Can anyone recommend CD releases of John Lewis piano solos?
I've found new Darrell Scott and Tim O'Brien, and Ralph Towner -- which had to come from Germany -- but I need an hour or so of John Lewis noodling around to play when I drive. I have only Marian McPartland's interview and one CD. Any ideas? I have plenty of MJQ.
I know this has been asked many times across the internet over the years, but I figured there's at least a chance that a Netflix employee who might know something reads this.
Why on earth does Netflix always only recommend the same 20 shows forever *most of which you have already watched*? Why do they recommend things you've already watched at all? Given this is the most obvious possible improvement to recommendations and trivial to implement, they must be doing it on purpose, but WHY?!?!
Some people have suggested that they recommend things you've already watched in order to cover up the lack of content, but even now they still have vastly more content than they show on the homepage, and while it may not be perfectly matched, anything would be better than just making the home page a static list of shows you've already watched. Doing this makes Netflix look *more* like a ghost town rather than less. So what gives?
I think there is a growing case to be made that the Israeli public is more culpable and participating in the murdering of Palestinian civilians than the average German during the holocaust was.
Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain: A review of Stanislas Dehaene's book "Consciousness and the Brain", which explores the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. The book discusses the differences between conscious and unconscious processing, the neural signatures of consciousness, and theories of consciousness such as the Global Neuronal Workspace.
Summary: Dehaene's book delves into the neuroscience of consciousness, distinguishing between conscious and unconscious processes in the brain. He proposes that conscious perception occurs when information is globally broadcast and processed by multiple brain regions, leading to reportability and self-monitoring. Unconscious processing, on the other hand, is more localized and cannot be reported or used for complex tasks requiring working memory. Dehaene discusses various theories of consciousness, such as the Global Neuronal Workspace, Integrated Information Theory, and the Multiple Drafts Model, and presents evidence from experiments using techniques like masking and neuroimaging. The book also touches on the philosophical implications of the research, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the prospect of machine consciousness.
a) How does Dehaene's Global Neuronal Workspace theory account for the differences between conscious and unconscious processing? What are the key neural signatures of conscious perception according to this theory?
b) Dehaene argues that consciousness is necessary for tasks requiring working memory, such as complex reasoning and decision-making. What are the implications of this view for our understanding of human cognition and the potential for machine consciousness?
c) The book suggests that many animals, particularly mammals, are likely to be conscious in ways similar to humans. What are the ethical implications of this view? How should it inform our treatment of animals and our understanding of their cognitive and emotional lives?
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: An essay discussing how a small, intolerant minority can disproportionately influence and dictate the choices and behaviors of the majority in various domains, such as religion, politics, and markets.
a) In what ways does the "minority rule" described by Taleb differ from the traditional understanding of democratic decision-making? What are the implications of this rule for the functioning of societies and institutions?
b) Taleb provides several examples of how the preferences of a small, intolerant minority can determine the options available to the majority, such as in the case of Kosher food or allergen-free environments. Can you think of other examples where this dynamic plays out, either in your personal life or in the broader society?
c) How might the "minority rule" contribute to the polarization and gridlock in contemporary politics? What strategies, if any, could be employed to mitigate the negative effects of this dynamic while still respecting individual rights and preferences?
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
"For their study, Spanish researchers recruited 361 adults with an average age of 44 years old. More than two-thirds (251) were women. Participants were separated into two classes based on a measurement called the “obesity index”: low level of obesity or high level of obesity.
While many studies on obesity rely on body mass index or BMI alone, the investigators took a multifaceted approach with their obesity index. The obesity index is not a standardized gauge for obesity but one that includes three variables: BMI, fat mass percentage, and waist circumference.
...They looked at metagenomic data, which is genetic material from a collection of microorganisms in a sample — in this case, stool samples. In addition, they looked at metabolomic data to analyze small molecules known as metabolites produced during cellular metabolism.
These two types of data, when analyzed in concert, can give a very precise picture of gut health and metabolism.
Using all of this data, researchers profiled some of the specific strains of bacteria found in the guts of the participants.
The researchers then looked at the microbiome for people classified as “high” on the obesity index compared to those classified as “low” on the index.
They found certain bacteria were linked with obesity risk, but that it was different for men versus women.
In the study, the gut microbiome of both men and women who ranked high on the obesity index is characterized by a lack of a potentially protective bacteria known as Christensenella minuta.
Interestingly, women and men who were obese had distinct gut microbiota profiles from one another. In men, two other forms of bacteria associated with obesity were prolific: Parabacteroides helcogenes and Campylobacter canadensis.
“Different microbes can be protective or they can increase risk for obesity. The way that they do that is by stimulating different aspects of our metabolic response and of our immune response…There are microbes such as E. coli that have been shown to increase risk of obesity because they’re known to be pro-inflammatory,” Mariana X. Byndloss, DVM, PhD, the Co-director of the Vanderbilt Microbiome Innovation Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told Healthline. She wasn’t affiliated with the research.
In the study the bacterium species Prevotella micans, Prevotella brevis, and Prevotella sacharolitica were associated with obesity in women but not in men."
I have no idea if this is a wild goose chase or not, but the emerging research on obesity is rather cold comfort for me; at least it helps me understand "how is it that my sister, born of the same parents and raised in the same environment, is thin and was thin all her life, while I am fat and was fat all my life?" as contributory factors besides "It's because you're stupid, lazy, and greedy and sit around stuffing your face with junk food 24/7, calories in = calories out, exercise, laws of thermodynamics, metabolism works the same for everyone, you dumb tub of lard".
A while back, Scott raises an eyebrows at the idea of lesbians who have extra with men..
Meanwhile, over in the U.K. we have the Cass report on treatment of trans kids ... and I'm getting the impression that certain political factions want to say "you're not trans, you're just a lesbian". Which, in the case of afab people who are masculin identified but attracted to men, would make them lesbians who have sex with men...
Were you taught any astronomy in K-12? I don't remember, I think I picked up most of my astronomy from science fiction, but astronomy might have been included in other science courses.
Please include when you were in school, at least the decade, and where. If you were in the US, let me know the state or region.
I've seen a claim that astronomy isn't taught in K-12 in the US because it conflicts with young earth creationism, but I have no idea whether this is true. I would have guessed that if it isn't taught, it would be just because they didn't get around to it.
So I'm taking this little survey. I realize ACX isn't a random sample, but I started the survey on Facebook, and ACX is at least generally younger and more geographically varied.
The Facebook results so far is that people were mostly taught astronomy in school.
I do think that if schools were dropping astronomy, I'd have heard of it, but maybe some schools never had it.
I think news stories have been pretty good about what happened, at least at the level of saying the moon got in front of the sun.
Perhaps the people who didn't know what was happening were picked by reporters. Perhaps astronomy, even on the minimal level, is a blur for a lot of people so they don't pay attention.
People who complain about the loading time of comments here should probably be aware of how this works in tech.
Meeting.
Bob the engineer: next item, fixing the comments. They load very slowly after 500 or so.
Product manager: how many substacks is that?
Bob: er, less than 0.1% but obviously they are popular stacks given the number of comments. We estimate 1-2% of users. We could do a reddit type solution.
PM: we are not Reddit. Reddit is all about comments, and that’s what drives traffic there, we are driven by the top line posts.
Bob: which brings people who comment. And then it falls over.
PM: for 1-2% … what about the mobile apps?
Bob: the comments scroll quickly there
PM: so less than 1-2% then in total. And we have a workaround.
Bob: but the mobile apps have other problems like not being able to edit…
PM: that’s a different task also on the backlog. Are the people who complain leaving the platform
Bob: no evidence of that right now, but they do complain a lot.
PM: where? On the App Store?
Bob: (exasperated) … no, obviously on the website. We have 4.8/5.0 ratings on the store. They complain on the comment threads if they get too large.
Pm: well luckily those comments are not readable. How long would it take us to redesign the website like Reddit.
Bob: 1-2months if we applied all front end resources
I have a question if it is not too late to ask. I apologize in advance if it is a stupid one (and yes some questions are so ill-informed as to be stupid).. So here it is. Is there any? way to quantify the degree to which a particular course of action is subject to the law of unintended consequences. Two examples,
Corn Ethanol Subsidies: These subsidies were meant to promote energy independence and reduce carbon emissions. Instead, they contributed to the rise in food prices by diverting corn from food production to energy, affecting global food markets.
The Cobra Effect: This term comes from an incident during British rule in colonial India, where a bounty was offered for every dead cobra to reduce their numbers. Instead, people began breeding cobras for income, increasing the population when the program ended and breeders released the snakes.
In other words, if by definition you can't predict what unintended consequence will occur, can you somehow determine what actions are more likely to lead to one?
In a move nobody could have seen coming (or at least, not the gentlemen who hysterically calling Scott, myself and others "white supremacists" for casting doubts on the project when scott first posted on it), the Saudis have been forced to scale back their planes for 'The Line' linear city: https://archive.is/xetJQ
Instead of being open to residents by 2030 as first planned, the city is expected to measure only 1.5 miles of the full 105 miles by that time.
For those playing along at home, Cook was one of the co-authors of an infamous paper alleging that racist violence was responsible for a drop off in black patents after 1900, but which was revealed to be a product of the data of main dataset they were using ending in 1900: https://twitter.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1489847148862742531
And all of this makes me laugh so much considering the number of people on here who have claimed, apparently very sincerely, that DEI is simply about making sure that capable minority candidates aren't discriminated against (this is trivially false from the name 'diversity, equity and inclusion', but it's nice to have real world counter-examples).
Of course, the fact that nobody seemed interested in a far more egregious case of affirmative action in government hiring when Scott posted a link to it makes me suspect we're dealing with people unwilling to update regardless of the evidence: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview
Very disappointing dark pattern in Substack's iOS app.
I attempted to read the linked post below, which was subscriber-only. Substack offered an opportunity to “Continue reading this post, courtesy of Jeff Maurer [Claim my free post]”. Just to be clear, I don’t object to this arrangement—many other authors have similar terms.
Clicking [Claim my free post] opened a dialog to [Subscribe and unlock]. Clicking through opened another dialog: “Verify your number: We need to verify your phone number before unlocking this post”.
This is misleading and exploitative. I have never given Substack my phone number. There is nothing which can be “verified”. Substack is simply using Jeff Maurer’s article as a lever to collect my phone number.
Why?
(I had posted a version of this to Jeff in Substack Notes; posting to ACX for posterity.)
I've been wondering if liveable neighborhoods have been proven to have an effect on screen addiction, or screen time, but I can't seem to find any studies on it. Are any of you in the know?
I just read Dr Bess Stillman's article, Debugging the Doctor Brain (about the perverse incentives that makes learning during residency difficult) and I'm wondering whether there's a single white collar field (I have no experience in blue collar, I don't know if it holds true there) that is actually good at (or taking steps to improve) training university graduates or if they're all awful.
I'm an engineer < 5 years out of uni, and many in my social circle are too. I'm finding, and this agrees with my other junior engineer friends, that there's not enough senior engineering oversight to go around. Most of us are making do, until we find out that management (often not engineering) has been asking us to sign off on things that are supposed to be checked by chartered engineers (which require evidence of professional development - most of us don't have that yet).
I learn in bits and pieces, and I'm grateful for any amount of time I get from senior people around me, but corporate cost-cutting has drastically shifted the ratios of experienced engineers and fresh grads. In many disciplines, there's a missing level of experience - around the 10 year mark. Most of us only have a group of equally clueless peers or one very busy subject matter expert (20+ years experience). I'm not sure if this is a retention issue or a retrenchment issue. It's all really really similar to Bess' observation on residents not being given sufficient guidance or learning space!
I am worried that this is happening to every professional field simultaneously - most of the workforce is inexperienced (because they're cheaper), experienced personnel are scarce and overloaded, the standard of the practice goes down because of this "figure it out" culture, where there's not quite enough people to even do the job, and people aren't being trained to do it properly. Obvious implications are worse healthcare, more mistakes in engineering (more expensive, less efficient, and unsafe infrastructure), more incompetence and fraud in everything.
I want to figure out if I'm noticing a real problem, but also wondering how to fix it.
Jordan Peterson is so lame. A recent Dwarkish RT said to listen to him on Cain and Able. I have so many criticisms.
1) Peterson plays the classic boring preacher. His sin is the boringness of the lecture, the slow pace, the stupidity of the audience applauding an insipid point.
2) His interpretations don't ring true. In it, Able is successful and deservingly so. This plays to Peterson's biases. Outside the biblical story it is a good point: people do tend to demonize the successful for no other reason than that they are successful. But this point is made all the time in comedy. It's not profound and probably not Biblical. Is Able more deservingly successful than Cain? I thought the point of the story was that God simply decided he preferred one offering over the other. Cain nor Able could predict which one would be preferred. Yet Peterson considers Able more successful due to cause.
His moment in history has probably passed, but why did anyone consider Jordan Peterson deep ever?
So during our get together for the eclipse the door into our garage broke and couldn't be opened. (I know! this a weak data point for equating total eclipses with the zombie apocalypse, because the first thing that happens when zombies arrive is either doors are locked or can't be locked.) So (after ripping the old door lock out.) I stopped at the local hardware and bought another.
"John" I said, "sell me your cheapest door lock, thingie, knob."
"My most cost effective you mean?" (John and I are old buddies, I go down to the hardware to have a beer or two on fridays.)
"Yeah that one", I say. He pulls down a box from the top shelf.
"I over ordered these." John says.
And for something less than $20 I go home with a new door knob.
And I wouldn't be writing this post if it hadn't been the best door knob gizmo to install ever. Now mind you I have no idea of the lifetime of this door knob, but if you've ever put in a door knob. (which you all should learn how to do, Because of zombies!) well after all the other stuff, you have to line up these two screws. which hold the whole door knob together. And it always is a pita. And on this new knob, you screwed the two screws into the outside first, and then you twist the inside knob on, and it has gaps for the screw shaft and a place for the head to catch. And then you tighten it up. And at the moment it get's my vote for the best door knob gizmo ever.
Ok so my understanding is that both (US) political parties are quite decentralized. Obviously primaries prevent much top-down control, but even party platforms and bylaws are decided pretty locally (?).
Given this, how hard would it be to “coup” a local political party? Eg imagine you’re a left-wing candidate running for election in a deep blue constituency. One strategy would be to get some of your friends to vote for you in the _Replublican_ primary, and then spend the general election convincing voters that you’re legit despite the nominal party label. Going further, you could imagine taking control of the whole local party apparatus and changing the “official” platform (not the these platforms mean much anyway).
Does this ever happen? I can’t find any instances but it’s a difficult-to-google scenario.
I'm clearly not cynical enough. There's at least good reason to believe that Amazon's Just Walk Out-- a system that lets people take their purchases, walk out, and be charged automatically is actually a thousand people in India evaluating video. Possible evidence-- shouldn't the charge for the purchase happen immediately rather than, as it does, taking hours?
I'd figured out that the answers to questions that appear after searches are scraped from web sites, but I didn't realize that the scraping sometimes adds errors and that google isn't directing people to the sites. The sites are in bad financial shape as a result. Talk about eating your seed corn.
Google ranking also involves a lot of work by humans.
The major point is that the stock market likes claims of using ai, which isn't the same thing as actually using ai.
Patients investigating long COVID-- they started with a survey of symptoms, then looked into which medications they were already taking that seemed to help. They've turned up some promising possibilities.
Left to themselves, scientists had been only studying specific symptoms, a very expensive way to learn anything.
There is *still* going to be another study of exercise even though there's a lot of evidence that exercise is bad for long COVID.
However, there are also studies being done or soon to be done based on the patients' research.
Do you know who Ivan Chonkin is? I'm sure that very few of you know the work of Vladimir Voinovich, an excellent satirist from the Soviet Union. His short stories and novels are both a telescope and a magnifying glass on life in a totalitarian cult of personality. He knows where the comi/tragedies are buried, and he unearths them all: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/old-stories-ivan-chonkin-is-dead
Polymarket seems to be by far the largest real-money prediction market, yet it was revealed to be less accurate than its smaller competitors(Manifold, Metaculus, etc.). Is there actual money making opportunity in Polymarket, including transaction costs and such?
What does modern psychology/psychiatry think about hypnosis? Is it useful? Mostly junk? No more useful than any other form of therapy? We don't know because it was first studied by weirdos in the 60s and nobody in modern times has tried replicating their results?
I've listened to a few hypnosis tracks out of curiosity, and it did put me into what I'd call an "altered state," so hypnosis certainly does *something*, but can you do anything *useful* with that state? Can you change behavior long-term with hypnotic suggestions? Is ignoring pain with hypnosis a thing?
Maybe Sam Bankman-Fried is better off than I thought:
The WSJ of April 6-7 reports that "All in all, FTX customers currently stand to get back their full account balances, based on their value when FTX collapsed in November 2022." (Page B5.)
People are buying up the debt and speculating on it. Maybe SBF will buy the prison. Store for everybody!
Separately, I apologize for impugning the integrity of DuckDuckGo. I am told it is not owned by Google.
Climate change/control and pandemic prevention/management may both be viewed as enhancing government control over the populace. WHICH of these two do you feel has the greater potential for controlling/affecting the populace? Differentials between long-term and short-term are invited.
Knowing the interests of this community, I'd like to share my recent substack post that is dealing with ideas of e/acc and AI safety. In my blog I'm focusing on topics that are related to Futurism, Science, Technology.
If I won't feel urgency to write something different, in 2 weeks I'll post about the need for increased productivity in biomedical research, and how I envision it to happen in the coming decades.
I wrote my first blogpost which is about why one should be open to wise insights from "cringy" sources. It's basically a reformulation of the ad hominem fallacy, but focusing on vibes instead of intellectual rigor or ethics. Read it and give me praise and recognition.
I did an analysis showing how the *time of day* that you submit a scientific preprint can influence how many citations that preprint later receives [1,2]. The basic thrust of this work is to show how institutions designed to deal with scientific work in a (seemingly) objective way can break down due to idiosyncrasies in social and technical processes.
Before I submit this work to a journal, I'm brainstorming other unexpected effects in citation trends that I could check for using article (meta)data alone, ideally with a mechanism for causal relationship that could be checked for in a controlled way. For example, something like "citation count vs. frequency of number of very uncommon words in the article text, because readers find the article more memorable and engaging" (I am not proposing this relationship nor interested in defending it here).
If anyone has ever thought about these kinds of effects, reach out to discuss!
Watched the Amazon reboot of Roadhouse, and was struck by how weird the whole endeavor seemed. It's not following the plot of the original movie, and it's not even following the original's tone, rather it's following what's presumably the audience's impression of the original's tone. It leans into a silliness that the Patrick Swayzee movie never acknowledged.
Not sure where I'm going with this. What do people think of this type of reboot, attempting to appeal to a post-hoc understanding of the original?
I'm sure that not all of my statements are pristine, but I actually feel very confident in the general thrust of my arguments. There are big, intuitive moving parts to Paul's picture that I mainly tackle here.
My biweekly COVID update for epidemiological weeks 13 and 14 is at the link below. Apologies for the typos. I also address the HPAI scare in dairy cattle. Bottom line:
1. H5N1 is not very symptomatic in cattle, which means cases are likely being overlooked.
2. The virus doesn't seem to be spreading via droplets or aerosols, but it's definitely showing up in the milk.
3. This would be highly concerning because of its potential to contaminate the milk supply — except that there's no reason to think that pasteurization won't kill the virus (the only virus types that seem to be able to survive pasteurization are bacteriophages).
4. If for some reason pasteurization is ineffective we probably should have already seen cases in humans linked to the milk supply (because the current number of 15 infected dairy herds is probably the tip of the iceberg).
5. Until this passes, I wouldn't advise you to indulge in raw milk products.
Maybe I'm being overly sanguine, but if I'm wrong, we'll know soon if H5N1 is spreading to humans via the milk supply.
In the past few months, I've noticed I've developed a kind of "productive dyslexia" when typing.
Essentially, I'll end up mistyping a word for a similar word. The most recent examples that I noticed were typing "with" instead of "wish" and "extend" instead of "extent", just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.
- It's always a correct word that I end up typing, just the *wrong* word.
- It completely bypasses my normal "oh I just typoed, fix that" reflex.
This is somewhat distressing to me, especially given that I've typed fine for decades before this and I've regressed suddenly in a major way. Do any of you have any takes on this?
I have a notion that part of what's going wrong these days is a crisis of conscientiousness. People and societies need a hard-to-define moderate amount of conscientiousness. Some things need to be done very well, some things need to be done pretty well, and some things don't matter.
At this point, we've got factions who are are anti-conscientiousness and pro-extreme conscientiousness. Neither one is trying to actually do things.
On the right, there's lack of interest in obeying rules that work-- for example a strong willingness to scam. On the left, there's willingness to destroy organizations which aren't sufficiently inclusive.
Both sides are very willing to break social connections.
Dupuyten's Contracture is a disease of the body growing extra connective tissue in a hand. It's not properly connected to muscles, and can lead to being unable to extend one or more fingers.z
I'm wondering whether it would be an especially good starting point for exploring the idea that DNA becoming unreliable is a cause of aging. It becomes more likely with age and is weirdly specific, as though rules for specific connective tissue have been changed.
I keep getting pushed to me short videos that appear to take place in south Asia in which rural people are participating in some kind of outdoor carnival game—weird variations of skee-ball or shooting baskets. Whoever succeeds is given a bag of grain or some other staple (the surrounding crowd cheers). Is this an actual method of dividing up resources used soemwhere? Who has time for this silliness? If the scenario is fake, who is making these videos with their large casts and elaborate setups? Do you guys know what I'm talking about?
Subject: Dumb things that people don't say any more.
Often it seems that the level of public discourse gets worse and worse with time, so I think it's nice occasionally to focus on dumb things that people used to say a lot when I was young, but which I haven't heard for a long time.
The whole "we only use 10% of our brains" thing is an obvious example, I haven't heard anyone seriously invoke that since the movie Lucy, and that was ten years ago. Back in the 90s you'd see it attributed to Albert Einstein and printed on posters.
"Money is the root of all evil" is another dumb cliche that used to come up a lot, and rarely does. That was of course a corruption of the original passage "The love of money is the root of all evil" but you don't hear that being said much these days either. My theory is 9/11 wiped it from the discourse by reminding us that there's plenty of evil that has nothing to do with the love of money.
What other (hopefully not too political) dumb things have you noticed people don't say any more?
I seem to have had more than the expected number of instances of LLMs refusing or failing to answer my questions recently.
Example 1: I asked Copilot whether Sydney Sweeney appears in the holiday episodes of Euphoria: I have subsequently established that the answer to this question is "no". Copilot told me that there are no holiday episodes and that Sweeney portrays Cassie Howard throughout Seasons 1 and 2. I asked "Aren't there two episodes after the end of season 1 and before the start of season 2?" Copilot started to type out a long answer, then deleted it and wrote, "My mistake, I can't give a response to that right now. Let's try a different topic."
Example 2: There was some discussion on Twitter recently about a story about Marcus Aurelius's wife having an affair with a gladiator and the emperor killing the gladiator and making his wife bathe in his blood. I asked Claude about this and Claude (correctly) said the story was apocryphal. I then asked what happened next according to the story, and Claude declined to answer on the basis that it would have to make something up itself. But this isn't true: at least in the version from Historia Augusta, the answer is that Marcus succeeded in seducing this wife by this method, but the fruit of their union (Commodus) was more a gladiator than a prince. There may be other versions, but then Claude could tell me about those.
Example 3: I asked ChatGPT what the probability is of sampling a normal distribution more than 60 standard deviations above the mean. It wouldn't give a numerical answer other than zero, saying the number was "so small that it's beyond the precision of most numerical computation methods to accurately represent". When I asked to write the formula, it did so. When I asked to calculate the formula, it ran some python code and again told me the answer was zero. I reminded it that it is possible to express very small numbers using standard scientific notation, but it would not budge. When I told it the answer was 1.238×10^-784, it agreed that was right.
Can someone recommend a good book for getting good at poker (Texas holdem)? I know how to play and understand the basics. I’m not afraid of math or numbers (though don’t have a high level math background).
When you see this level of divorce from reality, it's really no wonder there were so many aggressively incorrect people disagreeing with Scott's posts on things like the ferguson effect.
Has there been any update on the Far Out Initiative? I thought Scott mentioned he was intending to write something about the project in more detail. Are we going to see it discussed on the blog again in the future?
Econ 101 question: (I'm trying to understand currencies by hyperbolic thought experiments.) Imagine that for some ridiculous and unrealistic premise all the leaders of the world agreed to adopt a new single world currency and discontinue all other currencies. Which groups would be the winners and losers of this policy?* Would e.g. rich westerners, people with lots of third-world debt, or third-world exporters be better or worse off? If the winners and losers would depends on the implementation, then what implementation details would matter?
*in an Econ101 spherical cows sense. "There would be a global mega-recession and everyone would die" is not the answer I'm looking for, even if it's true.
I gave this online presentation about Metamodernism a couple of days ago, and was subsequently invited to give a follow-up series of presentations on the same subject.
Someone on Manifold suggested that I share my Substack in the open thread so I thought, "ah, what the heck". Here's one of my latest posts, in which I detail my philosophical and personal frustrations with much of the public discussion about privacy, which I think focuses on the wrong things, in essence, treating it as an issue of abstract rights, rather than the concrete applications of power, and the negative effects these can have on peoples lives. https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/the-privacy-paradox-and-what-privacy
I chatted George H from the last open thread: https://morelucid.substack.com/p/increasing-iq-by-10-points-is-possible . Dude sure seemed incredibly well informed to me. You can have whatever prior you want but he knew a ton of stuff about the subjects we discussed. Im not minimally informed myself but he super impressed me. Seems worth sharing because he was definitely WAY more informed than I expected. Top of the distribution outcome.
Do any of y'all have access to the Chaotic Thinking podcast (by Liminal Warmth)? I've googled it (as I recently remembered that it existed) but it seems that the major websites don't actually have the content of the podcast itself :(
Does anyone have high quality analysis of exercise using machines to share. I want specifically machines not bodyweight or free weight. Would super appreciate seeing anything cool!
Is it possible that the roles we consider high status in society today co-evolved with patriarchy in such a way that these are actually optimized for masculine traits? For example, in a world that was matriarchal, maybe companies would be lead by a triumvirate instead of a singular CEO Maybe in that world, after men have overcome social oppression through their masculist movement, they would be allowed and encouraged to form part of triumvirates but under perform on average? Or, say that we lived in a world were parenting was the highest status thing one could do, could men on average compete with women?
I’m not attempting to justify the lack of diversity in high status roles. Conditional on what we’ve got, I am fully in favor of increasing opportunity and access for all. I’m also not claiming that the above hypothesis implies genetics is the primary reason for a skewed distribution. I’m merely wondering if there’s something to it. For example in the same way we can argue humans domesticated dogs as much as dogs domesticated humans.
I took your survey and found some of the questions confusing. For example, Number of Lifetime Sex Partners. I've had a number of long-term sexual relationships and expect my current one to last the rest of my life. How should the question be answered? Since I already submitted the survey, it's too late for me, but I'm still interested in what you meant.
"Tensegrity" (tensional integrity) is a... building technique I guess? that combines cables which are only under tension with parts such as rods that are only under compression. You can make some nifty stuff, like a table where it looks like the top is levitating and trying to float away.
I've read a bunch of abstract arguments for why it's a great idea. In particular, it's supposedly very strong compared to the weight of the components, and there are some vague claims that the human body (the spine in particular) is built according to those principles.
So, why isn't this used a bunch everywhere? All I've found are some art projects, one bridge in Melbourne (probably also categorized under "art" as opposed to "efficient building technique"), and SUPERball, a theoretical design by NASA for a probe that can survive impacts in arbitrary orientations. That scarcity makes my BS detector go off.
Is it a bad tradeoff because of its high complexity to design and build? Are the physical properties actually not that great? Some other problems (I could imagine tendency towards explosive failures)? Or is humanity actually missing out on this great technique?
> The hedge fund Bridgewater is running a forecasting contest on Metaculus. US residents only, extra prizes for undergraduates. Prizes include $25,000 and potentially getting recruited by Bridgewater (in which case read the “Corporate Culture” section on their wiki page before accepting).
An actual link to that "wiki page" ("Wikipedia article", to be more precise - "wiki page" implies a Bridgewater-hosted wiki, which resulted in five minutes of life wasted clicking around their website looking for an internal wiki) would have been nice.
There's been a question that's been bugging me ever since I read "Answer to Job" and "Unsong". (Spoilers for both)
Scott's theodicy says that God created every universe which is net good. But there's a problem with this theory which is also present in a Tegmark IV multiverse and modal realism: we should expect ourselves to exist in a universe which is much weirder and far more complex than both our universe and the universe of "Unsong". One in which there aren't any real "laws", or the laws are randomly and regularly broken for no real reason at all.
Advocates of multiverse theories have addressed this problem by introducing the concept of "measure". As far as I can tell, it's a mysterious factor that affects how likely you are to exist in a given universe. Advocates often say it's related to orderliness and simplicity in a universe. And I can find that believable.
But if God created the multiverse... well, that changes the equation, doesn't it? At least intuitively. Because if you have a billion simulations in a single universe, and almost all of them are chaotic and nonsensical, intuitively the concept of measure wouldn't really apply. We would expect the average inhabitant of such a simulation to live a chaotic and nonsensical life. And I don't really see why it would be different with God.
Unless, of course, God's authority over reality is absolute, and so He has the power to create all His universes with a given amount of measure in each of them. That almost works... except that if God, as portrayed in "Unsong", had this power, surely he'd make the probability of existing in a less-than-perfect universe infinitesimal.
I'd like some input here because I found this theodicy really elegant, except for this single fatal flaw.
Forewarning of conditions for TERRORIST VIOLENCE (actually just the wilful use of technology for anti human, anti essentialist and wireheading purposes (unless you subsequently get violent about this))
I'm curious about the following thesis: "A significant factor in making it possible for Donald Trump to represent a major party were decades of work by intellectuals to criticize the heroes of the past and emphasize the flaws of the great men of history." If you emphasize George Washington being a slaveowner, John F Kennedy a womanizer, and Columbus as an evil man, does that create an environment where people are more willing to accept a leader with the kind of glaring flaws Donald Trump has. Is there an argument here? Or not?
What are the pluses and minuses of California creating a new UC?
We need to build more housing, but it's hard to do in any existing city. We could build new cities, but it's hard to get network effects going and they're not "cool" (ie there are a bunch of random towns in Northern California, but nobody moves there).
But cities with a UC campus have generally developed well and been desirable places to live, even when they were pretty new (eg Irvine, Davis, probably more I don't know about). If the state puts a new UC campus in some random part of the Central Valley, the Mojave Desert, or the northern forests, would an upper-middle-class town of 100,000 people grow around it?
There are many students trying to get into UCs, and many academics who want to be hired, and the project would more than pay for itself in land value, so what makes this hard?
Can anyone recommend CD releases of John Lewis piano solos?
I've found new Darrell Scott and Tim O'Brien, and Ralph Towner -- which had to come from Germany -- but I need an hour or so of John Lewis noodling around to play when I drive. I have only Marian McPartland's interview and one CD. Any ideas? I have plenty of MJQ.
I know this has been asked many times across the internet over the years, but I figured there's at least a chance that a Netflix employee who might know something reads this.
Why on earth does Netflix always only recommend the same 20 shows forever *most of which you have already watched*? Why do they recommend things you've already watched at all? Given this is the most obvious possible improvement to recommendations and trivial to implement, they must be doing it on purpose, but WHY?!?!
Some people have suggested that they recommend things you've already watched in order to cover up the lack of content, but even now they still have vastly more content than they show on the homepage, and while it may not be perfectly matched, anything would be better than just making the home page a static list of shows you've already watched. Doing this makes Netflix look *more* like a ghost town rather than less. So what gives?
So, apparently Iran has finally launched an actual attack on Israel. https://apnews.com/article/strait-of-hormuz-vessel-33fcffde2d867380e98c89403776a8ac
Honestly, this whole situation has been a long time coming. It will be very interesting to see how bad it gets.
https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1779198875925926360
I think there is a growing case to be made that the Israeli public is more culpable and participating in the murdering of Palestinian civilians than the average German during the holocaust was.
OC ACXLW Sat April 13 Consciousness and The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 61st Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays after that.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, April 13 2024
Time 2 pm
Conversation Starters:
Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain: A review of Stanislas Dehaene's book "Consciousness and the Brain", which explores the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. The book discusses the differences between conscious and unconscious processing, the neural signatures of consciousness, and theories of consciousness such as the Global Neuronal Workspace.
Summary: Dehaene's book delves into the neuroscience of consciousness, distinguishing between conscious and unconscious processes in the brain. He proposes that conscious perception occurs when information is globally broadcast and processed by multiple brain regions, leading to reportability and self-monitoring. Unconscious processing, on the other hand, is more localized and cannot be reported or used for complex tasks requiring working memory. Dehaene discusses various theories of consciousness, such as the Global Neuronal Workspace, Integrated Information Theory, and the Multiple Drafts Model, and presents evidence from experiments using techniques like masking and neuroimaging. The book also touches on the philosophical implications of the research, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the prospect of machine consciousness.
Text link:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-consciousness-and
Audio link:
https://podcastaddict.com/astral-codex-ten-podcast/episode/139738702
Questions for discussion:
a) How does Dehaene's Global Neuronal Workspace theory account for the differences between conscious and unconscious processing? What are the key neural signatures of conscious perception according to this theory?
b) Dehaene argues that consciousness is necessary for tasks requiring working memory, such as complex reasoning and decision-making. What are the implications of this view for our understanding of human cognition and the potential for machine consciousness?
c) The book suggests that many animals, particularly mammals, are likely to be conscious in ways similar to humans. What are the ethical implications of this view? How should it inform our treatment of animals and our understanding of their cognitive and emotional lives?
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: An essay discussing how a small, intolerant minority can disproportionately influence and dictate the choices and behaviors of the majority in various domains, such as religion, politics, and markets.
Text link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19lQrNJ7-XNBvhjn0gSS7I2vAGJC-C3oJcKTJXIfz7K8/edit
Questions for discussion:
a) In what ways does the "minority rule" described by Taleb differ from the traditional understanding of democratic decision-making? What are the implications of this rule for the functioning of societies and institutions?
b) Taleb provides several examples of how the preferences of a small, intolerant minority can determine the options available to the majority, such as in the case of Kosher food or allergen-free environments. Can you think of other examples where this dynamic plays out, either in your personal life or in the broader society?
c) How might the "minority rule" contribute to the polarization and gridlock in contemporary politics? What strategies, if any, could be employed to mitigate the negative effects of this dynamic while still respecting individual rights and preferences?
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Last day to apply for jobs at MATS to help accelerate AI safety! Hiring a Community Manager and 1-3 Research Managers.
https://matsprogram.org/careers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9SGlBUMbeA&ab_channel=CaspianReport
The UAE is building a city in Egypt. I have no idea whether this is a good idea for either the UAE or Egypt.
So, remember that cautionary post about "studies in elderly Hispanic women" way back when?
That may be relevant here: a Spanish study appears to find gut bacteria linked to obesity, but different for men and women:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/gut-bacteria-linked-to-higher-obesity-risk-is-different-for-men-and-women?utm_source=ReadNext
"For their study, Spanish researchers recruited 361 adults with an average age of 44 years old. More than two-thirds (251) were women. Participants were separated into two classes based on a measurement called the “obesity index”: low level of obesity or high level of obesity.
While many studies on obesity rely on body mass index or BMI alone, the investigators took a multifaceted approach with their obesity index. The obesity index is not a standardized gauge for obesity but one that includes three variables: BMI, fat mass percentage, and waist circumference.
...They looked at metagenomic data, which is genetic material from a collection of microorganisms in a sample — in this case, stool samples. In addition, they looked at metabolomic data to analyze small molecules known as metabolites produced during cellular metabolism.
These two types of data, when analyzed in concert, can give a very precise picture of gut health and metabolism.
Using all of this data, researchers profiled some of the specific strains of bacteria found in the guts of the participants.
The researchers then looked at the microbiome for people classified as “high” on the obesity index compared to those classified as “low” on the index.
They found certain bacteria were linked with obesity risk, but that it was different for men versus women.
In the study, the gut microbiome of both men and women who ranked high on the obesity index is characterized by a lack of a potentially protective bacteria known as Christensenella minuta.
Interestingly, women and men who were obese had distinct gut microbiota profiles from one another. In men, two other forms of bacteria associated with obesity were prolific: Parabacteroides helcogenes and Campylobacter canadensis.
“Different microbes can be protective or they can increase risk for obesity. The way that they do that is by stimulating different aspects of our metabolic response and of our immune response…There are microbes such as E. coli that have been shown to increase risk of obesity because they’re known to be pro-inflammatory,” Mariana X. Byndloss, DVM, PhD, the Co-director of the Vanderbilt Microbiome Innovation Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told Healthline. She wasn’t affiliated with the research.
In the study the bacterium species Prevotella micans, Prevotella brevis, and Prevotella sacharolitica were associated with obesity in women but not in men."
I have no idea if this is a wild goose chase or not, but the emerging research on obesity is rather cold comfort for me; at least it helps me understand "how is it that my sister, born of the same parents and raised in the same environment, is thin and was thin all her life, while I am fat and was fat all my life?" as contributory factors besides "It's because you're stupid, lazy, and greedy and sit around stuffing your face with junk food 24/7, calories in = calories out, exercise, laws of thermodynamics, metabolism works the same for everyone, you dumb tub of lard".
A while back, Scott raises an eyebrows at the idea of lesbians who have extra with men..
Meanwhile, over in the U.K. we have the Cass report on treatment of trans kids ... and I'm getting the impression that certain political factions want to say "you're not trans, you're just a lesbian". Which, in the case of afab people who are masculin identified but attracted to men, would make them lesbians who have sex with men...
Were you taught any astronomy in K-12? I don't remember, I think I picked up most of my astronomy from science fiction, but astronomy might have been included in other science courses.
Please include when you were in school, at least the decade, and where. If you were in the US, let me know the state or region.
I've seen a claim that astronomy isn't taught in K-12 in the US because it conflicts with young earth creationism, but I have no idea whether this is true. I would have guessed that if it isn't taught, it would be just because they didn't get around to it.
So I'm taking this little survey. I realize ACX isn't a random sample, but I started the survey on Facebook, and ACX is at least generally younger and more geographically varied.
The Facebook results so far is that people were mostly taught astronomy in school.
I do think that if schools were dropping astronomy, I'd have heard of it, but maybe some schools never had it.
I think news stories have been pretty good about what happened, at least at the level of saying the moon got in front of the sun.
Perhaps the people who didn't know what was happening were picked by reporters. Perhaps astronomy, even on the minimal level, is a blur for a lot of people so they don't pay attention.
People who complain about the loading time of comments here should probably be aware of how this works in tech.
Meeting.
Bob the engineer: next item, fixing the comments. They load very slowly after 500 or so.
Product manager: how many substacks is that?
Bob: er, less than 0.1% but obviously they are popular stacks given the number of comments. We estimate 1-2% of users. We could do a reddit type solution.
PM: we are not Reddit. Reddit is all about comments, and that’s what drives traffic there, we are driven by the top line posts.
Bob: which brings people who comment. And then it falls over.
PM: for 1-2% … what about the mobile apps?
Bob: the comments scroll quickly there
PM: so less than 1-2% then in total. And we have a workaround.
Bob: but the mobile apps have other problems like not being able to edit…
PM: that’s a different task also on the backlog. Are the people who complain leaving the platform
Bob: no evidence of that right now, but they do complain a lot.
PM: where? On the App Store?
Bob: (exasperated) … no, obviously on the website. We have 4.8/5.0 ratings on the store. They complain on the comment threads if they get too large.
Pm: well luckily those comments are not readable. How long would it take us to redesign the website like Reddit.
Bob: 1-2months if we applied all front end resources
PM: keep the task open. Priority 3.
Bob: as in never get to it. Anyway next item…
I have a question if it is not too late to ask. I apologize in advance if it is a stupid one (and yes some questions are so ill-informed as to be stupid).. So here it is. Is there any? way to quantify the degree to which a particular course of action is subject to the law of unintended consequences. Two examples,
Corn Ethanol Subsidies: These subsidies were meant to promote energy independence and reduce carbon emissions. Instead, they contributed to the rise in food prices by diverting corn from food production to energy, affecting global food markets.
The Cobra Effect: This term comes from an incident during British rule in colonial India, where a bounty was offered for every dead cobra to reduce their numbers. Instead, people began breeding cobras for income, increasing the population when the program ended and breeders released the snakes.
In other words, if by definition you can't predict what unintended consequence will occur, can you somehow determine what actions are more likely to lead to one?
In a move nobody could have seen coming (or at least, not the gentlemen who hysterically calling Scott, myself and others "white supremacists" for casting doubts on the project when scott first posted on it), the Saudis have been forced to scale back their planes for 'The Line' linear city: https://archive.is/xetJQ
Instead of being open to residents by 2030 as first planned, the city is expected to measure only 1.5 miles of the full 105 miles by that time.
Black woman of color Lisa Cook, Biden's diversity hire at the fed, has all too predictably turned out to be a plagiarist: https://www.dailywire.com/news/trouble-at-the-fed
For those playing along at home, Cook was one of the co-authors of an infamous paper alleging that racist violence was responsible for a drop off in black patents after 1900, but which was revealed to be a product of the data of main dataset they were using ending in 1900: https://twitter.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1489847148862742531
And all of this makes me laugh so much considering the number of people on here who have claimed, apparently very sincerely, that DEI is simply about making sure that capable minority candidates aren't discriminated against (this is trivially false from the name 'diversity, equity and inclusion', but it's nice to have real world counter-examples).
Of course, the fact that nobody seemed interested in a far more egregious case of affirmative action in government hiring when Scott posted a link to it makes me suspect we're dealing with people unwilling to update regardless of the evidence: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview
Very disappointing dark pattern in Substack's iOS app.
I attempted to read the linked post below, which was subscriber-only. Substack offered an opportunity to “Continue reading this post, courtesy of Jeff Maurer [Claim my free post]”. Just to be clear, I don’t object to this arrangement—many other authors have similar terms.
https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/more-evidence-emerges-that-lefty
Clicking [Claim my free post] opened a dialog to [Subscribe and unlock]. Clicking through opened another dialog: “Verify your number: We need to verify your phone number before unlocking this post”.
This is misleading and exploitative. I have never given Substack my phone number. There is nothing which can be “verified”. Substack is simply using Jeff Maurer’s article as a lever to collect my phone number.
Why?
(I had posted a version of this to Jeff in Substack Notes; posting to ACX for posterity.)
I've been wondering if liveable neighborhoods have been proven to have an effect on screen addiction, or screen time, but I can't seem to find any studies on it. Are any of you in the know?
I just read Dr Bess Stillman's article, Debugging the Doctor Brain (about the perverse incentives that makes learning during residency difficult) and I'm wondering whether there's a single white collar field (I have no experience in blue collar, I don't know if it holds true there) that is actually good at (or taking steps to improve) training university graduates or if they're all awful.
I'm an engineer < 5 years out of uni, and many in my social circle are too. I'm finding, and this agrees with my other junior engineer friends, that there's not enough senior engineering oversight to go around. Most of us are making do, until we find out that management (often not engineering) has been asking us to sign off on things that are supposed to be checked by chartered engineers (which require evidence of professional development - most of us don't have that yet).
I learn in bits and pieces, and I'm grateful for any amount of time I get from senior people around me, but corporate cost-cutting has drastically shifted the ratios of experienced engineers and fresh grads. In many disciplines, there's a missing level of experience - around the 10 year mark. Most of us only have a group of equally clueless peers or one very busy subject matter expert (20+ years experience). I'm not sure if this is a retention issue or a retrenchment issue. It's all really really similar to Bess' observation on residents not being given sufficient guidance or learning space!
I am worried that this is happening to every professional field simultaneously - most of the workforce is inexperienced (because they're cheaper), experienced personnel are scarce and overloaded, the standard of the practice goes down because of this "figure it out" culture, where there's not quite enough people to even do the job, and people aren't being trained to do it properly. Obvious implications are worse healthcare, more mistakes in engineering (more expensive, less efficient, and unsafe infrastructure), more incompetence and fraud in everything.
I want to figure out if I'm noticing a real problem, but also wondering how to fix it.
Jordan Peterson is so lame. A recent Dwarkish RT said to listen to him on Cain and Able. I have so many criticisms.
1) Peterson plays the classic boring preacher. His sin is the boringness of the lecture, the slow pace, the stupidity of the audience applauding an insipid point.
2) His interpretations don't ring true. In it, Able is successful and deservingly so. This plays to Peterson's biases. Outside the biblical story it is a good point: people do tend to demonize the successful for no other reason than that they are successful. But this point is made all the time in comedy. It's not profound and probably not Biblical. Is Able more deservingly successful than Cain? I thought the point of the story was that God simply decided he preferred one offering over the other. Cain nor Able could predict which one would be preferred. Yet Peterson considers Able more successful due to cause.
His moment in history has probably passed, but why did anyone consider Jordan Peterson deep ever?
Will there be another web series like Unsong in the future?
So during our get together for the eclipse the door into our garage broke and couldn't be opened. (I know! this a weak data point for equating total eclipses with the zombie apocalypse, because the first thing that happens when zombies arrive is either doors are locked or can't be locked.) So (after ripping the old door lock out.) I stopped at the local hardware and bought another.
"John" I said, "sell me your cheapest door lock, thingie, knob."
"My most cost effective you mean?" (John and I are old buddies, I go down to the hardware to have a beer or two on fridays.)
"Yeah that one", I say. He pulls down a box from the top shelf.
"I over ordered these." John says.
And for something less than $20 I go home with a new door knob.
And I wouldn't be writing this post if it hadn't been the best door knob gizmo to install ever. Now mind you I have no idea of the lifetime of this door knob, but if you've ever put in a door knob. (which you all should learn how to do, Because of zombies!) well after all the other stuff, you have to line up these two screws. which hold the whole door knob together. And it always is a pita. And on this new knob, you screwed the two screws into the outside first, and then you twist the inside knob on, and it has gaps for the screw shaft and a place for the head to catch. And then you tighten it up. And at the moment it get's my vote for the best door knob gizmo ever.
Ok so my understanding is that both (US) political parties are quite decentralized. Obviously primaries prevent much top-down control, but even party platforms and bylaws are decided pretty locally (?).
Given this, how hard would it be to “coup” a local political party? Eg imagine you’re a left-wing candidate running for election in a deep blue constituency. One strategy would be to get some of your friends to vote for you in the _Replublican_ primary, and then spend the general election convincing voters that you’re legit despite the nominal party label. Going further, you could imagine taking control of the whole local party apparatus and changing the “official” platform (not the these platforms mean much anyway).
Does this ever happen? I can’t find any instances but it’s a difficult-to-google scenario.
What made the LANBY ocean navigation network obsolete?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbf4BGIBENk&ab_channel=SashaYanshin
I'm clearly not cynical enough. There's at least good reason to believe that Amazon's Just Walk Out-- a system that lets people take their purchases, walk out, and be charged automatically is actually a thousand people in India evaluating video. Possible evidence-- shouldn't the charge for the purchase happen immediately rather than, as it does, taking hours?
I'd figured out that the answers to questions that appear after searches are scraped from web sites, but I didn't realize that the scraping sometimes adds errors and that google isn't directing people to the sites. The sites are in bad financial shape as a result. Talk about eating your seed corn.
Google ranking also involves a lot of work by humans.
The major point is that the stock market likes claims of using ai, which isn't the same thing as actually using ai.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00901-3
Patients investigating long COVID-- they started with a survey of symptoms, then looked into which medications they were already taking that seemed to help. They've turned up some promising possibilities.
Left to themselves, scientists had been only studying specific symptoms, a very expensive way to learn anything.
There is *still* going to be another study of exercise even though there's a lot of evidence that exercise is bad for long COVID.
However, there are also studies being done or soon to be done based on the patients' research.
Do you know who Ivan Chonkin is? I'm sure that very few of you know the work of Vladimir Voinovich, an excellent satirist from the Soviet Union. His short stories and novels are both a telescope and a magnifying glass on life in a totalitarian cult of personality. He knows where the comi/tragedies are buried, and he unearths them all: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/old-stories-ivan-chonkin-is-dead
In this Youtube short, the author claims that there is one thing all Protestants agree on: the bible has more authority than the church.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VMiM4khBVdM
Is he right?
Polymarket seems to be by far the largest real-money prediction market, yet it was revealed to be less accurate than its smaller competitors(Manifold, Metaculus, etc.). Is there actual money making opportunity in Polymarket, including transaction costs and such?
In Scott's livejournal era he wrote a book review of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Does anyone know if this is still readable somewhere?
I had planned to travel today to get into the path of the clipse's totality, but I cancelled my trip for various reasons that now seem small. Sigh.
There will be another eclipse on July 22, 2028, and that one will hit Sidney, Australia. That's one I won't miss.
What does modern psychology/psychiatry think about hypnosis? Is it useful? Mostly junk? No more useful than any other form of therapy? We don't know because it was first studied by weirdos in the 60s and nobody in modern times has tried replicating their results?
I've listened to a few hypnosis tracks out of curiosity, and it did put me into what I'd call an "altered state," so hypnosis certainly does *something*, but can you do anything *useful* with that state? Can you change behavior long-term with hypnotic suggestions? Is ignoring pain with hypnosis a thing?
Nice posts lately
Maybe Sam Bankman-Fried is better off than I thought:
The WSJ of April 6-7 reports that "All in all, FTX customers currently stand to get back their full account balances, based on their value when FTX collapsed in November 2022." (Page B5.)
People are buying up the debt and speculating on it. Maybe SBF will buy the prison. Store for everybody!
Separately, I apologize for impugning the integrity of DuckDuckGo. I am told it is not owned by Google.
Posting some recent interviews of mine. First, Alexander Murshak and Heghoulian: https://youtu.be/N4FIY2Izkoc?si=BpD-WWpvba8gQt2p
Second, Tracing Woodgrains and Peter Clarke: https://youtu.be/Lv9ibJpk3tw?si=ufeHYaLq1wH6YfjL
Third, Sheluyang Peng: https://youtu.be/p7De2Un5BLk?si=KA1fDqec0NAj7tAu
Lastly, Ivan Eland: https://youtu.be/2hmdMyx3eFY?si=TNL2ds5fCSzlRtkl
With Twitter, is there any plan for what happens if Musk falls down dead tomorrow?
Climate change/control and pandemic prevention/management may both be viewed as enhancing government control over the populace. WHICH of these two do you feel has the greater potential for controlling/affecting the populace? Differentials between long-term and short-term are invited.
David Chapman recently posted about Ultraspeaking, giving it a glowing review. https://meaningness.substack.com/p/ultraspeaking
Has anyone looked into Ultraspeaking or given it a try?
Knowing the interests of this community, I'd like to share my recent substack post that is dealing with ideas of e/acc and AI safety. In my blog I'm focusing on topics that are related to Futurism, Science, Technology.
If I won't feel urgency to write something different, in 2 weeks I'll post about the need for increased productivity in biomedical research, and how I envision it to happen in the coming decades.
https://open.substack.com/pub/rationalmagic/p/making-sense-of-eacc-vs-ai-safety?r=36e5vn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I wrote my first blogpost which is about why one should be open to wise insights from "cringy" sources. It's basically a reformulation of the ad hominem fallacy, but focusing on vibes instead of intellectual rigor or ethics. Read it and give me praise and recognition.
(or, uh, constructive criticism)
https://soupofthenight.substack.com/p/pick-up-wisdom-from-the-ground
I did an analysis showing how the *time of day* that you submit a scientific preprint can influence how many citations that preprint later receives [1,2]. The basic thrust of this work is to show how institutions designed to deal with scientific work in a (seemingly) objective way can break down due to idiosyncrasies in social and technical processes.
[1] https://peterse.github.io/2023/06/06/Early-bird-gets-the-worm.html
[2] https://peterse.github.io/2024/04/02/Survival-of-the-firstest.html
Before I submit this work to a journal, I'm brainstorming other unexpected effects in citation trends that I could check for using article (meta)data alone, ideally with a mechanism for causal relationship that could be checked for in a controlled way. For example, something like "citation count vs. frequency of number of very uncommon words in the article text, because readers find the article more memorable and engaging" (I am not proposing this relationship nor interested in defending it here).
If anyone has ever thought about these kinds of effects, reach out to discuss!
Watched the Amazon reboot of Roadhouse, and was struck by how weird the whole endeavor seemed. It's not following the plot of the original movie, and it's not even following the original's tone, rather it's following what's presumably the audience's impression of the original's tone. It leans into a silliness that the Patrick Swayzee movie never acknowledged.
Not sure where I'm going with this. What do people think of this type of reboot, attempting to appeal to a post-hoc understanding of the original?
The Onion has gotten on board the anti-hyperstition train.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6YF-nxc7XI
I'm going to try something a tad risky (to me, in the sense that I might have to deal with criticism I would not otherwise receive). I wrote a rebuttal to Paul Christiano's claim that the Universal Prior is malign: https://open.substack.com/pub/thothhermes/p/i-dont-see-how-the-universal-prior?r=28a5y9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I'm sure that not all of my statements are pristine, but I actually feel very confident in the general thrust of my arguments. There are big, intuitive moving parts to Paul's picture that I mainly tackle here.
My biweekly COVID update for epidemiological weeks 13 and 14 is at the link below. Apologies for the typos. I also address the HPAI scare in dairy cattle. Bottom line:
1. H5N1 is not very symptomatic in cattle, which means cases are likely being overlooked.
2. The virus doesn't seem to be spreading via droplets or aerosols, but it's definitely showing up in the milk.
3. This would be highly concerning because of its potential to contaminate the milk supply — except that there's no reason to think that pasteurization won't kill the virus (the only virus types that seem to be able to survive pasteurization are bacteriophages).
4. If for some reason pasteurization is ineffective we probably should have already seen cases in humans linked to the milk supply (because the current number of 15 infected dairy herds is probably the tip of the iceberg).
5. Until this passes, I wouldn't advise you to indulge in raw milk products.
Maybe I'm being overly sanguine, but if I'm wrong, we'll know soon if H5N1 is spreading to humans via the milk supply.
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1777003679494848567
What is the state of online poker since libratus (or just advances in weaker engines)?
a) weirdly nothing, impractical to implement
b) weirdly nothing, already full of bots anyway, some of which cheat or collude
c) now ghost towns
d) some other things
In the past few months, I've noticed I've developed a kind of "productive dyslexia" when typing.
Essentially, I'll end up mistyping a word for a similar word. The most recent examples that I noticed were typing "with" instead of "wish" and "extend" instead of "extent", just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.
- It's always a correct word that I end up typing, just the *wrong* word.
- It completely bypasses my normal "oh I just typoed, fix that" reflex.
This is somewhat distressing to me, especially given that I've typed fine for decades before this and I've regressed suddenly in a major way. Do any of you have any takes on this?
I have a notion that part of what's going wrong these days is a crisis of conscientiousness. People and societies need a hard-to-define moderate amount of conscientiousness. Some things need to be done very well, some things need to be done pretty well, and some things don't matter.
At this point, we've got factions who are are anti-conscientiousness and pro-extreme conscientiousness. Neither one is trying to actually do things.
On the right, there's lack of interest in obeying rules that work-- for example a strong willingness to scam. On the left, there's willingness to destroy organizations which aren't sufficiently inclusive.
Both sides are very willing to break social connections.
Dupuyten's Contracture is a disease of the body growing extra connective tissue in a hand. It's not properly connected to muscles, and can lead to being unable to extend one or more fingers.z
I'm wondering whether it would be an especially good starting point for exploring the idea that DNA becoming unreliable is a cause of aging. It becomes more likely with age and is weirdly specific, as though rules for specific connective tissue have been changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dupuytren%27s_contracture
I keep getting pushed to me short videos that appear to take place in south Asia in which rural people are participating in some kind of outdoor carnival game—weird variations of skee-ball or shooting baskets. Whoever succeeds is given a bag of grain or some other staple (the surrounding crowd cheers). Is this an actual method of dividing up resources used soemwhere? Who has time for this silliness? If the scenario is fake, who is making these videos with their large casts and elaborate setups? Do you guys know what I'm talking about?
https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1776936399612125478
From a sample of 1,000 muslims in the UK:
🔴 Only 1 in 4 believe Hamas committed murder and rape on 7/10
🔴 Almost half of British Muslims sympathise with Hamas
🔴 British Muslims have a net positive view of Hamas
🔴 Almost half (46%) say Jews have too much power over the UK Government
🔴 52% want to make it illegal to show an image of the Prophet Mohammed in the UK
🔴 Only 28% say it would be undesirable for homosexuality to be outlawed in the UK
Subject: Dumb things that people don't say any more.
Often it seems that the level of public discourse gets worse and worse with time, so I think it's nice occasionally to focus on dumb things that people used to say a lot when I was young, but which I haven't heard for a long time.
The whole "we only use 10% of our brains" thing is an obvious example, I haven't heard anyone seriously invoke that since the movie Lucy, and that was ten years ago. Back in the 90s you'd see it attributed to Albert Einstein and printed on posters.
"Money is the root of all evil" is another dumb cliche that used to come up a lot, and rarely does. That was of course a corruption of the original passage "The love of money is the root of all evil" but you don't hear that being said much these days either. My theory is 9/11 wiped it from the discourse by reminding us that there's plenty of evil that has nothing to do with the love of money.
What other (hopefully not too political) dumb things have you noticed people don't say any more?
I seem to have had more than the expected number of instances of LLMs refusing or failing to answer my questions recently.
Example 1: I asked Copilot whether Sydney Sweeney appears in the holiday episodes of Euphoria: I have subsequently established that the answer to this question is "no". Copilot told me that there are no holiday episodes and that Sweeney portrays Cassie Howard throughout Seasons 1 and 2. I asked "Aren't there two episodes after the end of season 1 and before the start of season 2?" Copilot started to type out a long answer, then deleted it and wrote, "My mistake, I can't give a response to that right now. Let's try a different topic."
Example 2: There was some discussion on Twitter recently about a story about Marcus Aurelius's wife having an affair with a gladiator and the emperor killing the gladiator and making his wife bathe in his blood. I asked Claude about this and Claude (correctly) said the story was apocryphal. I then asked what happened next according to the story, and Claude declined to answer on the basis that it would have to make something up itself. But this isn't true: at least in the version from Historia Augusta, the answer is that Marcus succeeded in seducing this wife by this method, but the fruit of their union (Commodus) was more a gladiator than a prince. There may be other versions, but then Claude could tell me about those.
Example 3: I asked ChatGPT what the probability is of sampling a normal distribution more than 60 standard deviations above the mean. It wouldn't give a numerical answer other than zero, saying the number was "so small that it's beyond the precision of most numerical computation methods to accurately represent". When I asked to write the formula, it did so. When I asked to calculate the formula, it ran some python code and again told me the answer was zero. I reminded it that it is possible to express very small numbers using standard scientific notation, but it would not budge. When I told it the answer was 1.238×10^-784, it agreed that was right.
Can someone recommend a good book for getting good at poker (Texas holdem)? I know how to play and understand the basics. I’m not afraid of math or numbers (though don’t have a high level math background).
As of 2020, white liberals believe that white Americans are both less intelligent and more violent than black americans: https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1776290465291051281
When you see this level of divorce from reality, it's really no wonder there were so many aggressively incorrect people disagreeing with Scott's posts on things like the ferguson effect.
Has there been any update on the Far Out Initiative? I thought Scott mentioned he was intending to write something about the project in more detail. Are we going to see it discussed on the blog again in the future?
Is there a way to amend a survey response if we've responded but have since remembered something which changes one of the answers?
Econ 101 question: (I'm trying to understand currencies by hyperbolic thought experiments.) Imagine that for some ridiculous and unrealistic premise all the leaders of the world agreed to adopt a new single world currency and discontinue all other currencies. Which groups would be the winners and losers of this policy?* Would e.g. rich westerners, people with lots of third-world debt, or third-world exporters be better or worse off? If the winners and losers would depends on the implementation, then what implementation details would matter?
*in an Econ101 spherical cows sense. "There would be a global mega-recession and everyone would die" is not the answer I'm looking for, even if it's true.
I gave this online presentation about Metamodernism a couple of days ago, and was subsequently invited to give a follow-up series of presentations on the same subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5AW9Gh6zs8&ab_channel=52LivingIdeas
I explain what Metamodernism is, how it could resolve culture war debates/time-wasting, and how it could sweep the culture.
Someone on Manifold suggested that I share my Substack in the open thread so I thought, "ah, what the heck". Here's one of my latest posts, in which I detail my philosophical and personal frustrations with much of the public discussion about privacy, which I think focuses on the wrong things, in essence, treating it as an issue of abstract rights, rather than the concrete applications of power, and the negative effects these can have on peoples lives. https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/the-privacy-paradox-and-what-privacy
Jake’s cancer has stopped responding to the clinical trial drug petosemtamab. Here’s an update he’s written for those following our story:
In a recent blog post, Scott said we all hate mensa. Why do we all hate mensa?
I chatted George H from the last open thread: https://morelucid.substack.com/p/increasing-iq-by-10-points-is-possible . Dude sure seemed incredibly well informed to me. You can have whatever prior you want but he knew a ton of stuff about the subjects we discussed. Im not minimally informed myself but he super impressed me. Seems worth sharing because he was definitely WAY more informed than I expected. Top of the distribution outcome.
Do any of y'all have access to the Chaotic Thinking podcast (by Liminal Warmth)? I've googled it (as I recently remembered that it existed) but it seems that the major websites don't actually have the content of the podcast itself :(
Does anyone have high quality analysis of exercise using machines to share. I want specifically machines not bodyweight or free weight. Would super appreciate seeing anything cool!
Is it possible that the roles we consider high status in society today co-evolved with patriarchy in such a way that these are actually optimized for masculine traits? For example, in a world that was matriarchal, maybe companies would be lead by a triumvirate instead of a singular CEO Maybe in that world, after men have overcome social oppression through their masculist movement, they would be allowed and encouraged to form part of triumvirates but under perform on average? Or, say that we lived in a world were parenting was the highest status thing one could do, could men on average compete with women?
I’m not attempting to justify the lack of diversity in high status roles. Conditional on what we’ve got, I am fully in favor of increasing opportunity and access for all. I’m also not claiming that the above hypothesis implies genetics is the primary reason for a skewed distribution. I’m merely wondering if there’s something to it. For example in the same way we can argue humans domesticated dogs as much as dogs domesticated humans.
I took your survey and found some of the questions confusing. For example, Number of Lifetime Sex Partners. I've had a number of long-term sexual relationships and expect my current one to last the rest of my life. How should the question be answered? Since I already submitted the survey, it's too late for me, but I'm still interested in what you meant.
"Tensegrity" (tensional integrity) is a... building technique I guess? that combines cables which are only under tension with parts such as rods that are only under compression. You can make some nifty stuff, like a table where it looks like the top is levitating and trying to float away.
I've read a bunch of abstract arguments for why it's a great idea. In particular, it's supposedly very strong compared to the weight of the components, and there are some vague claims that the human body (the spine in particular) is built according to those principles.
So, why isn't this used a bunch everywhere? All I've found are some art projects, one bridge in Melbourne (probably also categorized under "art" as opposed to "efficient building technique"), and SUPERball, a theoretical design by NASA for a probe that can survive impacts in arbitrary orientations. That scarcity makes my BS detector go off.
Is it a bad tradeoff because of its high complexity to design and build? Are the physical properties actually not that great? Some other problems (I could imagine tendency towards explosive failures)? Or is humanity actually missing out on this great technique?
As other weeks, I invite readers to "Radical Centrist"
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/
Recent topics: climate change, macroeconomic data, trade policy
> The hedge fund Bridgewater is running a forecasting contest on Metaculus. US residents only, extra prizes for undergraduates. Prizes include $25,000 and potentially getting recruited by Bridgewater (in which case read the “Corporate Culture” section on their wiki page before accepting).
An actual link to that "wiki page" ("Wikipedia article", to be more precise - "wiki page" implies a Bridgewater-hosted wiki, which resulted in five minutes of life wasted clicking around their website looking for an internal wiki) would have been nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgewater_Associates#Corporate_culture
Stripping away the public-relations firm signal diluting that runs rampant throughout that section, we get:
> The company has been likened to a cult,[36] but Dalio denies that and insists that the firm is a dedicated "community".[11] . . .
I get the feeling it's like Wolf of Wall Street but with a bunch of dopey corporate futurist newspeak instead of cocaine and midget tossing.
There's been a question that's been bugging me ever since I read "Answer to Job" and "Unsong". (Spoilers for both)
Scott's theodicy says that God created every universe which is net good. But there's a problem with this theory which is also present in a Tegmark IV multiverse and modal realism: we should expect ourselves to exist in a universe which is much weirder and far more complex than both our universe and the universe of "Unsong". One in which there aren't any real "laws", or the laws are randomly and regularly broken for no real reason at all.
Advocates of multiverse theories have addressed this problem by introducing the concept of "measure". As far as I can tell, it's a mysterious factor that affects how likely you are to exist in a given universe. Advocates often say it's related to orderliness and simplicity in a universe. And I can find that believable.
But if God created the multiverse... well, that changes the equation, doesn't it? At least intuitively. Because if you have a billion simulations in a single universe, and almost all of them are chaotic and nonsensical, intuitively the concept of measure wouldn't really apply. We would expect the average inhabitant of such a simulation to live a chaotic and nonsensical life. And I don't really see why it would be different with God.
Unless, of course, God's authority over reality is absolute, and so He has the power to create all His universes with a given amount of measure in each of them. That almost works... except that if God, as portrayed in "Unsong", had this power, surely he'd make the probability of existing in a less-than-perfect universe infinitesimal.
I'd like some input here because I found this theodicy really elegant, except for this single fatal flaw.
My podcast episode with Walt Bismarck, the Alt-Right Veteran mentioned by Scott on his
earlier SSC links post on the alleged victory of the Alt-Right - describing my evolution into a Far-Righter.
https://newaltright.substack.com/p/episode-8-dimes-square-hot-takes
Forewarning of conditions for TERRORIST VIOLENCE (actually just the wilful use of technology for anti human, anti essentialist and wireheading purposes (unless you subsequently get violent about this))
https://open.substack.com/pub/alephwyr/p/explicit-redlines-for-conservatives
I'm curious about the following thesis: "A significant factor in making it possible for Donald Trump to represent a major party were decades of work by intellectuals to criticize the heroes of the past and emphasize the flaws of the great men of history." If you emphasize George Washington being a slaveowner, John F Kennedy a womanizer, and Columbus as an evil man, does that create an environment where people are more willing to accept a leader with the kind of glaring flaws Donald Trump has. Is there an argument here? Or not?
What are the pluses and minuses of California creating a new UC?
We need to build more housing, but it's hard to do in any existing city. We could build new cities, but it's hard to get network effects going and they're not "cool" (ie there are a bunch of random towns in Northern California, but nobody moves there).
But cities with a UC campus have generally developed well and been desirable places to live, even when they were pretty new (eg Irvine, Davis, probably more I don't know about). If the state puts a new UC campus in some random part of the Central Valley, the Mojave Desert, or the northern forests, would an upper-middle-class town of 100,000 people grow around it?
There are many students trying to get into UCs, and many academics who want to be hired, and the project would more than pay for itself in land value, so what makes this hard?