Posts
Comments
It is true that cloud cover doesn't reduce UV as much as one might think, certainly. But there is a *huge* difference in UV levels between Winter and Summer in Northern Europe. Appopriate levels of sun-cream cannot plausibly be the same regardless of time of year. Time of day also makes a huge difference; if you're not going outside within 2-3 hours either side of the zenith (in theory noon; in practice moves up to 2 hours off this depending on exactly where you live, local time zones, and daylight saving), you can mostly forget about sun-cream.
I think it is pretty conclusive that sunscreen wearing will improve your skin complexion and smoothness in the long term (presumably the effect is not worth having if you never go outside in sunshine, obv).
Whether it has enough material effect to do anything to your risk of dying from malignant melonoma (which is pretty rare anyway), is more of an open question. It might not be a worthwhile trade-off for everyone.
Very interesting.
I have never watched much television (I've had one in my house only before I was 6 years old and then for an 8 month period once as a university student). I do have a netflix subscription and a laptop; this does not cause me an addiction problem. With very rare exceptions I typically watch about half an hour, once every 2-3 days, as an evening activity with my girlfriend.
I do feel I would be better off spending significantly less time aimlessly browsing the internet, though. Computer games I think are generally less bad than television, and while I certainly have at some times in my life spent a lot of time playing (up to 3-4 hours a day), I don't play as much now (perhaps an hour a day?), and don't feel that this is destructive.
I think I disagree with this comment. StS really does have hidden information and tradeoffs, as you don't know what you will encounter later in the run. Very often the value of a card depends on what cards you are offered later, or even which bosses you face.
Bridge is a slightly odd choice of example in your opening section. A single hand of Bridge has very high randomness; it's quite likely the weaker partnership will "win", assuming they have at least basic competence in the game. The advantage of a stronger pair only really becomes apparent over a large number of hands.
The same is true is Poker, even more so. In fact stronger players may not "win" very many more hands than weaker players at all; it's just that when they win they win more and when they lose they lose less.
This isn't true at all in Chess, of course.
Largely tangential to the main comment, but I'm not sure a "lgbtq" sale is a particularly good example of over-the-top wokeness. The only thing I could reasonably see to object to about it is the name, but I fear we are probably stuck with "lgbt######??", bad as it is. And as examples go, that one is actually quite tame- only 5 letters!
doing the dishes and laundry, but also vigorous exercise, talking to strangers, changing baby diapers, public speaking in front of crowds, having difficult conversations, and tackling unfamiliar subject matters
Mmm. I'm with you on all the social ones (strangers, crowds, conversations etc.). I wasn't remotely stressed the first time I changed a nappy- it wasn't difficult at all. I don't remember the first time I did dishes or laundry, but I imagine I was a small child and rather charmed by it all- certainly not stressed (nor have these things ever bothered me). I don't know that I've ever engaged in vigorous exercise.
Our daughter went through a fairly long period of calling cats "dog", and would aggressively correct us if we tried to correct her. Possibly something of the same thing.
R0 is not remotely immutable. It is a function of people's behaviour and physical infrastructure as well as physical properties of the virus (which are themselves likely changing, especially early in a pandemic, as the virus evolves).
It is not affected by levels of exposure, because R0 is defined as the infection rate in the absence of any exposure.
Nice write-up.
I'd also be interested in discussion of treatments that are only meant to relieve symptoms rather than reduce the risk of infection, for example expectorants (e.g. guaifenesin), antihistamines, and decongestants (e.g. phenylephrine).
"After all: the purpose of copyright law is, to a very large extent, to preserve the livelihood of intellectual property creators, who would otherwise have limited ability to profit from their own works due to the ease of reproducing it once made. Modern AI systems are threatening this, whether or not they technically violate copyright."
Yes, this is 100% backwards. The purpose of copyright law is to incetivise the production of art so that consumers of art can benefit from it. It incidentally protects artists livelihoods, but that is absolutely not it's main purpose.
We only want to protect the livelihood of artists because humans enjoy consuming art- the consumption is the ultimate point. We don't have laws protecting the livelihood of people who throw porridge at brick walls because we don't value that activity. We also don't have laws protecting the livelihood of people who read novels, because while lots of people enjoy doing that, other people don't value the activity.
If we can get art produced without humans invovled, that is 100% a win for society. In the short term it puts a few people out of work, which is unfortunate, but short-lived. The fact that AI art is vastly more efficiently-produced than human art is a good thing, that we should be embracing.
I think this doesn't work even with time-ordering. A spam bot will probably get to the post first in any case. A bot that simply upvotes everything will gain a huge amount of trust. Even a bot paid only to upvote specific posts will still gain trust if some of those posts are actually good, which it can "use" to gain credibility in its upvotes for the rest of the posts (which may not be good).
I'm OK with 3 out of 4, but I have serious issues with this:
We value triumphing over stagnation to achieve vitality.
I don't think this is a univeral value at all. This looks like valuing change as a fundamental good, and I certainly don't do this- quite the reverse. All other things being equal I'd much rather things stayed the same. Obviously I'd like bad things to change to good things, but that seems to be covered by the other three virtues. Stagnation, all other things being equal, is a good thing.
If I had two buttons, to give me $1000 of consumption today, or $1001 of consumption in thirty years (inflation adjusted of course), I would press the second button.
This sounds nuts to me. Firstly, what about risk? You might be dead in 30 years. We might have moved to a different economy where money is worthless. You might personally not value money (or not value the kind of things you can get with money) as much. Admittedly there's also some upside risk, but it's clearly lower than the downside.
We're ignoring investment possibilities, of course. But even then, in any case, if you have £1000 now, you can use it to buy something that would last more than 30 years and benefit you over that time.
Re: reciprocal altruism. Given the vast swathe of human prehistory, virtually anything not absurdly complex will be "tried" occasionally. It only takes a small number of people whose brains happen to wired to "tit-for-tat" to get started, and if they out-compete people who don't cooperate (or people who help everyone regardless of behaviour towards them), the wiring will quickly become universal.
Humans do, as it happens, explicitly copy successful strategies on an individual level. Most animals don't though, and this has minimal relevance to human niceness, which is almost certainly largely evolutionary.
I did not experience any changes like this at all when my daughter was born. When a child myself, I loved younger children, but as an adult I've not been very keen on young children, and I'm not particularly attached to my daughter either.
Niceness in humans has three possible explanations:
- Kin altruisim (basically the explanation given above)- in the ancestral environment, humans were likely to be closely related to most of the people they interacted with, giving them genetic "incentive" to be at least somewhat nice. This obviously doesn't help in getting a "nice" AGI- it won't share genetic material with us and won't share a gene-replication goal anyway.
- Reciprocal altruism- humans are social creatures, tuned to detect cheating and ostratice non-nice people. This isn't totally irrelevant- there is a chance a somewhat dangerous AI may have use for humans in achieving its goals, but basically, if the AI is worried that we might decide it's not nice and turn it off or not listen to it, then we didn't have that big a problem in the first place. We're worried about AGIs sufficiently powerful that they can trivially outwit or overpower humans, so I don't think this helps us much.
- Group selection. This is a bit controversial and probably least important of the three. At any rate, it obviously doesn't help with an AGI.
So in conclusion, human niceness is no reason to expect an AGI to be nice, unfortunately.
I hypothesise that the more details a prompt contains, the more likely DALL-E is to throw a wobbly and produce something almost totally random. But honestly, I'm very impressed with the outcome of most of these prompts. The picachu eating a hamburger is the only one of the above that really "failed", and a couple of the outputs picked up about half the requested details.
At a certain point, she had learned that hands are good for holding things, but she would only grasp a toy if you literally put it in her hand.
Newborn babies do in fact have a grip-reflex: this does not need to be learnt initially. Put anything in the palm of a newborn and they will grasp it. I think there is a tendancy for this reflex to be lost prior to re-learning how to grasp things consciously.
There will definitely be another wave next winter- I don't think anyone disputes that. I think it's very likely to be somewhat lower in terms of case count- how much depends a lot on what new variants arise. I think it's almost certainly going to quite a bit less bad in terms of hospitilisations/deaths (and this winter will be a lot less bad than last).
Masks definitely work. But I don't consider having to wear a mask whenever I'm in the company of another person to be remotely a price worth paying for a significantly reduced chance of getting a bit of a sniffle, which all covid really amounts to for a young tri-vaccinated person these days. So I don't wear masks, even when legally required to.