LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I've just started my 11yr old tech minded son reading the Worm web serial by John Macrae (free and online, longer than Harry potter series).  It's a bit grim/dark and violent, but an amazing and compelling sci-fi meditation on superheroes and personal struggles.  A more brutal and sophisticated world build along lines of popular 'my hero academia' anime that my boys watched compulsively.  1000's of fanfics too.

Stories from Larry Niven's "known space" universe.  Lots of fun overcoming-challenges short stories and novellas that revolve around interesting physics or problems or ideas.  And the follow up Man-Kzin War series by various invited authors have some really great stories too with a strong martial bent that will likely appeal to most boys.

At that age I read and loved Dune, The stars my destination (aka Tiger Tiger, a sci fi riff on Comte de Monte Christo), Enders Game.  I think Terry Pratchett humor needs a more sophisticated adult knowledge base, with culture references that are dating badly.

My 11yr old loved the Expanse TV series, though I haven't given them the books to read yet and I can't recommend the transhumanism anime Pantheon on Amazon highly enough - its one of best sci fi series of all time.

All good to introduce more adult problems and thinking to kids in an exciting context.

Have you tried other techniques to deal with nightmares?

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Is there a reason you are thinking of to expect that transition to happen at exactly the tail end of the distribution of modern human intelligence?  There don't seem, as far as I'm aware, to have been any similar transitions in the evolution of modern humans from our chimp-like ancestors.  If you look at proxies, like stone tools from homo-habilis to modern humans you see very slow improvements that slowly, but exponentially, accelerate in the rate of development.  

I suspect that most of that improvement, once cultural transition took off at all, happens because of the ways in which cultural/technological advancements feed into each other (in part due to economic gains meaning higher populations with better networks which means accelerated discovery which means more economic gains and higher better connected populations), and that is hard to disentagle from actual intelligence improvements.  So I suppose its still possible that you could have these exponential progress in technology feeding itself while at the same time actual intelligence is hitting a transition to a regime of diminishing returns, and it would be hard to see the latter in the record.

Another decent proxy for intelligence is brain size, though.  If intelligence wasn't actually improving the investment in larger brains just wouldn't pay off evolutionarily, so I expect that when we see brain size increases in the fossil record we are also seeing intelligence increasing at at least a similar rate.  Are there transitions in the fossil record from fast to slow changes in brain size in our lineage?  That wouldn't demonstrate diminishing returns intelligence (could be diminishing returns in the use of intelligence relative to the other metabolic costs, which is different from just particular changes to genes just not impacting intelligence as much as in the past), but it would at least be consistent with it.

Anyway, I'm not entirely sure where to look for evidence of the transition you seem to expect.  If such transitions were common in the past it would increase my credence in one in the near future.  But apriori it seems unlikely to me that there is such a transition at exactly the tail of the modern human intelligence distribution.

Hm, I expect the advantage of far UV is that many places where people want to spend time indoors are not already well-ventilated, or that it'd be much more expensive to modify existing hvac setups vs just sticking a lamp on a wall.

I'm not at all familiar with the literature on safety; my understanding (based on this [LW · GW]) is that no, we're not sure and more studies would be great, but there's a vicious cycle/chicken-and-egg problem where the lamps are expensive, so studies are expensive, so there aren't enough studies, so nobody buys lamps, so lamp companies don't stay in business, so lamps are expensive.

It's not just MedARC, there's e.g. an entire subfield at the intersection of neuroscience and AI, see e.g. The neuroconnectionist research programme. Hundreds, if not thousands of papers, have been published at this point. You can critique their methodologies, assumptions, etc. (indeed, there are lively debates within the subfield itself), but pointing at MedARC and trying to infer how promising the whole endeavour is just from that is kind of unserious/unaware.

You mention in another comment that your kid reads the encyclopaedia for fun, in which case I don't think The Martian would be too complex, no? 

I'm also reminded of how I started perusing the encyclopaedia for fun at age 7. At first I understood basically nothing (English isn't my native language), but I really liked certain pictures and diagrams and keep going back to them wanting to learn more, realising that I'd comprehend say 20% more each time, which taught me to chase exponential growth in comprehension. Might be worth teaching that habit. 

“My experience may not be applicable to you.”

Thanks for the note - my experience has been exactly the opposite. A classic case of the law of equal and opposite advice :)

Had something of a similar reaction but the note about far-UV not having the same problems as other UV serilization (i.e., also harmful to humans) I gather the point is about locality. UV in ducks will kill viri in the air system. But the spread of an airborn illness goes host-to-target before it passed through the air system.

As such seems that while the in-duct UV solution would help limit spread, it's not going to do much to clean the air in the room while people are in it exhailing, coughing or sneezing, talking.... 

I suspect it does little to protect the people directly next/in front of a contagious person but probably good for those practicing that old 6 foot rule (or whatever the arbitray distancing rule was).

Just my guess though.

Apologies for the soldier mindset react, I pattern-matched to some more hostile comment. Communication is hard.