LessWrong 2.0 Reader

"Processed" is a political category, not a nutritional one. I suspect that "ultra-processed" was invented because the literal meaning of "processed" was too blatantly at variance with the political job required of it.

I did not say that they didn't want to ban things, I explicitly said "whether to allow certain classes of research at all," and when I said "happy to rely on those levels, I meant that the idea that we should have "BSL-5" is the kind of silly thing that novice EAs propose that doesn't make sense because there literally isn't something significantly more restrictive other than just banning it.

I also think that "nearly all EA's focused on biorisk think gain of function research should be banned" is obviously underspecified, and wrong because of the details. Yes, we all think that there is a class of work that should be banned, but tons of work that would be called gain of function isn't in that class.

Something like 'A Person, who is not a Librarian' would be reasonable. Some people are librarians, and some are not.

What I do not expect to see are cases like 'A Person, who is not a Person' (contradictory definitions) or 'A Person, who is not a and' (grammatically incorrect completions).

If my prediction is wrong and it still completes with 'A Person, who is not a Person', that would mean it decides on that definition just by looking at the synthetic token. It would "really believe" that this token has that definition.

What is the measure of goodness? How does one judge what is the "better" explanation? Without an account of that, what is IBE?

Nitpick: you're talking about the discovery of the structure of DNA; it was already known at that time to be the particle which mediates inheritance IIRC.

I buy this argument.

I buy this argument.

I don't buy mathematical equivalence as an argument against, in this case, since the whole point of the path integral formulation is that it's mathematically equivalent but far simpler conceptually and computationally.

As someone diagnosed with ADHD only recently, as an adult, I can relate to having mental energy that is highly variable, and to having intellectual pursuits which are largely dependent on this energy. It would seem the vast majority of active participants on this website have no kids [LW · GW], so I thought it would be worthwhile to add my perspective, having 3 of my own, in my early 30s. Prior to having kids, I would often stay up until ~2am, deep in some sort of research, and occasionally stay up all night, tracking down and reading articles pertinent to my topic. Often, I would have a "crash" day, sleeping ~14 hours one day of the weekend.

After having kids, inertia kept my habits up for a while, but the all-nighters went away, and the 2am bedtime shifted closer to 11pm. (Total hours spent sleeping, of course, were lower, in spite of this, due to nighttime feedings.) With making up for sleep on the weekend becoming (understandably) less tolerable for my spouse, and having children who wake up ~6am or earlier and require an adult to be awake with them, regularity of time was imposed. But my mental energy still followed its own pattern. Melatonin has been helpful in forcing a "shut down sequence" on my mind before bed.

After being diagnosed and beginning medication, I have (aside from temporary side-effects from medications that were not ideally suited for me) found myself much more able to both apply a consistent level of energy to both professional and personal projects, as well as to keep a consistent bedtime, typically without the need for melatonin to "force" it. It also helps that our youngest is finally sleeping through the night consistently. Recently, I have even been considering waking up ~5am, to get some of the time back, after a night of good sleep. I plan to experiment with this, and see how it goes. 

Behind these changes, it is difficult to disentangle from each other the effects of the child-imposed schedule, the medication, and simply the advance of time/age. How much people should try to change themselves to fit their circumstances, and how much people should try to change their circumstances to fit themselves, remains an open question for me. But those who choose to submit themselves to the needs of others in the ways that family life requires can still find time & energy for their pursuits... At least once the baby is sleeping through the night.

IBE arguments don't exactly work that way. The argument is usually that one person is arguing that some hypothesis H is the best available explanation for the evidence E in question, and if the other person agrees with that, it is hard for them to not also agree that H is probably true (or something like that). Most people already accept IBE as an inference rule. They wouldn't say "Yes, the existence of an external world seems to be the best available explanation for our experiences, but I still don't believe the external world exists" nor "Yes, the best available explanation for the missing cheese is that a mouse ate it, but I still don't believe a mouse ate the cheese". And if they do disagree about H being the best available explanation, they usually feel compelled to argue that some H' is a better explanation.