Posts
Comments
Glacial ice preserves a record of seasonal temperature variations as each yearly layer of snow accumulates and then partially erodes. The accumulating ice also preserves particles from the atmosphere such as pollen. Ice cores extracted so far from Greenland extend at least 100,000 years and from Antarctica more than 800,000.
There is one other important difference between drugs (as currently regulated) and supplements: insurance doesn't pay for supplements. Insurance companies today frequently refuse to pay for drugs they claim are ineffective or unnecessary. While they typically rely on FDA recommendations, privately controlled pharmacy benefit managers set criteria which can differ from the FDA's. Insurance companies have an incentive to find reasons to refuse to pay for some, but not all, drugs, and deciding based on whether the drug is actually useful is a Schelling point. Big insurers and PBMs could conceivably afford to test new drugs, if sufficiently motivated.[1] To be sure, there are numerous opportunities for companies to profit by lying, colluding, and making decisions that are less than medically sound, but the market is still far from unregulated even without the FDA.
This isn't to say unscrupulous drugmakers won't market useless or dangerous products directly to consumers - of course they will. Nothing stops a manufacturer from releasing completely untested drugs onto the market and then waiting for someone else to study them. Any controls would have to move farther up the food chain. A big pharmaceutical company that doesn't want to get its hands dirty could buy the rights to a new drug once it starts to gain acceptance.
- ^
Assuming drugs cannot be evaluated by some other reputable group. In the event the FDA is abolished, I expect regulatory requirements for drug approval would persist in other countries, and any interested party could benefit from the information, so most insurance companies likely would not do their own testing.
For this particular question, the FAQ apparently makes no reference to the tagging/filtering system, which, going by the posts I found, reached something close to its present state two years ago (but has changed since then - the two-year-old posts are out of date and I haven't found a more recent relevant one).
Also, I notice there is a one-year-old comment:
Oh, I'm terribly sorry. The FAQ has gotten a bit out of date and is due for an update. Since it was written, the frontpage been changed. Curated posts are now the first few posts listed in the "Latest" section, the ones that have stars to the left of their titles.
Sorry for the confusion!
The referenced section of the FAQ remains unchanged since then.
I recently wanted to find some information about how-the-site-works (because I was trying to use the UI to do something[1] and not getting the results I expected) and could not find any easy way to look up this kind of information. Information is distributed across many posts of varying ages, and I can only determine whether something is still accurate by finding more recent information that contradicts it. Old posts may have screenshots depicting an older version of the site, where even if the same functionality is still available now, it doesn't necessarily work quite the same. I think documentation of site features needs to be available in one place that is kept up to date, such as a wiki.
- ^
I didn't understand until recently how to filter Latest Posts by tags. As it turns out, the "Add Tag Filter" button does not, by itself, filter anything: it only adds to the list of tags on which I can then apply a filter, and selecting a tag that is already on this list (which the menu by default invites me to do, offering a list of the core tags) does nothing (giving me the least possible information about what the feature is supposed to do). Hovering on a tag name, where I would have located the answer if I had paid close enough attention, brings up something that looks almost exactly like a non-interactable link preview but for one extra line of mostly low-contrast text, and after failing to notice this important distinction I went on a long detour around the site looking at old feature announcement posts.
Has anyone tried to map relationships between (at least some) LessWrong posts?
What I'm looking for would be some kind of overview of what connects to what that could be parsed without clicking through links recursively. If I assume a chronologically earlier post cannot refer to a later one, I expect this type of structure to have interesting properties. A practical application that comes to mind is to inform an algorithm to decide what to give attention.
To define a relationship, links from one post to another would be a good if imperfect metric (not all links represent the same type of relationship, and not all relationships are represented by explicit links).