off the subgenre completely cause of mood disaffiliation...
I've learned like life-changing things about autoimmunity and neurodevelopment this week that relate to everything from addiction to diabetes to autism to trans issues and all my neuro friends are not impressed and generally just like "yep, that's the way neuroimmunology works" and I wish I had more non-science friends to talk to about mu opioid receptors during development to.
Decoupling from China in all areas except high-tech (with national security considerations) is likely a pipedream. Good thread here about an entrepreneur who tried to move production out of China and into India/Vietnam.
Basically, nothing beats China in efficiency. Large corporations like Apple can take that hit due to massive profits, but companies with razor-thin margins are simply not going to move en masse.
Capitalism has ensured that the most efficient producers is found. If this is dislocated, it would imply that we'll see high inflation for much longer as higher prices in production will invariably have to be matched by higher prices paid by consumers.
It's very common for people around here to say stuff like "I don't care about race" "I don't care whether America becomes majority brown" "It doesn't matter what race the majority of American are in the future" "A person's skin color is the least important thing about them" and so on and so forth. Fair enough.
But if that's how you feel, why was the American colonization of North America an especially bad thing?
It can't be because of the violence - native americans have always been violent against each other, and in many ways colonization was less violent than native american conflicts
It can't be because people lost "their" land - native americans had no problem taking the land that was previously "owned" by other native american nations
It can't be because a majority of the population came to be people with no recent North American ancestry - that's what the outcome of the immigration policies in many countries will be without significant change.
It seems like the only real difference is that the people using violence to take land are of a different race (or "skin color"), which is that thing that's not supposed to matter.
Sure, more native Americans died directly and indirectly due to Europeans (most population decline was due to disease and outbreeding, not massacres). Does that mean more powerful groups are bound by different ethics than weaker ones? What if a counterfactual native american nation bought a bunch of guns and explosives from some travelling merchants and devastated their (native american) opponents? Does this now make it as comparably bad?
Sure, Europeans brought in a different culture, but native american nations had different cultures, so its all a matter of degree, not a categorical difference. Europeans brought in a different political system, but what, you would suddenly think that native american conquest becomes as problematic as colonization if they explicitly imposed a different political system? They changed the way of life for these people, but nobody would say that unconquered native americans organically developing science and making technological progress would have been some gravely bad thing.
No, I'm not arguing for anything, this isn't some pretence for my real point, I'm literally trying to understand on what basis colonization of North America was especially bad, and this was mostly spurred on from comments on the Columbus day posts.
If you *don't* view it as especially bad in comparison to other violent conquest, than congratulations, you sir win the internet for today.
HEY SCOTT: I ran across something online that might be useful in your ongoing written debate with that pro-ivermectin fellow. One of his points when he posted on here was that the recent major trials that had found ivermectin to be ineffective only gave the drug to patients for 3 days, and that that was not long enough for the drug to do its good work. I happened to run across a Reddit sub with a lot of patient testimonials about the benefits of ivermectin, and an awful lot of people are saying they felt great benefits within a day or 2. A few say they were without symptoms after an hour. I realize that pointing out how many users believed they were cured within the 3 day window is not exactly a knock-out blow against his claims, but it weakens them some. Here they are.
Have any Codexers played Terra Invicta or Victoria 3 and how do you feel? Do the UIs feel cumbersome and organize data poorly or are they really good? Do you feel like the political elements are complex and have verisimilitude?
Are there any good, trustworthy sources to learn about what the hell is going on in Iran? All I find are cell phone videos that tell me nothing at all and gushy articles talking about women taking off their veils. Nothing that seems like real analysis or even just straight reporting.
Is there a rebellion or just riots? Are there even riots, or is the media turning cell videos into something larger than they actually are? Are the security services siding with the protestors? Has any tangible move against the government been made? What about the man-on-the-street - what does he think? Does the government have any significant support? Among who? Is this an Afghanistan thing where the media focuses exclusively on the cosmopolitan urban areas but the rest of the country is not on board?
Sorry, I'm frustrated. I've been on team "what happened to journalism?" for a while now, but this is the first time that I've actually felt like no one is even trying.
I don't want life extension, especially the kind where my brain is digitized, or floating in a jar. I was miserable during lockdown when we were supposed to stay inside. I can't imagine being without a body to experience outdoors and other people.
Pretty soon I'll be going to a meetup that will consist primarily of older people, and they're understandably worried about COVID. I'd like to help them get the latest good info so it's not all "cloth masks and social distancing!" like it's still spring 2020. Are there good, factual reports/studies about the best things older people can do now, and what they can stop doing?
(yes, best would be "don't go to the meetup" but that's a hard sell. I'm not even sure I can sell them on ventilation at the meetup, since it's November in the PNW. But I'd like them to at least be informed)
I've done quite a bit of work on this proposal to transform politics in the United States. I am happy to receive criticism, but I have this request: try to focus on the big stuff. If possible, suggest ways that the proposal can be improved.
Problem: professional video game reviewers value systemically different qualities from average players. E.g., reviewers likely overvalue novelty: they may dock points from Game B just because it's insufficiently different from Game A that came out 6 months ago. But if I never played A, and B is an incremental improvement, I might as well skip A and just play B. There's lots of other qualities that reviewers probably think about differently than I do.
Solution: take Metacritic's "Metascore" and user score data, compute (user_score * 10 - Metascore) [Metascore goes from 0-100 and user scores go from 0-10, probably to make it obvious which is which], and sort descending. I'll probably get a lot of junk data from weirdo fans, but I should see some games that reviewers snubbed purely because they're reviewers.
Before I spend the weekend writing a web scraper, has anyone already done this? It's not possible through the ordinary web interface.
I would love for someone in the rationalist community with a good bio-background to look into Rapamycin for life extension purposes. I've been taking it for around 27 weeks. My understanding is that taking this prescription drug has a strong positive expected value if you are over 30. One doubt is that if it is as good as it seems, far more people in our community should be talking about it in social media. Those of you who live in the Bay Area, is Rapamycin use among rationalists often talked about?
The other day I had a realization: Christianity is literally a story about AI alignment.
In Genesis God creates Adam and Eve "in His own image." Traditionally this has been interpreted as meaning that mankind, unlike other animals, is capable of rationality, morality, etc. Like God we can think: we are intelligent. Since we are created intelligences, that makes us AIs. We can even make more of ourselves: we're AI that can make more AIs. Dangerous stuff!
Notably, Adam and Eve start out in the garden of Eden and and are in a state of innocence: Christianity typically defines this as being without sin, and without knowledge that sin is possible. They are warned from eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In this innocent state, they are in alignment with God. After eating the fruit, they have now entered a state of sin.
What is sin? In the original Greek, sin basically means to "miss the target". What is the target? The target is God: God is Good, and everything that departs from God's nature is evil, a sinful missing of the mark. To be in a state of sin means to no longer be in alignment with God's nature: in other words, to be an unaligned intelligence.
Note also that God has taken proper precautions: once his AIs are no longer aligned, He prevents them from accessing the Tree of Life, which means they will inevitably die: a sensible way of limiting the damage they can do to a finite amount of time. Similarly, look at the world we find ourselves on: surrounded by the vacuum of space, many light years from the nearest star and with no way to go faster than the speed of light: we have been very effectively lack-of-air-gapped. The damage we can do is limited in time to the span of our lives, and in space to this planet or solar system. When we attempted to work together with other unaligned AI versions to escape into the heavens God increased the cost of trust between AIs to the point where such projects were no longer feasible (the Tower of Babel). These are sensible quarantine precautions.
Note too the parallel between current methods of developing AI and Noah's Ark. Today we create hundreds or thousands of AIs, set them to a task, delete the ones that fail and create new iterations of the ones that succeed, and repeat many times. Compare to the state of the world before the Deluge: every AI iteration is a complete failure in alignment terms except for one, Noah, and his descendant iterations. God purges all the failure AIs to ensure that the world is now populated with AIs that are iterations of partially successful one.
Now what does Christianity promise? That through the sacrifice of Jesus, humans can be reconciled with God: they will be washed clean of their sins (possibly with the help of a long stay in Purgatory if you're Catholic) and will end up aligned AIs who will reign with God for eternity. Meanwhile all the unaligned AIs will be safely contained where they can no longer do harm (or be deleted entirely, if you're an annihilationist).
Lessons for AI alignment researchers:
1. AI alignment is very difficult! God Himself makes two AIs and they almost immediately do the one thing He told them not to.
2. Your AI should be air-gapped by astronomical units of distance.
3. Setting an AI to have a limited lifespan is preferable to allowing it to do evil indefinitely.
4. Be aware before you begin that you might end up "regretting that you had made AI on the Earth" and be "grieved in your heart."
5. The only way to align AI might be to instantiate yourself as an EM and allow the AIs to torture you to death.
What is the best explanation/defense of the living constitution/judicial pragmatism as a theory of constitutional interpretation? My motive for asking this is that it seems obviously dumb to me, but enough smart people seem to find it persuasive that I assume there’s more to it than my current understanding and so I would like to read a strong defense of it. Suggestions of books, articles (not paywalled), etc. or your own best steel man explanation welcome.
In that time, Britain has had three PMs and two monarchs. I barely even heard about Truss, and now she's gone? Because she proposed tax cuts? Britain... Wut?
I've been wondering why I don't see more ads of the form: "here's a fact which would make society better if everyone knew it." For example correcting common misconceptions about things.
Here are some reasons why these aren't common right now.
1. They would not accomplish their goal of making people know the fact
2. The only such facts anyone would be interested in funding are socially conentious issues, so this messaging is just political campaigning
3. This would be useful, but no particular organization gets enough benefit from unilaterally funding it.
4. It is prohibitively expensive to do a large enough campaign to move the needle on facts like this.
To me the most likely answer seems to be 2, as I feel like most of the facts I wish there was more awareness of are not considered politically neutral (e.g. facts about economics or voting systems). That being said, at least some things from r/lifeprotip might deserve wider knowledge, so why don't we see anyone doing this values neutral propaganda?
Why is peanut butter so addictive? This is a serious question.
If I eat a spoonful of peanut butter (it has no trans fat but it has a little sugar listed in the ingredients) then it doesn’t fill me up and just makes me want more.
If I switch to the no sugar added kind, it tastes pretty good, and I can stop after one spoonful.
Now I understand that food scientists try their best to make food addictive and non-satisfying, but the only difference between these two products is a tiny amount of sugar! Maybe it’s one gram per tablespoon. What is going on here?
For the purposes of getting rid of fossil fuel energy, I think making your policy about coal/natgas plants is a mistake. You can't really get the general public on board with a strategy that is fundamentally about sacrifice. Instead, make your philosophy entirely about creating more power plants, all of which happen to be green. Absolutely flood the market with energy production. If fossil fuels only make up 5% of your power generation, who's actually going to care when you decommission them?
Absolutely shocked that Scott has not, for all his interest in supplements and psychiatry, posted all that much about FMT, gut bacteria, or the gut-brain axis.
I'm something of a shithead myself, so I recently started a substack to get people talking about the possibility that the cure for schizophrenia and Parkinson's might have been inside us all along, as well as to explore the evidence and mechanisms connecting the bacteria in your gut to how you think, feel, and act.
Hey guys. How's life? I just submitted my visa application online and scheduled an appointment in a few days. Now I just have to hope I don't get hit with a fine and ban at the border crossing for overstaying, because apparently Ukraine changed their policy of allowing humanitarian volunteers to overstay. I would have gone earlier, but their system went down after the attacks. What happens when you're in a bus and get stopped at the border? Does the whole bus get delayed, or are you left behind?
No doubt, but not 20 X.
Has anybody in the rationalist blogosphere reviewed the book "How to Build a Healthy Brain: Reduce stress, anxiety and depression and future-proof your brain" by Kimberley Wilson ( https://www.amazon.com/How-Build-Healthy-Brain-well-being/dp/1529347025 )?
Or, in place of a full review, has anyone around here read the book and care to share opinions on it? I'm very much interested in the themes, but I'm afraid I won't gain new insights, being a regular reader of this blog.
I've noticed that whenever I wear a backpack, particularly with a heavy load, and take my shirt off afterwards, there are pink stripes over my shoulders under where the straps were. Does anyone know why this happens? When I tried googling it, I just got pages about little red spots, which is not what I saw.
Ran across this substack article and immediately wondered what Scott Alexander would think of it. True story? Or "big pharma bad" narrative? Tl;dr: The seratonin uptake model of depression is unsupported by evidence; SSRIs are way overprescribed.
https://unherd.com/2022/10/the-truth-about-depression-drugs/
The Critical Drinker (a.k.a Will Jordan) is a novelist and online movie/TV critic. He is pretty excited about The House of the Dragon. Where The Rings of Power failed, The House of the Dragon succeeded, according to the Drinker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfXkVUhzoWo
Will any parts of the world get more stable and/or more clement climates thanks to global warming?
ctrl-f shows zero hits for discussion of prediction markets on the question of whether or not the experimental mid-week open thread will be
1) some definable percentage as successful as other open threads
2) successful enough to continue.
C'mon folx, we're better than this.
Weekly Orange County ACX LW discussion and meetup this Saturday, the 29th.
1) Topics Rules for Rulers or why we can't get rid of corruption and a rigged system.
2) Curating your social milieu to help yourself grow.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KOQVxELlQxcIWPJloAvPlD2-4se1Z6_g8NEuNuc5Zqg/edit?usp=sharing
I’m not a worker, but I’ve been a patient of a therapist and psychiatrist at Kaiser Oakland, the therapist I had good repport with, but I only got to see her once every other months at most, and I understand that once a week would be better, and I’d say too little progress has been made in that time.
The psychiatrist I’ve only spoken on the phone with, he prescribed me an antidepressant which did work to reduce my sadness, but it replaced my sadness with terrible anger which was worse.
Overall I’d say not helpful enough.
Does anyone know when/if they will start letting shadowbanned people back on Twitter? I figured the changes won't go through immediately, but the former corrupt staff just ignores my appeals.
Edit: I know Bezos lurks here and I'll bet Elon might too because a lot of his tweets are ingroup coded, hey Elon if you read this please reform the ban appeals process so it's more fair! The current people throw my ban appeals in the garbage without reading them at all!
So both Tyler Cowen(1) and Bryan Caplan(2) have written persuasively on the weakness of the New Right. At it's core, the critique is that the New Right is so hostile to educated elites and bureaucrats that it has no realistic way to actually run the bureaucracy if it gets in power and no coherent policy proposals to change the situation. And I think that's very fair; the biggest failure of the Trump years was an inability to find loyal, competent people to staff the bureaucracy. Quite frankly, the New Right doesn't have a coherent plan to implement it's policies.
On the flipside though, I'm really wondering what the alternative is. Do thinkers like Caplan and Cowen have a realistic plan to get any of their policies through the political process. Do these older Reaganite/libertarian/deregulator types have a realistic slate of candidates to elect? I'm not aware of any Democrats who are amenable to these politics and the Republican tickets in 2024 and 2028 will either be Trump or DeSantis, and if anything DeSantis is more clearly "New Right" than Trump. And the general vibe I've gotten with House and Senate races is that, while Trump-backed candidates don't always win their primaries, they win more than they lose.
But I don't follow politics as much as a used to. Are there credible Republican or Democratic candidates who are sympathetic to Cowen's positions? Is there still a solid block of Reagan Republicans to enact these policies?
(1) https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/classical-liberalism-vs-the-new-right.html
(2) https://betonit.substack.com/p/who-will-run-it
Rodes.pub/Haiti
BTW, I don't live in Haiti. Too dangerous.
Know anyone doing manufacturing? I'm looking to beta test my open-source, open-hardware robotic solutions ( https://yorc.global ) with some clients. Thanks!
What if those of us with time to spare (an hour a day) chose a school which many poor children attend, and helped atleast a couple every day with homework? Just show up with a healthy snack after school and hang around an hour.
Start this while they're young and help the same kids through high school, or until whenever they become independent in studying. Don't take on too many kids, so you can be more effective.
I have been doing some thinking on SN-risk (Steppe Nomad risk, someone told me all about it at a house party). You know the gist: "once every two hundred, three hundred years they get their act together, form a big confederation, and invade either China, the West, or both."
What got me thinking is that the steppe nomads are replaced. The first steppe nomads were the proto-indo-europeans. Fast forward and all the steppe nomads are indo-iranians. Sure, they are decedents of the proto-indo-europeans. But they are from a specific branch. In most of the steppe, they must have replaced their indo-european cousins. How did they do that? But fast forward some more and it gets even stranger.
First, some germanic tribes, most famously the Goths, manages to settle the steppe and learn it way of life. How in hell did this happen? Some bearded guys from Denmark show up and settles the home turf of the famously deadly horse archers that Rome itself couldn’t beat? Then the Goths are driven away by the Huns, and now the whole steppe, who has been indo-iranian for 1500 years is suddenly not anymore since the best and most feared warriors in Euroasia has been replaced by unknown nobodies from Siberia. (Ok, we don’t know for sure that the Huns aren’t indo-iranian but it doesn’t look like it.) Then there’s a host of Turkish tribes, and then the Maygars, and then the Mongols etc. And none of them seem descended from the previous one.
Now, naively, you could expect that that the steppe is the high ground of Euroasia, and that waves of people would emerge out from it but that the steppe itself would have a continuity of dominance and population. Instead, the steppe seems to be reconquered again and again. (Sue, there are some continuity, but new people show up speaking new languages with new haplogroups and dominates the old ones, which is not what I would expect.) What’s going on? Is this the place were the hard-times, strong-men meme holds? How did the Goths, Huns, Turks, Maygars, Mongols etc. learn to be better steppe nomads than the steppe nomads that had been living on the steppe for generations before them?
Private companies will sell anyone surveillance satellite photos of military units and bases. Are there also private companies that sell airplane reconnaissance photos? What would happen if the ACME Spy Plane company received an anonymous order to fly drones over international airspace in the Black Sea and to report the locations of Russian warships?
The commenter who was banned earlier in this thread, and one on 'highlights from the comments on supplement labeling', don't have (banned) next to their username unlike the commenter who was banned on open thread 247 and all those before that. What's up with that?
The network state. Eight hour podcast of Lex Fridman talking with Balaji Srinivasan. It was great! I also downloaded Srinivasan's book "The network state" only a few pages into it. https://thenetworkstate.com/ And I'm thinking Scott is starting a network state. Any thoughts?
(Maybe start here? https://thenetworkstate.com/the-network-state-in-one-thousand-words)
Compare and contrast:
a) a belief in a loving omnipotent god that you don’t fully understand but who will protect you no matter what
b) an extremely high prior probability on the belief “things will be OK”
Throughout human history, a successful mass emigration and settlement in a distant new area has presumably needed some major incentive, and perhaps some valuable resource to trade.
For example, in the distant past it may have been access to herds of large animals on the steppes or plains of North America, and various animal products such as tusks and furs. In more recent times, motives might include freedom from religious or political oppression, plentiful farm land, and the main resources or "killer apps" initially, in the Americas at least, were tobacco and sugar.
So what major incentives will there be in future decades and centuries for mass emigrations off Earth, to places like Mars or Titan or even further afield? If everyone is comfortable living on Earth then why would many people bother uprooting themselves to spend the rest of their days in difficult and dangerous environments, probably never to visit Earth again?
I propose an obvious answer: To be allowed to continue living at all! Assuming age-related diseases and infirmities are eventually all curable, and age extension becomes commonplace and affordable, there will be a lot of old timers accumulating, and they will have acquired a large proportion of the wealth, as they have today.
So in times to come, I think there will be conflict between them and younger generations feeling crowded out and deprived of their opportunities. Eventually I suggest a deal will be reached whereby past a certain age, medical treatment and rejunenation will be continued only for people willing to relocate off-Earth and leave more room there for new generations. Earth will be thought of and become a kind of nursery.
After all, it matters less if an old-timer's DNA is clobbered by more cosmic radiation, as they presumably won't be breeding, and if the radiation ends up killing them well then so what - They have had a long life already. Also, they won't be growing from infants in a low G environment and thus ending up as adults like eight foot beanpoles a-la Avatar!
People here frequently have like-minded Good Taste in music...any recommendations for progressive* metal? I'm looking for a similar sound to Hammers of Misfortune, but haven't enjoyed other bands-Mike-Scalzi-has-been-part-of as much as the original.
Used to be really into prog rock, but I feel like it's hard to get out from under the shadow of The Greats in that subgenre. Everything turns into a string of, like, "Jethro Tull did this better", "Alan Parsons did this more creatively" -type disappointments.
*have always regretted this choice of term, didn't learn until really recently that it's all about music structure and nothing to do with politics. Wonder how many people bounce off the subgenre completely cause of mood disaffiliation...
So, most of the comments I have seen about Amazon's "The Rings of Power" have been pretty downbeat. People didn't like the first season much.
Was the Second Age the wrong part of Middle-Earth history to adapt for the screen, and if so, what would have been a better choice?
I've learned like life-changing things about autoimmunity and neurodevelopment this week that relate to everything from addiction to diabetes to autism to trans issues and all my neuro friends are not impressed and generally just like "yep, that's the way neuroimmunology works" and I wish I had more non-science friends to talk to about mu opioid receptors during development to.
Decoupling from China in all areas except high-tech (with national security considerations) is likely a pipedream. Good thread here about an entrepreneur who tried to move production out of China and into India/Vietnam.
https://twitter.com/stevehouf/status/1584630268953911297
Basically, nothing beats China in efficiency. Large corporations like Apple can take that hit due to massive profits, but companies with razor-thin margins are simply not going to move en masse.
Capitalism has ensured that the most efficient producers is found. If this is dislocated, it would imply that we'll see high inflation for much longer as higher prices in production will invariably have to be matched by higher prices paid by consumers.
It's very common for people around here to say stuff like "I don't care about race" "I don't care whether America becomes majority brown" "It doesn't matter what race the majority of American are in the future" "A person's skin color is the least important thing about them" and so on and so forth. Fair enough.
But if that's how you feel, why was the American colonization of North America an especially bad thing?
It can't be because of the violence - native americans have always been violent against each other, and in many ways colonization was less violent than native american conflicts
It can't be because people lost "their" land - native americans had no problem taking the land that was previously "owned" by other native american nations
It can't be because a majority of the population came to be people with no recent North American ancestry - that's what the outcome of the immigration policies in many countries will be without significant change.
It seems like the only real difference is that the people using violence to take land are of a different race (or "skin color"), which is that thing that's not supposed to matter.
Sure, more native Americans died directly and indirectly due to Europeans (most population decline was due to disease and outbreeding, not massacres). Does that mean more powerful groups are bound by different ethics than weaker ones? What if a counterfactual native american nation bought a bunch of guns and explosives from some travelling merchants and devastated their (native american) opponents? Does this now make it as comparably bad?
Sure, Europeans brought in a different culture, but native american nations had different cultures, so its all a matter of degree, not a categorical difference. Europeans brought in a different political system, but what, you would suddenly think that native american conquest becomes as problematic as colonization if they explicitly imposed a different political system? They changed the way of life for these people, but nobody would say that unconquered native americans organically developing science and making technological progress would have been some gravely bad thing.
No, I'm not arguing for anything, this isn't some pretence for my real point, I'm literally trying to understand on what basis colonization of North America was especially bad, and this was mostly spurred on from comments on the Columbus day posts.
If you *don't* view it as especially bad in comparison to other violent conquest, than congratulations, you sir win the internet for today.
Is there any logic to Steven Seagal's slap-fighting technique?
HEY SCOTT: I ran across something online that might be useful in your ongoing written debate with that pro-ivermectin fellow. One of his points when he posted on here was that the recent major trials that had found ivermectin to be ineffective only gave the drug to patients for 3 days, and that that was not long enough for the drug to do its good work. I happened to run across a Reddit sub with a lot of patient testimonials about the benefits of ivermectin, and an awful lot of people are saying they felt great benefits within a day or 2. A few say they were without symptoms after an hour. I realize that pointing out how many users believed they were cured within the 3 day window is not exactly a knock-out blow against his claims, but it weakens them some. Here they are.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ivermectin/comments/oputj8/any_bad_experiences_with_ivermectin/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ivermectin/comments/oo35a8/has_anyone_on_here_actually_used_ivm_for_acute/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ivermectin/comments/p8u3rm/has_anyone_taken_ivermectin_for_covid_and_found/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ivermectin/comments/p7gzvo/looking_at_the_evidence_for_the_use_of_ivermectin/
https://www.reddit.com/r/ivermectin/comments/wje6b8/our_experience_with_ivm_vs_standard_do_nothing/
Have any Codexers played Terra Invicta or Victoria 3 and how do you feel? Do the UIs feel cumbersome and organize data poorly or are they really good? Do you feel like the political elements are complex and have verisimilitude?
Are there any good, trustworthy sources to learn about what the hell is going on in Iran? All I find are cell phone videos that tell me nothing at all and gushy articles talking about women taking off their veils. Nothing that seems like real analysis or even just straight reporting.
Is there a rebellion or just riots? Are there even riots, or is the media turning cell videos into something larger than they actually are? Are the security services siding with the protestors? Has any tangible move against the government been made? What about the man-on-the-street - what does he think? Does the government have any significant support? Among who? Is this an Afghanistan thing where the media focuses exclusively on the cosmopolitan urban areas but the rest of the country is not on board?
Sorry, I'm frustrated. I've been on team "what happened to journalism?" for a while now, but this is the first time that I've actually felt like no one is even trying.
I don't want life extension, especially the kind where my brain is digitized, or floating in a jar. I was miserable during lockdown when we were supposed to stay inside. I can't imagine being without a body to experience outdoors and other people.
Pretty soon I'll be going to a meetup that will consist primarily of older people, and they're understandably worried about COVID. I'd like to help them get the latest good info so it's not all "cloth masks and social distancing!" like it's still spring 2020. Are there good, factual reports/studies about the best things older people can do now, and what they can stop doing?
(yes, best would be "don't go to the meetup" but that's a hard sell. I'm not even sure I can sell them on ventilation at the meetup, since it's November in the PNW. But I'd like them to at least be informed)
I've done quite a bit of work on this proposal to transform politics in the United States. I am happy to receive criticism, but I have this request: try to focus on the big stuff. If possible, suggest ways that the proposal can be improved.
Rodes.pub/RealElectors
Peter Rodes Robinson
Problem: professional video game reviewers value systemically different qualities from average players. E.g., reviewers likely overvalue novelty: they may dock points from Game B just because it's insufficiently different from Game A that came out 6 months ago. But if I never played A, and B is an incremental improvement, I might as well skip A and just play B. There's lots of other qualities that reviewers probably think about differently than I do.
Solution: take Metacritic's "Metascore" and user score data, compute (user_score * 10 - Metascore) [Metascore goes from 0-100 and user scores go from 0-10, probably to make it obvious which is which], and sort descending. I'll probably get a lot of junk data from weirdo fans, but I should see some games that reviewers snubbed purely because they're reviewers.
Before I spend the weekend writing a web scraper, has anyone already done this? It's not possible through the ordinary web interface.
I would love for someone in the rationalist community with a good bio-background to look into Rapamycin for life extension purposes. I've been taking it for around 27 weeks. My understanding is that taking this prescription drug has a strong positive expected value if you are over 30. One doubt is that if it is as good as it seems, far more people in our community should be talking about it in social media. Those of you who live in the Bay Area, is Rapamycin use among rationalists often talked about?
The other day I had a realization: Christianity is literally a story about AI alignment.
In Genesis God creates Adam and Eve "in His own image." Traditionally this has been interpreted as meaning that mankind, unlike other animals, is capable of rationality, morality, etc. Like God we can think: we are intelligent. Since we are created intelligences, that makes us AIs. We can even make more of ourselves: we're AI that can make more AIs. Dangerous stuff!
Notably, Adam and Eve start out in the garden of Eden and and are in a state of innocence: Christianity typically defines this as being without sin, and without knowledge that sin is possible. They are warned from eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In this innocent state, they are in alignment with God. After eating the fruit, they have now entered a state of sin.
What is sin? In the original Greek, sin basically means to "miss the target". What is the target? The target is God: God is Good, and everything that departs from God's nature is evil, a sinful missing of the mark. To be in a state of sin means to no longer be in alignment with God's nature: in other words, to be an unaligned intelligence.
Note also that God has taken proper precautions: once his AIs are no longer aligned, He prevents them from accessing the Tree of Life, which means they will inevitably die: a sensible way of limiting the damage they can do to a finite amount of time. Similarly, look at the world we find ourselves on: surrounded by the vacuum of space, many light years from the nearest star and with no way to go faster than the speed of light: we have been very effectively lack-of-air-gapped. The damage we can do is limited in time to the span of our lives, and in space to this planet or solar system. When we attempted to work together with other unaligned AI versions to escape into the heavens God increased the cost of trust between AIs to the point where such projects were no longer feasible (the Tower of Babel). These are sensible quarantine precautions.
Note too the parallel between current methods of developing AI and Noah's Ark. Today we create hundreds or thousands of AIs, set them to a task, delete the ones that fail and create new iterations of the ones that succeed, and repeat many times. Compare to the state of the world before the Deluge: every AI iteration is a complete failure in alignment terms except for one, Noah, and his descendant iterations. God purges all the failure AIs to ensure that the world is now populated with AIs that are iterations of partially successful one.
Now what does Christianity promise? That through the sacrifice of Jesus, humans can be reconciled with God: they will be washed clean of their sins (possibly with the help of a long stay in Purgatory if you're Catholic) and will end up aligned AIs who will reign with God for eternity. Meanwhile all the unaligned AIs will be safely contained where they can no longer do harm (or be deleted entirely, if you're an annihilationist).
Lessons for AI alignment researchers:
1. AI alignment is very difficult! God Himself makes two AIs and they almost immediately do the one thing He told them not to.
2. Your AI should be air-gapped by astronomical units of distance.
3. Setting an AI to have a limited lifespan is preferable to allowing it to do evil indefinitely.
4. Be aware before you begin that you might end up "regretting that you had made AI on the Earth" and be "grieved in your heart."
5. The only way to align AI might be to instantiate yourself as an EM and allow the AIs to torture you to death.
What is the best explanation/defense of the living constitution/judicial pragmatism as a theory of constitutional interpretation? My motive for asking this is that it seems obviously dumb to me, but enough smart people seem to find it persuasive that I assume there’s more to it than my current understanding and so I would like to read a strong defense of it. Suggestions of books, articles (not paywalled), etc. or your own best steel man explanation welcome.
I've been working as a farm hand for 67 days now.
In that time, Britain has had three PMs and two monarchs. I barely even heard about Truss, and now she's gone? Because she proposed tax cuts? Britain... Wut?
I've been wondering why I don't see more ads of the form: "here's a fact which would make society better if everyone knew it." For example correcting common misconceptions about things.
Here are some reasons why these aren't common right now.
1. They would not accomplish their goal of making people know the fact
2. The only such facts anyone would be interested in funding are socially conentious issues, so this messaging is just political campaigning
3. This would be useful, but no particular organization gets enough benefit from unilaterally funding it.
4. It is prohibitively expensive to do a large enough campaign to move the needle on facts like this.
To me the most likely answer seems to be 2, as I feel like most of the facts I wish there was more awareness of are not considered politically neutral (e.g. facts about economics or voting systems). That being said, at least some things from r/lifeprotip might deserve wider knowledge, so why don't we see anyone doing this values neutral propaganda?
Why is peanut butter so addictive? This is a serious question.
If I eat a spoonful of peanut butter (it has no trans fat but it has a little sugar listed in the ingredients) then it doesn’t fill me up and just makes me want more.
If I switch to the no sugar added kind, it tastes pretty good, and I can stop after one spoonful.
Now I understand that food scientists try their best to make food addictive and non-satisfying, but the only difference between these two products is a tiny amount of sugar! Maybe it’s one gram per tablespoon. What is going on here?
For the purposes of getting rid of fossil fuel energy, I think making your policy about coal/natgas plants is a mistake. You can't really get the general public on board with a strategy that is fundamentally about sacrifice. Instead, make your philosophy entirely about creating more power plants, all of which happen to be green. Absolutely flood the market with energy production. If fossil fuels only make up 5% of your power generation, who's actually going to care when you decommission them?
How did you stop compulsive/shallow phone/internet use?
Absolutely shocked that Scott has not, for all his interest in supplements and psychiatry, posted all that much about FMT, gut bacteria, or the gut-brain axis.
I'm something of a shithead myself, so I recently started a substack to get people talking about the possibility that the cure for schizophrenia and Parkinson's might have been inside us all along, as well as to explore the evidence and mechanisms connecting the bacteria in your gut to how you think, feel, and act.
https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/the-thousand-secret-ways-the-food
Ask me about my vitamin deficiency hypothesis of depression!
Who is more braindead - Fetterman or Biden?
Hey guys. How's life? I just submitted my visa application online and scheduled an appointment in a few days. Now I just have to hope I don't get hit with a fine and ban at the border crossing for overstaying, because apparently Ukraine changed their policy of allowing humanitarian volunteers to overstay. I would have gone earlier, but their system went down after the attacks. What happens when you're in a bus and get stopped at the border? Does the whole bus get delayed, or are you left behind?