I know someone who is 18 and has no clue what to do in life. Is going to university and just taking whatever prereqs with no idea, not even the first clue, despite all kinds of probing questions, what she wants to do.
I recommended maybe volunteering for charity. As a first pass, I went to Givewell's site to see if they had some recommendation where to volunteer and, surprisingly, I could find nothing.
So what are the best charities to volunteer for right now? How do you find out?
Does anyone here have any (personal or second-hand) experience in successfully treating height-related body image issues in men through therapy, and could recommend a good therapist (possibly from the ACX list) in the Bay Area or remote?
I’m 5’5 and past therapy attempts have been pretty unsuccessful, with some of my past therapists basically having taken the position of this just being a minor cosmetic issue with few real-life implications (I also got the feeling that it used to be way less of an issue before online dating, but alas I live in those changed times).
I’m looking for medical blog recommendations with a similar style to Scott’s but focused almost entirely on doctoring and medicine. Ideally one with thoughtful takes on both the day-to-day of medicine and interesting topics in medicine as a whole. As medical student, I’ve searched around for one but never found one anywhere near the quality of Scott’s.
There's a thing I'm annoyed about, and it isn't worthy of a full post, so ... here we go.
If you’re baffled/confused/upset about why the American public is still up in arms about inflation, even though it’s down - here’s a question for you.
Were you equally baffled/confused/upset when the public didn’t react at all to inflation until it had been going on for a little while?
Let's say for the sake of argument that 10% inflation is bad. We had 10% inflation -before- the public really got upset about it. Were you looking around wondering why nobody was getting upset about it at the time? Or did you not notice, for the same reason none of them noticed - it hadn't had time to actually have a substantive impact on your wallet?
Demanding everybody calm down about inflation after prices have inflated by some amount, because they're no longer rising as quickly, only means something if you were also demanding something be done about inflation when prices were rising more quickly but hadn't yet inflated to the point where it was causing problems.
People aren't upset about inflation because, a year from now, they'll be paying more for their food and rent. They're upset about inflation because they're paying more for their food and rent than they were paying a year ago. Necessarily, public opinion on inflation is a trailing indicator for inflation itself - and demanding people calm down about it, because it's in the past, is in effect demanding that nobody ever get upset about inflation, because they thing they're upset about is, necessarily, always in the past.
In the metamodern memespace, there's sort of a low-key debate about which religion is the most insightful or helpful. A lot of people single out Buddhism as displaying a lot of sophistication and insight, and being relatively less harmful than many other traditions. However, since I have appreciated what Buddhism has to offer, it has changed the way I look at Christianity and other religions.
Now that I relate to concepts and doctrines as more like meditation prompts that can potentially alter my perception or state of consciousness for the better, I see how Christian doctrines that seem arbitrary are actually potentially helpful for achieving altered or mystic states consciousness. I've seen rankings that suggest that the Christian mystics can achieve states of consciousness almost as enlightened as Buddhist adepts, and I think I'm beginning to see why.
In particular, I've been relating to the Christian doctrine of grace as a tool for helping me to generate the ideal complement to my state of consciousness. I think of it metaphorically as similar to equalizing waves, whether sound or light waves. You can reduce any sound wave to silence by producing its perfect complement. You can change any light wave to pure white light if you create the perfect complement to it so that the sum of the two adds up to white light, balanced activation of all light frequencies.
Likewise, during meditation or prayer, the idea of grace is not just to look for something outside of yourself, but, in some sense, to look for the thing which is MOST outside of yourself, the thing which is least like your current shape. Except, of course, that actually makes it easier to locate computationally. It may not be a simple as multiplying your current shape by -1, but the exact complement to your shape is actually implicit in your shape. In this way, the Christian approach also seems to preserve individuality. Instead of achieving smooth states of consciousness by reducing everything to nothing, it tries to provide a means by which you can access the perfect complement to each moment of experience, allowing each individual thing to enjoy its own idiosyncratic nature while also participating in a complementary dynamic that sums up to perfect, unified totality.
This is all very unlike the Christianity I grew up with, which suggested that the only important thing was making sure you performed the right ritual so that you would go to the right afterlife when you died. But I've now looked back on some of the C.S. Lewis stuff I read growing up, and Buddhism has helped me see it in a new light. I've heard some stuff from Tolkien and from famous Christian mystics like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, and from poets, that seems to be making reference to similar concepts.
I wish there was a modern community of Christian mystics I could ask about their practices, like a Christian Sangha. The closest I've found is the community of Jonathan Pageau's fans. Does this conceptualization of Christianity sound familiar to you, or are you familiar with a memespace that discusses such things (inside or outside of metamodern circles)?
I think YouTube is not even trying to remove all the scam ads with "Elon Musk" promising to send you lots of money if you give him access to your bank account. I see them every day.
But if your video contains something that resembles copyrighted music, it gets taken down automatically. Yes, it is important to have priorities.
A friend-of-a-friend, beloved of many in my circle, just passed away, leaving behind a family. He was suffering from several things, but chief among them was kidney failure, and complications from dialysis were a direct contributor to his sudden decline.
As someone who has considered kidney donation from time to time - but never that seriously - it has me asking questions. Including the obvious one, which is "would he still be alive if I had given him a kidney?"
And I realized I have some thoughts, and in reading the previous discussions (both Scott's, and the followup from the comments, and the comments on _that_ one) I'm still fuzzy on some parts of this.
I would not - I think - hesitate to give a kidney to a family member or close friend. Indeed, one of my reasons for not donating to a stranger is my worry that then I wouldn't have a spare for just that situation.
Which makes me wonder - in a case where someone is in dire need of a kidney, and has friends and family, what is generally going on? Is it that none of them are a match? Or that none of them offered? Are match rates that low? Or is it just that so many people are so typically biased against it that they would never offer even for someone dear to them?
Swedish researcher who investigated the influence of the muslim brotherhood in swedish politics now facing the prospect of being charged of a crime for his research
Why do spell checkers suck now? I'm a terrible speller, and also I tend to hit keys out of order sometimes. And yet when I spell something wrong the list of words I get never has the word I want.
It wasn't like this in the past. What went wrong? (Do I need to compile a list?)
Rule 7: If a common word can be made by switching the position of two adjacent letters, then that word should appear on the list.
"thousands of Tesla documents....chronic failures, many in relatively new vehicles, dat[ing] back at least seven years...across Tesla’s model lineup and across the globe, from China to the United States to Europe...nine former Tesla managers or service technicians...."
"the documents, which have not been previously reported, offer the most comprehensive view to date into the scope of the problems and how Tesla handled what its engineers have internally called part “flaws” and “failures.” The records and interviews reveal for the first time that the automaker has long known far more about the frequency and extent of the defects than it has disclosed to consumers and safety regulators. The documents, dated between 2016 and 2022, include repair reports from Tesla service centers globally; analyses and data reviews by engineers on parts with high failure rates; and memos sent to technicians globally, instructing them to tell consumers that broken parts on their cars were not faulty...."
The lede anecdote is of a new-Tesla owner whose family was endangered when the steering failed, and Tesla declared that the incident was due to "prior" suspension damage. Um with 115 miles on the odometer? "prior" to what exactly?
European regulators are no doubt reading that article with great interest. Meanwhile the fresh class-action lawsuits to be soon launched by Tesla car owners in the US could be epic -- looks like they could propose that the courts skip the discovery stage and proceed straight to verdict/damages.
Presumably Musk's initial responses will be to ban Reuters from Twitter, file a histrionic lawsuit against them, declare that whoever leaked the Tesla records is to be found and flayed alive or whatever, etc. The professional managers at Tesla though will surely try to respond in some more-organized ways.
I was curious about buying an empty lot and building a house there to rent out, until I talked to my real estate agent about the idea. He says building a house from scratch is always longer and more expensive than owners realize.
It made me think: If you want to build your dream house and don't have a multimillionaire budget, isn't it best to buy a small house and then transform it into what you want through renovations and additions?
Yug Gnirob here. Substack banned me without any notification.
Their appeal process is a joke. They don't tell you what the supposed violation is and instead demand you defend yourself in a void. They then send an email which just says
>Upon additional review we've determined that your account is in violation of Substack's Content Guidelines and will not be reactivated.
They have said nothing about which part of the Guidelines I supposedly violated, but I know accounts who have repeatedly linked pictures of dead babies in these threads are still unbanned, so I highly doubt this list is actually what they're using in their determinations. (This is the only place I post, so any violation would have had to be from here; everyone feel free to guess what rule exactly they're saying I violated. If you do it quickly enough then this post will remain on the page with "Removed" as the name and contents, instead of being deleted completely.)
I'm sure most of you good people live in large cities on one coast or the other. I, on the other hand, live in the middle of the country on a small peninsula that runs out into northern Lake Michigan. But even here in our little village, politics can get a little crazy: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/brouhaha-at-the-council
Joshua Moon runs a Kiwi Farms, a forum that has many supporters and even more enemies. Regardless of what you may have heard or think about his forum (please don't rail off to comment about it here), his essays are better journalism than most WSJ long forms. They tend to not to defend his site as a specific case but small websites in general (i.e are not heavily biased). Moon has experience very few have, and at least this new essay on the DDoS mitigation industry makes very good use of it: https://madattheinternet.substack.com/p/a-handful-of-companies-rule-the-internet
Hi, I'm hoping to be able to conduct a conversation with humanity.
Setting aside the odds, methods and reasons -- as an ordained Orthodox Rabbi, despite neither believing nor practicing as most Orthodox Jews do, those sentiments and studies are probably what I know best and care about most. So, because my language automatically leans towards these texts I use that language when discussing my utopian ideals (i.e. in maimonidean messianic language).
Yesterday I took a foray into the comment section of a fellow who refers to himself as a rationalist rabbi (and more or less is) but whose comment section is polluted by lesser lights.
I wrote briefly about the experience here (feel free to skip the email at the end if you aren't excited to see if you can decipher some of the yeshiva'isms).
Being a rabbi I couldn't help but add a comment below the article regarding the actual meaning of the adjacent contradictory biblical verses.
This led to my sharing the viscerak frustration with fools that Rabbi Eleazar had and then some suggestion for how we few good and smart guys could reform society such that we wouldn't have to run around all day stabbing trolls.
This particular blog is not short on smart people patiently listening to smart people. There are still too many fools jotting down words without understanding but at literally 1% of what takes place elsewhere.
I'm curious as to whether my suggestion in the comment is understandable to you.
I really think mankind needs a revolution in how we relate to each other. And I think that rulers will only appear to be legitimate if they are in adult-level communication with the masse of humanity.
And furthermore, I think that most of the uber-privileged would gladly join a movement for greater equality if they believed that it would lead to a safer, friendlier world for them too.
Do you think this is comprehensible in the comment?
P.S. It's long(ish) so please only read it if it looks like fun. 😉 - Oh, snd if you like it please leave a nice comment. I intend to share it with the audience for (and about) whom it was written and it would be nice if the 20% of worthy people from that page should see a few appreciative comments in intelligent language before it is sullied with a dozen comments by high school dropouts with vuvuzelas.
Why did the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia have the code name "noble anvil"? What kind of a name is that? What does an anvil have to do with anything? How can an anvil be noble?
(Please don't start a culture war battle in the subcomments to my comment specifically. Otherwise I will cry.)
Does anyone have any good recommendations for small business / personal tax preparers?
Honestly, I'm not even sure thats *exactly* what I need, and help formulating the question would probably be really valuable as well. What I can say is that I have abnormally complicated taxes for an individual (a few small businesses, K1s, lots of stuff) but simultaneously my small businesses are unusually simple.
I'm currently working with a high end tax pre team, and have been for the last few years, but every time I interact with them I feel like I want to tear my hair out. I feel like I am constantly filling out endless forms / ect for them.
What I (think) I want is someone I can just open up my (sloppy) books to, and who will take care of my taxes without sucking tons of hours out of my day, and making me get super angry multiple times.
Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm also open to suggestions to the question "what am I even looking for"
Does anyone have any good resources for summaries of British politics post WW2? I’m esp interested in the Thatcher-Brown era. Looking for something polemic, from someone that was on the inside, à la Cummings.
There is a noted reduction of fecundity in humans. Likewise, some of us boomers have noticed a reduction in the population of insects. Though I don't know if this is due to more effective insecticides or insect control programs, increased urbanization, or whatnot. Are these drops (human/insect fecundity) related? I don't know.
What I wonder, as additional data; is there a reduction in natural mice & rats? Is there a reduction in the fecundity of laboratory mice and rats?
For natural, or domestic pest mice & rats, we might find data from the insurance industry in losses due to mice & rats. Does anyone know hot to access this data? For the lab side, how can we find production records for fecundity, i.e. litter size, productive life of female rats (dams?) ?
One hypothesis ... please don't hate me for it; but the timing suggests cellular phone networks, which came on the market in the 90s. Indoor WIFI didn't come in until after 2000.
If we could see the insurance industry sees a reduction in rodent damage, with increased reduction in multi-story buildings. This would in my mind indicate ground dwelling rodents are less susceptible to reduce fecundity, that could suggest an RFI link.
Why isn't American labour productivity significantly higher than European productivity? Where exactly it is on the scale seems to depend on how exactly you measure, but afaict it's fairly uncontroversial that US productivity (unlike GDP/PPP per capita) is at most slightly higher than european productivity, meaning that most US gains are purely working more hours.
But the US has more natural resources than most EU countries, is (at least stereotypically) more business-friendly/cutthroat capitalist, and you'd expect someone working 50 hours a week to be more than twice as productive as someone working 25 hours a week (since there's more experience/agglomeration). Anecdotally, US companies just seem generally more organized and on the ball. You'd expect all these to push US productivity up on a per-hour basis.
Is this countered by US regulatory burden and public sector inefficiency? Something else?
I need advice about how to handle a possible (minor) medical discovery:
My daughter recently had some warts on her foot. Of course we wanted to get rid of them. So we went to the nearest drugstore and bought whatever the had - here in Germany they had different kinds of salicylic acid based products. We followed the directions, but they did not really help. After many weeks we asked a pediatrician, who prescribed a product with a different acid - that one hurt, so my daughter did not want to be treated with it.
Then my wife remembered that she had a wart too when she was little - and that her uncle cured it within a week. She asked her uncle what he did - we did the same, and a few days later, all three warts just fell off.
The weird thing: If I google for what we did, there are no hits. And there are many "cures for warts" on the internet (and even many more from times before the internet). But not this one. And it's nothing weird (unlike the German tradition of touching a toad under a full moon), just apply some pretty standard substance, that is sold for a different usecase for a fiver on amazon, twice a day. According to the wikipedia page of the substance, it's even used for (different) medical purposes. I don't know why it works, I don't know which exact component of the substance is responsible - basically I don't even know for sure if it's working at all or if it was just luck, placebo effect, something else, ...
So, what do I do now?
I have two things that would be nice to achieve:
1. Help people cure their warts.
2. Maybe earn a bit of money on the way.
My thoughts so far (in no particular order):
- Just posting it on the internet somewhere will surely not help with 2. and probably also not with 1.
- It would probably be good to run some kind of study/trial/... to figure out if there is an effect at all. I have neither the know how nor the means to do that.
- I don't have any connections to the pharma industry.
- As it's a pretty standard substance, I don't expect that there is tons of money to be made.
- I would be willing to invest a bit of money (maybe 1000€, which I think is the price for a patent) into this if it would mean I had a decent chance of making a bit more money back.
- I don't want to spend too much time on this - but just keeping it for myself feels wrong. If earning money from it requires too much effort, goal 1 is more important than goal 2.
- As I don't have any medical background going to the nearest university to get a scientist interested is about as unlikely to succeed as sending a random letter to a random pharma company.
Any other thoughts that might be relevant? Advice?
Does anyone else find that their posted comments here sometimes randomly disappear? I'm sure I posted a lunar rock sample based debunking of the notion of moon landings having been faked, but now it has gone. I think it was a direct reply to the thread OP, so it couldn't have been lower in the heirarchy and some parent comment was deleted taking mine with it.
Also, in last week's Open Thread I posted a top-level comment about my former confusion between Jessica Mulroney and Dylan Mulvaney until I twigged that they were different people! OK that may have been a bit frivolous and inconsequential and could thus have been removed by Scott, but I don't think the moon rock reply was objectionable in either tone or content.
It's in response to questions put to him about irregular unions, and the guys over at the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition or Holy Office, fact-fans!) got to introduce it.
What is really going to put the cat among the pigeons is the permission for blessing gay couples. You can't call it a marriage ceremony or a wedding, but you can exercise pastoral discretion:
"39. In any case, precisely to avoid any form of confusion or scandal, when the prayer of blessing is requested by a couple in an irregular situation, even though it is expressed outside the rites prescribed by the liturgical books, this blessing should never be imparted in concurrence with the ceremonies of a civil union, and not even in connection with them. Nor can it be performed with any clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding. The same applies when the blessing is requested by a same-sex couple.
40. Such a blessing may instead find its place in other contexts, such as a visit to a shrine, a meeting with a priest, a prayer recited in a group, or during a pilgrimage. Indeed, through these blessings that are given not through the ritual forms proper to the liturgy but as an expression of the Church’s maternal heart—similar to those that emanate from the core of popular piety—there is no intention to legitimize anything, but rather to open one’s life to God, to ask for his help to live better, and also to invoke the Holy Spirit so that the values of the Gospel may be lived with greater faithfulness.
41. What has been said in this Declaration regarding the blessings of same-sex couples is sufficient to guide the prudent and fatherly discernment of ordained ministers in this regard. Thus, beyond the guidance provided above, no further responses should be expected about possible ways to regulate details or practicalities regarding blessings of this type."
And hoo-boy, I'm expecting everyone to start losing their lives over this, particularly the set who (both in approval and disapproval) will be going "the pope says gay marriage is okay!"
No, the Pope does not say that, but this is.... yeah. It's a step. One that got the Anglicans into trouble, and I'm not at all confident that this will remain a simple blessing for certain circumstances and not at all an ersatz wedding ceremony, because that's not how it worked out for the Church of England when they tried it.
I might have found a low-hanging fruit to improve online dating?
Alice is weird, in several ways, that she hides in superficial encounters but wouldn't want to keep hiding forever in an intimate relationship. Examples: her brother is in prison and she doesn't know what'll happen when he gets out, she has a pretty extreme kink and she's seriously afraid of the paperclip maximizer. In the context of dating, these are things that would make some people not want to date her. Disclosing them too early would be alarming and would make her look obsessed about, or overly identified with, these weirdnesses. But disclosing then too late would be misleading - and of course misdirection may also make people not want to date her.
So maybe a dating site should treat weirdnesses something like as follows. Alice sets up her normal public profile, and enters her weirdnesses separately and individually. These get rated, anonymously, by other users, on scales like "how gross", "how dangerous" and "how much I wouldn't want to date someone who has that". This should also allow some positive ratings like "that's hot actually". Alice's profile only shows the number of weirdnesses, and maybe how they rank on some scales, and until she has some minimum number of weirdnesses (each above some minimum threshold of badness), her profile is marked "incomplete" as the site declares "everyone is weird".
When Bob comes to her profile, how he has previously rated anonymized weirdnesses like Alice's gets calculated into the match prediction. If Bob and Alice have weirdnesses that are identical or similar, this has a strong pro-matching effect! (On top of how this may already affected their ratings of each other's weirdnesses.) Users can choose to disclose a weirdness to a specific user, but the recipient gets to choose whether they want to know.
Has something like this been done? I think it should, because I think the non-obvious reasons someone might not want to date someone are pretty central to the problem of online dating, or even of dating in general. I even suspect the ability to handle them with care is why getting set up for a date by mutual friends is the most successful form of matchmaking.
I just read through all of Unsong, and really liked it. One could say I had a whale of a time (sorry, I had to).
Note to anyone wanting to read it over the holidays: when the Hell chapter comes with a content warning, Scott really means it. Like, even for the kind of people who don't normally care about content warnings.
General question: Scott, although Jewish, is clearly familiar with the New Testament and various Christian interpretations of that. Is that completely normal for Jews growing up in the US (except perhaps the ultra-orthodox) that you learn about the Gospels and Revelation etc. in school or pick it up through "background noise"? Or are those books considered off-limits, but the most liberal and/or atheist Jews don't mind so much? I'm wondering how many readers would have deatailed cultural knowledge of both Lurianic Kabbalah and the Book of Revelations.
How had I never heard of this fascinating workaround! Here’s a hypothetical scenario: the manufacturer of an existing mint-family tea product applies for conditional approval to use the tea for treating Covid in pet hamsters. Jan and colleagues have conclusively documented the fact that mint tea can work for this purpose: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33452205/
The tea manufacturer could then slap a label on the box saying “conditionally FDA-approved for treating Covid*” with the asterisk noting that it’s conditionally approved for hamsters. The entire maneuver would look like a marketing stunt – but I don’t think that’s a legally valid justification for the FDA to reject the conditional use application. And it's actually not just a marketing stunt - the hamster maneuver could have the socially desirable side-effect of finally getting the word out about the fact that mint tea realistically might prevent or treat Covid in people. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37007799/
If somebody could get their foot in the door with a mint-for-hamsters application then the next step on the slippery slope would be for Shionogi to apply for permission to market Xocova for use in hamsters. If buying a pet hamster could get me a "veterinary" Xocova prescription, I would buy a pet hamster.
Why hasn't Ukraine drafted more troops? I recently learned that they've exempted relatively young men from mandatory service- I think under 30. That's why reports of Ukrainian troops in the field are generally older men, the average age is in the 40s or so. Russia has not really gone full mobilization or conscription on their end, so despite fighting a larger population country Ukraine could (in theory) have as many or even more troops on the ground by mobilizing a higher % of their citizens. In practice they seem to be outnumbered at least 3 to 1 on the battlefield.
Is exempting younger men meant to save their economy? As presumably they're more likely to be in the IT field. I'd imagine not having drafted them when the war started is now some pretty strong path dependency- patriotism/willingness to die on a frozen muddy battlefield for Donetsk has probably dimmed some versus 18 months ago. I can't imagine drafting all of the younger men now would go over very well. Or is there some other angle that I'm missing?
I just read Michael Sandel's book — Justice: What's the right thing to do?
Sandel summarises John Rawls as saying that, from behind the veil of ignorance, most people would prefer an egalitarian society to one where people are rewarded for merit. I think Rawls is wrong about this and wrote a response here:
Can someone point me to some good "plain English" exposition on unconditional election and conditional election? I don't find the wikipedia very helpful on this. For instance, wouldn't this permit debauchery? If [edit: an] evangelical believes that someone else's fate is predestined either for redemption or salvation [correction ~11 hours later: redemption or damnation], wouldn't lecturing to that person create pointless suffering?
Apologies in advance if this has been discussed ad nauseam in the past, but what do readers think about the prospect of abolishing cash? Is it likely, or inevitable, and if so is that desirable?
In the UK a few months ago our PM, Rishi Sunak, let slip in a newspaper (Telegraph) interview that cash was "transitional", and in the last year or two banks have been frantically pushing mobile phone apps for transactions. So it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to conclude that abolishing cash is a medium-term plan at least here.
I think it would (or will) be a Very Bad Idea, from a civil liberties standpoint. It is bad enough that credit card transactions are recorded, but having to use mobile phone apps adds a vast new dimension of state surveillance possibilities by enabling past and present location tracking as well as transactions!
When one adds constant nannying health advice, with possible insurance implications for unhealthy purchases, and aggressive and peremptory "debanking" (closing bank accounts) of customers who the banks decide may have non-PC views, the future for personal liberties looks bleak.
To the 20-odd people who replied to the moon landing guy: stop feeding the trolls! You're making it so damn easy, good quality comments never get that much engagement and it's sad to see it wasted.
I've been playing with Leonardo.ai (an AI image generator). It has a "make good mode" called Alchemy, which brings its images up to pretty nice quality, in exchange for costing three times more credits to use. I have no idea what the difference is on the back end when Alchemy mode is used.
However, I don't think I'm interested in signing up to Leonardo.ai in the long term. For one thing, the Alchemy feature turned out to be a free trial, and now it's expired, Leonardo's output is pretty shit by comparison.
But the main reason is that they've overcompensated so much with their offensive content sanitisation efforts that I keep running into the censor for innocuous things. And even when the censor lets me through, the resulting image often willfully misunderstands what I want (for eg, asking for two emaciated people having a knife fight over a loaf of bread produces an image of two friendly smiling people holding cutlery knives while passing loaves of bread to each other. This kind of mistake never gets made when asking for non-violence- or non-sex-adjacent scenarios, where most of the time I've been surprised and impressed by the nuances the AI has picked up on.)
I'm not paying Leonardo.ai a subscription when I suspect I'll only burn through all the extra credits trying to cajole the system into producing a result it's trying not to give me. I also dislike distributed systems in general and prefer the idea of being able to do things just as easily when the Internet is down as not.
I know other people have got local copies of image generators running, and I'm thinking I wouldn't mind having one of my own. I have a coding background, and I'm fine with Python, which I gather has become the language of choice for AI programming. But haven't actually followed any AI tutorials (not since it all took off anyway). I also have other projects on and can't really do a deep dive into something new right now.
Basically I can't justify going off and learning all this stuff on my own, but that doesn't mean I can't ask for advice from people who already know it, just to get a sense of what I would be letting myself in for.
So, to boil it down: if I were to decide to roll my own local AI image generator:
- what's the best setup/software/library to use?
- what's the procedure (installation, coding, training, parameter tweaking, etc) and how labour-intensive is it?
- what kind of resources do I need (how much training data, GPU cycles, etc) to get a decent result?
- what kind of quality can a lone player expect to achieve? Something 90% as good as the pro tools, or something 1% as good?
Is it ethical to have a child, knowing that this child will be born into a life of slavery? What should we make of all the slaves who have chosen to have children throughout history?
Four ships are sailing the sea, each moving with a constant speed (speeds of different ships may be different). None of their courses are parallel to one another. It is known that the first three ships all meet with each other at some point, though not all three at once. It is also known that the fourth ship meets with the first one, and then with the second. Prove that the fourth ship must also inevitably meet with the third one at some point (in the past or the future with respect to its other meetings).
Why is inflation bad? I am not an economist, but it seems to me their explanations are woefully unpersuasive. I'll post my own attempt at answer in a subordinated comment, this is just a problem statement.
Normies will tell you that inflation is bad because it impoverishes them. Economists will tell you that is not necessarily true, but then fail to provide explanation why then we should be concerned inflation.
Here I am going to use as a foil an open source textbook from something called Rice university (here: https://openstax.org/details/books/principles-economics-3e). I’ve read, like, two to three another textbooks, and if my memory serves me well, their explanations of inflation costs are fairly similar.
a) unintended redistribution of purchasing power between various groups in society, like creditors vs debtors. Well, ok, but the word “unintended” here is used strangely; what distributions of purchasing power are “intended”? Who is the one who intends?
It seems to me that uninteded redistributions of purchasing power in this broad sense happen all the time in societies not based on central planning, and economists are pretty chill about them, when inflation is not involved. E.g. new technology is invented which boosts wages of some workers and puts others out of work, price of oil falls on global markets, increasing incomes of people driving gasoline cars and depressing prospects of people dependent on electric vehicle sales, etc.
b) blurred price signals; explained as
>In a world where inflation is at a high rate, but bouncing up and down to some extent, does a higher price of a good mean that inflation has risen, or that supply of that good has decreased, or that demand for that good has increased? Should a buyer of the good take the higher prices as an economic hint to start substituting other products—or have the prices of the substitutes risen by an equal amount? Should a seller of the good take a higher price as a reason to increase production—or is the higher price only a sign of a general inflation in which the prices of all inputs to production are rising as well? The true story will presumably become clear over time, but at a given moment, who can say? [end quote]
Perhaps I am missing something, but this seems to me as authors being partly confused and partly making a big deal out of something trivial.
Inflation is in itself a price signal; if you are a producer and prices of the thing you are producing are going up together with prices of other things, it is absolutely rational to increase production compared to an alternative universe where prices are staying the same, given the same costs of production.
It is true that there are costs associated with checking whether your costs of production as before you fire up the machines, but those are imho almost negligible in a modern economy; as a producer of the thing you probably have an established mechanism to check your costs.
d) problems with long-term planning. This is the correct reason, although it is not connected with inflation in itself, but with an uncertainty about the future rate of inflation.
When you are reasonably confident that in next years, inflation will average around 2 %/year, your financial planning will be easier than when you think it could be anything from 1 % to 120 % per year. However.
Presumably the reason why difficulty of long-term planning is something to be avoided is because it messes up production; if companies do not know what will happen tomorrow, they’ll reduce production and lay off workers, right? Or workers would quit themselves and enter a barter economy or something. And if everyone is doing that, unemployment should go up, right? This indeed happens when a country enters an inflationary collapse territory, but it takes quite a lot of uncertainty about future inflation before employment starts being affected.
Not only are highly-above-2 % levels of inflation evidently compatible with low unemployment, but the the whole philosophy of inflation-fighting through interest rate hikes espoused by world’s central banks is based on an idea that sometimes it is worthwhile to reduce employment to bring inflation down. See results of so called Volcker disinflation in the 80s, when US unemployment rate hit a post-WW2 record, only to be outdone by a covid panic in 2020.
Maybe economists are slacking when writing textbook chapters on why inflation needs to be avoided because they think that an explanation is unnecessary - public already opposes inflation more than it should, so there is no immediate danger that it will turn pro-inflationary. From the same textbook:
>Economists usually oppose high inflation, but they oppose it in a milder way than many non-economists. Robert Shiller, one of 2013’s Nobel Prize winners in economics, carried out several surveys during the 1990s about attitudes toward inflation. One of his questions asked, “Do you agree that preventing high inflation is an important national priority, as important as preventing drug use or preventing deterioration in the quality of our schools?” Answers were on a scale of 1–5, where 1 meant “Fully agree” and 5 meant “Completely disagree.” For the U.S. population as a whole, 52% answered “Fully agree” that preventing high inflation was a highly important national priority and just 4% said “Completely disagree.” However, among professional economists, only 18% answered “Fully agree,” while the same percentage of 18% answered “Completely disagree.” [end quote]
Nevertheless, there isn’t widespread opposition among economists against crushing relatively mild (e.g. below 5 %) inflation by choking of credit supply and potentially increasing unemployment, so presumably they are ok with that. It’s just they haven’t bothered to provide a good explanation why.
Is there any advice for being less toxic when playing multiplayer games? Sometimes I engage in toxic behavior like flaming my allies for their mistakes, and I always end up regretting it. Intellectually, I should know better, but sometimes monkey brain wins and it just happens.
This also happens when playing with people I know, especially if there's a large skill gap. Why do I care so much about winning rather than enjoying spending time with others? Even when I like someone, if we lose too many games in a row I'll just get frustrated and have to take a break.
> Neural repair: As a test of the little biobots, the Tufts team created a 2D layer of neurons in a petri dish and then scratched it with a metal rod. They then place a dense concentration of anthrobots on part of the “wound.”
> Surprisingly, their presence seemed to encourage healing — new neurons grew below the anthrobots, but not on gaps that were left uncovered.
It sounds like a big deal, but I am no biologist. Anyone would like to chime in?
Wrote a quick book review of 1632 by Eric Flint. Honestly, one of my favorite books. I figure that it's sort of rationality-adjacent -- or, at least, belonging to that vague genre of "people solve problems and build stuff," which is close enough. https://lettersfromtrekronor.substack.com/p/book-review-1632
Many here have expressed interest in a dating service that follows basically the model of OKCupid circa 2010, believing it was better for the purpose of matching people happily. I believe there is even an effort underway. However I haven't seen a discussion of what exactly caused OKCupid to stop being Like That.
Do we know? It seems important to me that we know, as otherwise how can we be confident any efforts we make will avoid the same failure modes?
The only theory I've heard is pretty barebones, though plausible. It goes something like this:
> It was more profitable to switch to the Tinder model, even though this model is dysfunctional for creating good relationships. People won't use a model of paying the company if they get married, which leaves the subscription fee model, which incentivizes stringing people along since most people do not continue dating, especially via a dating service, once they have married.
That's a story of misaligned incentives. I'm not sure how that is fixed. The service being a nonprofit seems like a good start, but nonprofits still have to make money. Must there be an endowment? OpenAI aside, one usually doesn't get venture capital for nonprofits, AIUI.
Any thoughts about how reasonably honest government happens? I'm thinking about being able to get a driver's license without paying a bribe. It's would seem as though governments where every potential gate-keeping office requires bribes to superiors which are partially covered by needing bribes from members of the public, and yet there are governments where that doesn't happen.
I've been writing a series of posts on anthropic reasoning with the eventual goal to resolve all the paradoxes, get rid of the bizzareness of both SSA and SIA, and reduce this field to basic probability theory.
I think the LessWrong post about the dog longevity company gave an incomplete summary of the evidence related to IGF-1 inhibitors and longevity. According to the post, Loyal (the company) was basically observing correlation (small dogs live longer than big dogs, and also have lower IGF-1) and assuming causation. But the post doesn't mention that a causal link between IGF-1 inhibition and longevity has been established and replicated in model organisms, including worms and mice:
Of course showing that a drug works in mice definitely doesn't guarantee that it'll work in dogs or humans (looks like IGF-1 inhibitors don't work to increase longevity in humans). There's even the meme where people append "IN MICE" to hyped-up science headlines to more accurately reflect the results they're reporting on. But still, I think this evidence is worth noting and the LessWrong post was incomplete without it.
Anyway I might write a longer post on this later, but I'm generally in favor of a right-to-try with medicine. I think it's good that the FDA is allowing sales of this drug. I forget where I heard this (maybe from an ACX post?) but it's kinda crazy that if a medicine definitely DOESN'T work, it's completely unregulated and freely accessible (homeopathy, essential oils, "alternative medicine"). But if a medicine actually MIGHT work, then it becomes very highly regulated.
My wife wrote a round-up of responses to her clinical trial odyssey essay-guides: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/reactions-to-please-be-dying-but. ACX figures prominently, because the best and most-engaged responses tended to come from here. The FDA is the major villain in the clinical trial essay-guides.
> I think we got wires crossed on whether you need some pre-existing work to show before applying (you don’t)
Alexander here! Scott, Thank you for sharing the links!
My idea here is that getting some progress done early increases our chances. If we detected signs of the effect on our own brains, it means the study is more likely to replicate and it means that we are more likely to find applications of the effect too.
Fun trivia: In the Scandinavian translations of "The Fox and the Grapes" fable, the fox isn't trying to reach grapes, since there wasn't any grapes growing there. It is instead after rowanberries.
Since rowanberries are actually really sour and generally an ill-tasting laxative when unprocessed, the fox is actually completely correct in his observation; entirely changing the moral of the story.
What is wrong with reddit? I find that oftentimes I have a question, and I can't honestly think of any other place on the internet that I can ask that question and get an answer other than specific subreddits. But at the same time, I don't want to post on reddit because I hate it. You can't post anything there without at least half the comments being about how you're a fucking idiot for even asking the question to begin with. Every single time I'm like "I know I had bad experiences on reddit in the past, but this current post I'm about to do is so innocuous that no one could possibly take issue with it and ridicule me for it", and every time, without fail, I'm proven wrong.
Reddit just seems to me to be the judgiest place in the world. Does reddit select for this? Is this just toxoplasma in action? Does half of reddit just consider themselves to be better than other people?
Do most ACX readers and rationalists in general believe in the moonlandings? It just doesn’t seem plausible when you take into account that SpaceX after twenty years can’t do it, but some how NASA accomplished it in less than ten in the 60s.
What's the end game for the migration crisis in NY?
I know someone who is 18 and has no clue what to do in life. Is going to university and just taking whatever prereqs with no idea, not even the first clue, despite all kinds of probing questions, what she wants to do.
I recommended maybe volunteering for charity. As a first pass, I went to Givewell's site to see if they had some recommendation where to volunteer and, surprisingly, I could find nothing.
So what are the best charities to volunteer for right now? How do you find out?
Does anyone here have any (personal or second-hand) experience in successfully treating height-related body image issues in men through therapy, and could recommend a good therapist (possibly from the ACX list) in the Bay Area or remote?
I’m 5’5 and past therapy attempts have been pretty unsuccessful, with some of my past therapists basically having taken the position of this just being a minor cosmetic issue with few real-life implications (I also got the feeling that it used to be way less of an issue before online dating, but alas I live in those changed times).
I’m looking for medical blog recommendations with a similar style to Scott’s but focused almost entirely on doctoring and medicine. Ideally one with thoughtful takes on both the day-to-day of medicine and interesting topics in medicine as a whole. As medical student, I’ve searched around for one but never found one anywhere near the quality of Scott’s.
Is it just me or has Scott's posting frequency dropped substantially?
There's a thing I'm annoyed about, and it isn't worthy of a full post, so ... here we go.
If you’re baffled/confused/upset about why the American public is still up in arms about inflation, even though it’s down - here’s a question for you.
Were you equally baffled/confused/upset when the public didn’t react at all to inflation until it had been going on for a little while?
Let's say for the sake of argument that 10% inflation is bad. We had 10% inflation -before- the public really got upset about it. Were you looking around wondering why nobody was getting upset about it at the time? Or did you not notice, for the same reason none of them noticed - it hadn't had time to actually have a substantive impact on your wallet?
Demanding everybody calm down about inflation after prices have inflated by some amount, because they're no longer rising as quickly, only means something if you were also demanding something be done about inflation when prices were rising more quickly but hadn't yet inflated to the point where it was causing problems.
People aren't upset about inflation because, a year from now, they'll be paying more for their food and rent. They're upset about inflation because they're paying more for their food and rent than they were paying a year ago. Necessarily, public opinion on inflation is a trailing indicator for inflation itself - and demanding people calm down about it, because it's in the past, is in effect demanding that nobody ever get upset about inflation, because they thing they're upset about is, necessarily, always in the past.
In the metamodern memespace, there's sort of a low-key debate about which religion is the most insightful or helpful. A lot of people single out Buddhism as displaying a lot of sophistication and insight, and being relatively less harmful than many other traditions. However, since I have appreciated what Buddhism has to offer, it has changed the way I look at Christianity and other religions.
Now that I relate to concepts and doctrines as more like meditation prompts that can potentially alter my perception or state of consciousness for the better, I see how Christian doctrines that seem arbitrary are actually potentially helpful for achieving altered or mystic states consciousness. I've seen rankings that suggest that the Christian mystics can achieve states of consciousness almost as enlightened as Buddhist adepts, and I think I'm beginning to see why.
In particular, I've been relating to the Christian doctrine of grace as a tool for helping me to generate the ideal complement to my state of consciousness. I think of it metaphorically as similar to equalizing waves, whether sound or light waves. You can reduce any sound wave to silence by producing its perfect complement. You can change any light wave to pure white light if you create the perfect complement to it so that the sum of the two adds up to white light, balanced activation of all light frequencies.
Likewise, during meditation or prayer, the idea of grace is not just to look for something outside of yourself, but, in some sense, to look for the thing which is MOST outside of yourself, the thing which is least like your current shape. Except, of course, that actually makes it easier to locate computationally. It may not be a simple as multiplying your current shape by -1, but the exact complement to your shape is actually implicit in your shape. In this way, the Christian approach also seems to preserve individuality. Instead of achieving smooth states of consciousness by reducing everything to nothing, it tries to provide a means by which you can access the perfect complement to each moment of experience, allowing each individual thing to enjoy its own idiosyncratic nature while also participating in a complementary dynamic that sums up to perfect, unified totality.
This is all very unlike the Christianity I grew up with, which suggested that the only important thing was making sure you performed the right ritual so that you would go to the right afterlife when you died. But I've now looked back on some of the C.S. Lewis stuff I read growing up, and Buddhism has helped me see it in a new light. I've heard some stuff from Tolkien and from famous Christian mystics like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, and from poets, that seems to be making reference to similar concepts.
I wish there was a modern community of Christian mystics I could ask about their practices, like a Christian Sangha. The closest I've found is the community of Jonathan Pageau's fans. Does this conceptualization of Christianity sound familiar to you, or are you familiar with a memespace that discusses such things (inside or outside of metamodern circles)?
I think YouTube is not even trying to remove all the scam ads with "Elon Musk" promising to send you lots of money if you give him access to your bank account. I see them every day.
But if your video contains something that resembles copyrighted music, it gets taken down automatically. Yes, it is important to have priorities.
A friend-of-a-friend, beloved of many in my circle, just passed away, leaving behind a family. He was suffering from several things, but chief among them was kidney failure, and complications from dialysis were a direct contributor to his sudden decline.
As someone who has considered kidney donation from time to time - but never that seriously - it has me asking questions. Including the obvious one, which is "would he still be alive if I had given him a kidney?"
And I realized I have some thoughts, and in reading the previous discussions (both Scott's, and the followup from the comments, and the comments on _that_ one) I'm still fuzzy on some parts of this.
I would not - I think - hesitate to give a kidney to a family member or close friend. Indeed, one of my reasons for not donating to a stranger is my worry that then I wouldn't have a spare for just that situation.
Which makes me wonder - in a case where someone is in dire need of a kidney, and has friends and family, what is generally going on? Is it that none of them are a match? Or that none of them offered? Are match rates that low? Or is it just that so many people are so typically biased against it that they would never offer even for someone dear to them?
Happy Winter Solstice to you all! And those who celebrate it, a blessed Advent waiting for Christmas Day which is fast approaching.
Israeli savagery is just unmatched. What a disgusting people. Pure evil.
https://twitter.com/NourNaim88/status/1737584585372836035
Truly the power of Hunter's nudes would have surely swung the election.
Swedish researcher who investigated the influence of the muslim brotherhood in swedish politics now facing the prospect of being charged of a crime for his research
https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1737502854162645254
LIberal democratic propaganda org Freedom House of course rates a society capable of such authoritarian madness 100 out of 100 for freedom: https://freedomhouse.org/explore-the-map?type=fiw&year=2023&country=SWE
Why do spell checkers suck now? I'm a terrible speller, and also I tend to hit keys out of order sometimes. And yet when I spell something wrong the list of words I get never has the word I want.
It wasn't like this in the past. What went wrong? (Do I need to compile a list?)
Rule 7: If a common word can be made by switching the position of two adjacent letters, then that word should appear on the list.
Huh, even realizing that our news cycles nowadays are crowded with batshittery I'm a bit surprised that this isn't generating broader headlines:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/
"thousands of Tesla documents....chronic failures, many in relatively new vehicles, dat[ing] back at least seven years...across Tesla’s model lineup and across the globe, from China to the United States to Europe...nine former Tesla managers or service technicians...."
"the documents, which have not been previously reported, offer the most comprehensive view to date into the scope of the problems and how Tesla handled what its engineers have internally called part “flaws” and “failures.” The records and interviews reveal for the first time that the automaker has long known far more about the frequency and extent of the defects than it has disclosed to consumers and safety regulators. The documents, dated between 2016 and 2022, include repair reports from Tesla service centers globally; analyses and data reviews by engineers on parts with high failure rates; and memos sent to technicians globally, instructing them to tell consumers that broken parts on their cars were not faulty...."
The lede anecdote is of a new-Tesla owner whose family was endangered when the steering failed, and Tesla declared that the incident was due to "prior" suspension damage. Um with 115 miles on the odometer? "prior" to what exactly?
European regulators are no doubt reading that article with great interest. Meanwhile the fresh class-action lawsuits to be soon launched by Tesla car owners in the US could be epic -- looks like they could propose that the courts skip the discovery stage and proceed straight to verdict/damages.
Presumably Musk's initial responses will be to ban Reuters from Twitter, file a histrionic lawsuit against them, declare that whoever leaked the Tesla records is to be found and flayed alive or whatever, etc. The professional managers at Tesla though will surely try to respond in some more-organized ways.
Ha! We're on the leelanau, south of Northport. Manton is a nice area
I was curious about buying an empty lot and building a house there to rent out, until I talked to my real estate agent about the idea. He says building a house from scratch is always longer and more expensive than owners realize.
It made me think: If you want to build your dream house and don't have a multimillionaire budget, isn't it best to buy a small house and then transform it into what you want through renovations and additions?
Any reading recommendations on status? I have read the book review
Yug Gnirob here. Substack banned me without any notification.
Their appeal process is a joke. They don't tell you what the supposed violation is and instead demand you defend yourself in a void. They then send an email which just says
>Upon additional review we've determined that your account is in violation of Substack's Content Guidelines and will not be reactivated.
Which links to the Content Guidelines. https://substack.com/content
They have said nothing about which part of the Guidelines I supposedly violated, but I know accounts who have repeatedly linked pictures of dead babies in these threads are still unbanned, so I highly doubt this list is actually what they're using in their determinations. (This is the only place I post, so any violation would have had to be from here; everyone feel free to guess what rule exactly they're saying I violated. If you do it quickly enough then this post will remain on the page with "Removed" as the name and contents, instead of being deleted completely.)
Substack's breaking your comment section, Scott.
I'm sure most of you good people live in large cities on one coast or the other. I, on the other hand, live in the middle of the country on a small peninsula that runs out into northern Lake Michigan. But even here in our little village, politics can get a little crazy: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/brouhaha-at-the-council
Does anyone know of a smart and conscientious online marketing person? Ideally someone who will accept a cut of incremental revenue as payment.
So many online marketing people seem scammy!
Joshua Moon runs a Kiwi Farms, a forum that has many supporters and even more enemies. Regardless of what you may have heard or think about his forum (please don't rail off to comment about it here), his essays are better journalism than most WSJ long forms. They tend to not to defend his site as a specific case but small websites in general (i.e are not heavily biased). Moon has experience very few have, and at least this new essay on the DDoS mitigation industry makes very good use of it: https://madattheinternet.substack.com/p/a-handful-of-companies-rule-the-internet
Hi, I'm hoping to be able to conduct a conversation with humanity.
Setting aside the odds, methods and reasons -- as an ordained Orthodox Rabbi, despite neither believing nor practicing as most Orthodox Jews do, those sentiments and studies are probably what I know best and care about most. So, because my language automatically leans towards these texts I use that language when discussing my utopian ideals (i.e. in maimonidean messianic language).
Yesterday I took a foray into the comment section of a fellow who refers to himself as a rationalist rabbi (and more or less is) but whose comment section is polluted by lesser lights.
I wrote briefly about the experience here (feel free to skip the email at the end if you aren't excited to see if you can decipher some of the yeshiva'isms).
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/cast-not-thy-pearls
Being a rabbi I couldn't help but add a comment below the article regarding the actual meaning of the adjacent contradictory biblical verses.
This led to my sharing the viscerak frustration with fools that Rabbi Eleazar had and then some suggestion for how we few good and smart guys could reform society such that we wouldn't have to run around all day stabbing trolls.
This particular blog is not short on smart people patiently listening to smart people. There are still too many fools jotting down words without understanding but at literally 1% of what takes place elsewhere.
I'm curious as to whether my suggestion in the comment is understandable to you.
I really think mankind needs a revolution in how we relate to each other. And I think that rulers will only appear to be legitimate if they are in adult-level communication with the masse of humanity.
And furthermore, I think that most of the uber-privileged would gladly join a movement for greater equality if they believed that it would lead to a safer, friendlier world for them too.
Do you think this is comprehensible in the comment?
P.S. It's long(ish) so please only read it if it looks like fun. 😉 - Oh, snd if you like it please leave a nice comment. I intend to share it with the audience for (and about) whom it was written and it would be nice if the 20% of worthy people from that page should see a few appreciative comments in intelligent language before it is sullied with a dozen comments by high school dropouts with vuvuzelas.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/cast-not-thy-pearls
Why did the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia have the code name "noble anvil"? What kind of a name is that? What does an anvil have to do with anything? How can an anvil be noble?
(Please don't start a culture war battle in the subcomments to my comment specifically. Otherwise I will cry.)
Why are Western Europeans so much poorer than Americans, even after adjusting for social transfers?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income
Their growth is also shockingly low:
https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd8d9
The typical excuse was always “something something welfare,” but it’s clear that even accounting for that they are still vastly poorer.
Maybe there’s just a fundamental genetic difference that makes the Europine creature inferior?
Does anyone have any good recommendations for small business / personal tax preparers?
Honestly, I'm not even sure thats *exactly* what I need, and help formulating the question would probably be really valuable as well. What I can say is that I have abnormally complicated taxes for an individual (a few small businesses, K1s, lots of stuff) but simultaneously my small businesses are unusually simple.
I'm currently working with a high end tax pre team, and have been for the last few years, but every time I interact with them I feel like I want to tear my hair out. I feel like I am constantly filling out endless forms / ect for them.
What I (think) I want is someone I can just open up my (sloppy) books to, and who will take care of my taxes without sucking tons of hours out of my day, and making me get super angry multiple times.
Does anyone have any recommendations? I'm also open to suggestions to the question "what am I even looking for"
Does anyone have any recommended reading for a soon-to-be father? Advice on late pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood is what I'm looking for.
The one I often see bandied about is "The Birth Partner", but I'm wondering if there are any others.
Does anyone have any good resources for summaries of British politics post WW2? I’m esp interested in the Thatcher-Brown era. Looking for something polemic, from someone that was on the inside, à la Cummings.
Is there a long term change in fecundity?
I mean on a range from 1980 to today.
There is a noted reduction of fecundity in humans. Likewise, some of us boomers have noticed a reduction in the population of insects. Though I don't know if this is due to more effective insecticides or insect control programs, increased urbanization, or whatnot. Are these drops (human/insect fecundity) related? I don't know.
What I wonder, as additional data; is there a reduction in natural mice & rats? Is there a reduction in the fecundity of laboratory mice and rats?
For natural, or domestic pest mice & rats, we might find data from the insurance industry in losses due to mice & rats. Does anyone know hot to access this data? For the lab side, how can we find production records for fecundity, i.e. litter size, productive life of female rats (dams?) ?
One hypothesis ... please don't hate me for it; but the timing suggests cellular phone networks, which came on the market in the 90s. Indoor WIFI didn't come in until after 2000.
If we could see the insurance industry sees a reduction in rodent damage, with increased reduction in multi-story buildings. This would in my mind indicate ground dwelling rodents are less susceptible to reduce fecundity, that could suggest an RFI link.
Why isn't American labour productivity significantly higher than European productivity? Where exactly it is on the scale seems to depend on how exactly you measure, but afaict it's fairly uncontroversial that US productivity (unlike GDP/PPP per capita) is at most slightly higher than european productivity, meaning that most US gains are purely working more hours.
But the US has more natural resources than most EU countries, is (at least stereotypically) more business-friendly/cutthroat capitalist, and you'd expect someone working 50 hours a week to be more than twice as productive as someone working 25 hours a week (since there's more experience/agglomeration). Anecdotally, US companies just seem generally more organized and on the ball. You'd expect all these to push US productivity up on a per-hour basis.
Is this countered by US regulatory burden and public sector inefficiency? Something else?
I need advice about how to handle a possible (minor) medical discovery:
My daughter recently had some warts on her foot. Of course we wanted to get rid of them. So we went to the nearest drugstore and bought whatever the had - here in Germany they had different kinds of salicylic acid based products. We followed the directions, but they did not really help. After many weeks we asked a pediatrician, who prescribed a product with a different acid - that one hurt, so my daughter did not want to be treated with it.
Then my wife remembered that she had a wart too when she was little - and that her uncle cured it within a week. She asked her uncle what he did - we did the same, and a few days later, all three warts just fell off.
The weird thing: If I google for what we did, there are no hits. And there are many "cures for warts" on the internet (and even many more from times before the internet). But not this one. And it's nothing weird (unlike the German tradition of touching a toad under a full moon), just apply some pretty standard substance, that is sold for a different usecase for a fiver on amazon, twice a day. According to the wikipedia page of the substance, it's even used for (different) medical purposes. I don't know why it works, I don't know which exact component of the substance is responsible - basically I don't even know for sure if it's working at all or if it was just luck, placebo effect, something else, ...
So, what do I do now?
I have two things that would be nice to achieve:
1. Help people cure their warts.
2. Maybe earn a bit of money on the way.
My thoughts so far (in no particular order):
- Just posting it on the internet somewhere will surely not help with 2. and probably also not with 1.
- It would probably be good to run some kind of study/trial/... to figure out if there is an effect at all. I have neither the know how nor the means to do that.
- I don't have any connections to the pharma industry.
- As it's a pretty standard substance, I don't expect that there is tons of money to be made.
- I would be willing to invest a bit of money (maybe 1000€, which I think is the price for a patent) into this if it would mean I had a decent chance of making a bit more money back.
- I don't want to spend too much time on this - but just keeping it for myself feels wrong. If earning money from it requires too much effort, goal 1 is more important than goal 2.
- As I don't have any medical background going to the nearest university to get a scientist interested is about as unlikely to succeed as sending a random letter to a random pharma company.
Any other thoughts that might be relevant? Advice?
Does anyone else find that their posted comments here sometimes randomly disappear? I'm sure I posted a lunar rock sample based debunking of the notion of moon landings having been faked, but now it has gone. I think it was a direct reply to the thread OP, so it couldn't have been lower in the heirarchy and some parent comment was deleted taking mine with it.
Also, in last week's Open Thread I posted a top-level comment about my former confusion between Jessica Mulroney and Dylan Mulvaney until I twigged that they were different people! OK that may have been a bit frivolous and inconsequential and could thus have been removed by Scott, but I don't think the moon rock reply was objectionable in either tone or content.
So Pope Francis has issued a declaration, and I'm glumly anticipating the reaction to it:
https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pubblico/2023/12/18/0901/01963.html#en
It's in response to questions put to him about irregular unions, and the guys over at the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition or Holy Office, fact-fans!) got to introduce it.
What is really going to put the cat among the pigeons is the permission for blessing gay couples. You can't call it a marriage ceremony or a wedding, but you can exercise pastoral discretion:
"39. In any case, precisely to avoid any form of confusion or scandal, when the prayer of blessing is requested by a couple in an irregular situation, even though it is expressed outside the rites prescribed by the liturgical books, this blessing should never be imparted in concurrence with the ceremonies of a civil union, and not even in connection with them. Nor can it be performed with any clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding. The same applies when the blessing is requested by a same-sex couple.
40. Such a blessing may instead find its place in other contexts, such as a visit to a shrine, a meeting with a priest, a prayer recited in a group, or during a pilgrimage. Indeed, through these blessings that are given not through the ritual forms proper to the liturgy but as an expression of the Church’s maternal heart—similar to those that emanate from the core of popular piety—there is no intention to legitimize anything, but rather to open one’s life to God, to ask for his help to live better, and also to invoke the Holy Spirit so that the values of the Gospel may be lived with greater faithfulness.
41. What has been said in this Declaration regarding the blessings of same-sex couples is sufficient to guide the prudent and fatherly discernment of ordained ministers in this regard. Thus, beyond the guidance provided above, no further responses should be expected about possible ways to regulate details or practicalities regarding blessings of this type."
And hoo-boy, I'm expecting everyone to start losing their lives over this, particularly the set who (both in approval and disapproval) will be going "the pope says gay marriage is okay!"
No, the Pope does not say that, but this is.... yeah. It's a step. One that got the Anglicans into trouble, and I'm not at all confident that this will remain a simple blessing for certain circumstances and not at all an ersatz wedding ceremony, because that's not how it worked out for the Church of England when they tried it.
I might have found a low-hanging fruit to improve online dating?
Alice is weird, in several ways, that she hides in superficial encounters but wouldn't want to keep hiding forever in an intimate relationship. Examples: her brother is in prison and she doesn't know what'll happen when he gets out, she has a pretty extreme kink and she's seriously afraid of the paperclip maximizer. In the context of dating, these are things that would make some people not want to date her. Disclosing them too early would be alarming and would make her look obsessed about, or overly identified with, these weirdnesses. But disclosing then too late would be misleading - and of course misdirection may also make people not want to date her.
So maybe a dating site should treat weirdnesses something like as follows. Alice sets up her normal public profile, and enters her weirdnesses separately and individually. These get rated, anonymously, by other users, on scales like "how gross", "how dangerous" and "how much I wouldn't want to date someone who has that". This should also allow some positive ratings like "that's hot actually". Alice's profile only shows the number of weirdnesses, and maybe how they rank on some scales, and until she has some minimum number of weirdnesses (each above some minimum threshold of badness), her profile is marked "incomplete" as the site declares "everyone is weird".
When Bob comes to her profile, how he has previously rated anonymized weirdnesses like Alice's gets calculated into the match prediction. If Bob and Alice have weirdnesses that are identical or similar, this has a strong pro-matching effect! (On top of how this may already affected their ratings of each other's weirdnesses.) Users can choose to disclose a weirdness to a specific user, but the recipient gets to choose whether they want to know.
Has something like this been done? I think it should, because I think the non-obvious reasons someone might not want to date someone are pretty central to the problem of online dating, or even of dating in general. I even suspect the ability to handle them with care is why getting set up for a date by mutual friends is the most successful form of matchmaking.
I just read through all of Unsong, and really liked it. One could say I had a whale of a time (sorry, I had to).
Note to anyone wanting to read it over the holidays: when the Hell chapter comes with a content warning, Scott really means it. Like, even for the kind of people who don't normally care about content warnings.
General question: Scott, although Jewish, is clearly familiar with the New Testament and various Christian interpretations of that. Is that completely normal for Jews growing up in the US (except perhaps the ultra-orthodox) that you learn about the Gospels and Revelation etc. in school or pick it up through "background noise"? Or are those books considered off-limits, but the most liberal and/or atheist Jews don't mind so much? I'm wondering how many readers would have deatailed cultural knowledge of both Lurianic Kabbalah and the Book of Revelations.
Conditional Veterinary Approval!
https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/resources-you/conditional-approval-explained-resource-veterinarians
How had I never heard of this fascinating workaround! Here’s a hypothetical scenario: the manufacturer of an existing mint-family tea product applies for conditional approval to use the tea for treating Covid in pet hamsters. Jan and colleagues have conclusively documented the fact that mint tea can work for this purpose: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33452205/
The tea manufacturer could then slap a label on the box saying “conditionally FDA-approved for treating Covid*” with the asterisk noting that it’s conditionally approved for hamsters. The entire maneuver would look like a marketing stunt – but I don’t think that’s a legally valid justification for the FDA to reject the conditional use application. And it's actually not just a marketing stunt - the hamster maneuver could have the socially desirable side-effect of finally getting the word out about the fact that mint tea realistically might prevent or treat Covid in people. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37007799/
If somebody could get their foot in the door with a mint-for-hamsters application then the next step on the slippery slope would be for Shionogi to apply for permission to market Xocova for use in hamsters. If buying a pet hamster could get me a "veterinary" Xocova prescription, I would buy a pet hamster.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/10/xocova-ensitrelvir-covid-antiviral/675768/
Why hasn't Ukraine drafted more troops? I recently learned that they've exempted relatively young men from mandatory service- I think under 30. That's why reports of Ukrainian troops in the field are generally older men, the average age is in the 40s or so. Russia has not really gone full mobilization or conscription on their end, so despite fighting a larger population country Ukraine could (in theory) have as many or even more troops on the ground by mobilizing a higher % of their citizens. In practice they seem to be outnumbered at least 3 to 1 on the battlefield.
Is exempting younger men meant to save their economy? As presumably they're more likely to be in the IT field. I'd imagine not having drafted them when the war started is now some pretty strong path dependency- patriotism/willingness to die on a frozen muddy battlefield for Donetsk has probably dimmed some versus 18 months ago. I can't imagine drafting all of the younger men now would go over very well. Or is there some other angle that I'm missing?
I just read Michael Sandel's book — Justice: What's the right thing to do?
Sandel summarises John Rawls as saying that, from behind the veil of ignorance, most people would prefer an egalitarian society to one where people are rewarded for merit. I think Rawls is wrong about this and wrote a response here:
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/those-are-my-tomatoes
Can someone point me to some good "plain English" exposition on unconditional election and conditional election? I don't find the wikipedia very helpful on this. For instance, wouldn't this permit debauchery? If [edit: an] evangelical believes that someone else's fate is predestined either for redemption or salvation [correction ~11 hours later: redemption or damnation], wouldn't lecturing to that person create pointless suffering?
Apologies in advance if this has been discussed ad nauseam in the past, but what do readers think about the prospect of abolishing cash? Is it likely, or inevitable, and if so is that desirable?
In the UK a few months ago our PM, Rishi Sunak, let slip in a newspaper (Telegraph) interview that cash was "transitional", and in the last year or two banks have been frantically pushing mobile phone apps for transactions. So it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to conclude that abolishing cash is a medium-term plan at least here.
I think it would (or will) be a Very Bad Idea, from a civil liberties standpoint. It is bad enough that credit card transactions are recorded, but having to use mobile phone apps adds a vast new dimension of state surveillance possibilities by enabling past and present location tracking as well as transactions!
When one adds constant nannying health advice, with possible insurance implications for unhealthy purchases, and aggressive and peremptory "debanking" (closing bank accounts) of customers who the banks decide may have non-PC views, the future for personal liberties looks bleak.
Is there a way to hide some comments or view only the first few comments in each thread or view only abbreviated versions of most comments?
To the 20-odd people who replied to the moon landing guy: stop feeding the trolls! You're making it so damn easy, good quality comments never get that much engagement and it's sad to see it wasted.
Practical AI question:
I've been playing with Leonardo.ai (an AI image generator). It has a "make good mode" called Alchemy, which brings its images up to pretty nice quality, in exchange for costing three times more credits to use. I have no idea what the difference is on the back end when Alchemy mode is used.
However, I don't think I'm interested in signing up to Leonardo.ai in the long term. For one thing, the Alchemy feature turned out to be a free trial, and now it's expired, Leonardo's output is pretty shit by comparison.
But the main reason is that they've overcompensated so much with their offensive content sanitisation efforts that I keep running into the censor for innocuous things. And even when the censor lets me through, the resulting image often willfully misunderstands what I want (for eg, asking for two emaciated people having a knife fight over a loaf of bread produces an image of two friendly smiling people holding cutlery knives while passing loaves of bread to each other. This kind of mistake never gets made when asking for non-violence- or non-sex-adjacent scenarios, where most of the time I've been surprised and impressed by the nuances the AI has picked up on.)
I'm not paying Leonardo.ai a subscription when I suspect I'll only burn through all the extra credits trying to cajole the system into producing a result it's trying not to give me. I also dislike distributed systems in general and prefer the idea of being able to do things just as easily when the Internet is down as not.
I know other people have got local copies of image generators running, and I'm thinking I wouldn't mind having one of my own. I have a coding background, and I'm fine with Python, which I gather has become the language of choice for AI programming. But haven't actually followed any AI tutorials (not since it all took off anyway). I also have other projects on and can't really do a deep dive into something new right now.
Basically I can't justify going off and learning all this stuff on my own, but that doesn't mean I can't ask for advice from people who already know it, just to get a sense of what I would be letting myself in for.
So, to boil it down: if I were to decide to roll my own local AI image generator:
- what's the best setup/software/library to use?
- what's the procedure (installation, coding, training, parameter tweaking, etc) and how labour-intensive is it?
- what kind of resources do I need (how much training data, GPU cycles, etc) to get a decent result?
- what kind of quality can a lone player expect to achieve? Something 90% as good as the pro tools, or something 1% as good?
I appreciate any advice.
Is it ethical to have a child, knowing that this child will be born into a life of slavery? What should we make of all the slaves who have chosen to have children throughout history?
Math puzzle:
Four ships are sailing the sea, each moving with a constant speed (speeds of different ships may be different). None of their courses are parallel to one another. It is known that the first three ships all meet with each other at some point, though not all three at once. It is also known that the fourth ship meets with the first one, and then with the second. Prove that the fourth ship must also inevitably meet with the third one at some point (in the past or the future with respect to its other meetings).
(please ROT13 proposed answers)
Another open thread... Another opportunity to wish everyone well.
Whoever you are, I hope you feel better - or if you are feeling down, at least not as bad.
Also please see this video of Gurdeep Pandher of the Yukon dancing:
https://www.threads.net/@gurdeeppandher/post/C091zzuLQB4
Why is inflation bad? I am not an economist, but it seems to me their explanations are woefully unpersuasive. I'll post my own attempt at answer in a subordinated comment, this is just a problem statement.
Normies will tell you that inflation is bad because it impoverishes them. Economists will tell you that is not necessarily true, but then fail to provide explanation why then we should be concerned inflation.
Here I am going to use as a foil an open source textbook from something called Rice university (here: https://openstax.org/details/books/principles-economics-3e). I’ve read, like, two to three another textbooks, and if my memory serves me well, their explanations of inflation costs are fairly similar.
Anyway, that textbook provides (https://openstax.org/books/principles-economics-3e/pages/22-4-the-confusion-over-inflation) following reasons why inflation is bad:
a) unintended redistribution of purchasing power between various groups in society, like creditors vs debtors. Well, ok, but the word “unintended” here is used strangely; what distributions of purchasing power are “intended”? Who is the one who intends?
It seems to me that uninteded redistributions of purchasing power in this broad sense happen all the time in societies not based on central planning, and economists are pretty chill about them, when inflation is not involved. E.g. new technology is invented which boosts wages of some workers and puts others out of work, price of oil falls on global markets, increasing incomes of people driving gasoline cars and depressing prospects of people dependent on electric vehicle sales, etc.
b) blurred price signals; explained as
>In a world where inflation is at a high rate, but bouncing up and down to some extent, does a higher price of a good mean that inflation has risen, or that supply of that good has decreased, or that demand for that good has increased? Should a buyer of the good take the higher prices as an economic hint to start substituting other products—or have the prices of the substitutes risen by an equal amount? Should a seller of the good take a higher price as a reason to increase production—or is the higher price only a sign of a general inflation in which the prices of all inputs to production are rising as well? The true story will presumably become clear over time, but at a given moment, who can say? [end quote]
Perhaps I am missing something, but this seems to me as authors being partly confused and partly making a big deal out of something trivial.
Inflation is in itself a price signal; if you are a producer and prices of the thing you are producing are going up together with prices of other things, it is absolutely rational to increase production compared to an alternative universe where prices are staying the same, given the same costs of production.
It is true that there are costs associated with checking whether your costs of production as before you fire up the machines, but those are imho almost negligible in a modern economy; as a producer of the thing you probably have an established mechanism to check your costs.
d) problems with long-term planning. This is the correct reason, although it is not connected with inflation in itself, but with an uncertainty about the future rate of inflation.
When you are reasonably confident that in next years, inflation will average around 2 %/year, your financial planning will be easier than when you think it could be anything from 1 % to 120 % per year. However.
Presumably the reason why difficulty of long-term planning is something to be avoided is because it messes up production; if companies do not know what will happen tomorrow, they’ll reduce production and lay off workers, right? Or workers would quit themselves and enter a barter economy or something. And if everyone is doing that, unemployment should go up, right? This indeed happens when a country enters an inflationary collapse territory, but it takes quite a lot of uncertainty about future inflation before employment starts being affected.
Not only are highly-above-2 % levels of inflation evidently compatible with low unemployment, but the the whole philosophy of inflation-fighting through interest rate hikes espoused by world’s central banks is based on an idea that sometimes it is worthwhile to reduce employment to bring inflation down. See results of so called Volcker disinflation in the 80s, when US unemployment rate hit a post-WW2 record, only to be outdone by a covid panic in 2020.
Maybe economists are slacking when writing textbook chapters on why inflation needs to be avoided because they think that an explanation is unnecessary - public already opposes inflation more than it should, so there is no immediate danger that it will turn pro-inflationary. From the same textbook:
>Economists usually oppose high inflation, but they oppose it in a milder way than many non-economists. Robert Shiller, one of 2013’s Nobel Prize winners in economics, carried out several surveys during the 1990s about attitudes toward inflation. One of his questions asked, “Do you agree that preventing high inflation is an important national priority, as important as preventing drug use or preventing deterioration in the quality of our schools?” Answers were on a scale of 1–5, where 1 meant “Fully agree” and 5 meant “Completely disagree.” For the U.S. population as a whole, 52% answered “Fully agree” that preventing high inflation was a highly important national priority and just 4% said “Completely disagree.” However, among professional economists, only 18% answered “Fully agree,” while the same percentage of 18% answered “Completely disagree.” [end quote]
Nevertheless, there isn’t widespread opposition among economists against crushing relatively mild (e.g. below 5 %) inflation by choking of credit supply and potentially increasing unemployment, so presumably they are ok with that. It’s just they haven’t bothered to provide a good explanation why.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErMSHiQRnc8&ab_channel=AlanBecker
Remember Animation vs. Math? This is a new one by the same person. I'd say it's not as concept-dense, but the special effects are spectacular.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1J6Ou4q8vE&t=156s
Is there any advice for being less toxic when playing multiplayer games? Sometimes I engage in toxic behavior like flaming my allies for their mistakes, and I always end up regretting it. Intellectually, I should know better, but sometimes monkey brain wins and it just happens.
This also happens when playing with people I know, especially if there's a large skill gap. Why do I care so much about winning rather than enjoying spending time with others? Even when I like someone, if we lose too many games in a row I'll just get frustrated and have to take a break.
More of Scott's old travel posts: in "Stuff" (https://archive.ph/x1Hpm https://sharetext.me/wb5wbwiukp), Scott ascends Mt. Fuji and not much good comes out of it. Then in "Stuff" (https://archive.ph/zxkK8 https://sharetext.me/a1aotukelw) he goes to visit the infamous Yasukuni Jinja. The true winner of WWII is revealed, and the duplicity of the Chinese is laid bare.
From https://bigthink.com/health/tiny-biobots-surprise-their-creators-by-healing-wound/
> Neural repair: As a test of the little biobots, the Tufts team created a 2D layer of neurons in a petri dish and then scratched it with a metal rod. They then place a dense concentration of anthrobots on part of the “wound.”
> Surprisingly, their presence seemed to encourage healing — new neurons grew below the anthrobots, but not on gaps that were left uncovered.
It sounds like a big deal, but I am no biologist. Anyone would like to chime in?
This year’s review of Why Nations Fail suggests it’s not very good. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-why-nations-fail The comments on the review seem to agree.
Is there a better book that tackles this, but is aimed at the same audience?
Wrote a quick book review of 1632 by Eric Flint. Honestly, one of my favorite books. I figure that it's sort of rationality-adjacent -- or, at least, belonging to that vague genre of "people solve problems and build stuff," which is close enough. https://lettersfromtrekronor.substack.com/p/book-review-1632
Many here have expressed interest in a dating service that follows basically the model of OKCupid circa 2010, believing it was better for the purpose of matching people happily. I believe there is even an effort underway. However I haven't seen a discussion of what exactly caused OKCupid to stop being Like That.
Do we know? It seems important to me that we know, as otherwise how can we be confident any efforts we make will avoid the same failure modes?
The only theory I've heard is pretty barebones, though plausible. It goes something like this:
> It was more profitable to switch to the Tinder model, even though this model is dysfunctional for creating good relationships. People won't use a model of paying the company if they get married, which leaves the subscription fee model, which incentivizes stringing people along since most people do not continue dating, especially via a dating service, once they have married.
That's a story of misaligned incentives. I'm not sure how that is fixed. The service being a nonprofit seems like a good start, but nonprofits still have to make money. Must there be an endowment? OpenAI aside, one usually doesn't get venture capital for nonprofits, AIUI.
Any thoughts about how reasonably honest government happens? I'm thinking about being able to get a driver's license without paying a bribe. It's would seem as though governments where every potential gate-keeping office requires bribes to superiors which are partially covered by needing bribes from members of the public, and yet there are governments where that doesn't happen.
I've been writing a series of posts on anthropic reasoning with the eventual goal to resolve all the paradoxes, get rid of the bizzareness of both SSA and SIA, and reduce this field to basic probability theory.
Here are links to the posts so far written:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HQFpRWGbJxjHvTjnw/anthropical-motte-and-bailey-in-two-versions-of-sleeping
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uEP3P6AuNjYaFToft/conservation-of-expected-evidence-and-random-sampling-in
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xbQLwBAyP2KjZC4qS/antropical-probabilities-are-fully-explained-by-difference
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8rWP3ZvHe2HkQd53o/anthropical-paradoxes-are-paradoxes-of-probability-theory
If you have some confusion or unanswered questions about anthropics - feel free to ask them here and I'll add them to my todo list.
Why does Data Secrets Lox not have written rules?
For that matter why doesn't Less Wrong?
I like knowing what to expect from a place.
Dumb question:
What is the syntax for getting quoted text displayed with the blue left-hand bars on substack?
<blockquote>
doesn't work
</blockquote>
I think the LessWrong post about the dog longevity company gave an incomplete summary of the evidence related to IGF-1 inhibitors and longevity. According to the post, Loyal (the company) was basically observing correlation (small dogs live longer than big dogs, and also have lower IGF-1) and assuming causation. But the post doesn't mention that a causal link between IGF-1 inhibition and longevity has been established and replicated in model organisms, including worms and mice:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04805-5
Of course showing that a drug works in mice definitely doesn't guarantee that it'll work in dogs or humans (looks like IGF-1 inhibitors don't work to increase longevity in humans). There's even the meme where people append "IN MICE" to hyped-up science headlines to more accurately reflect the results they're reporting on. But still, I think this evidence is worth noting and the LessWrong post was incomplete without it.
Anyway I might write a longer post on this later, but I'm generally in favor of a right-to-try with medicine. I think it's good that the FDA is allowing sales of this drug. I forget where I heard this (maybe from an ACX post?) but it's kinda crazy that if a medicine definitely DOESN'T work, it's completely unregulated and freely accessible (homeopathy, essential oils, "alternative medicine"). But if a medicine actually MIGHT work, then it becomes very highly regulated.
My wife wrote a round-up of responses to her clinical trial odyssey essay-guides: https://bessstillman.substack.com/p/reactions-to-please-be-dying-but. ACX figures prominently, because the best and most-engaged responses tended to come from here. The FDA is the major villain in the clinical trial essay-guides.
On a personal level, I'm pleased to note that petosemtamab / MCLA-158, the clinical trial drug I'm taking for recurrent/metastatic squamous cell carcinoma of the tongue, is working, and, moreover, it turns out that there are other promising treatments in phase 1b and phase 2 for when petosemtamab stops working: https://jakeseliger.com/2023/12/07/tentative-fluttering-optimism-the-surprising-hot-r-d-ferment-in-head-and-neck-cancer-treatment/.
will be in SF starting afternoon of 21st to afternoon of 22nd. going to the big party for a certain magazine if you are going too find me
> I think we got wires crossed on whether you need some pre-existing work to show before applying (you don’t)
Alexander here! Scott, Thank you for sharing the links!
My idea here is that getting some progress done early increases our chances. If we detected signs of the effect on our own brains, it means the study is more likely to replicate and it means that we are more likely to find applications of the effect too.
A riddle:
Witch's state, Kepler's weight,
A throng you must break through.
Curfew's start, anchor's part
An archaic mutt to shoo.
Reptile's help, lemon's whelp
Pollyana's bright-side brew.
Three clues entwine a splendid design:
an auspicious night of hidden delight!
What would be the most entertains sport to watch professional athletes play on the moon? Imagine we have a full colonist with a giant arena.
I was thinking basketball but dribbling probably becomes quite awkward there. What does running to bases look like in baseball?
Fun trivia: In the Scandinavian translations of "The Fox and the Grapes" fable, the fox isn't trying to reach grapes, since there wasn't any grapes growing there. It is instead after rowanberries.
Since rowanberries are actually really sour and generally an ill-tasting laxative when unprocessed, the fox is actually completely correct in his observation; entirely changing the moral of the story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes#%22The_Fox_and_the_Grapes%22_in_other_languages
I wrote a short story inspired by Borges, if anyone is interested in that kind of thing (no, it's not as good as Borges' stories): https://bowlofnailsforbreakfast.substack.com/p/the-most-borgesian-story
Is vaping actually harmful?
What is wrong with reddit? I find that oftentimes I have a question, and I can't honestly think of any other place on the internet that I can ask that question and get an answer other than specific subreddits. But at the same time, I don't want to post on reddit because I hate it. You can't post anything there without at least half the comments being about how you're a fucking idiot for even asking the question to begin with. Every single time I'm like "I know I had bad experiences on reddit in the past, but this current post I'm about to do is so innocuous that no one could possibly take issue with it and ridicule me for it", and every time, without fail, I'm proven wrong.
Reddit just seems to me to be the judgiest place in the world. Does reddit select for this? Is this just toxoplasma in action? Does half of reddit just consider themselves to be better than other people?
Do most ACX readers and rationalists in general believe in the moonlandings? It just doesn’t seem plausible when you take into account that SpaceX after twenty years can’t do it, but some how NASA accomplished it in less than ten in the 60s.