A) you keep speaking out of both sides of your mouth saying the _school_ is doing it to them. It's not clear what that would mean or that it's happening. Evidence please, and not of the anecdote variety.
B) Do you have literally any other examples? Anything at all? Are we really just in "extremism is anything I don't like" land? You say piles big - what else is in there? Evidence please.
This Saturday we are fortunate to have a special guest speaker, Professor Michael Rose, one of the leading researchers in the world on the evolution of aging and scientific strategies for health and life extension. His experiments and analysis point towards a heterodox approach to human life extension that has immediate implications on lifestyle and that provides a new scientific paradigm to develop advanced life extension technologies.
Please read the following outline of his research and approach to healthy long life, and bring your questions, comments, and criticisms for the presentation and lively discussion that will follow.
Embracing the power of evolution to stop aging | Dr. Michael Rose
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are easily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Here is a summary from Claude 2:
Aging as a Decline in Adaptation
Aging reflects a progressive decline in adaptation due to weakening natural selection after the onset of reproduction, not inherent biochemical deterioration. Some organisms exhibit no senescence, demonstrating that aging is not inevitable.
Experimental Evolution of Aging
Shifting onset of reproduction in fruit flies quickly changes lifespan and aging rates, demonstrating the malleability of aging by altering natural selection.
Role of Natural Selection in Patterns of Aging
Comparative biology reveals correlations between ecological mortality factors and aging rates, evidencing the role of natural selection in shaping aging.
Human Aging in Evolutionary Context
Humans likely evolved slow aging due to reduced extrinsic mortality from tools, hunting, and sociality attenuating the age-dependent decline in the forces of natural selection.
Impact of Agriculture on Human Aging
Agriculture initially decreased health but populations adapted genetically to cereal and milk diets, primarily during high selection pressure juvenile phases. Older adults retain poor adaptation to agriculture.
Cessation of Aging
There is a late-life cessation of aging where mortality/fertility plateaus due to negligible natural selection. Some populations may exhibit early cessation, investigable with hunter-gatherer lifestyles and medicine. Experiments shifting cessation of reproduction alter timing of aging cessation in flies, demonstrating it is evolvable.
Antagonistic Pleiotropy
Trade-offs between early reproduction and late survival due to antagonistic pleiotropy of genetic variants accelerate senescence. Natural selection favors sacrificing later health for early fertility due to asymmetric forces of natural selection declining with age.
Evolutionary Basis for Life Extension
Evolutionary experimental research provides the strongest framework for understanding the plasticity of aging rates and cessation. Mainstream molecular damage theories inadequately explain aging. Aging should be understood as an evolvable decline in adaptation amenable to genetic and environmental manipulation.
If we look at the historical dramas/biographies that won Best Picture at the Oscars, it seems that some decades of history get a lot more love than other decades. If we look at the decade in which the movies' characters achieved their fame/greatest achievement/etc., it seems that the 1940s and 1960s are really well represented. (So I'd attribute Lawrence of Arabia with the 1910s, because that's when Lawrence when to Arabia even though the movie also includes his death in 1935. But that's not why he's famous).
By my unscientific calculations, no one has yet made a historical drama/biography that won Best Picture set in the 1980s or the 1990s. There have been winners in every other decade since 1910. (Lawrence of Arabia for the 1910s, Chariots of Fire for the 1920s, The King's Speech for the 1930s, Patton for the 1940s, A Beautiful Mind for the 1950s, Green Book for the 1960s, Argo for the 1970s, Spotlight for the 2000s, probably too early for the 2010s and yet we already have Nomadland).
So my first question is: will we ever get a historical drama/biography that wins Best Picture and is centered primarily around people who became famous in the 1980s or 1990s?
When should we expect this movie to come out? How long until we no longer expect this movie to come out?
I need help calculating how far from the Sun a Dyson Swarm would need to orbit to function efficiently. Assume the Swarm uses solar energy emitted by the Sun. The hotter the solar panels are, the less efficient they are at converting sunlight to energy.
At the Earth's distance from the Sun (93 million miles), a solar panel floating in space, receiving full sunlight, would heat up to 120°C. (If the solar panel were shaded by another object, it would cool down to only 3 Kelvin.)
At Mars' distance from the Sun (152 million miles), how hot would the solar panel get? Maybe the Dyson Swarm satellites should orbit at that distance.
"In 529 AD Damascius, the last head of the Academy in Athens, closed down the philosophical school and, with several fellow scholars, went into exile in Persia. This is often portrayed as the final act in “the closing of the western mind” and the beginning of “the darkening age”; the symbolic closing of an institution founded by Plato himself almost a millennium earlier. It is regularly portrayed in popular writing and anti-theist polemic as the end of ancient science and rationalism in the west and the beginning of a one thousand year medieval dark age. But is this true? What was the Academy and why did it close? And what does this tell us about Christianity and intellectual history?"
Given this preliminary snippet, and given I detested Nixey's take, I'm hoping for a good old barney here, though maybe he might be a bit more sympathetic to Jones:
"In 2017 Jones gave newspaper arts journalist Catherine Nixey a glowing pre-publication review for her notorious book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, (Macmillan, 2017), which featured prominently on the book’s cover and in its publicity material. Jones announced enthusiastically that “Nixey’s debut challenges our whole understanding of Christianity’s earliest years and the medieval society that followed” and declared her “a formidable classicist and historian”. Actual experts in the relevant period and subject matter, on the other hand, were rather less than impressed with Nixey’s biased and polemical work, with Oxford Classicist Peter Thonemann pointing to her reliance on “quite a bit of nifty footwork” and Dame Averil Cameron calling it “overstated and unbalanced” and “a travesty” (see “Review – Catherine Nixey ‘The Darkening Age'” for my full critique of Nixey’s rather terrible book).
So perhaps Jones was depending on Nixey when he turned his attention to the subject of Christian responses to Classical philosophy and learning while writing Power and Thrones."
Hi, I've never posted but wanted to give it a try. I found ACX as a senior in college through my bff Daniel and have been reading on and off for a few years now. This blog brought me into to the worlds of Substack, rationalism, and EA, all of which helped shape my current principles and beliefs, so I'm eternally grateful for this community. My favorite posts are the book reviews from ACX readers-- I might ingest more new ideas during the book review contest than any other time of year.
I started blogging daily as an experiment and want to plug it here: https://splattern.substack.com/. I've had a lot of fun writing it. Currently all my readers are close friends, but I think it'd be interesting to share it more broadly. The content has no particular angle, it's whatever I feel like writing about. Thanks.
On some corners of the internet (e.g. reddit) there's commonly-cited advice that you should never, ever talk to the police about anything, and instead you should immediately call a lawyer. This video seems to come up pretty often as support https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE ... of course it's no surprise that the people most keen to promote this meme are criminal defence lawyers.
This seems to me like outstandingly bad advice, assuming you're either not guilty of anything or are guilty of some minor infraction. In the case where you're innocent, the police officer will usually ascertain this after a couple of questions and you'll be on your way. In the case where you're guilty of some minor infraction, if you're polite then you've got a good chance they'll warn you to stop it and send you on your way. Even in the case where they give you a ticket for something, you're much better off paying a few hundred dollars for a ticket than getting arrested and wasting the day in a cell while you pay a lawyer a few grand to stand around and tell them that you're not answering any questions. In all the videos I've seen where someone tries to be as uncooperative as legally possible, they usually wind up making things worse for themselves, not better.
The other day the police approached me to ask me what I was doing in a particular place at a particular time of night. I told them, and they went on their way. I hate to think what would have happened if I'd followed the internet's advice and refused to answer any questions.
In Geeks, Mops and Sociopaths (https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) (which Scott also wrote an essay about here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures) David Chapman argues that as a subculture grows, "geeks" (the true fans) welcome "mops" (casual fans) as it validates their status as "cool" and makes the subculture grow. This seems to make sense on a rational level, as growth of a subculture also means there's a natural increase in The Thing the subculture cares about.
However, my experience is the opposite—as a subculture grows to the point where it's starting to become "mainstream" (i.e. it's starting to lose its status as a subculture), "geeks" usually start gatekeeping aggressively. (Chapman does mention this as well—"successful subcultures always do create costly barriers to entry, to keep out the uncommitted"—but I don't think this really captures the spirit of the kind of gatekeeping I'm thinking of)
Here are some phenomena which, to me, all seem to stem from this effect:
* Eternal September - geeks complaining about "normies" invading the Internet.
* Music - back when people cared more about music than they do now, "casual fans" were derided as "posers" that didn't truly appreciate the music, or did something else that upset the status quo of the ingroup.
* Gamergate seems to have been an expression of this phenomenon, where admittance of women into a traditionally male-dominated hobby seemed to cross some kind of threshold.
Usually the "geeks" don't explicitly state that they're engaging in gatekeeping behaviour—instead of saying "we don't want to dilute our in-group, so you can't join" they usually use some other argument related to lack of skill or understanding, or not fulfilling some very specific set of criteria ("you're not a real X unless..."). To some extent they might not themselves be aware of what they're doing, as protecting the status quo of the in-group is probably a subconscious instinct.
Sorry, now I feel like I'm rambling. Anyhow, have you experienced similar phenomena? And do you agree / disagree that the examples I posted above are caused by the same social dynamic? If so, is there a common name for this phenomenon? (I think "gatekeeping" is a bit too broad to describe it)
A tight space is sometimes described as being claustrophobic. A person who is afraid of tight spaces is also claustrophobic. This only works for tight spaces -- you wouldn't describe a wide open space as agoraphobic, or a spider as arachnophobic. But the adjective "claustrophobic", for some reason, applies to both the fearing subject and the feared object.
Another example: suspicious. A suspicious person can either be a person who is suspicious, or a person about whom suspicions are formed.
Are there other examples of this sort of thing, and does it have a name?
As one does, I periodically see memes like "Trans lesbians sure do love X, Y, and Z!" And X, Y, and Z do seem like things I like/would like if I tried...except I'm a straight cis man. Is there a psychological commonality between me and the average trans lesbian? I believe I have found a contender.
I believe I experience a trans lesbian-like feeling that I would describe as a "revulsion to masculinity." E.g., I don't watch porn with audio because sometimes the man talks, and at no point do I ever want to listen to a man talk. This revulsion has a partial exception for myself, but imagining myself with the physique of a professional bodybuilder grosses me out (not that there is any danger of this ever happening). But what if I didn't make this exception?
I hypothesize that there is a psychological dial in the XY brain labeled "Masc = Ew." If you set this dial to Medium, you get someone like me; if you set it to High, you get a trans lesbian. Trans lesbian-typical interests come along for the ride when the dial moves.
In your hypothetical diverse religion class, are the ideas of the various religions being presented by people who believe in them? Does it still qualify as intellectual diversity if lots of religions are covered but all of them are described by the same person, someone who believes in one or none of them?
Or in other words you are absolutely confident in an opinion that everyone you know shares and that you have never heard a coherent defense of — although you know that you know less about the society in question than did a large number of people who lived in it and held the opposite opinion.
Thus demonstrating the virtues of intellectual diversity and the problem with its absence.
I am not, as it happens, a supporter of apartheid, although I am less confident than you are those who supported it were wrong. But there are other issues, some of which I know quite a lot about, where I have encountered the same pattern of ignorant certainty coming out of the same lack of intellectual diversity in the relevant environment. You can probably guess some of them from my first substack post or the post two before this.
I fancy I have devised the Master Counterargument Against Every Conceivable Atheist Argument. It's very simple really, as it's based on the observation that every argument for atheism omits the conclusion, which is always the same:
> [Some argument that there is no God]
> ... and in conclusion, I know more than Jesus, am therefore better than him, and you should listen to me and not Jesus!
They never say this, and yet, it is always entailed, because really, if Jesus was not the Son of God and you know this to be so, you definitely are better than Jesus: you are right and Jesus was wrong about something extremely central to Jesus. As this conclusion is as false as stating that 1 = 0, you can be certain the preceding argument had some sort of flaw, even if you can't pinpoint it.
It's like I experienced in college, when a math professor solved a very complex equation, and the calculation ended in 1 = 0. He dared us to find where he had made an error. None did. Yet, you could be sure there was some kind of mistake somewhere, because one does not equal zero.
Potentially of interest to young professionals and promising students who want to pursue entrepreneurship, research, or general social impact.
Future Academy is an ambitious five-month program with three tracks: An incubator, a researcher fellowship, and a general career fellowship. The 2023 edition will give talent (especially from India) the opportunity to learn important principles and skills around effective impact and work together on ambitious projects - culminating in a demo day with prizes of up to $50,000.
The program will run from November (2023) to end of March (2024).
I have a stats question that is probably pretty simple, but I'm rusty enough with stats I can't figure out how to do it, and can't find the answer with some moderate effort online. Google did't give a link to an answer in the first dozen or so responses, and GPT4 gave a clearly wrong answer.
If someone got a z score of A the first time they take a test, what is the probability they will get a higher score B or better the second time? Assume there is no practice effect, and let's call the test-retest reliability of the test R.
What's the latest on ocean fertilization? Why aren't countries with large fishing industries all over this: couldn't it dramatically increase fishing yields? Who are the players who are pushing to make it reality and what support do they need?
The Last Psychiatrist said this about the Barbie movie on Twitter:
> #Barbie is fun, spiteful, and so un-self-aware it needs Haldol, or Jesus. E.g. it despises fascist patriarchy, but only the patriarchy part. It longs for the fascism. I looked from pig to man and man to pig and pig to man again, but it was impossible to say which was which.
What might they have meant by that? What parts of the movie do you think stood out to them, and why? What was your interpretation of the Barbie movie?
Does anyone else have trouble understanding Zvi’s blog? It seems like he focuses on including as much information as possible, as opposed to making it clear and easy to read (unlike Scott).
I've been here (and on SlateStarCodex, and on Scott's livejournal before that) a long time, previously commenting as Eric Rall. I've semi-recently realized I'm trans, and I'm in the later stages of coming out publicly now. So going forwards, I'm Erica, with she/her pronouns.
Also, I would like to apologize for inadvertently tainting the autogynophilia dataset from the 2020 SSC survey. I'd responded to that survey with how I'd thought of myself at the time (straight cis man), which I have since realized to be in error.
Is there a well-known range as to how tan white people can get with prolonged sun exposure? I'm a standard-looking white guy with dark hair and blue eyes, and as far as I know based on family history all of my descendants were northern European, mostly from the British isles. (Also if I grow my beard out it's partially red). Without a lot of sun you couldn't pick me out from a crowd of 'normal' white folks. But under prolonged sun (like a summer of hiking, or construction when I was a kid) I get tan enough that people ask if I'm part Native or Middle Eastern. I become like an Italian with blue eyes.
Is there just a huge spectrum on potential skin tone? Of course I could have a darker skinned ancestor somewhere back there in the gene pool. But then wouldn't my baseline skin tone be slightly darker all the time, not just after tanning? Again without a lot of sun I am 100% pasty, my legs are like disturbingly pale in the winter
Has anyone done analysis on what sorting mechanisms produce true intellectual diversity? I'm a university student, and after conversing with a friend about the decision banning affirmative action in the US, we came to the conclusion that it's a good thing because race is a poor proxy for true intellectual diversity. That being said, what sorts of things should colleges weight their admissions by in order to produce intellectually diverse campuses?
We did come to the conclusion that race could have a small weight, as it affects your experience of living in the us, but I personally like ethnicity better as a factor. I'm a white Cuban, but culturally I'm much more Latin than the average white person--and culture seems a much better factor to seek diversity in, than skin color. Some other factors I would think important to sorting for intellectual diversity: socioeconomic status, religion, political beliefs, desired area of study (which they already do), hobbies(?), Etc. Some of these seem impossible to sort by in the current environment (can you imagine the headlines if a university started letting in Republicans preferentially because they were underrepresented on campus), but perhaps there's some mix of factors that can replace affirmative action while still achieving one of its goals, which was intellectual diversity (if I'm to believe the emails I've gotten from my university).
This is ignoring the "account for racism" part of affirmative action, ie letting in more black people because due to racism they haven't had the same scholastic resources growing up. This is an admirable goal, also with it's faults, but not what I'm curious about.
How important is visualization w.r.t. the interpretability (or broader alignment) problem? Specifically, is there need+opportunity for impact of frontend engineers in that space?
For background I’ve got 10 years of experience, most of which has been on frontend data visualization stuff, currently at Google. I looked around at some different teams within Google and saw Tensorboard and the Learning Interpretability Tool, but it’s unclear to me how much those teams are bottlenecked by visualization implementation problems vs research problems of knowing where/how to even look, and I’d like to have more background before I cold-call them directly
I've been playing around with Claude 2 (an LLM optimised for analysing texts) and I'm extremely impressed with it's general reasoning abilities. Talking to it feels a lot like talking to a humanities professor that reads and writes super humanly fast, is on a light dose of psychedelics and only suffers from mild dementia. You can ask it to review essays, responses to that essay other essays on the same topic with different perspectives, and its response is usually very convincing.
I'm wondering if we're rapidly approaching the end of the age where it's reasonable for humans to argue with each other about how the world works.
when Claude 3+, instead of arguing over different interpretations of economics we'll just ask the 300IQ AI that's read every text ever written on the topic and contemplated the issue for the human equivalent of 10,000 years to weigh in, and it'' answer "with 87% certainty the correct view is a synthesis of Neo-Keynesianism mixed with anarcho-primitivist elements."
In a few years are we likely to have something close to definitive answers to our long run ideological disputes?
There’s a common fallacy (very pronounced in most politics) where people overestimate the importance and contribution of certain factors in their understanding and explanation of complex phenomena. Often to the exclusion of all other factors. (E.g. “We failed in Iraq because of X”, “I’m obese because of my genes”, “the only reason people associate with the right or the left politically, is tribal”.)
Does this have a catchy name? Has anyone done any interesting work on it, and written anything good and accessible? I’d like to understand better how some things grow to seemingly outsized importance in our mind, and how we can become better and more accurate in assessing factors. (Not that I think I’m particularly bad at it, but it seems like such an important thing to get right, calibrate correctly, and be able to talk about effectively, in constructive discussions.)
In a dystopian mirror universe, a highlight of the Olympic Games is the random selection of one person between the ages of 12 and 72 [1] from each country to compete in the sport of their choosing at the next Games [2].
If that random person fails to medal [3], they will be thrown into the Olympic Cauldron to die by fire.
If a panel of experts agree that an elite athlete has deliberately lost in order to put a random person on the medal podium, the athlete will be tossed into the Cauldron along with the random person (but that has never happened because this practice has always been part of the mirror universe's Olympics culture and only a tiny minority of bleeding heart weirdos find it problematic).
Please note that the randomly selected people have unlimited access to every resource the elite athletes might have; the very best training facilities, equipment, emotionally invested elite athlete team members (if applicable), coaches, sports medicine / psychologists as well as bleeding-edge general medical care, the finest nutrition, comfortable housing for the random person and their entire family, and so on. Furthermore, the random person's job will be held for them and their income from the job will be replaced by the M.U.I.O.C. while they are in training. In addition, they will receive fame, prizes, and promotional opportunities if they medal.
You are the random person selected to compete for your country in the next Olympic Games.
Which sport do you choose, and why?
[1] Twelve and 72 because that is the historical age range of Olympic medalists.
[2] For the sake of simplicity, the mirror universe holds the Summer and Winter Games concurrently. The randomly selected people may choose any Olympic sport (https://olympics.com/en/sports/) and have the usual four years to train for it.
[3] Note that those who never compete at all, like alternates, do not receive medals.
Mostly facetiously, I sometimes wonder if the apparently widespread cultural idea in current America that licorice (‘black’ licorice) and raisins are foul, unpleasant foods rather than delicious sweet treats that people devoted a lot of time and resources into making because they are so delicious, indicates some actual shift in the perception of taste, flavour, and texture.
Shouldn't we put negative weight toward the contribution of AI Safety experts to making AI forecasts?
By way of analogy, consider that since 1947, the Doomsday Clock from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has been an average of approximately 7 minutes away from midnight. If this is a rough forecast of the imminence of nuclear war, the Atomic Safety experts have not only kind of wrong but horribly wrong on nuclear predictions. Setting aside the possibility of some anthropic principle, there hasn't been a single nuclear attack since 1945. Even the most reluctant Bayesian would have to be embarrassed on behalf of these Atomic Safety experts.
But, just as I would seek the advice of an Atomic Safety expert for securing our nuclear stockpile, I would still ask AI Safety experts how best to align AIs. The cautionary tale of the Doomsday Clock simply suggests I should bet against the actual forecasts of AI Safety experts.
Picking the right experts to inform forecasts is not only not trivial, it's frequently adversarial. Professional stock pickers, for example, are anti-experts. Nurses were often terrible relayers of COVID conspiracy theories during the Pandemic. It's almost as if we need a special mention of the Dunning-Kruger effect but for proximate experts.
Probably an unpopular opinion: if you're an English speaker, I don't think there's any point in learning a second language unless you have a very specific reason to. Eg. you just accepted a job in Spain, or your wife's family speaks only Korean.
People talk about only speaking one language as if it's an intellectual shortcoming, but it's a huge time investment with very little payoff for 99% of people.
I've come to this conclusion after spending years on and off learning French and German, only to spend several weeks in France and Germany and not need anything but English. Nor did I need to speak local languages in advance of weeks of travelling southeast Asia. AI based translation now makes monolingual travel even easier.
Yes I'm sure being able to read Russian poetry would be enriching, but it's not like I've exhausted English poetry yet. And there's a lot of enriching activities I could do in the hundreds or thousands of hours it takes to learn a language.
Edit: thanks for your thoughtful replies. After reading lots of them I realise I've underestimated how many people intrinsically enjoy learning languages for it's own sake. Consider my comment one side of a bravery debate (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/), aimed at people like my younger self who didn't enjoy learning languages but felt they were supposed to. If you enjoy learning languages then the equation will be completely different for you.
I do think that non-elective language subjects in school are utterly pointless though.
Has anyone ever managed to get the block or mute functions on Substack working properly? I've tried a couple of times to block or mute certain users whose comments I find irritating and unenlightening, but without it making any apparent difference (i.e. I can still see their comments).
Hey, Scott, the New York City meetup is confusingly listed as "Manhattan, New York". This will cause a lot of people to fail to find it and think there isn't one. Could you change it to "New York City, New York" or "New York, New York" so people can actually find it? Thanks!
How are you supposed to counter when someone responds to an analogy of yours with "Did you *really* just compare X and Y?"
Looks like we lost trebuchet. :-(
A) you keep speaking out of both sides of your mouth saying the _school_ is doing it to them. It's not clear what that would mean or that it's happening. Evidence please, and not of the anecdote variety.
B) Do you have literally any other examples? Anything at all? Are we really just in "extremism is anything I don't like" land? You say piles big - what else is in there? Evidence please.
ACXLW Longevity (special guest speaker) 9/2/23
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wu69N0x-dvEN3NImEDCEZfd0MOeCQe6cS4AolAdiCuc/edit?usp=sharing
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 41st Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays thereafter.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, Sept 2, 2023
Time: 2 PM
This Saturday we are fortunate to have a special guest speaker, Professor Michael Rose, one of the leading researchers in the world on the evolution of aging and scientific strategies for health and life extension. His experiments and analysis point towards a heterodox approach to human life extension that has immediate implications on lifestyle and that provides a new scientific paradigm to develop advanced life extension technologies.
Please read the following outline of his research and approach to healthy long life, and bring your questions, comments, and criticisms for the presentation and lively discussion that will follow.
This link is the summary:
https://55theses.org/the-55-theses/
The full text starts on this web page and continues on linked pages in the sidebar:
https://55theses.org/2011/03/18/thesis-1/
Or, if you want the 55 theses on evolutionary strategies for aging and commentary, a full-length PDF is here:
https://michaelroses55.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/55-theses-explained-final.pdf
A 20 minute audio is available here:
https://youtu.be/vd6Dm978dbg?si=_X6noVVrCKw9T-tD
Embracing the power of evolution to stop aging | Dr. Michael Rose
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are easily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Here is a summary from Claude 2:
Aging as a Decline in Adaptation
Aging reflects a progressive decline in adaptation due to weakening natural selection after the onset of reproduction, not inherent biochemical deterioration. Some organisms exhibit no senescence, demonstrating that aging is not inevitable.
Experimental Evolution of Aging
Shifting onset of reproduction in fruit flies quickly changes lifespan and aging rates, demonstrating the malleability of aging by altering natural selection.
Role of Natural Selection in Patterns of Aging
Comparative biology reveals correlations between ecological mortality factors and aging rates, evidencing the role of natural selection in shaping aging.
Human Aging in Evolutionary Context
Humans likely evolved slow aging due to reduced extrinsic mortality from tools, hunting, and sociality attenuating the age-dependent decline in the forces of natural selection.
Impact of Agriculture on Human Aging
Agriculture initially decreased health but populations adapted genetically to cereal and milk diets, primarily during high selection pressure juvenile phases. Older adults retain poor adaptation to agriculture.
Cessation of Aging
There is a late-life cessation of aging where mortality/fertility plateaus due to negligible natural selection. Some populations may exhibit early cessation, investigable with hunter-gatherer lifestyles and medicine. Experiments shifting cessation of reproduction alter timing of aging cessation in flies, demonstrating it is evolvable.
Antagonistic Pleiotropy
Trade-offs between early reproduction and late survival due to antagonistic pleiotropy of genetic variants accelerate senescence. Natural selection favors sacrificing later health for early fertility due to asymmetric forces of natural selection declining with age.
Evolutionary Basis for Life Extension
Evolutionary experimental research provides the strongest framework for understanding the plasticity of aging rates and cessation. Mainstream molecular damage theories inadequately explain aging. Aging should be understood as an evolvable decline in adaptation amenable to genetic and environmental manipulation.
If we look at the historical dramas/biographies that won Best Picture at the Oscars, it seems that some decades of history get a lot more love than other decades. If we look at the decade in which the movies' characters achieved their fame/greatest achievement/etc., it seems that the 1940s and 1960s are really well represented. (So I'd attribute Lawrence of Arabia with the 1910s, because that's when Lawrence when to Arabia even though the movie also includes his death in 1935. But that's not why he's famous).
By my unscientific calculations, no one has yet made a historical drama/biography that won Best Picture set in the 1980s or the 1990s. There have been winners in every other decade since 1910. (Lawrence of Arabia for the 1910s, Chariots of Fire for the 1920s, The King's Speech for the 1930s, Patton for the 1940s, A Beautiful Mind for the 1950s, Green Book for the 1960s, Argo for the 1970s, Spotlight for the 2000s, probably too early for the 2010s and yet we already have Nomadland).
So my first question is: will we ever get a historical drama/biography that wins Best Picture and is centered primarily around people who became famous in the 1980s or 1990s?
When should we expect this movie to come out? How long until we no longer expect this movie to come out?
Is the U.S. uniquely positioned to survive a zombie outbreak? Consider its relevant advantages:
1) Large, strong military
2) Large government that is reasonably good at organizing things in emergencies
3) Widespread personal gun ownership
4) Common for people to have large amounts of food in their houses that doesn't quickly go bad (e.g. - boxes of pasta, canned foods)
Which countries are uniquely VULNERABLE to zombie outbreaks?
I need help calculating how far from the Sun a Dyson Swarm would need to orbit to function efficiently. Assume the Swarm uses solar energy emitted by the Sun. The hotter the solar panels are, the less efficient they are at converting sunlight to energy.
At the Earth's distance from the Sun (93 million miles), a solar panel floating in space, receiving full sunlight, would heat up to 120°C. (If the solar panel were shaded by another object, it would cool down to only 3 Kelvin.)
At Mars' distance from the Sun (152 million miles), how hot would the solar panel get? Maybe the Dyson Swarm satellites should orbit at that distance.
I wonder what are y'all's favorite vowels.
(I like "A", as in "ah", because I'm boring.)
Huzzah, History for Atheists has a new post up and it's a book review!
https://historyforatheists.com/2023/08/the-closing-of-the-athenian-academy/
"In 529 AD Damascius, the last head of the Academy in Athens, closed down the philosophical school and, with several fellow scholars, went into exile in Persia. This is often portrayed as the final act in “the closing of the western mind” and the beginning of “the darkening age”; the symbolic closing of an institution founded by Plato himself almost a millennium earlier. It is regularly portrayed in popular writing and anti-theist polemic as the end of ancient science and rationalism in the west and the beginning of a one thousand year medieval dark age. But is this true? What was the Academy and why did it close? And what does this tell us about Christianity and intellectual history?"
Given this preliminary snippet, and given I detested Nixey's take, I'm hoping for a good old barney here, though maybe he might be a bit more sympathetic to Jones:
"In 2017 Jones gave newspaper arts journalist Catherine Nixey a glowing pre-publication review for her notorious book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, (Macmillan, 2017), which featured prominently on the book’s cover and in its publicity material. Jones announced enthusiastically that “Nixey’s debut challenges our whole understanding of Christianity’s earliest years and the medieval society that followed” and declared her “a formidable classicist and historian”. Actual experts in the relevant period and subject matter, on the other hand, were rather less than impressed with Nixey’s biased and polemical work, with Oxford Classicist Peter Thonemann pointing to her reliance on “quite a bit of nifty footwork” and Dame Averil Cameron calling it “overstated and unbalanced” and “a travesty” (see “Review – Catherine Nixey ‘The Darkening Age'” for my full critique of Nixey’s rather terrible book).
So perhaps Jones was depending on Nixey when he turned his attention to the subject of Christian responses to Classical philosophy and learning while writing Power and Thrones."
Hi, I've never posted but wanted to give it a try. I found ACX as a senior in college through my bff Daniel and have been reading on and off for a few years now. This blog brought me into to the worlds of Substack, rationalism, and EA, all of which helped shape my current principles and beliefs, so I'm eternally grateful for this community. My favorite posts are the book reviews from ACX readers-- I might ingest more new ideas during the book review contest than any other time of year.
I started blogging daily as an experiment and want to plug it here: https://splattern.substack.com/. I've had a lot of fun writing it. Currently all my readers are close friends, but I think it'd be interesting to share it more broadly. The content has no particular angle, it's whatever I feel like writing about. Thanks.
On some corners of the internet (e.g. reddit) there's commonly-cited advice that you should never, ever talk to the police about anything, and instead you should immediately call a lawyer. This video seems to come up pretty often as support https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE ... of course it's no surprise that the people most keen to promote this meme are criminal defence lawyers.
This seems to me like outstandingly bad advice, assuming you're either not guilty of anything or are guilty of some minor infraction. In the case where you're innocent, the police officer will usually ascertain this after a couple of questions and you'll be on your way. In the case where you're guilty of some minor infraction, if you're polite then you've got a good chance they'll warn you to stop it and send you on your way. Even in the case where they give you a ticket for something, you're much better off paying a few hundred dollars for a ticket than getting arrested and wasting the day in a cell while you pay a lawyer a few grand to stand around and tell them that you're not answering any questions. In all the videos I've seen where someone tries to be as uncooperative as legally possible, they usually wind up making things worse for themselves, not better.
The other day the police approached me to ask me what I was doing in a particular place at a particular time of night. I told them, and they went on their way. I hate to think what would have happened if I'd followed the internet's advice and refused to answer any questions.
In Geeks, Mops and Sociopaths (https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths) (which Scott also wrote an essay about here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-cyclic-theory-of-subcultures) David Chapman argues that as a subculture grows, "geeks" (the true fans) welcome "mops" (casual fans) as it validates their status as "cool" and makes the subculture grow. This seems to make sense on a rational level, as growth of a subculture also means there's a natural increase in The Thing the subculture cares about.
However, my experience is the opposite—as a subculture grows to the point where it's starting to become "mainstream" (i.e. it's starting to lose its status as a subculture), "geeks" usually start gatekeeping aggressively. (Chapman does mention this as well—"successful subcultures always do create costly barriers to entry, to keep out the uncommitted"—but I don't think this really captures the spirit of the kind of gatekeeping I'm thinking of)
Here are some phenomena which, to me, all seem to stem from this effect:
* Eternal September - geeks complaining about "normies" invading the Internet.
* Music - back when people cared more about music than they do now, "casual fans" were derided as "posers" that didn't truly appreciate the music, or did something else that upset the status quo of the ingroup.
* Gamergate seems to have been an expression of this phenomenon, where admittance of women into a traditionally male-dominated hobby seemed to cross some kind of threshold.
Usually the "geeks" don't explicitly state that they're engaging in gatekeeping behaviour—instead of saying "we don't want to dilute our in-group, so you can't join" they usually use some other argument related to lack of skill or understanding, or not fulfilling some very specific set of criteria ("you're not a real X unless..."). To some extent they might not themselves be aware of what they're doing, as protecting the status quo of the in-group is probably a subconscious instinct.
Sorry, now I feel like I'm rambling. Anyhow, have you experienced similar phenomena? And do you agree / disagree that the examples I posted above are caused by the same social dynamic? If so, is there a common name for this phenomenon? (I think "gatekeeping" is a bit too broad to describe it)
Dating ad: I’m a 28-year-old woman (she / her pronouns) who works as an AI alignment researcher and lives in Berkeley, CA. I’m looking for a man, aged ~24-34, who lives in the Bay Area and is looking for a primary, monogam-ish, or monogamous partner. Check out my dating doc! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n_O2nBYJwsZDSXXrVCo9zZHVioeHyvjNWRk6TVCauS8/edit?usp=sharing
(And Scott, please let me know if this kind of content isn't what you want in the open thread.)
Grammar time!
A tight space is sometimes described as being claustrophobic. A person who is afraid of tight spaces is also claustrophobic. This only works for tight spaces -- you wouldn't describe a wide open space as agoraphobic, or a spider as arachnophobic. But the adjective "claustrophobic", for some reason, applies to both the fearing subject and the feared object.
Another example: suspicious. A suspicious person can either be a person who is suspicious, or a person about whom suspicions are formed.
Are there other examples of this sort of thing, and does it have a name?
Thoughts on gender:
As one does, I periodically see memes like "Trans lesbians sure do love X, Y, and Z!" And X, Y, and Z do seem like things I like/would like if I tried...except I'm a straight cis man. Is there a psychological commonality between me and the average trans lesbian? I believe I have found a contender.
I believe I experience a trans lesbian-like feeling that I would describe as a "revulsion to masculinity." E.g., I don't watch porn with audio because sometimes the man talks, and at no point do I ever want to listen to a man talk. This revulsion has a partial exception for myself, but imagining myself with the physique of a professional bodybuilder grosses me out (not that there is any danger of this ever happening). But what if I didn't make this exception?
I hypothesize that there is a psychological dial in the XY brain labeled "Masc = Ew." If you set this dial to Medium, you get someone like me; if you set it to High, you get a trans lesbian. Trans lesbian-typical interests come along for the ride when the dial moves.
You've been reading Brendan's Just So Stories.
@JMJ:
In your hypothetical diverse religion class, are the ideas of the various religions being presented by people who believe in them? Does it still qualify as intellectual diversity if lots of religions are covered but all of them are described by the same person, someone who believes in one or none of them?
Or in other words you are absolutely confident in an opinion that everyone you know shares and that you have never heard a coherent defense of — although you know that you know less about the society in question than did a large number of people who lived in it and held the opposite opinion.
Thus demonstrating the virtues of intellectual diversity and the problem with its absence.
I am not, as it happens, a supporter of apartheid, although I am less confident than you are those who supported it were wrong. But there are other issues, some of which I know quite a lot about, where I have encountered the same pattern of ignorant certainty coming out of the same lack of intellectual diversity in the relevant environment. You can probably guess some of them from my first substack post or the post two before this.
Oh, well. Better luck next time...
"How Science Sleuths Showed LK-99 Isn't a Superconductor"...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7
I have a "review" of Ramaswamy's proposal for backing the dollar with a basket of commodities: https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/ramaswamy-and-the-fed
Vivek Ramaswamy gets high profile endorsement.
From O J Simpson.
Ain't he lucky.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/08/27/vivek-ramaswamy-oj-simpson-nfl-football-debate-george-soros-murder-1994/
I fancy I have devised the Master Counterargument Against Every Conceivable Atheist Argument. It's very simple really, as it's based on the observation that every argument for atheism omits the conclusion, which is always the same:
> [Some argument that there is no God]
> ... and in conclusion, I know more than Jesus, am therefore better than him, and you should listen to me and not Jesus!
They never say this, and yet, it is always entailed, because really, if Jesus was not the Son of God and you know this to be so, you definitely are better than Jesus: you are right and Jesus was wrong about something extremely central to Jesus. As this conclusion is as false as stating that 1 = 0, you can be certain the preceding argument had some sort of flaw, even if you can't pinpoint it.
It's like I experienced in college, when a math professor solved a very complex equation, and the calculation ended in 1 = 0. He dared us to find where he had made an error. None did. Yet, you could be sure there was some kind of mistake somewhere, because one does not equal zero.
The same with atheism.
Potentially of interest to young professionals and promising students who want to pursue entrepreneurship, research, or general social impact.
Future Academy is an ambitious five-month program with three tracks: An incubator, a researcher fellowship, and a general career fellowship. The 2023 edition will give talent (especially from India) the opportunity to learn important principles and skills around effective impact and work together on ambitious projects - culminating in a demo day with prizes of up to $50,000.
The program will run from November (2023) to end of March (2024).
You can learn more about the program at https://impactacademy.org/future-academy/ and apply at https://airtable.com/appXZX9Gd8QRdoLWn/shrTfEhXGPbR3ORp1
I have a stats question that is probably pretty simple, but I'm rusty enough with stats I can't figure out how to do it, and can't find the answer with some moderate effort online. Google did't give a link to an answer in the first dozen or so responses, and GPT4 gave a clearly wrong answer.
If someone got a z score of A the first time they take a test, what is the probability they will get a higher score B or better the second time? Assume there is no practice effect, and let's call the test-retest reliability of the test R.
If you are in NYC, I'll be in this show at KGB Bar on Friday. Probably, you have weekend plans. If you don't, tho, you should come!
It's a story telling show (like The Moth, but not The Moth)
This is my second time on the show. My story this time will be about my initiation into the advanced debate team at my high school in Kansas.
There's a gun.
Tickets are like $12? Get them here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/tale-nycs-finest-storytelling-tickets-701121943607
It's a fun space. I'm sure the other performers are good, too, but I don't know them.
What's the latest on ocean fertilization? Why aren't countries with large fishing industries all over this: couldn't it dramatically increase fishing yields? Who are the players who are pushing to make it reality and what support do they need?
I just realized that in the study of anglophysics, a cis person taking HRT would have trans-cended to godhood and become christ.
Over 95% of US journalists have – at least – a bachelor's degree.
Diana Marcum didn't. And she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.
https://fragmentsintime.substack.com/p/the-tenth-island
The Last Psychiatrist said this about the Barbie movie on Twitter:
> #Barbie is fun, spiteful, and so un-self-aware it needs Haldol, or Jesus. E.g. it despises fascist patriarchy, but only the patriarchy part. It longs for the fascism. I looked from pig to man and man to pig and pig to man again, but it was impossible to say which was which.
What might they have meant by that? What parts of the movie do you think stood out to them, and why? What was your interpretation of the Barbie movie?
Does anyone else have trouble understanding Zvi’s blog? It seems like he focuses on including as much information as possible, as opposed to making it clear and easy to read (unlike Scott).
I've been here (and on SlateStarCodex, and on Scott's livejournal before that) a long time, previously commenting as Eric Rall. I've semi-recently realized I'm trans, and I'm in the later stages of coming out publicly now. So going forwards, I'm Erica, with she/her pronouns.
Also, I would like to apologize for inadvertently tainting the autogynophilia dataset from the 2020 SSC survey. I'd responded to that survey with how I'd thought of myself at the time (straight cis man), which I have since realized to be in error.
Is there a well-known range as to how tan white people can get with prolonged sun exposure? I'm a standard-looking white guy with dark hair and blue eyes, and as far as I know based on family history all of my descendants were northern European, mostly from the British isles. (Also if I grow my beard out it's partially red). Without a lot of sun you couldn't pick me out from a crowd of 'normal' white folks. But under prolonged sun (like a summer of hiking, or construction when I was a kid) I get tan enough that people ask if I'm part Native or Middle Eastern. I become like an Italian with blue eyes.
Is there just a huge spectrum on potential skin tone? Of course I could have a darker skinned ancestor somewhere back there in the gene pool. But then wouldn't my baseline skin tone be slightly darker all the time, not just after tanning? Again without a lot of sun I am 100% pasty, my legs are like disturbingly pale in the winter
Has anyone done analysis on what sorting mechanisms produce true intellectual diversity? I'm a university student, and after conversing with a friend about the decision banning affirmative action in the US, we came to the conclusion that it's a good thing because race is a poor proxy for true intellectual diversity. That being said, what sorts of things should colleges weight their admissions by in order to produce intellectually diverse campuses?
We did come to the conclusion that race could have a small weight, as it affects your experience of living in the us, but I personally like ethnicity better as a factor. I'm a white Cuban, but culturally I'm much more Latin than the average white person--and culture seems a much better factor to seek diversity in, than skin color. Some other factors I would think important to sorting for intellectual diversity: socioeconomic status, religion, political beliefs, desired area of study (which they already do), hobbies(?), Etc. Some of these seem impossible to sort by in the current environment (can you imagine the headlines if a university started letting in Republicans preferentially because they were underrepresented on campus), but perhaps there's some mix of factors that can replace affirmative action while still achieving one of its goals, which was intellectual diversity (if I'm to believe the emails I've gotten from my university).
This is ignoring the "account for racism" part of affirmative action, ie letting in more black people because due to racism they haven't had the same scholastic resources growing up. This is an admirable goal, also with it's faults, but not what I'm curious about.
How important is visualization w.r.t. the interpretability (or broader alignment) problem? Specifically, is there need+opportunity for impact of frontend engineers in that space?
For background I’ve got 10 years of experience, most of which has been on frontend data visualization stuff, currently at Google. I looked around at some different teams within Google and saw Tensorboard and the Learning Interpretability Tool, but it’s unclear to me how much those teams are bottlenecked by visualization implementation problems vs research problems of knowing where/how to even look, and I’d like to have more background before I cold-call them directly
I've been playing around with Claude 2 (an LLM optimised for analysing texts) and I'm extremely impressed with it's general reasoning abilities. Talking to it feels a lot like talking to a humanities professor that reads and writes super humanly fast, is on a light dose of psychedelics and only suffers from mild dementia. You can ask it to review essays, responses to that essay other essays on the same topic with different perspectives, and its response is usually very convincing.
I'm wondering if we're rapidly approaching the end of the age where it's reasonable for humans to argue with each other about how the world works.
when Claude 3+, instead of arguing over different interpretations of economics we'll just ask the 300IQ AI that's read every text ever written on the topic and contemplated the issue for the human equivalent of 10,000 years to weigh in, and it'' answer "with 87% certainty the correct view is a synthesis of Neo-Keynesianism mixed with anarcho-primitivist elements."
In a few years are we likely to have something close to definitive answers to our long run ideological disputes?
There’s a common fallacy (very pronounced in most politics) where people overestimate the importance and contribution of certain factors in their understanding and explanation of complex phenomena. Often to the exclusion of all other factors. (E.g. “We failed in Iraq because of X”, “I’m obese because of my genes”, “the only reason people associate with the right or the left politically, is tribal”.)
Does this have a catchy name? Has anyone done any interesting work on it, and written anything good and accessible? I’d like to understand better how some things grow to seemingly outsized importance in our mind, and how we can become better and more accurate in assessing factors. (Not that I think I’m particularly bad at it, but it seems like such an important thing to get right, calibrate correctly, and be able to talk about effectively, in constructive discussions.)
Why was meditation never a Western tradition until recently? Is it simply due to the prevalence of prayer in a Judeo Christian society?
In a dystopian mirror universe, a highlight of the Olympic Games is the random selection of one person between the ages of 12 and 72 [1] from each country to compete in the sport of their choosing at the next Games [2].
If that random person fails to medal [3], they will be thrown into the Olympic Cauldron to die by fire.
If a panel of experts agree that an elite athlete has deliberately lost in order to put a random person on the medal podium, the athlete will be tossed into the Cauldron along with the random person (but that has never happened because this practice has always been part of the mirror universe's Olympics culture and only a tiny minority of bleeding heart weirdos find it problematic).
Please note that the randomly selected people have unlimited access to every resource the elite athletes might have; the very best training facilities, equipment, emotionally invested elite athlete team members (if applicable), coaches, sports medicine / psychologists as well as bleeding-edge general medical care, the finest nutrition, comfortable housing for the random person and their entire family, and so on. Furthermore, the random person's job will be held for them and their income from the job will be replaced by the M.U.I.O.C. while they are in training. In addition, they will receive fame, prizes, and promotional opportunities if they medal.
You are the random person selected to compete for your country in the next Olympic Games.
Which sport do you choose, and why?
[1] Twelve and 72 because that is the historical age range of Olympic medalists.
[2] For the sake of simplicity, the mirror universe holds the Summer and Winter Games concurrently. The randomly selected people may choose any Olympic sport (https://olympics.com/en/sports/) and have the usual four years to train for it.
[3] Note that those who never compete at all, like alternates, do not receive medals.
Mostly facetiously, I sometimes wonder if the apparently widespread cultural idea in current America that licorice (‘black’ licorice) and raisins are foul, unpleasant foods rather than delicious sweet treats that people devoted a lot of time and resources into making because they are so delicious, indicates some actual shift in the perception of taste, flavour, and texture.
See also fruit cake, and less soft gummies. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/07/american-gummy-candy-chewy-food-texture-preferences/674635/
Anyone know who won the AI Worldview Contest?
https://www.openphilanthropy.org/open-philanthropy-ai-worldviews-contest/
In your opinion, what's the best way to deal with anxiety?
Shouldn't we put negative weight toward the contribution of AI Safety experts to making AI forecasts?
By way of analogy, consider that since 1947, the Doomsday Clock from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has been an average of approximately 7 minutes away from midnight. If this is a rough forecast of the imminence of nuclear war, the Atomic Safety experts have not only kind of wrong but horribly wrong on nuclear predictions. Setting aside the possibility of some anthropic principle, there hasn't been a single nuclear attack since 1945. Even the most reluctant Bayesian would have to be embarrassed on behalf of these Atomic Safety experts.
But, just as I would seek the advice of an Atomic Safety expert for securing our nuclear stockpile, I would still ask AI Safety experts how best to align AIs. The cautionary tale of the Doomsday Clock simply suggests I should bet against the actual forecasts of AI Safety experts.
Picking the right experts to inform forecasts is not only not trivial, it's frequently adversarial. Professional stock pickers, for example, are anti-experts. Nurses were often terrible relayers of COVID conspiracy theories during the Pandemic. It's almost as if we need a special mention of the Dunning-Kruger effect but for proximate experts.
Previously: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-290/comment/36856231
Probably an unpopular opinion: if you're an English speaker, I don't think there's any point in learning a second language unless you have a very specific reason to. Eg. you just accepted a job in Spain, or your wife's family speaks only Korean.
People talk about only speaking one language as if it's an intellectual shortcoming, but it's a huge time investment with very little payoff for 99% of people.
I've come to this conclusion after spending years on and off learning French and German, only to spend several weeks in France and Germany and not need anything but English. Nor did I need to speak local languages in advance of weeks of travelling southeast Asia. AI based translation now makes monolingual travel even easier.
Yes I'm sure being able to read Russian poetry would be enriching, but it's not like I've exhausted English poetry yet. And there's a lot of enriching activities I could do in the hundreds or thousands of hours it takes to learn a language.
Edit: thanks for your thoughtful replies. After reading lots of them I realise I've underestimated how many people intrinsically enjoy learning languages for it's own sake. Consider my comment one side of a bravery debate (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/), aimed at people like my younger self who didn't enjoy learning languages but felt they were supposed to. If you enjoy learning languages then the equation will be completely different for you.
I do think that non-elective language subjects in school are utterly pointless though.
Has anyone ever managed to get the block or mute functions on Substack working properly? I've tried a couple of times to block or mute certain users whose comments I find irritating and unenlightening, but without it making any apparent difference (i.e. I can still see their comments).
Hey, Scott, the New York City meetup is confusingly listed as "Manhattan, New York". This will cause a lot of people to fail to find it and think there isn't one. Could you change it to "New York City, New York" or "New York, New York" so people can actually find it? Thanks!
I urge everyone to sign the international Declaration on Women's Sex-Based Rights: https://www.womensdeclaration.com