So I'm fully aware that I shouldn't ask for a list of favorite podcasts, so I won't, but if anyone recalls a link to a list of favorite podcasts that's been done in the past I'd very much appreciate it.
What do people think of the claims that omicron improves immunity for vaccinated and boosted people? I'm thinking about exposing myself by going to a probably crowded open air market without a mask.
I'm 69, vaccinated and triple boosted (Pfizer). I have type 2 diabetes, controlled. I'm low-end obese or possibly high-end overweight. (Correction: it was actually two boosters.)
I probably had COVID early on (messed with my sense of taste, but it recovered after about 6 months).
I don't know whether I've already had omicron. I live in southeast Philadelphia, not one of the highest risk zip codes.
It is unfortunate that this thread is 4 days old. I'd love to hear thoughts on the Oregon 6th district race, especially from Scott himself. Carrick really generated a shitstorm in Oregon for a variety of reasons. "Not political", aka doesn't vote, cryptobro cash, not community oriented, etc. Shouldn't "effective" altruists be smarter than dumping a nobody into a race with crpyto cash?
I think the answer is clearly yes. If not, then we should expect the energy crisis to continue indefinitely, because of market expectations for low energy output will keep down investment in all energy extraction methods.
One problem with applying EA to influencing politics is that a lot of political issues are ones where people can and do honestly disagree about what policies are good. In the case of Covid, it sounds as though the EA people see the right approach as greatly increasing federal funding on preparedness. I don't know if that works or not, and would be much more concerned with reductions in regulatory barriers — producing a workable vaccine took less than a week, getting it approved took most of a year.
For a more extreme disagreement, lots of people take it for granted that reducing climate change is an important objective. My view, as some here know, is that it is not clear whether the net effects of climate change are good or bad and there is little reason to think they are very bad. To take an older example of a similar controversy, the EA approach fifty years ago would probably have led to pushing ways of reducing population growth. It now looks as though, at least in the developed world, that would have been the opposite of the right direction.
You can use experiments and statistics to try to estimate the effect of bed nets on mortality, but it's a little harder to do the equivalent in cases like those.
Exploring evolutionary psychology using language models. This post looks at the difference between word vector representations of Kin Altruism and Reciprocal Altruism. As one would expect, reciprocal altruism is related to conscientiousness while kin altruism is slightly more related to emotional attachment.
And all this is done without surveying a single psychology undergraduate :p
> Over time, I’ve realized that my default mode is to tune into what’s going on for other people—what they might be feeling, what’s going on with group dynamics, and what I would do in their shoes. Cycling through other people’s perspectives is automatic for me: it runs in a background thread of my mind and I can’t pause it without conscious effort.
I found this statement really interesting, because it is the exact opposite of my own experience. I guess it's another reminder of just how different everyone is.
The FDA has rejected the EUA request for fluvoxamine. I've only read the article[0] and the summary in [1], not all the details, but they sound like legitimate, if perhaps thin, reasons for rejection.
Unfortunately, he's a Democrat. And given how much Democrats are working to make my life worse off, I can't support him. Even if he was "one of the good ones", getting elected would shift power towards the party.
Find me a candidate who won't caucus with the Democrats and I'll reconsider.
Would there be a way to make a betting market for financial fraud? Resolutions would be something like "will SEC open an investigation?" (is that public?).
A lot of the data is semi-public if you have know-how and will to sleuth. Would be good to incentivize the sleuthing and public posting of documents + bets.
Is there any way to dabble in neurotech by buying a cheap brain computer interface and playing around with the data obtained from it ? That is to say is there a cheap reliable interface can be hooked up to a cheap eeg or something similar ?
From a cold, amoral economic perspective, is slavery bad? Bad for the economy? I've read some pieces over the years arguing slavery was bad for the US South. Something about free labor being more efficient. But I'm never sure how divorced from politics such arguments are.
Perhaps the concept of AGI gives us a different perspective on the issue. Assume that somehow we know that an AGI has no qualia and can't suffer. Such an AGI would blur the line between human capital and other capital investments. Much like how under a slavery regime such investments would be blurred.
It seems to me that one can't argue that slavery is bad for the economy if total ownership of AGI's is not.
The Covid-19 pandemic has been a huge disruptor of business-as-usual, including normalizing remote work, and a host of other previously very unlikely global changes. I wonder what kind of an event may lead to something like an emergence of a viable third party in the US and the subsequent reduction in political polarization?
Looking for recommendations on places to live in the US. I recently got a fully remote job (in the US) and, having worked to get the opportunity to live anywhere, need to actually figure out the best place to live. Current plan is to get a list of promising places and go AirBnB each of them for two weeks, see how I like it. Yes, I am the generic California expat.
My priorities:
--Decent dating scene for someone in their mid 30s
--Good cost of living, ie, can I get a decent place to live for $1500-$2000/month
--Outgoing vibe. I can be a real homebody, so a place that makes it trivially easy to go out and have fun is important.
The best place to get quality and in-depth science news and reviews is Quanta Magazine. The runner up for astrophysics is Ethan Siegel's column in Forbes.
Long time lurker, first time poster to the open thread. I apologize in advance that it is shameless self-promotion post.
I've recently quit my job in academia to start a digital marketing agency. I work with physical or mental health practicioners that are looking to grow their practice (psychologists, physio, chiro, acupuncture, etc.). I've been struggling to grow my agency due to my disdain of engaging in typical "sales" tactics like cold-calling/cold-messaging. My eventual plan is to grow entirely by referals, but I'm not quite large enough yet that referals are growing my agency at the pace I need to pay my bills in the short term. So I post here with two hopes:
1.) If you're in my target market and are looking to learn more about digital marketing (or know someone who is) please reach out!
2.) Any advice on growing a business without using the skeezy sales tactics/cold outreach. (That also isn't "do good work and wait for referals" as I'm already doing that).
Is the government paying private companies 'prizes' for reaching set goals an effective means of industrial policy? An example would be the US government paying a company which reaches a desired milestone- manufacturing x amount of lithium ion batteries or semiconductors or solar panels in the US, for instance, or developing a malaria vaccine, or being the first to land on an asteroid. Or, developing a certain type of weapons system let's say. For real-world examples, NASA seems to have a series of smaller prizes for set goals (developing a certain type of power system), and Google famously had a Lunar X prize for a private company to land a rover on the Moon. Wiki apparently calls this an 'inducement prize contest'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inducement_prize_contest
Is this effective industrial policy? Rather than more heavy-handed government intervention, such as picking winner & losers, directly funding specific companies (which of course are always very politically connected), or other boondoggles- the government can simply pick a goal and individual entrepreneurs can scramble to meet it. Does this work in real life? Should the US or other developed countries be doing more of this?
10 % on unambiguous Ukrainian victory (up from 9 % on April 4).
Ukrainian victory is defined as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24, regardless of whether it is now directly controlled by Russia (Crimea), or by its proxies (Donetsk and Luhansk "republics”), 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, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
30 % on compromise solution which both sides might plausibly claim as victory (up from 26 % on April 4)
60 % on unambigous Russian victory (down from 65 % on April 4).
Russian victory is defined as Russia getting something 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 Russian victory.
Discussion:
I didn’t do updates in for a few weeks, not because nothing happened, but because things that happened kind of balanced each other out. Ukrainians are doing well on the battlefield, considering the circumstances, on the other hand Russian economy does not seem to be collapsing and Russian public does not seem to be rebellious, while EU diplomatic fiasco around oil sanctions, together with increasing acceptance of Gazprom gas payment terms, seemed to suggest that Western willingness to support Ukraine is wavering.
New information that pushed me to slightly reassess the situation are current elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, where pro-escalation parties (CDU and Greens) won a solid victory. North Rhine-Westphalia is most populous and bellwether German state (also with largest GDP), and German policy is very important for the outcome of the conflict.
*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 this year, that is.
Is there any way to go from viewing a comment to viewing the parent of that comment? This feels crazy to have to ask in a tree-structured comment system with permalinks to specific comments, but I can't see any way to do it.
Given the discussions last week about software engineering, I suspect a lot of you would probably enjoy thecodelesscode.com if you're not already familiar with it.
How susceptible is the gut biome to persistent change through diet? Do we have high quality studies here? It seems naively like if you, say, totally cut carbohydrates from your diet for a week, you'd have to have significantly changed the ecosystem down there. But then, that doesn't seem to result in the same benefits that are claimed by, say, fecal transplants.
>Routine hospital procedures like C-sections and joint replacements could become more dangerous, too, as the risk associated with [antibiotic-resistant] infection increases.
Nearly everyone who hasn't had an appendectomy has an appendix. Each of these people could get acute appendicitis. They could get it today. Or they could get it in a few decades, when routine surgeries might be (much?) more dangerous
Could preemptive appendectomy, done in the near future, be advisable for people with decades of life expectancy left? In other words, might it be rational to choose to face a risk of infection soon, so as to avoid the possibility of being forced to face a (much?) higher risk of infection later on?
For this to make sense, it seems that there would need to be a big increase in antibiotic-resistant infection risk coming. That's because lifetime acute appendicitis is only 8.6% in males, 6.7% in females (https://www.aafp.org/afp/2018/0701/p25.html - not sure if those figures are US or global).
How concerning is actually the appearance of Frank's sign (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank's_sign)? Assume it's Grade 2b/3 - deep creases across both earlobes, in a 65-year old female patient.
I've seen medical opinions ranging from "it probably indicates physiological aging, but is a very poor predictor of cardiovascular problems, mostly to be ignored" to "an 700% increase in cardiovascular risks, run a detailed battery of tests". Could anybody familiar with Doing Good Medical Statistics and Bayesianism be so kind and provide me with the most accurate interpretation and recommendations?
Does anybody know a good ethnography about traditional child-rearing in Africa, preferably describing the practices of at least a few decades ago? (doesn't have to be super-esoteric hunter-gatherer tribes, Bantu is also great).
How do I find and read the other book review contest submissions? No post has been made for this? Is it in one of the open threads? I also remember coming across a post that someone had madde a random reading tool or something of the sort
Since Google and other major search engines are broken in the sense that all they give you are commercial results, is there now a market for search engines that give you better results?
What are the chances the latest crypto thing blows over and the show resumes in a format not wildly unlike the current (pre-crash) one? I think it's basically certain, but a lot of people are excited about an Ape Meltdown. Seems like mood affilition to me.
How bad is meat for you? I grew up in a mostly vegetarian environment and I constantly heard people telling me the human body wasn't good at digesting meat. How untrue is that?
I’m trying to buckle down and learn about ML/AI. So far I’m a couple weeks into Andrew Ng’s coursera course and I’m pretty happy with it so far. I’d love to talk to anyone willing who fits into the following 2 categories:
1 - Successfully self-taught or internet-taught and landed an ML/AI job.
2 - Attempting to self teach ML/AI. I found having other people on the same journey to communicate with was very helpful when I was learning data structures and algorithms.
Any general advice or recommendations for good resources are also appreciated.
I was wondering if Scott would consider doing another Adversarial Collaboration contest, like on the old Slate Star Codex, because I have a suitable question: What is the best way to eat for health and longevity?
As far as I understand, there are two schools of thought on this. Both agree that:
-The standard American diet (SAD) is crap;
-Highly processed food (chips, cookies, Twinkies) is bad for you;
-We should eat lots of non-starchy vegetables, especially dark leafy greens.
They disagree on everything else, namely:
School 1, Paleo-Keto, teaches that carbs are evil, and we should eat mostly unsaturated fat and high-quality protein.
Good foods: meat (especially organic/grass-fed; especially-especially wild-caught, like bison or venison), seafood, eggs, healthy oils (coconut, avocado), non-starchy vegetables.
Bad foods: grains, starchy vegetables, fruit, legumes.
Borderline: small amounts of nuts and high-fat dairy (heavy cream, butter).
School 2, Whole Foods Plant-Based (WFPB), teaches that animal foods and fat are evil, and we should eat lots of simple, plant-based foods, as minimally processed as possible.
Is one of these better than the other, in terms of health outcomes? Or is it a case of "pick one and stick with it, either one is better than SAD"? Or is there some complex diet-genome interaction that makes each diet more suitable for different people?
I’m starting to think about the 2024 election. Specifically, for a Republican who can fend off either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis in a primary.
The first name on my list: Bill Gates. As a Republican. I’ve gotten mixed but favorable feedback. However, in my circles, it is unanimous that he would be preferred to Trump redux.
Thoughts? (or put your fake money where your mouth is at Manifold Markets)
In the part marked "The Analysis", I try to get an overall p-value from a list of ivermectin studies in two different ways, and get 0.15 and 0.04.
They write that I am wrong to use a regular t-test, and that I should have used Cochrane's RevMan tool, which would have suggested/performed "random-effects inverse variance DerSimonian and Laird meta analysis", and come out with 0.04 and 0.005 respectively.
This is somewhat beyond my statistical comprehension - can someone with more experience in this field weigh in?
Does anyone have recommendations for positive arguments in favour of Yudkowsky-level pessimism on AI risk? I've seen some rebuttals to counterarguments, but I don't recall ever seeing anything that actually makes a positive case for why an unaligned AI is likely to end the world in the near future.
I’m hoping someone here can clear up the controversy over the discovery of the double helix. From what I’ve heard, it sounded like Rosalind Franklin saw it first, but didn’t recognize it for what it was until after Watson and Crick had done so, which is why they are credited with its discovery. This impression of mine might be way off, if not incomplete at the very least. Would love a solid education on this piece of the history of science. Thanks!
Do you think applying for the job at DeepMind would be wise? If a Friendly AI approach were developed that was actually good, but it was declared a trade secret and the researcher were contractually forbidden to disclose that IP owned by Google with anybody outside the company, all it would accomplish is to effectively delete that researcher from the pool of people who might contribute to solving the problem.
That's only a likely scenario if specific Google executives are insane. But how could I know?
"What you have said about German professors is not exaggerated. I have got to know another sad specimen of this kind - one of the foremost physicists of Germany. To two pertinent objections which I raised against one of his theories and which demonstrate a direct defect in his conclusions, he responds by pointing out that another (infallible) colleague of his shares his opinion. I'll soon make it hot for the man with a masterly publication. Autoritätsdusel is the greatest enemy of truth."
I've seen some discussion about it, but Authoritätsdusel probably means the stupidity of authority.
"Was Sie über die deutschen Professoren gesagt haben, ist gar nicht über-trieben. Ich habe wieder ein trauriges Subjekt dieser Art kennen gelernt – einen derersten Physiker Deutschlands. Auf zwei sachliche Einwände, welche ich ihm gegen eine seiner Theorien anführte, und die einen direkten Defekt seiner Schlüsse darthun, antwortet er mir mit dem Hinweis, daß ein anderer (unfehlbarer) Kollege von ihm der selben Meinung sei. Ich werde dem Mann demnächst mit einer tüchtigen Veröffentlichung ein heizen. Autoritätsdusel ist der größte Feind der Wahrheit."
The Guild of the ROSE is an online-focused attempt at Rationality training and self-improvement, building on the foundations (and learning from the mistakes of) similar orgs.
We place a strong emphasis on accessibility, community, and ethics, with a bias towards action (actually Doing Things with one's self improvement journey).
Any and all constructive feedback is welcome! We are looking to grow and gain more members from outside the Rationalsphere.
Having read the last open thread and the first book review and having thought about it a bit, I now agree that it would be very interesting to see the complete ranking of the book reviews. This would be helpful to decide if I should read more than 12 book reviews.
"‘Desperate Remedies’ Review: From Asylums to Zoloft Psychiatry’s goal was to transform the treatment of mental illness via science—but the results have been anything but conclusive." By Richard J. McNally | May 13, 2022
Ours is a time of historical reckoning for many fields, and psychiatry is no exception. An indisputable masterpiece among a flurry of reappraisals is Andrew Scull’s “Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness”—a comprehensive, fascinating and persuasive narrative of the past 200 years of psychiatry in America.
The author, an emeritus professor at the University of California, San Diego, begins his narrative in the early 19th century, with the establishment of institutions to house members of affluent New England families who were mentally ill. These well-staffed asylums, situated in bucolic surroundings, featured therapeutic activities including singing, acting and French lessons. Social reformers such as Dorothea Dix galvanized support for public insane asylums as alternatives to poorhouses, prisons or homelessness. Optimism abounded as reformers predicted cure rates as high as 80%.
By century’s end, it became obvious that such predictions were wildly inaccurate. These asylums included many patients with conditions that carried bleak prognoses such as senility, mental handicap, dementia praecox (schizophrenia) and general paresis of the insane (GPI), a mysterious, progressive disease characterized by delusions, hallucinations, mood disturbance, apathy and dementia, culminating in death. The reputation of psychiatry reached its nadir by century’s end. Asylum superintendents functioned more like prison wardens than directors of therapeutic institutions. Therapeutic helplessness in the face of intractable psychopathology, Mr. Scull makes clear, was professionally demoralizing for psychiatry. The rest of his book traces the history of psychiatry through its next century, when great hopes gave rise to daring treatments of varying effectiveness, and the asylum system largely came to an end.
Mr. Scull has a background in sociology, but differs sharply from critics of the field who once proclaimed that mental illness was nothing but a myth, or claimed that diagnoses merely were stigmatizing labels imposed upon people who failed to conform with societal norms. Indeed, the author emphasizes the intense suffering experienced by individuals with major mental illness and acknowledges the challenges faced by their families and by the psychiatrists struggle to help them. Yet he is unsparing in his critiques when motives of money, power and fame have tempted psychiatrists to disregard the welfare of those under their care.
* * *
Mr. Scull’s major concern is for patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, for whom psychiatrists are the primary treaters. Although medication remains the mainstay of treatment, it has become increasingly apparent that as many as 67% to 80% of patients either fail to respond or cease taking medication because of intolerable side effects. Moreover, clinical researchers have confirmed that patients who are able to remain on antipsychotic medication commonly develop cerebral atrophy and tardive dyskinesia, an involuntary movement disorder. Despite upbeat advertising campaigns for new drugs, there have been no true breakthroughs in psychopharmacology for more than a half-century. Indeed, pharmaceutical companies are now abandoning psychiatry.
Mr. Scull closes by asking: “Does psychiatry have a future?” His melancholy question partly reflects the failure of advances in genomics and neuroscience to yield actionable insights that improve the lives of people with major mental illness. Indeed, the humbling conclusion of these advances is to underscore just how complex the genetics and neuroscience of mental illness really are.
Flynn also got a bump in the Portland Effective Alturists & Rationality group some months back.
I saw that Flynn focuses on biosecurity, so I asked the promoter whether Flynn supports gain of function research or not, and I never got an answer. More specifics on his "pandemic prevention" platform would be great, because I'm pretty disappointed in the depth of content right now.
Currently watching the final of the Eurovision song contest. Norway are on, and it's bananas. Literally. The song is called "Give That Wolf A Banana" and they're two guys in suits dressed as yellow wolves.
Look, I can't describe it, you have to see it.
There's a lot of (boring) ballads made it to the grand final this year, and while I'm expecting Ukraine to possibly win (due to sentiment, not the song) at least we have a few brave souls keeping the Eurovision tradition alive.
Australia's costume is so elaborate, there was a hold-up in the second semi-final while they got him on-stage.
> Somewhere in your head there is a microphone. It produces a little voice inside of you, whose approval you desperately crave. You would do anything for the voice to like you. Ghosts, mental models, and personified abstract concepts fight each other for a turn at the mike and the right to implicitly control your actions. Who wins?
I found Scott's recent comment rather bizarre. Is this really what some people experience?
Let's say you're the Japanese government, you see the cratering birth rates and you decide to look for a solution in tech, and so you create a government-mandated dating app/matchmaking service. What would this be like? Assume you can mandate all singles to use it and that you are able to accurately assess any citizen's relationship status, and your goal is to get as many people into happy, long-term relationships as possible.
I'm putting together an introductory college English class with an "Intelligence: from IQ to AI" theme. I'm looking for recommendations of fiction (especially short fiction). Stories featuring collective intelligence (including prediction markets) would be especially welcome! Thanks in advance.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01336-4?WT.ec_id=NATURE-202205&sap-outbound-id=F78931C80AA0330410205792EE3B23C13D9C77FC
CALLING LAWYERS: Want to work at an ACX-supported startup nonprofit? Legal Impact for Chickens is hiring! 🐥⚖️ https://www.legalimpactforchickens.org/were-hiring. Read about our ACX grant here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-results?s=r
So I'm fully aware that I shouldn't ask for a list of favorite podcasts, so I won't, but if anyone recalls a link to a list of favorite podcasts that's been done in the past I'd very much appreciate it.
As a non-particularly-outstanding physics phd student I am suddenly very very scared about my employment opportunities
https://www.quantamagazine.org/machine-scientists-distill-the-laws-of-physics-from-raw-data-20220510/
(Or, to paraphrase default_friend, this is hands down is one of the most evil and anti-human things i have ever seen)
What do people think of the claims that omicron improves immunity for vaccinated and boosted people? I'm thinking about exposing myself by going to a probably crowded open air market without a mask.
I'm 69, vaccinated and triple boosted (Pfizer). I have type 2 diabetes, controlled. I'm low-end obese or possibly high-end overweight. (Correction: it was actually two boosters.)
I probably had COVID early on (messed with my sense of taste, but it recovered after about 6 months).
I don't know whether I've already had omicron. I live in southeast Philadelphia, not one of the highest risk zip codes.
It is unfortunate that this thread is 4 days old. I'd love to hear thoughts on the Oregon 6th district race, especially from Scott himself. Carrick really generated a shitstorm in Oregon for a variety of reasons. "Not political", aka doesn't vote, cryptobro cash, not community oriented, etc. Shouldn't "effective" altruists be smarter than dumping a nobody into a race with crpyto cash?
Will nuclear energy be deregulated at all in the next two years? https://manifold.markets/JohnBuridan/will-us-nuclear-energy-become-more
I think the answer is clearly yes. If not, then we should expect the energy crisis to continue indefinitely, because of market expectations for low energy output will keep down investment in all energy extraction methods.
One problem with applying EA to influencing politics is that a lot of political issues are ones where people can and do honestly disagree about what policies are good. In the case of Covid, it sounds as though the EA people see the right approach as greatly increasing federal funding on preparedness. I don't know if that works or not, and would be much more concerned with reductions in regulatory barriers — producing a workable vaccine took less than a week, getting it approved took most of a year.
For a more extreme disagreement, lots of people take it for granted that reducing climate change is an important objective. My view, as some here know, is that it is not clear whether the net effects of climate change are good or bad and there is little reason to think they are very bad. To take an older example of a similar controversy, the EA approach fifty years ago would probably have led to pushing ways of reducing population growth. It now looks as though, at least in the developed world, that would have been the opposite of the right direction.
You can use experiments and statistics to try to estimate the effect of bed nets on mortality, but it's a little harder to do the equivalent in cases like those.
Hardcore Bayesians don't assign a zero probability to anything, or at least they're very unlikely to.
Exploring evolutionary psychology using language models. This post looks at the difference between word vector representations of Kin Altruism and Reciprocal Altruism. As one would expect, reciprocal altruism is related to conscientiousness while kin altruism is slightly more related to emotional attachment.
And all this is done without surveying a single psychology undergraduate :p
https://vectors.substack.com/p/in-the-beginning-was-the-word?s=w
> Over time, I’ve realized that my default mode is to tune into what’s going on for other people—what they might be feeling, what’s going on with group dynamics, and what I would do in their shoes. Cycling through other people’s perspectives is automatic for me: it runs in a background thread of my mind and I can’t pause it without conscious effort.
I found this statement really interesting, because it is the exact opposite of my own experience. I guess it's another reminder of just how different everyone is.
https://dianaberlin.com/posts/journaling-in-practice
The FDA has rejected the EUA request for fluvoxamine. I've only read the article[0] and the summary in [1], not all the details, but they sound like legitimate, if perhaps thin, reasons for rejection.
[0] https://www.statnews.com/2022/05/16/fda-rejects-antidepressant-seen-as-possible-covid-19-treatment/
[1] https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/nda/2020/EUA%20110%20Fluvoxamine%20Decisional%20Memo_Redacted.pdf
> Carrick Flynn
Unfortunately, he's a Democrat. And given how much Democrats are working to make my life worse off, I can't support him. Even if he was "one of the good ones", getting elected would shift power towards the party.
Find me a candidate who won't caucus with the Democrats and I'll reconsider.
Would there be a way to make a betting market for financial fraud? Resolutions would be something like "will SEC open an investigation?" (is that public?).
A lot of the data is semi-public if you have know-how and will to sleuth. Would be good to incentivize the sleuthing and public posting of documents + bets.
Obviously a half baked idea
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ylOpbW1H-I
A look at rogue waves-- slightly rare giant waves.
Until 1978 when there was solid evidence, the many eyewitness accounts were ignored, and the occasional vanished ship was considered a mystery.
The fun question is, how seriously should eyewitness accounts be taken?
Is there any way to dabble in neurotech by buying a cheap brain computer interface and playing around with the data obtained from it ? That is to say is there a cheap reliable interface can be hooked up to a cheap eeg or something similar ?
From a cold, amoral economic perspective, is slavery bad? Bad for the economy? I've read some pieces over the years arguing slavery was bad for the US South. Something about free labor being more efficient. But I'm never sure how divorced from politics such arguments are.
Perhaps the concept of AGI gives us a different perspective on the issue. Assume that somehow we know that an AGI has no qualia and can't suffer. Such an AGI would blur the line between human capital and other capital investments. Much like how under a slavery regime such investments would be blurred.
It seems to me that one can't argue that slavery is bad for the economy if total ownership of AGI's is not.
Or am I missing something?
How does one journal
In case Russia starts another campaign in the EU due to NATO expansion. What your recommendation on stocks to buy or sell?
The Covid-19 pandemic has been a huge disruptor of business-as-usual, including normalizing remote work, and a host of other previously very unlikely global changes. I wonder what kind of an event may lead to something like an emergence of a viable third party in the US and the subsequent reduction in political polarization?
Looking for recommendations on places to live in the US. I recently got a fully remote job (in the US) and, having worked to get the opportunity to live anywhere, need to actually figure out the best place to live. Current plan is to get a list of promising places and go AirBnB each of them for two weeks, see how I like it. Yes, I am the generic California expat.
My priorities:
--Decent dating scene for someone in their mid 30s
--Good cost of living, ie, can I get a decent place to live for $1500-$2000/month
--Outgoing vibe. I can be a real homebody, so a place that makes it trivially easy to go out and have fun is important.
The best place to get quality and in-depth science news and reviews is Quanta Magazine. The runner up for astrophysics is Ethan Siegel's column in Forbes.
Long time lurker, first time poster to the open thread. I apologize in advance that it is shameless self-promotion post.
I've recently quit my job in academia to start a digital marketing agency. I work with physical or mental health practicioners that are looking to grow their practice (psychologists, physio, chiro, acupuncture, etc.). I've been struggling to grow my agency due to my disdain of engaging in typical "sales" tactics like cold-calling/cold-messaging. My eventual plan is to grow entirely by referals, but I'm not quite large enough yet that referals are growing my agency at the pace I need to pay my bills in the short term. So I post here with two hopes:
1.) If you're in my target market and are looking to learn more about digital marketing (or know someone who is) please reach out!
2.) Any advice on growing a business without using the skeezy sales tactics/cold outreach. (That also isn't "do good work and wait for referals" as I'm already doing that).
Is the government paying private companies 'prizes' for reaching set goals an effective means of industrial policy? An example would be the US government paying a company which reaches a desired milestone- manufacturing x amount of lithium ion batteries or semiconductors or solar panels in the US, for instance, or developing a malaria vaccine, or being the first to land on an asteroid. Or, developing a certain type of weapons system let's say. For real-world examples, NASA seems to have a series of smaller prizes for set goals (developing a certain type of power system), and Google famously had a Lunar X prize for a private company to land a rover on the Moon. Wiki apparently calls this an 'inducement prize contest'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inducement_prize_contest
Is this effective industrial policy? Rather than more heavy-handed government intervention, such as picking winner & losers, directly funding specific companies (which of course are always very politically connected), or other boondoggles- the government can simply pick a goal and individual entrepreneurs can scramble to meet it. Does this work in real life? Should the US or other developed countries be doing more of this?
Quick update on my predictions on the outcome of Ruso-Ukrainian war. Previous prediction here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-218/comment/5875195?s=r.
10 % on unambiguous Ukrainian victory (up from 9 % on April 4).
Ukrainian victory is defined as either a) Ukrainian government gaining control of the territory it had not controlled before February 24, regardless of whether it is now directly controlled by Russia (Crimea), or by its proxies (Donetsk and Luhansk "republics”), 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, or c) return to exact prewar status quo ante.
30 % on compromise solution which both sides might plausibly claim as victory (up from 26 % on April 4)
60 % on unambigous Russian victory (down from 65 % on April 4).
Russian victory is defined as Russia getting something 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 Russian victory.
Discussion:
I didn’t do updates in for a few weeks, not because nothing happened, but because things that happened kind of balanced each other out. Ukrainians are doing well on the battlefield, considering the circumstances, on the other hand Russian economy does not seem to be collapsing and Russian public does not seem to be rebellious, while EU diplomatic fiasco around oil sanctions, together with increasing acceptance of Gazprom gas payment terms, seemed to suggest that Western willingness to support Ukraine is wavering.
New information that pushed me to slightly reassess the situation are current elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, where pro-escalation parties (CDU and Greens) won a solid victory. North Rhine-Westphalia is most populous and bellwether German state (also with largest GDP), and German policy is very important for the outcome of the conflict.
*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 this year, that is.
Is there any way to go from viewing a comment to viewing the parent of that comment? This feels crazy to have to ask in a tree-structured comment system with permalinks to specific comments, but I can't see any way to do it.
Given the discussions last week about software engineering, I suspect a lot of you would probably enjoy thecodelesscode.com if you're not already familiar with it.
How susceptible is the gut biome to persistent change through diet? Do we have high quality studies here? It seems naively like if you, say, totally cut carbohydrates from your diet for a week, you'd have to have significantly changed the ecosystem down there. But then, that doesn't seem to result in the same benefits that are claimed by, say, fecal transplants.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/11/14/20963824/drug-resistance-antibiotics-cdc-report
>Routine hospital procedures like C-sections and joint replacements could become more dangerous, too, as the risk associated with [antibiotic-resistant] infection increases.
Nearly everyone who hasn't had an appendectomy has an appendix. Each of these people could get acute appendicitis. They could get it today. Or they could get it in a few decades, when routine surgeries might be (much?) more dangerous
Could preemptive appendectomy, done in the near future, be advisable for people with decades of life expectancy left? In other words, might it be rational to choose to face a risk of infection soon, so as to avoid the possibility of being forced to face a (much?) higher risk of infection later on?
For this to make sense, it seems that there would need to be a big increase in antibiotic-resistant infection risk coming. That's because lifetime acute appendicitis is only 8.6% in males, 6.7% in females (https://www.aafp.org/afp/2018/0701/p25.html - not sure if those figures are US or global).
How concerning is actually the appearance of Frank's sign (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank's_sign)? Assume it's Grade 2b/3 - deep creases across both earlobes, in a 65-year old female patient.
I've seen medical opinions ranging from "it probably indicates physiological aging, but is a very poor predictor of cardiovascular problems, mostly to be ignored" to "an 700% increase in cardiovascular risks, run a detailed battery of tests". Could anybody familiar with Doing Good Medical Statistics and Bayesianism be so kind and provide me with the most accurate interpretation and recommendations?
Does anybody know a good ethnography about traditional child-rearing in Africa, preferably describing the practices of at least a few decades ago? (doesn't have to be super-esoteric hunter-gatherer tribes, Bantu is also great).
How do I find and read the other book review contest submissions? No post has been made for this? Is it in one of the open threads? I also remember coming across a post that someone had madde a random reading tool or something of the sort
Since Google and other major search engines are broken in the sense that all they give you are commercial results, is there now a market for search engines that give you better results?
What are the chances the latest crypto thing blows over and the show resumes in a format not wildly unlike the current (pre-crash) one? I think it's basically certain, but a lot of people are excited about an Ape Meltdown. Seems like mood affilition to me.
How bad is meat for you? I grew up in a mostly vegetarian environment and I constantly heard people telling me the human body wasn't good at digesting meat. How untrue is that?
I’m trying to buckle down and learn about ML/AI. So far I’m a couple weeks into Andrew Ng’s coursera course and I’m pretty happy with it so far. I’d love to talk to anyone willing who fits into the following 2 categories:
1 - Successfully self-taught or internet-taught and landed an ML/AI job.
2 - Attempting to self teach ML/AI. I found having other people on the same journey to communicate with was very helpful when I was learning data structures and algorithms.
Any general advice or recommendations for good resources are also appreciated.
I was wondering if Scott would consider doing another Adversarial Collaboration contest, like on the old Slate Star Codex, because I have a suitable question: What is the best way to eat for health and longevity?
As far as I understand, there are two schools of thought on this. Both agree that:
-The standard American diet (SAD) is crap;
-Highly processed food (chips, cookies, Twinkies) is bad for you;
-We should eat lots of non-starchy vegetables, especially dark leafy greens.
They disagree on everything else, namely:
School 1, Paleo-Keto, teaches that carbs are evil, and we should eat mostly unsaturated fat and high-quality protein.
Good foods: meat (especially organic/grass-fed; especially-especially wild-caught, like bison or venison), seafood, eggs, healthy oils (coconut, avocado), non-starchy vegetables.
Bad foods: grains, starchy vegetables, fruit, legumes.
Borderline: small amounts of nuts and high-fat dairy (heavy cream, butter).
School 2, Whole Foods Plant-Based (WFPB), teaches that animal foods and fat are evil, and we should eat lots of simple, plant-based foods, as minimally processed as possible.
Good: whole grains, legumes incl. tofu, vegetables (starchy and non-starchy), fresh fruit.
Bad foods: anything animal-based, oils.
Borderline: nuts and seeds, dried fruit.
Is one of these better than the other, in terms of health outcomes? Or is it a case of "pick one and stick with it, either one is better than SAD"? Or is there some complex diet-genome interaction that makes each diet more suitable for different people?
Vox is so goddamned terrible.
I’m starting to think about the 2024 election. Specifically, for a Republican who can fend off either Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis in a primary.
The first name on my list: Bill Gates. As a Republican. I’ve gotten mixed but favorable feedback. However, in my circles, it is unanimous that he would be preferred to Trump redux.
Thoughts? (or put your fake money where your mouth is at Manifold Markets)
Is Coinbase going to go bankrupt?
I don’t know if HBD is still a banned discourse around here, but Isn’t this:
quite relevant to the black-white IQ gap?
https://www.nature.com/articles/npjgenmed201618
Some ivermectin proponents have argued there's an error with my post at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted?s=w .
In the part marked "The Analysis", I try to get an overall p-value from a list of ivermectin studies in two different ways, and get 0.15 and 0.04.
They write that I am wrong to use a regular t-test, and that I should have used Cochrane's RevMan tool, which would have suggested/performed "random-effects inverse variance DerSimonian and Laird meta analysis", and come out with 0.04 and 0.005 respectively.
This is somewhat beyond my statistical comprehension - can someone with more experience in this field weigh in?
Does anyone have recommendations for positive arguments in favour of Yudkowsky-level pessimism on AI risk? I've seen some rebuttals to counterarguments, but I don't recall ever seeing anything that actually makes a positive case for why an unaligned AI is likely to end the world in the near future.
Anyone have an idea of what the marginal impact of a donation to Flynn would be? Is it a close race?
I’m hoping someone here can clear up the controversy over the discovery of the double helix. From what I’ve heard, it sounded like Rosalind Franklin saw it first, but didn’t recognize it for what it was until after Watson and Crick had done so, which is why they are credited with its discovery. This impression of mine might be way off, if not incomplete at the very least. Would love a solid education on this piece of the history of science. Thanks!
Do you think applying for the job at DeepMind would be wise? If a Friendly AI approach were developed that was actually good, but it was declared a trade secret and the researcher were contractually forbidden to disclose that IP owned by Google with anybody outside the company, all it would accomplish is to effectively delete that researcher from the pool of people who might contribute to solving the problem.
That's only a likely scenario if specific Google executives are insane. But how could I know?
"What you have said about German professors is not exaggerated. I have got to know another sad specimen of this kind - one of the foremost physicists of Germany. To two pertinent objections which I raised against one of his theories and which demonstrate a direct defect in his conclusions, he responds by pointing out that another (infallible) colleague of his shares his opinion. I'll soon make it hot for the man with a masterly publication. Autoritätsdusel is the greatest enemy of truth."
I've seen some discussion about it, but Authoritätsdusel probably means the stupidity of authority.
"Was Sie über die deutschen Professoren gesagt haben, ist gar nicht über-trieben. Ich habe wieder ein trauriges Subjekt dieser Art kennen gelernt – einen derersten Physiker Deutschlands. Auf zwei sachliche Einwände, welche ich ihm gegen eine seiner Theorien anführte, und die einen direkten Defekt seiner Schlüsse darthun, antwortet er mir mit dem Hinweis, daß ein anderer (unfehlbarer) Kollege von ihm der selben Meinung sei. Ich werde dem Mann demnächst mit einer tüchtigen Veröffentlichung ein heizen. Autoritätsdusel ist der größte Feind der Wahrheit."
Albert Einstein
The Guild of the ROSE is an online-focused attempt at Rationality training and self-improvement, building on the foundations (and learning from the mistakes of) similar orgs.
We place a strong emphasis on accessibility, community, and ethics, with a bias towards action (actually Doing Things with one's self improvement journey).
Any and all constructive feedback is welcome! We are looking to grow and gain more members from outside the Rationalsphere.
https://guildoftherose.org/
Having read the last open thread and the first book review and having thought about it a bit, I now agree that it would be very interesting to see the complete ranking of the book reviews. This would be helpful to decide if I should read more than 12 book reviews.
"‘Desperate Remedies’ Review: From Asylums to Zoloft Psychiatry’s goal was to transform the treatment of mental illness via science—but the results have been anything but conclusive." By Richard J. McNally | May 13, 2022
https://www.wsj.com/articles/desperate-remedies-book-review-psychiatry-from-asylums-to-zoloft-11652453874
Ours is a time of historical reckoning for many fields, and psychiatry is no exception. An indisputable masterpiece among a flurry of reappraisals is Andrew Scull’s “Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness”—a comprehensive, fascinating and persuasive narrative of the past 200 years of psychiatry in America.
The author, an emeritus professor at the University of California, San Diego, begins his narrative in the early 19th century, with the establishment of institutions to house members of affluent New England families who were mentally ill. These well-staffed asylums, situated in bucolic surroundings, featured therapeutic activities including singing, acting and French lessons. Social reformers such as Dorothea Dix galvanized support for public insane asylums as alternatives to poorhouses, prisons or homelessness. Optimism abounded as reformers predicted cure rates as high as 80%.
By century’s end, it became obvious that such predictions were wildly inaccurate. These asylums included many patients with conditions that carried bleak prognoses such as senility, mental handicap, dementia praecox (schizophrenia) and general paresis of the insane (GPI), a mysterious, progressive disease characterized by delusions, hallucinations, mood disturbance, apathy and dementia, culminating in death. The reputation of psychiatry reached its nadir by century’s end. Asylum superintendents functioned more like prison wardens than directors of therapeutic institutions. Therapeutic helplessness in the face of intractable psychopathology, Mr. Scull makes clear, was professionally demoralizing for psychiatry. The rest of his book traces the history of psychiatry through its next century, when great hopes gave rise to daring treatments of varying effectiveness, and the asylum system largely came to an end.
Mr. Scull has a background in sociology, but differs sharply from critics of the field who once proclaimed that mental illness was nothing but a myth, or claimed that diagnoses merely were stigmatizing labels imposed upon people who failed to conform with societal norms. Indeed, the author emphasizes the intense suffering experienced by individuals with major mental illness and acknowledges the challenges faced by their families and by the psychiatrists struggle to help them. Yet he is unsparing in his critiques when motives of money, power and fame have tempted psychiatrists to disregard the welfare of those under their care.
* * *
Mr. Scull’s major concern is for patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, for whom psychiatrists are the primary treaters. Although medication remains the mainstay of treatment, it has become increasingly apparent that as many as 67% to 80% of patients either fail to respond or cease taking medication because of intolerable side effects. Moreover, clinical researchers have confirmed that patients who are able to remain on antipsychotic medication commonly develop cerebral atrophy and tardive dyskinesia, an involuntary movement disorder. Despite upbeat advertising campaigns for new drugs, there have been no true breakthroughs in psychopharmacology for more than a half-century. Indeed, pharmaceutical companies are now abandoning psychiatry.
Mr. Scull closes by asking: “Does psychiatry have a future?” His melancholy question partly reflects the failure of advances in genomics and neuroscience to yield actionable insights that improve the lives of people with major mental illness. Indeed, the humbling conclusion of these advances is to underscore just how complex the genetics and neuroscience of mental illness really are.
Question for astronomy nerds (may use this in a story, fyi):
Someone turns Pluto into a black hole. Same orbit, same mass, they just snapped their fingers and suddenly it’s a very, very small black hole.
Is there any use of an optical telescope you can think of where you could observe this from Earth?
The Dragonsphere will reign for 10^1000 years!
Flynn also got a bump in the Portland Effective Alturists & Rationality group some months back.
I saw that Flynn focuses on biosecurity, so I asked the promoter whether Flynn supports gain of function research or not, and I never got an answer. More specifics on his "pandemic prevention" platform would be great, because I'm pretty disappointed in the depth of content right now.
https://www.carrickflynnfororegon.com/issues
Currently watching the final of the Eurovision song contest. Norway are on, and it's bananas. Literally. The song is called "Give That Wolf A Banana" and they're two guys in suits dressed as yellow wolves.
Look, I can't describe it, you have to see it.
There's a lot of (boring) ballads made it to the grand final this year, and while I'm expecting Ukraine to possibly win (due to sentiment, not the song) at least we have a few brave souls keeping the Eurovision tradition alive.
Australia's costume is so elaborate, there was a hold-up in the second semi-final while they got him on-stage.
> Somewhere in your head there is a microphone. It produces a little voice inside of you, whose approval you desperately crave. You would do anything for the voice to like you. Ghosts, mental models, and personified abstract concepts fight each other for a turn at the mike and the right to implicitly control your actions. Who wins?
I found Scott's recent comment rather bizarre. Is this really what some people experience?
Let's say you're the Japanese government, you see the cratering birth rates and you decide to look for a solution in tech, and so you create a government-mandated dating app/matchmaking service. What would this be like? Assume you can mandate all singles to use it and that you are able to accurately assess any citizen's relationship status, and your goal is to get as many people into happy, long-term relationships as possible.
I'm putting together an introductory college English class with an "Intelligence: from IQ to AI" theme. I'm looking for recommendations of fiction (especially short fiction). Stories featuring collective intelligence (including prediction markets) would be especially welcome! Thanks in advance.
Interested in learning about the pros and cons of empathy? This overview is a good place to start: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SMziBSCT9fiz5yG3L/notes-on-empathy