I'm facing a tough medical decision, and someone on a previous open thread suggested I try and nerdsnipe someone into looking at the evidence. I worry a little this is somewhat against the norms of these Open Threads, and I apologise if it is, but I thought it might be worth a shot:
1. My problem
I've had 3 adhesive small obstructions (ASBOs) in 4 years. An ASBO is a mechanical blockage of the small intestine caused by intra-abdominal adhesions (scar bands), most often after surgery/inflammation. Some people also develop chronic adhesion-related abdominal pain between episodes; others are symptom-free between acute obstructions. My first episode seemed to be caused by a congenital adhesion, it required a laparotomy where the adhesion was released; my subsequent episodes were managed non-operatively, and are likely due to the post-surgical adhesions.
2. Current medical practice
When an ASBO episode occurs, it is sometimes managed non-operatively, but other times requires emergency surgery, which involves releasing the adhesions (called 'adhesiolysis') causing the obstruction, and sometimes removing the obstructed part of the bowel. The default is to watch-and-wait; avoid elective adhesiolysis because surgery itself can form new adhesions. Elective surgery is usually for chronic pain that’s clearly adhesion-related, or (rarely) for patients with extremely frequent recurrences (e.g., every few months).
This paper proposes a a preventive approach: use an imaging technique to map adhesions; perform planned adhesiolysis, and place 'barriers' to hinder adhesion re-formation. In their 5-year cohort, elective surgery + barriers was associated with ≈3–4× fewer ASBO readmissions vs non-operative management. However, the cohort comprised only patients with chronic abdominal pain
4. Questions
Adhesion barriers were not used in my initial laparotomy. I think the case that the authors make in the Discussion--for this approach being suitable even for people with recurrent ASBO who don't have chronic pain--makes sense. I think the fact of chronic abdominal pain is not necessary for the elective procedure to reduce future ASBO recurrence risk via the mechanism they propose, ie, barriers preventing adhesion re-formation. Some of the authors are involved in a larger scale RCT comparing their approach to the current wait-and-watch approach (https://kce.fgov.be/en/kce-trials/funded-trials/aware-elective-adhesiolysis-vs-wait-and-see-policy-to-prevent-recurrence-of-adhesive-small-bowel) which begins this September and ends in 2029. I think the evidence as it stands right now is sufficient to weight in favour of the elective approach, but this is pretty much my first time reading any kind of scientific literature. Some concerns I have are:
a. The sample size is too small to capture a meaningful effect
b. The paper is misrepresenting the existing evidence they cite in their favour
Fwiw, I've reached out to the corresponding author of the study (ten Broek), as well as other surgeons who have published on the topic of ASBO, and ten Broek has been the only one who endorsed generalising the results to people without chronic pain; the others have either deferred to ten Broek on the question, or said the evidence is insufficient to justify elective surgery without chronic pain
"God, I can't tell you how much the "There's not enough enrichment in my enclosure" joke has helped my mental health. Because, for some reason I can't comprehend, pretending that I'm a zoo keeper caring for an animal (which is also me) just makes everything easier to comprehend. Like "your head gets screwy when your apartment is messy" just doesn't carry as much resonance as "The tiger becomes agitated when its enclosure is cluttered" because then I'll be like, no shit,? The tiger? I've got to keep things nice and clean for the tiger."
Tentative theory (and I'm not saying this approach would work for everyone), These days, a lot of zoo animals get more consideration than a high proportion of people. Tigers are especially cool.
No one expects a tiger to prove their moral superiority by enduring bad conditions.
Zoo keepers have relatively abundant resources compared to most parents, so there aren't issues of who's in charge compared to parents who can't do everything their kids want, and who are likely to resist demands, whether reasonable or not.
Imagining yourself as an outside observer can be very useful for people who are too hard on themselves. One of the strategies used in cognitive behavioral therapy when people think things like "I'm worthless" is to reframe it using the criteria of "Would you say that to a friend? Would you even say that to a stranger?"
It's sort of an inverted golden rule too, treat yourself as you treat others
One thing driving polarisation is the perception that there are hardly any moderates--if you believe virtually everyone who votes for the other party is a sociopathic extremist, of course you're going to hate and/or fear the entire other side.
Of course this isn't remotely true when it comes to ordinary people, but it often looks true when it comes to vocal opinionated people, especially those who comment online. But I'm skeptical it's true even for them, to anything like the extent that it looks. I think that while a lot of commenters are extreme, a lot are also quite moderate but you'd never know it because there are a bunch of perverse incentives discouraging one from admitting this during a debate with someone they strongly disagree with (losing potential allies in that debate, and sounding like they're not really fully repudiating their opponent's values, are just two examples). Moloch strikes again.
So to declare war on Moloch, and try to not so much encourage moderation as to unmask the moderation that already exists, I propose a kind of ritual where we regularly link to examples of ourselves arguing with different sides of an issue or with partisans of opposite ideologies. One problem I have personally is that I kind of hate the term "moderate" because it implies that you take a sort of cowardly wishy washy "both sides have a point" on everything, instead of getting murderously angry at the proud sociopaths and hypocrites on all the different "sides", as I do.
May add more. I'd like the sociopaths of each side to know when I'm condemning them, it's not because of what side they're on, it's because they're a sociopath.
I think there is an interesting and useful concept of sob story resistance. It explains a lot in politics and in daily life.
Some people have none and you see them rebroadcasting tenuous and sometimes fake claims of a supposed victim trying to get support. It is important because it is a source of irrationality and has policy implications in education, welfare and crime.
It has to be kept in mind that the other side sees it as being an uncaring asshole, and that there are indeed people who overdo their cynicism (and/or hide egoism behind cynicism).
But I agree, pathological empathy enabling abusers seems to me like the bigger problem at the moment. This can happen in two ways - first, an overly trusting supporter enabling dysfunction, and second, an already powerful person gathering even more power from the public to allegedly support the downtrodden (which they mostly do, but they can easily abuse that power by either selectively withholding the support from detractors or by even actively oppressing detractors in the name of support). You can even do all at once!
That's all well and good, but often visceral reactions are much more effective at driving action and reflection than a pile of facts.
(completely tangential: I think this is more or less (EDIT: one of) the points of Sam Kriss's "Against Truth"; see also: "Lies and Truth in a Hypernormal Sense" by Lou Keep of Sam[]zdat).
I would phrase it more like: sob story resistance is useful against bad actors that want to exploit your prosocial feelings, but it also risks making you a sociopath if you categorically cannot empathize with others. Sadly, being sob-story resistant is not an absolute virtue but, like so many others, its validity rests on one's personal judgement.
Of course, due to engagement algorithms, the truthfulness of sob stories needs to be questioned often, but there are some factors that can be taken as baseline verifiers. Here are two that come to mind after a minute of reflection:
- understanding that personal tragedies can be true and also NOT be a symbol for a larger tragedy
- sometimes tradeoffs mean that some preventable evil might happen in order to achieve a greater good somewhere else
I was printing a photograph the other day, and it suddenly struck me that we have a machine that can make a photorealistic portrait in a manner of minutes, and that I've never known a world in which we couldn't do that, and that there was indeed a world that couldn't do that, for a very long time. And it kind of sank in that AI is going to be ingrained into the children's lives in a way that will just permanently reshape the world they live in.
Right but, you're making it sound really scary. I think when people worry about AI destroying art (especially writing) they need to be reminded that the same could have been said for photography, and also for recorded music.
People could have said photography would destroy painting. Well, it did reduce the demand for painters a lot but it also:
(a) pushed painting into new artistic directions
(b) made classic paintings vastly more accessible to ordinary people
(c) became the basis for a whole new art form of its own
Then people could have said recorded music would put all musicians out of work (who'd ever go to a performance of Beethoven's symphonies again when you can just hear them in your house?). Well it did reduce the demand but it also:
(a) kept concerts alive, to the extent people still go to them a century later
(b) made music vastly more accessible to ordinary people
(c) created a whole new set of genres of music
And people now say LLMs will eliminate writers. Again it will reduce the demand but will probably:
(a) push human writing in new directions
(b) make classical literature vastly more accessible to the less educated (e.g. you could get an LLM to "translate" classic works into modern language for you, or into a specifically tailored vocuabulary for your tastes and reading level)
(c) form the basis of a whole new art form.
Something to bear in mind when confronted with all the doomsaying.
I think about this whenever I hear people making fun of old technological panics about how the camera/wristwatch/magazine etc will change us and society - "haha, look at these people panicking over nothing just like people are panicking about AI now"
But the thing is, those things *did* change us; every single new technology irreversibly changed the way we think and act in the world in some way. For better? For worse? Who knows, we quickly forget that we ever used to be different and our current state becomes what we think of as normal.
8 % on Ukrainian victory (unchanged from March 17, 2025).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
22 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 20 % on March 17, 2025).
70 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 72 % on March 17, 2025).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
There has been a lot of diplomatic smoke emitted roughly in last week, but imho only substantive action worth updating on was Trump slapping tariffs on India explicitly connected to Indian purchases of Russian oil.
Though it is far from clear whether those tariffs will really go into effect (they are scheduled to begin on August 27), that action goes somewhat beyond what I’d expected from Trump administration in terms of how much they are willing to help Ukraine (see previous updates). And it is potentially impactful action.
Russia does indeed rely on exports of oil to India (in fact, it is their largest oil export destination, currently even more important in this respect than China, see here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-07-15/trump-lobs-the-ukraine-ball-into-putin-s-court). At the same time, economic relationship between India and US, unlike that between China and US, is highly asymmetrical, in the sense that India is far more dependent on the US than vice versa, so they can’t just shrug this off, though Indian government would for face-saving reasons never admit it. But I do expect that they’ll quietly push Russia to be more conciliatory.
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
Can you (or someone else) explain the Trump aid freeze situation?
My impression was that Trump was going to halt military aid to Ukraine. Did he do this? If so, how come the Ukraine situation hasn't changed noticeably in the past six months? Did Ukraine manage to hold on without as much US military aid?
2) Ukraine still receives aid already approved by Congress under Biden administration. Also it draws from huge stockpile which it received between Trump's election and inauguration, since Biden administration frontloaded a lot of aid in that period in anticipation of possible freeze. This will eventually run out.
3) Trump does not plan to ask Congress for further aid for Ukraine, but he agreed that US government will approve purchases of military equipment paid by various western European countries and delivered to Ukraine, and also apparently that deliveries of American equipment to western European countries replacing their weapons sent to Ukraine will be prioritized. Procedures governing these things are rather byzantine and I am not even American, much less expert on details of your export controls, but I gather that this scheme will likely result in much less US equipment going to Ukraine than under Biden.
4) Ukraine is less depended on external aid than in, like, 2023, since it expanded its arms industry.
The general uncertainty over long-term Trump II policies also applies to Ukraine support by the US, and the world has to take it day by day. Last month, Hegseth made an apparently unilateral decision to reverse a weapon shipment already granted under Biden, which was again reversed by Trump shortly after:
> Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth paused a large package of weapons shipments to Ukraine. [..] Shortly after the pause became public, Trump reversed Hegseth’s pause and vowed to continue providing defensive weapons to Ukraine [..].
Trump wants to continue delivering arms to Ukraine, but on Europe's tab.
> Trump also announced a deal with NATO to provide potentially billions of dollars in more weapons to Ukraine, made by the US but paid for by European allies.
This is consistent with yesterday's statements by JD Vance ahead of the Putin-Trump meeting:
> “We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business. We want to bring about a peaceful settlement to this thing,” Vance told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures.”
My current expectation is that, under Trump II, the US continues to provide actual weapons but only when they're paid for, and does no longer grant direct financial aid to Ukraine. Other support, such as military intelligence, would continue as is.
The reason why the military situation has not changed much is a combination of Ukraine being innovative in the face of necessity, and European allies stepping up. The ground war is increasingly dominated by relatively cheap, available hardware (drones) that is not reliant on the US or any other single provider. The air war is much more dynamic, with Ukraine's demand for air defense increasing, but here we also see innovation and, in the medium term, decreased dependence on traditional air defense and thus on the US.
I wouldn't give much credibility to the Indian tariffs justification; they may just as well be diplomatic smoke to soften allegations of excessive friendliness towards Russia. Trump has been applying tariffs for any reason or none at all, and complying with his demands regarding today's tariffs is no guarantee that he won't apply new tariffs tomorrow. If anything, Trump seems interested in economic outcomes much more than in diplomatic ones.
I don't think that is true. Trump's justification for tariffs are often stupi...er heterodox (like levying tariffs purely for reasons of negative trade balance), but, precisely because of that, I think they are basically honest, and more importantly, will be perceived by Modi as such.
I feel like there should be a lot of discussion of GPT-5 on here: is it just somewhere I haven't found yet (one of the subscriber-only OTs?) or are we collectively waiting to see what happens in the first few days?
As a big disclaimer: I know next-to-nothing from a technical stanpoint, besides all the pieces I picked up reading various discussions, mainly under Scott's blog and AI 2027, AI Futures, Gary Marcus and a few other voices (mostly skeptical as to the LLM>AGI>ASI short-term pipeline).
Has the new model's release impacted anyone's timelines? Is this a .5%-adjustment- or a 50%-adjustment- kind of impact?
Again, sorry if everyone is talking about this somewhere else, I wasn't able to find the place.
CONSUMER: Some people like it, some people don't. May depend on whether they use normal, Thinking, or Pro. OpenAI was trying to clear up confusion in its model names and choices, but this seems to have failed and people are more confused and angrier than ever. It still has lots of hallucinations and dumb mistakes - supposedly this is less than previous models, but people have found some howlers.
FUTURIST: On METR's time horizon graph, it's about halfway between the early exponential curve and the later superexponential curve, so it doesn't tell us too much more about which one is real or more likely to continue. It definitely doesn't suggest (on that graph) that progress has stopped or really slowed, just that we can't distinguish between fast and very fast. But aside from the METR graph, it "feels" less impressive than most people expected, and is obviously not some giant leap towards superintelligence.
Some people have pointed out that it might be a very small compute scaleup (or even a compute step backwards) from GPT-4.5, so maybe this doesn't prove anything about scaling laws. But maybe the fact that they didn't bother increasing compute further itself suggests they know something we don't about scaling laws slowing?
My impression is that formally, it doesn't tell us much about timelines. Informally on vibes, it's kind of disappointing and many people's timelines have grown longer. The one formal claim I heard about timelines is that its failure to be a giant leap disproves some theory that reinforcement training compute scales up superhyperfast, but I don't think this was AI 2027's theory or especially common.
Somewhat related: Is AI 2027 keeping track of their predictions? I'm reading their website right now, and I've found a specific prediction that seems to be wrong, in footnote 10:
> We forecast that mid-2025 agents will score 85% on SWEBench-Verified.
If I follow that link, the highest score is currently 75.20% with a date of 2025-06-12, and the highest-scoring model of August 2025 is at 67.60%.
I find it useful as a peer reviewer for whatever I'm doing with Opus 4.1 in Claude Code, but it's not as good as o3 on my custom evals (focused on systems thinking and game design). The big thing is the price per million tokens is *insane* compared to everything out there.
So far, it's a bigger jump than 4 to 4o, but not as big a jump as 3.5 to 4.
From what I'm hearing it sounds like a decent incremental upgrade, and not even for all purposes. It's been heavily trained for professional tasks like planning and coding, and people using it for creative purposes, or just to vent their emotions, are saying it feels like talking to an overworked secretary.
The "enshitification" of products. After reading the article about mashed potatoes, it would be a nice segue into shrinkflation and the replacement of products with lower quality versions of themselves.
It seems such a strong effect, particularly the 80% of students in philosophy courses at Harvard being first born children. Has there been any more research since Scott's post and the less wrong surveys of famous mathematicians and physicists?
I'm still bothered by Scott's claim that super forecasters' prediction is relevant to single digit level. I thought how do you even verify that, especially since I don't think there's enough predictions yet (?).
I think that one way to falsify this is to have an agent that does the exact same prediction as the super forecasters, but be errored by some margin points. Then see if they perform worse or on parity with the real forecast. We can even have multiple agents with 1%, 5%, 10%, and 20% error respectively to see whether smaller error actually perform better.
I don't think it's a super-strong claim that this consistently improves performance everywhere and at all times.
But they did exactly what you suggested, so the precise claim is: "In the competitions we looked at, super forecasters used single digit level precision. If we round this single level digit precision to the next multiple of 5 or 10, their performance drops."
Interesting, looks like we're actually already on the same picture, and that some people are already debating this. I havent read it all closely yet but if someone has confirmed or denied this claim, feel free to tell me about it.
If you want to see the actual evidence, you probably would have to read Tetlock's book on the topic.
There is also this research paper. The finding is the same, but the binning is coarser, so I am not sure that you will be satisfied with it. With a very quick scan I think it was just up to seven bins, because they want to compare it with pundits.
There seems to be a consensus amongst people who are building muscle that bulk and cut cycles are the way to go. I'm confused about how this is different from weight loss in other circumstances, where the percentage of people who succeed in maintaining weight loss is really low. Is it just selection effects where the gym-goers are the ones who are unusually good at maintaining weight loss, or is there something special about lifting weights/eating lots of protein/etc, that makes weight loss stickier?
I don't know much about this cycle, but the percentage of people who can lose weight *over a short period of time* is pretty high. Body builders who build muscles do not aim at maintaining the weight over a long time period, so that seems like the wrong reference frame.
Yeah fair enough I guess there are people who either just keep bulking and cutting till they die or there's selection effects to who I'm seeing because they're stopping making content at the point that they get bigger and stay there
1. Typically people doing this are interested in net gaining over time, which is easier and the default trajectory over net losing weight over time.
2. Anyone doing this is already about 10x more motivated and conscientious than the median person, because they're counting calories and macros, in addition to working out between 3 and 5x a week - if you filtered your "trying to lose weight" populations according to this degree of conscientiousness and motivation, success would be much higher than the current outcomes where ~80% fail to keep more than 10% off for at least a year, and ~98% fail to keep more than 10% off for more than 5 years.
So I read Cremieux’s March piece about making one’s own GLP-1 solutions, and am thinking very seriously of ordering a supply of Retatrutide. Retatrutide’s the newest of the GLP-1 drugs, and seems to be better than Zepbound. It’s had clinical trials up through phase 3, and nothing worrisome happened in the trials. But it does not yet have FDA approval (and when it does I’m sure insurance will not cover it just for weight loss, and it will be even more expensive than the drugs currently available.). The precautions Cremieux described — buying only from sources he currently recommends, and/or sources highest rated by an independent lab — and then having one of the vials one receives tested by a lab — those seem adequate to me as protection against injecting the wrong drug, or a contaminated one.
Does anyone know of any reason to have significant doubts about the safety of doing this? I am not interested in “reasons” based on some general objection like “you are not medically trained.” I think the quality of US medical care is quite compromised by various systemic things these days, and believe the best course is to supplement what conventional care offers with one’s own carefully researched hacks. So when I ask about the safety of weight loss a la Cremieux I am really only interested in reasons based on information someone has about actual dangers they have thought of or seen manifested. Also, anyone who agrees that this procedure is reasonably safe — would be interested to hear why you think so.
I'm not sure why you would risk trying Retatrutide over Zepbound or Semaglutide when the latter two already work very well. If Zepbound doesn't work for you then I would understand.
Because the data from clinical trials indicate that Retatrutide is better in a number of ways: Better about sparing lean body mass, prob leads to faster weight loss, seems to push multiple markers of liver function in a good direction, has a component that combats the metabolic slowdown that occurs with these drugs as weight is lost.
If you are going to share a link in an open thread, please have a longer (few paragraph) description of what the link is and why you think it's interesting.
I have not been counting, but have the impression that the number of posts that are basically just little read-my-blog-post ads is way up. Some people do write a coupla paragraphs summarizing their post, some don’t. But either way I don’t like the feel of threads that are full of those read-me posts. The authors are not really addressing the group the way real posters do. We’re
Sorry, I thought it was more intriguing the way I did it. But I see thats not really working.
I am (somewhat desperately) working on improving process in the public sector. I write about why well-intentioned systems consistently produce bad outcomes, using my experience in California water as a lens for understanding universal bureaucratic patterns. The goal is to help other people trapped inside systems find ways to make change that actually works.
A secondary problem is getting these people to read the ideas. In this article to make the concept of path dependency relatable,and more interesting I use Fleetwood Mac's career, and a water treatment plant.
Hello! I've asked this place for help (which I have not used) before, so I might as well ask it for help again.
I have an essay I'm writing for a possible entry into a philosophy master's program, if anyone is interested in reading it, please contact me on my discord at .lackadaisical. It's still very much in progress and anyone with knowledge about Wittgenstein would be particularly useful. For reference, I am an MS Statistics student who gets "OK-ish" grades in stat but had a low GRE quant score, so I'm becoming rather disenchanted for any future academic prospects in the field. Job prospects--well, everywhere seems rough right now.
New essay I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on - the truth isn’t enough.
If you think tone doesn’t matter, you’re probably less persuasive than you think.
You can have the most correct argument in the world, but if you deliver it with needless snark or robotic detachment, you’ve already lost half your audience before they’ve engaged with the actual ideas.
This isn’t anything to do with coddling feelings. It’s about recognising that tone is part of the message, just as much as word choice or logic. McLuhan said the medium is the message; in human conversation, tone is the medium.
On how tone shapes whether your truth lands, why “tone policing” complaints miss a deeper reality, and how to use the soft machinery of meaning to get through to people who disagree with you.
As an audience of truth-seekers, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts as I’ve felt rationalists don’t always get the tone right.
It seems to me that needless snark is extremely popular. It's an easy way to get attention, though it may interfere with getting any specific message across.
One is snarky when they try to communicate (successfully or not) that they are high-status. It is not helpful from the perspective of delivering the message, and it was a mistake if the person actually wanted to deliver the message.
But maybe their intended goal was to communicate the (perceived) status difference, in which case, it either works successfully or it does not, depending on the situation.
We need to further distinguish who is the intended recipient of the status message. It could be the person who is talked to, in which case the actual message is "I will treat you with contempt, stop bothering me". Or it could be the audience, in which case the actual message is "look, I am higher status than this guy". If the audience is your ingroup, it can also imply "look, our group is higher status than this guy and his ilk".
EDIT:
Obvious example: RationalWiki and their "snarky point of view" policy. The purpose of the policy is to communicate that the editors of RationalWiki are higher status than whomever they review, and that they are not interested in a debate with them.
In this case, I think the snark is an efficient way to deliver the message, and the fact that it makes the message plausibly deniable is a bonus.
I think of this as "writing skill" and I don't think it's undervalued. It seems to me that many rationalists do not actually have a serious goal of "persuade as many others as possible" and so they don't care as much about tone/writing as you might expect.
I have heard people say that GDP is growing especially fast because of spending on AI . But AI infrastructure isn't producing value yet, because it's not yet finished being built. The argument has to be that the investment itself is increasing GDP.
But nobody keeps money under their mattress these days. To a first approximation, all money is either spent or invested. But that means it gets added to GDP. So it seems like all that an AI boom can do is shift money from being spent/invested in something else, to being spent/invested in AI. So why does this raise GDP?
GDP is the value of all final goods produced with a country over a period of time. If households or firms reduce their spending, firms reduce production, and GDP falls. An AI boom increases the demand for servers - when firms increase production of servers to meet this higher demand, GDP rises.
If households reduce their spending, then savings necessarily increases, since savings is all income that's not spent. It sounds like you're asking, since this increased savings is going to finance investment spending anyway, why should a drop in spending have any impact on GDP? This is actually the central issue in Keynes' general theory. Financial markets channel savings into investment, and interest rates adjust to equate the two. A $1 trillion increase in savings won't necessarily lead to $1 trillion more of investment if the demand for investment goods is insensitive to interest rates. Instead, in textbook principles of macro, the surplus of savings (and drop in total expenditure) causes firms to reduce production to meet demand, which reduces income, and as income falls, savings itself falls until eventually, back in equilibrium, savings equals investment.
After some assumptions (employed, marginal worker, positive value, etc), Option 1 will create higher GDP, because people value the food created by a Chef more than the Fast food cook - willing to pay more for it.
Same for investment that can utilize unused resources, or move from areas we value less to areas we value more.
Basically, building more expensive structures raises the GDP.
Investment isn't fixed, it goes up and down as people decide to invest more or less from year to year. GDP = C + I + G + (X - M), if AI causes causes firms to want to invest more, it can rise and the other things can fall.
It might be better to think less of GDP (spending) and think more of the "production possibilities frontier" - how much we can produce with our factors of production. GDP will grow faster not because of spending on AI (or any other type of investment), but because (or if or when) AI (or other types of investment) causes the PPF to shift out.
>To a first approximation, all money is either spent or invested.
Not sure how much work "first approximation" is doing in your statement, but yes, companies are indeed keeping increasing sums of cash under their mattresses:
"corporate cash reserves worldwide now exceed $8 trillion [..] This represents one of the most significant financial shifts of the 21st century."
"While cash is a vital buffer in uncertain times, too much can be a liability. Investors want to see a balance: enough liquidity to weather downturns but not so much that it signals a lack of strategic direction or inefficient capital allocation."
And that has been reaching ridiculous amounts especially for the big tech companies. Apple alone has more than 200 billions of cash reserves in tax havens, or (converted into 100$ bills) 2000 tons of dollar. That's a big I-mattress.
I think not all spending/increasing equally contributes to GDP. The most influential would be direct spending (hiring people, buying goods), while indirect investment like buying stock in slow and stable companies would do comparatively less.
AI companies are directly spending very aggressively (hiring, data centers, etc) and so their impact on GDP is greater than allocating an equal amount of money to a more cautious company which doesn't spend much even if their valuation increases.
Classically, investment grows the economy directly in two ways:
1) a company invests in buildings, equipment, training etc.
2) once the investment is realised, the company would typically benefit from increased revenue and profits
3) investments are typically financed at least partially by debt, which must be repaid
In terms of GDP, (1) and (2) contribute directly to production. Debt doesn't contribute directly to GDP, but has general stimulatory effects, since it tends to increase the amount of money in circulation. I'm guessing that some increase of money supply, and increase in the velocity of money is what's showing up in the figures, and what's missing from your model.
For AI, I would guess that the main contribution is (1), since none of the AI businesses are profit-making yet. The main investments presumably are
- investment in physical infrastructure, which boosts Nvidia and other chip companies, but also local and national contractors and suppliers since the machines have to live somewhere
- well paid engineers, in the AI companies and elsewhere, who will be spending their pay checks on second homes, new vehicles and other luxuries, which surely will show up in GDP.
If the AI boom is really going to take off, I would expect soon to see smaller companies appearing which offer AI-consulting, similar to the profusion of IT-services companies which flourished 1995-2005 or so, and web-development companies 2000-2010. (AI should also kill off any of those that are still hanging on.)
Yes, this. What's missing in Scott's question is that a single dollar can contribute to GDP many times: each time the recipient of a dollar spends it domestically, that's another dollar in that year's GDP. Hence GDP is the total of everything produced in a year (or a smaller time-period but annualized), *not* a snapshot of how much money exists at any one time.
I mean, GDP grows exponentially provided things aren't messed with (see: Solow-Swan model) and American economic growth as a percentage isn't more rapid than say, the 80s or 60s--I think saying GDP is growing especially fast due to an investment in AI is a bit of a misnomer (in comparison to what period of history are we talking about here?)
I have the feeling that argument is usually that without investment into AI, GDP growth in the US would be much smaller or even negative, not that it is exceptional right now compared to the padt. At least I only heard this before in the context of musings like "No wonder people aren't happy about the US economy, the situation is bleak, it only doesn't show in official data yet because of all that investment into AI chips and data centers"
Because GDP is about volume of economic activity and not wealth, and if everyone starts rebalancing their portfolios because AI affects their predictions in different directions and drives both new beliefs and new disagreements, this raises GDP, even though the collective still owns the same property?
I have never understood this formulation: funding "up to $1-2m." Isn't it in fact just "up to 2m?"
No, "up to" could refer to both the minimum and the maximum. $0-2m is different to $1-2m.
She left me so I made an AI replica of her: Digital Relationships could have a greater impact than The Pill.
This is a Substack piece I wrote detailing some of the pros and cons of having relationships with AI, whether they be romantic or otherwise.
https://markmcneilly.substack.com/p/she-left-me-so-i-made-an-ai-replica
I'm facing a tough medical decision, and someone on a previous open thread suggested I try and nerdsnipe someone into looking at the evidence. I worry a little this is somewhat against the norms of these Open Threads, and I apologise if it is, but I thought it might be worth a shot:
1. My problem
I've had 3 adhesive small obstructions (ASBOs) in 4 years. An ASBO is a mechanical blockage of the small intestine caused by intra-abdominal adhesions (scar bands), most often after surgery/inflammation. Some people also develop chronic adhesion-related abdominal pain between episodes; others are symptom-free between acute obstructions. My first episode seemed to be caused by a congenital adhesion, it required a laparotomy where the adhesion was released; my subsequent episodes were managed non-operatively, and are likely due to the post-surgical adhesions.
2. Current medical practice
When an ASBO episode occurs, it is sometimes managed non-operatively, but other times requires emergency surgery, which involves releasing the adhesions (called 'adhesiolysis') causing the obstruction, and sometimes removing the obstructed part of the bowel. The default is to watch-and-wait; avoid elective adhesiolysis because surgery itself can form new adhesions. Elective surgery is usually for chronic pain that’s clearly adhesion-related, or (rarely) for patients with extremely frequent recurrences (e.g., every few months).
3. Proposed preventive approach
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9872389/
This paper proposes a a preventive approach: use an imaging technique to map adhesions; perform planned adhesiolysis, and place 'barriers' to hinder adhesion re-formation. In their 5-year cohort, elective surgery + barriers was associated with ≈3–4× fewer ASBO readmissions vs non-operative management. However, the cohort comprised only patients with chronic abdominal pain
4. Questions
Adhesion barriers were not used in my initial laparotomy. I think the case that the authors make in the Discussion--for this approach being suitable even for people with recurrent ASBO who don't have chronic pain--makes sense. I think the fact of chronic abdominal pain is not necessary for the elective procedure to reduce future ASBO recurrence risk via the mechanism they propose, ie, barriers preventing adhesion re-formation. Some of the authors are involved in a larger scale RCT comparing their approach to the current wait-and-watch approach (https://kce.fgov.be/en/kce-trials/funded-trials/aware-elective-adhesiolysis-vs-wait-and-see-policy-to-prevent-recurrence-of-adhesive-small-bowel) which begins this September and ends in 2029. I think the evidence as it stands right now is sufficient to weight in favour of the elective approach, but this is pretty much my first time reading any kind of scientific literature. Some concerns I have are:
a. The sample size is too small to capture a meaningful effect
b. The paper is misrepresenting the existing evidence they cite in their favour
Fwiw, I've reached out to the corresponding author of the study (ten Broek), as well as other surgeons who have published on the topic of ASBO, and ten Broek has been the only one who endorsed generalising the results to people without chronic pain; the others have either deferred to ten Broek on the question, or said the evidence is insufficient to justify elective surgery without chronic pain
A meme:
"God, I can't tell you how much the "There's not enough enrichment in my enclosure" joke has helped my mental health. Because, for some reason I can't comprehend, pretending that I'm a zoo keeper caring for an animal (which is also me) just makes everything easier to comprehend. Like "your head gets screwy when your apartment is messy" just doesn't carry as much resonance as "The tiger becomes agitated when its enclosure is cluttered" because then I'll be like, no shit,? The tiger? I've got to keep things nice and clean for the tiger."
Tentative theory (and I'm not saying this approach would work for everyone), These days, a lot of zoo animals get more consideration than a high proportion of people. Tigers are especially cool.
No one expects a tiger to prove their moral superiority by enduring bad conditions.
Zoo keepers have relatively abundant resources compared to most parents, so there aren't issues of who's in charge compared to parents who can't do everything their kids want, and who are likely to resist demands, whether reasonable or not.
Imagining yourself as an outside observer can be very useful for people who are too hard on themselves. One of the strategies used in cognitive behavioral therapy when people think things like "I'm worthless" is to reframe it using the criteria of "Would you say that to a friend? Would you even say that to a stranger?"
It's sort of an inverted golden rule too, treat yourself as you treat others
What do you think are the most important questions that we should be asking which are currently not getting much attention?
Probably the one you just asked.
One thing driving polarisation is the perception that there are hardly any moderates--if you believe virtually everyone who votes for the other party is a sociopathic extremist, of course you're going to hate and/or fear the entire other side.
Of course this isn't remotely true when it comes to ordinary people, but it often looks true when it comes to vocal opinionated people, especially those who comment online. But I'm skeptical it's true even for them, to anything like the extent that it looks. I think that while a lot of commenters are extreme, a lot are also quite moderate but you'd never know it because there are a bunch of perverse incentives discouraging one from admitting this during a debate with someone they strongly disagree with (losing potential allies in that debate, and sounding like they're not really fully repudiating their opponent's values, are just two examples). Moloch strikes again.
So to declare war on Moloch, and try to not so much encourage moderation as to unmask the moderation that already exists, I propose a kind of ritual where we regularly link to examples of ourselves arguing with different sides of an issue or with partisans of opposite ideologies. One problem I have personally is that I kind of hate the term "moderate" because it implies that you take a sort of cowardly wishy washy "both sides have a point" on everything, instead of getting murderously angry at the proud sociopaths and hypocrites on all the different "sides", as I do.
Here's my sprawling argument with a Christian fundamentalist: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-385/comment/124494355
Here's me criticising Yudhowsky for his (among other things) anti-Christian arrogance:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-305/comment/44751417
Here's me condemning the libertarian rhetoric of pro-choice progressives
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-322/comment/52665511
And here's me condemning the authoritarian rhetoric of law-and-order conservatives
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-338/comment/62081891 and https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-mentally/comment/62447554.
May add more. I'd like the sociopaths of each side to know when I'm condemning them, it's not because of what side they're on, it's because they're a sociopath.
Anyone want to join me?
I think there is an interesting and useful concept of sob story resistance. It explains a lot in politics and in daily life.
Some people have none and you see them rebroadcasting tenuous and sometimes fake claims of a supposed victim trying to get support. It is important because it is a source of irrationality and has policy implications in education, welfare and crime.
It has to be kept in mind that the other side sees it as being an uncaring asshole, and that there are indeed people who overdo their cynicism (and/or hide egoism behind cynicism).
But I agree, pathological empathy enabling abusers seems to me like the bigger problem at the moment. This can happen in two ways - first, an overly trusting supporter enabling dysfunction, and second, an already powerful person gathering even more power from the public to allegedly support the downtrodden (which they mostly do, but they can easily abuse that power by either selectively withholding the support from detractors or by even actively oppressing detractors in the name of support). You can even do all at once!
That's all well and good, but often visceral reactions are much more effective at driving action and reflection than a pile of facts.
(completely tangential: I think this is more or less (EDIT: one of) the points of Sam Kriss's "Against Truth"; see also: "Lies and Truth in a Hypernormal Sense" by Lou Keep of Sam[]zdat).
I would phrase it more like: sob story resistance is useful against bad actors that want to exploit your prosocial feelings, but it also risks making you a sociopath if you categorically cannot empathize with others. Sadly, being sob-story resistant is not an absolute virtue but, like so many others, its validity rests on one's personal judgement.
Of course, due to engagement algorithms, the truthfulness of sob stories needs to be questioned often, but there are some factors that can be taken as baseline verifiers. Here are two that come to mind after a minute of reflection:
- understanding that personal tragedies can be true and also NOT be a symbol for a larger tragedy
- sometimes tradeoffs mean that some preventable evil might happen in order to achieve a greater good somewhere else
I was printing a photograph the other day, and it suddenly struck me that we have a machine that can make a photorealistic portrait in a manner of minutes, and that I've never known a world in which we couldn't do that, and that there was indeed a world that couldn't do that, for a very long time. And it kind of sank in that AI is going to be ingrained into the children's lives in a way that will just permanently reshape the world they live in.
Right but, you're making it sound really scary. I think when people worry about AI destroying art (especially writing) they need to be reminded that the same could have been said for photography, and also for recorded music.
People could have said photography would destroy painting. Well, it did reduce the demand for painters a lot but it also:
(a) pushed painting into new artistic directions
(b) made classic paintings vastly more accessible to ordinary people
(c) became the basis for a whole new art form of its own
Then people could have said recorded music would put all musicians out of work (who'd ever go to a performance of Beethoven's symphonies again when you can just hear them in your house?). Well it did reduce the demand but it also:
(a) kept concerts alive, to the extent people still go to them a century later
(b) made music vastly more accessible to ordinary people
(c) created a whole new set of genres of music
And people now say LLMs will eliminate writers. Again it will reduce the demand but will probably:
(a) push human writing in new directions
(b) make classical literature vastly more accessible to the less educated (e.g. you could get an LLM to "translate" classic works into modern language for you, or into a specifically tailored vocuabulary for your tastes and reading level)
(c) form the basis of a whole new art form.
Something to bear in mind when confronted with all the doomsaying.
I think about this whenever I hear people making fun of old technological panics about how the camera/wristwatch/magazine etc will change us and society - "haha, look at these people panicking over nothing just like people are panicking about AI now"
But the thing is, those things *did* change us; every single new technology irreversibly changed the way we think and act in the world in some way. For better? For worse? Who knows, we quickly forget that we ever used to be different and our current state becomes what we think of as normal.
This is another update to my long-running attempt at predicting the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Previous update is here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-373/comment/101162797.
8 % on Ukrainian victory (unchanged from March 17, 2025).
I define Ukrainian victory as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24 without losing any similarly important territory and without conceding that it will stop its attempts to join EU or NATO, b) Ukrainian government getting official ok from Russia to join EU or NATO without conceding any territory and without losing de facto control of any territory it had controlled before February 24 of 2022, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
22 % on compromise solution that both sides might plausibly claim as a victory (up from 20 % on March 17, 2025).
70 % on Ukrainian defeat (down from 72 % on March 17, 2025).
I define Ukrainian defeat as Russia getting what it wants from Ukraine without giving any substantial concessions. Russia wants either a) Ukraine to stop claiming at least some of the territories that were before war claimed by Ukraine but de facto controlled by Russia or its proxies, or b) Russia or its proxies (old or new) to get more Ukrainian territory, de facto recognized by Ukraine in something resembling Minsk ceasefire(s)* or c) some form of guarantee that Ukraine will became neutral, which includes but is not limited to Ukraine not joining NATO. E.g. if Ukraine agrees to stay out of NATO without any other concessions to Russia, but gets mutual defense treaty with Poland and Turkey, that does NOT count as Ukrainian defeat.
Discussion:
There has been a lot of diplomatic smoke emitted roughly in last week, but imho only substantive action worth updating on was Trump slapping tariffs on India explicitly connected to Indian purchases of Russian oil.
Though it is far from clear whether those tariffs will really go into effect (they are scheduled to begin on August 27), that action goes somewhat beyond what I’d expected from Trump administration in terms of how much they are willing to help Ukraine (see previous updates). And it is potentially impactful action.
Russia does indeed rely on exports of oil to India (in fact, it is their largest oil export destination, currently even more important in this respect than China, see here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-07-15/trump-lobs-the-ukraine-ball-into-putin-s-court). At the same time, economic relationship between India and US, unlike that between China and US, is highly asymmetrical, in the sense that India is far more dependent on the US than vice versa, so they can’t just shrug this off, though Indian government would for face-saving reasons never admit it. But I do expect that they’ll quietly push Russia to be more conciliatory.
* Minsk ceasefire or ceasefires (first agreement did not work, it was amended by second and since then it worked somewhat better) constituted, among other things, de facto recognition by Ukraine that Russia and its proxies will control some territory claimed by Ukraine for some time. In exchange Russia stopped trying to conquer more Ukrainian territory. Until February 24 of 2022, that is.
Can you (or someone else) explain the Trump aid freeze situation?
My impression was that Trump was going to halt military aid to Ukraine. Did he do this? If so, how come the Ukraine situation hasn't changed noticeably in the past six months? Did Ukraine manage to hold on without as much US military aid?
There are a lot of moving parts in this.
1) Aid freeze as such lasted only about a week (apparently from 4th to 12th March). Then Trump lifted it (https://theweek.com/politics/us-ukraine-talks-rubio-saudi-arabia). This freeze pertained to aid already approved by Congress.
2) Ukraine still receives aid already approved by Congress under Biden administration. Also it draws from huge stockpile which it received between Trump's election and inauguration, since Biden administration frontloaded a lot of aid in that period in anticipation of possible freeze. This will eventually run out.
3) Trump does not plan to ask Congress for further aid for Ukraine, but he agreed that US government will approve purchases of military equipment paid by various western European countries and delivered to Ukraine, and also apparently that deliveries of American equipment to western European countries replacing their weapons sent to Ukraine will be prioritized. Procedures governing these things are rather byzantine and I am not even American, much less expert on details of your export controls, but I gather that this scheme will likely result in much less US equipment going to Ukraine than under Biden.
4) Ukraine is less depended on external aid than in, like, 2023, since it expanded its arms industry.
5) At the same time, despite all of the above, Ukrainian military situation IS getting steadily worse, and observers are quite worried. E.g. Michael Koffman here(audio): https://warontherocks.com/2025/07/drones-discord-and-the-shifting-front-in-ukraine/
The general uncertainty over long-term Trump II policies also applies to Ukraine support by the US, and the world has to take it day by day. Last month, Hegseth made an apparently unilateral decision to reverse a weapon shipment already granted under Biden, which was again reversed by Trump shortly after:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/08/politics/pentagon-could-divert-weapons-for-ukraine-us-stockpiles
> Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth paused a large package of weapons shipments to Ukraine. [..] Shortly after the pause became public, Trump reversed Hegseth’s pause and vowed to continue providing defensive weapons to Ukraine [..].
Trump wants to continue delivering arms to Ukraine, but on Europe's tab.
> Trump also announced a deal with NATO to provide potentially billions of dollars in more weapons to Ukraine, made by the US but paid for by European allies.
This is consistent with yesterday's statements by JD Vance ahead of the Putin-Trump meeting:
https://thehill.com/homenews/5445500-vance-done-funding-ukraine-war-business/
> “We’re done with the funding of the Ukraine war business. We want to bring about a peaceful settlement to this thing,” Vance told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures.”
My current expectation is that, under Trump II, the US continues to provide actual weapons but only when they're paid for, and does no longer grant direct financial aid to Ukraine. Other support, such as military intelligence, would continue as is.
The reason why the military situation has not changed much is a combination of Ukraine being innovative in the face of necessity, and European allies stepping up. The ground war is increasingly dominated by relatively cheap, available hardware (drones) that is not reliant on the US or any other single provider. The air war is much more dynamic, with Ukraine's demand for air defense increasing, but here we also see innovation and, in the medium term, decreased dependence on traditional air defense and thus on the US.
Mostly a combination of (not necessarily ordered by importance)
1) A delay between stopping the aid and the consequences - Ukraine had a stock of weapons and supplies that would last for a while
2) Currently the defense largely relies on drones which are manufactured in Ukraine from components imported from China and other suppliers
3) European deliveries
I wouldn't give much credibility to the Indian tariffs justification; they may just as well be diplomatic smoke to soften allegations of excessive friendliness towards Russia. Trump has been applying tariffs for any reason or none at all, and complying with his demands regarding today's tariffs is no guarantee that he won't apply new tariffs tomorrow. If anything, Trump seems interested in economic outcomes much more than in diplomatic ones.
I don't think that is true. Trump's justification for tariffs are often stupi...er heterodox (like levying tariffs purely for reasons of negative trade balance), but, precisely because of that, I think they are basically honest, and more importantly, will be perceived by Modi as such.
I feel like there should be a lot of discussion of GPT-5 on here: is it just somewhere I haven't found yet (one of the subscriber-only OTs?) or are we collectively waiting to see what happens in the first few days?
As a big disclaimer: I know next-to-nothing from a technical stanpoint, besides all the pieces I picked up reading various discussions, mainly under Scott's blog and AI 2027, AI Futures, Gary Marcus and a few other voices (mostly skeptical as to the LLM>AGI>ASI short-term pipeline).
Has the new model's release impacted anyone's timelines? Is this a .5%-adjustment- or a 50%-adjustment- kind of impact?
Again, sorry if everyone is talking about this somewhere else, I wasn't able to find the place.
What I've been hearing:
CONSUMER: Some people like it, some people don't. May depend on whether they use normal, Thinking, or Pro. OpenAI was trying to clear up confusion in its model names and choices, but this seems to have failed and people are more confused and angrier than ever. It still has lots of hallucinations and dumb mistakes - supposedly this is less than previous models, but people have found some howlers.
FUTURIST: On METR's time horizon graph, it's about halfway between the early exponential curve and the later superexponential curve, so it doesn't tell us too much more about which one is real or more likely to continue. It definitely doesn't suggest (on that graph) that progress has stopped or really slowed, just that we can't distinguish between fast and very fast. But aside from the METR graph, it "feels" less impressive than most people expected, and is obviously not some giant leap towards superintelligence.
Some people have pointed out that it might be a very small compute scaleup (or even a compute step backwards) from GPT-4.5, so maybe this doesn't prove anything about scaling laws. But maybe the fact that they didn't bother increasing compute further itself suggests they know something we don't about scaling laws slowing?
My impression is that formally, it doesn't tell us much about timelines. Informally on vibes, it's kind of disappointing and many people's timelines have grown longer. The one formal claim I heard about timelines is that its failure to be a giant leap disproves some theory that reinforcement training compute scales up superhyperfast, but I don't think this was AI 2027's theory or especially common.
Somewhat related: Is AI 2027 keeping track of their predictions? I'm reading their website right now, and I've found a specific prediction that seems to be wrong, in footnote 10:
> We forecast that mid-2025 agents will score 85% on SWEBench-Verified.
If I follow that link, the highest score is currently 75.20% with a date of 2025-06-12, and the highest-scoring model of August 2025 is at 67.60%.
I find it useful as a peer reviewer for whatever I'm doing with Opus 4.1 in Claude Code, but it's not as good as o3 on my custom evals (focused on systems thinking and game design). The big thing is the price per million tokens is *insane* compared to everything out there.
So far, it's a bigger jump than 4 to 4o, but not as big a jump as 3.5 to 4.
From what I'm hearing it sounds like a decent incremental upgrade, and not even for all purposes. It's been heavily trained for professional tasks like planning and coding, and people using it for creative purposes, or just to vent their emotions, are saying it feels like talking to an overworked secretary.
The "enshitification" of products. After reading the article about mashed potatoes, it would be a nice segue into shrinkflation and the replacement of products with lower quality versions of themselves.
Is there any update on birth order effects?
It seems such a strong effect, particularly the 80% of students in philosophy courses at Harvard being first born children. Has there been any more research since Scott's post and the less wrong surveys of famous mathematicians and physicists?
Given the very low fertility of academics, this stat does not surprise me much even if assuming that birth order has little effect.
I'm still bothered by Scott's claim that super forecasters' prediction is relevant to single digit level. I thought how do you even verify that, especially since I don't think there's enough predictions yet (?).
I think that one way to falsify this is to have an agent that does the exact same prediction as the super forecasters, but be errored by some margin points. Then see if they perform worse or on parity with the real forecast. We can even have multiple agents with 1%, 5%, 10%, and 20% error respectively to see whether smaller error actually perform better.
I don't think it's a super-strong claim that this consistently improves performance everywhere and at all times.
But they did exactly what you suggested, so the precise claim is: "In the competitions we looked at, super forecasters used single digit level precision. If we round this single level digit precision to the next multiple of 5 or 10, their performance drops."
Interesting, looks like we're actually already on the same picture, and that some people are already debating this. I havent read it all closely yet but if someone has confirmed or denied this claim, feel free to tell me about it.
I have never looked into this topic myself. A quick search gives this blog post on the topic.
https://www.jasoncollins.blog/posts/tetlock-and-gardners-superforecasting-the-art-and-science-of-prediction#:~:text=The%20most%20surprising%20finding%20(to,forecasts%20and%20granularity%20predicts%20accuracy.
If you want to see the actual evidence, you probably would have to read Tetlock's book on the topic.
There is also this research paper. The finding is the same, but the binning is coarser, so I am not sure that you will be satisfied with it. With a very quick scan I think it was just up to seven bins, because they want to compare it with pundits.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/rzeckhauser/files/value_of_precision.pdf
Sources I read so far seems to rely on Tetlock. Sounds ripe for replication then.
There seems to be a consensus amongst people who are building muscle that bulk and cut cycles are the way to go. I'm confused about how this is different from weight loss in other circumstances, where the percentage of people who succeed in maintaining weight loss is really low. Is it just selection effects where the gym-goers are the ones who are unusually good at maintaining weight loss, or is there something special about lifting weights/eating lots of protein/etc, that makes weight loss stickier?
I don't know much about this cycle, but the percentage of people who can lose weight *over a short period of time* is pretty high. Body builders who build muscles do not aim at maintaining the weight over a long time period, so that seems like the wrong reference frame.
Yeah fair enough I guess there are people who either just keep bulking and cutting till they die or there's selection effects to who I'm seeing because they're stopping making content at the point that they get bigger and stay there
Two thoughts:
1. Typically people doing this are interested in net gaining over time, which is easier and the default trajectory over net losing weight over time.
2. Anyone doing this is already about 10x more motivated and conscientious than the median person, because they're counting calories and macros, in addition to working out between 3 and 5x a week - if you filtered your "trying to lose weight" populations according to this degree of conscientiousness and motivation, success would be much higher than the current outcomes where ~80% fail to keep more than 10% off for at least a year, and ~98% fail to keep more than 10% off for more than 5 years.
Good points, thank you
So I read Cremieux’s March piece about making one’s own GLP-1 solutions, and am thinking very seriously of ordering a supply of Retatrutide. Retatrutide’s the newest of the GLP-1 drugs, and seems to be better than Zepbound. It’s had clinical trials up through phase 3, and nothing worrisome happened in the trials. But it does not yet have FDA approval (and when it does I’m sure insurance will not cover it just for weight loss, and it will be even more expensive than the drugs currently available.). The precautions Cremieux described — buying only from sources he currently recommends, and/or sources highest rated by an independent lab — and then having one of the vials one receives tested by a lab — those seem adequate to me as protection against injecting the wrong drug, or a contaminated one.
Does anyone know of any reason to have significant doubts about the safety of doing this? I am not interested in “reasons” based on some general objection like “you are not medically trained.” I think the quality of US medical care is quite compromised by various systemic things these days, and believe the best course is to supplement what conventional care offers with one’s own carefully researched hacks. So when I ask about the safety of weight loss a la Cremieux I am really only interested in reasons based on information someone has about actual dangers they have thought of or seen manifested. Also, anyone who agrees that this procedure is reasonably safe — would be interested to hear why you think so.
I'm not sure why you would risk trying Retatrutide over Zepbound or Semaglutide when the latter two already work very well. If Zepbound doesn't work for you then I would understand.
Because the data from clinical trials indicate that Retatrutide is better in a number of ways: Better about sparing lean body mass, prob leads to faster weight loss, seems to push multiple markers of liver function in a good direction, has a component that combats the metabolic slowdown that occurs with these drugs as weight is lost.
Path dependency and Fleetwood Mac... https://open.substack.com/pub/title22/p/stevie-nicks-saves-the-water-dept?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2o3x1e
If you are going to share a link in an open thread, please have a longer (few paragraph) description of what the link is and why you think it's interesting.
I have not been counting, but have the impression that the number of posts that are basically just little read-my-blog-post ads is way up. Some people do write a coupla paragraphs summarizing their post, some don’t. But either way I don’t like the feel of threads that are full of those read-me posts. The authors are not really addressing the group the way real posters do. We’re
not people to them, we’re eyeballs.
“Out, vile jelly!”
Sorry, I thought it was more intriguing the way I did it. But I see thats not really working.
I am (somewhat desperately) working on improving process in the public sector. I write about why well-intentioned systems consistently produce bad outcomes, using my experience in California water as a lens for understanding universal bureaucratic patterns. The goal is to help other people trapped inside systems find ways to make change that actually works.
A secondary problem is getting these people to read the ideas. In this article to make the concept of path dependency relatable,and more interesting I use Fleetwood Mac's career, and a water treatment plant.
Hello! I've asked this place for help (which I have not used) before, so I might as well ask it for help again.
I have an essay I'm writing for a possible entry into a philosophy master's program, if anyone is interested in reading it, please contact me on my discord at .lackadaisical. It's still very much in progress and anyone with knowledge about Wittgenstein would be particularly useful. For reference, I am an MS Statistics student who gets "OK-ish" grades in stat but had a low GRE quant score, so I'm becoming rather disenchanted for any future academic prospects in the field. Job prospects--well, everywhere seems rough right now.
New essay I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on - the truth isn’t enough.
If you think tone doesn’t matter, you’re probably less persuasive than you think.
You can have the most correct argument in the world, but if you deliver it with needless snark or robotic detachment, you’ve already lost half your audience before they’ve engaged with the actual ideas.
This isn’t anything to do with coddling feelings. It’s about recognising that tone is part of the message, just as much as word choice or logic. McLuhan said the medium is the message; in human conversation, tone is the medium.
On how tone shapes whether your truth lands, why “tone policing” complaints miss a deeper reality, and how to use the soft machinery of meaning to get through to people who disagree with you.
As an audience of truth-seekers, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts as I’ve felt rationalists don’t always get the tone right.
Essay: https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/the-truth-isnt-enough
It seems to me that needless snark is extremely popular. It's an easy way to get attention, though it may interfere with getting any specific message across.
Is there such a thing as needed snark?
Snark communicates status.
One is snarky when they try to communicate (successfully or not) that they are high-status. It is not helpful from the perspective of delivering the message, and it was a mistake if the person actually wanted to deliver the message.
But maybe their intended goal was to communicate the (perceived) status difference, in which case, it either works successfully or it does not, depending on the situation.
We need to further distinguish who is the intended recipient of the status message. It could be the person who is talked to, in which case the actual message is "I will treat you with contempt, stop bothering me". Or it could be the audience, in which case the actual message is "look, I am higher status than this guy". If the audience is your ingroup, it can also imply "look, our group is higher status than this guy and his ilk".
EDIT:
Obvious example: RationalWiki and their "snarky point of view" policy. The purpose of the policy is to communicate that the editors of RationalWiki are higher status than whomever they review, and that they are not interested in a debate with them.
In this case, I think the snark is an efficient way to deliver the message, and the fact that it makes the message plausibly deniable is a bonus.
I think of this as "writing skill" and I don't think it's undervalued. It seems to me that many rationalists do not actually have a serious goal of "persuade as many others as possible" and so they don't care as much about tone/writing as you might expect.
I have heard people say that GDP is growing especially fast because of spending on AI . But AI infrastructure isn't producing value yet, because it's not yet finished being built. The argument has to be that the investment itself is increasing GDP.
But nobody keeps money under their mattress these days. To a first approximation, all money is either spent or invested. But that means it gets added to GDP. So it seems like all that an AI boom can do is shift money from being spent/invested in something else, to being spent/invested in AI. So why does this raise GDP?
GDP is the value of all final goods produced with a country over a period of time. If households or firms reduce their spending, firms reduce production, and GDP falls. An AI boom increases the demand for servers - when firms increase production of servers to meet this higher demand, GDP rises.
If households reduce their spending, then savings necessarily increases, since savings is all income that's not spent. It sounds like you're asking, since this increased savings is going to finance investment spending anyway, why should a drop in spending have any impact on GDP? This is actually the central issue in Keynes' general theory. Financial markets channel savings into investment, and interest rates adjust to equate the two. A $1 trillion increase in savings won't necessarily lead to $1 trillion more of investment if the demand for investment goods is insensitive to interest rates. Instead, in textbook principles of macro, the surplus of savings (and drop in total expenditure) causes firms to reduce production to meet demand, which reduces income, and as income falls, savings itself falls until eventually, back in equilibrium, savings equals investment.
Let's say a person has 2 career options:
1) Fast Food Cook
2) Chef at pricy restaurant.
After some assumptions (employed, marginal worker, positive value, etc), Option 1 will create higher GDP, because people value the food created by a Chef more than the Fast food cook - willing to pay more for it.
Same for investment that can utilize unused resources, or move from areas we value less to areas we value more.
Basically, building more expensive structures raises the GDP.
Investment isn't fixed, it goes up and down as people decide to invest more or less from year to year. GDP = C + I + G + (X - M), if AI causes causes firms to want to invest more, it can rise and the other things can fall.
It might be better to think less of GDP (spending) and think more of the "production possibilities frontier" - how much we can produce with our factors of production. GDP will grow faster not because of spending on AI (or any other type of investment), but because (or if or when) AI (or other types of investment) causes the PPF to shift out.
>To a first approximation, all money is either spent or invested.
Not sure how much work "first approximation" is doing in your statement, but yes, companies are indeed keeping increasing sums of cash under their mattresses:
https://www.hec.edu/en/executive-education/news/corporate-cash-boom-what-every-ceo-needs-know
"corporate cash reserves worldwide now exceed $8 trillion [..] This represents one of the most significant financial shifts of the 21st century."
"While cash is a vital buffer in uncertain times, too much can be a liability. Investors want to see a balance: enough liquidity to weather downturns but not so much that it signals a lack of strategic direction or inefficient capital allocation."
And that has been reaching ridiculous amounts especially for the big tech companies. Apple alone has more than 200 billions of cash reserves in tax havens, or (converted into 100$ bills) 2000 tons of dollar. That's a big I-mattress.
http://www.ahead-education.eu/why-apple-sits-on-so-much-cash.html
I think not all spending/increasing equally contributes to GDP. The most influential would be direct spending (hiring people, buying goods), while indirect investment like buying stock in slow and stable companies would do comparatively less.
AI companies are directly spending very aggressively (hiring, data centers, etc) and so their impact on GDP is greater than allocating an equal amount of money to a more cautious company which doesn't spend much even if their valuation increases.
Classically, investment grows the economy directly in two ways:
1) a company invests in buildings, equipment, training etc.
2) once the investment is realised, the company would typically benefit from increased revenue and profits
3) investments are typically financed at least partially by debt, which must be repaid
In terms of GDP, (1) and (2) contribute directly to production. Debt doesn't contribute directly to GDP, but has general stimulatory effects, since it tends to increase the amount of money in circulation. I'm guessing that some increase of money supply, and increase in the velocity of money is what's showing up in the figures, and what's missing from your model.
For AI, I would guess that the main contribution is (1), since none of the AI businesses are profit-making yet. The main investments presumably are
- investment in physical infrastructure, which boosts Nvidia and other chip companies, but also local and national contractors and suppliers since the machines have to live somewhere
- well paid engineers, in the AI companies and elsewhere, who will be spending their pay checks on second homes, new vehicles and other luxuries, which surely will show up in GDP.
If the AI boom is really going to take off, I would expect soon to see smaller companies appearing which offer AI-consulting, similar to the profusion of IT-services companies which flourished 1995-2005 or so, and web-development companies 2000-2010. (AI should also kill off any of those that are still hanging on.)
Yes, this. What's missing in Scott's question is that a single dollar can contribute to GDP many times: each time the recipient of a dollar spends it domestically, that's another dollar in that year's GDP. Hence GDP is the total of everything produced in a year (or a smaller time-period but annualized), *not* a snapshot of how much money exists at any one time.
I mean, GDP grows exponentially provided things aren't messed with (see: Solow-Swan model) and American economic growth as a percentage isn't more rapid than say, the 80s or 60s--I think saying GDP is growing especially fast due to an investment in AI is a bit of a misnomer (in comparison to what period of history are we talking about here?)
I have the feeling that argument is usually that without investment into AI, GDP growth in the US would be much smaller or even negative, not that it is exceptional right now compared to the padt. At least I only heard this before in the context of musings like "No wonder people aren't happy about the US economy, the situation is bleak, it only doesn't show in official data yet because of all that investment into AI chips and data centers"
Because GDP is about volume of economic activity and not wealth, and if everyone starts rebalancing their portfolios because AI affects their predictions in different directions and drives both new beliefs and new disagreements, this raises GDP, even though the collective still owns the same property?
GDP is about economic activity X price.
The (Really old) joke was that "GDP is a metric that goes down when a man marries his secretary."