Posts
Comments
Unless you also think the United States is an outlier in terms of spouses who don't unconditionally love each other, I guess you have to endorse something like Kaj_Sotala's point that divorce isn't always the same as ending love though, right?
Hmm, they changed it yesterday.
probably the majority of spouses unconditionally love their partners.
How do you square this with ~50% of marriages ending in divorce?
a good trade for immunity to cavities and gum disease.
If you throw in immunity to bad breath
FYI, https://www.luminaprobiotic.com/faq says used to say
This strain doesn't do anything to protect against gum disease, or bad breath.
And he thinks Hermes 2 Pro is ‘cracked for agentic function calling,’
I don't understand what the word 'cracked' means here; "broken" or "super awesome" or ...?
persuade/inspire/motivate/stimulate etc is just the politically correct way of saying what it actual is, which is manipulation.
Persuade has a fairly neutral connotation for me, that is "I was persuaded to give 10k to a scammer" and "I was persuaded by a friend to quit my day job" both seem correct to me. I would nominate that as the word for describing what it "actually" is, rather than "manipulation" which seems overly negative/cynical.
Might be this one: https://feelinggood.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/evaluation-of-therapy-session-v-1-for-article.pdf
I think anorexia is in a different category because the patient often doesn't want to get better. David Burns talks about it a little on https://feelinggood.com/2019/11/25/168-ask-david-the-blushing-cure-how-to-heal-a-broken-heart-treating-anorexia-and-more/, where he mentions that some sort of therapy with a 50% success rate is good.
The rapid cure stuff is mainly about depression and anxiety disorders, I guess agoraphobia should count (with the caveat that the patient has to be well enough to reach the therapist's office). Certainly whether it "could take years" is the crux of the matter; David Burns very much denies it should ever take nearly that long.
David Burns also has his own podcast, many episodes of which are example live sessions of this rapid cure (see https://feelinggood.com/list-of-feeling-good-podcasts/ and search for "live therapy", or https://feelinggood.com/podcast-database/ which has a fancy Javascript interface allowing filtering on tags).
He does often make the explicit claim on his podcast, that 90% of patients can be cured in one or two sessions (plus one more for "relapse prevention"). It's a bit hard to know how much of this is from a selection effect on the patients though. I'm pretty sure I recall him also mentioning that he only treats (people studying to be) therapists for liability reasons now that he doesn't have an active clinical practice with insurance. And I think when he had on one of the app developers, they mentioned in passing that they had discussed some social anxiety issues, but it sounded like there wasn't any dramatic breakthrough on that.
Anyone knows a psychologist like that?
I don't personally, but you could check out https://www.feelinggoodinstitute.com/, they say "Expect meaningful change within five therapy sessions"; I assume that means five 1 hour sessions and probably one 2 hour session is more effective than two 1 hour sessions (due to time wasted on recalling previous context, breaking flow, etc).
A big part of understanding the culture of futility is understanding how traumatic it is when the bad guys win. When SBF, the Luke Skywalker of crypto, and CZ, the Darth Vader of crypto, go head to head and CZ emerges victorious. Then CZ says "Ha! serves you right for being an idiotic do-gooder" and everyone cheers.
Didn't we actually learn that they were both bad guys? I find this example confusing.
I was kind of surprised by this too; I found this study which seems to support it though: https://theconversation.com/we-studied-what-happens-when-guys-add-their-cats-to-their-dating-app-profiles-144999
In our study, we recruited 1,388 heterosexual American women from 18 to 24 years old to take a short anonymous online survey[...] Most of the women found the men holding cats to be less dateable. This result surprised us, since previous studies had shown that women found men with pets to have higher potential as partners. They also thought the men holding cats were less extroverted and more neurotic, agreeable and open. Importantly, they saw these men as less masculine, too. [...] Women who self-identified as “cat people” were more inclined to view the men pictured with cats as more dateable or say they had no preference.
The NYT paywall doesn't didn't do anything if Javascript is disabled.
EDIT: I've noticed recently that NYT articles are cut-off before the end now, even without JavaScript. I wonder if the timing of this paywall upgrade is related to the lawsuit?
No particular reason why we can only have 42 chromosomes
Isn't having extra chromosomes usually bad? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisomy
(PS the usual number is 46)
What is an example where two negative numbers multiply to give a negative number?
Since you didn't specify real numbers, it seems like -i * -i = -1
should fit?
We know roughly how to achieve immortality
Isn't the assumption that once we successfully align AGI, it can do the work on immortality? So "we" don't need to know how beyond that.
then you could spread the pesticide (and not other pesticides) in the region
This would affect other insects in addition to the targeted mosquitoes, right? This seems strictly worse than the original gene drive proposition to me.
A survey shows that gay male teenagers are several times more likely to conceive girls than straight male teenagers.
Does "conceive" mean "have sex with" here? Because according to what I think of as the standard definition of that word, you would be saying that gay male teenagers are more likely to produce female offspring (which sounds pretty silly). Did the survey use that word?
Also asked (with some responses from the authors of the paper) here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/khFC2a4pLPvGtXAGG/how-to-catch-an-ai-liar-lie-detection-in-black-box-llms-by?commentId=v3J5ZdYwz97Rcz9HJ
Testing with PortAudio's demo paex_read_write_wire.c [2]
It looks like this uses the blocking IO interface, I guess that adds its own buffering on top of everything else. For minimal latency you want the callback interface. Try adapting test/patest_wire.c or test/pa_minlat.c.
Humans have lived during one of Earth's colder period, but historically it's been a lot hotter. Our bodies are well adapted for heat (so long as we can cool off using sweat)
This doesn't seem very reassuring? For example, https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/3151/too-hot-to-handle-how-climate-change-may-make-some-places-too-hot-to-live/
Since 2005, wet-bulb temperature values above 95 degrees Fahrenheit [35 C] have occurred for short periods of time on nine separate occasions in a few subtropical places like Pakistan and the Persian Gulf. They also appear to be becoming more frequent.
If it's been hotter historically, such that dinosaurs would have been totally fine with these higher temperatures that doesn't exactly help humans...
Let me just quote Wikipedia: "A seahorse [...] is any of 46 species of small marine fish in the genus Hippocampus." Because I spent a few confused minutes trying to figure out how males could face more intense competion in a brain part.
He says non-programmers; I guess you misread?
Theoretically capitalism should be fixing these examples automatically
Huh? Why?
If you want to get a job working on machine learning research, the claim here is that the best way to do that is to replicate a bunch of papers. Daniel Ziegler (yes, a Stanford ML PhD dropout, and yes that was likely doing a lot of work here) spent 6 weeks replicating papers and then got a research engineer job at OpenAI.
Wait, a research job at OpenAI? That’s worse. You do know why that’s worse, right?
I don't know why, and I'm confused about what this sentence is saying. Worse than what?
I don't think anyone is proposing to offer this deal to Putin; it's not like the rank and file soldiers are able to make the "invade your neighbor" decision in a bid to get EU citizenship.
Low confidence generally means questionable or implausible information was used, the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or significant concerns or problems with sources existed.1
I haven't voted at all, but perhaps the downvotes are because it seems like a non sequitur? That is, I don't understand why Richard_Kennaway is declaring his preferences about this.
I don't understand what's the point of all the swearing? It's just kind of annoying to read.
I've read (I don't have any first hand knowledge of it though) that in sign language dialogues both signers can be signing to each other at the same time (full-duplex) as opposed to each speaker having to wait for the other to stop (half-duplex). Might be another thing to file under "neat features".
They also talk about the protestors entering government buildings, but never about any people working in those buildings being afraid or hurt, so according to Zvi's rules this would imply that the buildings were empty or something.
I don't know about the other stuff, but https://www.vox.com/world/2023/1/9/23546507/brazil-bolsonaro-lula-capital-invasion-january-8 says
Congress was in recess at the time, leaving the building mostly empty.
Huh. I literally have no idea what feeling this is referring to.
Also, any reason you swapped the friend for a stranger? That changes the situation somewhat – in degree at least, but maybe in kind too.
Yes, the other examples seemed to be about caring about people you are close to more than strangers, but I wanted to focus on the ethical reasoning vs internal motivation part.
examples of when it is right to be motivated by careful principled ethical reasoning or rule-worship
Thanks, that's helpful.
Okay, I think my main confusion is that all the examples have both the motivation-by-ethical-reasoning and lack-of-personal-caring/empathy on the moral disharmony/ugliness side. I'll try to modify the examples a bit to tease them apart:
- Visiting a stranger in the hospital in order to increase the sum of global utility is morally ugly
- Visiting a stranger in the hospital because you've successfully internalized compassion toward them via loving kindness meditation (or something like that) is morally good(?)
That is, the important part is the internalized motivation vs reasoning out what to do from ethical principles.
(although I notice my intuition has a hard time believing the premise in the 2nd case)
imagine visiting a sick friend at the hospital. If our motivation for visiting our sick friend is that we think doing so will maximize the general good, (or best obeys the rules most conducive to the general good, or best respects our duties), then we are morally ugly in some way.
If our motivation is just to make our friend feel better is that okay? Because it seems like that is perfectly compatible with consequentialism, but doesn't give the "I don't really care about you" message to our friend like the other motivations.
Or is the fact that the main problem I see with the "morally ugly" motivations is that they would make the friend feel bad a sign that I'm still too stuck in the consequentialist mindset and completely missing the point?
I do find [Rao's] ‘the biggest thing you actually buy is a car’ attitude odd given the existence of houses.
He does touch on the existence of houses:
We’ve been shopping for a house for the first time and it feels clearly like “buying a full-stack theory of life”
Maybe this somewhat depends if you're relying on mortgage financing etc?
they have high glycemic load and worse nutrient content than many non-starchy vegetables, they make you feel hunger again, meaning you’re probably going to eat too much
What do you make of all the claims that people didn't feel hungry on the diet then? Placebo effect?
I would file this under
Some people, when confronted with
a problemMega-Godzilla, think “I know, I'll use regularexpressionsGodzilla.” Now they have twoproblemsrampaging monsters.
I think BIG-bench could be the final AI benchmark: if a language model surpasses the top human score on it, the model is an AGI. At this point, there is nowhere to move the goalposts.
But when you say:
the benchmark is still growing. The organizers keep it open for submissions.
Doesn't that mean this benchmark is a set of moving goalposts?
So if you wanted to install separate windfarms to account for just one nuclear plant it would take you 10 years instead of 5.
This is a minor point, but aren't you ignoring the additional parallelization possible with building 20 windfarms vs 1 nuclear plant?
even if it theoretically understands the English language.
If you mix up a prompt into random words so that it's no longer grammatically correct English, does it give worse results? That is, I wonder how much it's basically just going off keywords.
Maybe it's rather reading-twitter-posts-about-wordle that is negative.
the FDA is bad at evaluating new technology (they approve things that shouldn't be, and block things they shouldn't); as an example, it took five years to pull thalidomide.
The FDA never approved thalidomide, so that doesn't seem like an applicable example?
if it were safe, there would be the opposite, and people with visible side effects would be celebrated as heroes
I'm not sure that I follow the logic here. Are you taking the "safe" condition to mean that we would know exactly when some side effects are due to the vaccine, and when they are just coincidental (so there would never be any arguments over that)?
In absence of vaccines, how many serious diseases a human body was supposed to have seen throughout its life? Probably one or two, then you'd mostly be dead.
I don't understand where this assumption is coming from (both in terms of "one or two" specifically, and that there should be any particular number in the first place).
With our usual vaccination schedule, we now routinely prime our immune system against twelve diseases
Is the idea here that all vaccines have the same fixed risk level, regardless of what it's vaccinating against, whereas non-serious disases have a lower risk level? And most of the twelve diseases are not in the "serious" category?
This guy claims to have done it in 30 days: https://medium.com/@maxdeutsch/how-i-developed-perfect-pitch-in-30-days-at-24-years-old-7e2e78b8c26b
[Canada's] last day of data is likely a reporting delay there.
I think it's likely more about testing capacity. E.g., Ontario restricted tests to high risk population since Dec 31.
If by "region around Washington" you meant the graph labeled "Capital Region", I think that refers to the capital of Denmark.
It seems difficult to pin down Bossche's predictions as right or wrong.
Has his previous theory's been proven right?
His previous claim, as I understand it, is that mass vaccination will produce immune evading and more dangerous variants. I think the fact that the variants we've seen so far either emerged before widespread vaccination (alpha), or in places with low vaccination rates (the rest) is at least weak evidence against his claim.
Perhaps he would argue the low vaccination rates did produce those variants, even though the rates were low. But how could we tell?
Will his current theory's been proven right?
He says:
Omicron is likely to start out as a mild disease because short-lived, poorly functional anti-S antibodies (Abs) that resulted from previous asymptomatic infection (e.g., with another previously dominant variant) will no longer recognize Omicron. [...] However, the overall pattern of ‘mild’ disease would only prevail until Omicron becomes dominant and causes high infection rates. When this happens, short-lived, low affinity anti-S Abs will start to compete with innate Abs in an increasing part of the population as a direct result of the enhanced likelihood of re- exposure shortly after previous infection.
How would we distinguish this from the case where Omicron seems mild at the beginning because 90%+ of covid cases are mild, and then once the numbers are high enough we start seeing the smaller fraction of severe cases?
There is one prediction that looks almost tractable enough to (eventually) decide:
It is undeniable that mass vaccination will only drive the virus [...] to use alternate receptor domains on permissive cells. The fitness cost that may come with such a dramatic mutation is likely to be rewarded with enhanced pathogenicity. I am truly afraid that these dynamics will eventually allow for the natural selection of individuals with uncompromised innate immunity while eliminating those without it. While such natural selection would lead to an eradication of SARS-CoV-2 as innate immunity sterilizes the virus and blocks transmission [...] the price paid for ending the pandemic by virus eradication is not comparable to the one paid for by generating herd immunity and allowing the virus to enter an endemic state.
So I guess if we reach endemic state following mass vaccination (the general concensus is that eradication is basically impossible by now so I judge this extremely likely), then his theory will be proven wrong. And if many hundreds of millions die followed by eradication of the virus then he was right. Check back in a year or two?
The problem is that he can still claim half-credit if the virus uses an alternate receptor domain, but that doesn't lead to a high kill rate. And regardless we still won't know whether his counterfactual herd-immunity via natural immunity route would have avoided this.
It is a viral vector vaccine based on a human adenovirus that has been modified to contain the gene for making the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19
So it's not better than the mRNA vaccines in this sense, as far as I understand (I don't know if that makes it a bad idea, as such).
The inactivated virus type vaccines are
Chinese CoronaVac and the Sinopharm BIBP and WIBP vaccines; the Indian Covaxin; later this year the Russian CoviVac; the Kazakhstani vaccine QazVac; and the Iranian COVIran Barekat.
But those are probably much harder to get for readers in Western countries. And they've generally been found to be less effective, I think; possibly because the inactivation process damages the proteins.
Does it really show that? Looks hoplessly confounded to me:
Among fully vaccinated persons, 93 of 122 (76%) Pfizer-BioNTech recipients and 0 of 50 (0%) Moderna recipients had been vaccinated ≥4 months before the outbreak (p<0.001). A larger proportion of Pfizer-BioNTech recipients had diabetes (p = 0.02) or hypertension (p<0.001) than Moderna or Janssen COVID-19 vaccine recipients, and a higher proportion of Pfizer-BioNTech and Janssen recipients had a history of smoking (p<0.001) than Moderna recipients
This is the system that is planning to finally [replace their fax machines by the end of 2021](https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/ontario-fax-machines-1.5955753) (which means they'll probably get that done around 2025), so I'd say expecting up-to-date VOC tests is being too optimistic.