I am a mathematics postdoc, and I am leading a group of undergrad computer science majors in a project to build Alpha Algebra (along the lines of Alpha Geometry as built recently by DeepMind). Are there any programmers here who would like to help us with this? It will mostly require training an LLM on synthetic data.
I spent hours writing an impressive essay asking for help figuring some things out about the pharmaceutical industry.
It was a thing of beauty, and I am sure someone with relevant expertise would have been delighted to help; certainly, upon reading the pure ambrosia of its prose, none could have resisted — nor desired to!
My eyes are tired and gritty, and I long to finally lie down; and lo, finally, I am done! I try to scroll over to read through one last time, to ensure no niggling typo or mistaken neologism enfoolishes me in front of my heroes¹; one last scan before posting and—
Substack ate the post.
No worries. I am prepared. My "select all → copy" trick will—
...oh. It failed to record any of the copied text, as it sometimes does. Clipboard has not even been used today, as far as it knows!
(there's even a helpful note to the effect of "you can copy stuff here to save it :D")
Well, the clipboard /does/ occasionally just... stop keeping any history whatsoever; I know this is a risk.
And, of course, Substack's comment-handling processes were written by some sort of cognitively-handicapped chimpanzee whose mother evidently had a fondness for "bush hooch"; recent estimates indicate she also — very likely — favored the practice of dealing her drooling, idiot offspring daily (if not hourly, IMO) severe, IQ-leeching blows directly to the head.²
Yes, I knew these things could happen....
/...just not BOTH AT ONCE when I had spent over A GODDAMN HOUR on formatting and typing and waiting for unfreezing and aAAAAHSJDJDJDKA)dnajsjdjf;;nd/
¹: (anyone peripherally or centrally involved in drug development, I might say. 👍 it was my dream — before I realized that having dreams is itself a dream, heh.
"follow your heart~" and "FiNd yOur PaSSiOn!" and all that nonsense...
OR: take the first OK job you can get anywhere, so your mother can get good care and stick around on Earth with you?
well, as cool as it might have been to do something interesting /as your work/ — I mean, THEY pay YOU, to use their fancy labs and learn more of & research upon your favorite subject, I hear! — still: me ol' ma had to come first...
...she gave up on /her/ own dreams for my sake, after all; what kinda son would not return the favor?! heh.
and, anyway, as she always reminded me: "you've got to be practical". it's not such a bad motto to remember, I guess!)
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²: (Really, it's a miracle the creature was able to program even *this* abomination, I suppose. Sadly, any "thinking" beings — and I use the term loosely — that, somehow, managed to make text /more resource-intensive/ than a triple-A FPS title... are undoubtedly even now squatting fearfully in filth and darkness, angrily attempting to develop a video player from fæcal discharge. A hard life, even for a subchimp.)
"I'm actually really worried about how heated the israel/palestine debate has become and how vitriolic both sides have gotten. It almost seems like if one person were heroic enough to do something drastic like set themselves on fire it could really change the course of history."
I think this whole thing is fascinating in that the consequences of a fundamental tension or contradiction on the left are being materialized more than at any other point - that is, the tension between the 'anti-anti-semitism' and 'anti-colonialist' aspects of the American left.
It's easy to have said this at many points in recent history, but I think this time it could be for real: The ADL strategy has well and truly backfired and zionists now face the real prospect of losing their dominant political and institutional power in the US.
Columbia obviously sided with the 'anything that is anti-israel is anti-semitic' contingent, as did much of the media, but this was ineffective to an ahistorical degree.
Harvard zionists already taking the same line:
"Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi called on the University to clear out the encampment in Harvard Yard in a statement posted to Chabad’s X account just before 11 p.m., referring to the protesters as “Jew haters and Hamas lovers.”"
"Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos “Alexander” Kestenbaum, who is suing the University over allegations of tolerating antisemitism on campus, also slammed the protest in a post on X after Passover ended.
“President Garber: expel these terrorist supporters NOW or resign,” Kestenbaum wrote. “We Jews have had enough of your inaction!”"
But it seems claims of 'anti-semitism' are not the magic bullet they once were. I wonder how this all ends?
Hi! I'm looking for participants to take a questionnaire inspired by some research spun off from the Astral Codex Ten reader survey. Because I've talked about the research on Reddit, I'm only looking for people who haven't looked at the Slate Star Codex subreddit recently and don't follow my Substack. Anyway, the survey is here: https://forms.gle/mHAyiuci4mb9hyCY6
It deals with personality and how it influences the ways in which people allocate resources. That link again: https://forms.gle/mHAyiuci4mb9hyCY6
I'm currently doing my econ undergrad, and as a 6-month research project (not final thesis), I have to learn about one regression technique, do some simulations with it, and apply it to some real data. Below are all the options I can choose from. I know very little about most of them (and just reading the wiki article doesn't help that much), so any advice on which one is most interesting or useful would be welcomed. Even just "I only know three of these methods, but I like this one most" would be useful for me. At the moment I only know IV and Logistic Regression so those would be a little less interesting to me.
(About me: pretty average, young, EA, ACX reader, also interested in AI.)
Is anybody in this group knowledgable about the benefits of libraries for society? I'm planning to go into library science as a career and I'd like to improve my logical thinking skills so I can hopefully make a good impact on the field someday.
Also, is library science a field that can easily integrate the kind of thinking that this group espouses?
With the recently passed ban on TikTok, anyone who is legally knowledgeable know how this works?
The text (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text) says "It shall be unlawful for an entity to distribute..a foreign adversary controlled application by carrying out..internet hosting services to enable the distribution", and it specifics that this includes source code. But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States specified that the publication of source code was protected by the first amendment, so the government would need a compelling interest to prevent that publication.
Is there a conflict here? Is preventing the publication of an apk likely to withstand court scrutiny?
EDIT: My best guess currently is that the government is claiming there is a compelling state interest, that of national security, and that is why they should be allowed to ban the publication of this app and it's code. And even if it were to go to the court the courts don't like telling the government was is and isn't national security related, so they would probably just ok this.
I don't know Tatu, they had five years to find physical evidence in the McMartin case, and two full jury trials. They never presented any. But thank you for the comment.
I think a lot of the people on the Open Thread are young so I thought I would invite you to read about a hysteria that happened in the US, and some other countries, in the 1980's and 90's. Perhaps they cover this in school, I have no idea. But the child care sexual abuse hysteria is a black eye on the US and our justice system. https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/our-endless-hysteria
Can you imagine if a major publisher or university press released a book about 'jewish privilege'? Or gentile professors at elite US colleges ran courses on 'destroying jewishness'? This would be absolutely scandalous and people here would be furious.
And yet, I point out the exact opposite situation is true and people are furious...at me for pointing it out.
If these jewish intellectuals hate me for my race, why am I supposed to cry when their ideological bedfellows starting seeing them as oppressive white people themselves? Especially when the hegemonic institutions of America are almost universally on their side and will help them, a privilege not afforded to white people who feel the consequences of left wing race ideology.
Would any AI enthusiasts have some advice for a grad student? I'm working on a school project where we're evaluating different methods of "teaching" a model about, say, a research article (e.g. RAG, fine-tuning). Right now we're asking the trained model a bunch of questions about the paper then classifying its answers as Right/Wrong/Catastrophically Wrong. We figure the method that produces the most Right answers is the best, but surely there's a more "industry standard" way of evaluating this kind of thing?
The first witness in Trump's trial about the alleged hush money for Stormy Daniels was the former publisher for The National Enquirer, who allegedly "used the tabloid to suppress damaging rumors about Trump, and prosecutors say ... helped negotiate the hush-money payment at the center of this case".
Have you looked at Orchid yet? I'm very curious if a separate firm will pop up to take Embryo info from Orchid or Genomic predictions and apply height and IQ tests to them
Shameless self-promotion: my biweekly COVID update here. Things are looking pretty good right now in the US. If past patterns hold we should expect another wavelet late summer.
So, the upcoming Democratic National Convention in August: massive shitshow of street violence, or not?
On the "yes, it will be" side:
* The pro-Hamas factions in the US are well-organized, well-funded, and eager to cause problems.
* Thanks to Black Lives Matter, law enforcement has been stripped of most of its ability to control demonstrations, and Chicago in particular has generationally awful leadership.
* Biden is about to sign on to $10 billion more in aid to Israel, making appeasement impossible.
* Exact same thing happened in 1968. "It's like poetry, it rhymes."
On the "no, it won't be" side:
* Perhaps Biden will somehow appease them anyway.
* Perhaps the war will be long over by then.
* Perhaps there will be a new Current Thing by August.
I could use a bit of advice from some statisticians or maybe data scientists.
This summer I will have a summer internship working with scientists doing research on air pollution and cardiovascular health. This will involve downloading all sorts of data sets from various goverment databases, and looking for patterns in them. What sorts of tools should I be using to make discovery easy?
Off hand, I would probably work with Google Sheets for small data sets, write custom code in Python if I needed to do any serious data cleaning, and load the data into something like a local Postgres server if I needed to do heavier querying in SQL. Any other tooling I should be considering?
This columbia university business is fascinating. It seems that many of these Jews have been supporting the ADL strategy, and were desperately hoping that people wouldn't notice that 'one of these victim groups is not like the other'.
It's like something our of folklore. Jewish intellectuals being attacked by a golem of their own making.
I have had this thought on my mind for a while now- how to get around the over-specialization and narrowing of every field of study. I really think that it is the bottleneck for nearly every real and pertinent problem in the world right now, without exaggeration. A lot of people, especially in academia, seem to be aware of this problem but I haven’t seen any convincing ideas for solutions yet. Am I just unaware of relevant things happening in this direction or should I make more of an effort to focus on this in the future?
I want to come up with a detailed and independent framework and methodology that works parallel to all the hyper-specialized subjects we have now. It would focus entirely on synthesizing all the discrete fields for more focused problem solving. A person trained in this should be able to take one real and specific problem, like say widespread hormone disruption, and address it from every available angle- the various biochemical aspects of it, the social and psychological causes and effects, the environmental factors involved- bring in any relevant specialists where needed, but then be able to propose real and practical solutions to it that are effective without causing catastrophic disruptions long term(since the approach is to examine the problem from every available perspective, this should minimize the issues that come from the various interrelated systems that are usually studied separately). I think that this is more of a matter of change in perception of the phenomenon than a change in abilities to address it, but it will make every field of study we have right now that much more effective. Does this sound feasible? Does it already exist in some form and I just don’t know yet? Is there some other way of getting around the problems caused by hyper-specialization?
" I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies)."
Manifold just announced that they'll soon be transitioning to a real-money gambling site. I can't imagine how that's supposed to work or why they think they'll have an advantage over Kalshi, PredictIt and the like. The whole reason why Manifold exists and works the way it does is because it exclusively uses play money so they can ignore all the laws around gambling and finance that make it hard to do real world prediction markets. Meanwhile, it ruins the site for all the existing users who like it the way it is.
Does the media criticism term "slop" (as in "modern slop") have any specific meaning other than "a thing 4chan did not like"? I'm leaning toward "boo light" until I see evidence otherwise. (I've also seen "goyslop," which I assume is the explicitly anti-Semitic version.)
I've heard that most of the vegetables found in American supermarkets are strains that have been optimized for long shelf lives and appearance, at the expense of taste. From personal experience, are there any strains of vegetables that you've grown and eaten that taste noticeably better than their supermarket cousins? What are they?
I've been watching the Metaculus Presidential Election market, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11245/winner-of-2024-us-presidential-election/ , and one thing seems odd. It seems sort-of "sticky" around 50/50, not moving more that 5% away from that since last November. Does this strike anyone else as strange? It isn't as if the period since then was placid and uneventful. I'm wondering if there are a lot of Metaculus members who round uncertainty in a more-or-less-two-way-contest to "50/50", rather than a more sophisticated estimate...
Linus Torvalds isn’t sweating AI. He’s been hitting his mark again and again for over 30 years. Elizer, I’m afraid, comes across as being full of beans. Admittedly I’ve only been only been keeping one eye on LLMs so feel free to think Yudowski is the real deal, you may be right, but that’s how the guy’s persona writ large strikes me.
I was clearing out some old links, and I had forgotten about this... "The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule" by Tyler Austin Harper. Great article about why intellectuals during the 1920s thought humanity would soon go extinct. I only have two quibbles with Harper's thesis.
First, he implies there was a hiatus in our extinction fears. Being a late Boomer (actually, I prefer to separate my generation from the early Boomers because we grew up in a since we grew up in significantly different cultural matrix) — but being a late Boomer, I remember the regular air raid drills in the first and second grades when we'd hide under our desks in case of nuclear attack — and then we'd watch an upbeat public service film about how families who are confident and prepared can survive a nuclear conflict. I think the public service films were more traumatizing than the drills. And the beat of doom never let up. There was always a new way that our world was going to end. By the time Y2K rolled around I was pretty cynical about end-of-the-world scenarios.
Second, he claims that extinction panics are fomented by economic elites. From what I've seen extinction panics are fomented mostly by academia and the media. The economic elites go along with them because they're suckers like the rest of us.
How strong would a T-800 terminator need to be to be able to quickly kill a human man with its bare hands?
Imagine you get into a physical fight with someone else. All things being equal, if the other person is ONLY TWICE as strong as you in every way (arms, legs, fingers, etc.), you'll definitely notice a difference straightaway and will lose. And if the other person is made of metal and can't feel pain, you're even more screwed.
But then again, being merely twice as strong as a human man might not leave the T-800 strong enough to achieve fast hand-to-hand kills. For example, the average man has a hand grip strength of 72 lbs. If a T-800 were twice as strong and had a grip strength of 144 lbs, it might be able to cause pain and bruising by grabbing and squeezing you, but it wouldn't be enough to break your bones. Also, if the average man can bench press 140 lbs, then a T-800 could bench press 280 lbs. That's not enough to be able to throw someone out a window or to be able to crush them to death in a bear hug.
Put simply, what the is minimum strength requirement for a T-800 to be able to quickly kill or crippled a grown man in unaided combat? 5x a human male's strength? 10x? Is it more important for some of the T-800's body parts to be stronger than others?
Sabine Hossenfelder's video on how her dream died, "And now I'm here."
This reminded me of some of my experiences. Thank heavens I dropped out of grad school, and found something else. I suspect my life would have been miserable if I had gone the academic route. A close friend had to survive twenty-plus years of post-docs and on non-tenure-tracked temporary positions before she finally found a tenure-track position. Along the way, she discovered that her thesis advisor was sabotaging her career by giving her lukewarm recommendations. I suspect the toxicity in academia has only gotten worse since I dropped out of grad school many years ago, but this Hossenfelder video brought back some unpleasant memories for me...
I was looking through some of the archives from the SSC days and came across an article on cost disease. Scott outlined the issue but never really came to any conclusions about why it was happening. Were there ever any follow-up articles or discussion about this?
I'm in a career crisis, and trying to cover all the angles. The short version is I'm a software developer (going on nearly 8 years) working in a very niche stack (including the language) building cross-platform high-performance desktop apps, underpaid, and facing an uncertain future with my employer as the business may not stay afloat. I'd like to move on, but am having trouble getting hired. I suspect that employers, being risk-averse, don't place much stake in some of my experience despite the skills being easily transferable (to languages like Java, C# and C++).
Trends in job postings suggests that cloud and devops experience is valued, so to that end I'm picking up some certs, but I have no intention of switching to IT/admin or devops; I want to program. My only other idea is building something for web, full-stack, but I expect there is marginal value in some dinky undergrad-level demo, which leaves either a) open-source contributions, or b) an ambitious project that will require ample investment of time, that I don't have. I have intuited however that, despite the fact that a bootcamp is redundant for me, some of the end-term projects as part of those programs may be substantial enough to warrant exploring, even if they are basically "demos". That makes it a possible 'c'. I'm not in the U.S., but the market is as bad or worse. Another piece of background: my education wasn't in CS, I made a lateral move, so I'm relying even more on experience and reputation. I'd do web or native, I don't care, except I understand the former is saturated and I have experience in the latter.
Appreciate any input by other experienced devs. Thanks.
I wrote a review of Jordan Peele's 2019 film Us which touches on things that I don't believe other reviewers have seriously considered (long story short, I think the movie can be seen as having themes related to autism and the paranormal -- I don't think that Jordan Peele necessarily intended it, but the parallels are interesting).
What are the best accessibly written arguments against AI existential risk concerns? The best I think I've come across is Maciej Ceglowski's "Superintelligence: The Idea that Eats Smart People," but would be happy to hear of others.
I'd also be interested in the best accelerationist arguments out there, of either the left or the right variety. (This is a know-thy-enemy exercise for me, so preaching to the choir type screeds aren't going to be interesting; rather writing that genuinely tries to be persuasive.)
What do you think about targeted killings? Here I’ll narrowly define targeted killings as those which are ordered by one state in retaliation against another state’s specific political/military leaders deemed to be most responsible for an international act of aggression.
The official policy of the United States prohibits assassination as of 1981, as outlined in Executive Order 12333. However, starting with the war on terror, the United States and Israel began to employ “targeted killings,” against terrorist leaders. This practice has begun to spill over into the killing of officials of other sovereign countries. Both the US and Israel have linked terrorist activity so strongly to Iran, that they have more recently gone as far as to kill a handful of Iran’s top military officials. The primary targets of these attacks were leaders of Iran’s Quds Force, which along with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were the first government departments ever designated as FTOs (foreign terrorist organizations).
Under the right circumstances, might targeted killings of the leaders of aggressor states be the most sensible, humane response? In modern warfare, it’s become common practice to place the authors of war outside the worst effects of it. Assassination, even in retaliation, is widely considered immoral, while the alternative of killing a slew of fresh service people and unlucky civilians is standard practice. It isn’t clear to me how this framework is morally defensible.
If a leader believes that it is in his/her people’s best interest to risk those people’s lives in conflict, shouldn’t that leader naturally include him/herself among them? All world leaders would without hesitation claim their willingness to die for their country but these same leaders have built a moral/legal framework around themselves that largely shields them from the possibility.
It is easier for me to understand an ethical objection to war in general than it is for me to understand the ethical objection to targeting the specific authors of it over a greater number of nameless, relatively blameless individuals.
Outside of ethics, the common argument against targeted killings is that they are potentially more destabilizing than standard warfare, but this sounds dubious to me. War itself is destabilizing. An aggressive state leader who holds so much personal power that his/her death means his/her country’s ruin is inherently destabilizing already. And one could argue it’s the taboo against assassination itself that fuels much of the popular outrage resulting from its practice.
I’m probably wrong here, as most of the world appears to disagree with me on this. What are your thoughts?
Is there a hetero male Aella? I haven't looked very hard, so there might be an obvious answer. I think people like Aella living non-standard sexual lives represent hope that human sexuality is not solved, like new physics mean the universe might not be boring.
(edit: I had to edit this to tone down the silly fanboy vibes ha ha)
Dan Savage performed this duty for me back in the 2000s/2010s until I kind of trailed off my Lovecast subscription. When I was interested again, it was the Trump/MeToo years and the few times I tuned in I just didn't need to hear more stories that felt political.
I imagine a "hetero male sex influencer" being like what I imagine Andrew Tate was from descriptions of him. I love the pink-haired polyamorous people I know, but the ones I occasionally come across as podcasters/writers tend to be so ... gentle and hand-wringey. Multiamory was just dull (back in the day, haven't tuned in in a long time) and @polyamfam on instagram seems cute but then they un-ironically use the word "oof."
Bald and Bankrupt is probably a sex tourist but I love his travel videos and thank fuck he doesn't talk about sex and relationships. More Plates More Dates is a steroid-fluencer. I successfully steered clear of Pick Up Artists when they were popular in the 2010s and I'm totally allergic to anything adjascent.
Advice? I'm a 23 y/o recent philosophy grad who spent most of the last 10 years or so with their head in the clouds thinking about everything but practical, actually deployable-in-the-world ideas. Now that I'm supposed to be an adult, I find I'm in fairly desperate need of mentors to shepherd me onto the path of not being useless to myself and the world around me. In what is I guess proper Gen Z fashion, I'm afraid it took me this (way too) long to realize I actually need to follow a realistic career path.
I want to become a residential real estate developer like others in my family, but I barely know the first thing about how. I was feeling at a loss for what to do, but then I remembered, apparently there is this weird internet community full of ~140 IQ creative geniuses (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-mystery-of-internet-survey-iqs) who are randomly good at all sorts of stuff; I think I could do a lot worse than to learn from one of those people. So anyway, I feel I would greatly benefit by having someone to talk to from the rat community (on discord/slack/email/wherever - DM me!) who happens to know how to run a successful physical business, or has a sophisticated understanding of financial management, some insight into people/local RE politics, who might even run a construction company/has general contracting or design experience or practiced as a broker/agent/appraiser, or has anything else that might help get me better understand real estate development or business in general.
They don't have to be directly involved in my industry specifically, to be clear--they just need to know something that could be useful in my endeavors somehow. Considering I know next to nothing, learning literally *anything* remotely practical would be a pretty significant improvement. But if you *do* happen to have detailed, advanced technical knowledge about one of the above topics, even better.
If anyone is feeling a little generous with their time, and willing to chat with me for a bit to help me improve, I would be very grateful!
Won't Labour in Britain just reverse Brexit to the maximum degree possible once they take office? (I'm assuming that they're going to win a fairly large majority). The initial vote for Brexit was famously 52-48, and I believe that the turnout for the referendum wasn't super-high. Just based on thermostatic public opinion and the UK's general economic decline since then, it doesn't seem unreasonable that at least 5% of Leave voters will now have changed their minds. Plus, the British political system doesn't exactly have a lot of constraints on what a single-party majority can do- if Labour thinks it's a good idea they can simply push it through.
Likely the EU won't simply accept the UK back as a full member, but presumably they could strike a deal like Switzerland or a few other countries have where the UK is a member of the common market and so on again- they're just not a voting member. I think this would be extremely difficult to reverse even in the case of a future Tory administration. Is Labour going to push through something like this assuming they win this year? If not, why not?
A year or so ago, a new type of experiment involving a pair of photons was able to measure the pressure inside a proton. The pressure at the center turns out to be a staggering 10^35 Pascals, about ten times the pressure at the center of a neutron star.
Given how relatively little extra mass is needed to collapse a neutron star into a black hole (doubling the mass would generally do the trick), that pressure seems to put the center of a proton well into mini-black hole ball park.
It was claimed some years ago that a proton cannot in its entirety actually be a mini-black hole, in a classical sense, teetering stably (somehow) between evaporating entirely and absorbing particles, because if it was then it would have no magnetic moment, which it does.
But what if it had one or more mini-black holes in its deep interior that were surrounded and "shielded" by processes I sketch next which would produce a magnetic moment?
If a black hole near the centre emitted a particle, and the pressure gradient accelerated it outward to within a whisker of the speed of light, wouldn't the particle's relativistic mass increase accordingly? Now obviously gravity affects all masses equally, but by sweeping up vacuum energy wouldn't this particle concentrate mass-energy in one direction, relative to the center, as opposed to this energy being evenly spread round the center? If so then that would mean the effect of gravity on the particle would be enhanced, thus tending to haul it back towards the center? This effect would act like the well-known asymptotic freedom, whereby there is little force on the particle when close to the centre, but when ejected outward, it becomes massive enough to be dragged back in!
I gather the pressure gradient is colossal at the center, decreasing outward, then drops off to a minimum before increasing somewhat and pointing inward. So that would seem to be consistent with a picture of a proton's interior as resembling a spherical fountain of ejected particles, initially swelling in mass during their outward (possibly arching) trajectory, but then declining in mass and being hauled back in to be re-absorbed by the black holes.
This also seems consistent with collision experiments which seem to find quarks of all kinds of masses. It simply depends on the energy of the colliding particle how far it can pierce the interior of the proton before meeting a quark, on its way outward or back.
I wonder if the following issue with "standardized exams" is found in countries other than my home country, India. Here various college admissions as well as civil service posts are decided via specific examinations, the most famous of those being the UPSC exam (for India's Civil/Administrative Service, AFAIK a variant of what was instituted by the British East India Company in the 19th century, `supposedly modeling them on the imperial examinations for the Qing bureaucracy) and IIT-JEE's to enter the Indian Institutes of Technology. Unlike SAT, these are single-admission-cluster exams: you take an exam for a bunch of positions in a bunch of places together, but you can take the same exam next year without your score this year haunting you the next.
On the surface, this looks meritocratic, but candidates goodhart it: they take a year or two off after their high school or bachelor's or master's, and spend all their time just preparing to crack the exam. This seems horribly unfair to students attempting it the first time: someone with much less talent can get ahead of you simply because they dedicate a year of their life to just preparing for and cracking the exam. This is even worse when they do it for a PhD position: the exams cannot be arbitrarily hard, so they can crack it, but once they enter the program they cannot keep up with the much sharper learning curve. It is not even clear if there are legal means to prohibit it, such as an "age penalty".
Are similar considerations relevant to debates on standardized testing in the US or in any other country?
Hi everyone, I’m doing a story for the podcast about advanced psychiatric directives, and am looking for people willing to talk about their directives, their experiences with how they were honored or ignored, or if you’re a clinician, any experience you have with them. I’m easy to find at gmail hiphination.
So the astral codex exention (the new one which re-works the comments) is showing me one single comment:
Comments have been filtered out by the Astral Codex Eleven extension. If it works correctly, this comment should soon be replaced by the real comment thread. If not, try reloading the page.
I don't know what "soon" means, but it is, for me, more than a minute or two, and reloading the page doesn't seem to change this outcome. It's easy to turn off and get the native version of the comments, but this should probably be fixed. I was enjoying the noticeably faster comment loading before this, but that requires that the comments actually load.
So I recently finished reading "Catching Fire", by Richard Wrangham. A very interesting book, recommended. A major premise of the book is that cooking allowed us to get more calories out of food. And then thinking about all the obesity we now see, could part of the extra pounds we are putting on be because we are able to get more calories out of the food we are eating? All our processed foods make more calories available for us to absorb. And we enjoy the taste of processed foods because there is a signal in them that more calories will be available. I know this isn't as sexy as, "it's Lithium" or microplastics, but it seems like a hypothesis that someone could look into, (yeah sure, someone probably already has.). Did 'food science' take off in the 1960's- 70's. Maybe we can blame this on Nixon too. :^) https://biocomplexity.virginia.edu/news/lasting-influence-1969-white-house-conference-food-nutrition-and-health
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to devise an idea for a story set somewhere one wouldn't expect such a story. For example: a bitter artistic dispute in a mine, a fistfight in a Wall Street boardroom, or a love affair in a WWII bomber.
Best place to look for algo people to hear out a complex biology problem. I'm looking to chat with someone about how to go about ML approaches for a unique* computational biology problem I have. It can be short - I have the background to do most of my own reading but need for pointers where to go read. Prefer by zoom/in person if you're in Boston than text. Hmu here or MIT edu email, reuvenf
*Probably not, but I haven't seen off-the-shelf solutions for it
Research seems to agree that prevalence of myopia in children has increased. There also seems to be an agreement that not spending enough time outdoors increases myopia risk.
Sorry for the vagueness, correct me if I'm wrong.
Further there seem to be two theories(?) as to the cause. First is what I've dubbed "near work". Focusing your eyes near due to indoors instead of far in outdoors. Then there is the amount of light, which is significantly less indoors. The claim is that the eyes of children grow depthwise, and for this growth to stop at an optimal time, enough visible spectrum light is needed (keyword: emmetropization).
I've seen it claimed that the near work theory is older and amount of light is newer but to be honest I have no idea myself.
Separately, there are also recommendations for children to wear sunglasses since their eyes are more vulnerable to UV light.
Here's my question that keeps bothering me: by my layman logic wouldn't this mean children should wear clear UV protective sunglasses?
I've only seen answers along the lines of "sunglasses are fine, the light level outdoors still crosses the threshold of reducing myopia risk". But is there any reason not to use clear UV glasses?
Richard Feynman, in an interview recorded in 1981 with BBC Horizon, says about the social sciences:
"Social science is an example of a science which is not a science; they don’t do [things] scientifically, they follow the forms-or you gather data, you do so-and-so and so forth but they don’t get any laws, they haven’t found out anything. They haven’t got anywhere yet - maybe some day they will, but it’s not very well developed, but what happens is on an even more mundane level. We get experts on everything that sound like they’re sort of scientific experts. They’re not scientific, they sit at a typewriter and they make up something like, oh, food grown with, er, fertilizer that’s organic is better for you than food grown with fertilizer that’s inorganic-may be true, may not be true, but it hasn’t been demonstrated one way or the other. But they’ll sit there on the typewriter and make up all this stuff as if it’s science and then become an expert on foods, organic foods and so on. There’s all kinds of myths and pseudoscience all over the place. I may be quite wrong, maybe they do know all these things, but I don’t think I’m wrong. You see, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something, and therefore I see how they get their information and I can’t believe that they know it, they haven’t done the work necessary, haven’t done the checks necessary, haven’t done the care necessary"
In the years since, have there been developments in psychology (say) or other social sciences that have "generated reliable knowledge that we can hold on to".
Thought experiment that I think I heard on a podcast but can't source to properly credit:
You're out walking your beloved pet.
(Not generic second-person "you," but the actual *you,* the "individual-you-reading-this-you", and not a hypothetical beloved pet, but your *actual* pet, the one that's living with you right now. If you don't currently have a living pet, imagine your passed beloved pet.)
A limousine with blacked-out windows pulls up beside you. A nondescript man in a nondescript suit climbs out of the front seat with an envelope.
"Hello," he says. "My employer, who will remain anonymous, would like to purchase your beloved pet. This envelope contains a legally-binding sales transfer. Upon signing it, $1,000,000 will instantly be deposited into an account of your choosing."
"This sounds like a scam," you probably say.
"I assure you, it is not, and here is my proof." The nondescript man shows you whatever it is that would convince *you,* the real person reading this, that this is indeed a legitimate offer from an unknowable source. (1)
"Uh, why does your employer want my beloved pet?" You probably ask.
"My employer will not share that information."
"But what is your employer going to do with my beloved pet?" You probably try to insist.
"My employer will not share that information. My employer simply wants your pet and is willing to pay for it. You have two minutes to make a decision and hand me the leash/carrier/lead rope/tank."
You stare down at your beloved pet.
What do you - seriously, *you,* the person reading this, with your particular finances and goals and obligations - do?
Follow ups:
If no to $1,000,000, what about $10,000,000? $100,000,000? $2,000,000,000? More?
If yes to $1,000,000, what about $500,000? $50,000? $10,000?
What if it's not your own pet, but the pet of a loved one (spouse, family member, best friend, etc) who is currently in your care?
What if it's not your pet, or a loved one's pet, but a stranger's loose pet you just caught, wearing pet identification tags?
_____
(1) In other words, please just accept the conditions of the hypothetical and refrain from attempting to Kobayashi Maru it.
I just watched a short documentary about the old, grand buildings of Cairo, Illinois that are sitting abandoned. If things continue the way they have been, those buildings will probably be lost in the future like all their brethren.
Here's an idea: the townspeople should sell them to Microsoft for $1 to be used as server farms, on the condition that the buildings be restored to their original condition (at least on the outside) and local people be hired to do the renovation work and all maintenance and groundskeeping going forward.
Anything wrong with this idea, or is it just a win-win no one has thought of before me?
Don't let the title fool you. Yes, it is about irises, with photographs. But it's also about LLMs, including a poem about irises by ChatGPT, modeled after Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." See, here's some paragraphs following that poem:
suppose one might ask whether or not that poem is a “real” poem and, if so, is it as good as a human could do. That question, after all, is on many people’s minds these days: Are they as good as us? Better perhaps? Will they replace us, displace us? (Annihilate us?)
Those particular questions aren’t on my mind at the moment. They don’t compute, if you will. I don’t know what they mean.
Ever since GPT-3 came out my position has been that these are strange beasts, not like anything we know. Not like us, but not like other machines either. It’s going to take a while to think through these things, to make arrangements, to arrive at a modus vivendi.
In one respect the most recent large language models ARE superior to any human: they can generate coherent text on a much wider range of subjects than anyone can. Some of that text, however, may be fabricated. But WE do that as well. Yet it’s not that breadth of capability that we find problematic, not as long as it doesn’t exceed human ability in this or that specialized respect.
How can we reconcile the altruism of EA (rational good-making) with that of a Mahayana Bodhisattva (to dedicate one’s life energies to the awakening of all beings)?
Are there any dentists/periodontists who can comment on the evidence base for systemic antibiotics to control periodontitis. I'm being pushed by my periodontist to do a course of antibiotics but everything I've found (essentially Cochrane Reviews) seems to point to there not being a good evidence base for the practice. Further, it seems like a lot of whats done in dentistry doesnt have a good evidence base. Add in the interobserver variability issues, and I'm starting to think this field may have some issues.
The London mayoral election takes place in 10 days time. The most recent poll puts Sadiq Khan on 46% vote share, 19 points ahead of his closest opponent (Susan Hall on 27%). Manifold (https://manifold.markets/cash/will-sadiq-khan-be-reelected-mayor) says there’s a 94% chance Khan will win. 1/20 is (just about) available on Betfair Exchange, implying a 95% chance he will win. These sorts of situations are testing. It’s tempting to say that 95% is too high for something as inherently uncertain as a democratic election, but do you really want to take the other side of that bet?
I am a mathematics postdoc, and I am leading a group of undergrad computer science majors in a project to build Alpha Algebra (along the lines of Alpha Geometry as built recently by DeepMind). Are there any programmers here who would like to help us with this? It will mostly require training an LLM on synthetic data.
I spent hours writing an impressive essay asking for help figuring some things out about the pharmaceutical industry.
It was a thing of beauty, and I am sure someone with relevant expertise would have been delighted to help; certainly, upon reading the pure ambrosia of its prose, none could have resisted — nor desired to!
My eyes are tired and gritty, and I long to finally lie down; and lo, finally, I am done! I try to scroll over to read through one last time, to ensure no niggling typo or mistaken neologism enfoolishes me in front of my heroes¹; one last scan before posting and—
Substack ate the post.
No worries. I am prepared. My "select all → copy" trick will—
...oh. It failed to record any of the copied text, as it sometimes does. Clipboard has not even been used today, as far as it knows!
(there's even a helpful note to the effect of "you can copy stuff here to save it :D")
Well, the clipboard /does/ occasionally just... stop keeping any history whatsoever; I know this is a risk.
And, of course, Substack's comment-handling processes were written by some sort of cognitively-handicapped chimpanzee whose mother evidently had a fondness for "bush hooch"; recent estimates indicate she also — very likely — favored the practice of dealing her drooling, idiot offspring daily (if not hourly, IMO) severe, IQ-leeching blows directly to the head.²
Yes, I knew these things could happen....
/...just not BOTH AT ONCE when I had spent over A GODDAMN HOUR on formatting and typing and waiting for unfreezing and aAAAAHSJDJDJDKA)dnajsjdjf;;nd/
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¹: (anyone peripherally or centrally involved in drug development, I might say. 👍 it was my dream — before I realized that having dreams is itself a dream, heh.
"follow your heart~" and "FiNd yOur PaSSiOn!" and all that nonsense...
OR: take the first OK job you can get anywhere, so your mother can get good care and stick around on Earth with you?
well, as cool as it might have been to do something interesting /as your work/ — I mean, THEY pay YOU, to use their fancy labs and learn more of & research upon your favorite subject, I hear! — still: me ol' ma had to come first...
...she gave up on /her/ own dreams for my sake, after all; what kinda son would not return the favor?! heh.
and, anyway, as she always reminded me: "you've got to be practical". it's not such a bad motto to remember, I guess!)
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²: (Really, it's a miracle the creature was able to program even *this* abomination, I suppose. Sadly, any "thinking" beings — and I use the term loosely — that, somehow, managed to make text /more resource-intensive/ than a triple-A FPS title... are undoubtedly even now squatting fearfully in filth and darkness, angrily attempting to develop a video player from fæcal discharge. A hard life, even for a subchimp.)
"I'm actually really worried about how heated the israel/palestine debate has become and how vitriolic both sides have gotten. It almost seems like if one person were heroic enough to do something drastic like set themselves on fire it could really change the course of history."
Palestine activists have taken over Harvard Yard and set up an encampment. Incredible stuff.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/25/harvard-yard-protest-palestine/
I think this whole thing is fascinating in that the consequences of a fundamental tension or contradiction on the left are being materialized more than at any other point - that is, the tension between the 'anti-anti-semitism' and 'anti-colonialist' aspects of the American left.
It's easy to have said this at many points in recent history, but I think this time it could be for real: The ADL strategy has well and truly backfired and zionists now face the real prospect of losing their dominant political and institutional power in the US.
Columbia obviously sided with the 'anything that is anti-israel is anti-semitic' contingent, as did much of the media, but this was ineffective to an ahistorical degree.
Harvard zionists already taking the same line:
"Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi called on the University to clear out the encampment in Harvard Yard in a statement posted to Chabad’s X account just before 11 p.m., referring to the protesters as “Jew haters and Hamas lovers.”"
"Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos “Alexander” Kestenbaum, who is suing the University over allegations of tolerating antisemitism on campus, also slammed the protest in a post on X after Passover ended.
“President Garber: expel these terrorist supporters NOW or resign,” Kestenbaum wrote. “We Jews have had enough of your inaction!”"
But it seems claims of 'anti-semitism' are not the magic bullet they once were. I wonder how this all ends?
Looking forward to seeing you guys in Atlanta!
Hi! I'm looking for participants to take a questionnaire inspired by some research spun off from the Astral Codex Ten reader survey. Because I've talked about the research on Reddit, I'm only looking for people who haven't looked at the Slate Star Codex subreddit recently and don't follow my Substack. Anyway, the survey is here: https://forms.gle/mHAyiuci4mb9hyCY6
It deals with personality and how it influences the ways in which people allocate resources. That link again: https://forms.gle/mHAyiuci4mb9hyCY6
Hi, small stats question here.
I'm currently doing my econ undergrad, and as a 6-month research project (not final thesis), I have to learn about one regression technique, do some simulations with it, and apply it to some real data. Below are all the options I can choose from. I know very little about most of them (and just reading the wiki article doesn't help that much), so any advice on which one is most interesting or useful would be welcomed. Even just "I only know three of these methods, but I like this one most" would be useful for me. At the moment I only know IV and Logistic Regression so those would be a little less interesting to me.
(About me: pretty average, young, EA, ACX reader, also interested in AI.)
.
.
K Nearest Neighbor Regression
Regression trees
Ridge Regression and Lasso Regression
Principal component regression
Logistic Regression
Linear discriminant analysis
Instrumental Variables
Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model
Spurious Regression Problem
Is anybody in this group knowledgable about the benefits of libraries for society? I'm planning to go into library science as a career and I'd like to improve my logical thinking skills so I can hopefully make a good impact on the field someday.
Also, is library science a field that can easily integrate the kind of thinking that this group espouses?
With the recently passed ban on TikTok, anyone who is legally knowledgeable know how this works?
The text (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text) says "It shall be unlawful for an entity to distribute..a foreign adversary controlled application by carrying out..internet hosting services to enable the distribution", and it specifics that this includes source code. But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States specified that the publication of source code was protected by the first amendment, so the government would need a compelling interest to prevent that publication.
Is there a conflict here? Is preventing the publication of an apk likely to withstand court scrutiny?
EDIT: My best guess currently is that the government is claiming there is a compelling state interest, that of national security, and that is why they should be allowed to ban the publication of this app and it's code. And even if it were to go to the court the courts don't like telling the government was is and isn't national security related, so they would probably just ok this.
I don't know Tatu, they had five years to find physical evidence in the McMartin case, and two full jury trials. They never presented any. But thank you for the comment.
I think a lot of the people on the Open Thread are young so I thought I would invite you to read about a hysteria that happened in the US, and some other countries, in the 1980's and 90's. Perhaps they cover this in school, I have no idea. But the child care sexual abuse hysteria is a black eye on the US and our justice system. https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/our-endless-hysteria
Why do jewish intellectuals hate white people so much?
https://i.imgur.com/QCT9nT3.jpeg
Can you imagine if a major publisher or university press released a book about 'jewish privilege'? Or gentile professors at elite US colleges ran courses on 'destroying jewishness'? This would be absolutely scandalous and people here would be furious.
And yet, I point out the exact opposite situation is true and people are furious...at me for pointing it out.
If these jewish intellectuals hate me for my race, why am I supposed to cry when their ideological bedfellows starting seeing them as oppressive white people themselves? Especially when the hegemonic institutions of America are almost universally on their side and will help them, a privilege not afforded to white people who feel the consequences of left wing race ideology.
Would any AI enthusiasts have some advice for a grad student? I'm working on a school project where we're evaluating different methods of "teaching" a model about, say, a research article (e.g. RAG, fine-tuning). Right now we're asking the trained model a bunch of questions about the paper then classifying its answers as Right/Wrong/Catastrophically Wrong. We figure the method that produces the most Right answers is the best, but surely there's a more "industry standard" way of evaluating this kind of thing?
Nominative determinism department:
The first witness in Trump's trial about the alleged hush money for Stormy Daniels was the former publisher for The National Enquirer, who allegedly "used the tabloid to suppress damaging rumors about Trump, and prosecutors say ... helped negotiate the hush-money payment at the center of this case".
The former publisher's name? Pecker
Have you looked at Orchid yet? I'm very curious if a separate firm will pop up to take Embryo info from Orchid or Genomic predictions and apply height and IQ tests to them
Y'all ever meet up in Tahoe?
Also, I'll drop my new interview with Jon Askonas here: https://youtu.be/RHWhC2af4kc?si=XSOg561ChcW48Pkn
Shameless self-promotion: my biweekly COVID update here. Things are looking pretty good right now in the US. If past patterns hold we should expect another wavelet late summer.
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1782071333943382468
So, the upcoming Democratic National Convention in August: massive shitshow of street violence, or not?
On the "yes, it will be" side:
* The pro-Hamas factions in the US are well-organized, well-funded, and eager to cause problems.
* Thanks to Black Lives Matter, law enforcement has been stripped of most of its ability to control demonstrations, and Chicago in particular has generationally awful leadership.
* Biden is about to sign on to $10 billion more in aid to Israel, making appeasement impossible.
* Exact same thing happened in 1968. "It's like poetry, it rhymes."
On the "no, it won't be" side:
* Perhaps Biden will somehow appease them anyway.
* Perhaps the war will be long over by then.
* Perhaps there will be a new Current Thing by August.
* "Nothing ever happens."
I could use a bit of advice from some statisticians or maybe data scientists.
This summer I will have a summer internship working with scientists doing research on air pollution and cardiovascular health. This will involve downloading all sorts of data sets from various goverment databases, and looking for patterns in them. What sorts of tools should I be using to make discovery easy?
Off hand, I would probably work with Google Sheets for small data sets, write custom code in Python if I needed to do any serious data cleaning, and load the data into something like a local Postgres server if I needed to do heavier querying in SQL. Any other tooling I should be considering?
This columbia university business is fascinating. It seems that many of these Jews have been supporting the ADL strategy, and were desperately hoping that people wouldn't notice that 'one of these victim groups is not like the other'.
It's like something our of folklore. Jewish intellectuals being attacked by a golem of their own making.
I have had this thought on my mind for a while now- how to get around the over-specialization and narrowing of every field of study. I really think that it is the bottleneck for nearly every real and pertinent problem in the world right now, without exaggeration. A lot of people, especially in academia, seem to be aware of this problem but I haven’t seen any convincing ideas for solutions yet. Am I just unaware of relevant things happening in this direction or should I make more of an effort to focus on this in the future?
I want to come up with a detailed and independent framework and methodology that works parallel to all the hyper-specialized subjects we have now. It would focus entirely on synthesizing all the discrete fields for more focused problem solving. A person trained in this should be able to take one real and specific problem, like say widespread hormone disruption, and address it from every available angle- the various biochemical aspects of it, the social and psychological causes and effects, the environmental factors involved- bring in any relevant specialists where needed, but then be able to propose real and practical solutions to it that are effective without causing catastrophic disruptions long term(since the approach is to examine the problem from every available perspective, this should minimize the issues that come from the various interrelated systems that are usually studied separately). I think that this is more of a matter of change in perception of the phenomenon than a change in abilities to address it, but it will make every field of study we have right now that much more effective. Does this sound feasible? Does it already exist in some form and I just don’t know yet? Is there some other way of getting around the problems caused by hyper-specialization?
Some interesting information about the publishing industry, which came to light as a result of the recent Penguin Random House antitrust suit.
https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books
" I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies)."
Maybe some of you would find the report on Salary trend in Berlin's tech and startup space interesting: https://handpickedberlin.com/berlin-salary-trends-2024-report/
(n=1150)
Manifold just announced that they'll soon be transitioning to a real-money gambling site. I can't imagine how that's supposed to work or why they think they'll have an advantage over Kalshi, PredictIt and the like. The whole reason why Manifold exists and works the way it does is because it exclusively uses play money so they can ignore all the laws around gambling and finance that make it hard to do real world prediction markets. Meanwhile, it ruins the site for all the existing users who like it the way it is.
Does the media criticism term "slop" (as in "modern slop") have any specific meaning other than "a thing 4chan did not like"? I'm leaning toward "boo light" until I see evidence otherwise. (I've also seen "goyslop," which I assume is the explicitly anti-Semitic version.)
I've heard that most of the vegetables found in American supermarkets are strains that have been optimized for long shelf lives and appearance, at the expense of taste. From personal experience, are there any strains of vegetables that you've grown and eaten that taste noticeably better than their supermarket cousins? What are they?
My style advice to the rationalist community and beloved commentators on this blog:
Enough of the use of “priors“.
Use prejudice, bias or other equivalents, instead.
I'm still unfamiliar with the etiquette of these open threads, but this does help get my blog some views:
https://open.substack.com/pub/thothhermes/p/akrasia-is-mainly-error-assignment?r=28a5y9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I've been watching the Metaculus Presidential Election market, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11245/winner-of-2024-us-presidential-election/ , and one thing seems odd. It seems sort-of "sticky" around 50/50, not moving more that 5% away from that since last November. Does this strike anyone else as strange? It isn't as if the period since then was placid and uneventful. I'm wondering if there are a lot of Metaculus members who round uncertainty in a more-or-less-two-way-contest to "50/50", rather than a more sophisticated estimate...
Linus Torvalds isn’t sweating AI. He’s been hitting his mark again and again for over 30 years. Elizer, I’m afraid, comes across as being full of beans. Admittedly I’ve only been only been keeping one eye on LLMs so feel free to think Yudowski is the real deal, you may be right, but that’s how the guy’s persona writ large strikes me.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-takes-on-evil-developers-hardware-errors-and-hilarious-ai-hype/
In 1995, New Mexico almost passed a law requiring psychologists to dress up as wizards when giving evidence in court: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2024/04/19/protocol-3/
I was clearing out some old links, and I had forgotten about this... "The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule" by Tyler Austin Harper. Great article about why intellectuals during the 1920s thought humanity would soon go extinct. I only have two quibbles with Harper's thesis.
First, he implies there was a hiatus in our extinction fears. Being a late Boomer (actually, I prefer to separate my generation from the early Boomers because we grew up in a since we grew up in significantly different cultural matrix) — but being a late Boomer, I remember the regular air raid drills in the first and second grades when we'd hide under our desks in case of nuclear attack — and then we'd watch an upbeat public service film about how families who are confident and prepared can survive a nuclear conflict. I think the public service films were more traumatizing than the drills. And the beat of doom never let up. There was always a new way that our world was going to end. By the time Y2K rolled around I was pretty cynical about end-of-the-world scenarios.
Second, he claims that extinction panics are fomented by economic elites. From what I've seen extinction panics are fomented mostly by academia and the media. The economic elites go along with them because they're suckers like the rest of us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/opinion/polycrisis-doom-extinction-humanity.html
How strong would a T-800 terminator need to be to be able to quickly kill a human man with its bare hands?
Imagine you get into a physical fight with someone else. All things being equal, if the other person is ONLY TWICE as strong as you in every way (arms, legs, fingers, etc.), you'll definitely notice a difference straightaway and will lose. And if the other person is made of metal and can't feel pain, you're even more screwed.
But then again, being merely twice as strong as a human man might not leave the T-800 strong enough to achieve fast hand-to-hand kills. For example, the average man has a hand grip strength of 72 lbs. If a T-800 were twice as strong and had a grip strength of 144 lbs, it might be able to cause pain and bruising by grabbing and squeezing you, but it wouldn't be enough to break your bones. Also, if the average man can bench press 140 lbs, then a T-800 could bench press 280 lbs. That's not enough to be able to throw someone out a window or to be able to crush them to death in a bear hug.
Put simply, what the is minimum strength requirement for a T-800 to be able to quickly kill or crippled a grown man in unaided combat? 5x a human male's strength? 10x? Is it more important for some of the T-800's body parts to be stronger than others?
Sabine Hossenfelder's video on how her dream died, "And now I'm here."
This reminded me of some of my experiences. Thank heavens I dropped out of grad school, and found something else. I suspect my life would have been miserable if I had gone the academic route. A close friend had to survive twenty-plus years of post-docs and on non-tenure-tracked temporary positions before she finally found a tenure-track position. Along the way, she discovered that her thesis advisor was sabotaging her career by giving her lukewarm recommendations. I suspect the toxicity in academia has only gotten worse since I dropped out of grad school many years ago, but this Hossenfelder video brought back some unpleasant memories for me...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8
I was looking through some of the archives from the SSC days and came across an article on cost disease. Scott outlined the issue but never really came to any conclusions about why it was happening. Were there ever any follow-up articles or discussion about this?
I'm in a career crisis, and trying to cover all the angles. The short version is I'm a software developer (going on nearly 8 years) working in a very niche stack (including the language) building cross-platform high-performance desktop apps, underpaid, and facing an uncertain future with my employer as the business may not stay afloat. I'd like to move on, but am having trouble getting hired. I suspect that employers, being risk-averse, don't place much stake in some of my experience despite the skills being easily transferable (to languages like Java, C# and C++).
Trends in job postings suggests that cloud and devops experience is valued, so to that end I'm picking up some certs, but I have no intention of switching to IT/admin or devops; I want to program. My only other idea is building something for web, full-stack, but I expect there is marginal value in some dinky undergrad-level demo, which leaves either a) open-source contributions, or b) an ambitious project that will require ample investment of time, that I don't have. I have intuited however that, despite the fact that a bootcamp is redundant for me, some of the end-term projects as part of those programs may be substantial enough to warrant exploring, even if they are basically "demos". That makes it a possible 'c'. I'm not in the U.S., but the market is as bad or worse. Another piece of background: my education wasn't in CS, I made a lateral move, so I'm relying even more on experience and reputation. I'd do web or native, I don't care, except I understand the former is saturated and I have experience in the latter.
Appreciate any input by other experienced devs. Thanks.
I wrote a review of Jordan Peele's 2019 film Us which touches on things that I don't believe other reviewers have seriously considered (long story short, I think the movie can be seen as having themes related to autism and the paranormal -- I don't think that Jordan Peele necessarily intended it, but the parallels are interesting).
https://lettersfromtrekronor.substack.com/p/film-review-us
What are the best accessibly written arguments against AI existential risk concerns? The best I think I've come across is Maciej Ceglowski's "Superintelligence: The Idea that Eats Smart People," but would be happy to hear of others.
I'd also be interested in the best accelerationist arguments out there, of either the left or the right variety. (This is a know-thy-enemy exercise for me, so preaching to the choir type screeds aren't going to be interesting; rather writing that genuinely tries to be persuasive.)
What do you think about targeted killings? Here I’ll narrowly define targeted killings as those which are ordered by one state in retaliation against another state’s specific political/military leaders deemed to be most responsible for an international act of aggression.
The official policy of the United States prohibits assassination as of 1981, as outlined in Executive Order 12333. However, starting with the war on terror, the United States and Israel began to employ “targeted killings,” against terrorist leaders. This practice has begun to spill over into the killing of officials of other sovereign countries. Both the US and Israel have linked terrorist activity so strongly to Iran, that they have more recently gone as far as to kill a handful of Iran’s top military officials. The primary targets of these attacks were leaders of Iran’s Quds Force, which along with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were the first government departments ever designated as FTOs (foreign terrorist organizations).
Under the right circumstances, might targeted killings of the leaders of aggressor states be the most sensible, humane response? In modern warfare, it’s become common practice to place the authors of war outside the worst effects of it. Assassination, even in retaliation, is widely considered immoral, while the alternative of killing a slew of fresh service people and unlucky civilians is standard practice. It isn’t clear to me how this framework is morally defensible.
If a leader believes that it is in his/her people’s best interest to risk those people’s lives in conflict, shouldn’t that leader naturally include him/herself among them? All world leaders would without hesitation claim their willingness to die for their country but these same leaders have built a moral/legal framework around themselves that largely shields them from the possibility.
It is easier for me to understand an ethical objection to war in general than it is for me to understand the ethical objection to targeting the specific authors of it over a greater number of nameless, relatively blameless individuals.
Outside of ethics, the common argument against targeted killings is that they are potentially more destabilizing than standard warfare, but this sounds dubious to me. War itself is destabilizing. An aggressive state leader who holds so much personal power that his/her death means his/her country’s ruin is inherently destabilizing already. And one could argue it’s the taboo against assassination itself that fuels much of the popular outrage resulting from its practice.
I’m probably wrong here, as most of the world appears to disagree with me on this. What are your thoughts?
Is there a hetero male Aella? I haven't looked very hard, so there might be an obvious answer. I think people like Aella living non-standard sexual lives represent hope that human sexuality is not solved, like new physics mean the universe might not be boring.
(edit: I had to edit this to tone down the silly fanboy vibes ha ha)
Dan Savage performed this duty for me back in the 2000s/2010s until I kind of trailed off my Lovecast subscription. When I was interested again, it was the Trump/MeToo years and the few times I tuned in I just didn't need to hear more stories that felt political.
I imagine a "hetero male sex influencer" being like what I imagine Andrew Tate was from descriptions of him. I love the pink-haired polyamorous people I know, but the ones I occasionally come across as podcasters/writers tend to be so ... gentle and hand-wringey. Multiamory was just dull (back in the day, haven't tuned in in a long time) and @polyamfam on instagram seems cute but then they un-ironically use the word "oof."
Bald and Bankrupt is probably a sex tourist but I love his travel videos and thank fuck he doesn't talk about sex and relationships. More Plates More Dates is a steroid-fluencer. I successfully steered clear of Pick Up Artists when they were popular in the 2010s and I'm totally allergic to anything adjascent.
Advice? I'm a 23 y/o recent philosophy grad who spent most of the last 10 years or so with their head in the clouds thinking about everything but practical, actually deployable-in-the-world ideas. Now that I'm supposed to be an adult, I find I'm in fairly desperate need of mentors to shepherd me onto the path of not being useless to myself and the world around me. In what is I guess proper Gen Z fashion, I'm afraid it took me this (way too) long to realize I actually need to follow a realistic career path.
I want to become a residential real estate developer like others in my family, but I barely know the first thing about how. I was feeling at a loss for what to do, but then I remembered, apparently there is this weird internet community full of ~140 IQ creative geniuses (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-mystery-of-internet-survey-iqs) who are randomly good at all sorts of stuff; I think I could do a lot worse than to learn from one of those people. So anyway, I feel I would greatly benefit by having someone to talk to from the rat community (on discord/slack/email/wherever - DM me!) who happens to know how to run a successful physical business, or has a sophisticated understanding of financial management, some insight into people/local RE politics, who might even run a construction company/has general contracting or design experience or practiced as a broker/agent/appraiser, or has anything else that might help get me better understand real estate development or business in general.
They don't have to be directly involved in my industry specifically, to be clear--they just need to know something that could be useful in my endeavors somehow. Considering I know next to nothing, learning literally *anything* remotely practical would be a pretty significant improvement. But if you *do* happen to have detailed, advanced technical knowledge about one of the above topics, even better.
If anyone is feeling a little generous with their time, and willing to chat with me for a bit to help me improve, I would be very grateful!
Won't Labour in Britain just reverse Brexit to the maximum degree possible once they take office? (I'm assuming that they're going to win a fairly large majority). The initial vote for Brexit was famously 52-48, and I believe that the turnout for the referendum wasn't super-high. Just based on thermostatic public opinion and the UK's general economic decline since then, it doesn't seem unreasonable that at least 5% of Leave voters will now have changed their minds. Plus, the British political system doesn't exactly have a lot of constraints on what a single-party majority can do- if Labour thinks it's a good idea they can simply push it through.
Likely the EU won't simply accept the UK back as a full member, but presumably they could strike a deal like Switzerland or a few other countries have where the UK is a member of the common market and so on again- they're just not a voting member. I think this would be extremely difficult to reverse even in the case of a future Tory administration. Is Labour going to push through something like this assuming they win this year? If not, why not?
A year or so ago, a new type of experiment involving a pair of photons was able to measure the pressure inside a proton. The pressure at the center turns out to be a staggering 10^35 Pascals, about ten times the pressure at the center of a neutron star.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/swirling-forces-crushing-pressures-measured-in-the-proton-20240314/
Given how relatively little extra mass is needed to collapse a neutron star into a black hole (doubling the mass would generally do the trick), that pressure seems to put the center of a proton well into mini-black hole ball park.
It was claimed some years ago that a proton cannot in its entirety actually be a mini-black hole, in a classical sense, teetering stably (somehow) between evaporating entirely and absorbing particles, because if it was then it would have no magnetic moment, which it does.
But what if it had one or more mini-black holes in its deep interior that were surrounded and "shielded" by processes I sketch next which would produce a magnetic moment?
If a black hole near the centre emitted a particle, and the pressure gradient accelerated it outward to within a whisker of the speed of light, wouldn't the particle's relativistic mass increase accordingly? Now obviously gravity affects all masses equally, but by sweeping up vacuum energy wouldn't this particle concentrate mass-energy in one direction, relative to the center, as opposed to this energy being evenly spread round the center? If so then that would mean the effect of gravity on the particle would be enhanced, thus tending to haul it back towards the center? This effect would act like the well-known asymptotic freedom, whereby there is little force on the particle when close to the centre, but when ejected outward, it becomes massive enough to be dragged back in!
I gather the pressure gradient is colossal at the center, decreasing outward, then drops off to a minimum before increasing somewhat and pointing inward. So that would seem to be consistent with a picture of a proton's interior as resembling a spherical fountain of ejected particles, initially swelling in mass during their outward (possibly arching) trajectory, but then declining in mass and being hauled back in to be re-absorbed by the black holes.
This also seems consistent with collision experiments which seem to find quarks of all kinds of masses. It simply depends on the energy of the colliding particle how far it can pierce the interior of the proton before meeting a quark, on its way outward or back.
I wonder if the following issue with "standardized exams" is found in countries other than my home country, India. Here various college admissions as well as civil service posts are decided via specific examinations, the most famous of those being the UPSC exam (for India's Civil/Administrative Service, AFAIK a variant of what was instituted by the British East India Company in the 19th century, `supposedly modeling them on the imperial examinations for the Qing bureaucracy) and IIT-JEE's to enter the Indian Institutes of Technology. Unlike SAT, these are single-admission-cluster exams: you take an exam for a bunch of positions in a bunch of places together, but you can take the same exam next year without your score this year haunting you the next.
On the surface, this looks meritocratic, but candidates goodhart it: they take a year or two off after their high school or bachelor's or master's, and spend all their time just preparing to crack the exam. This seems horribly unfair to students attempting it the first time: someone with much less talent can get ahead of you simply because they dedicate a year of their life to just preparing for and cracking the exam. This is even worse when they do it for a PhD position: the exams cannot be arbitrarily hard, so they can crack it, but once they enter the program they cannot keep up with the much sharper learning curve. It is not even clear if there are legal means to prohibit it, such as an "age penalty".
Are similar considerations relevant to debates on standardized testing in the US or in any other country?
Hi everyone, I’m doing a story for the podcast about advanced psychiatric directives, and am looking for people willing to talk about their directives, their experiences with how they were honored or ignored, or if you’re a clinician, any experience you have with them. I’m easy to find at gmail hiphination.
Here's a hand-drawn map of some animals of the world: https://openseadragon.github.io/openseadragonizer/?img=https://i.redd.it/232n3d1009vc1.jpeg (not mine, just thought it was neat)
So the astral codex exention (the new one which re-works the comments) is showing me one single comment:
Comments have been filtered out by the Astral Codex Eleven extension. If it works correctly, this comment should soon be replaced by the real comment thread. If not, try reloading the page.
I don't know what "soon" means, but it is, for me, more than a minute or two, and reloading the page doesn't seem to change this outcome. It's easy to turn off and get the native version of the comments, but this should probably be fixed. I was enjoying the noticeably faster comment loading before this, but that requires that the comments actually load.
So I recently finished reading "Catching Fire", by Richard Wrangham. A very interesting book, recommended. A major premise of the book is that cooking allowed us to get more calories out of food. And then thinking about all the obesity we now see, could part of the extra pounds we are putting on be because we are able to get more calories out of the food we are eating? All our processed foods make more calories available for us to absorb. And we enjoy the taste of processed foods because there is a signal in them that more calories will be available. I know this isn't as sexy as, "it's Lithium" or microplastics, but it seems like a hypothesis that someone could look into, (yeah sure, someone probably already has.). Did 'food science' take off in the 1960's- 70's. Maybe we can blame this on Nixon too. :^) https://biocomplexity.virginia.edu/news/lasting-influence-1969-white-house-conference-food-nutrition-and-health
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to devise an idea for a story set somewhere one wouldn't expect such a story. For example: a bitter artistic dispute in a mine, a fistfight in a Wall Street boardroom, or a love affair in a WWII bomber.
Best place to look for algo people to hear out a complex biology problem. I'm looking to chat with someone about how to go about ML approaches for a unique* computational biology problem I have. It can be short - I have the background to do most of my own reading but need for pointers where to go read. Prefer by zoom/in person if you're in Boston than text. Hmu here or MIT edu email, reuvenf
*Probably not, but I haven't seen off-the-shelf solutions for it
Research seems to agree that prevalence of myopia in children has increased. There also seems to be an agreement that not spending enough time outdoors increases myopia risk.
Sorry for the vagueness, correct me if I'm wrong.
Further there seem to be two theories(?) as to the cause. First is what I've dubbed "near work". Focusing your eyes near due to indoors instead of far in outdoors. Then there is the amount of light, which is significantly less indoors. The claim is that the eyes of children grow depthwise, and for this growth to stop at an optimal time, enough visible spectrum light is needed (keyword: emmetropization).
I've seen it claimed that the near work theory is older and amount of light is newer but to be honest I have no idea myself.
Separately, there are also recommendations for children to wear sunglasses since their eyes are more vulnerable to UV light.
Here's my question that keeps bothering me: by my layman logic wouldn't this mean children should wear clear UV protective sunglasses?
I've only seen answers along the lines of "sunglasses are fine, the light level outdoors still crosses the threshold of reducing myopia risk". But is there any reason not to use clear UV glasses?
Can somebody explain the precise meaning and origin of "based" in current CW paralance?
This is my weekly invitation to subscribe to my Substack:
These are some links to climate change related posts.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/cop-28-and-counting
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/why-not-lng-exports
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/climate-risk-and-insurance
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/legal-remedies-for-climate-change
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/legal-remedies-for-climate-change-e7d
Richard Feynman, in an interview recorded in 1981 with BBC Horizon, says about the social sciences:
"Social science is an example of a science which is not a science; they don’t do [things] scientifically, they follow the forms-or you gather data, you do so-and-so and so forth but they don’t get any laws, they haven’t found out anything. They haven’t got anywhere yet - maybe some day they will, but it’s not very well developed, but what happens is on an even more mundane level. We get experts on everything that sound like they’re sort of scientific experts. They’re not scientific, they sit at a typewriter and they make up something like, oh, food grown with, er, fertilizer that’s organic is better for you than food grown with fertilizer that’s inorganic-may be true, may not be true, but it hasn’t been demonstrated one way or the other. But they’ll sit there on the typewriter and make up all this stuff as if it’s science and then become an expert on foods, organic foods and so on. There’s all kinds of myths and pseudoscience all over the place. I may be quite wrong, maybe they do know all these things, but I don’t think I’m wrong. You see, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something, and therefore I see how they get their information and I can’t believe that they know it, they haven’t done the work necessary, haven’t done the checks necessary, haven’t done the care necessary"
https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo?si=VNNdNW9lQU6RFkB6
In the years since, have there been developments in psychology (say) or other social sciences that have "generated reliable knowledge that we can hold on to".
What do you think of the research which cautions against eating certain foods in the same meal, due to a canceling out of nutritional benefit? A few examples are listed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/nutrition/comments/1782lxj/what_food_combinations_not_to_combine_such_as/
Do you make the effort to avoid any of these combinations, like cheese and spinach, or berries and bananas?
Thought experiment that I think I heard on a podcast but can't source to properly credit:
You're out walking your beloved pet.
(Not generic second-person "you," but the actual *you,* the "individual-you-reading-this-you", and not a hypothetical beloved pet, but your *actual* pet, the one that's living with you right now. If you don't currently have a living pet, imagine your passed beloved pet.)
A limousine with blacked-out windows pulls up beside you. A nondescript man in a nondescript suit climbs out of the front seat with an envelope.
"Hello," he says. "My employer, who will remain anonymous, would like to purchase your beloved pet. This envelope contains a legally-binding sales transfer. Upon signing it, $1,000,000 will instantly be deposited into an account of your choosing."
"This sounds like a scam," you probably say.
"I assure you, it is not, and here is my proof." The nondescript man shows you whatever it is that would convince *you,* the real person reading this, that this is indeed a legitimate offer from an unknowable source. (1)
"Uh, why does your employer want my beloved pet?" You probably ask.
"My employer will not share that information."
"But what is your employer going to do with my beloved pet?" You probably try to insist.
"My employer will not share that information. My employer simply wants your pet and is willing to pay for it. You have two minutes to make a decision and hand me the leash/carrier/lead rope/tank."
You stare down at your beloved pet.
What do you - seriously, *you,* the person reading this, with your particular finances and goals and obligations - do?
Follow ups:
If no to $1,000,000, what about $10,000,000? $100,000,000? $2,000,000,000? More?
If yes to $1,000,000, what about $500,000? $50,000? $10,000?
What if it's not your own pet, but the pet of a loved one (spouse, family member, best friend, etc) who is currently in your care?
What if it's not your pet, or a loved one's pet, but a stranger's loose pet you just caught, wearing pet identification tags?
_____
(1) In other words, please just accept the conditions of the hypothetical and refrain from attempting to Kobayashi Maru it.
I just watched a short documentary about the old, grand buildings of Cairo, Illinois that are sitting abandoned. If things continue the way they have been, those buildings will probably be lost in the future like all their brethren.
Here's an idea: the townspeople should sell them to Microsoft for $1 to be used as server farms, on the condition that the buildings be restored to their original condition (at least on the outside) and local people be hired to do the renovation work and all maintenance and groundskeeping going forward.
Anything wrong with this idea, or is it just a win-win no one has thought of before me?
I've got a new post at 3 Quarks Daily: The Irises Are Blooming Early This Year, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/04/the-irises-are-blooming-early-this-year.html
Don't let the title fool you. Yes, it is about irises, with photographs. But it's also about LLMs, including a poem about irises by ChatGPT, modeled after Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." See, here's some paragraphs following that poem:
suppose one might ask whether or not that poem is a “real” poem and, if so, is it as good as a human could do. That question, after all, is on many people’s minds these days: Are they as good as us? Better perhaps? Will they replace us, displace us? (Annihilate us?)
Those particular questions aren’t on my mind at the moment. They don’t compute, if you will. I don’t know what they mean.
Ever since GPT-3 came out my position has been that these are strange beasts, not like anything we know. Not like us, but not like other machines either. It’s going to take a while to think through these things, to make arrangements, to arrive at a modus vivendi.
In one respect the most recent large language models ARE superior to any human: they can generate coherent text on a much wider range of subjects than anyone can. Some of that text, however, may be fabricated. But WE do that as well. Yet it’s not that breadth of capability that we find problematic, not as long as it doesn’t exceed human ability in this or that specialized respect.
How can we reconcile the altruism of EA (rational good-making) with that of a Mahayana Bodhisattva (to dedicate one’s life energies to the awakening of all beings)?
Are there any dentists/periodontists who can comment on the evidence base for systemic antibiotics to control periodontitis. I'm being pushed by my periodontist to do a course of antibiotics but everything I've found (essentially Cochrane Reviews) seems to point to there not being a good evidence base for the practice. Further, it seems like a lot of whats done in dentistry doesnt have a good evidence base. Add in the interobserver variability issues, and I'm starting to think this field may have some issues.
Election betting, UK edition:
The London mayoral election takes place in 10 days time. The most recent poll puts Sadiq Khan on 46% vote share, 19 points ahead of his closest opponent (Susan Hall on 27%). Manifold (https://manifold.markets/cash/will-sadiq-khan-be-reelected-mayor) says there’s a 94% chance Khan will win. 1/20 is (just about) available on Betfair Exchange, implying a 95% chance he will win. These sorts of situations are testing. It’s tempting to say that 95% is too high for something as inherently uncertain as a democratic election, but do you really want to take the other side of that bet?
By no later than 28 January 2025, but probably this year, the UK will hold a general election. The Economist (https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/04/15/explore-our-prediction-model-for-britains-looming-election) says if the election were held tomorrow, Labour would have a 87% chance of winning an outright majority. Their track record is not good, but the mid-odds on Betfair Exchange are currently 1.14, implying an 88% chance of a Labour majority. Metaculus (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/20559/labour-majority-after-next-uk-election/) has a Labour majority at 95%, which seems high to me.
How bad will it be for the Tories? The Economist says the mid-point estimate (if the election were held tomorrow) is 198 seats, but notes that tactical voting could push this lower. Manifold expects 175 seats (https://manifold.markets/Anthem/how-many-seats-will-the-conservativ-89c852a83f80) with most of the probability weight in the range 130-195. Metaculus (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11549/seats-won-per-party-in-uk-general-election/) gives the median as 172 seats, with the interquartile range 123-223 (which seems a large range). The Tories’ worst ever result was in 1906, when they (together with their Liberal Unionist allies) won 156 seats. Looking at this market https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.223763243, one might think that too much probability is being given to them winning fewer than 150 seats.