LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I can't speak for less wrong as a whole, but I looked into this a little bit around that time, and concluded that actually it looked like things were heading in the sensible direction. In particular, towards the end of 2014, the US government stopped funding gain of function research: https://www.nature.com/articles/514411a, and there seemed to be a growing consensus/understanding that it was dangerous. think anyone doing (at least surface level) research in 2014/early 2015 could have reasonably concluded that this wasn't a neglected area. That does leave open the question of what I did wrong in not noticing that the moratorium was lifted 3 years later...

"And if a vaccine is causing these deaths, where are the lawuits?"

Vaccine manufacturers are actually exempt from such lawsuits. 

This is the video, right? You could link to that instead of the removed youtube link.

This is relevant because I read that "FDA requires healthcare providers to report any death after COVID-19 vaccination to VAERS"

How does this square with OpenVaers's claim that only about 1% of injuries are reported?

Without knowing the reporting rate, it's difficult to interpret the data. If we take the 1% and 5869 numbers at face value, it implies that the vaccines killed about 560.000 people, whereas if we assume 100% reporting rate, it looks like they're an amazing preventer of unrelated causes of death. Is there any reasonable way to estimate what % to use?

I'm 65% moving back to us in a month or two but haven't lived there in like 5 years so am not sure what to expect nor where I'd like to go.

I'm mainly optimizing for friend-making/having/meeting (IRL) though I'm not sure how much I care about that since I haven't had much chance to do that for the last few years. though also trees and stuff are nice too

I'm not really sure how to choose between cities in terms of satisfying this. vaguely seems like SF would be cool and have many cool people that would be nice to meet but is also expensive

Any recommendations on figuring out where to stay?

Thanks!

This is an interview with Edward Mills, who is running trials on repurposed drugs. 
https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/featured/whats-the-deal-with-ivermectin-and-covid/

He seems more measured in his assessment of Ivermectin. Ultimately, he thinks there will be a small positive treatment effect, but not one that merits calling it a "miracle drug." 

Contrast that with Bret Weinstein or Pierre Kory, who think this will end the pandemic. 

 

I have a hope that with more practice, this gets better.

Not just practice, but also noticing what other people do differently. For example, I often write long texts, which some people say is already a mistake. But even a long text can be made more legible if it contains  section headers and pictures. Both of them break the visual monotonicity of the text wall. This is why section headers are useful even if they are literally: "1", "2", "3". In some sense, pictures are even better, because too many headers create another layer of monotonicity, which a few unique pictures do not. Which again suggests that having 1 photo, 1 graph, and 1 diagram is better than having 3 photos. I would say, write the text first, then think about which parts can be made clearer by adding a picture.

There is some advice on writing, by Stephen King, or by Scott Alexander.

If you post a garbage, let it be. Write more articles, and perhaps at the end of a year (or a decade) make a list "my best posts" which will not include the garbage.

BTW, whatever you do, you will get some negative response. Your posts on LW are upvoted, so I assume they are not too bad.

Also, writing can be imbalanced. Even for people who only write great texts, some of them are more great and some of them are less great than the others. But if they deleted the worst one, guess what, now some other articles is the worst one... and if you continue this way, you will stop with one or zero articles.

It should be mentioned that Eliezer's last (known) big release Inadequate Equilibria was pretty much a correction of pathological outside-viewing. The thrust can be summed up as "sometimes you can't beat the market, sometimes you can, it's important to know which situation you're in instead of just pathetically assuming the former all of the time."

FWIW, I think that mind uploading is much less likely to work than a purely synthetic AI, at least in reasonably near-term scenarios. I have never read any description of how mind uploading is going to work which doesn't begin by assuming that the hard part (capturing all of the necessary state from an existing mind) is already done.