Why do you care about how effectively the iron in iron supplements gets absorbed? The iron that's not absorbed just gets flashed out. Can't you just supplement more to get what you need?

It's worth noting that the Californian choice isn't free. Californian like residential solar to allow homeowners to feel good about themselves and use net metering to incentives residential solar. Grid electricity in California are double of what residential customers in Texas pay.

Why do you think it would require a central planner to implement agrivoltaics but the profit seeking market isn't doing it on their own?

Your first post is about optimal policy. The optimal response to usually-bogus-but-impactful objections is permitting reform.

How do you know that if you would get rid of net metering subventions which are about letting other energy produces pay for residential solar and other subventions for residential solar, it would still be economical to build residential solar in the US over specialized installations?

You need to pay anyway for the gas plant if you want to have electricity even on days where the sun isn't shining.

You can optimize for different goals. If you want you could optimize for a minimum of new land use. That would however be stupid economic policy as there's enough land and cheaper energy is more valuable.

Using central planing to enforce more expensive energy production because agrivoltaics are cool and reduce land use is not good policy.

What do you mean with "meaningful action" regarding climate in the 2010s?

If you look at solar energy, panel prices go down largely in a straight (on a logarithmic scale) since 1975 with a short pause between 2005 to 2010. German pro-solar policy started in the 1990 and the biggest change in 2011 was the new five-year plan of th CCP which was probably driven more by economic justifications.

There are few people who currently think we should do whatever is possible to reduce temperature rise. Doing so would mean to have a plan for geoengineering. Climate activist often use climate as a justification to push for anticapitalist policies that they independently believe.

Viruses (including phages) depend on the protein production of the host cell. If the host cell codes proteins differently, the proteins that the virus "wants" to produce don't get produced. 

While we still don't know a lot about phages, I think it's likely that phages are a key part of why we have the biodiversity of bacteria in the ocean and other environments that we have. The more of a given bacteria exist, the easier it is for phages to keep the populations of that bacteria down. 

If someone would take a bacteria from the ocean where the population is currently limited by phages, modifying it to change its coding and thus not express the phages that currently target it might massively increase the population of that bacteria.

It seems to me that it's going to be easier to build a bacteria with changed coding for amino acid then to get a whole mirror organism bacteria to work.

Having a 4-base pairs per amino acid coding where a single mutation does not result in a different amino acid being expressed and is a stop codon is useful for having a stable organism that doesn't mutate and thus people might build it.

You get the same problem of the new bacteria being immune against existing phages but on the plus-side it's not harder for the immune system to deal with it.

Instead of focusing research dollars on antibiotics, I would expect them to be more effectively spend on phage development to be able to create phages that target potentially problematic bacteria.

There's a form of exposure that does lead people to suppress certain emotions and become more functional in certain contexts. I think that frequently happens when people try to do a bunch of exposure therapy. 

Here’s a striking fact: if you give a few thousand dollars to charity, you can save someone’s life.

Your link does not support that "fact". The page speaks about estimations.

In their own FAQ GiveWell says:

"However, estimating the cost to save a life involves simplification, guesswork, and subjective judgment. As a result, our estimates are very uncertain. We analyze the cost-effectiveness of programs primarily because doing so helps us see large, clear differences in good accomplished per dollar spent and because working on the models helps us ensure that we are thinking through as many of the relevant issues as possible. For more on how we use cost-effectiveness estimates in our grantmaking, see this page."

Your argument is that the subjective judgement of people, who you like and who themselves say they are very uncertain, is a striking fact. 

This kind of epistemic laundering is either dishonest or ignorant. 

Sam Bankman Fried was a billionaire inspired by the ideas of effective altruism, who ran a crypto firm.

Sam Bankman-Fried wasn't just "inspired by the ideas of effective altruism". He was one of the main case studies of 80,000 Hours who supposedly coached him into entering finance which he wouldn't have without the help from 80,000 Hours. That was true even before he had a lot of money to donate. 

What EAs look for, before endorsing systemic reform, is genuine evidence of effectiveness. For this reason, EAs tend to think that, say, advocating for communism is unlikely to be very effective. We’re not having communism any time soon, even if it is a good idea (I don’t think it is, of course).

This seems to me to ignore the real dynamics. EA do invest money into longtermist courses that are supposed to produce significant systemic change (an aligned AI would constitute significant systemic change) and the evidence for individual causes like for example huge OpenPhil investment in OpenAI is quite thin. 

Given the relative lack of cybersecurity, I think there's a good chance of LessWrong being hacked by outside parties and privacy be breached. Message content that's really sensitive like sharing AI safety related secrets likely shouldn't flow through LessWrong private messages. 

One class where people might really want privacy is around reporting abuses by other people. If Alice writes a post about how Bob abused her, Carol might want to write Alice a messages about Bob abusing her as well while caring about privacy because Carol fears retaliation. 

I think it would be worth having an explicit policy about how such information is handled, but looking at the DM metadata seems to me like it wouldn't cause huge problems. 

On NEPA, the recommended reforms seems to be bills to be passed and not just executive orders. Given that it will be a lot easier for DOGE, to propose executive order than to get bills through the Congress and the Senate, it would likely be good if the process policy agenda would also have suggestions about executive orders to pass to improve the situation. 

This basically sounds like there are people in DC who listen to the AI safety community and told Andreesen that they plan to follow at least some demands of the AI safety folks.

OpenAI likely lobbied for it.

The military people who know that some physics was classified likely don't know the exact physics that were classified. While I would like more information I would not take this as evidence for much.

What evidence do you have for the claim that major Democratic party insiders counseled him to stay?

Dean Philipps didn't win. I think Cenk Uygar got defunded.

If somebody does not pick a fight that's costly to them, that's no sign of careless thinking.

Are you talking about measured sleep time or time in bed?

I don't think that Democrats decision making about Biden is in the same class as individual decision making. People around Biden had a lot of political power and people who challenged that power could lose their careers for not being a team player.

It needed the poor debate performance for powerful people to feel like the could get away with calling for Biden to step down without paying a huge price. It's no sign that people weren't thinking.

Does your family have the same opinions as your social circle? If not family events can be good place to learn why people hold different beliefs.

Getting to know your neighbors is another way to expose yourself to people who often think differently.

As far as professions go being an Uber driver might get you into a lot of conversations with diverse passengers.

Do you have any quotes or any particular podcast episodes you recommend?

I don't have specific recommendations for the past. I would expect a section in the next All-In Podcast in which David Sachs participates to law out his views a bit.

How to exactly draw the line is a difficult question,

That's the question you would ask if you  think the person who's drawing the line is aligned. If you think the people speaking about national security and using that to further different political and geopolitical ends are not aligned, it's not the most interesting question. 

It sounds to me like you are taking this as an abstract policy issue while ignoring the real-world censorship industrial complex. It's like discussing union policy in the 1970s and 1980s in New York without taking into account that a lot of strikes are because someone failed to pay the Mafia.

If you don't know what the censorship industrial complex is, Joe Rogan had a good interview with Mike Benz, who is a former official with the U.S. Department of State and current Executive Director of the Foundation For Freedom Online.

I believe about Sacks views comes from regularly listening to the All-In Podcast where he regularly talks about AI.

I haven't looked much into Sacks' particular stance here, but I think concerns around censorship are typically along the lines of "the state should not be involved in telling companies what their models can/can't say. This can be weaponized against certain viewpoints, especially conservative viewpoints. Some folks on the left are trying to do this under the guise of terms like misinformation, fairness, and bias."

Sacks is smarter and more sophisticated than that. 

Also things like "an AI model should not output bioweapons or other things that threaten national security" are "censorship" under some very narrow definition of censorship, but IME this is not what people mean when they say they are worried about censorship.

In the real world, efforts of the Department of Homeland security that started with censoring for reasons of national security ended up increasing the scope of what they censor. In the end the lab leak theory got censored and if you would ask the Department of Homeland security for their justification there's a good chance that they would say "national security".

If you take early writing of Eliezer, the idea is AI should be aligned with Coherent Extrapolated Volition. That's a different goal from aligning AI with the views of credentialed experts or the leadership of AI companies.

"How do you regulate AI companies so that they aren't enforcing Californian values on the rest of the United States and the world?" is an alignment question. If you have a good answer to that question, it would be easier to convince someone worried about those companies having enforced Californian values via censorship industrial complex doing the same thing with AI to regulate AI companies.

If you ignore the alignment questions that people like David Sachs care about, it's hard to convince them that you are sincere about the other alignment questions. 

With David Sacks being the AI/Crypto czar, we likely won't be getting any US regulation on AI in the next years. 

It seems to me like David Sacks perspective on the issue is that AI regulation is just another aspect of the censorship industrial complex.

To convince him of AI regulation, you would likely need to have an idea about how to do AI regulation without furthering the censorship industrial complex. The lack of criticism of the censorship industrial complex in the AI safety discourse now is a big problem because there are no available policy proposals.

From my conversations with Vassar, I think there's a sense of "There's a lot that's possible to do in the world, if you just ignore social conventions" that's downstream from being accepting what Vassar says. A person who previously didn't take any psychedelics because of social conventions, might become more open to taking psychedelics and thinking about whether it makes sense to take them.

Michael Vassar has lots of different ideas and is someone who's willing to share his ideas in a relatively unfiltered way. Some of them are ideas for experiments that could be done. 

Without knowing concrete facts of what happened (I only talked to Michael when he was in Berlin):

Let's say, Michael suggest that doing a certain "psychological technique" might be a valuable experiment. Alice, did the experiment and it had outcome. Michael thinks it had a bad outcome. Alice, however think the outcome is great and continues doing the technique.

If you conclude from that that Michael is bad, because he proposed an experiment that had a bad outcome, you are judging people who are experimenting with the unknown for their love of experimenting with the unknown.

If you want to criticize Michael because he's to open to experimentation, do that more explicitly because then you need to actually argue the core of the issue. Michael is person who thinks that various Chesterton's fences are no reason to avoid experimentation. 

Michael also is very open about talking to anyone even if the person might be "bad", so you might also criticize him for speaking with Olivia in the first place instead of kicking Olivia out from he conversations he had. 

Given that Ziz was actually a student at CFAR, calling Ziz a CFARian and blaming CFAR for Ziz would make a lot more sense than blaming Michael for Olivia. Jessica suggests that Olivia was also trying to study from Anna Salomon, so probably Olivia was at CFAR at some point, so might also be called a CFARian.

How do you know that Michael Vassar or Jessica Taylor have been aggressive about asserting their point of view in the presence of people who take psychedelics?

What kind of student teacher relationship did Vassar and Olivia had and for what amount of time did they have it?

Did you come to "conspiratorial interpretations" of the behavior of your family in that process?

But I have observed this all directly. 

This post feels like it's written on an unnecessarily high level of abstraction. What are the actual events you observed directly? What did you see with your own eyes or hear with your own ears?

Did you do any targeted work to change beliefs while under the influence of drugs?

Especially, processes like belief reporting or internal double cruxt that were facilitated by another person?

Elizabeth wrote in Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow about how it's good to have pursue goals with good feedback loops to stay aligned.

It seems to me like SecureBio focusing on a potential pandemic is a goal where the feedback loop is worse than if you would focus on the normal variation in viruses. Knowing which flu viruses and coronaviruses varients are the the most common and growing the most, seems like straightforward problem that could be solved by NAObservatory. 

What's the core reason why the NAObservatory currently doesn't provide that data and when in the future would you expect that kind of data to be easily accessible from the NAObservatory website?

If Biden pardons people like Fauci for crimes like perjury, that would set a bad precedent.

There's a reason why perjury is forbidden and if you just give pardons to any government official who committed crimes at the end of an administration that's a very bad precedent.

One way out of that would be to find a different way to punish government criminals when they are pardoned. One aspect of a pardon is that they remove the Fifth Amendment defense. 

You can subpoena pardoned people in front of Congress and ask them under oath to speak about all the crimes they committed that they can't be prosecuted for because of the pardon. Then you can charge them for any lies where they didn't volunteer information about pardoned crimes they committed. 

Just keeping yourself vertical enough to walk requires constant dynamic tension (this can be easily tested by getting smashingly drunk).

That's a bad test for the hypothesis. Getting drunk makes coordination harder with makes it hard to work. At the same time it doesn't fully relax all muscles. 

If you want to know how much muscle tension is required for a given muscle, the much better test would to go to a Alexander Technique teacher who trained to do that movement with minimal muscle tension and see how much muscle tension they exert.

Here’s an idea: What if when you have a feeling in your body, sometimes it’s there for others to see? What if feelings use the body as a display?

That framing sounds dualistic and as if feelings are somehow separate from the body, so that they could be displayed by the body.

Evolutionary the main job of brains is to coordinate movement. Trauma responses like fight, flight and freeze express themselves in movement not because it's beneficial to display them in the body but because movement is required to effectively respond. 

If you truly want to understand what goes on, it's also important to be conscious of tension being possible to by held by fascia in addition to being held directly by muscle tension. 

Keeping muscles tensed makes you ready to move. 

How would that work? Muscle movement happens through changing a muscle from being untensed to the tensed state. You have more potential to move when your muscles are relaxed. 

I do think plenty of rationalists invested into crypto since then. While 20x is a lot, it's not as big as what was possible beforehand and there are also other investments like Tesla stock that have been 20x since 2018 (and you had a LessWrong post arguing that people should invest into Tesla before it spiked). 

Nvidia is even 30x over that timeframe.  

Okay, my statement as far as "no trials" was imprecise, I did explicitly talk about the COVID-19 trials, so I did grant that there are trials that happen. The just don't happen for most vaccines as most vaccines are controlled against previously licensed vaccines. 

Because it's an incredibly rare side-effect 

A quick search suggests 1/10000 as a current official number. Do you consider 1/10000 incredibly rare?

I've never made any claims about "absolute safety". 

People who want to decide whether or not to take a vaccine care about absolute safety and not about relative safety between different vaccines. 

Sure, they are "unsafe" in the way that any action or inaction is nominally "unsafe".

They are unsafe in a way that warrants their producers being held not liable for the damages caused by them to set incentives to minimize damages. The assumption here is that the cost of paying for an insurance policy that adequately pays for the damage is too high to burden the producers of vaccines with it. 

There are few cases where we say as a society that things are so risky that we need to shield a company from the harm that their products might produce. 

There's a reason that prediction markets are popular on LessWrong. They are a tax on bullshit. A requirement to have insurance policies is in the same way a tax on bullshit. "Unavoidably unsafe" is about unwillingness to pay that tax. 

The medically relevant question is whether a new drug or therapy is safe and effective relative what what we are already doing.

That's relevant for people who want to decide about whether to take the old or the new vaccine. To the person who wants to make a decision between taking no vaccine at all or the new vaccine, evidence that compares the new vaccine against no vaccine is relevant. 

__________

But let's focus more on the meat of the issue. What makes you confident that the current system is effective at finding all side-effects that exist of vaccines? 

Is it that you decided beforehand that "distrust of scientists" is bad and therefore you trust the output of the system? Otherwise, what process did you went through to develop your trust that this particular system works very well? 

This isn't about liking or disliking RFK Jr

If you care about evidence, how about starting with acknowledging that the answer to your first question about why one would believe RFK Jr is that because he's factually correct with the claim that no randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trials for vaccines are run?

You seem to have had a false belief that needs updating, and if you just gloss over that, that's not good reasoning. 

The key question is about what policy you want. Given what RFK Jr. said, it's likely that the policy he is going to advocate is some form of a requirement of randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trials for vaccines.

Currently, the reasoning of why there's no randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trials for vaccines has nothing to do with evidence-based reasoning but with a mix of a certain medical ethics and pharma lobbying. 

Meaning it was proven to be safe and effective against a placebo and, therefore, is the new standard. 

Safe is a relative term and you are using the term "proof" quite losely. 

Vaccines are by law unavoidably unsafe, which is the legal justification from the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Act for giving the producers immunity from lawsuits over the vaccines. The whole idea at that time is that vaccines have some side effects but the benefits outweigh the risks. The vaccines from that era are the one's that are used in the controlled studies. HHS did not follow the law to report on the progress on how vaccines got more safe after that in the way the act requires.

In medicine, it frequently happens that drugs have side-effects that were not picked up in initial clinical trials, so obviously if you follow evidence-based reasoning, a trial does not proof anything absolutely safe. As a relevant recent example, the increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis from mRNA Covid-19 vaccines was not picked up by the placebo-controlled trials that they ran. 

evidence-based reasoning instead of his distrust of scientists

Distrust of scientist was part of the motto of the Royal Society. When studying bioinformatics one of my professors made a point to say something in every lecture to foster our distrust. The replication crisis of the last decade was inherently about distrust of scientists and one of the greatest things that happened to science in that timeframe.

Saying scientists who are not running enough placebo-controlled trials should be distrusted, is an evidence-based argument. Ideally, there would be meta-science that better tells us when we need to to run placebo-controlled trials and when we don't but the NIH under past leadership did not like to fund that meta-science. 

Policy-wise, I think that focusing on standards of evidence is the most likely choice he could make as HHS secretary because he's unlikely able to just declare certain vaccines he doesn't like to be off-the-shelves. 

So if you want an evidence-based discussion it makes sense to focus on the merits and costs of placebo-controlled trials.

Mind-body dualism does not exist. Emotions show themselves in the body and can be perceptible to other people. 

If you want to understand better how other people feel and are motivated doing a lot of Circling where people express what they feel is a good step to expose yourself to relevant information.

Being obstinate makes you more prone to motivated cognition. 

One problematic aspect is that it's often easier to avoid motivated reasoning when the stakes are low. Even if you manage to avoid it in 95% of the cases, if th remaining 5% are there what really matters you are still overall screwed.

While I agree in principle that there are often better ways to get the necessary information than the scientific method, I'm not sure that I meet someone who from whom I know that they actually applies the scientific method too much. And I have spent a lot of time with rationalists and organizing Quantified Self meetups. 

Have you meet people who were using the scientific method too much? If so, what did those people do?

Congress does have leadership that's separate from the president. People like Nancy Pelosi have political power. 

You also have a lot of other organizations. Organizations like the Chamber of Commerce can drive legislative change as well. 

If you don't think it relates to the question at hand, why did you brought up the point in the first place?

I think you are too much focused on Trump (likely because the media likes to focus on Trump) and not on how a successful campaign to repeal the act would look like. It's unlikely that Trump makes it his agenda, but that's not required given that the legislature is independent from the executive.

Trump's recent demand that the US Senate should confirm his appointees via recess appointments, similarly really does not strike me as Trump caring about what party elites think.

Trump made that demand and John Thune became Senate majority leader without making a clear promise to appoint all candidates via recess appointments. 

Elites already managed to prevent the pro-antitrust, pro-Snowden pardon appointment of Matt Gaetz and replace him with a more conventional Republican that's less likely to go after corporate power and other elite interests.

I also have a pure EAA protein powder which is entirely fermented and have a balanced amino acid profile. These are generally very poorly marketed supplements but they are widely available.

What's the name under which the protein powder is sold?

Most politics is not top down from the president. If Trump would care about repealing the act he could do it, but it's unlikely a topic he cares very much about.

If you want change, you likely need to convince congressional Republicans. I would expect that such congressman have a reasonable fear of being attacked for going against "America First" if they would move to repeal the Jones Act.

If DOGE would want to get rid of it, they would need to convince congressmen. There are likely a lot of laws that would be easier for them to target with the political capital they have.

There's a question of how much of the iodine goes to the thyroid and that might produce side effects. On the other hand, the salt water might also have side effects. Do you have reason to believe the salt water to have negligible side effects?

If you promote "diversity" then you have not only take in mind what you mean with it, but also how policy is likely going to work in practice. 

In practice, there are some dimensions that are easy to measure like race and gender. There are other dimensions that are harder to measure. Some dimensions are also not conducive to research progress. Researchers with IQ under a hundred are underrepresented in grant giving.

Then there are variables like vaccination status, where being unvaxxed does not result in you having a worse ability to do research in the same way as having a lower IQ but there are perspectives on medical research that will correlate with vaccination status. 

If your policy tries to increase the representation of unvaxxed researchers, that might be threatening to hegemonic beliefs and thus a research bureaucracy likely prefers increasing representation of minority races that are unlikely to threaten any hegenomic beliefs. 

If you don't specify the dimensions, the dimensions that are going to selected are most likely those that don't threaten hegemony of current opinions and thus the dimensions that are least likely to actually matter for diversity of ideas and the selected dimensions might even be chosen to strengthen the hegemony of the existing ideas. 

If you actually want real diversity by doing things like calling for diversity in vaccination status you should do that explicitly. 

One big political problem is that Trump campaigned on "Make in America" so, convincing Republicans under his watch of just replacing the Jones Act is hardly possible.

Maybe the policy positions should be: "Tariffs are great if you want 'Make in America', repeal the Jones Act and replace it with a 100% tariff on foreign build ships (with the president having the ability to change the tariff as needed)". 

If you decrease ship costs from 4-5x to 2x of what it costs outside of the US, you might still get a renaissance of ships and you have a bunch of money that you can use to pay off people. 

I assume salt water has lower side effects, so that seemed like a promising thing to check.

Why do you make that assumption? Besides the antiviral effect of it, I would expect salt water to drain H_2O from the oral mucosa. Do you think the effect is too small to matter? Do you think it's a desirable effect?