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I think something like Jim's point of overcorrecting from a coarse view of "all drugs are bad" to a coarse view of "hey, the authorities lied to us about drugs and they're probably okay to use casually" is closer to what gave us the problem.
Good point, though I think current evidence as a whole (anti-addictive; efficacy as a therapeutic modality; population surveys finding psychedelic use anticorrelated with psychological distress) pushes towards psychedelics' risk profile being less harmful though higher variance than alcohol and tobacco per use.
Consequently, psychedelics can be horrible and still not as bad as alcohol and tobacco.
They could be, but current evidence shows that psychedelic-assisted therapy is efficacious for PTSD, depression, end-of-life anxiety, smoking cessation, and probably alcoholism.
Psychedelic experiences have been rated as extremely meaningful by healthy volunteers [1, 2], and psychedelic use is associated with decreased psychological distress and suicidality in population surveys.
The drugs seem to be in the Bay Area water supply (metaphorically or literally? no one really knows for sure), that is another reason to move somewhere else sooner rather than later. In Bay Area, you probably can't avoid meeting junkies every day, this shifts your "Overton window"
In a bunch of comments on this post, people are giving opinions about "drugs." I think this is the wrong level of abstraction, sorta like having an opinion about whether food is good or bad.
Different drugs have wildly different effect and risk profiles – it doesn't make sense to lump them all together into one category.
Illegal drugs are, on average, very bad. How about a policy that if you use illegal drugs you are presumptively considered not yet good enough to be in the community?
The risk profile of a drug isn't correlated with its legal status, largely because our current drug laws were created for political purposes in the 1970s. A quote from Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
A 2010 analysis concluded that psychedelics are causing far less harm than legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco. (Psychedelics still carry substantial risks, aren't for everybody, and should always be handled with care.)
Quora for the curious: Did the Buddha forbid the translation of his teachings into Sanskrit? If so, did he mention why?
From my quick skim of those answers, it looks like he was more concerned about accessibility of the teachings rather than issues of interpretation.
The correspondent's reply here is helpful color on how things can get more complicated (e.g. shifts in how you perceive the actions/intentions of yourself & others) and sometimes harmful (e.g. extended stays in Dark Night).
It's interesting that a lot of the discussion about psychedelics here is arguing from intuitions and personal experience, rather than from the trial results that have been coming out.
I do think that psychedelic experiences vary a lot from person-to-person and trip-to-trip, and that psychedelics aren't for everyone. (This variability probably isn't fully captured by the trial results because study participants are carefully screened for lots of factors that may be contraindicated.)
Jim Babcock's stance here is the most sensible one I've seen in this thread:
My own impression is that the effect of LSD is not primarily a regression to the mean thing, but rather, that it temporarily enables some self-modification capabilities, which can be powerfully positive but which require a high degree of sanity and care to operate safely.
...
Meanwhile nearly everyone has been exposed to extremely unsubtle and substantially false anti-drug propaganda, which fails to survive contact with reality. So it's unfortunate but also unsurprising that the how-much-caution pendulum in their heads winds up swinging too far to the other side. The ideal messaging imo would leave most people feeling like planning an acid trip is more work than they personally will get around to, plus mild disdain towards impulsive usage and corner-cutting.
Big +1.
Really important to disambiguate the two:
"People shouldn't do psychedelics" is highly debatable and has to argue against a lot of research demonstrating their efficacy for improving mental wellness and treating psychiatric disorders.
"Leaders & subgroups shouldn't push psychedelics on their followers" seems straightforwardly correct.
After looking into this a bit more, I now think holding these ETFs is a straightforward way to approximate the thesis:
It looks like glucosamine may help reduce all-cause mortality (UK Biobank study), so I might start taking that as well.
It's a big topic and I don't have a great articulation for it yet.
Some scattered points:
- Generally higher model uncertainty than I used to have
- Idealism now seems as plausible as materialism
- Panpsychism seems plausible / not-crazy, and consciousness matters a lot
- The many-worlds interpretation seems plausible. If physics is many-worlds, we may not be able to ever escape from ethical parochialism
- Not about metaphysics, but I've been growing less confused about my motivations such that ethical considerations no longer feel as fraught. (I used to identify my ethics with my view of my self-worth such that acting ethically seemed super important)
fwiw I've noticed that my feelings about x-risk have started to loosen recently, though it's probably because some of my metaphysics are shifting
Yes! I'm also reminded of Romeo's comment about rationality attracting "the walking wounded" on a similar post from a couple years back.
I think rationality is doing pretty good, all things considered, though I definitely resonate with Applied Divinity Studies' viewpoint. Tsuyoku Naritai!
In folksier terms, what's being discussed is rationalists' often-strange relationship to common courtesy (i.e. Lindy social dynamics).
Reminds me a bit of this good thread by Qiaochu.
NXIVM had much recruiting success by training people on techniques that actually helped them quickly solve their present problems.
(NXIVM is a deeply problematic organization which contained a secret cult and in many ways should not be emulated.)
+1 to Ann Arbor.
I've also heard hearsay about Madison, WI being good.
For me to prefer a rationalist community hub, it would have to have similar kinds of support. I'm imagining a circle of parents that takes turns watching ALL the kids. Or passes toys around in an exchange circle. There is also an issue where rationalists often have very particular ideas about child rearing, and they don't all mesh. Even with people filling the child care role for each other, I think I'd strongly miss not having "elders" around.
Makes me think of this David Brooks essay, which includes a profile of the Temescal Commons in Oakland.
Agree with these points, though Seattle doesn't seem very dynamic compared to the Bay, LA, NYC, or even Salt Lake. (It seems very normie, to use a pejorative.)
I actually feel like East Bay (Oakland and every place north of Oakland) is really pleasant:
- Cost of living isn't terrible except for rent, and it's still possible to find good deals on rent, e.g. I've lived in North Oakland for 6 years and have only paid more than $1,000/month for one of those years (granted for the rest of the time I've been living in group houses or with a partner)
- East Bay parks are amazing
- Minimal social decay except for downtown Berkeley and parts of Oakland
- Wonderful weather for ~10 months of the year (every season except for fire season)
- Lots of interesting + diverse people, intellectual communities, and social life
What am I missing?
Got it, thanks for clarifying
For example, Kurzweil's 1999 predictions of what 2009 would look like were mostly wrong, but if instead you pretend they are predictions about 2019 they are almost entirely correct.
This isn't right.
See Assessing Kurzweil predictions about 2019: the results – "So, did more time allow for more perspective or more ways to go wrong? Well, Kurzweil's predictions for 2019 were considerably worse than those for 2009, with more than half strongly wrong"
Yeah, I'm roughly as excited about Microsoft as I am about Facebook or Apple.
I wonder how much of OpenAI they got for their $1B...
The biggest semiconductor equipment companies (symbols BRKS, LRCX, KLAC, and AMAT) look like decent investments, but not quite cheap enough that I'm willing to buy them.
What do you think of companies like Broadcom, NXP, Marvell, and MediaTek?
(I don't quite know where these sit in the value chain in relation to the companies you quoted; I believe they're focused more on chip design and mostly don't do fabrication)
A nice clip from the Thiel/Cowen interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCwXRlIb8c0
Update: Brave Browser now gives an option to search for archived versions whenever it lands on a "page does not exist"
Great analogy.
Do you have examples of equilibria around these dynamics in the animal world? Do you have a sense of how stable these equilibria are?
e.g. do toxic black-and-red butterflies persist after their non-toxic lookalikes arrive?
Posting this here for cross-reference:
If I Can’t Have Me, No One Can
[Content warning: a suicide note that deals heavily with sexual violence]
At some point I'd like to interweave the simulacra-levels framework with the discussion of motivations in this post: Altruistic action is dispassionate
They feel related.
StatNews piece on the IHME model: https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/17/influential-covid-19-model-uses-flawed-methods-shouldnt-guide-policies-critics-say/
+1
The adversarial collaboration talks a bit about this.
Pigs: about 100. Conditions for pigs are very bad, though I still think humans matter a lot more.
Very surprised by your ratios here.
cf. the "Is eating meat a net harm?" adversarial collaboration on Slate Star Codex. Look at the surveys they ran as a benchmark.
Yes, I pointed out some of the limitations in the original link. Should still be included in a lit review though.
Seems like a good model for estimating total infections, from my quick look: https://observablehq.com/@danyx/estimating-sars-cov-2-infections
I haven't poked its methodology.
Thanks, hadn't seen that.
Also just saw this, which makes a lot of the same points: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2020/04/04/ihme-projections/
Gautret et al. 2020 and Chen et al. 2020 are studies of hydroxychloroquine efficacy.
I stumbled onto these during the course of my internet reading, would be great to see a proper lit review.
IHME published a dashboard with state-by-state projections of coronavirus peaks: http://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
The accompanying FAQ is also interesting: http://www.healthdata.org/covid/faqs
Which US federal agencies should receive more funding in response to coronavirus? Which should receive less?
As a continuation of Karma 2.0 we are working on a feature in which your avatar size can scale with your karma, such that users with the most karma can signal their superiority even better, and truly tower over their intellectual contemporaries.
lol
Is the Chinese coronavirus data fake?
If so, what's a good estimate of the actual number of Chinese cases & actual number of Chinese deaths?
I think that's right.
Awesome.
I looked into this a bit with a friend who's an MD, and it turns out that this paper isn't very good.
Study not randomized, groups not balanced by disease severity, several treatment-group patients excluded from the data after trial started because they got worse (some went to ICU; one died).
From p. 10 of the paper:
We enrolled 36 out of 42 patients meeting the inclusion criteria in this study that had at least six days of follow-up at the time of the present analysis. A total of 26 patients received hydroxychloroquine and 16 were control patients.
Six hydroxychloroquine-treated patients were lost in follow-up during the survey because of early cessation of treatment. Reasons are as follows: three patients were transferred to intensive care unit, including one transferred on day2 post-inclusion who was PCR-positive on day1, one transferred on day3 post-inclusion who was PCR-positive on days1-2 and one transferred on day4 post-inclusion who was PCR-positive on day1 and day3; one patient died on day3 post inclusion and was PCR-negative on day2; one patient decided to leave the hospital on day3 post-inclusion and was PCR-negative on days1-2; finally, one patient stopped the treatment on day3 post-inclusion because of nausea and was PCR-positive on days1-2-3.
The results presented here are therefore those of 36 patients (20 hydroxychloroquine-treated patients and 16 control patients). None of the control patients was lost in follow-up.
Does hydroxychloroquine + azithromycin effectively treat COVID-19?
See Gautret et al. 2020, a small trial of this (not randomized) that found a big effect.
Economists mostly disagree with present market sentiment, which could be the basis for a trade: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/policy-for-the-covid-19-crisis/
... plus rising nominal prices means seeking returns is the main motivation, not avoiding risk.
Why do you think nominal prices will keep rising?