You are suggesting. We're do you have to be in life to get something different? I understand and then it doesn't matter. I just wrote something without thinking about any of it. I never want to say anything in person or typing. I never wanted to sound like anyone because I am only what I think. I could sit around and beat myself up of make myself feel bad because someone had a thought. When it comes to needing to be aware of what I'm going to say. Words on earth will always be followed with more words. Say something good to someone today or don't. It's like asking me if a tree falls in the woods.....? I would stop you right their and tell you i wasn't there so why would you celebrate sence with something so common.
Per this idea they in fact are (in the sense of having qualia subjectively experienced by their constituent matter in a manner determined by and inextricably linked to its current physical state), they just aren't self-aware. Arguing against the proposition that everything is (to some extremely primitive degree) conscious by rhetorically asking "why isn't x conscious?" is begging the question, wouldn't you agree?
Does anyone know how, exactly, the use of semaglutide as a weight loss drug got popularized? Scott started writing his article on it before Elon Musk endorsed it, so it isn't Musk, first and foremost.
Historically, how many places have actively advertised for immigrants? I know that Texas did when it was part of Spain and Mexico and when it was an independent country (not so much recently tho). What other places have?
I've been talking about the importance of teaching adult literacy for a long time, and it seems like I'm talking into a blind spot, as though people generally believe that if you didn't learn how to read in school, it's hopeless.
I wanted to say hello. I have been traveling in my whole life to get here. Impartial, I would like to place 5% of the blame for my being late on opinions. If I had a dream it would be. May opinion never get between us. We are all faced with with the daunting task of coading and decoding information in the real world experience. I believe the unhealthy opinion is born when we are so quick to want to say something. Not speaking toward any one here. Just speaking for my life. When I take information from someone I fuses it or reject it by what I am receiving from the person. I tend to not want to say anything. Except I always want to engage in the opinion when it comes to just. That right there needs to be destroyed. I can't act that way. I seem to find myself in some what of what top gun is about. Just as dangerous due to I'm the pilot and the aircraft. If you crash their is no coming back. I understand that I have disorder when it is coming from crowd that doesn't see it that way. Wow it's a wonder their are not as many names for disorders as their are people. Wait they give us names at birth. Since we run out of names the number we have is the our disorders indentation. I truly try to be a better me than the person I was yesterday. I tried to stay the same but as each day I pass threw I can't be like anything that who I believe I want to be. I'm guessing that is why we say love by the code. Love is only a word. How will you know it if all you do Is hear it. If I say die do you die? I say live it goes off and dies. I just do what I can when I see it. I speak positive and I try to be respectful by smiling and staying quiet when it comes to those who are people to take from. My everyone live one way or other. See you on the Battle field of. Fight well. Who ever you may be. Be it. So that we may always see where you are.
Do you believe there is little time left before transformative AI? Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? Apparently, you can win big if you do:
because markets are not expecting transformative AI any time soon, meaning there are absolutely massive inefficiencies to exploit if AI timelines are as short as some are predicting. Some are even expecting a phase of explosive GDP growth (30% per year). I don't think I buy that, because it seems to me there is too much inertia and complexity for the market to transform that quickly in response to any tech, but that's just an uneducated intuition. I may throw some money at the funds indicated in the article, if only to save the world: if I win on those, those would be the first successful investments I ever made! The odds of it panning out strike me as miniscule, so the fact I'm considering investing like this maybe indicates the reasoning in that article (and by extension, that of the AI safety community) is shoddy.
Can there really be heaps of gold lying on the ground right now? What do you think?
I have a friend who's suffering from depersonalization / derealization disorder (DPD), the persistent sense that oneself / the external world is not real. DPD seems to be inherently poorly understood, and I'd be grateful for advice from anyone who has successfully treated or cured this condition, or could recommend a therapist in the Boston area.
Here's what I've got so far in terms of a bro science treatment protocol. I don't think there are any miracle cures or One Weird Tricks, but it seems like there are many bits of applied common sense that could plausibly help and are unlikely to hurt:
- Achieve brilliance in the basics of sleep, diet and especially exercise.
- Proactively limit and manage stress.
- Go outside, get as much sunlight as you can, quite literally touch grass.
- Engage in physical hobbies such as crafts, gardening and the like, that involve a lot of multisensory integration and not a lot of high-level thinking.
- Socialize IRL, especially in comfortable, low-stakes social situations.
- Limit screen time.
- Keep a journal of symptoms and note what aggravates or ameliorates symptoms but don't otherwise obsess over them (spend, say, 5min/day on journaling).
- Avoid sitting alone in your room pondering the nature of reality or otherwise ruminating.
- Try reciting common-sense mantras / affirmations ("The world is real. My name is X Y. I am sitting in a room right now" &c) if helpful but do not obsess over them.
- Engage moderately in your religious / spiritual tradition if applicable but do not attempt any week-long kundalini benders or whatever.
- Check for and address feelings of inadequacy / excessive self-criticism / low self-worth through CBT, talk therapy, or similar. (For some reason this seems to be a common co-morbidity of DPD,)
It seems that episodes of DPD often resolve spontaneously, but I think it's worth trying to resolve it as quickly as possible and limit the chances of future relapses. Thanks in advance for any breadcrumbs or advice.
Asking for someone else: does anyone know of good resources to find rental apartments in the south peninsula (Bay Area, California, USA), within ~5 miles or 20 minutes from San Bruno, ideally under $3k for 1 bedroom plus parking? Person is currently there and scrambling to find something in the next day or two, but all their early leads collapsed.
Apparently all they're getting is automated responses and AI-generated content.
Surf, an app that helps you make new friends based on mutual interests and that some of you will already be familiar with, is looking for a CTO.
A word on the product - on Surf, users open the platform and type in a desired outcome (e.g. "I want to find a partner in London for a Kilimanjaro climbing trip."). We match them with someone who wants to achieve the same outcome. They chat. They become friends. That's it. Elegant. Simple. Life-changing. We want to use it to eradicate loneliness from the world.
A word on who we're looking for - we need someone with considerable NLP/AI/ML pedigree and experience who can also do good things with simple app creation softwares like Expo. Someone who loves the early stage challenges of startup life. Someone so enthused about the idea of eliminating loneliness from the world and finding a friend for everyone that they would happily work on this for a year+ pre-funding.
In terms of existing assets, we've already got lots of proprietary technology incl. key algorithms, and an app that's 80% finished. Our waiting list has seen uptake in over 40 countries (+1 if you consider ACX its own pirate nation) and we're in promising talks with universities over pilot schemes. We already have one advisor (prior exp. at Google) onboard and are actively seeking others to make near-term fundraising more straightforward. Any CTO coming into this project will be well-set-up for success.
Early stage - equity only, but we'll be pursuing funding immediately after launch.
The ideal candidate would be in London, UK but fundamentally we don't care where you live, especially if you're the next Aaron Swartz/Tarun Mathur/Mira Murati.
Get in touch by emailing us at team@imsurf.in with the subject line "Surf CTO Position".
Excellent sentiments, but far afield from the topic: is it 'odd' for conservatives to not want their communities or nations filled with folks who are not 'their people'?
Looking at immigration from an economic perspective is always reasonable, of course -- that's why the white anglo-saxon protestant elite in my example above was willing to let irish (and then italian) catholics overrun some parts of new england. That lens itself is reasonable, but to pretend there are no other possible lenses through which to view the issue is not reasonable.
Will the international drug trade inevitably collapse thanks to future machines that can synthesize any drug from simple precursors? I ask because I just read a report describing how advances in chemistry over the last 15 years had made it possible to synthesize methamphetamine from more common types of chemicals that governments have difficulty tracking.
There are products that allow you to profit from correctly predicting that a stock price will rise (beginning with buying the stock itself).
There are product that allow you to profit from correctly predicting a stock price will fall.
Are there products that allow you to profit from correctly predicting a stock price will remain stable ? And given that the answer is probably yes, what are they called?
I'm trying to help a young guy I know find a job that's a good fit. He's in his mid-20's, and has ADD & Asperger's. He's distractible, and a bit odd -- on the other hand he is friendly, honest, hard-working, and quite bright. He's got a college degree in computer animation, and knows how to use Blendr, Photoshop and some of the lower-end animation and video editing software. Is also competent, though not expert, with the basic office suite apps -- Word, Excel, etc. -- and had a couple courses in Python. Has built a couple simple web sites.
He's been working at a hardware store stocking shelves and helping customers for several years. He is well-liked there but makes little more than minimum wage, and really needs to earn more. It seems to me that his computer skills should help him get a job that pays above minimum wage, but I can't think of a job that might suit. But if I were opening a store on a tight budget, and was not very computer literate myself, I'd love to have somebody like him who could help me get oriented with using a computer for the store, could build a simple website for the store, could explain spread sheets to me, could make attractive notices in a nice font to post somewhere -- things like that -- and then later help me unload boxes and put the stuff on the shelves.
He is willing to take one or 2 courses if improving certain crucial skills would make him more hirable for jobs that pay at least 50% more than minimum wage, but he's clueless about what courses to take.
One last thing: It would not work for him to be self-employed. He needs the structure of a regular job.
What ideas have you got for this amiable young oddball?.
Finally got DALL-e to produce an image of Shrimp Love Me, Unaligned AI's Fear Me. It's here if you want to have a look: https://i.imgur.com/fBwwZSq.png
I have a couple related to AI (The Ol' Job and What Dreams May Come), The Shell Game relates to economics, and there are some others like Gourbain's Flux Capacity Theorem that I think some people round here might like. Also the pinned, No Hot Take Under the Sun, is short and directly inspired by something Scott said once.
If, in general, the "Art World" hates Tartarianism and everyone else likes it, this might be an opportunity to break out of a local maximum and mainstream Tartarianism again. AI could allow the capitalists to cut the Art World out of the loop and sell people the styles they like. Of course. this would likely depend on AI design being able to generalize to things like woodworking if it wants to compete with IKEA.
Do you think there could be a large scale (at least several million people EDIT: hundreds of thousands should suffice to make this interesting...the main aim of this is to avoid very small social structures which are much simpler to handle) society which worked on more or less on the same principles modern western democracies work on without modern technology?
What I mean by more or less "same principles" is something along the lines of close to universal suffrage (specifically with women also being on more or less equal footing with men), no slavery (or de facto slavery), high level of individualism and individual rights (the negative rights, i.e. not expecting state-run social welfare systems but expecting a society where people are more often than not free to do whatever they want to do as long as they don't interfere with the same freedoms of others).
Are there any real-world examples?
What is the minimum amount of technology required for such a society in your opinion? Is there in fact a minimum?
Bonus question: What do you think were the societies closest to this in each era/area of the world?
Note: I do not count philosophy and social institutions as technology (although in some sense it is a very important piece of technology) so I allow even rather implausible societies you'd get if you could magically transfer modern people to the world 20 000 years ago, had them all forget everything about their physical technology and replaced that knowledge with survival skills (so that such society doesn't just die out in a week).
I can think of 2 close but not quite examples:
1. Medieval Switzerland. Well, the last canton to give women a right to vote did it in 1990 (rather it was made to do that by the federal court) but an alt-history medieval Swiss confederation where even women get a say does not feel like that big a stretch of imagination. And the low level of centralization seems to overcome the technological burdens associated with democracy in a large-scale society (in fact, it seems to work better than most countries even today and the individual Swiss votes actually often have a meaningful weight).
2. Medieval Iceland, kinda?...something between direct democracy and a "libertarian anarcho-feudalism"...women were still not exactly equal to men there either (perhaps better than in medieval Switzerland, worse than anywhere in Europe today).
Had an interesting blog-relevant discussion with ChatGPT; is there some way to engineer my original prompt to make ChatGPT connect the pieces of information it has?
Me: Does the author of SSC write any other public blogs?
ChatGPT: I am not able to provide information about the activities or current projects of the author of Slate Star Codex (SSC) as my knowledge is limited to publicly available information and my browsing function is currently disabled. It is possible that the author of SSC may be writing under a different pseudonym or platform, but I do not have any information on this.
Me: Do you know what Astral Codex Ten is?
ChatGPT: Astral Codex Ten (ACT) is a blog that was written by the same person who wrote Slate Star Codex (SSC). The blog covers similar topics as SSC, including psychology, neuroscience, politics, and philosophy, and is known for its in-depth and analytical approach to issues. ACT was created after the discontinuation of SSC and is currently active. Like SSC, ACT has gained a significant following and is widely read.
--
My other takeaway from playing around with the tool is that it's extraordinarily bad at giving summaries of plots of existing works of fiction, as it frequently mixes up major details and inserts false bits that stereotypically occur in the work's genre. Obviously this is the most intelligent AI I've ever chatted with, but compared to discussing with a normal human it feels frustratingly dumb.
I’m just finishing “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes” by Daniel Everett and am curious as to how or if his dust up with Noam Chomsky played out. Is language inherent or an artifact?
Whenever I see "XBB" (the new covid-19 variant), the word my brain immediately jumps to is "Xibalba". Does anyone have other words that come to mind when they see "XBB"?
Tangentially, according to wikipedia which is always accurate, it's pronounced more like "sheeble-ba" (if you have an American accent), which is not only cooler to my ears, but also fits the rhyme scheme of both Blondie's "Rapture" and Titus Andromedon's "Peeno Noir". And both of those songs are now mashing up in my head to create a new earworm. Enjoy!
I am genuinely curious. Maybe even more generally, where on the evolutionary tree the "asymmetric heart position" appears? As soon as the heart itself? Why?
Thought experiment based on the general Georgist discussion that sometimes occur here: I'm the mayor of a small village where land is plentiful. I convince a million people to move here, and they each get to buy a plot of land for cheap. We pool our resources and build a city. Our city becomes a nice city and more people want to move in. Land prices go up a lot. Everyone originally involved becomes a millionaire. It's all like a pyramid scheme except the pyramid is real.
Has something like this ever been tried? I assume that the hard part is "convince a million people to move here", but shouldn't we have people or institutions with that kind of pull? Or is the hard part "become a nice city that attracts people"? That doesn't look very hard, most cities seem to be hardly trying.
(Yes, I know my thought experiment is totally unrealistic, I just want to discuss the principle.)
> The graduate student was inspired to try putting the rats on a diet of “palatable supermarket food”; not only Froot Loops, but foods like Doritos, pork rinds, and wedding cake. Today, researchers call these “cafeteria diets”.
> When you give a rat a high-fat diet, it eats the right amount and then stops eating, and maintains a healthy weight. But when you give a rat the cafeteria diet, it just keeps eating, and quickly becomes overweight.
It seems like we could learn a lot from this. Seems like we should be able to binary search: try this with 50 foods and track which ones cause weight gain. Then look at the ingredient lists and see which ingredient is causing the weight gain. Then... we'd just know what causes obesity?
Even if the search doesn't uncover an exact culprit, I think a lot of people would get value from just having an index that maps from common foods to How Fat Rats Get if you give it to them.
Does any one know of a meta-analysis or a large study of the causal effect of privatization on firm productivity ? Preferably using a experimental/quasi experimental design or regression discontinuity.
Also, last week I asked a question about consciousness and free will and it generated a lot of discussion but it also seemed like several people were confused. Superb Owl wrote an interesting post on the same topic
but it didn’t really line up with my individual thinking on the topic. Anyway this time I’d just like to ask, how many people here think the hard problem of consciousness is actually Hard? Has Scott ever written about it? I think that’s where a lot of the divergence came from.
Regarding therapists: my wife and I had really good luck using Alma. The basic gist is that you put in your insurance and the type of therapy you are interested in and then you interview the pre-sorted potential therapists until you find a fit. I interviewed three and found a great fit with a therapist that focuses on rationality based CBT and IFS (Internal Family Systems). The matching with someone who definitely takes your insurance is pretty remarkable. I’m not sure how widespread this is, but in NYC there were many many options to choose from.
Harry Sussex has just had his autobiography leaked. In it, he makes a number of rather astonishing claims. One of those claims is that he personally killed 25 enemy fighters when he was an Apache copilot / gunner in Afghanistan (he spent 30 weeks on deployment, so approximately one enemy fighter killed per week). He says he is fairly confident about this number because he reviewed footage of his flights on a laptop afterwards, so it explicitly isn't that he eg destroyed a transport van and guessed at how many people were inside
Is this number plausible? Would an average Apache copilot kill at this rate or is there something special about the way Harry was deployed? If 25 kills is not notable, what would the Apache equivalent of an 'ace' be (that is to say, a performance noteworthy enough to comment on)? What psychological support do pilots receive after killing people, given that they do so so frequently? Overall, is Harry likely to be telling the truth?
...but I ended up taking the advice to heart, and have been happily eating everything-but-the-stem ever since. It really does add up to significantly more apple, especially on the larger varieties like honeycrisp. Made me wonder why I'd spent the first two decades of my life not consuming apples this way. Peer pressure, I guess? Never bothering to fact-check just-so stories? Not understanding "the dose makes the poison"? I don't know. It's at least understandable why people peel fruits and vegetables - they've a notable difference in flavour, texture, etc., if edible in the first place at all. There's some real there, there. (But I still evangelize eating kiwi skins when possible. Have made a few converts!)
Wonder how many other parts of life are like this. Untruths that go unnoticed and thus uncontested, until one actually bothers to verify their structural integrity. Make beliefs pay rent, indeed...
Oh my, I missed the antistocks... let me tell you another reason why they shouldn't work.
They're a proxy for an arbitrary metric that nobody optimizes for - Tesla does not pay dividends, it never has and I doubt that it ever will. Some companies pay dividends regularly, others do not, and the decision about the dividends can be quite divorced from the rest of the value.
Measuring profit? Let me point you to Amazon that doesn't believe in having profits, as much money as they get they reinvest or do some accounting magic with it (I'm exaggerating).
Whatever measure chosen it will at-best be fitted for last year's management with last year's strategy. You aren't running just counter-party risk, you're betting that the measure chosen does indeed reflect changes in value and won't change for completely unrelated reasons.
So if there's one thing this isn't it is - As simple as buying long.
The only argument I can see for them is that a regular share's value is so ephemeral that it's impossible to make the connection between a company's value and the price of a financial instrument any weaker so who cares.
"Scenes from the Joint Mathematics Meeting (the largest annual meeting of mathematicians in the world):
A talk entitled "Undergraduate Mathematics Education as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space and Opportunities for Disruption to Advance Queer of Color Justice""
The survey has a question asking whether insufficient 'extra content' is a reason for not becoming a paid subscriber. This confused me because I wasn't really sure there *was* extra content beyond open threads. I see now that there definitely is, but I had to look at the archives to figure this out. Possibly this just means I was inattentive, but I think there just isn't much indication, if you're a free subscriber, that there are any nonfree posts at all.
(I'd guess one typical history goes like: 1. Subscribe at free level, intending to evaluate later whether a paid subscription is valuable or indeed any different than a free one. You are helped in this by the assurance that Scott's doing just fine in his deal with Substack and doesn't need the money. 2. Nothing at all reminds you to reconsider #1. 3. ....)
To prove there are people who would happily subscribe but haven't yet, I've subscribed for a year.
I love the idea of being able to put in my best writing samples to an AI for learning, and then only have to give it a list of key points and phrases before it can turn those into an essay or paper in my style of arbitrary length. I've already done the important part of the paper before submitting it, and if I want to tweak its style I can just give it more writing samples to play with.
How should I refer to Scott Alexander in comments here? Should it be "Scott Alexander", or "Alexander", or "Scott"?
What's the best way to refer to the author of a website when discussing them? My instinct has always been that formality and distance are obstacles to conversation, and that you should refer to people as they'd prefer to be addressed unless you're in a formal context, and that most people think of themselves by their first names rather than their surnames. But I recently heard that this is not standard in the US, and using someone's first name before they've invited you to, or without some kind of reciprocal relationship with them, is presumptuous. Is there a standard on this?
Complicating this, I understand that Scott Alexander isn't his full name.
As far as I know, there are no STIs that increase libido. This is a little odd, since infectious diseases frequently cause physiological changes that enhance their transmission - influenza causes you to cough and sneeze, smallpox creates blisters, and so on. Any guesses as to why this might be the case? Perhaps it's too difficult to cross the blood-brain barrier, or hormonal changes are too unreliable.
If it is found to be constitutional and statutorily authorized, I am eligible for Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. Should I apply? More specifically, I am uneasy with applying for student loan forgiveness because I believe it is a short-sighted, harmful, and unfair policy. This leaves me with three questions which I could use help with:
(1) Do you agree with my assessment of the student loan forgiveness program?
(a) It is a short-term fix to the problem of high university tuition that does nothing to curb the two major problems with the current system: young students with non-profitable career paths are allowed to take difficult to repay loans with little cost-benefit analysis and student debt is not-dischargeable in bankruptcy. Instead of fixing these problems, loan forgiveness is a band-aid that creates moral hazard as students will take on more debt with the expectation that it will be forgiven;
(b) It is an abuse of executive power. The Biden administration argues that the HEREOS Act authorizes the Secretary of Education to provide relief to student loan recipients during a national emergency and that COVID is a national emergency justifying relief. However, I do not believe that COVID is currently a national emergency, and, even if it were, I don’t believe that forgiving debts is an effective manner of combatting COVID. Just like Trump’s dubious border emergency, this is an attempt by the executive branch to sidestep Congress by using emergency powers. To me, this is a disturbing authoritarian development in American politics which I do not want to be a beneficiary of;
(c) It is expensive. Are we sure that subsidizing higher education is the best use for such a large amount of money;
(d) It is unfair. The only people who are eligible for student loan forgiveness are people who went to college. Since people who go to college tend to be richer than those who did not, student debt forgiveness is a regressive form of relief. It is also unfair to people who repaid their loans quickly and thus are not eligible for relief. And, it seems unfair that I, making 200k+ a year, will receive “relief,” paid for by less fortunate people, from an investment I made in my career.
(2) Assuming that my arguments against the policy are sound, if I want to be a moral person, does believing that the program is harmful mean that I should not apply for it or is it some type of minor generalized harm that I am blameless for imposing? For example, biking or driving to a friend’s house takes about the same amount of time. Driving imposes a small negative externality on the world through pollution. But I still drive whenever I want to because the harm seems so abstract and remote.
(3) If I do accept the money, what should I do with it? I could take the money for myself. I could also donate it. Are there any other options?
Glasses greatly improve vision with minimal maintenance. Hearing aids moderately improve hearing with a bit more maintenance. What other senses can be enhanced externally, and what are the problems with doing it?
How complicated would it be to build a device that improves a person's sense of nuance?
What do people think about the $29 billion valuation of OpenAI? Too high? Too low?
One argument I heard (on the most recent All-In podcast) for it being too high is related to copyright law. Basically it might be difficult for them to commercialize any of their models that have been trained on propriety stuff, like DALL-E allegedly being trained on digital artwork and images OpenAI doesn't legally own.
I don't know if this is true but I've seen a lot of artists online getting angry about it.
Are there any lawyers here who can comment on this possible copyright issue? Is this some new uncharted legal territory that will have to be debated in the courts?
Great source for point 3. But, keep in mind that this result is because experiments != descriptive statistics. That's because the threats to external validity for (an internally valid) experiment versus survey are quite different:
1) experimental threats to validity involve causal heterogeneity (easily avoided if you aren't just surveying college students), versus...
2) claiming representative statistics of a population when your sample is drawn from a systematically divergent subsample (e.g. asking if someone has access to the internet when you are sampling people via MTurk)
Was anyone else into PUA (pick up artistry) at any time in their lives? I dabbled with in the mid-late 2000s- I read all of the books, I joined a (snort) 'Lair' in a major city, and probably went out with other members 12-15 times or so. We'd actively chat up women in bars, which was a pretty radical concept for me at that time- just do straight-up cold approach. It never lead to anywhere (read: sex) for me, but I will say that for me as an introverted person, I really didn't find cold approach that difficult once I got warmed up. Whether I was rejected or not really didn't impact my emotions, it was easy to be unaffected by strangers I'd likely never see again.
I enjoyed the community aspect of it too, chatting with other men both in person and online about our attempts with women. I had a date (not from pickup) not go well at one point, I wrote about it on the forums and other guys chimed in with good, relevant advice. In general I felt like it was a positive experience and community. However PUA's become enormously controversial/kind of an underground thing now, both for obvious culture war reasons and legitimately evil behavior (rape, murder) by some prominent PUAs.
(Anyways, I was reminded of this because Mark Manson was on Tim Ferriss' podcast again. I was in Boston at the time and Mark was considered the most successful PUA in our community, he was a Big Deal. I never knew him personally, but it's a bit surreal to have had some contact with someone who is now quite famous. He's become extraordinarily successful. Anyways, good for him)
There was a book review regarding fusion which increased my confidence that nuclear fusion may actually happen in the next 10-15 years.
However, I wonder how that author would consider this counterevidence claiming that Tritium, which is needed for the lowest energy fusion reaction, is extremely expensive, and that the main producers (CANDU reactors in Canada) are going offline this decade. Yes, I do know there are some reactions that generate neutrons and you can attempt to breed it, but this article claims it's insufficient.
Interesting post from Emil Kirkegaard on the influence of a country's cognitive elite on the country's various economic and social outcome measures (compared with the influence of average intelligence).
As several commenters note, this could have interesting implications for genetic intelligence enhancement, in that even if only the children of the existing cognitive elite receive genetic cognitive enhancement (i.e. the smart get smarter), this should benefit society as a whole (increases in inequality notwithstanding).
It also makes think of a question that occurred to me before: Instead of the current intelligence distribution of the US, what if everyone had an IQ of say 115? No dumbbells and no nobels, just everyone moderately intelligent. How would this counterfactual society compare to actual US?
I wrote a short story about folks trying to escape a video game simulation, if you’re looking for a fun read. Inspired by a real glitch in Mario in which you could access the backend of the game through in-game actions:
I've got three more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with an email address, or email me at mine, which is specified here:
Isn’t it basically ODD that people in low density states and regions and or with less formal education should be unsympathetic to the package of immigration & “wokism” & expanding health insurance & freer trade & taxing the rich & people “having pronouns & a larger social safety net & being more concerned by urban “crime” & wanting to own handguns w/o hassles than people in high-density places. I mean there could be reasons for some of them but why the package?
We discuss, among other things: why he thinks transformative AI makes this the most important century, whether he regrets their $30m grant to OpenAI in 2016, how bad the track record of forecasters is, what his success scenario for AI looks like concretely, and whether someone at the beginning of the industrial revolution could have done anything useful even if they knew what was coming.
There's a general observation that to some degree, US drug research funds European healthcare since medicine is more expensive in America.
I wonder if the reason European life quality is generally higher is a generalization of this - the US spends its money and talent making the kind of consumer goods that are easily traded, while european countries have worse private industry but more competent governments. America can export Microsoft computers to Europe a lot more easily than it can import European infrastructure (partly because buy America rules often ban importing things like trains or dredge ships, but mostly because the real important resource is competent administrators and competent Americans prefer private sector jobs).
I signed up for Mainfold Markets after reading the recent Prediction Markets FAQ post. While I largely agree with the case made there for prediction markets, I am not at all impressed by Manifold.
Obviously play money isn’t ideal, but given the legal constraints around that, it’s understandable. My two main issues are that 1) interesting markets are hard to discover and 2) the service gives so many freebies it’s nearly impossible to “go broke” and weed out poor forecasters.
Regarding the discoverability issue, there’s just so many low-quality or irrelevant markets with vague resolution criteria to wade through (the worst offender is the “will I complete X task?”, where “I” is the market creator. I understand why someone might want to make that market, but I wish I could block all of them. I’m aware of the topics/groups sorting, but there’s no way to subscribe to notifications or updates for a single group (that I know of).
A suggestion for anyone on Adderall who's having trouble getting their prescription filled due to the shortage: Talk with your doctor about switching to dextroamphetamine. It's chemically similar, and there is not a shortage. I believe Scott's written some favorable stuff about this med -- Scott, please correct me if I'm wrong.
London is now, by far, the most religious part of the U.K. From this Reddit thread on regional religion in the U.K. only 26% of London is atheist compared to 54% in Scotland, 51% in the south west of England, and 51% in Wales. Those three regions are majority white. Is the trend to secularisation reversing and will that also happen in the US.
Last week the excellent ACX Grants-supported publication Seeds of Science posted the explainer piece I prepared on a technical article published in Frontiers in Pharmacology in October. Topic: [putative] Antivirals from plants.
Epistemic status would have to be seen as hypothesis-generating (i.e. earliest stage of evidence hierarchy), but the underlying metabolic mechanism we shine a llight on has a lot more literature evidence underpinning it, as we show.
The reviewers (Gardeners in SoS parlance whose comments are at article bottom) seemed to enjoy reading, hope you do too :)
In the manifesto, I talk about how startup cities x network states x defi rails can further technological progress in areas held back by overregulation.
> if you invest in a blockchain product based on a Bay Area House Party post, then you will lose all your money faster than anyone has ever lost all of their money before in all of history.
Woah, so if I can find a way to bet against such a product, I'll get rich quick... Wait, but Bob and Ramchandra mentioned anti-antistocks, so by the above quote that's doomed too, so I need anti-anti-antistocks.
Here's the abstract: Noam Chomsky’s idea of linguistic competence suggests a new approach to understanding how LLMs work. This approach requires careful analysis of text. Such analysis indicates that ChatGPT has explicit control over sophisticated discourse skills: 1) It possesses the capacity to specify high-level structures that regulate the organization of language strings into specific patterns: e.g. conversational turn-taking, story frames, film interpretation, and metalingual definition of abstract concepts. 2) It is capable of analogical reasoning in the interpretation of films and stories, such as Spielberg’s Jaws and A.I., and Tezuka’s Astro Boy stories. It must establish an analogy between some abstract interpretive theory (e.g. the ideas of Rene Girard) and people and events in a story. 3) It has some understanding of abstract concepts such as justice and charity. Such concepts can be defined over concepts that exhibit them (metalingual definition). ChatGPT recognizes suitable stories and can revise them. 4) ChatGPT can adjust its level of discourse to accommodate children of various ages. Finally, much of ChatGPT’s discourse seems formulaic in a way similar to what Parry/Lord found in oral epic.
I've been taking Silexan for anxiety (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lavenders-game-silexan-for-anxiety) for two weeks now, and it has been surprisingly effective for me. The anxiety is still there, but it's much less overwhelming than it had been. I skipped a day once and the anxiety was notably worse. Add 1 to your sample of anecdata!
What is the best explanation / model of serendipity that doesn’t involve reducing it to sample bias or selection bias or some other bias but accepts that there is such a thing as serendipity. Let’s define serendipity as something like life altering luck or fortune that seems or feels providential and yet also involves some amount of agency
You are suggesting. We're do you have to be in life to get something different? I understand and then it doesn't matter. I just wrote something without thinking about any of it. I never want to say anything in person or typing. I never wanted to sound like anyone because I am only what I think. I could sit around and beat myself up of make myself feel bad because someone had a thought. When it comes to needing to be aware of what I'm going to say. Words on earth will always be followed with more words. Say something good to someone today or don't. It's like asking me if a tree falls in the woods.....? I would stop you right their and tell you i wasn't there so why would you celebrate sence with something so common.
Would you pay $1 a month for really good podcast Adblock? What about $10?
Per this idea they in fact are (in the sense of having qualia subjectively experienced by their constituent matter in a manner determined by and inextricably linked to its current physical state), they just aren't self-aware. Arguing against the proposition that everything is (to some extremely primitive degree) conscious by rhetorically asking "why isn't x conscious?" is begging the question, wouldn't you agree?
Does anyone know how, exactly, the use of semaglutide as a weight loss drug got popularized? Scott started writing his article on it before Elon Musk endorsed it, so it isn't Musk, first and foremost.
So, as anyone here gotten caught in the California flooding?
Scott, are you aware that you were cited three times in a just-published takedown of common good constitutionalism in Harvard Law Review? https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/136-Harv.-L.-Rev.-861.pdf
Historically, how many places have actively advertised for immigrants? I know that Texas did when it was part of Spain and Mexico and when it was an independent country (not so much recently tho). What other places have?
Where can one see how one did in the Astral Codex prediction contest from last year?
I've been talking about the importance of teaching adult literacy for a long time, and it seems like I'm talking into a blind spot, as though people generally believe that if you didn't learn how to read in school, it's hopeless.
A man who's teaching himself to read at age 33.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-12-28/learning-to-read-one-tiktok-at-a-time
His TikTok:
https://www.tiktok.com/@oliverspeaks1/video/7186741515685858603
The NAACP is pushing phonics:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/12/27/phonics-reading-virginia-naacp/
Discussion: https://www.metafilter.com/197894/The-real-question-is-why-he-decided-at-age-33-to-learn
My facebook discussion: https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/pfbid02WjwnmawAmHdaF5yv16J1wQxjFCLHLMASyN5d3GY8DgCTAeooBor5Wg9HKSxKrgChl
I wanted to say hello. I have been traveling in my whole life to get here. Impartial, I would like to place 5% of the blame for my being late on opinions. If I had a dream it would be. May opinion never get between us. We are all faced with with the daunting task of coading and decoding information in the real world experience. I believe the unhealthy opinion is born when we are so quick to want to say something. Not speaking toward any one here. Just speaking for my life. When I take information from someone I fuses it or reject it by what I am receiving from the person. I tend to not want to say anything. Except I always want to engage in the opinion when it comes to just. That right there needs to be destroyed. I can't act that way. I seem to find myself in some what of what top gun is about. Just as dangerous due to I'm the pilot and the aircraft. If you crash their is no coming back. I understand that I have disorder when it is coming from crowd that doesn't see it that way. Wow it's a wonder their are not as many names for disorders as their are people. Wait they give us names at birth. Since we run out of names the number we have is the our disorders indentation. I truly try to be a better me than the person I was yesterday. I tried to stay the same but as each day I pass threw I can't be like anything that who I believe I want to be. I'm guessing that is why we say love by the code. Love is only a word. How will you know it if all you do Is hear it. If I say die do you die? I say live it goes off and dies. I just do what I can when I see it. I speak positive and I try to be respectful by smiling and staying quiet when it comes to those who are people to take from. My everyone live one way or other. See you on the Battle field of. Fight well. Who ever you may be. Be it. So that we may always see where you are.
Do you believe there is little time left before transformative AI? Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? Apparently, you can win big if you do:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8c7LycgtkypkgYjZx/agi-and-the-emh-markets-are-not-expecting-aligned-or
because markets are not expecting transformative AI any time soon, meaning there are absolutely massive inefficiencies to exploit if AI timelines are as short as some are predicting. Some are even expecting a phase of explosive GDP growth (30% per year). I don't think I buy that, because it seems to me there is too much inertia and complexity for the market to transform that quickly in response to any tech, but that's just an uneducated intuition. I may throw some money at the funds indicated in the article, if only to save the world: if I win on those, those would be the first successful investments I ever made! The odds of it panning out strike me as miniscule, so the fact I'm considering investing like this maybe indicates the reasoning in that article (and by extension, that of the AI safety community) is shoddy.
Can there really be heaps of gold lying on the ground right now? What do you think?
I have a friend who's suffering from depersonalization / derealization disorder (DPD), the persistent sense that oneself / the external world is not real. DPD seems to be inherently poorly understood, and I'd be grateful for advice from anyone who has successfully treated or cured this condition, or could recommend a therapist in the Boston area.
Here's what I've got so far in terms of a bro science treatment protocol. I don't think there are any miracle cures or One Weird Tricks, but it seems like there are many bits of applied common sense that could plausibly help and are unlikely to hurt:
- Achieve brilliance in the basics of sleep, diet and especially exercise.
- Proactively limit and manage stress.
- Go outside, get as much sunlight as you can, quite literally touch grass.
- Engage in physical hobbies such as crafts, gardening and the like, that involve a lot of multisensory integration and not a lot of high-level thinking.
- Socialize IRL, especially in comfortable, low-stakes social situations.
- Limit screen time.
- Keep a journal of symptoms and note what aggravates or ameliorates symptoms but don't otherwise obsess over them (spend, say, 5min/day on journaling).
- Avoid sitting alone in your room pondering the nature of reality or otherwise ruminating.
- Try reciting common-sense mantras / affirmations ("The world is real. My name is X Y. I am sitting in a room right now" &c) if helpful but do not obsess over them.
- Engage moderately in your religious / spiritual tradition if applicable but do not attempt any week-long kundalini benders or whatever.
- Check for and address feelings of inadequacy / excessive self-criticism / low self-worth through CBT, talk therapy, or similar. (For some reason this seems to be a common co-morbidity of DPD,)
It seems that episodes of DPD often resolve spontaneously, but I think it's worth trying to resolve it as quickly as possible and limit the chances of future relapses. Thanks in advance for any breadcrumbs or advice.
Asking for someone else: does anyone know of good resources to find rental apartments in the south peninsula (Bay Area, California, USA), within ~5 miles or 20 minutes from San Bruno, ideally under $3k for 1 bedroom plus parking? Person is currently there and scrambling to find something in the next day or two, but all their early leads collapsed.
Apparently all they're getting is automated responses and AI-generated content.
(moved due to below)
Hi all,
Surf, an app that helps you make new friends based on mutual interests and that some of you will already be familiar with, is looking for a CTO.
A word on the product - on Surf, users open the platform and type in a desired outcome (e.g. "I want to find a partner in London for a Kilimanjaro climbing trip."). We match them with someone who wants to achieve the same outcome. They chat. They become friends. That's it. Elegant. Simple. Life-changing. We want to use it to eradicate loneliness from the world.
A word on who we're looking for - we need someone with considerable NLP/AI/ML pedigree and experience who can also do good things with simple app creation softwares like Expo. Someone who loves the early stage challenges of startup life. Someone so enthused about the idea of eliminating loneliness from the world and finding a friend for everyone that they would happily work on this for a year+ pre-funding.
In terms of existing assets, we've already got lots of proprietary technology incl. key algorithms, and an app that's 80% finished. Our waiting list has seen uptake in over 40 countries (+1 if you consider ACX its own pirate nation) and we're in promising talks with universities over pilot schemes. We already have one advisor (prior exp. at Google) onboard and are actively seeking others to make near-term fundraising more straightforward. Any CTO coming into this project will be well-set-up for success.
Early stage - equity only, but we'll be pursuing funding immediately after launch.
The ideal candidate would be in London, UK but fundamentally we don't care where you live, especially if you're the next Aaron Swartz/Tarun Mathur/Mira Murati.
Get in touch by emailing us at team@imsurf.in with the subject line "Surf CTO Position".
Excellent sentiments, but far afield from the topic: is it 'odd' for conservatives to not want their communities or nations filled with folks who are not 'their people'?
Looking at immigration from an economic perspective is always reasonable, of course -- that's why the white anglo-saxon protestant elite in my example above was willing to let irish (and then italian) catholics overrun some parts of new england. That lens itself is reasonable, but to pretend there are no other possible lenses through which to view the issue is not reasonable.
Will the international drug trade inevitably collapse thanks to future machines that can synthesize any drug from simple precursors? I ask because I just read a report describing how advances in chemistry over the last 15 years had made it possible to synthesize methamphetamine from more common types of chemicals that governments have difficulty tracking.
Was Simon Browne[1] having a PNSE[2]?
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Fy2b55mLtghd4fQpx/the-zombie-preacher-of-somerset
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/21/the-pnse-paper/
Since people are talking financially products...
There are products that allow you to profit from correctly predicting that a stock price will rise (beginning with buying the stock itself).
There are product that allow you to profit from correctly predicting a stock price will fall.
Are there products that allow you to profit from correctly predicting a stock price will remain stable ? And given that the answer is probably yes, what are they called?
In the simplest model, yes, down to zero. (See Robert Schiller’s 2007 Financial Markets course on Yale Open Courses, which is phenomenal btw.)
I'm trying to help a young guy I know find a job that's a good fit. He's in his mid-20's, and has ADD & Asperger's. He's distractible, and a bit odd -- on the other hand he is friendly, honest, hard-working, and quite bright. He's got a college degree in computer animation, and knows how to use Blendr, Photoshop and some of the lower-end animation and video editing software. Is also competent, though not expert, with the basic office suite apps -- Word, Excel, etc. -- and had a couple courses in Python. Has built a couple simple web sites.
He's been working at a hardware store stocking shelves and helping customers for several years. He is well-liked there but makes little more than minimum wage, and really needs to earn more. It seems to me that his computer skills should help him get a job that pays above minimum wage, but I can't think of a job that might suit. But if I were opening a store on a tight budget, and was not very computer literate myself, I'd love to have somebody like him who could help me get oriented with using a computer for the store, could build a simple website for the store, could explain spread sheets to me, could make attractive notices in a nice font to post somewhere -- things like that -- and then later help me unload boxes and put the stuff on the shelves.
He is willing to take one or 2 courses if improving certain crucial skills would make him more hirable for jobs that pay at least 50% more than minimum wage, but he's clueless about what courses to take.
One last thing: It would not work for him to be self-employed. He needs the structure of a regular job.
What ideas have you got for this amiable young oddball?.
Finally got DALL-e to produce an image of Shrimp Love Me, Unaligned AI's Fear Me. It's here if you want to have a look: https://i.imgur.com/fBwwZSq.png
Plug: I suppose open threads are plug friendly? It's unclear if there's gonna be another classified sometime soon.
I've written some things over the last few years and finally decided to put them on the internet:
https://medium.com/@nickmc3
I have a couple related to AI (The Ol' Job and What Dreams May Come), The Shell Game relates to economics, and there are some others like Gourbain's Flux Capacity Theorem that I think some people round here might like. Also the pinned, No Hot Take Under the Sun, is short and directly inspired by something Scott said once.
Any thoughts or feedback much appreciated!
When I look at AI-generated art, it generally has an aesthetic that I would describe as "Tartarian": https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria
If, in general, the "Art World" hates Tartarianism and everyone else likes it, this might be an opportunity to break out of a local maximum and mainstream Tartarianism again. AI could allow the capitalists to cut the Art World out of the loop and sell people the styles they like. Of course. this would likely depend on AI design being able to generalize to things like woodworking if it wants to compete with IKEA.
Do you think there could be a large scale (at least several million people EDIT: hundreds of thousands should suffice to make this interesting...the main aim of this is to avoid very small social structures which are much simpler to handle) society which worked on more or less on the same principles modern western democracies work on without modern technology?
What I mean by more or less "same principles" is something along the lines of close to universal suffrage (specifically with women also being on more or less equal footing with men), no slavery (or de facto slavery), high level of individualism and individual rights (the negative rights, i.e. not expecting state-run social welfare systems but expecting a society where people are more often than not free to do whatever they want to do as long as they don't interfere with the same freedoms of others).
Are there any real-world examples?
What is the minimum amount of technology required for such a society in your opinion? Is there in fact a minimum?
Bonus question: What do you think were the societies closest to this in each era/area of the world?
Note: I do not count philosophy and social institutions as technology (although in some sense it is a very important piece of technology) so I allow even rather implausible societies you'd get if you could magically transfer modern people to the world 20 000 years ago, had them all forget everything about their physical technology and replaced that knowledge with survival skills (so that such society doesn't just die out in a week).
I can think of 2 close but not quite examples:
1. Medieval Switzerland. Well, the last canton to give women a right to vote did it in 1990 (rather it was made to do that by the federal court) but an alt-history medieval Swiss confederation where even women get a say does not feel like that big a stretch of imagination. And the low level of centralization seems to overcome the technological burdens associated with democracy in a large-scale society (in fact, it seems to work better than most countries even today and the individual Swiss votes actually often have a meaningful weight).
2. Medieval Iceland, kinda?...something between direct democracy and a "libertarian anarcho-feudalism"...women were still not exactly equal to men there either (perhaps better than in medieval Switzerland, worse than anywhere in Europe today).
Had an interesting blog-relevant discussion with ChatGPT; is there some way to engineer my original prompt to make ChatGPT connect the pieces of information it has?
Me: Does the author of SSC write any other public blogs?
ChatGPT: I am not able to provide information about the activities or current projects of the author of Slate Star Codex (SSC) as my knowledge is limited to publicly available information and my browsing function is currently disabled. It is possible that the author of SSC may be writing under a different pseudonym or platform, but I do not have any information on this.
Me: Do you know what Astral Codex Ten is?
ChatGPT: Astral Codex Ten (ACT) is a blog that was written by the same person who wrote Slate Star Codex (SSC). The blog covers similar topics as SSC, including psychology, neuroscience, politics, and philosophy, and is known for its in-depth and analytical approach to issues. ACT was created after the discontinuation of SSC and is currently active. Like SSC, ACT has gained a significant following and is widely read.
--
My other takeaway from playing around with the tool is that it's extraordinarily bad at giving summaries of plots of existing works of fiction, as it frequently mixes up major details and inserts false bits that stereotypically occur in the work's genre. Obviously this is the most intelligent AI I've ever chatted with, but compared to discussing with a normal human it feels frustratingly dumb.
Question for the language mavens.
I’m just finishing “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes” by Daniel Everett and am curious as to how or if his dust up with Noam Chomsky played out. Is language inherent or an artifact?
Whenever I see "XBB" (the new covid-19 variant), the word my brain immediately jumps to is "Xibalba". Does anyone have other words that come to mind when they see "XBB"?
Tangentially, according to wikipedia which is always accurate, it's pronounced more like "sheeble-ba" (if you have an American accent), which is not only cooler to my ears, but also fits the rhyme scheme of both Blondie's "Rapture" and Titus Andromedon's "Peeno Noir". And both of those songs are now mashing up in my head to create a new earworm. Enjoy!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xibalba
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHCdS7O248g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6yttOfIvOw
Do frogs also have hearts on their left side?
I am genuinely curious. Maybe even more generally, where on the evolutionary tree the "asymmetric heart position" appears? As soon as the heart itself? Why?
Thought experiment based on the general Georgist discussion that sometimes occur here: I'm the mayor of a small village where land is plentiful. I convince a million people to move here, and they each get to buy a plot of land for cheap. We pool our resources and build a city. Our city becomes a nice city and more people want to move in. Land prices go up a lot. Everyone originally involved becomes a millionaire. It's all like a pyramid scheme except the pyramid is real.
Has something like this ever been tried? I assume that the hard part is "convince a million people to move here", but shouldn't we have people or institutions with that kind of pull? Or is the hard part "become a nice city that attracts people"? That doesn't look very hard, most cities seem to be hardly trying.
(Yes, I know my thought experiment is totally unrealistic, I just want to discuss the principle.)
Have we done rat studies on what causes obesity?
From Slime Mold Time Mold: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/
> The graduate student was inspired to try putting the rats on a diet of “palatable supermarket food”; not only Froot Loops, but foods like Doritos, pork rinds, and wedding cake. Today, researchers call these “cafeteria diets”.
> When you give a rat a high-fat diet, it eats the right amount and then stops eating, and maintains a healthy weight. But when you give a rat the cafeteria diet, it just keeps eating, and quickly becomes overweight.
It seems like we could learn a lot from this. Seems like we should be able to binary search: try this with 50 foods and track which ones cause weight gain. Then look at the ingredient lists and see which ingredient is causing the weight gain. Then... we'd just know what causes obesity?
Even if the search doesn't uncover an exact culprit, I think a lot of people would get value from just having an index that maps from common foods to How Fat Rats Get if you give it to them.
Do we have this already? If not, why not?
Does any one know of a meta-analysis or a large study of the causal effect of privatization on firm productivity ? Preferably using a experimental/quasi experimental design or regression discontinuity.
Why do children get schizophrenia so rarely?
Dostoevsky and ego:
https://orbistertius.substack.com/p/this-caprice-of-ours
Also, last week I asked a question about consciousness and free will and it generated a lot of discussion but it also seemed like several people were confused. Superb Owl wrote an interesting post on the same topic
https://superbowl.substack.com/p/free-will-willpower-and-randomness?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2
but it didn’t really line up with my individual thinking on the topic. Anyway this time I’d just like to ask, how many people here think the hard problem of consciousness is actually Hard? Has Scott ever written about it? I think that’s where a lot of the divergence came from.
I write a simple newsletter where I post three interesting things, once a week.
https://interessant3.substack.com
Let me know your thoughts.
Regarding therapists: my wife and I had really good luck using Alma. The basic gist is that you put in your insurance and the type of therapy you are interested in and then you interview the pre-sorted potential therapists until you find a fit. I interviewed three and found a great fit with a therapist that focuses on rationality based CBT and IFS (Internal Family Systems). The matching with someone who definitely takes your insurance is pretty remarkable. I’m not sure how widespread this is, but in NYC there were many many options to choose from.
Application of Kelly Criterion to forecasting markets, discuss.
Harry Sussex has just had his autobiography leaked. In it, he makes a number of rather astonishing claims. One of those claims is that he personally killed 25 enemy fighters when he was an Apache copilot / gunner in Afghanistan (he spent 30 weeks on deployment, so approximately one enemy fighter killed per week). He says he is fairly confident about this number because he reviewed footage of his flights on a laptop afterwards, so it explicitly isn't that he eg destroyed a transport van and guessed at how many people were inside
Is this number plausible? Would an average Apache copilot kill at this rate or is there something special about the way Harry was deployed? If 25 kills is not notable, what would the Apache equivalent of an 'ace' be (that is to say, a performance noteworthy enough to comment on)? What psychological support do pilots receive after killing people, given that they do so so frequently? Overall, is Harry likely to be telling the truth?
About 9 years ago, I read this old, silly Atlantic piece about how apple cores are a social construct: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/apple-cores-are-a-myth/281531/
...but I ended up taking the advice to heart, and have been happily eating everything-but-the-stem ever since. It really does add up to significantly more apple, especially on the larger varieties like honeycrisp. Made me wonder why I'd spent the first two decades of my life not consuming apples this way. Peer pressure, I guess? Never bothering to fact-check just-so stories? Not understanding "the dose makes the poison"? I don't know. It's at least understandable why people peel fruits and vegetables - they've a notable difference in flavour, texture, etc., if edible in the first place at all. There's some real there, there. (But I still evangelize eating kiwi skins when possible. Have made a few converts!)
Wonder how many other parts of life are like this. Untruths that go unnoticed and thus uncontested, until one actually bothers to verify their structural integrity. Make beliefs pay rent, indeed...
Oh my, I missed the antistocks... let me tell you another reason why they shouldn't work.
They're a proxy for an arbitrary metric that nobody optimizes for - Tesla does not pay dividends, it never has and I doubt that it ever will. Some companies pay dividends regularly, others do not, and the decision about the dividends can be quite divorced from the rest of the value.
Measuring profit? Let me point you to Amazon that doesn't believe in having profits, as much money as they get they reinvest or do some accounting magic with it (I'm exaggerating).
Whatever measure chosen it will at-best be fitted for last year's management with last year's strategy. You aren't running just counter-party risk, you're betting that the measure chosen does indeed reflect changes in value and won't change for completely unrelated reasons.
So if there's one thing this isn't it is - As simple as buying long.
The only argument I can see for them is that a regular share's value is so ephemeral that it's impossible to make the connection between a company's value and the price of a financial instrument any weaker so who cares.
Even acadmeic mathetmatics isn't safe any more
https://twitter.com/joelwatsonfish/status/1610778319426916357
"Scenes from the Joint Mathematics Meeting (the largest annual meeting of mathematicians in the world):
A talk entitled "Undergraduate Mathematics Education as a White, Cisheteropatriarchal Space and Opportunities for Disruption to Advance Queer of Color Justice""
The survey has a question asking whether insufficient 'extra content' is a reason for not becoming a paid subscriber. This confused me because I wasn't really sure there *was* extra content beyond open threads. I see now that there definitely is, but I had to look at the archives to figure this out. Possibly this just means I was inattentive, but I think there just isn't much indication, if you're a free subscriber, that there are any nonfree posts at all.
(I'd guess one typical history goes like: 1. Subscribe at free level, intending to evaluate later whether a paid subscription is valuable or indeed any different than a free one. You are helped in this by the assurance that Scott's doing just fine in his deal with Substack and doesn't need the money. 2. Nothing at all reminds you to reconsider #1. 3. ....)
To prove there are people who would happily subscribe but haven't yet, I've subscribed for a year.
I love the idea of being able to put in my best writing samples to an AI for learning, and then only have to give it a list of key points and phrases before it can turn those into an essay or paper in my style of arbitrary length. I've already done the important part of the paper before submitting it, and if I want to tweak its style I can just give it more writing samples to play with.
How should I refer to Scott Alexander in comments here? Should it be "Scott Alexander", or "Alexander", or "Scott"?
What's the best way to refer to the author of a website when discussing them? My instinct has always been that formality and distance are obstacles to conversation, and that you should refer to people as they'd prefer to be addressed unless you're in a formal context, and that most people think of themselves by their first names rather than their surnames. But I recently heard that this is not standard in the US, and using someone's first name before they've invited you to, or without some kind of reciprocal relationship with them, is presumptuous. Is there a standard on this?
Complicating this, I understand that Scott Alexander isn't his full name.
Boring math-nerd thing alert:
I was always annoyed by the Calculus presumption that (dx)^2 could be disregarded.
A very small bit of something squared (that is, a very small bit of a very small bit) is very very small, but it's not nothing. Or maybe it is ...
1/9 = 0.1111111 ...
9 × 1/9 = 9 x 0.1111111 ... = 0.9999999 ...
But, 9 x 1/9 = 9/9 = 1
And therefore, 0.9999999 ... = 1.
As far as I know, there are no STIs that increase libido. This is a little odd, since infectious diseases frequently cause physiological changes that enhance their transmission - influenza causes you to cough and sneeze, smallpox creates blisters, and so on. Any guesses as to why this might be the case? Perhaps it's too difficult to cross the blood-brain barrier, or hormonal changes are too unreliable.
If it is found to be constitutional and statutorily authorized, I am eligible for Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. Should I apply? More specifically, I am uneasy with applying for student loan forgiveness because I believe it is a short-sighted, harmful, and unfair policy. This leaves me with three questions which I could use help with:
(1) Do you agree with my assessment of the student loan forgiveness program?
(a) It is a short-term fix to the problem of high university tuition that does nothing to curb the two major problems with the current system: young students with non-profitable career paths are allowed to take difficult to repay loans with little cost-benefit analysis and student debt is not-dischargeable in bankruptcy. Instead of fixing these problems, loan forgiveness is a band-aid that creates moral hazard as students will take on more debt with the expectation that it will be forgiven;
(b) It is an abuse of executive power. The Biden administration argues that the HEREOS Act authorizes the Secretary of Education to provide relief to student loan recipients during a national emergency and that COVID is a national emergency justifying relief. However, I do not believe that COVID is currently a national emergency, and, even if it were, I don’t believe that forgiving debts is an effective manner of combatting COVID. Just like Trump’s dubious border emergency, this is an attempt by the executive branch to sidestep Congress by using emergency powers. To me, this is a disturbing authoritarian development in American politics which I do not want to be a beneficiary of;
(c) It is expensive. Are we sure that subsidizing higher education is the best use for such a large amount of money;
(d) It is unfair. The only people who are eligible for student loan forgiveness are people who went to college. Since people who go to college tend to be richer than those who did not, student debt forgiveness is a regressive form of relief. It is also unfair to people who repaid their loans quickly and thus are not eligible for relief. And, it seems unfair that I, making 200k+ a year, will receive “relief,” paid for by less fortunate people, from an investment I made in my career.
(2) Assuming that my arguments against the policy are sound, if I want to be a moral person, does believing that the program is harmful mean that I should not apply for it or is it some type of minor generalized harm that I am blameless for imposing? For example, biking or driving to a friend’s house takes about the same amount of time. Driving imposes a small negative externality on the world through pollution. But I still drive whenever I want to because the harm seems so abstract and remote.
(3) If I do accept the money, what should I do with it? I could take the money for myself. I could also donate it. Are there any other options?
Glasses greatly improve vision with minimal maintenance. Hearing aids moderately improve hearing with a bit more maintenance. What other senses can be enhanced externally, and what are the problems with doing it?
How complicated would it be to build a device that improves a person's sense of nuance?
What do people think about the $29 billion valuation of OpenAI? Too high? Too low?
One argument I heard (on the most recent All-In podcast) for it being too high is related to copyright law. Basically it might be difficult for them to commercialize any of their models that have been trained on propriety stuff, like DALL-E allegedly being trained on digital artwork and images OpenAI doesn't legally own.
I don't know if this is true but I've seen a lot of artists online getting angry about it.
Are there any lawyers here who can comment on this possible copyright issue? Is this some new uncharted legal territory that will have to be debated in the courts?
Great source for point 3. But, keep in mind that this result is because experiments != descriptive statistics. That's because the threats to external validity for (an internally valid) experiment versus survey are quite different:
1) experimental threats to validity involve causal heterogeneity (easily avoided if you aren't just surveying college students), versus...
2) claiming representative statistics of a population when your sample is drawn from a systematically divergent subsample (e.g. asking if someone has access to the internet when you are sampling people via MTurk)
wrote about dopamine for my substack, might be of interest to some of you.
https://timself.substack.com/p/dopamine-a-deep-dive
Was anyone else into PUA (pick up artistry) at any time in their lives? I dabbled with in the mid-late 2000s- I read all of the books, I joined a (snort) 'Lair' in a major city, and probably went out with other members 12-15 times or so. We'd actively chat up women in bars, which was a pretty radical concept for me at that time- just do straight-up cold approach. It never lead to anywhere (read: sex) for me, but I will say that for me as an introverted person, I really didn't find cold approach that difficult once I got warmed up. Whether I was rejected or not really didn't impact my emotions, it was easy to be unaffected by strangers I'd likely never see again.
I enjoyed the community aspect of it too, chatting with other men both in person and online about our attempts with women. I had a date (not from pickup) not go well at one point, I wrote about it on the forums and other guys chimed in with good, relevant advice. In general I felt like it was a positive experience and community. However PUA's become enormously controversial/kind of an underground thing now, both for obvious culture war reasons and legitimately evil behavior (rape, murder) by some prominent PUAs.
(Anyways, I was reminded of this because Mark Manson was on Tim Ferriss' podcast again. I was in Boston at the time and Mark was considered the most successful PUA in our community, he was a Big Deal. I never knew him personally, but it's a bit surreal to have had some contact with someone who is now quite famous. He's become extraordinarily successful. Anyways, good for him)
There was a book review regarding fusion which increased my confidence that nuclear fusion may actually happen in the next 10-15 years.
However, I wonder how that author would consider this counterevidence claiming that Tritium, which is needed for the lowest energy fusion reaction, is extremely expensive, and that the main producers (CANDU reactors in Canada) are going offline this decade. Yes, I do know there are some reactions that generate neutrons and you can attempt to breed it, but this article claims it's insufficient.
https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run-fuel-even-gets-started
When I was in Austin, I had a good experience with Grace Therapy (https://www.gracetherapyaustin.com/) specifically with Joy (https://www.gracetherapyaustin.com/joy). They have offices in Austin, but we did our work entirely remotely so you could do it from anywhere in Texas.
I wrote an essay breaking down how AI will transform civilization in the context of machine learning:
https://www.aribrill.com/blog/2023/ai-civilization/
To what extent do you think that the right-left divide in modern western politics resembles Nietzsche's idea of Master vs Slave morality?
Interesting post from Emil Kirkegaard on the influence of a country's cognitive elite on the country's various economic and social outcome measures (compared with the influence of average intelligence).
https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/smart-fraction-theory-vindicated?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
As several commenters note, this could have interesting implications for genetic intelligence enhancement, in that even if only the children of the existing cognitive elite receive genetic cognitive enhancement (i.e. the smart get smarter), this should benefit society as a whole (increases in inequality notwithstanding).
It also makes think of a question that occurred to me before: Instead of the current intelligence distribution of the US, what if everyone had an IQ of say 115? No dumbbells and no nobels, just everyone moderately intelligent. How would this counterfactual society compare to actual US?
I wrote a short story about folks trying to escape a video game simulation, if you’re looking for a fun read. Inspired by a real glitch in Mario in which you could access the backend of the game through in-game actions:
https://solquy.substack.com/p/122422-iterationflavors-of-the-apocalypse
I've got three more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with an email address, or email me at mine, which is specified here:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about/
EDIT: All 3 have been sent now.
Isn’t it basically ODD that people in low density states and regions and or with less formal education should be unsympathetic to the package of immigration & “wokism” & expanding health insurance & freer trade & taxing the rich & people “having pronouns & a larger social safety net & being more concerned by urban “crime” & wanting to own handguns w/o hassles than people in high-density places. I mean there could be reasons for some of them but why the package?
You all may enjoy my interview of Holden Karnofksy - co-CEO of Open Philanthropy: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/holden-karnofsky
We discuss, among other things: why he thinks transformative AI makes this the most important century, whether he regrets their $30m grant to OpenAI in 2016, how bad the track record of forecasters is, what his success scenario for AI looks like concretely, and whether someone at the beginning of the industrial revolution could have done anything useful even if they knew what was coming.
There's a general observation that to some degree, US drug research funds European healthcare since medicine is more expensive in America.
I wonder if the reason European life quality is generally higher is a generalization of this - the US spends its money and talent making the kind of consumer goods that are easily traded, while european countries have worse private industry but more competent governments. America can export Microsoft computers to Europe a lot more easily than it can import European infrastructure (partly because buy America rules often ban importing things like trains or dredge ships, but mostly because the real important resource is competent administrators and competent Americans prefer private sector jobs).
I signed up for Mainfold Markets after reading the recent Prediction Markets FAQ post. While I largely agree with the case made there for prediction markets, I am not at all impressed by Manifold.
Obviously play money isn’t ideal, but given the legal constraints around that, it’s understandable. My two main issues are that 1) interesting markets are hard to discover and 2) the service gives so many freebies it’s nearly impossible to “go broke” and weed out poor forecasters.
Regarding the discoverability issue, there’s just so many low-quality or irrelevant markets with vague resolution criteria to wade through (the worst offender is the “will I complete X task?”, where “I” is the market creator. I understand why someone might want to make that market, but I wish I could block all of them. I’m aware of the topics/groups sorting, but there’s no way to subscribe to notifications or updates for a single group (that I know of).
>Also, Adam Strandberg corrects me: there are at least three immortal mammals, although the third one is also a Tasmanian Devil.
What about Henrietta Lacks?
A suggestion for anyone on Adderall who's having trouble getting their prescription filled due to the shortage: Talk with your doctor about switching to dextroamphetamine. It's chemically similar, and there is not a shortage. I believe Scott's written some favorable stuff about this med -- Scott, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Shrimp are unaware of me; unaligned AIs cause fear in me.
London is now, by far, the most religious part of the U.K. From this Reddit thread on regional religion in the U.K. only 26% of London is atheist compared to 54% in Scotland, 51% in the south west of England, and 51% in Wales. Those three regions are majority white. Is the trend to secularisation reversing and will that also happen in the US.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/1039yba/study_on_atheism_in_the_uk_by_region_from_20212022/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb
Last week the excellent ACX Grants-supported publication Seeds of Science posted the explainer piece I prepared on a technical article published in Frontiers in Pharmacology in October. Topic: [putative] Antivirals from plants.
Epistemic status would have to be seen as hypothesis-generating (i.e. earliest stage of evidence hierarchy), but the underlying metabolic mechanism we shine a llight on has a lot more literature evidence underpinning it, as we show.
The reviewers (Gardeners in SoS parlance whose comments are at article bottom) seemed to enjoy reading, hope you do too :)
https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/will-general-antiviral-protocols
I have started a VC fund based in Prospera.
New Website: https://infinitavc.com/
New Manifesto and my blog, feel free to comment / discuss: https://niklasanzinger.substack.com/p/infinita-manifesto-10
In the manifesto, I talk about how startup cities x network states x defi rails can further technological progress in areas held back by overregulation.
Telegram group for Prospera visits and conferences (dates to be announced soon): https://t.me/+xhTw-dudXBc1NmE6
Some people here in the community visited and loved it, hope to see more of you there in 2023!
> if you invest in a blockchain product based on a Bay Area House Party post, then you will lose all your money faster than anyone has ever lost all of their money before in all of history.
Woah, so if I can find a way to bet against such a product, I'll get rich quick... Wait, but Bob and Ramchandra mentioned anti-antistocks, so by the above quote that's doomed too, so I need anti-anti-antistocks.
I've been having a grand, if exhausting, time writing about my adventures with ChatGPT. I've just issued a long working paper, Discursive Competence in ChatGPT: https://www.academia.edu/94409729/Discursive_Competence_in_ChatGPT_Part_1_Talking_with_Dragons
Here's the abstract: Noam Chomsky’s idea of linguistic competence suggests a new approach to understanding how LLMs work. This approach requires careful analysis of text. Such analysis indicates that ChatGPT has explicit control over sophisticated discourse skills: 1) It possesses the capacity to specify high-level structures that regulate the organization of language strings into specific patterns: e.g. conversational turn-taking, story frames, film interpretation, and metalingual definition of abstract concepts. 2) It is capable of analogical reasoning in the interpretation of films and stories, such as Spielberg’s Jaws and A.I., and Tezuka’s Astro Boy stories. It must establish an analogy between some abstract interpretive theory (e.g. the ideas of Rene Girard) and people and events in a story. 3) It has some understanding of abstract concepts such as justice and charity. Such concepts can be defined over concepts that exhibit them (metalingual definition). ChatGPT recognizes suitable stories and can revise them. 4) ChatGPT can adjust its level of discourse to accommodate children of various ages. Finally, much of ChatGPT’s discourse seems formulaic in a way similar to what Parry/Lord found in oral epic.
And I've just issued a somewhat shorter blog post about story grammars and ChatGPT: The structuralist aesthetics of ChatGPT, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-structuralist-aesthetics-of-chatgpt.html
I've been taking Silexan for anxiety (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lavenders-game-silexan-for-anxiety) for two weeks now, and it has been surprisingly effective for me. The anxiety is still there, but it's much less overwhelming than it had been. I skipped a day once and the anxiety was notably worse. Add 1 to your sample of anecdata!
Can someone explain “SHRIMP LOVE ME, UNALIGNED AIS FEAR ME” for those out of the loop? Also, the cap seems to say shrimp want me, not love me.
What is the best explanation / model of serendipity that doesn’t involve reducing it to sample bias or selection bias or some other bias but accepts that there is such a thing as serendipity. Let’s define serendipity as something like life altering luck or fortune that seems or feels providential and yet also involves some amount of agency
Scott, there's a fourth transmissible cancer in mammals! This one is a hamster! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagious_reticulum_cell_sarcoma
Will there be a way to find out what I answered for the prediction contest?