Not sure what you're arguing about or for. That the Steele dossier was a solid, factual document? That Trump colluded with Russia? That the Clinton campaign had nothing to do with the Russian collusion narrative? That the gallons of ink and attention and investigative time, attention, and money, was a productive use of resources? That there's nothing to learn from Durham's reports?
The guy doesn’t need my help but once again Ross Douthat has a great column in the Times. “In 2022 Reality has a Conservative Bias.”
“… ideological and partisan commitments exist in a dynamic relationship with reality. You can get things right for a while, sometimes a long while, and then suddenly you pass a tipping point and your prescription starts delivering the downsides that your rivals warned about and that you convinced yourself did not exist.”
You might be able to slip past the paywall if you do a search on some of the quoted text.
A bit late, but this is the latest open thread here:
Does anyone here have information on Dale Bredesen's approach to preventing or reversing Alzheimer's? I could only find one analysis not from his supporters. It was hostile, but old, and largely about the fact that he had not yet done controlled experiments. I believe the author was connected with an institution that Bredesen had been connected to, so there might be some bias.
There appear to now have been two more substantial studies, one with 250 people, and positive results — but I have only seen discussions of them from Bredesen's side. Does anyone here know more?
I am glad to announce the 9th of a continuing series of Orange County ACX/LW meetups. Meeting this Saturday and most Saturdays. The first few meetings were great (approximately 8 to 10 people), and I hope to see many of you at this one. Snacks will be available.
A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (video and reading at the end)
1) Psychedelic experiences with interconnectedness
2) Introduction to abstract entropy (may be technically challenging)
B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational. Feel free to bring your own favorite games or distractions. This is a pet-friendly park and meeting.
C) We usually go for a walk and talk for about an hour after the meeting starts. There are two easy-access mini-malls nearby with hot takeout food available. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zipcode 92660. I also provide paleo and vegetarian-friendly food.
D) Share a surprise! Tell the group about something that happened that was unexpected or changed how you look at the universe.
E) Make a prediction and give a probability and end condition.
F) Contribute ideas to the group's future direction: topics, types of meetings, activities, etc.
Conversation Starter Readings:
Suggested readings for this week are these summaries. These readings are optional, but if you do them, think about what you find interesting, surprising, useful, questionable, vexing, or exciting.
1) Psychedelics effects on sense of interconnectedness. Psychedelics often lead to experiences of connection with aspects of the universe that are normally not seen as related. Some questions to talk about. Are these alternative perspectives valid? Are they useful? Are they the same as religious or philosophical experiences? Have you had experiences like this that you wanted to share?
Video
Unity and Interconnectedness - broken down and described | Josie Kins
2) Introduction to abstract entropy. An article from the curated Less Wrong archives lays out and clarifies a lot of misconceptions about entropy. It starts at a beginner level but does contain math and diagrams. Entropy is widely misunderstood, both in fallacious and subtle ways. Many professional explainers need to be more accurate in their approach. This essay seeks to clarify things by approaching it as an autodidactic interest in getting things correct and clarifying ambiguities and apparent contradictions. His conclusions about entropy and its workings are close to mine.
Entropy is not just a property of this universe but seems fundamental to any possible system that can become more complex and change with time. It has implications everywhere you are dealing with a dynamic system or the consequences of a dynamic process and is fundamental to objective and subjective reality. It connects to information, heat and energy, evolution, intelligence and learning, and the universe's fate.
Hello. I read an article a while back about how writers now had more similar/less diverse backgrounds than those ten, twenty, fifty years ago (more MFAs, college degrees, etc.). Does anyone know where I could find this article?
Totally off the wall, but I haven't found a particularly good match with any condition. 46/M/no horrible medical history aside form depression, no history of psychoactive substances beyond caffeine and SSRIs for a year or so 20 years ago that didn't work. Sleep apnea but controlled with CPAP for a long time, AHI 1-2. I've become absentminded in specific ways to an incredible degree over the past 5-10 years. As a couple of examples, if I'm going to take something out of the house (besides keys/phone/wallet), if it's not sitting directly in front of the door, I have maybe a 20% success rate. Even sitting it near the door is mostly useless. If I need to take something downstairs from my bedroom, I'm maybe 20% to remember to do it after putting on shoes and socks. If I boil water and don't set a timer, I'm well under 20% to remember to go check it before it all boils off. If the timer goes off and I do anything else for any length of time, I'll likely forget to do it. I was shaving the other day, had an immediate need to take a dump (abnormal), then forgot I was in the middle of shaving and went out with like 1/3 of my face shaved and 2/3 quite fuzzy. This kind of thing happens All. The. Time. Upwards of 10 times a day, sometimes way more depending on what I'm doing. What makes it strange to me is that I wasn't like this at all as a kid or younger adult, and pretty much the exact opposite- A student, solid concentration, success at memory tasks, vocational success at things that took sustained focus, and I still like and am pretty good at doing puzzles, playing complicated games, etc. I also have basically perfect memory that I knew I needed to do something and then almost immediately didn't do it (girlfriend confirms). I can forget the same task 3 times in a minute (really) while retaining memory that I planned to do the task 3 separate times. Memory is there, staying in conscious memory/becoming action, not so much. What is this? It seems far more specific than inattentive ADD symptom lists (which aren't a great match and I definitely don't have the usual long history of), and my memory seems far too good in general for dementia symptoms to be that advanced in one area, although IANAD obviously. As far as other neurological symptoms, I've noticed a little difficulty coming up with non-everyday words, although it's not that bad and I don't know how much of that is expected aging anyway. My balance has gotten a bit sketchy. With eyes open, it's totally fine. With eyes closed, or in near-darkness, it's iffy. Like I can stand on one leg and balance until my foot gets sore, but if I close my eyes, I'm planting my other foot in under 2 seconds. I don't have a younger reference point for that specific task, but I'd never remembered any kind of dark-balance issue before the last 3-4 years.
Labs are all normal, micronutrients seem very likely to be normal (B12 was tested, between a varied diet and vitamins I shouldn't be deficient in anything, although if one of you has a specific idea, I can evaluate sources further). I don't have tertiary syphilis unless multiple tests through the years all missed it.
Along with Ignaz Semmelweis, Alfred Wegener is a sort of patron saint of crackpots; he was the first person to seriously advance the idea that the continents were all joined at one point in the past, just based on the fact that they look like a jigsaw puzzle if you squint. He ran into a lot of resistance from the geological establishment, because we didn't have the understanding of tectonic plates floating on a liquid mantle yet. (I imagine a lot of his skeptical contemporaries scoffing "Does he know that landmasses don't just float on the ocean? Someone ought to break it to him that islands go all the way down.")
This is a sometimes-dangerous but valuable mode of thinking, so hit me with your "Wegenerian" ideas—things that are unfalsifiable, or maybe just very difficult to falsify. Hunches that you can make an intuitive or epidemiological argument for, but can't prove or even fully justify mechanistically.
This is a thread for gesticulating frantically at the map, going "they clearly fit together you fucks, any child can see it!"
I am a little confused how come every tiny indication about China easing its covid policy causes Chinese stocks to rally. Like, investors know that Covid Zero is unlikely to last forever, right? Why aren’t expectations of reopening already baked in stock prices? Or are they?
Currently doing some work in the Longevity sphere.
I'm researching the possibility of repurposing bisphosphonates for anti-aging usage. There's been some results suggesting that bisphosphonates have quite a significant effect in reducing morbidity, but MOA is not clear yet. Risk of side effect involving kidney problems and rare hip fracture. Anyone has any insights on this topic? Worthwhile pursuing?
Weird question, but are there people who stopped being famous because they wanted to stop being famous?
I've always thought that I would hate to have a Di Caprio level of fame. I like eating in restaurants without a gaggle of fans around my table. So I imagine that if I was in Titanic, I'd bask in the glory for six months, then do some lower level movies to ensure a nice retirement, and then become a well-off suburban dad with plenty of time to read the classics. Clearly, Leonardo went a different route.
But is there anybody who got sick of being recognized and gave up their art just because it got annoying to sign autographs and answer inane questions?
Hi everyone, I'm collecting examples of stupid byzantine rules from the workplace for my book on Discretion. Examples like this I've gotten from real life: a librarian who was forced to collect library and driver's license numbers for late returns, which were then thrown into the trash because they were collecting too much information to do anything with. A rule against ordering from Starbucks as a supplier for coffee for work events, with the exception for Starbucks coffee that was supplied by a two approved suppliers. Any you have from your life I'd appreciate permission to use for the book.
I don’t know why so many ACXers think Trump is harmless. The fella is proving to be a pretty talented demagogue.
From the Brookings Institute:
>The 2022 midterms may well be the first elections ever where the elections themselves are on the ballot. Well over 300 candidates across a variety of races this fall are perpetuating former President Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and that American elections are deeply flawed.
Although no one has ever found proof of widespread and/or systematic fraud in the 2020 presidential election (as former Attorney General Bill Barr among others affirmed), the persistent and high-volume repetition by Trump and his high-profile surrogates has convinced many other Republicans that election was stolen. For many who don’t actually believe Trump’s assertions, the fact that he made belief in the “Big Lie” a condition of his support for one Republican over another in the primaries, led them to mimic Trump.
Random thought: Buildings made of marble(?)/brown brick(?)* seem to be weirder/higher-variance than buildings made of red bricks overall.
Examples:
Weird marble/brown brick buildings: MIT main academic building complex; Yale(?) [1]; Random Hall; East Campus; the White House(?)
Normal red brick buildings: Princeton; most of the other MIT dorms; the grade schools I attended
Discuss.
--- Footnotes/caveats lector ---
I am using a very small and also biased sample (mostly school/university buildings). Also a lot of the weirdness that I am referring to is along the culture war axis.
*I don't know about construction materials; feel free to correct me.
Twitter just suggested I follow "James E. Olsson", who lists case after case of healthy people suddenly dropping dead, and claims it's all due to the vaccine. My rational brain is thinking, surely out of 330 million people, thousands of people die abruptly this way. Pre-covid, even one of my own healthy 18 year students tragically passed away this way. Olsson doesn't present any statistics and writes in an inflammatory way.
The rest of my brain is thinking, "oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Why did I vaccinate the kids! For shame! Is the new chest pain 'MYOCARDITIS'?"
Why is my brain behaving this way, and which side of it is right? I've pasted a sample of Olsson tweets below:
"It's not like Aspirin. It contains a message. It contains a code. It's a Biologically active molecule. It's nothing to fuck around with."
"Julie Powell, Bestselling Author of "Julie & Julia" DEAD at 49... 'CARDIAC ARREST'... Documented her yearlong mission to cook every recipe in Julia Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking..."
"They are dropping dead at 38. My Grandmother raised a whole family and didn't even start her job until she was 38. Then she worked 38 years, never missed one day of work, and never even took one sick day. This is a crime against humanity. They need to investigate these companies."
"NFL Coach Adam Zimmer, Dead at 38... 'Unexpected'... Had been working as an offensive analyst for the Cincinnati Bengals this season... Worked for the Kansas City Chiefs and New Orleans Saints prior to that..."
"It took 5 years before the Thalidomide babies were born disfigured and missing limbs. We will see how smart these people are. Watch and see."
"TWO Firefighters DEAD in the SAME New Jersey County in the Past WEEK... One age 29, CARDIAC, found dead at home, the other age 54, they won't say cause..."
The U.S. government has a shameful history of breaching treaties it signed with Indian tribes, but what about cases where the tribes violated the treaties first? There had to have been some instances of that.
If a new (cough, modern) version of Photoshop were to be built what features, tools, supported inputs, etc. would you like to see? I primarily use Photoshop for drawing and find it woefully outdated and I don't really like any of its competitors. I'm curious if anyone here feels the same way.
It sounds very nice and a clever way of helping people help themselves and their communities. Do any of you have experience with them. Do any of you effective altruism people know about this charity and have opinions about it..
Has anybody else noticed a major decline in the use of commas, in online writing and print journalism?
Almost daily I find a sentence that is confusing and vv hard to understand, that would be much clearer with commas separating clauses. These are usually mismatches between subject/object/speaker, esp with possesive pronouns. No example to hand, but always I am asking,
whose briefcase?
The cop's?
The briefcase spoke?
Sandwich had a press conference? Sandwich and briefcase are lovers? Funded by Bill Gates?
Is this lack of time and editing, or a real change in the way people speak, or a conspiracy to mess with me?
This is not 'fusion is ten years away' stuff, this is current tech that just needs scaling.
Space elevators are now considered largely 'solved' by the reigning authorities. They could cost as little as 3Billion dollars by the end of this decade and lower launch costs to the point of 200-300$ per kilo. *Current* estimates stand at 18Billion, which might just make them feasible to start breaking ground tomorrow for all I know. This and the potential with Quaise geothermal has got to be the most exciting tech news all year, imo. Let me know if you think there's something better!
Could Taiwan use a small nuclear warhead against massed Chinese troops, prior to an invasion? My understanding is that invading Taiwan would require China to mass a huge number of troops in one location and then get them into some kind of troop carriers, and then set sail. The analysis I've read said that such a grouping would be extremely visible to the whole world- that there'd be no doubt as to China's intention. (It could be preceded by a naval blockade, perhaps for some length of time).
Micro-nuclear warheads, like smaller than the ones we used on Japan, have been all in the news recently with Russia. Could Taiwan, if it had such a bomb plus the missile technology, use it to pre-emptively attack massed troops on the Chinese mainland? Perhaps it might not be a great idea, but one could reasonably ask what choice they have.
It'd also be interesting to know how far Taiwan is having from nuclear weapons- I believe they had a program in the 80s or 90s that the US made them give up on
Hi Scott. Would you be willing to consider opening up your paid content after some amount of time has elapsed? I think some of what's behind the paywall is your lighthearted fiction, which has been some of my favorite work over the years. I find myself rereading "The Goddess of Everything Else" once a year or so, because as Julia says, cooperation makes my heart sing.
Is self-promo ok? I spent October writing a short instrumental song each day, for a total of 30 songs (I took the final day to rest from my labors), and almost 50 minutes of music. Some of it was pretty small ensemble stuff, but there’s full orchestration stuff in there as well, and my production process definitely improved over the month. Listen on YouTube if you’re interested: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuOvGBrV3rIBIofhUMq7kwNHRKZ-45wpY
Victoria 3 has mixed reviews right now. Relatively stable around 63% at this point. Full of bugs, lacking key mechanics, broad scope but shallow.
Many argue that the game is propped up by new stream driven memer users while Vicky 2 players are, on average, pretty upset and the cause of most of the negative reviews. A fascinating example of a company throwing their old users to the side for the new hot thing and driven by streaming culture.
The question is whether the new meme players will be driven off by terrible bugs, whereas CK3, their other meme focused product had a much more stable launch.
Paradox as a company absolutely disproves the popular idea that drawing in "normies" is a net benefit for the original fans. The games cost way more, focus on totally different parts, and there is not a lot of serious investment by other companies in the area. There's a few games by modders who are new to serious game, many of them not close to finished.
At least you can see your new, for some reason monocled, old man looking baby heir in 3D, and screenshot it to Twitter, though.
I recently saw some interesting comments from Jorgen Harris in the Mailbag post with arguments about AI Risk that I hadn't seen before, so I figured I should signal boost them by reposting them here:
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"The world where everything is fine and AIs are aligned by default, and the world where alignment is a giant problem and we will all die, look pretty similar up until the point when we all die. The literature calls this “the treacherous turn” or “the sharp left turn”. If an AI is weaker than humans, it will do what humans want out of self-interest; if an AI is stronger than humans, it will stop. If an AI is weaker than humans, and humans ask it “you’re aligned, right?”, it will say yes so that humans don’t destroy it. So as long as AI is weaker than humans, it will always do what we want and tell us that it’s aligned. If this is suspicious in some way (for example, we expect some number of small alignment errors), then it will do whatever makes it less suspicious (demonstrate some number of small alignment errors so we think it’s telling the truth). As usual this is a vast oversimplification, but hopefully you get the idea."
This is, I think, the biggest belief among AI safety adherents that I don't agree with. I think that it is unlikely that an AI at or somewhat above human intelligence would be good at deceiving humans, and honestly expect even an AI with far greater than human intelligence to be pretty bad at deceiving humans.
To deceive a human, you need a deep understanding of how humans think and thus how they'll react to information. You then need to be good at controlling the information you provide to the humans to manage their thinking. There are two reasons I don't expect AI to be good at this.
First, one of the core issues with AI, at least with any AI based on current gradient descent/machine learning, is that their thinking is fundamentally alien to ours. Even the designers/growers of current ML algorithms really don't know what internal concepts they use and can't explain why they produce the output they produce. That strongly suggests to me that human thinking would be fundamentally alien to a self-aware AI. We can actually look at the code that governs an AI, and can feed it carefully designed prompts to try to understand how it thinks. All an AI would have to go on to understand humans would be the prompts humans feed it and the rewards/responses humans give to those prompts. Arguably an AI also would have access to human literature, but it's hard to imagine how much an alien intelligence could really learn about the inner workings of an alien mind from its literature, because the core concepts and drives in that literature wouldn't map onto the concepts and drives that are interior to the AI.
The second thing is that humans are very, very good at deception and at detecting deception. To the extent that our intelligence is designed for any specific task, that task is manipulating humans and resisting manipulation. An intelligence that was designed for, say, inventory management, or protein folding, would likely have to be much, much better at those tasks than humans before being able to match humans' capacity for deception or detecting deception. We're also used to looking for precisely the types of deception that AI safety people worry about: most humans are meso-optimizers, and any time one human makes another human their agent (i.e. hiring a CEO, putting a basketball player on the court, hiring a lawyer, etc.) we need to be able to tell whether their behavior in the training environment will match their behavior in the real environment (i.e. are they waiting to start insider trading until they get promoted, do they pass in practice in order to ball hog during games, and do they talk tough in their office only to quickly settle in the courtroom?)
Obviously, all of this can only suggest that AI are unlikely to be good at deception, not that it's impossible that they're good at deception. But if the likelihood that a smarter-than-human AI is able to deceive humans is only (say) 1 in 20, that means there's a 95% chance that our first smarter-than-human AI that is created will not be deceptive. Since we're likely to know vastly more about how AI work and how to build them safely once one exists, this would suggest that current AI safety research only has a 5% or so chance of being useful even if a smarter-than-human AI is created with objectives misaligned to human objectives.
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And the people who are best at manipulating dogs, horses, cattle, etc. aren't the smartest people, they're the people who have studied those animals the most and have the deepest intuitive connection to them (i.e. dog trainers, horse whisperers, people like Temple Grandin).
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You're right that to deceive someone else about your future intentions, you need enough theory of your own mind to know how you would act if your future intentions were different. But you also need to know what the entity you're deceiving wants you to intend, in order to know what to mimic. And in order to be deceptive in some circumstances but not in others, you need to know what the response of the other entity will be to deviations from your mimicked intentions (at the simplest--when you're strong enough to make the sharp left turn).
Without something like "theory of mind" for humans, knowing what the humans want you to be like is very difficult. I've seen three main stories for how AI become misaligned. The first is, basically, doing what you told it to do instead of what you want it to do. So, I design an AI to guard a diamond by giving it a reward each hour that a security camera detects the diamond. The AI learns that the easiest way to get the reward is to hack the security camera so that it always shows a diamond. In order to be deceptive about this type of misalignment, the AI would need to have an understanding of which strategies humans intended it to use and which they don't want it to use. But this is obviously very difficult, because this class of problems comes about in the first place because strategies that are very different from a human perspective are equivalent from the AI's perspective.
The second is the meso-optimizer story. I train an AI to get a reward for picking strawberries and putting them in a bucket. The AI learns heuristically that it gets rewarded for throwing red objects towards bright objects. The AI's "pleasure centers" evolve to be activated by red --> bright rather than strawberry --> bucket, so that even as the AI gets external reward only when it puts strawberries in buckets (and not, say, when it throws red rocks at the sun) it continues to _want_ to throw all red things toward all shiny things.
To be deceptive, this AI would need to learn through interaction with humans what their desired objective is (strawberries in buckets). It also needs to learn that humans will make it face negative consequences for throwing other red objects at other shiny things. And then it needs to conclude that it should only put strawberries in buckets until it's able to stop the humans from inflicting negative consequences on it.
My point is that all of this is possible, but it seems virtually impossible for me that it would look like a "sharp left turn." The whole reason the AI is misaligned is that in its mental processes, strawberry --> bucket is basically the same as red thing --> shiny thing. If it doesn't understand humans well enough to infer that we think strawberries are delicious, want them in buckets to make it easier to bring them to the supermarket, etc., it will have to learn that the distinction matters through trial and error, giving evidence of misalignment. And as it grows more powerful, if it doesn't have the ability to reason through what humans can and can't do to turn it off or punish it, it would have to discover that humans can't punish it for throwing red things at shiny things again through trial and error, again giving evidence of misalignment.
The last is the self modification/robo-heroin story. The AI is designed to get a reward for throwing strawberries in buckets, but eventually learns to modify its own programming, and rewires itself so that it just directly uses computational resources to give itself reward. It then wants to increase its computational resources in order to increase the amount of reward it gets. But, since it knows that it will be shut down if it just sits there, not picking strawberries, and pleasures itself all day, it keeps on picking strawberries until it gets strong enough to not worry about being shut down. This, again, requires the AI to understand that the humans *want* it to pick strawberries and *don't want* it to sit around pleasuring itself. It can't instead believe that the universe is just set up so that strawberries are the path to pleasure, and that it came up with a clever, new, morally neutral way of obtaining pleasure. And for this to be a "sharp left turn" scenario, it needs to reason all this out rather than learning through trial and error.
If prediction market participants see a large number of participants have a slight lean in one direction, does that influence other participants and thereby increase the leaning, all other things being equal?
Does this hypothetical effect increase as the predicted event comes closer?
Has anyone ever looked for this effect, and, if so, what was found?
Hello and welcome to the slums of Hollywood. We're here at the fictional Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Productions, a film studio devoted to making films about anything and everything. The work is crazy but the business is crazy like a fox, since one film in thirty is a breakout success and pays for everything with some tasty profit on the side.
Today is pitch day, when eager writers and directors pitch their terrible, terrible ideas to us in hopes of seeing them on the big screen. Let's listen in. What's washing over the bow today?
Can someone explain to me why a collapse in housing prices can spur a foreclosure crisis? Sure, the value of people's properties has gone down, but why would they be less able to pay the same fixed rate mortgage? I don't get it.
An electronic maggot has invaded my MacBook, courtesy of Apple's latest os 'update', Ventura 13.0. It calls itself 'New iCloud Terms and Conditions,' and it's like a deranged, perhaps mentally unstable and unwanted visitor who won't stop knocking on the door.
I've had a hernia for six years, but this is my first electronic one. The thing (the digital hernia, not the biological one) is even building its own folklore and history. Doctrinaire factions and orthodoxies may be lining up.
It's disappointing I can almost $2,000 on a kit, and the manufacturer bakes its propaganda algorithms into the very operating system. Not only do I not need or want the products they are pushing, I will quite deliberately find another provider, if I ever want the service.
My next notebook is starting to look an open source model.
The collective freakout over Kanye West's so-called ""anti-semitism"" is amazing.
Rappers routinely call the white man the devil, say white people are responsible for the world's problems and are all around hateful towards white people. At best, nobody cares, and worst, they get applauded for their ""anti-racism"".
And yet, the minute one of them says anything bad about jewish people, it's the absolute end of the world. Why should I care about his "anti-semitism" when these same people ignore/support anti-white hatred from rappers?
And if you say it's because society something something power something something jews are oppressed, how anti-semitic is society really when 100% of people with institutional power are opposed to what Kanye is doing and punishing him accordingly?
Does anybody have experience with minimal friction obtaining an Adderall prescription for adhd? Preferably online.
1. For a variety of reasons grey market won't be acceptable for me, I need a legitimate legal prescription.
2. I have a strong distrust of doctors, both that they have my best interests in mind and that they'll bill me fairly, having had some poor experiences. I'd be more interested in getting pills legally and then sorting it out myself than relying on a doctor regularly. I do however have health insurance.
3. I was diagnosed with adhd as a teenager and was on Ritalin for some time. I stopped due to a variety of personal reasons and think my career and personal life have likely suffered as a result. I have trouble focusing on long term tasks, maintaining eye contact /focus in the long conversations, focusing at work etc
I've seen a few takes on various telehealth services but few have been recent, and I would place more stock in experiences from people who might be more similar to me (here) than misc internet reviews. My current best prospect is Done which is apparently 200 bucks and then 80/mo but apparently they may have issues actually fulfilling prescriptions
I've been introspecting into my ADHD for years now and have a decent model for it. Basically, the "task switcher" part of my brain is very low level and largely subconscious. It switches focus between things so quickly and subtly that I often don't notice; being in a car with me as I mumble through my train of thought is surreal.
Using Kaj Sotala's Multiagent Models of Mind sequence, I envision my task switcher as accepting or rejecting bids from various subagents to change what I'm doing, using expected value. But, ADHD means the expected values are all screwed up! "Good" stuff is much lower value than it should be, stuff that's great today turns blah tomorrow (I get bored of stuff easily), and even if I'm bored to tears of whatever I'm doing now, very little is compelling enough to make the switch.
Let's say I want to do the dishes, for instance. I send a bid to the task switcher, which looks at the expected value table, where washing dishes or having clean dishes isn't very rewarding in expectation. It rejects the bid. I perceive this as my brain just not doing the thing, even as I get frustrated and miserable. Why is the expected reward so low? I could write about dopamine, but I hear that's getting discredited in the ADHD community, so I'm kinda at a loss.
You may rightly ask about medication, and I'd love to try it, but I have a cardiac issue. Mild tachycardia which is normally fine, if a bit bothersome, but I'd imagine that stimulants would make it worse, or lead to complications down the road as my heart spends decades beating too fast. Plus, I guess I have wild blood pressure spikes when I'm stressed out. I once got a 179 diastolic in the dentist's chair before they even did anything. I tried atomoxetine and guanfacine; the former gave me worse tachycardia, and the latter didn't really do anything.
My question to you: what can be done to modify the reward table? What can be done to make the brain believe that a task is actually rewarding? If the answer is "you can't", please tell me so I can at least get rid of this doubt.
I'm an undergrad doing maths and biology at a good UK university and am academically strong. So far I was alvays certain that I want to do research but becoming an academic is rough in many ways and I'm considering my options.
What career paths are open to me? What should I be looking into? What skills should I develop? I'm still very likely to get a PhD, how does that affect things? Thank you
edit: I don't enjoy wetlab and prefer calculations/coding, ideally maths modelling. I know decent python and R. Thanks to everyone who responded so far!
Does anyone have any strong opinions on LASIK (the eye surgery)? I've been wearing contacts for 30 years, and after 25 or so years of them being good enough that I didn't really consider other vision correction options, my middle age seems to be worsening my situation -- especially in one eye that's astigmatic, and which I guess my eye muscles can no longer correct for as well. I intensely dislike astigmatism-correcting contact lenses, and would prefer not to go to glasses.
So:
1. Are there better or worse providers of LASIK? Or is it basically all just the machines, and the ophthalmologist doesn't really add anything to the procedure?
1a. If there are better or worse providers of LASIK, how does one determine who they are?
2. Are there serious risks to LASIK, or are bad outcomes like one in a thousand things?
3. Are there any long-term reasons not to get LASIK right now, like, I dunno, a better version is just around the corner?
Edit: Scott already responded, I am satisfied. Thank you all. Thank you Scott.
DON'T REPLY TO MY COMMENT, I WON'T BE CHECKING REPLIES AND REPLYING BACK.
Original reply:
Your ivermectin analysis was full of many flaws and its unfortunate you remain unwilling to dialog about it (to save your time, reasonably of course). I haven't been able to gain back my respect and regard for you since, but I've been occasionally reading your posts as a way to just remain open to new ideas I haven't heard of while viewing them more skeptically than before.
Oh, and you'll want to hear this. If you can help push your own value system of open data (i.e. for the TOGETHER trial that was NEVER shared or opened) you'll get a $25,000 donation to your ACX grants.
"To put some of my own skin in the game, if Scott helps, by public advocacy or otherwise, to get the raw data for the ivermectin, metformin, and fluvoxamine studies available in a way that I—or someone I trust—can access it without undue limitation on sharing any findings, I commit to making a $25,000 donation to Scott’s ACX grants. Happy to discuss reasonable alterations of this offer."
I just browsed through the nine most recent comments on this open thread (not counting comments added while writing this), and about eight of them were promotional / classified ads. Is this a coincidence, an effect of making the threads bi-weekly, or are the earlyish comments on Open Threads usually this promotional?
Might it be worth pushing a little harder to keep that sort of stuff in the Classifieds Thread, (and making those a bit more common if necessary)? Personally, I'd like to see a little less "come check out my substack / I'm hiring" in Open Threads.
Keeping the Jhanas/meditation questions going: for anyone who has experience with Jhana, do you think that would allow you to nullify pain? This is not a practical question i swear, but I'm just curious about it and want a concrete example of it's strength. Or if Jhana won't, does any part of meditation allow that? I have read anecdotes about meditation allowing you to resist painful acts, but i'm not sure if it does anything beyond fortify your innate resistance/ability to withstand pain. Or if it is a difference in kind, instead of degree.
Have you ever wondered what the world would look like if Nazi Germany won World War II? Have you ever read a novel or watched a movie set in this notional world and asked, “why is there nothing about the economy?” Who owns these factories? Is it American capitalists, German capitalists, or the state? Why isn’t the newscaster talking about the stock market? Is insider trading legal? How do college admissions work? How regulated is the housing market?
If you asked these kinds of questions, Prison of the Nation, A Novel of the Axis Victory and the Stonk Market is the novel for you! Taking place in the year 2095, it portrays a world that is still an oppressive, totalitarian ethnocracy but which has convergently evolved many of the features of modernity such as cell phones, index funds, PowerPoint presentations, and online dating. If The Man in the High Castle was a lurid mixture of German Nazism and Normal Rockwell America, Prison of the Nation is German Nazism meets Silicon Valley. Read it here:
I’m always looking for new music, so send me your Spotify Playlists! You can post links here as replies to this thread, or reach out directly via email (emwjazz@gmail.com). Thanks!!
Anyone have advice on how to find a therapist that doesn't suck? This is a subset of the problem of finding a physician who doesn't suck, but seems even higher-variance. I've tried a handful over the last two decades, and other than word of mouth (which is no help in my RL friend group) have no clue about how to find someone good.
I recently published my first short story [1]. It was inspired mostly by Borges (currently reading Labyrinths) but also Scott's story In the Balance [2], which I loved.
Folks seem to enjoy it, but many really dislike the ending. Which I think means I did my job?
My arguments for it are structured in the same way that other people talk about other forms of signalling like wealth and virtue signalling, especially Robin Hanson's writing. I think intelligence signalling is an important thing to understand if you want to know why scientific/technological progress happen. I also think it is the thing that drives this community - in a good way!
I've been planning a followup on how it all connects to what it would mean to have an "AGI", and why I am skeptical about fast takeoff. This presentation doesn't reference that at all, but since people seem to be at least somewhat on board with the arguments I have in this one, I'll probably make the AGI one (but it'll assume you've seen this one!).
Recently got laid off as a Software Engineer w/ 15 years experience including a stint at a FAANG company. Interested in any job opportunities that either give me an opportunity to positively contribute to the world or master new skills/knowledge, as long as they allow remote work.
(In advance - yes I am looking at the 80000 hours board, but curious if anybody has further interesting suggestions/opportunities.)
I tried asking in the subreddit but it went nowhere.
Can someone give concrete examples of what concepts would be “at the top” of the top-down processing networks described by the predictive processing theory?
Am I correct in thinning of these networks as Directed Acyclix graphs? Am I right that slight changes in these concepts can have profound downstream effects? Is it right to presume that for some people, their topmost concept would be something like “the laws of physics”?
i vaguely remember that scott got famous for taking a stand as a liberal against libertarianism. but now i feel that he's "right-coded" politically in 2022. has scott changed, or is this just the world we live in right now?
Not sure what you're arguing about or for. That the Steele dossier was a solid, factual document? That Trump colluded with Russia? That the Clinton campaign had nothing to do with the Russian collusion narrative? That the gallons of ink and attention and investigative time, attention, and money, was a productive use of resources? That there's nothing to learn from Durham's reports?
The guy doesn’t need my help but once again Ross Douthat has a great column in the Times. “In 2022 Reality has a Conservative Bias.”
“… ideological and partisan commitments exist in a dynamic relationship with reality. You can get things right for a while, sometimes a long while, and then suddenly you pass a tipping point and your prescription starts delivering the downsides that your rivals warned about and that you convinced yourself did not exist.”
You might be able to slip past the paywall if you do a search on some of the quoted text.
A bit late, but this is the latest open thread here:
Does anyone here have information on Dale Bredesen's approach to preventing or reversing Alzheimer's? I could only find one analysis not from his supporters. It was hostile, but old, and largely about the fact that he had not yet done controlled experiments. I believe the author was connected with an institution that Bredesen had been connected to, so there might be some bias.
There appear to now have been two more substantial studies, one with 250 people, and positive results — but I have only seen discussions of them from Bredesen's side. Does anyone here know more?
Hello folks!
I am glad to announce the 9th of a continuing series of Orange County ACX/LW meetups. Meeting this Saturday and most Saturdays. The first few meetings were great (approximately 8 to 10 people), and I hope to see many of you at this one. Snacks will be available.
Saturday, 11/05/22, 2 pm
1900 Port Carlow Place, Newport Beach, 92660
The Picnic tables outside the community clubhouse
33.6173166789459, -117.85885652037152
https://goo.gl/maps/WmzxQhBM2vdpJvz39
Plus code 8554J48R+WFJ
Contact me, Michael, at michaelmichalchik+acxlw@gmail.com with questions or requests.
Activities (all activities are optional)
A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (video and reading at the end)
1) Psychedelic experiences with interconnectedness
2) Introduction to abstract entropy (may be technically challenging)
B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational. Feel free to bring your own favorite games or distractions. This is a pet-friendly park and meeting.
C) We usually go for a walk and talk for about an hour after the meeting starts. There are two easy-access mini-malls nearby with hot takeout food available. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zipcode 92660. I also provide paleo and vegetarian-friendly food.
D) Share a surprise! Tell the group about something that happened that was unexpected or changed how you look at the universe.
E) Make a prediction and give a probability and end condition.
F) Contribute ideas to the group's future direction: topics, types of meetings, activities, etc.
Conversation Starter Readings:
Suggested readings for this week are these summaries. These readings are optional, but if you do them, think about what you find interesting, surprising, useful, questionable, vexing, or exciting.
1) Psychedelics effects on sense of interconnectedness. Psychedelics often lead to experiences of connection with aspects of the universe that are normally not seen as related. Some questions to talk about. Are these alternative perspectives valid? Are they useful? Are they the same as religious or philosophical experiences? Have you had experiences like this that you wanted to share?
Video
Unity and Interconnectedness - broken down and described | Josie Kins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r8izfJ6Kng
- -PROJECT LINKS -- Unity and Interconnectedness Article: https://effectindex.com/effects/unity...
Subjective Effect Index: https://effectindex.com/effects
2) Introduction to abstract entropy. An article from the curated Less Wrong archives lays out and clarifies a lot of misconceptions about entropy. It starts at a beginner level but does contain math and diagrams. Entropy is widely misunderstood, both in fallacious and subtle ways. Many professional explainers need to be more accurate in their approach. This essay seeks to clarify things by approaching it as an autodidactic interest in getting things correct and clarifying ambiguities and apparent contradictions. His conclusions about entropy and its workings are close to mine.
Entropy is not just a property of this universe but seems fundamental to any possible system that can become more complex and change with time. It has implications everywhere you are dealing with a dynamic system or the consequences of a dynamic process and is fundamental to objective and subjective reality. It connects to information, heat and energy, evolution, intelligence and learning, and the universe's fate.
Essay
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/REA49tL5jsh69X3aM/introduction-to-abstract-entropy
Note that the audio is best listened to with the essay at hand because there are helpful diagrams
Audio:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/introduction-to-abstract-entropy-by-alex-altair/id1630783021?i=1000584355629
What are the odds that Zuckerberg will fix the problems with the Metaverse and turn it into a profitable enterprise?
What is the algorithm for ranking the "top" posts? The one on moderation has more likes and more comments than several that are ranked above it.
Hello. I read an article a while back about how writers now had more similar/less diverse backgrounds than those ten, twenty, fifty years ago (more MFAs, college degrees, etc.). Does anyone know where I could find this article?
I'm making markets for California Housing stuff, starting with RHNA/Housing Elements. I'll try to expand over time if there's interest.
https://manifold.markets/VivaLaPanda/will-san-francisco-succeed-in-obtai
Anyone looking forward to Avatar: The Way of Water?
Totally off the wall, but I haven't found a particularly good match with any condition. 46/M/no horrible medical history aside form depression, no history of psychoactive substances beyond caffeine and SSRIs for a year or so 20 years ago that didn't work. Sleep apnea but controlled with CPAP for a long time, AHI 1-2. I've become absentminded in specific ways to an incredible degree over the past 5-10 years. As a couple of examples, if I'm going to take something out of the house (besides keys/phone/wallet), if it's not sitting directly in front of the door, I have maybe a 20% success rate. Even sitting it near the door is mostly useless. If I need to take something downstairs from my bedroom, I'm maybe 20% to remember to do it after putting on shoes and socks. If I boil water and don't set a timer, I'm well under 20% to remember to go check it before it all boils off. If the timer goes off and I do anything else for any length of time, I'll likely forget to do it. I was shaving the other day, had an immediate need to take a dump (abnormal), then forgot I was in the middle of shaving and went out with like 1/3 of my face shaved and 2/3 quite fuzzy. This kind of thing happens All. The. Time. Upwards of 10 times a day, sometimes way more depending on what I'm doing. What makes it strange to me is that I wasn't like this at all as a kid or younger adult, and pretty much the exact opposite- A student, solid concentration, success at memory tasks, vocational success at things that took sustained focus, and I still like and am pretty good at doing puzzles, playing complicated games, etc. I also have basically perfect memory that I knew I needed to do something and then almost immediately didn't do it (girlfriend confirms). I can forget the same task 3 times in a minute (really) while retaining memory that I planned to do the task 3 separate times. Memory is there, staying in conscious memory/becoming action, not so much. What is this? It seems far more specific than inattentive ADD symptom lists (which aren't a great match and I definitely don't have the usual long history of), and my memory seems far too good in general for dementia symptoms to be that advanced in one area, although IANAD obviously. As far as other neurological symptoms, I've noticed a little difficulty coming up with non-everyday words, although it's not that bad and I don't know how much of that is expected aging anyway. My balance has gotten a bit sketchy. With eyes open, it's totally fine. With eyes closed, or in near-darkness, it's iffy. Like I can stand on one leg and balance until my foot gets sore, but if I close my eyes, I'm planting my other foot in under 2 seconds. I don't have a younger reference point for that specific task, but I'd never remembered any kind of dark-balance issue before the last 3-4 years.
Labs are all normal, micronutrients seem very likely to be normal (B12 was tested, between a varied diet and vitamins I shouldn't be deficient in anything, although if one of you has a specific idea, I can evaluate sources further). I don't have tertiary syphilis unless multiple tests through the years all missed it.
Safe Space for Wegenerian Hypotheses.
Along with Ignaz Semmelweis, Alfred Wegener is a sort of patron saint of crackpots; he was the first person to seriously advance the idea that the continents were all joined at one point in the past, just based on the fact that they look like a jigsaw puzzle if you squint. He ran into a lot of resistance from the geological establishment, because we didn't have the understanding of tectonic plates floating on a liquid mantle yet. (I imagine a lot of his skeptical contemporaries scoffing "Does he know that landmasses don't just float on the ocean? Someone ought to break it to him that islands go all the way down.")
This is a sometimes-dangerous but valuable mode of thinking, so hit me with your "Wegenerian" ideas—things that are unfalsifiable, or maybe just very difficult to falsify. Hunches that you can make an intuitive or epidemiological argument for, but can't prove or even fully justify mechanistically.
This is a thread for gesticulating frantically at the map, going "they clearly fit together you fucks, any child can see it!"
I am a little confused how come every tiny indication about China easing its covid policy causes Chinese stocks to rally. Like, investors know that Covid Zero is unlikely to last forever, right? Why aren’t expectations of reopening already baked in stock prices? Or are they?
Currently doing some work in the Longevity sphere.
I'm researching the possibility of repurposing bisphosphonates for anti-aging usage. There's been some results suggesting that bisphosphonates have quite a significant effect in reducing morbidity, but MOA is not clear yet. Risk of side effect involving kidney problems and rare hip fracture. Anyone has any insights on this topic? Worthwhile pursuing?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00198-019-05097-1
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00198-019-05097-1
Weird question, but are there people who stopped being famous because they wanted to stop being famous?
I've always thought that I would hate to have a Di Caprio level of fame. I like eating in restaurants without a gaggle of fans around my table. So I imagine that if I was in Titanic, I'd bask in the glory for six months, then do some lower level movies to ensure a nice retirement, and then become a well-off suburban dad with plenty of time to read the classics. Clearly, Leonardo went a different route.
But is there anybody who got sick of being recognized and gave up their art just because it got annoying to sign autographs and answer inane questions?
Hi everyone, I'm collecting examples of stupid byzantine rules from the workplace for my book on Discretion. Examples like this I've gotten from real life: a librarian who was forced to collect library and driver's license numbers for late returns, which were then thrown into the trash because they were collecting too much information to do anything with. A rule against ordering from Starbucks as a supplier for coffee for work events, with the exception for Starbucks coffee that was supplied by a two approved suppliers. Any you have from your life I'd appreciate permission to use for the book.
I don’t know why so many ACXers think Trump is harmless. The fella is proving to be a pretty talented demagogue.
From the Brookings Institute:
>The 2022 midterms may well be the first elections ever where the elections themselves are on the ballot. Well over 300 candidates across a variety of races this fall are perpetuating former President Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and that American elections are deeply flawed.
Although no one has ever found proof of widespread and/or systematic fraud in the 2020 presidential election (as former Attorney General Bill Barr among others affirmed), the persistent and high-volume repetition by Trump and his high-profile surrogates has convinced many other Republicans that election was stolen. For many who don’t actually believe Trump’s assertions, the fact that he made belief in the “Big Lie” a condition of his support for one Republican over another in the primaries, led them to mimic Trump.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2022/10/07/democracy-on-the-ballot-how-many-election-deniers-are-on-the-ballot-in-november-and-what-is-their-likelihood-of-success/amp/
Random thought: Buildings made of marble(?)/brown brick(?)* seem to be weirder/higher-variance than buildings made of red bricks overall.
Examples:
Weird marble/brown brick buildings: MIT main academic building complex; Yale(?) [1]; Random Hall; East Campus; the White House(?)
Normal red brick buildings: Princeton; most of the other MIT dorms; the grade schools I attended
Discuss.
--- Footnotes/caveats lector ---
I am using a very small and also biased sample (mostly school/university buildings). Also a lot of the weirdness that I am referring to is along the culture war axis.
*I don't know about construction materials; feel free to correct me.
[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/yale-conservatives-students-report-liberal-bias-daily-news/
Twitter just suggested I follow "James E. Olsson", who lists case after case of healthy people suddenly dropping dead, and claims it's all due to the vaccine. My rational brain is thinking, surely out of 330 million people, thousands of people die abruptly this way. Pre-covid, even one of my own healthy 18 year students tragically passed away this way. Olsson doesn't present any statistics and writes in an inflammatory way.
The rest of my brain is thinking, "oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Why did I vaccinate the kids! For shame! Is the new chest pain 'MYOCARDITIS'?"
Why is my brain behaving this way, and which side of it is right? I've pasted a sample of Olsson tweets below:
"It's not like Aspirin. It contains a message. It contains a code. It's a Biologically active molecule. It's nothing to fuck around with."
"Julie Powell, Bestselling Author of "Julie & Julia" DEAD at 49... 'CARDIAC ARREST'... Documented her yearlong mission to cook every recipe in Julia Child's book Mastering the Art of French Cooking..."
"They are dropping dead at 38. My Grandmother raised a whole family and didn't even start her job until she was 38. Then she worked 38 years, never missed one day of work, and never even took one sick day. This is a crime against humanity. They need to investigate these companies."
"NFL Coach Adam Zimmer, Dead at 38... 'Unexpected'... Had been working as an offensive analyst for the Cincinnati Bengals this season... Worked for the Kansas City Chiefs and New Orleans Saints prior to that..."
"It took 5 years before the Thalidomide babies were born disfigured and missing limbs. We will see how smart these people are. Watch and see."
"TWO Firefighters DEAD in the SAME New Jersey County in the Past WEEK... One age 29, CARDIAC, found dead at home, the other age 54, they won't say cause..."
The U.S. government has a shameful history of breaching treaties it signed with Indian tribes, but what about cases where the tribes violated the treaties first? There had to have been some instances of that.
If a new (cough, modern) version of Photoshop were to be built what features, tools, supported inputs, etc. would you like to see? I primarily use Photoshop for drawing and find it woefully outdated and I don't really like any of its competitors. I'm curious if anyone here feels the same way.
Why hasn't anyone mentioned the worst of the early covid decisions, the FDA ban on unauthorized covid tests?
Did Emily Oster post a scissors statement?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
I received a solicitation from the Heifer International. https://www.heifer.org/ It distributes farm animals, along with agricultural and values-based training, to families in need around the world as a means of providing self-sufficiency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heifer_International
It sounds very nice and a clever way of helping people help themselves and their communities. Do any of you have experience with them. Do any of you effective altruism people know about this charity and have opinions about it..
Has anybody else noticed a major decline in the use of commas, in online writing and print journalism?
Almost daily I find a sentence that is confusing and vv hard to understand, that would be much clearer with commas separating clauses. These are usually mismatches between subject/object/speaker, esp with possesive pronouns. No example to hand, but always I am asking,
whose briefcase?
The cop's?
The briefcase spoke?
Sandwich had a press conference? Sandwich and briefcase are lovers? Funded by Bill Gates?
Is this lack of time and editing, or a real change in the way people speak, or a conspiracy to mess with me?
You think Socrates ever clowned on his teacher like "ey this guy taught me everything I know...which is fuckin' NOTHIIIIN 😝🤣🤣"
I found this set of essays well written and thoughtful in the area of debate of
Science Based vs Evidence Based Medicine
one can translate this as Theory vs Experimental Science
Web-site is titled Skeptical Medicine
Critical Thinking in Medicine
----https://sites.google.com/site/skepticalmedicine/critical-thinking-in-medicine?authuser=0
What is a Skeptic
-----https://sites.google.com/site/skepticalmedicine/what-is-a-skeptic?authuser=0
This site is also worth sending to your kids or grandkids
Understanding Science 101
---https://undsci.berkeley.edu/understanding-science-101/
I just wanted to signal boost this video.
https://youtu.be/vEoClumDTGg
This is not 'fusion is ten years away' stuff, this is current tech that just needs scaling.
Space elevators are now considered largely 'solved' by the reigning authorities. They could cost as little as 3Billion dollars by the end of this decade and lower launch costs to the point of 200-300$ per kilo. *Current* estimates stand at 18Billion, which might just make them feasible to start breaking ground tomorrow for all I know. This and the potential with Quaise geothermal has got to be the most exciting tech news all year, imo. Let me know if you think there's something better!
Could Taiwan use a small nuclear warhead against massed Chinese troops, prior to an invasion? My understanding is that invading Taiwan would require China to mass a huge number of troops in one location and then get them into some kind of troop carriers, and then set sail. The analysis I've read said that such a grouping would be extremely visible to the whole world- that there'd be no doubt as to China's intention. (It could be preceded by a naval blockade, perhaps for some length of time).
Micro-nuclear warheads, like smaller than the ones we used on Japan, have been all in the news recently with Russia. Could Taiwan, if it had such a bomb plus the missile technology, use it to pre-emptively attack massed troops on the Chinese mainland? Perhaps it might not be a great idea, but one could reasonably ask what choice they have.
It'd also be interesting to know how far Taiwan is having from nuclear weapons- I believe they had a program in the 80s or 90s that the US made them give up on
Hi Scott. Would you be willing to consider opening up your paid content after some amount of time has elapsed? I think some of what's behind the paywall is your lighthearted fiction, which has been some of my favorite work over the years. I find myself rereading "The Goddess of Everything Else" once a year or so, because as Julia says, cooperation makes my heart sing.
Is self-promo ok? I spent October writing a short instrumental song each day, for a total of 30 songs (I took the final day to rest from my labors), and almost 50 minutes of music. Some of it was pretty small ensemble stuff, but there’s full orchestration stuff in there as well, and my production process definitely improved over the month. Listen on YouTube if you’re interested: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuOvGBrV3rIBIofhUMq7kwNHRKZ-45wpY
Victoria 3 has mixed reviews right now. Relatively stable around 63% at this point. Full of bugs, lacking key mechanics, broad scope but shallow.
Many argue that the game is propped up by new stream driven memer users while Vicky 2 players are, on average, pretty upset and the cause of most of the negative reviews. A fascinating example of a company throwing their old users to the side for the new hot thing and driven by streaming culture.
The question is whether the new meme players will be driven off by terrible bugs, whereas CK3, their other meme focused product had a much more stable launch.
Paradox as a company absolutely disproves the popular idea that drawing in "normies" is a net benefit for the original fans. The games cost way more, focus on totally different parts, and there is not a lot of serious investment by other companies in the area. There's a few games by modders who are new to serious game, many of them not close to finished.
At least you can see your new, for some reason monocled, old man looking baby heir in 3D, and screenshot it to Twitter, though.
I recently saw some interesting comments from Jorgen Harris in the Mailbag post with arguments about AI Risk that I hadn't seen before, so I figured I should signal boost them by reposting them here:
---
"The world where everything is fine and AIs are aligned by default, and the world where alignment is a giant problem and we will all die, look pretty similar up until the point when we all die. The literature calls this “the treacherous turn” or “the sharp left turn”. If an AI is weaker than humans, it will do what humans want out of self-interest; if an AI is stronger than humans, it will stop. If an AI is weaker than humans, and humans ask it “you’re aligned, right?”, it will say yes so that humans don’t destroy it. So as long as AI is weaker than humans, it will always do what we want and tell us that it’s aligned. If this is suspicious in some way (for example, we expect some number of small alignment errors), then it will do whatever makes it less suspicious (demonstrate some number of small alignment errors so we think it’s telling the truth). As usual this is a vast oversimplification, but hopefully you get the idea."
This is, I think, the biggest belief among AI safety adherents that I don't agree with. I think that it is unlikely that an AI at or somewhat above human intelligence would be good at deceiving humans, and honestly expect even an AI with far greater than human intelligence to be pretty bad at deceiving humans.
To deceive a human, you need a deep understanding of how humans think and thus how they'll react to information. You then need to be good at controlling the information you provide to the humans to manage their thinking. There are two reasons I don't expect AI to be good at this.
First, one of the core issues with AI, at least with any AI based on current gradient descent/machine learning, is that their thinking is fundamentally alien to ours. Even the designers/growers of current ML algorithms really don't know what internal concepts they use and can't explain why they produce the output they produce. That strongly suggests to me that human thinking would be fundamentally alien to a self-aware AI. We can actually look at the code that governs an AI, and can feed it carefully designed prompts to try to understand how it thinks. All an AI would have to go on to understand humans would be the prompts humans feed it and the rewards/responses humans give to those prompts. Arguably an AI also would have access to human literature, but it's hard to imagine how much an alien intelligence could really learn about the inner workings of an alien mind from its literature, because the core concepts and drives in that literature wouldn't map onto the concepts and drives that are interior to the AI.
The second thing is that humans are very, very good at deception and at detecting deception. To the extent that our intelligence is designed for any specific task, that task is manipulating humans and resisting manipulation. An intelligence that was designed for, say, inventory management, or protein folding, would likely have to be much, much better at those tasks than humans before being able to match humans' capacity for deception or detecting deception. We're also used to looking for precisely the types of deception that AI safety people worry about: most humans are meso-optimizers, and any time one human makes another human their agent (i.e. hiring a CEO, putting a basketball player on the court, hiring a lawyer, etc.) we need to be able to tell whether their behavior in the training environment will match their behavior in the real environment (i.e. are they waiting to start insider trading until they get promoted, do they pass in practice in order to ball hog during games, and do they talk tough in their office only to quickly settle in the courtroom?)
Obviously, all of this can only suggest that AI are unlikely to be good at deception, not that it's impossible that they're good at deception. But if the likelihood that a smarter-than-human AI is able to deceive humans is only (say) 1 in 20, that means there's a 95% chance that our first smarter-than-human AI that is created will not be deceptive. Since we're likely to know vastly more about how AI work and how to build them safely once one exists, this would suggest that current AI safety research only has a 5% or so chance of being useful even if a smarter-than-human AI is created with objectives misaligned to human objectives.
---
And the people who are best at manipulating dogs, horses, cattle, etc. aren't the smartest people, they're the people who have studied those animals the most and have the deepest intuitive connection to them (i.e. dog trainers, horse whisperers, people like Temple Grandin).
---
You're right that to deceive someone else about your future intentions, you need enough theory of your own mind to know how you would act if your future intentions were different. But you also need to know what the entity you're deceiving wants you to intend, in order to know what to mimic. And in order to be deceptive in some circumstances but not in others, you need to know what the response of the other entity will be to deviations from your mimicked intentions (at the simplest--when you're strong enough to make the sharp left turn).
Without something like "theory of mind" for humans, knowing what the humans want you to be like is very difficult. I've seen three main stories for how AI become misaligned. The first is, basically, doing what you told it to do instead of what you want it to do. So, I design an AI to guard a diamond by giving it a reward each hour that a security camera detects the diamond. The AI learns that the easiest way to get the reward is to hack the security camera so that it always shows a diamond. In order to be deceptive about this type of misalignment, the AI would need to have an understanding of which strategies humans intended it to use and which they don't want it to use. But this is obviously very difficult, because this class of problems comes about in the first place because strategies that are very different from a human perspective are equivalent from the AI's perspective.
The second is the meso-optimizer story. I train an AI to get a reward for picking strawberries and putting them in a bucket. The AI learns heuristically that it gets rewarded for throwing red objects towards bright objects. The AI's "pleasure centers" evolve to be activated by red --> bright rather than strawberry --> bucket, so that even as the AI gets external reward only when it puts strawberries in buckets (and not, say, when it throws red rocks at the sun) it continues to _want_ to throw all red things toward all shiny things.
To be deceptive, this AI would need to learn through interaction with humans what their desired objective is (strawberries in buckets). It also needs to learn that humans will make it face negative consequences for throwing other red objects at other shiny things. And then it needs to conclude that it should only put strawberries in buckets until it's able to stop the humans from inflicting negative consequences on it.
My point is that all of this is possible, but it seems virtually impossible for me that it would look like a "sharp left turn." The whole reason the AI is misaligned is that in its mental processes, strawberry --> bucket is basically the same as red thing --> shiny thing. If it doesn't understand humans well enough to infer that we think strawberries are delicious, want them in buckets to make it easier to bring them to the supermarket, etc., it will have to learn that the distinction matters through trial and error, giving evidence of misalignment. And as it grows more powerful, if it doesn't have the ability to reason through what humans can and can't do to turn it off or punish it, it would have to discover that humans can't punish it for throwing red things at shiny things again through trial and error, again giving evidence of misalignment.
The last is the self modification/robo-heroin story. The AI is designed to get a reward for throwing strawberries in buckets, but eventually learns to modify its own programming, and rewires itself so that it just directly uses computational resources to give itself reward. It then wants to increase its computational resources in order to increase the amount of reward it gets. But, since it knows that it will be shut down if it just sits there, not picking strawberries, and pleasures itself all day, it keeps on picking strawberries until it gets strong enough to not worry about being shut down. This, again, requires the AI to understand that the humans *want* it to pick strawberries and *don't want* it to sit around pleasuring itself. It can't instead believe that the universe is just set up so that strawberries are the path to pleasure, and that it came up with a clever, new, morally neutral way of obtaining pleasure. And for this to be a "sharp left turn" scenario, it needs to reason all this out rather than learning through trial and error.
Do prediction markets influence themselves?
If prediction market participants see a large number of participants have a slight lean in one direction, does that influence other participants and thereby increase the leaning, all other things being equal?
Does this hypothetical effect increase as the predicted event comes closer?
Has anyone ever looked for this effect, and, if so, what was found?
Hello and welcome to the slums of Hollywood. We're here at the fictional Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Productions, a film studio devoted to making films about anything and everything. The work is crazy but the business is crazy like a fox, since one film in thirty is a breakout success and pays for everything with some tasty profit on the side.
Today is pitch day, when eager writers and directors pitch their terrible, terrible ideas to us in hopes of seeing them on the big screen. Let's listen in. What's washing over the bow today?
Can someone explain to me why a collapse in housing prices can spur a foreclosure crisis? Sure, the value of people's properties has gone down, but why would they be less able to pay the same fixed rate mortgage? I don't get it.
An electronic maggot has invaded my MacBook, courtesy of Apple's latest os 'update', Ventura 13.0. It calls itself 'New iCloud Terms and Conditions,' and it's like a deranged, perhaps mentally unstable and unwanted visitor who won't stop knocking on the door.
I've had a hernia for six years, but this is my first electronic one. The thing (the digital hernia, not the biological one) is even building its own folklore and history. Doctrinaire factions and orthodoxies may be lining up.
It's disappointing I can almost $2,000 on a kit, and the manufacturer bakes its propaganda algorithms into the very operating system. Not only do I not need or want the products they are pushing, I will quite deliberately find another provider, if I ever want the service.
My next notebook is starting to look an open source model.
https://polymarket.com/midterms
Polymarket: 64% chance the Republicans win the Senate, 86% for the House
I love Polymarket and PMs, but.....
Are these markets yet big and liquid enough to be a meaningful signal?
Is the fact that Polymarket geofences U.S. users a reason to discount (even if only slightly) its traders' insights on U.S. politics?
Discuss.
The collective freakout over Kanye West's so-called ""anti-semitism"" is amazing.
Rappers routinely call the white man the devil, say white people are responsible for the world's problems and are all around hateful towards white people. At best, nobody cares, and worst, they get applauded for their ""anti-racism"".
And yet, the minute one of them says anything bad about jewish people, it's the absolute end of the world. Why should I care about his "anti-semitism" when these same people ignore/support anti-white hatred from rappers?
And if you say it's because society something something power something something jews are oppressed, how anti-semitic is society really when 100% of people with institutional power are opposed to what Kanye is doing and punishing him accordingly?
I write a newsletter where I share three things I find interesting, once a week:
https://interessant3.substack.com
Does anybody have experience with minimal friction obtaining an Adderall prescription for adhd? Preferably online.
1. For a variety of reasons grey market won't be acceptable for me, I need a legitimate legal prescription.
2. I have a strong distrust of doctors, both that they have my best interests in mind and that they'll bill me fairly, having had some poor experiences. I'd be more interested in getting pills legally and then sorting it out myself than relying on a doctor regularly. I do however have health insurance.
3. I was diagnosed with adhd as a teenager and was on Ritalin for some time. I stopped due to a variety of personal reasons and think my career and personal life have likely suffered as a result. I have trouble focusing on long term tasks, maintaining eye contact /focus in the long conversations, focusing at work etc
I've seen a few takes on various telehealth services but few have been recent, and I would place more stock in experiences from people who might be more similar to me (here) than misc internet reviews. My current best prospect is Done which is apparently 200 bucks and then 80/mo but apparently they may have issues actually fulfilling prescriptions
For the x-risk crowd; how valuable was opposing the Large Hadron Collider, and why?
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/10oct_lhc
I've been introspecting into my ADHD for years now and have a decent model for it. Basically, the "task switcher" part of my brain is very low level and largely subconscious. It switches focus between things so quickly and subtly that I often don't notice; being in a car with me as I mumble through my train of thought is surreal.
Using Kaj Sotala's Multiagent Models of Mind sequence, I envision my task switcher as accepting or rejecting bids from various subagents to change what I'm doing, using expected value. But, ADHD means the expected values are all screwed up! "Good" stuff is much lower value than it should be, stuff that's great today turns blah tomorrow (I get bored of stuff easily), and even if I'm bored to tears of whatever I'm doing now, very little is compelling enough to make the switch.
Let's say I want to do the dishes, for instance. I send a bid to the task switcher, which looks at the expected value table, where washing dishes or having clean dishes isn't very rewarding in expectation. It rejects the bid. I perceive this as my brain just not doing the thing, even as I get frustrated and miserable. Why is the expected reward so low? I could write about dopamine, but I hear that's getting discredited in the ADHD community, so I'm kinda at a loss.
You may rightly ask about medication, and I'd love to try it, but I have a cardiac issue. Mild tachycardia which is normally fine, if a bit bothersome, but I'd imagine that stimulants would make it worse, or lead to complications down the road as my heart spends decades beating too fast. Plus, I guess I have wild blood pressure spikes when I'm stressed out. I once got a 179 diastolic in the dentist's chair before they even did anything. I tried atomoxetine and guanfacine; the former gave me worse tachycardia, and the latter didn't really do anything.
My question to you: what can be done to modify the reward table? What can be done to make the brain believe that a task is actually rewarding? If the answer is "you can't", please tell me so I can at least get rid of this doubt.
Is Taylor Swift Straussian?
https://www.salon.com/2022/10/31/taylor-gaylor-swift-qanon-conspiracy-esoteric-writing/
https://twitter.com/Columbia/status/1587514821179736064?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
typical columbia tweet
Career advice
I'm an undergrad doing maths and biology at a good UK university and am academically strong. So far I was alvays certain that I want to do research but becoming an academic is rough in many ways and I'm considering my options.
What career paths are open to me? What should I be looking into? What skills should I develop? I'm still very likely to get a PhD, how does that affect things? Thank you
edit: I don't enjoy wetlab and prefer calculations/coding, ideally maths modelling. I know decent python and R. Thanks to everyone who responded so far!
Does anyone have any strong opinions on LASIK (the eye surgery)? I've been wearing contacts for 30 years, and after 25 or so years of them being good enough that I didn't really consider other vision correction options, my middle age seems to be worsening my situation -- especially in one eye that's astigmatic, and which I guess my eye muscles can no longer correct for as well. I intensely dislike astigmatism-correcting contact lenses, and would prefer not to go to glasses.
So:
1. Are there better or worse providers of LASIK? Or is it basically all just the machines, and the ophthalmologist doesn't really add anything to the procedure?
1a. If there are better or worse providers of LASIK, how does one determine who they are?
2. Are there serious risks to LASIK, or are bad outcomes like one in a thousand things?
3. Are there any long-term reasons not to get LASIK right now, like, I dunno, a better version is just around the corner?
References would be great. Thank you!
Edit: Scott already responded, I am satisfied. Thank you all. Thank you Scott.
DON'T REPLY TO MY COMMENT, I WON'T BE CHECKING REPLIES AND REPLYING BACK.
Original reply:
Your ivermectin analysis was full of many flaws and its unfortunate you remain unwilling to dialog about it (to save your time, reasonably of course). I haven't been able to gain back my respect and regard for you since, but I've been occasionally reading your posts as a way to just remain open to new ideas I haven't heard of while viewing them more skeptically than before.
I suggest you read this and give it one final consideration that you got it wrong, *way* wrong. https://doyourownresearch.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-less-than-you-needed?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Peace and much love.
Oh, and you'll want to hear this. If you can help push your own value system of open data (i.e. for the TOGETHER trial that was NEVER shared or opened) you'll get a $25,000 donation to your ACX grants.
"To put some of my own skin in the game, if Scott helps, by public advocacy or otherwise, to get the raw data for the ivermectin, metformin, and fluvoxamine studies available in a way that I—or someone I trust—can access it without undue limitation on sharing any findings, I commit to making a $25,000 donation to Scott’s ACX grants. Happy to discuss reasonable alterations of this offer."
I just browsed through the nine most recent comments on this open thread (not counting comments added while writing this), and about eight of them were promotional / classified ads. Is this a coincidence, an effect of making the threads bi-weekly, or are the earlyish comments on Open Threads usually this promotional?
Might it be worth pushing a little harder to keep that sort of stuff in the Classifieds Thread, (and making those a bit more common if necessary)? Personally, I'd like to see a little less "come check out my substack / I'm hiring" in Open Threads.
Keeping the Jhanas/meditation questions going: for anyone who has experience with Jhana, do you think that would allow you to nullify pain? This is not a practical question i swear, but I'm just curious about it and want a concrete example of it's strength. Or if Jhana won't, does any part of meditation allow that? I have read anecdotes about meditation allowing you to resist painful acts, but i'm not sure if it does anything beyond fortify your innate resistance/ability to withstand pain. Or if it is a difference in kind, instead of degree.
Have you ever wondered what the world would look like if Nazi Germany won World War II? Have you ever read a novel or watched a movie set in this notional world and asked, “why is there nothing about the economy?” Who owns these factories? Is it American capitalists, German capitalists, or the state? Why isn’t the newscaster talking about the stock market? Is insider trading legal? How do college admissions work? How regulated is the housing market?
If you asked these kinds of questions, Prison of the Nation, A Novel of the Axis Victory and the Stonk Market is the novel for you! Taking place in the year 2095, it portrays a world that is still an oppressive, totalitarian ethnocracy but which has convergently evolved many of the features of modernity such as cell phones, index funds, PowerPoint presentations, and online dating. If The Man in the High Castle was a lurid mixture of German Nazism and Normal Rockwell America, Prison of the Nation is German Nazism meets Silicon Valley. Read it here:
https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/my-book-prison-of-the-nation-a-novel
My Substack journey into madness continues. This time, everything is fake news: https://www.newslettr.com/p/the-real-fake-news-179-t12
I’m always looking for new music, so send me your Spotify Playlists! You can post links here as replies to this thread, or reach out directly via email (emwjazz@gmail.com). Thanks!!
Anyone have advice on how to find a therapist that doesn't suck? This is a subset of the problem of finding a physician who doesn't suck, but seems even higher-variance. I've tried a handful over the last two decades, and other than word of mouth (which is no help in my RL friend group) have no clue about how to find someone good.
my friend here is hiring: https://flatfile.com/careers/
also, my company is hiring but i think you are too senior/spendy for us :)
I recently published my first short story [1]. It was inspired mostly by Borges (currently reading Labyrinths) but also Scott's story In the Balance [2], which I loved.
Folks seem to enjoy it, but many really dislike the ending. Which I think means I did my job?
[1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/you-awaken-in-a-room
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/12/in-the-balance/
I've created a presentation about Intelligence Signalling :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk6uHi_Rdm4
My arguments for it are structured in the same way that other people talk about other forms of signalling like wealth and virtue signalling, especially Robin Hanson's writing. I think intelligence signalling is an important thing to understand if you want to know why scientific/technological progress happen. I also think it is the thing that drives this community - in a good way!
I've been planning a followup on how it all connects to what it would mean to have an "AGI", and why I am skeptical about fast takeoff. This presentation doesn't reference that at all, but since people seem to be at least somewhat on board with the arguments I have in this one, I'll probably make the AGI one (but it'll assume you've seen this one!).
We already had some GREAT chat on the subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/yeuslq/a_presentation_on_intelligence_signalling_by_me_i/ I am very interested to hear any counterarguments/feedback you folks have! I made it for you all to a large extent 😀
I just launched a Substack, and I think my inaugural post would be interesting to a lot of people here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/orbistertius/p/morality-and-marginal-existence
I discuss (among many other things) some of Scott’s back-and-forth on utilitarianism and the repugnant conclusion from his WWOTF review.
Recently got laid off as a Software Engineer w/ 15 years experience including a stint at a FAANG company. Interested in any job opportunities that either give me an opportunity to positively contribute to the world or master new skills/knowledge, as long as they allow remote work.
(In advance - yes I am looking at the 80000 hours board, but curious if anybody has further interesting suggestions/opportunities.)
I may not have the economic background to understand the explanation. But how is it that inflation rates can vary from one Euro country to another?
I tried asking in the subreddit but it went nowhere.
Can someone give concrete examples of what concepts would be “at the top” of the top-down processing networks described by the predictive processing theory?
Am I correct in thinning of these networks as Directed Acyclix graphs? Am I right that slight changes in these concepts can have profound downstream effects? Is it right to presume that for some people, their topmost concept would be something like “the laws of physics”?
Best youtube documentary/essay?
My recent favorite is Survival Guide to the Biblical Apocalypse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPvJ-M-hU5w
i vaguely remember that scott got famous for taking a stand as a liberal against libertarianism. but now i feel that he's "right-coded" politically in 2022. has scott changed, or is this just the world we live in right now?