Open and Welcome Thread – June 2021

Helion has now raised $500 million for a net-positive reactor with a target date of 2024.

this would represent perhaps the weirdest possible timeline for fusion development I can imagine: that a public startup had achieved QE > 1 while people are still mocking fusion as forever decades out, and for well over a year they've just... chosen not to tell anybody.

I mean, it's a really weird timeline if they saved this announcement up because it'd make a bigger splash post-covid.

Sense of smell was something that was reported for patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 on the other hand I'm not aware of any similar reports for loss of smell for vaccines.

One of the key reasons why I used free text instead of a poll in Which rationalists faced significant side-effects from COVID-19 vaccination? [LW · GW] was that having free text makes it more likely that unforseen symptoms like loss of smell get reported then if I just use a poll. Exposing more people to that post to report side effects is one straightforward thing you can do if you a bit worried.

Having someone else proofread it, or just generally give style feedback, is often quite valuable. You can post in the Open Thread with a link to a Google Doc, or you can ping me on Intercom, and I can take a look and suggest any obvious improvements that stand out.

Also, there is value to independently posting a link to your essay via other non-LW channels. E.g. sharing it on Facebook or Discord or wherever you might find others interested in it.

I have heard the following hack mentioned (not sure where - it might have been in response to a similar question, or an observation):

Start your own blog and write stuff on it. (While this advice might not take into account the cost, or explain how to mitigate it, it seems to suggest that a) writing helps you at getting better at writing, b) it can be a way of getting feedback in order to improve.)

This has the following advantage: (unless you were to implement such a thing, somehow) no one can downvote stuff on your blog. (Even if you accidentally post a draft.*)

*This is in fact my main advice: Avoid accidentally posting a draft. (If you're not sure about the interface:

• don't draft it here
• 'Name' the post something like 'testing saving draft of post on LW' (and remember to remove that before actually posting it)

I have undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics. I taught myself business, entrepreneurship, computer science, machine learning, web development and Chinese. I have run my own consumer hardware startup.

The Chinese word for kinetochore is 动粒. If you go to the English Wikipedia page on kinetochores it's all in English. If you go to the Chinese Baidupedia page on 动粒 the first sentence lists the English word "kinetochore". That's because English is the lingua franca of science.

Learning Chinese because you love China and Chinese culture is a stupendous idea. Learning Chinese because you want to break out of your Western cultural assumptions is a great idea. Learning Chinese because China is the center of the world [LW · GW] is perfectly reasonable. Learning Chinese because you want to advance your scientific career is inefficient.

Learning Chinese is harder than learning chemistry. It is harder than learning business and entrepreneurship. Learning Chinese has a difficulty comparable to maybe 4 years of full-time technical training in physics. That's twice as long as a Master's Degree in computer science. If you're already planning to get a graduate degree in molecular biology then learning Chinese too basically amounts to doubling your workload. You could get bigger bang for your buck teaching yourself to program.

I expect that the biggest use of Chinese would be if you wanted to do business in China or with Chinese companies. If you want to do this then learning even a little Chinese is a really good idea (though somehow not mandatory). If you are not interested in either of these things then Chinese is unlikely to help you (directly) in career success.

Learning Chinese should be thought of as part of a liberal education. You should learn Chinese for the same reason you should learn about fiction, art, history, physics, anthropology, math and psychology—because it broadens your understanding of the world. This sort of thing is very useful, but it can be hard to pin down exactly how it's useful.

If you're willing to throw years of effort into something with no (immediate) career payoff then yeah, you should learn Chinese. But you should not learn Chinese (just) so you can read biology papers written in Chinese.

Yeah, I largely agree with lsusr. According to my mom (whose career has focused on second language acquisition and Chinese-American cultural exchange), basically no student gets past second year Chinese at a university level unless they're majoring it. Like, even business majors who plan to work in China. When I took university-level Chinese it really shocked me how much harder it was than other languages I'd learned – after nine months of five hours a week of quality university-level instruction, reading-wise I could barely understand books aimed at toddlers, and speaking-wise I could theoretically order food in a restaurant but wouldn't be able to understand any responses to what I said.

And it would be harder than other languages even if you were just learning to speak, but learning to read basically doubles the difficulty (if not more). My mom is quite fluent in speaking and listening – she worked for years as a Mandarin-English medical interpreter, and lived and worked in China (and Japan, which uses some Chinese characters) for a decade long before Google Translate existed – but she's almost entirely illiterate in Chinese. Many if not most people in the village where my dad grew up were illiterate as well. 

Point being, your question was whether it's worth it for you to learn (to read) Chinese, and I think the answer to that is no for almost anyone in almost any situation. Not because it wouldn't be great to know Chinese, but because the time investment is so shockingly huge.

I thought a bit more about it and at the rate that automatic translation gets better I would expect that it's no problem to read biology papers in 1-2 decades if they are written in Chinese and you don't know Chinese.

China's sciences are not very good, and relatedly most of those papers are likely of extremely low quality. I know Chinese, and it's a wonderful language, but I wouldn't recommend learning it for that purpose. My 2c

I like to think that depictions of good life after AGI are just called slice of life stories. Just find a story about three friends baking a cake and add "also, most of the production of ingredients was handled by robots." Any story that doesn't hinge on someone being poor or in danger is valid post-scarcity. This eliminates a huge fraction of all stories we tell, but a much smaller fraction of the stories you'd actually like to have happen to you.

I'm not sure of any slice of life stories that actual do have the "also, robots" conceit, though. Maybe Questionable Content?

Everyone says the Culture novels are the best example of an AI utopia, but even though it's a cliché to mention the culture, it's a cliché for a good reason. Don't start with Consider Phlebas (the first one), but otherwise just dive in. My other recommendation is the Commonwealth Saga by Peter F Hamilton and the later Void Trilogy - it's not on the same level of writing quality as the Culture, although still a great story, but it depicts an arguably superior world to that of the Culture - with more unequivocal support of life extension and transhumanism.

The Commonwealth has effective immortality, a few downsides of it are even noticeable (their culture and politics is a bit more stagnant than we might like), but there's never any doubt at all that it's worth it, and it's barely commented on in the story. The latter-day Void Trilogy Commonwealth is probably the closest a work of published fiction has come to depicting a true eudaemonic utopia that lacks the problems of the culture [LW · GW].

o_1 = (observed: flat, black, with red speck)

p_1 = p(slow given o_1) = 0.5

o_2 = (observed: article claiming p_1 = 0.25)

p_2 = p(slow given o_1, o_2) = ?

I wouldn't call this trivial, it depends on the particulars (which is why in the notation above, there's a contradiction around the value of p_1). The easiest resolution involves following up on the article by looking for data/causal models. Like using the computer, and acquiring evidence.

There is a private FB event I am invited to and I can invite you to. I don't think we're friends on FB, so if you have FB, you can add me, and then I can invite you: https://www.facebook.com/oliver.habryka/