About a year ago, archaeologists digging at a site called Sayburc in south east Turkey uncovered an 11,000 year old wall containing some carvings of animals and people:
It is pretty easy to search and find articles on this, along with images. But for the reader's convenience, here are a couple:
Any guesses what these carvings were meant to convey? After so many thousands of years I would have thought there's next to no chance of being able to clearly relate them to any recorded myth or religion. But all the same, it's fun to try and guess.
For what it is worth, I think they might have been meant to represent rulership and justice, and the area where they were found was a sort of council chamber where the tribal leader and his senior counsellors or village elders met.
There are two apparent "frames". The first shows a standing man sholding his penis, and surrounded on either side by a pair of leopards facing him in a rather menacing manner. Perhaps the leopards were meant to represent his royalty, a symbol used down the ages for this, and the penis his fecundity. A king in primitive societies was expected to be fertile in his offspring, and to bestow fertility on the land, and if he failed in either, if for example a drought caused a crop failure, then the king was soon for the chop, literally!
Also, as one of the papers cited above points out, the figure between the leopards is wearing a two-braid necklace. Assuming that could be a crude form of regalia, this seems further evidence that the figure is supposed to be a chief.
The other frame, to the left of the leopards shows another man holding up what looks like a snake and facing a bull. I think in primitive societies a snake often signifies cunning and wisdom (c.f. the snake tempter in the Biblical creation story), and presumably a bull is meant to represent the opposite, i.e. bovine obstinate stupidity combined with mindless violence. So I suspect that frame is meant to represent justice contending with barbarism and primitive kneejerk responses.
We should remember that this site was one of the very first where communities had settled to start farming. So the inhabitants would have been fairly wild nomadic types and quite a handful for the ruler, and regulating them would have been fairly challenging, and thus a major if not the main preoccupation of whoever was running the place.
All that said, perhaps this symbolism is a bit advanced for those times, and the carvings just show some myth, long forgotten or transformed unrecognisably in the millennia since. For example, is it obvious the figure between the leopards is a man and not a monkey? He seems to have quite an ape-like face.
Is it true, or just an artifact of attributing nature to nurture? Is it even scientific in the sense of having testable predictions? Are there good studies about it?
Sacrilegious commentary ( following "the rest is commentary " line on the main Astral Codex motto ( smart and undoubtedly attractive and self filtering for a certain kind of audiences ). Deliciously subversive . Not necessarily universal, and
assumingely universal.
P(B), is in practice, harder to determine than one may assume.
It is "just" the denominator and hence merely a scaling factor.
Nevertheless, this 'hard' guessing of P(B) in most applied settings, makes Bayesian inference a relative and not absolute matter: the equal sign is typically replaced by a "proportionial to" symbol.
For example, if If A is lung cancer and B radon exposure, one may have a pretty good idea of the prevalence of lung cancer in the general population i.e. P(A).
One may also be able to estimate, from appropriate sampling the radon exposure history among those who have lung cancer i.e. P(B|A).
However, to estimate radon exposure in the general population is harder -> what is an adequate sampling frame for non lung cancer individuals?
Some more thoughts about why the crypto post bothered me so much: debates over the object-level correctness of its arguments aside, it basically pattern-matches to the arguments crypto scammers (which Scott admits are ubiquitous) make for getting money from people. I don't think Scott himself is a crypto scammer, but he does have a lot of reputation as a reasonable guy and it seems likely that him putting his weight behind arguments like this helps make people more vulnerable to them.
There's a counterpoint here that we should judge arguments based on their object-level merits, not whether they pattern match onto stuff bad people say (and while I do have some object level disagreements, I admit I'm not making them here and don't consider them overwhelmingly convincing). I think this is wrong: In cases where you know there are ubiquitous successful scammers, you should avoid trusting your object-level intuition and knee-jerk reject things that match to them if you don't have good reason to think you're better at detecting scams than they are at convincing you of scams (if you can't reliably outperform the rock with a sticker saying "crypto is scams", you're better off just listening to the rock). And as the FTX stuff showed, both Scott and a lot of other people in these parts are not reliably good at detecting crypto scams - probably good enough to detect the obvious ones, but crypto has a lot of really talented and hardworking scammers, and you're still more likely to be convinced by them than to chance into a non-scam based on object level reasoning.
(Sorry for making generalizations here, please add qualifiers as needed.) A white American soccer mom, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, Iranian dissident Badri Khamenei and a Buddhist monk in Jagadhri have some common traits due to their shared indo-european-ness: Their words for "mother" and "milk" sound alike, and they all would probably agree that there is an old thunder good with a hammer or mace. But do they have anything inherited in common in regards to daily life practices, traditions or beliefs about the world (that say a Native American, Chinese or Pygmy person wouldn't have)? Some candidates:
1. They would all agree that a bowl of yogurt is an acceptable breakfast? (But other pastoral nomads (e.g. mongols) likely agree?)
2. They would all agree that white is the most appropriate color for a horse that a king will ride? (I'm not sure they would all agree to this though.)
3. There's some kind of festival in the spring involving large bonfires? (But large fires doesn't seem specific enough.)
4. Cremation is acceptable? (but Catholics doesn't agree, and Japanese do.) Maybe "The spreading of ashes after cremation is acceptable"?
Please suggest your own ideas! But likely this is a fools errand: indo-european cultures have diffused too much and practices have been exchanged too much with e.g. China so that nothing like what I'm looking for remains.
I have a question for those who want US and EU (“the West”) to broker a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia that would entail a loss of Ukrainian territory or/and some other concession which Ukraine currently rejects. How, practically, is this supposed to work if Ukraine isn’t willing to play ball?
Only solution that I can think of is that the West would simply threaten Ukrainians with withholding critical aid unless they moderate their demands. Is this the plan? Or is there some other way I am not seeing?
What is the morally right thing to do with a person who is in a permanent vegetative state? I have a close family member who has no chance of recovery and seems cruel to keep them in this state. thoughts?
My son (7) has not really caught the bug for reading yet, but I think I’ve found his subject. I was telling him some Greek myths the other night and he was fascinated. He wants books on them for Christmas.
Anyone have any recommendations for books either about Greek myths or based on them? He reads well so they don’t need to be geared towards first graders, but they probably should have pictures. Thanks!
I'm interested in whether people think AI is going to render a lot of professions obsolete in the next few years.
I was quite shocked to see GPT3 programing, admittedly not to a professional human standard, but it was basically competent. I could easily imagine the next generation of AIs surpassing my ability at least, and obviously it would be exponentially cheaper than hiring human coders. I can't see how I'd stay employed in that scenario.
It seems like most jobs that mainly involve manipulating information are in the same situation. Accountants, doctors, journalists, lawyers, finance, engineering, basically the entire professional middle class, might end up going the way of the hand-loom-weavers.
Maybe I'm overreacting, there's a lot of (what sounds like) hyperbole around AI at the moment, but could we genuinely be looking at an early-stages-of-the-industrial-revolution type disruption of the labour market over the next decade?
A year ago I would have laughed at the idea, but does a near-future where AI does all the cognitive work and human workers all do manual labour (or are celebrities etc.) seem plausible?
If you haven't encountered it yet around the rat-sphere, check out The Story of VaccinateCA, about a grassroots effort to collect and publish reliable information about vaccine availability, back when COVID-19 vaccines were just becoming available. It's a long read, but worth it.
I have been wondering whether to take fever-reducing medication (e.g. paracetamol) when I have flu. On the one hand, it feels good, reduces flu symptoms and so on. But I wonder if it has any effect on the duration of the sickness, preventing fever means preventing my body from fighting it, in theory extending the fight for a couple more days.
So is my conclusion correct, that if I'm willing to suffer the symptoms, it's better not to take such medications and let the body fight it off with fever?
"In October the SEC charged celebrity Kim Kardashian with touting digital tokens on social media without disclosing the remuneration for her endorsement. (She settled with the SEC for $1.26 million without admitting or denying its findings.)" (WSJ 12/19/22)
It seems to me that software development is moving in the direction opposite to "division of labor".
Twenty years ago I would naively expect that the growing field (in both budgets and complexity) of software development will allow lots of obscure specializations. But what I observe suggests otherwise.
The idea of "full stack developer" goes again separating database from business logic from web page development from design. In "scrum", team members are officially treated as replaceable, so one day you design a database table with partitions that will contain millions of records, and the next day you tweak stylesheets to move a button one pixel leftwards on a mobile screen.
With "devops", programmers and technical support become one; and with "cloud" they are further united with network administrators. The guy who partitions database tables and tweaks stylesheets is now also responsible for designing and implementing network security. And he is supposed to be simultaneously a specialist on all of that.
I can imagine the reasons why companies could prefer this. With the everything-specialists it seems like you can hire fewer people and save money. (Not really, because you need to hire multiple everything-specialists anyway. Might as well hire a few specialists instead.) Or maybe the idea is that everyone is replaceable because everyone has all skills and knowledge, and this should keep the salaries down. (But does it actually work? Companies are complaining about lack of developers, which is probably made worse by the need to know everything, and thus the salaries are growing anyway.)
This seems to go against the established wisdom about the "division of labor" which still seems generally accepted, so I wonder if any economist has noticed and studied this paradox.
Also, I am curious whether this trend is specific for software development, or whether it exists in more, maybe even all professions. (I mean, requiring people to do what was previously multiple specializations. Not because you openly need to save money, but because you explicitly promote the belief that a *true* specialist is a specialist on everything.)
There are now widely available apps that can generate novel images of an individual using a small 'prompt' of images provided by a user. An example of this is the Lensa app. This was immediately followed by abuse, e.g. generating celebrity nude images using a prompt that combines celebrity face shots with nude shots of others. It's not hard to anticipate an ever expanding category of embarrassing deep fakes that could be generated using just publicly available face shots.
Is anyone aware of strategies to counter this technology, when your career requires making a small number of profile pictures available on the internet? Adversarial perturbations seem promising (like the barely visible noise that makes image classifiers mistake pandas for worms or whatever) but I haven't found any hits on Google using just the obvious keywords for this kind of technique.
After toying around with ChatGPT and reading various twitter threads/articles about it I've come to realize that I am far easier to fool than I would've guessed. The replies ChatGPT gives me that I am confident are incorrect sound remarkably persuasive on first glance. Combine this with the fact that my knowledge of facts is limited (though above the Clearer-Thinking-test-taking average apparently) and I'm now second guessing many of my favourite substack/blog posts. I know Knoll's Law basically covers this, but I think this deserves more attention. So much of the focus has been on the ability of ChatGPT to be persuasive, rather than on how easily we're fooled.
I see. I understand the valid points. I am not going into debating the validity of the formula. ( that I even misspelled in my initial post, as I was legitimately promptly corrected.
My initial intention ( probably not clearly expressed), was to ponder on the universality attached to it by the following message of the substack motto .
" All the rest is commentary ".
Which is exactly what I am doing.
Is it axiomatic or relative (and I am not asking philosophically ( death is absolute or relative because atoms get recycled).
Just from a pure generalized ( or not ?) applicability to that.
I am not debating, nor have the intention. I am genuinely asking and gave a ( flawed ?) example.
The collective noun for a group of wombats is a wisdom of wombats. This is one of those supposed facts which appears nowhere other than on lists of collective nouns.
My question is: who the heck comes up with these collective nouns, and what the heck is the process behind it? I can see them arising naturally in animals which naturally hang around in groups, but these animals are the ones with the dullest collective nouns like "flock" and "herd". The animals with really exotic collective nouns like "wisdom" or "bloat" tend to be solitary or small-group animals anyway.
Hey Scott! I was playing around with DALL-e and got it to make a pretty good stained glass image of Darwin and the finch. While I somehow think you don't really want your house to be dominated by rationalist stained glass windows, you might want to have a look. It's here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/2XNbUJxh84hbFgYz5
The way things have being going in the Reality Department, I expect Musk to lose the poll, but then declare the entire election process corrupt, and override it.
He'll find people stuffing ballots into mailboxes in Arizona, and plead with the technicians that all he needs is 11, 000 votes. Mobs will rush the Twitter Tower, and Musk will declare himself Emperor of Twitter, Thank You Very Much. That old CEO business was highly overrated, anyway, he'll say.
I'm a (certain type of) data scientist, and a boss of mine asked me about how to think about ChatGPT. In order to organize my thoughts on it, I wrote a post about it. I'd be really interested to see what folks around here think of it: https://ipsherman.substack.com/p/an-opinion-about-ai-chatgpt-and-more . P.S. I don't spend a lot of time in these Open Threads, so I apologize if self-promotion here is gauche. Please let me know if it is, and if there's a better way to solicit feedback!
Random thought: I wonder if you could use the same principle of noise cancellation to create active anti-sonar tech - basically, create a perfectly out-of-phase pulse of the same amplitude as the inbound ping, thus cancelling out your echo. This would obviously be very useful for military submarines / USVs, so I imagine either it's already being investigated or there's a technical reason it wouldn't work.
> Conventional wisdom is that intelligence-related studies replicate better than other fields, and Clearer Thinking is testing that now by trying to replicate 40 intelligence-related claims. They’re looking for experimental subjects to take their online tests; click here if you want to help.
Heads up, but I think the second example question in the "minimum average distance to red dots" section is incorrect. The test claims that the correct answer is to choose the middle, which has a total distance of 3sqrt2. However, if you choose one of the sides instead, the total distance is only 2+sqrt5, which is slightly lower.
* In addition to the incorrect example question for centroids, one of the paper folding questions is impossible as well (near the middle, I forget which one). There's no way to fold the first image into the second unless you flip it over first.
* Why do we need to click a link to explicitly pause the timer between sections? It should be paused automatically when you're between questions or sections!
* SAT question enforces max of 1600 rather than 2400, regardless of when you took the test. Also not clear how to answer if you took the SAT multiple times
* no option to list a double major in college
* might be nice to have examples of what is urban, suburban, highly urban, etc. for comparison
* No way to go back in the demographics section if you mess up. Only option is to "reset everything", which is rather scary if you just spent an hour doing the previous tests and don't want to lose progress
It feels to me like it's going to be much easier to write AIs that can give 80% correct solutions 80% of the time to "hard" problems than to write ones that can reliably and consistently solve "easy" problems (definitions of "hard" and "easy" intentionally not gone into).
So what are some applications for which a quite-likely-to-be-correct output that you can't rely on is valuable?
And what are good ways of using plausible-but-unreliable applications plus secondary testing to get reliable applications?
I have three more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with your email address, or email me at the address specified in my about page:
"As soon as new psychology and behavior papers come out in Nature and Science (the two most prestigious general science journals), ..."
I don't think scientists should treat Nature and Science as the two most-prestigious general science journals anymore. Both have written editorials and/or letters to the effect that science must be politicized, and articles should be judged on the desirability of their expected impact on society, in addition to their scientific merits.
I was pretty unhappy with my results on the intelligence test linked in the main post. I think I had a lot of issues with the test that impacted my performance.
I don't think the structure was well specified enough. I'd really like to know as I'm taking it how many more "activities" are left, and the same for the surveys. I had to make decisions about whether I wanted to keep going in those sections with bad info.
I got 98%+ on reasoning and then mid to high 80s on the others except betting where I did very badly because I wanted to be done. Sadly I reclicked the link to check something on the intro which apparently because of cookies won't let you look at their intro page about the test structure and also blanked my results page before I could click the link. I know I got 88/86/84 I think on the non reasoning/better sections but can't remember the percentage.
Were there only 5 test sections? Woulda been nice to have a list of the number of sections and what they were.
I'm very curious about the quality of the participants. I underperformed by old high school SAT/ACT scores I think but not sure if it is due to sample bias.
I’m currently in college. If I get married, I’ll no longer be filed as dependent under my parents, I will have almost 0 income, and my university will offer me a bunch of financial aid.
There has to be a reason why I can’t just go get legally married to one of my buddies, and then get a divorce after we graduate. Anyone know more than me about this?
Also about Clearer Thinking: one of their questionnaires asks "how many hours a week do you devote to learning?".
I thought about this and decided the question is hopelessly ill-formed, with no way to assign an answer that has any meaning. Learning is the result of everything you do, including -- according to fairly popular theories of sleep -- sleeping. This was noted many years ago by Bill Watterson: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/03/25
I maintain a friendship with a woman in Shanghai. We talk. This has, over time, dramatically improved my ability to read and write in Chinese. Are the hours I spend talking to my friend "devoted to learning"?
The claim is that meat substitutes, except for seitan and mycoprotein-based meat substitutes, have low bioavailibilty of iron and possibly zinc. The other substitutes are high in phytates, a plant product that inhibits mineral absorbition.
I believe that people eat meat because they like it. It's not just flavor or status. I think there's a feeling of satiation from animal products, and it's observable that people buy them as soon as they can afford them. This is cross-cultural, and vegetarianism or veganism only happen when people have a theory in favor of them.
It's possible that meat substitutes without phytates are feasible, and people might like them better, but meanwhile, I think the feeling of satiation from animal products should be studied rather than just trying to imitate the flavor and texture.
I used the archive link because I'm getting a 403 error from the original article.
Reading a poem called "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope, written in the early 1700s, I found a couple of lines in it rather puzzling. Perhaps some perceptive reader(s) can help suggest or explain their intended meaning. It's quite a long poem, and the following is an extract, to put the relevant lines in context:
:::
'Tis not enough your counsel still be true;
Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do;
Men must be taught as if you taught them not;
And things unknown proposed as things forgot.
Without good breeding, truth is disapproved;
That only makes superior sense beloved. <-- "That" referring to the "good breeding" presumably
Be niggards of advice on no pretence; <-- ?
For the worse avarice is that of sense: <--- ??
With mean complacence ne'er betray your trust,
Nor be so civil as to prove unjust.
Fear not the anger of the wise to raise;
Those best can bear reproof, who merit praise.
:::
Clearly the first few lines advise the reader to offer advice not starkly and explicitly, as if the advisee was clueless and ignorant, but dressed up diffidently and diplomatically as if it was something they had merely forgotten. Fair enough, so far so good.
By contrast, after the two puzzling lines, the author warns against going to the opposite extreme and sugar-coating the advice so much that its import and content is disguised beyond recognition. At least that is my reading.
But what about the lines between? "The worse avarice is that of sense:". HUH? Maybe the colon at the end of that line is a clue, and somehow the following lines are supposed to expand on this enigmatic line. But I don't really see the connection.
If anything, the two lines seem almost contradictory, because the first appears to be saying "Minimize tha amount of stark unvarnished advice offered" (in keeping with the previous lines); but then the next line appears to say that being sparing of and withholding common sense advice is "the worst" fault!
What would be a good thing to try for an 88 yo man diagnosed with head and backache that spreads to the neck and finally reaches the hand, going away completely?
It generally gets better with massage and happens only during sleep. Disturbs sleep often everyday for a week and then nothing for a month is a recent pattern but it varies.
He took Gabapentin
(given by his cardiologist) and something else in the Gabapentin family and that made him groggy/sleepy all day.
What are some ways to prevent this pain? Is there a painkiller that won't cause grogginess? Could this be triggered by some food? What is the way to treat spondilosis/spondilytis? ?
I'm trying to gauge what characteristics of human civilization/society are constant, change in cycle and trend over human existence (consciousness to...). Any tips or source references would be appreciated.
I assume Clearer Thinking is applying grade inflation to the final results, and/or getting a lot of Mechanical Turks to fill it out without putting in much effort, because otherwise my final scores do not make sense, in my opinion. the added weirdness of everyone apparently getting different questions is making me wonder if it boils down to inadequate sample size -- they say you scored higher than X% of participants, but maybe the total participants in that section were 3 people.
>The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) is a multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford. EHLI is one of the actions prioritized in the Statement of Solidarity and Commitment to Action, which was published by the Stanford CIO Council (CIOC) and People of Color in Technology (POC-IT) affinity group in December 2020.
>[instead of] Philippine Islands
>[consider using] Philippines or the Republic of the Philippines
>[Because] The term is politically incorrect and denotes colonialism. Some people of Filipino heritage might use the term, though.
and
>[instead of] stand up meeting
>[consider using] quick meeting
>[Because] Ableist language that trivializes the experiences of people living with disabilities.
and
>[instead of] Scrum Master
>[consider using] agile lead, scrum leader
>[Because] Historically, masters enslaved people, didn't consider them human and didn't allow them to express free will, so this term should generally be avoided.
Language simply wasn't built to express the raw contempt I feel towards minds that think like this.
I don't know why the multitude of symptoms discredits the situation. We had a pandemic where a lot of ppl caught a new virus at the same time. It's like if 350M ppl got mono or the vaccine for mono in one year, would that discredit mono, or hiv, etc. I just think there's no benefit to being heartless/skeptical. I don't understand what societal good it renders. If you want to promote mind body healing, ok, but you still recognize the problem with that:
Is there any information about SBF at MIT? Did he seem intelligent? How possible is it to cheat at MIT? Was he defrauding people? What were his ambitions?
SBF's attitude toward risk-- it sounds like he didn't understand some fairly basic math.
I'm bitterly amused by the talk about maximum impact. He has probably had about as much impact as he possibly could have, but I don't think that's what he had in mind.
These were selected from a number of accounts from people who got sick from covid, some of them very sick, but who recovered fully in a month or so.
This is in answer to long covid skeptics, who I suspect are confusing being hard-headed and hard-hearted. Whatever is going on, I don't think it's ordinary deconditioning, and I find it unlikely that it's social contagion.
Vy Says:
Comment #24 September 5th, 2022 at 3:50 am
Wish I could say the same, unfortunately, it was a lot worse for me.
Some background information – I am in my late 20s, never had any health issues and used to spend 3-4 days a week doing Muay Thai (kick boxing) and commuting to work by bike every day (10km), never smoked and only consumed alcohol in moderate amounts (1 per week max).
I got Covid back in early April, 2020, just days after the very first lockdown was put in place (I live in London). The first symptoms were quite mild – cough, fewer and fatigue. Then a day or two later I lost the sense of smell, muscle pain kicked in, body temperature soared above +39C followed with unbearable pain of eye sockets. We’re now on day 4/5 of Covid – started having coughing episodes of 10-15 minutes during which I could barely breathe, to the point where I was passing out 2-3 times a day. I haven’t eaten for days at that point either.
At that point I’ve decided that it’s time to call the NHS, but as expected – there was nothing they could help or advise with, apart from strongly advising against taking Ibuprofen. Apart from that, told me to get plenty of rest, consume more fluids and only go to A&E if the breathing difficulties get any worse (apparently passing out multiple times a day was not severe enough yet).
After 2 weeks I started feeling better, fewer was gone and so was the pain in eye sockets. The smell & taste was coming back slowly, still couldn’t taste salt at all. Walking around the apartment was still a huge challenge, so I was spending most of my time on the coach in my living room. Took me a good month before I would attempt to leave the apartment and venture up onto the roof terrace. Another month before I finally attempted to head outside for a short walk.
Unfortunately that’s where the recovery has completely halted to a grind. For the next year or so I would suffer from constant fatigue and brain fog, every 5-7 days I’d develop cold-like symptoms. Performing even the most basic tasks (I am a software developer) were unbearable. The longest I could stay concentrated in front of a computer would be 10-15 minutes, after that – I’d just get extremely irritated and delete any work I’ve manage to get done and restart again. No matter what I tried – nothing was helping, so I ended up resigning in early September since it felt like a better option than trying to fight the corporate world that just refused to accept the reality of long Covid.
After going to Turkey and Lithuania to get a number of tests, procedures and screening I was advised to take Covid Vaccine (Moderna) ASAP as they had patients with similar cases reporting mild improvements after 1st one and even better after second. The first jab sent me back to bed for 10 days, literally felt like a brutal case of flu. Second one was slightly better, just severe muscle pains and mild fewer.
Unfortunately the long Covid symptoms only started to fade away during summer of 2022 (just a few months ago). Went to the gym for the first time in 2 years back in July, during the latest trip to Turkey to get even more health checks done.
****
[serious long-COVID-like effects, but not from COVID]
Vitor Says:
Comment #28 September 5th, 2022 at 11:33 am
5 days after I got my first vaccination, I started getting severe headaches, fatigue, muscle pain, and exertion intolerance. Some of these symptoms have gotten better over time, others have gotten worse (specially the last one). I managed to finish my phd on the strength of the work I’d already done at that point. Now, almost 1.5 years later, I’m feeling good enough to start working 2 days a week again.
Have never had covid.
That’s a career-ending illness, as you like to call it. But I have to agree with Moshe #15 that there’s no chance in hell 20% of the population has experienced symptoms of that magnitude. AFAIK, long covid surveys capture a broad range of symptoms (e.g., you’re counted if you say you have headaches “more often than usual” after covid). That’s well and good for a *scientific* investigation of a new condition, but it’s way too broad for any kind of policy decision (personal or society-wide).
*****
JimV Says:
Comment #33 September 5th, 2022 at 8:21 pm
I’ve mentioned my symptoms here before. On the positive side, I had a tendency to snack a lot and eat big meals, and just about everything tastes bad now, so I am back to my college weight, and staying there. I basically eat one smallish meal a day (e.g., half a sub sandwich) plus a milkshake. I rarely get through a day without at least one two-hour nap when I am too tired to do anything else. I am retired so it isn’t a big deal, but I could not sustain the 60-hour work-weeks I used to average when employed as an engineer. I used to be able to walk up to 20 miles a day (I refuse to own a car), but now five miles leaves me drained and and almost falling asleep on my feet.
I had a mild (8 hour) case of covid in May of 2020, then a much worse (three days barely getting out of bed at all) in November of 2021. Probably alpha and omicron. A few things I used to like tasted bad after the first case, then almost everything after the second case. As I said, that has had pluses as well as minuses. I had the two Moderna shots between case one and two, and a Moderna and a Pfizer booster since.
I had a lung issue a few years ago which I still take medication for, but had no respiratory problems with covid. Maybe the medication helped there, but the covid effects seem to be very idiosyncratic, except for the fatigue and fog. There still seems to be a lot we need to learn about it. I expect part of the problem is that at around 8 billion population we are a big target for viruses. Plus all the long-distance travel.
*****
David Speyer Says:
Comment #35 September 6th, 2022 at 9:24 am
Got COVID in July on vacation. Got Paxlovid the next day and my wife and I drove 12 hours to get back home.
I had two days of exhaustion and aches during which I slept alone and isolated as best I could. After that, my wife got it too and full isolation was impossible, but we continued blasting fans through the house, wearing N-95’s and eating all meals outdoors, with the result that two of our three kids tested negative throughout and the third tested positive but never developed symptoms.
The first two days were exhausting, but not worse than other diseases we’ve had: I’d say every 2-4 years one of our kids has brought home something this bad. After that, it was just normal-cold level bad. Symptoms were gone after 5 days and I tested negative at 8 days; I was able to exercise and get by on normal amounts of sleep after 2 weeks.
I will say, though, that I feel like I don’t have as much motivation to slog through boring work as I used to. This seems like a silly symptom, but it is really noticeable, and I hope it will go away. Exciting work like research and classroom teaching I am fully ready for.
> 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe
In the past three months, which is as far as my RSS reader is willing to show old posts, the amount of paid content has been 20%. Or, if you ignore both types of open threads, about 19%.
I would be mostly fine with this, but as I read the posts via an RSS reader, it is a bit frustrating to constantly get this clickbait content that I can't open.
In Universe-Hopping Through Substack, Scott admitted that "I just really don’t like paying for online content." although it may have been tongue-in-cheek.
I wonder what Scott's thoughts are on this situation.
Assume the Hunter Biden laptop story had not been "suppressed" on social media in late 2020. What are the odds it would have swung the election in Trump's favor? 0%? 100%? 5%?
I spent a really long time on that survey but in the end it was too much and I abandoned. Not a good survey design to expect people to spend another 20+ minutes *after* they expressed wanting to stop.
Has anyone else done the clearer thinking tests and got a ridiculously high score?
I've never considered myself unusually good at these and scored higher than 90% of people in all 4 categories with higher than 99.67% in the folded cube one.
Can anyone recommend a source of Christmas carol recordings (actual carols like you might sing in church, as opposed to other Christmas songs like Jingle Bells or White Christmas), where a) you can easily make out the words and b) it's just the traditional tune without lots of changes and flourishes? Traditional choirs (like King's College) fail the first criterion, and most pop artists who release their own versions of carols fail the second. There must be lots of people, including semi-professional and amateur musicians, making recordings of themselves just singing carols, but they're surprisingly hard to find on YouTube, Amazon, etc. Main use case is for singing along to in the car with the family.
Watching excerpts from Russian TV is endlessly amusing, but this was special. If you have 4 minutes of time (7:11 - 11:13), watch this: https://youtu.be/y68hgP__4gE?t=431
Nadezhdin (a former member of Russian Duma): "Russian imperialism and chauvinism is a problem that Lenin already tried to solve. Yes, we were strong and could take a lot of territory... 400 years ago. Now the world is different. Other nations - French, Germans, British - they already overcame their imperialism..."
Moderator: "LOL, you're funny!"
Nadezhdin: "...but we, sadly, now have people like Dugin who proposes hard labor for those who slander the Tzar, literally, I am not kidding..."
Moderator: "Yeah, so what?"
Nadezhdin: "...I have spent decades of my life trying to solve this problem that Lenin was already trying to solve..."
Moderator: "So, are you the next Lenin?"
Nadezhdin: "...and now we hear this shit again, like 'only Russia has spirituality', 'only Russia knows friendship', 'only Russians can sacrifice themselves'. Look at the icons of saints in a Russian Orthodox church, most of them are Greek..."
Moderator: "You need to learn to stop."
Guest#2: "Spiderman can climb the walls. But our Russian superpower [according to the propaganda song shown at the beginning of the video] is that we can *die* better than the others?"
Moderator: "You're stupid."
Guest#2: "Let me quote the classic [Yevtushenko] 'We know how to gather armies / We like to posture about our might / We learned how to die / When will we learn how to live?' I have the same question. Learning how to live should become our superpower!"
Guest#3: "Speaking about religion, look at statistics: 43% of Americans visit church at least once a week, but only 7% of Russians. And speaking about traditions, I have seen Makovsky's painting 'A priest blessing the brothel'. Yes, brothels were legal in Tzar's Russia, and blessed by priests."
Moderator: "Calm down. You are an old man, this is your 7th marriage, and you still keep talking about brothels. Be quiet."
Guest#2: "We should be proud of our young people. They are more kind than the yelling old mean men..."
Moderator: "The only yelling old man here is Nadezhdin."
Nadezhdin: "I am a strong old man. A proud Russian..."
So the inquiry into 6/1/2021 recommended Trump be barred from office.
Not a huge fan of Trump, but it's kind of obvious that this feeds into the "rigged" narrative - they are *literally* banning the prime opposition candidate from the presidential election, which pattern-matches well to Putin's tactics in Russia.
I hope this doesn't wind up blowing the powderkeg.
Elon Musk is running a Twitter poll - what else? - on whether he should step down as head of Twitter.
If you feel like weighing in, you know where to find this. 2 hours left.
About a year ago, archaeologists digging at a site called Sayburc in south east Turkey uncovered an 11,000 year old wall containing some carvings of animals and people:
It is pretty easy to search and find articles on this, along with images. But for the reader's convenience, here are a couple:
https://arkeonews.net/a-relief-of-a-man-holding-his-phallus-was-found-in-sayburc-one-of-the-tas-tepeler/
https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2022.125
Any guesses what these carvings were meant to convey? After so many thousands of years I would have thought there's next to no chance of being able to clearly relate them to any recorded myth or religion. But all the same, it's fun to try and guess.
For what it is worth, I think they might have been meant to represent rulership and justice, and the area where they were found was a sort of council chamber where the tribal leader and his senior counsellors or village elders met.
There are two apparent "frames". The first shows a standing man sholding his penis, and surrounded on either side by a pair of leopards facing him in a rather menacing manner. Perhaps the leopards were meant to represent his royalty, a symbol used down the ages for this, and the penis his fecundity. A king in primitive societies was expected to be fertile in his offspring, and to bestow fertility on the land, and if he failed in either, if for example a drought caused a crop failure, then the king was soon for the chop, literally!
Also, as one of the papers cited above points out, the figure between the leopards is wearing a two-braid necklace. Assuming that could be a crude form of regalia, this seems further evidence that the figure is supposed to be a chief.
The other frame, to the left of the leopards shows another man holding up what looks like a snake and facing a bull. I think in primitive societies a snake often signifies cunning and wisdom (c.f. the snake tempter in the Biblical creation story), and presumably a bull is meant to represent the opposite, i.e. bovine obstinate stupidity combined with mindless violence. So I suspect that frame is meant to represent justice contending with barbarism and primitive kneejerk responses.
We should remember that this site was one of the very first where communities had settled to start farming. So the inhabitants would have been fairly wild nomadic types and quite a handful for the ruler, and regulating them would have been fairly challenging, and thus a major if not the main preoccupation of whoever was running the place.
All that said, perhaps this symbolism is a bit advanced for those times, and the carvings just show some myth, long forgotten or transformed unrecognisably in the millennia since. For example, is it obvious the figure between the leopards is a man and not a monkey? He seems to have quite an ape-like face.
What do you think of Attachment theory? (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory). Briefly, that attachment patterns with others are formed in early life and could persist to adulthood.
Is it true, or just an artifact of attributing nature to nurture? Is it even scientific in the sense of having testable predictions? Are there good studies about it?
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]P(B)
Sacrilegious commentary ( following "the rest is commentary " line on the main Astral Codex motto ( smart and undoubtedly attractive and self filtering for a certain kind of audiences ). Deliciously subversive . Not necessarily universal, and
assumingely universal.
P(B), is in practice, harder to determine than one may assume.
It is "just" the denominator and hence merely a scaling factor.
Nevertheless, this 'hard' guessing of P(B) in most applied settings, makes Bayesian inference a relative and not absolute matter: the equal sign is typically replaced by a "proportionial to" symbol.
For example, if If A is lung cancer and B radon exposure, one may have a pretty good idea of the prevalence of lung cancer in the general population i.e. P(A).
One may also be able to estimate, from appropriate sampling the radon exposure history among those who have lung cancer i.e. P(B|A).
However, to estimate radon exposure in the general population is harder -> what is an adequate sampling frame for non lung cancer individuals?
Additional perplexing commentary:
I also never understood "steps" as a metric 😅
Some more thoughts about why the crypto post bothered me so much: debates over the object-level correctness of its arguments aside, it basically pattern-matches to the arguments crypto scammers (which Scott admits are ubiquitous) make for getting money from people. I don't think Scott himself is a crypto scammer, but he does have a lot of reputation as a reasonable guy and it seems likely that him putting his weight behind arguments like this helps make people more vulnerable to them.
There's a counterpoint here that we should judge arguments based on their object-level merits, not whether they pattern match onto stuff bad people say (and while I do have some object level disagreements, I admit I'm not making them here and don't consider them overwhelmingly convincing). I think this is wrong: In cases where you know there are ubiquitous successful scammers, you should avoid trusting your object-level intuition and knee-jerk reject things that match to them if you don't have good reason to think you're better at detecting scams than they are at convincing you of scams (if you can't reliably outperform the rock with a sticker saying "crypto is scams", you're better off just listening to the rock). And as the FTX stuff showed, both Scott and a lot of other people in these parts are not reliably good at detecting crypto scams - probably good enough to detect the obvious ones, but crypto has a lot of really talented and hardworking scammers, and you're still more likely to be convinced by them than to chance into a non-scam based on object level reasoning.
(Sorry for making generalizations here, please add qualifiers as needed.) A white American soccer mom, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin, Iranian dissident Badri Khamenei and a Buddhist monk in Jagadhri have some common traits due to their shared indo-european-ness: Their words for "mother" and "milk" sound alike, and they all would probably agree that there is an old thunder good with a hammer or mace. But do they have anything inherited in common in regards to daily life practices, traditions or beliefs about the world (that say a Native American, Chinese or Pygmy person wouldn't have)? Some candidates:
1. They would all agree that a bowl of yogurt is an acceptable breakfast? (But other pastoral nomads (e.g. mongols) likely agree?)
2. They would all agree that white is the most appropriate color for a horse that a king will ride? (I'm not sure they would all agree to this though.)
3. There's some kind of festival in the spring involving large bonfires? (But large fires doesn't seem specific enough.)
4. Cremation is acceptable? (but Catholics doesn't agree, and Japanese do.) Maybe "The spreading of ashes after cremation is acceptable"?
Please suggest your own ideas! But likely this is a fools errand: indo-european cultures have diffused too much and practices have been exchanged too much with e.g. China so that nothing like what I'm looking for remains.
I have a question for those who want US and EU (“the West”) to broker a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia that would entail a loss of Ukrainian territory or/and some other concession which Ukraine currently rejects. How, practically, is this supposed to work if Ukraine isn’t willing to play ball?
Only solution that I can think of is that the West would simply threaten Ukrainians with withholding critical aid unless they moderate their demands. Is this the plan? Or is there some other way I am not seeing?
Scott, you should add 'Links' to the title when you include links!! To let people know!
What is the morally right thing to do with a person who is in a permanent vegetative state? I have a close family member who has no chance of recovery and seems cruel to keep them in this state. thoughts?
Euthanasia is not legal here
My son (7) has not really caught the bug for reading yet, but I think I’ve found his subject. I was telling him some Greek myths the other night and he was fascinated. He wants books on them for Christmas.
Anyone have any recommendations for books either about Greek myths or based on them? He reads well so they don’t need to be geared towards first graders, but they probably should have pictures. Thanks!
I'm interested in whether people think AI is going to render a lot of professions obsolete in the next few years.
I was quite shocked to see GPT3 programing, admittedly not to a professional human standard, but it was basically competent. I could easily imagine the next generation of AIs surpassing my ability at least, and obviously it would be exponentially cheaper than hiring human coders. I can't see how I'd stay employed in that scenario.
It seems like most jobs that mainly involve manipulating information are in the same situation. Accountants, doctors, journalists, lawyers, finance, engineering, basically the entire professional middle class, might end up going the way of the hand-loom-weavers.
Maybe I'm overreacting, there's a lot of (what sounds like) hyperbole around AI at the moment, but could we genuinely be looking at an early-stages-of-the-industrial-revolution type disruption of the labour market over the next decade?
A year ago I would have laughed at the idea, but does a near-future where AI does all the cognitive work and human workers all do manual labour (or are celebrities etc.) seem plausible?
If you haven't encountered it yet around the rat-sphere, check out The Story of VaccinateCA, about a grassroots effort to collect and publish reliable information about vaccine availability, back when COVID-19 vaccines were just becoming available. It's a long read, but worth it.
https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-story-of-vaccinateca/
https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review?ref=the-browser
I have been wondering whether to take fever-reducing medication (e.g. paracetamol) when I have flu. On the one hand, it feels good, reduces flu symptoms and so on. But I wonder if it has any effect on the duration of the sickness, preventing fever means preventing my body from fighting it, in theory extending the fight for a couple more days.
So is my conclusion correct, that if I'm willing to suffer the symptoms, it's better not to take such medications and let the body fight it off with fever?
An excellent post by Razib Khan on why "transgenerational epigenetic inheritance" isn't important for humans: https://razib.substack.com/p/you-cant-take-it-with-you-straight
It's a bit of a scoop of my own epigenetics post series (which has been delayed as an indirect consequence of FTX) but I hope to expand upon it a lot.
Why is Long Covid so underfunded. Why do doctors dismiss it? Do doctors dismiss it because it's underfunded?
New movie to come out in 2023 about Robert Oppeheimer and the Manhattan Project, titled "Oppenheimer".
Trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZq9kSRwfkg
Starring Cillian Murphy, and if the voice-over is him, I have to say I'm impressed with his American accent. Real Americans may disagree 😀
Regarding the previous ACX survey, the philosophy survey was the most interesting part of it. Did no interesting results come of that?
"In October the SEC charged celebrity Kim Kardashian with touting digital tokens on social media without disclosing the remuneration for her endorsement. (She settled with the SEC for $1.26 million without admitting or denying its findings.)" (WSJ 12/19/22)
What would the world look like if you could only see X-rays?
What would it look like if you could only see gamma rays?
It seems to me that software development is moving in the direction opposite to "division of labor".
Twenty years ago I would naively expect that the growing field (in both budgets and complexity) of software development will allow lots of obscure specializations. But what I observe suggests otherwise.
The idea of "full stack developer" goes again separating database from business logic from web page development from design. In "scrum", team members are officially treated as replaceable, so one day you design a database table with partitions that will contain millions of records, and the next day you tweak stylesheets to move a button one pixel leftwards on a mobile screen.
With "devops", programmers and technical support become one; and with "cloud" they are further united with network administrators. The guy who partitions database tables and tweaks stylesheets is now also responsible for designing and implementing network security. And he is supposed to be simultaneously a specialist on all of that.
I can imagine the reasons why companies could prefer this. With the everything-specialists it seems like you can hire fewer people and save money. (Not really, because you need to hire multiple everything-specialists anyway. Might as well hire a few specialists instead.) Or maybe the idea is that everyone is replaceable because everyone has all skills and knowledge, and this should keep the salaries down. (But does it actually work? Companies are complaining about lack of developers, which is probably made worse by the need to know everything, and thus the salaries are growing anyway.)
This seems to go against the established wisdom about the "division of labor" which still seems generally accepted, so I wonder if any economist has noticed and studied this paradox.
Also, I am curious whether this trend is specific for software development, or whether it exists in more, maybe even all professions. (I mean, requiring people to do what was previously multiple specializations. Not because you openly need to save money, but because you explicitly promote the belief that a *true* specialist is a specialist on everything.)
It is incredibly ironic to watch many of the pro-Chesterton's Fence people, including Scott, defend cryptocurrency. Almost unimaginably so.
There are now widely available apps that can generate novel images of an individual using a small 'prompt' of images provided by a user. An example of this is the Lensa app. This was immediately followed by abuse, e.g. generating celebrity nude images using a prompt that combines celebrity face shots with nude shots of others. It's not hard to anticipate an ever expanding category of embarrassing deep fakes that could be generated using just publicly available face shots.
Is anyone aware of strategies to counter this technology, when your career requires making a small number of profile pictures available on the internet? Adversarial perturbations seem promising (like the barely visible noise that makes image classifiers mistake pandas for worms or whatever) but I haven't found any hits on Google using just the obvious keywords for this kind of technique.
After toying around with ChatGPT and reading various twitter threads/articles about it I've come to realize that I am far easier to fool than I would've guessed. The replies ChatGPT gives me that I am confident are incorrect sound remarkably persuasive on first glance. Combine this with the fact that my knowledge of facts is limited (though above the Clearer-Thinking-test-taking average apparently) and I'm now second guessing many of my favourite substack/blog posts. I know Knoll's Law basically covers this, but I think this deserves more attention. So much of the focus has been on the ability of ChatGPT to be persuasive, rather than on how easily we're fooled.
I see. I understand the valid points. I am not going into debating the validity of the formula. ( that I even misspelled in my initial post, as I was legitimately promptly corrected.
My initial intention ( probably not clearly expressed), was to ponder on the universality attached to it by the following message of the substack motto .
" All the rest is commentary ".
Which is exactly what I am doing.
Is it axiomatic or relative (and I am not asking philosophically ( death is absolute or relative because atoms get recycled).
Just from a pure generalized ( or not ?) applicability to that.
I am not debating, nor have the intention. I am genuinely asking and gave a ( flawed ?) example.
I'm conducting a 2-minute survey to better understand how people with niche or intellectual interests find friends. Any help is greatly appreciated!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeCh2YASTcam5saz3aUhLF6hMJ10ubbHcZhrAI7nhaj1DWovg/viewform?usp=sf_link
The collective noun for a group of wombats is a wisdom of wombats. This is one of those supposed facts which appears nowhere other than on lists of collective nouns.
My question is: who the heck comes up with these collective nouns, and what the heck is the process behind it? I can see them arising naturally in animals which naturally hang around in groups, but these animals are the ones with the dullest collective nouns like "flock" and "herd". The animals with really exotic collective nouns like "wisdom" or "bloat" tend to be solitary or small-group animals anyway.
Hey Scott! I was playing around with DALL-e and got it to make a pretty good stained glass image of Darwin and the finch. While I somehow think you don't really want your house to be dominated by rationalist stained glass windows, you might want to have a look. It's here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/2XNbUJxh84hbFgYz5
Took the clearer thinking test. I scored below average across the board. Is there any hope for me left in this brazen world ?
The way things have being going in the Reality Department, I expect Musk to lose the poll, but then declare the entire election process corrupt, and override it.
He'll find people stuffing ballots into mailboxes in Arizona, and plead with the technicians that all he needs is 11, 000 votes. Mobs will rush the Twitter Tower, and Musk will declare himself Emperor of Twitter, Thank You Very Much. That old CEO business was highly overrated, anyway, he'll say.
I'm a (certain type of) data scientist, and a boss of mine asked me about how to think about ChatGPT. In order to organize my thoughts on it, I wrote a post about it. I'd be really interested to see what folks around here think of it: https://ipsherman.substack.com/p/an-opinion-about-ai-chatgpt-and-more . P.S. I don't spend a lot of time in these Open Threads, so I apologize if self-promotion here is gauche. Please let me know if it is, and if there's a better way to solicit feedback!
Random thought: I wonder if you could use the same principle of noise cancellation to create active anti-sonar tech - basically, create a perfectly out-of-phase pulse of the same amplitude as the inbound ping, thus cancelling out your echo. This would obviously be very useful for military submarines / USVs, so I imagine either it's already being investigated or there's a technical reason it wouldn't work.
> Conventional wisdom is that intelligence-related studies replicate better than other fields, and Clearer Thinking is testing that now by trying to replicate 40 intelligence-related claims. They’re looking for experimental subjects to take their online tests; click here if you want to help.
Heads up, but I think the second example question in the "minimum average distance to red dots" section is incorrect. The test claims that the correct answer is to choose the middle, which has a total distance of 3sqrt2. However, if you choose one of the sides instead, the total distance is only 2+sqrt5, which is slightly lower.
More feedback on the intelligence test:
* In addition to the incorrect example question for centroids, one of the paper folding questions is impossible as well (near the middle, I forget which one). There's no way to fold the first image into the second unless you flip it over first.
* Why do we need to click a link to explicitly pause the timer between sections? It should be paused automatically when you're between questions or sections!
* SAT question enforces max of 1600 rather than 2400, regardless of when you took the test. Also not clear how to answer if you took the SAT multiple times
* no option to list a double major in college
* might be nice to have examples of what is urban, suburban, highly urban, etc. for comparison
* No way to go back in the demographics section if you mess up. Only option is to "reset everything", which is rather scary if you just spent an hour doing the previous tests and don't want to lose progress
It feels to me like it's going to be much easier to write AIs that can give 80% correct solutions 80% of the time to "hard" problems than to write ones that can reliably and consistently solve "easy" problems (definitions of "hard" and "easy" intentionally not gone into).
So what are some applications for which a quite-likely-to-be-correct output that you can't rely on is valuable?
And what are good ways of using plausible-but-unreliable applications plus secondary testing to get reliable applications?
I have three more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with your email address, or email me at the address specified in my about page:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about/
Re. this:
"As soon as new psychology and behavior papers come out in Nature and Science (the two most prestigious general science journals), ..."
I don't think scientists should treat Nature and Science as the two most-prestigious general science journals anymore. Both have written editorials and/or letters to the effect that science must be politicized, and articles should be judged on the desirability of their expected impact on society, in addition to their scientific merits.
I was pretty unhappy with my results on the intelligence test linked in the main post. I think I had a lot of issues with the test that impacted my performance.
I don't think the structure was well specified enough. I'd really like to know as I'm taking it how many more "activities" are left, and the same for the surveys. I had to make decisions about whether I wanted to keep going in those sections with bad info.
I got 98%+ on reasoning and then mid to high 80s on the others except betting where I did very badly because I wanted to be done. Sadly I reclicked the link to check something on the intro which apparently because of cookies won't let you look at their intro page about the test structure and also blanked my results page before I could click the link. I know I got 88/86/84 I think on the non reasoning/better sections but can't remember the percentage.
Were there only 5 test sections? Woulda been nice to have a list of the number of sections and what they were.
I'm very curious about the quality of the participants. I underperformed by old high school SAT/ACT scores I think but not sure if it is due to sample bias.
I’m currently in college. If I get married, I’ll no longer be filed as dependent under my parents, I will have almost 0 income, and my university will offer me a bunch of financial aid.
There has to be a reason why I can’t just go get legally married to one of my buddies, and then get a divorce after we graduate. Anyone know more than me about this?
Anyone have thoughts on the Bank of Japan thing? Hype or a big problem?
Also about Clearer Thinking: one of their questionnaires asks "how many hours a week do you devote to learning?".
I thought about this and decided the question is hopelessly ill-formed, with no way to assign an answer that has any meaning. Learning is the result of everything you do, including -- according to fairly popular theories of sleep -- sleeping. This was noted many years ago by Bill Watterson: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/03/25
I maintain a friendship with a woman in Shanghai. We talk. This has, over time, dramatically improved my ability to read and write in Chinese. Are the hours I spend talking to my friend "devoted to learning"?
What was the author of this question thinking?
https://web.archive.org/web/20221211080521/https://www.nutritioninsight.com/news/highly-nutritious-meat-substitutes-on-the-market-cannot-be-absorbed-by-the-human-body-study-flags.html
"Highly nutritious meat substitutes on the market cannot be absorbed by the human body, study flags"
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/19/3903
The claim is that meat substitutes, except for seitan and mycoprotein-based meat substitutes, have low bioavailibilty of iron and possibly zinc. The other substitutes are high in phytates, a plant product that inhibits mineral absorbition.
I believe that people eat meat because they like it. It's not just flavor or status. I think there's a feeling of satiation from animal products, and it's observable that people buy them as soon as they can afford them. This is cross-cultural, and vegetarianism or veganism only happen when people have a theory in favor of them.
It's possible that meat substitutes without phytates are feasible, and people might like them better, but meanwhile, I think the feeling of satiation from animal products should be studied rather than just trying to imitate the flavor and texture.
I used the archive link because I'm getting a 403 error from the original article.
Look, it's not a hard question. Don't overthink this. Just answer.
Banana?
Reading a poem called "An Essay on Criticism" by Alexander Pope, written in the early 1700s, I found a couple of lines in it rather puzzling. Perhaps some perceptive reader(s) can help suggest or explain their intended meaning. It's quite a long poem, and the following is an extract, to put the relevant lines in context:
:::
'Tis not enough your counsel still be true;
Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do;
Men must be taught as if you taught them not;
And things unknown proposed as things forgot.
Without good breeding, truth is disapproved;
That only makes superior sense beloved. <-- "That" referring to the "good breeding" presumably
Be niggards of advice on no pretence; <-- ?
For the worse avarice is that of sense: <--- ??
With mean complacence ne'er betray your trust,
Nor be so civil as to prove unjust.
Fear not the anger of the wise to raise;
Those best can bear reproof, who merit praise.
:::
Clearly the first few lines advise the reader to offer advice not starkly and explicitly, as if the advisee was clueless and ignorant, but dressed up diffidently and diplomatically as if it was something they had merely forgotten. Fair enough, so far so good.
By contrast, after the two puzzling lines, the author warns against going to the opposite extreme and sugar-coating the advice so much that its import and content is disguised beyond recognition. At least that is my reading.
But what about the lines between? "The worse avarice is that of sense:". HUH? Maybe the colon at the end of that line is a clue, and somehow the following lines are supposed to expand on this enigmatic line. But I don't really see the connection.
If anything, the two lines seem almost contradictory, because the first appears to be saying "Minimize tha amount of stark unvarnished advice offered" (in keeping with the previous lines); but then the next line appears to say that being sparing of and withholding common sense advice is "the worst" fault!
Any ideas? :-)
What would be a good thing to try for an 88 yo man diagnosed with head and backache that spreads to the neck and finally reaches the hand, going away completely?
It generally gets better with massage and happens only during sleep. Disturbs sleep often everyday for a week and then nothing for a month is a recent pattern but it varies.
He took Gabapentin
(given by his cardiologist) and something else in the Gabapentin family and that made him groggy/sleepy all day.
What are some ways to prevent this pain? Is there a painkiller that won't cause grogginess? Could this be triggered by some food? What is the way to treat spondilosis/spondilytis? ?
I'm trying to gauge what characteristics of human civilization/society are constant, change in cycle and trend over human existence (consciousness to...). Any tips or source references would be appreciated.
Here's a cycle comparison I threw together:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15qRymG5V2hq9wUzt226XiTjrtd_iPOCC/view?usp=share_link
I assume Clearer Thinking is applying grade inflation to the final results, and/or getting a lot of Mechanical Turks to fill it out without putting in much effort, because otherwise my final scores do not make sense, in my opinion. the added weirdness of everyone apparently getting different questions is making me wonder if it boils down to inadequate sample size -- they say you scored higher than X% of participants, but maybe the total participants in that section were 3 people.
I found this gem today on hacker news:
http://web.archive.org/web/20221219160303/https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/ehli
>The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) is a multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford. EHLI is one of the actions prioritized in the Statement of Solidarity and Commitment to Action, which was published by the Stanford CIO Council (CIOC) and People of Color in Technology (POC-IT) affinity group in December 2020.
>[instead of] Philippine Islands
>[consider using] Philippines or the Republic of the Philippines
>[Because] The term is politically incorrect and denotes colonialism. Some people of Filipino heritage might use the term, though.
and
>[instead of] stand up meeting
>[consider using] quick meeting
>[Because] Ableist language that trivializes the experiences of people living with disabilities.
and
>[instead of] Scrum Master
>[consider using] agile lead, scrum leader
>[Because] Historically, masters enslaved people, didn't consider them human and didn't allow them to express free will, so this term should generally be avoided.
Language simply wasn't built to express the raw contempt I feel towards minds that think like this.
I don't know why the multitude of symptoms discredits the situation. We had a pandemic where a lot of ppl caught a new virus at the same time. It's like if 350M ppl got mono or the vaccine for mono in one year, would that discredit mono, or hiv, etc. I just think there's no benefit to being heartless/skeptical. I don't understand what societal good it renders. If you want to promote mind body healing, ok, but you still recognize the problem with that:
I’m old enough to remember when Europe was going to collapse this winter.
Is there any information about SBF at MIT? Did he seem intelligent? How possible is it to cheat at MIT? Was he defrauding people? What were his ambitions?
SBF's attitude toward risk-- it sounds like he didn't understand some fairly basic math.
https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/why-infinite-coin-flipping-is-bad
I'm bitterly amused by the talk about maximum impact. He has probably had about as much impact as he possibly could have, but I don't think that's what he had in mind.
Accounts of long COVID:
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6704#comments
These were selected from a number of accounts from people who got sick from covid, some of them very sick, but who recovered fully in a month or so.
This is in answer to long covid skeptics, who I suspect are confusing being hard-headed and hard-hearted. Whatever is going on, I don't think it's ordinary deconditioning, and I find it unlikely that it's social contagion.
Vy Says:
Comment #24 September 5th, 2022 at 3:50 am
Wish I could say the same, unfortunately, it was a lot worse for me.
Some background information – I am in my late 20s, never had any health issues and used to spend 3-4 days a week doing Muay Thai (kick boxing) and commuting to work by bike every day (10km), never smoked and only consumed alcohol in moderate amounts (1 per week max).
I got Covid back in early April, 2020, just days after the very first lockdown was put in place (I live in London). The first symptoms were quite mild – cough, fewer and fatigue. Then a day or two later I lost the sense of smell, muscle pain kicked in, body temperature soared above +39C followed with unbearable pain of eye sockets. We’re now on day 4/5 of Covid – started having coughing episodes of 10-15 minutes during which I could barely breathe, to the point where I was passing out 2-3 times a day. I haven’t eaten for days at that point either.
At that point I’ve decided that it’s time to call the NHS, but as expected – there was nothing they could help or advise with, apart from strongly advising against taking Ibuprofen. Apart from that, told me to get plenty of rest, consume more fluids and only go to A&E if the breathing difficulties get any worse (apparently passing out multiple times a day was not severe enough yet).
After 2 weeks I started feeling better, fewer was gone and so was the pain in eye sockets. The smell & taste was coming back slowly, still couldn’t taste salt at all. Walking around the apartment was still a huge challenge, so I was spending most of my time on the coach in my living room. Took me a good month before I would attempt to leave the apartment and venture up onto the roof terrace. Another month before I finally attempted to head outside for a short walk.
Unfortunately that’s where the recovery has completely halted to a grind. For the next year or so I would suffer from constant fatigue and brain fog, every 5-7 days I’d develop cold-like symptoms. Performing even the most basic tasks (I am a software developer) were unbearable. The longest I could stay concentrated in front of a computer would be 10-15 minutes, after that – I’d just get extremely irritated and delete any work I’ve manage to get done and restart again. No matter what I tried – nothing was helping, so I ended up resigning in early September since it felt like a better option than trying to fight the corporate world that just refused to accept the reality of long Covid.
After going to Turkey and Lithuania to get a number of tests, procedures and screening I was advised to take Covid Vaccine (Moderna) ASAP as they had patients with similar cases reporting mild improvements after 1st one and even better after second. The first jab sent me back to bed for 10 days, literally felt like a brutal case of flu. Second one was slightly better, just severe muscle pains and mild fewer.
Unfortunately the long Covid symptoms only started to fade away during summer of 2022 (just a few months ago). Went to the gym for the first time in 2 years back in July, during the latest trip to Turkey to get even more health checks done.
****
[serious long-COVID-like effects, but not from COVID]
Vitor Says:
Comment #28 September 5th, 2022 at 11:33 am
5 days after I got my first vaccination, I started getting severe headaches, fatigue, muscle pain, and exertion intolerance. Some of these symptoms have gotten better over time, others have gotten worse (specially the last one). I managed to finish my phd on the strength of the work I’d already done at that point. Now, almost 1.5 years later, I’m feeling good enough to start working 2 days a week again.
Have never had covid.
That’s a career-ending illness, as you like to call it. But I have to agree with Moshe #15 that there’s no chance in hell 20% of the population has experienced symptoms of that magnitude. AFAIK, long covid surveys capture a broad range of symptoms (e.g., you’re counted if you say you have headaches “more often than usual” after covid). That’s well and good for a *scientific* investigation of a new condition, but it’s way too broad for any kind of policy decision (personal or society-wide).
*****
JimV Says:
Comment #33 September 5th, 2022 at 8:21 pm
I’ve mentioned my symptoms here before. On the positive side, I had a tendency to snack a lot and eat big meals, and just about everything tastes bad now, so I am back to my college weight, and staying there. I basically eat one smallish meal a day (e.g., half a sub sandwich) plus a milkshake. I rarely get through a day without at least one two-hour nap when I am too tired to do anything else. I am retired so it isn’t a big deal, but I could not sustain the 60-hour work-weeks I used to average when employed as an engineer. I used to be able to walk up to 20 miles a day (I refuse to own a car), but now five miles leaves me drained and and almost falling asleep on my feet.
I had a mild (8 hour) case of covid in May of 2020, then a much worse (three days barely getting out of bed at all) in November of 2021. Probably alpha and omicron. A few things I used to like tasted bad after the first case, then almost everything after the second case. As I said, that has had pluses as well as minuses. I had the two Moderna shots between case one and two, and a Moderna and a Pfizer booster since.
I had a lung issue a few years ago which I still take medication for, but had no respiratory problems with covid. Maybe the medication helped there, but the covid effects seem to be very idiosyncratic, except for the fatigue and fog. There still seems to be a lot we need to learn about it. I expect part of the problem is that at around 8 billion population we are a big target for viruses. Plus all the long-distance travel.
*****
David Speyer Says:
Comment #35 September 6th, 2022 at 9:24 am
Got COVID in July on vacation. Got Paxlovid the next day and my wife and I drove 12 hours to get back home.
I had two days of exhaustion and aches during which I slept alone and isolated as best I could. After that, my wife got it too and full isolation was impossible, but we continued blasting fans through the house, wearing N-95’s and eating all meals outdoors, with the result that two of our three kids tested negative throughout and the third tested positive but never developed symptoms.
The first two days were exhausting, but not worse than other diseases we’ve had: I’d say every 2-4 years one of our kids has brought home something this bad. After that, it was just normal-cold level bad. Symptoms were gone after 5 days and I tested negative at 8 days; I was able to exercise and get by on normal amounts of sleep after 2 weeks.
I will say, though, that I feel like I don’t have as much motivation to slog through boring work as I used to. This seems like a silly symptom, but it is really noticeable, and I hope it will go away. Exciting work like research and classroom teaching I am fully ready for.
> 95% of content is free, but for the remaining 5% you can subscribe
In the past three months, which is as far as my RSS reader is willing to show old posts, the amount of paid content has been 20%. Or, if you ignore both types of open threads, about 19%.
I would be mostly fine with this, but as I read the posts via an RSS reader, it is a bit frustrating to constantly get this clickbait content that I can't open.
In Universe-Hopping Through Substack, Scott admitted that "I just really don’t like paying for online content." although it may have been tongue-in-cheek.
I wonder what Scott's thoughts are on this situation.
Assume the Hunter Biden laptop story had not been "suppressed" on social media in late 2020. What are the odds it would have swung the election in Trump's favor? 0%? 100%? 5%?
I spent a really long time on that survey but in the end it was too much and I abandoned. Not a good survey design to expect people to spend another 20+ minutes *after* they expressed wanting to stop.
Has anyone else done the clearer thinking tests and got a ridiculously high score?
I've never considered myself unusually good at these and scored higher than 90% of people in all 4 categories with higher than 99.67% in the folded cube one.
Surely this has been botted with random answers?
Can anyone recommend a source of Christmas carol recordings (actual carols like you might sing in church, as opposed to other Christmas songs like Jingle Bells or White Christmas), where a) you can easily make out the words and b) it's just the traditional tune without lots of changes and flourishes? Traditional choirs (like King's College) fail the first criterion, and most pop artists who release their own versions of carols fail the second. There must be lots of people, including semi-professional and amateur musicians, making recordings of themselves just singing carols, but they're surprisingly hard to find on YouTube, Amazon, etc. Main use case is for singing along to in the car with the family.
How can I find a good nutritional coach? Thanks.
Watching excerpts from Russian TV is endlessly amusing, but this was special. If you have 4 minutes of time (7:11 - 11:13), watch this: https://youtu.be/y68hgP__4gE?t=431
Nadezhdin (a former member of Russian Duma): "Russian imperialism and chauvinism is a problem that Lenin already tried to solve. Yes, we were strong and could take a lot of territory... 400 years ago. Now the world is different. Other nations - French, Germans, British - they already overcame their imperialism..."
Moderator: "LOL, you're funny!"
Nadezhdin: "...but we, sadly, now have people like Dugin who proposes hard labor for those who slander the Tzar, literally, I am not kidding..."
Moderator: "Yeah, so what?"
Nadezhdin: "...I have spent decades of my life trying to solve this problem that Lenin was already trying to solve..."
Moderator: "So, are you the next Lenin?"
Nadezhdin: "...and now we hear this shit again, like 'only Russia has spirituality', 'only Russia knows friendship', 'only Russians can sacrifice themselves'. Look at the icons of saints in a Russian Orthodox church, most of them are Greek..."
Moderator: "You need to learn to stop."
Guest#2: "Spiderman can climb the walls. But our Russian superpower [according to the propaganda song shown at the beginning of the video] is that we can *die* better than the others?"
Moderator: "You're stupid."
Guest#2: "Let me quote the classic [Yevtushenko] 'We know how to gather armies / We like to posture about our might / We learned how to die / When will we learn how to live?' I have the same question. Learning how to live should become our superpower!"
Guest#3: "Speaking about religion, look at statistics: 43% of Americans visit church at least once a week, but only 7% of Russians. And speaking about traditions, I have seen Makovsky's painting 'A priest blessing the brothel'. Yes, brothels were legal in Tzar's Russia, and blessed by priests."
Moderator: "Calm down. You are an old man, this is your 7th marriage, and you still keep talking about brothels. Be quiet."
Guest#2: "We should be proud of our young people. They are more kind than the yelling old mean men..."
Moderator: "The only yelling old man here is Nadezhdin."
Nadezhdin: "I am a strong old man. A proud Russian..."
Moderator: "Actually, he is a Jew."
Watching readers of this blog wrestle with dissatisfaction over their results on intelligence testing is fascinating. Lots of food for thought.
So the inquiry into 6/1/2021 recommended Trump be barred from office.
Not a huge fan of Trump, but it's kind of obvious that this feeds into the "rigged" narrative - they are *literally* banning the prime opposition candidate from the presidential election, which pattern-matches well to Putin's tactics in Russia.
I hope this doesn't wind up blowing the powderkeg.