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These are some of the signs that my 27 month old late-talker has invented:
-‘sit here’: taps where he wants me to sit
-‘I want a banana’: points to a picture of banana in a book, rubs his tummy then points to the fruit bowl
-‘I want to go outside’ fetches his shoes, points to his feet then runs to the door
-‘give it to me’ opens and closes hands
-‘the bin needs emptying’ runs to the kitchen bin then points to a picture of a wheelie bin
-‘please sweep up the food that I threw on the floor’ points to the dustpan and brush, then points to the food on the floor, then makes a pretend sweeping motion with his hand
Letting him make up his own gestures is much easier than attempting to teach sign language to a toddler who is too busy playing to pay any attention.
That’s what the r/slatestarcodex subreddit is for.
A few thoughts…
Have schools dropped all the fun activities so that they can spend more time catching up on the lessons missed during covid?
The teen suicide rate was declining over the 90s and early 00s. Then the No Child Left Behind act came into effect in 2003. Then the suicide rate gradually started increasing again. It is highly plausible that the no child left behind act would cause an increase in suicides, but I’m not sure why it would cause a gradual increase over many years rather than a sudden jump in suicide rates?
Correction: Actually gas stoves are a significant source of pollution. See here https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04707
##AGI might not be conscious
###I don’t think that feedforward networks can be conscious
Integrated information theory does not allow for conscious feedforward networks.
###There is no good reason to expect AGI to be a recurrent neural network
Transformer models like GPT are basically feedforward networks [to do: check that this is correct]. Recurrent neural networks have had some successes but they are difficult to train. Whereas feedforward networks can be trained quite effectively using back-propagation. Biological neural networks are unable to implement back-propagation and instead rely on a variant of Hebbian Learning. To implement a recurrent neural network trained via Hebbian Learning on a computer wouldn’t necessarily be the best use of computational resources. AGI may very well be a feedforward network trained using back-prop.
###Anthropics All of human consciousness is about to be massively dwarfed by an enormous explosion of superintelligent, highly conscious AIs. And by some incredible co-incidence I happen to be human???
It just seems so implausible. An explosion of unconscious or minimally conscious superintelligent AIs is much more plausible.
I still think that the dopamine system is involved in psychosis.
It is quite difficult for the brainstem to reward accurate perception. If dopamine production by the brainstem is in any way dependent on information that is coming in from the neocortex rather than from the brainstem’s own sensory areas then there is the potential for things to go wrong.
One part of the neocortex might get dopamine for detecting danger, and it can rewire itself to maximise its dopamine reward by hallucinating evil spirits.
Another part of the brain might get dopamine when social status increases, and it can rewire itself to maximise its dopamine reward by finding evidence that said individual is the messiah.
Another part of the brain might get dopamine whenever it comes across a really interesting hypothesis. Of course, the most interesting hypothesis is rarely the correct one.
When my little one was a newborn he was just as happy being handled by strangers as he was with mum and dad. It was around four months that he started showing a preference for mum and dad and disliking strangers. I’m sure that he could recognise us long before the four month mark though.
Geese need to imprint from birth, whereas there is no immediate need for a baby who is not yet mobile to imprint on it’s parents. So if babies have an ‘imprinting window’ then it probably occurs later, after a baby has learnt to reliably recognise familiar faces in spite of changes in make-up or clothing.
Aside: Babies prefer to look at faces while still in the womb https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/articles/2017/babies-preference-for-faces-begins-before-birth-/.
Mother geese don’t change their appearance much over their lifetime. I doubt that a chick ever needs to update its mommy thought assessor.
The ‘my kid’ thought assessor in humans is easily fooled by puppies and baby rabbits. Spend a large proportion of your waking hours around a cute animal and your brainstem assumes that it is your child.
I think that psychosis can be characterised as a failure of inner alignment.
Let me explain with two examples.
- We all seek status, but we obviously don’t have a genetically hardwired status classifier in the brainstem. Instead the rest of the brain figures out what our social status is. When something boosts our estimated status the ventral tegmental area in the brainstem sends out a dopamine reward signal. If the brain’s inner alignment mechanisms fail then the rest of the brain maximises its dopamine reward by convincing itself that it is the messiah.
- The parts of the brain which detect threats get rewarded whenever they detect a threat so that they have an incentive to be vigilant to threats. If inner alignment fails then the threat detector circuits try to maximise their dopamine reward by hallucinating ghosts or snakes or whatever.
Many antipsychotics are dopamine antagonists. Dopamine antagonists don’t fix the underlying alignment failure but they trade off less psychosis for more apathy.
Brilliant article. I’m also curious about the economics side of things.
I found an article which estimates that nuclear power would be two orders of magnitude cheaper if the regulatory process were to be improved, but it doesn’t explain the calculations which led to the ‘two orders of magnitude’ claim. https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2022/nuclear-wasted-why-the-cost-of-nuclear-energy-is-misunderstood
I would have thought that toasters would cause more indoor air pollution than gas stoves? I’m not sure if this is the most accurate way to measure air pollution but toasters smell fume-y whereas gas hobs don’t.
I also wish to point out that the flame on a gas hob is blue all the time, except for the first second or two after ignition. Whereas the bunsen burners we used at school were put on a sooty yellow flame much of the time. I wonder whether chemistry teachers have an unusually high rate of asthma?
Aversive experiences are generally more intense than pleasant experiences. Imagine you have a choice between : a) 10 seconds of experiencing the greatest pleasure that you have ever had in your life followed by one second of the most excruciating pain that you have ever experienced or b) 11 seconds spent unconscious
I think that most people would choose option b.
Similarly, I think that most people have lives that are worth living, but there are some people with severe depression whose lives have extremely negative utility. Creating happy lives is a good thing, but I reckon that creating a life that has a 90% chance of being happy and a 10% chance of having severe depression would be a net negative in expected utility.
I put a towel inside my backpack to prevent the contents from rattling. I do up the straps quite tight and if needs be I put socks around the straps so they don’t chafe against my neck. If the pocket where I keep my phone and keys is not tight enough to stop my keys from jangling then I stuff a flannel in as well. I also put hairbands around the zippers to prevent jangling noises. I also try to finish the contents of my water bottle in one go because I don’t like to have a half full bottle sploshing around.
OK, 25 is a bit ridiculous. But I still think it's not unreasonable to believe that medieval peasants were less intelligent than, say, modern day sub-saharan Africans. Infectious diseases and malnutrition were rife, lead acetate was used to sweeten wines and foods and mercury was prescribed as a cure-all for everything from syphilus to teething.
Here’s another reason why knitting may have taken so long to invent.
IQ scores in most Western countries have been rising by about 0.3 points per year over the course of the 20th century. If we assume that average IQ was stable until about 1750 when the industrial revolution began and increased by 0.3 points per year after that then the average IQ of people living before 1750 would have been about 28 by the standards of someone living in the year 1990 (I use 1990 as the benchmark because IQ scores have actually been decreasing over the past few decades).
The Flynn effect presumably started before there were IQ tests to measure it.
Prenatal and early childhood malnutrition generally lower IQ, as does catching certain diseases in pregnancy or early childhood. Child labour might be bad for IQ too - not sure about this one though because a lot of modern schools are basically equivalent to child labour but being in school is not generally thought to lower IQ. So knocking a population out of Malthusian equilibrium would be expected to result in IQ rises.
Related: here is an essay about how the Black Death may have triggered the Rennaissance by reducing Europe’s population enough to temporarily knock everyone out of Malthusian equilibrium. https://www.nhd.org/sites/default/files/Franke_Senior_Paper.pdf
Why did babies evolve to wake so frequently at night? Did frequent night waking have some evolutionary benefit to babies that outweighed the risks of sleep deprived parents?
I don’t know if there’s been much research into the long term effects of sleep training? The best information that I could find was this article https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220322-how-sleep-training-affects-babies.
Can we please be clear that sleep training and locking kids in their rooms should only be done as a last resort. And if you do lock your children in their bedrooms then at least leave a potty in their rooms.
I have some bad childhood memories of bedtime battles and spending hours on end lying in bed pretending to be asleep and having to face the terror of waking up from a nightmare alone because I didn’t want to get told off for being awake in the night.
Here is the secret to successful co-sleeping: Get a large playpen that can fit a double mattress. Then once the baby is asleep you can slip out and go to the loo/have sex/get a glass of water.
More tips:
If the baby needs changing after a night feed then first roll him onto his tummy, then change him, then roll him back onto his back. My boy would usually sleep through nappy changes so long as he was changed on his tummy.
Put the baby to bed in leggings rather than sleepsuits, so that nappy leaks can be dealt with without waking the baby.
There are two plausible ways to cut sleep duration without harming cognition: increasing the proportion of slow wave sleep that is spent in deep sleep and reducing REM sleep.
Slow wave sleep is needed for synaptic homeostasis (e.g. see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1087079205000420). There are evolutionary trade-offs between time spent awake, time spent in light sleep, and time spent in deep sleep. Deep sleep is more restorative than light sleep but an animal is more likely to be awakened from predators in deep sleep. Humans sleep less than other primates but spend more time in deep sleep than other primates - maybe because our ancestors took turns to stay awake and watch for predators at night?
I’m not so sure what the function of REM sleep is. Maybe something something emotion learning something something? There are cases of people on antidepressants going months with no REM sleep. There are also cases of people on antidepressants who say they have no emotions so I doubt that it’s possible to cut REM sleep without side effects.
I used to think that my Dad was a bit bizarre because he washed everything before he put it in the dishwasher. Now I know that he’s not alone.
I hand wash everything but for me it would be
- Lick the dishes clean before putting them in the dishwasher.
Do you have a reference for the claim that Y-chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve lived around the same time? The only information that I could find online was a bunch of studies that found various estimated ages for mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam that all disagree wildly with each other. Most of them have error bars of at least 50,000 years.
I wonder how often the CoCo point is attained in real life transferable utility bargaining games.
Eg. Do most houses sell for half way between the seller’s walk away price and the buyer’s walk away price? Do most employees earn a wage that is half way between the employee’s walk away wage and the employer’s walk away wage (at least when the employee’s walk away wage is above the legal minimum wage)?
On second thoughts...
If someone asks this AI to translate natural language into code, who is to say that the resulting code won't contain viruses?
Suppose that an AI does not output anything during it's training phase. Once it has been trained it is given various prompts. Each time it is given a prompt, it outputs a text or image response. Then it forgets both the prompt it was given and the response it outputted.
How might this AI get out of the box?
70% of 84 hunter-gatherers studied in 2013 slept less than 7 hours per day, with 46% sleeping less than 6 hours.
The study in question also found that the hunter gatherers spent 8-9 hours in bed each night. Sleep duration was measured using those Fitbit trackers that always tell you that you only slept four hours when you’re sure you slept about eight hours. If you move around in your sleep then the tracker assumes that you are awake.
I was diagnosed with autism when I was about four years old. About a year later the diagnosis was changed to Asperger’s Syndrome.
Pros of having a formal diagnosis:
N/A
Cons of having a formal diagnosis:
If you want to have children one day then you will face scrutiny from social services. Do not under any circumstances pursue a formal diagnosis if you are female, intend to have children and live in the UK.
If you are still in school then you might get SEN support. This means that you will receive BS therapy once in a while. It also means that your school might get extra funding if they exaggerate your deficits enough and keep you out of any gifted programs that might make you look too high functioning. If you decide not to take notes because your lessons entirely consist of the teacher reading out the contents of the textbook and you have a copy of the textbook then you may get a taxpayer-funded scribe to take notes for you. There will also be extra legal complications if your parents want to homeschool you.
You are legally protected from discrimination at work due to your autism. This is a con rather than a pro because in the Nash equilibrium nobody wants to hire you. If you end up unemployed then when you apply for universal credit you will be told that you have to apply for disability benefits instead because you have autism. Of course you are not disabled enough to qualify for disability benefits so you end up with nothing.
Once you have a formal diagnosis your qualifications have less signalling value because potential employers assume that you had extra time for your exams.
Your parents can obtain legal guardianship over you. So for example if you donate money to a charity and your parents believe that the charity is run by scammers and that all the money goes to corrupt African dictators then your parents can declare you to be incapable of managing your own finances and gain control over your bank accounts.
I wouldn’t attempt to work out whether a baby needs to sleep from how long they’ve been awake. A baby’s sleep needs actually vary a lot from day to day. I have always just fed my son to sleep whenever he was yawning or rubbing his eyes. When he was a newborn he would get anywhere from 8 to 16 hours sleep over a 24 hour period and his wake windows could be anything from 30 minutes to 12 hours. He tends to sleep a lot during developmental leaps, then at the end of the leap he’ll hit a bunch of milestones and go back to his usual pattern of going the whole day on a couple of power naps.
I’ve never used a Snoo myself but here is an occupational therapist’s view of the Snoo https://www.otdude.com/editorial-opinion/an-occupational-therapists-honest-opinion-on-the-snoo-bassinet-with-some-research/.
‘Justice’ has got to be one of the worst commonsense concepts.
It is used to ‘prove’ the existence of free will and it is the basis of a lot of suboptimal political and economic decision making.
Taboo ‘justice’ and talk about incentive alignment instead.
This is my proposed solution:
I set aside a fixed amount of money per year that I am prepared to spend on healthcare. At the end of every year I rate my quality of life for that year on a scale of -10 to 10.
If my rating is 10 I give all the money to the doctor. If my rating is 2 I give 2/10 of the money to the doctor and burn 8/10 of the money. If my rating is -3 then I burn all the money and the doctor has to pay me 3/10 of my budget, which I then burn.
If I score 4 or less on the GPCOG (which is NOT to be administered by the doctor) then my quality of life rating is automatically set to -10. For context, the GPCOG is widely used to screen for dementia.
You might be right. I forgot that the OP is in the US, where healthcare is absurdly expensive.
If you are on an extremely high income then the health benefits might be worth it.
Otherwise go to Lidl or Aldi on a Saturday night when a lot of the meat has 30% off stickers. Buy whatever cuts are cheapest. Freeze the meat as soon as you get home. Then buy kale, broccoli and frozen mixed veg to eat with the meat and splash out on swimming pool fees or a day out hiking or trail running or mountain biking or wild swimming.
Don't make the mistake that I made when I was pregnant. I spent too much time planning parenting strategies years down the line and not enough time researching breastfeeding, and I ended up struggling with a tongue tied baby who would not latch.
Before the baby arrives make sure that, as a minimum, you know the following:
- The side-lying, laid-back, koala hold, cradle hold, cross cradle hold, dangle and clutch hold nursing positions.
- the flipple technique
- how to cup feed a baby
- how to use nipple shields
- how to use a breast pump
- how to do breast compressions
- how many wet nappies a baby should have per day
- how wet a nappy has to be to qualify as wet
- that you should never hold the back of a baby's head while nursing even if the midwife tells you to.
The best online resources are La Leche League, Kellymom and Analytical Armadillo.
Imagine that the graph of IQ as a function of parameter p is left-skewed.
Then natural selection is going to produce a population in which values of p are clustered around the optimum with more values slightly below the optimum than slightly above the optimum. In such a population, genes which increase p would paradoxically appear to be associated with both high iq and extremely low iq.
You appear to be very knowledgeable about vaping. Can I ask you for some personal advice?
My husband tried to switch to e-cigs on several occasions. Every time he was back to smoking within a couple of days. He has been using cheap clearomiser e-cigs, and he says the vape liquid leaks into his mouth and leaves a nasty taste, and I suspect that the nicotine content of his vape liquid is too low.
I have been trying to persuade him to try buproprion or more expensive e-cigs or vape liquid with a higher nicotine content.
These are the replies that I usually get: 'I can quit without bupropion. I am smoking at the moment because of stressful event X, and I will quit on date Y when my life will be less stressful' 'I will have the same problems with the expensive e-cigs' 'I'm not really addicted to nicotine. I am just a puffer and I don't draw the smoke deep into my lungs. I only smoke to keep my hands busy/deal with stress/keep me awake at work.'
I won't deny that homework should be banned, school uniforms should be eliminated and school should be optional, but it must be remembered being in school has a few advantages.
- In school there are usually explicit rules and predictable punishments, whereas at home there are usually unwritten rules and unpredictable punishments.
- Most countries ban corporal punishment at school but allow corporal punishment at home.
- Schools provide a daycare service, although their inflexible start and finish times make them poorly optimised for this purpose.
By the way, if you want to really understand Pythagoras's theorem, Cut The Knot has a collection of 118 proofs.
As for the 'tricky seedlings' example, another question would be:
I would expect plants whose seeds are dispersed by animals to be more k-selected and have less 'tricky' seedlings compared with plants whose seeds are dispersed by the wind. Can I think of any counterexamples?
For the question about mould and seedlings, there are some interesting spin-off questions that you could come up with e.g.
I heard speculation somewhere that endothermy may have evolved to protect against fungal infections. If heat is good at killing off fungi, why do compost heaps work better when they are insulated so that they get hot on the inside?
My (highly speculative!) hypothesis is that the emergence of these variant viruses arises in cases of chronic infection during which the immune system places great pressure on the virus to escape immunity and the virus does so by getting really good at getting into cells. 11/19
That’s plausible, but doesn’t explain why the chronic infections hadn’t done this earlier, and the English strain doesn’t escape immunity in this way (and we don’t know about the others) so I notice it doesn’t feel like it explains things.
Here is a National Geographic article on how new therapies may have allowed chronic patients to be kept alive for longer and with higher viral loads, and may have influenced viral evolution. In particular, the article cites a preprint on Medrxiv which finds that convalescent plasma therapy leads to rapid changes in spike proteins and to the evolution of antibody resistance.
In my experience, a day off is most likely to improve energy levels and motivation if it is spent doing outdoor exercise.
On the other hand, spending one hour a day on outdoor exercise is more effective than spending one day a week on exercise.
Or is the author a text predicting neural network which has no visuospatial capacities and sucks at geometry?
I'm trying to find out which associations are or aren't universal.
Do you associate higher pitched sounds with paler colours and feel them more in your extremities? Do you associate lower pitched sounds with darker colours and feel them more in your core?
When you look at a visually cluttered scene, does your inner speech get louder in order to compete for your attention? If not, how would you make sense of the metaphor 'a loud shirt'?
Would you be more likely to associate thickly textured music with the sensation of being under a duvet than thinly textured music?
Do you automatically associate some sounds with roughness and some sounds with smoothness?
When people talk about something having a 'clear sound', do you imagine it being translucent?
When you hear a very loud and discordant chord, is the pain localised to a particular part of your body depending on the pitch and timbre of the note, do you experience pain that is not really localised anywhere, or is it not painful at all?
All but three of your definitions are exactly the same as the definitions that I would give.
Split notes are what novice brass players produce. To hammer a note is to play a note that is loud and sudden and short. Music is flowing if every note feels like it is the natural continuation of the notes before it. So an unanticipated discord or pause or change in volume will break the flow, but if it feels like the music is building up to a sudden change then the flow will be broken by not having this sudden change.
Here's one thing I've always found puzzling:
Everyone seems to knows what it means when a music teacher describes a passage as 'flowing' or 'full of energy' or 'treacly', or describes a note to be 'hard' or 'soft' or 'bright' or 'split'. Yet some people say that they don't have synaesthesia and there are even people who say they have no imagery at all.
Are there people who instinctively know what a 'bright sound' is yet don't automatically visualise such sounds as being brightly coloured? Or who instinctively know what a 'hammering note' is without feeling any physical pain when they hear one?
The paper Parasite prevalence and the worldwide distribution of cognitive ability by Christopher Epping et al suggests that the Flynn effect was partly due to a reduction in exposure to parasites and infectious diseases during pregnancy and childhood.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2010.0973
I agree. I mean, when would you say that the existential catastrophe happens in the following scenario?
Suppose that technological progress starts to slow down and, as a result, economic growth fails to keep pace with population growth. Living standards decline over the next several decades until the majority of the world's population is living in extreme poverty. For a few thousand years the world remains in a malthusian trap. Then there is a period of rapid technological progress for a few hundred years which allows a significant portion of the population to escape poverty and acheive a comfortable standard of living. Then technological progress starts to slow down again. The whole cycle repeats many times until some fluke event causes human extinction.
How are these percentages to be interpreted?
Municipalities spend the most on the cost item "environment" (63%). Environment is followed by "culture, sports and recreation" (56%) and "administration” (44%).
In the definition FB(X)↔□(X(FB)) , what does FB(X) mean and what does X(FB) mean?
Here is my list:
1. Peltor Optime 3M earmuffs. Without them I would not be able to work, vacuum the house, be in the same room
as a spinning washing machine or allow my husband to control the volume on the TV.
2. Poundland earplugs. They block more noise than any other brand that I've tried.3. Tangle Teezer hair brushes. As a child, if anyone tried to touch my hair I would run away or, if cornered,
kick and bite the aggressor. I refused to brush my hair or to cut off my dreadlocks myself. Instead, every
time my hair needed to be cut or washed I would be physically restrained and I would be screaming during
the whole procedure. Tangle Teezer brushes solved the whole problem.
4. Poundworld has closed down but my list wouldn't be complete without mentioning Poundworld comfort bras.
Poundworld boys socks were also great; if you turned them inside out they were actually more comfortable
than many expensive brands of seamless socks.
5. Primark full briefs. They are more comfortable than Asda full briefs.
6. Any smartphone, e-reader or other portable boredom-reducing device.
I can't fall asleep with earplugs in. I wear earplugs and earmuffs at work, but my job involves fast-paced assembly work which provides a lot of tactile feedback to distract me from the itchy earplugs.
Also be aware any earplugs marketed as being 'for sleep' or 'for nuisance noise' block out so little noise that you are better off sleeping on your side with a pillow over your ear. Look for earplugs with an SNR of at least 30dB (preferably at least 35dB).
Two related life hacks:
1. Poundland earplugs are surprisingly good.
2. Slot glasses in over the top of earmuffs. I don't wear contact lenses due to dust allergies, and, even if I buy the thinnest frames, glasses under earmuffs still reduce sound attenuation. (Disclaimer: wearing glasses over earmuffs causes some visual distortion.)