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What is the current status of CFAR? The website seems like it is inactive, which I find surprising given that there were four weekend workshops in 2022 that CFAR wanted to use for improving its workshops.
Musk recently wrote an opinion piece for the German newspaper Welt, calling on voters to vote for the far-right AfD party in the upcoming election. And now it seems that the article is practically the direct result of asking Grok for such an opinion piece. Is the way you produce such an opinion piece relevant? Possibly, because you might produce generic, cliched text that way and not realize how little you know. If so, efitors should realize that, of course.
What are recommendable essays discussing how to write essays?
Somewhat related as data points:
- „A total of 565 studies from 80 different countries or regions were included in the final analysis. Postpartum depression was found in 17.22% (95% CI 16.00–18.51) of the world’s population.“ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-021-01663-6
- „Many women experience labour-related and childbirth-related morbidity in the medium-to-long term after childbirth (ie, beyond 6 weeks postnatally). Available data show the most prevalent conditions are dyspareunia (35%), low back pain (32%), urinary incontinence (8–31%), anxiety (9–24%), anal incontinence (19%), depression (11–17%), tokophobia (6–15%), perineal pain (11%), and secondary infertility (11%).“ https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(23)00454-0/fulltext
I think I did not assume anything away. I pointed out that the theory of comparative advantage rests on assumptions, in particular autonomy. If someone can just force you to surrender your production (without a loss of production value), he will not trade with you (except maybe if he is nice).
Exactly. But then what does "curiosity" signal? Not laziness (as suggested in the post), but the opposite, right? Just asking seems the lazier version.
"But nowadays curiosity was déclassé. It suggested laziness (why not just ask it?)…"
I think that does not work. Asking is easy, so asking is the lazy option.
Reminds me of this: "If you watch Stranger Things with your kids, there’s a good chance they think the strangest things of all are not the slimy monsters without faces but the kids riding their bikes without parental supervision."
This does not have so much to do with child books vs books for grown-ups, though. I remember when everyone was reading Dan Brown and I know people who blamed themselves for it because it wasn't considered real literature.
Skill in childcare is not going to correlate with ‘tests of cognitive ability’
This is a bold claim and would require evidence, at least according to my priors. It is a much stronger claim than saying that the cost-benefit-ratio is worse for requiring whatever educational achievement or IQ requirement someone might demand.
But certainly paying grandparents to do childcare seems way better than paying daycare centers to do childcare?
Well, who knows? Just from a bang-for-the-buck perspective, the answer depends on how much you have to pay grandparents for childcare, how much you have to pay kindergartners, how much quality differs and how many children each would supervise. As people have children at higher age, grandparents are older and probably cannot take as much stress as they could decades ago; as families are smaller, grandparents will take care of one or two children. (They could take care of children from outside the family, but then the question is whether you should make working more attractive and maybe subsidize for old people.)
...
The researchers point to unexpected results in trials of school-based mental health interventions in the United Kingdom and Australia: Students who underwent training in the basics of mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy did not emerge healthier than peers who did not participate, and some were worse off, at least for a while.
...
This is a case where it would be interesting to see what "underwent training" actually means. If, for example, they did not count the students who lost interest and only counted those who remained in the study, then I would expect exactly this result.
... Apparently Obamacare included a recommended annual screening of teen girls for depression and HHS also mandated a change in how hospitals code injuries. ...
This would be very interesting if we knew if these are just random people explaining superficial interpretations on Twitter or people who really formed hypotheses based on reasonable readings of the data. I had heard that Haidt used international data and not just Obamacare data, but I don't know.
Moreover, I would assume that Schizophrenia in particular is not a condition that nowadays you would just act like you have it and in former times people did not care because there was no Obamacare.
What is strange about the graph though is that the data is starting in 2008 and the rate is always a comparison to 2008.
Lenore Skenazy: Sometimes some lady will call 911 when she sees a girl, 8, riding a bike. So it goes these days.
BUT the cops should be able to say, “Thanks, ma’am!”…and then DO NOTHING.
Instead, a cop stopped the kid, then went to her home to confront her parents.
That seems weird. Where I live (not in the US), many parents feel bad if their children are not able to ride a bike when they are 4 or 5 years old. (Of course we do not let them ride their bikes alone / in the traffic until they are older.)
Maybe the numerator of the score should remain at the initial karma until at least 4 people have voted, for example.
Thanks. I dud not see any, but I will check again. Maybe I also accidentally set them when i tried to check whether I had set any...
I will see whether I can make a useful one later on. Still, my main point is about the sorting score as stated in that referenced footnote: if indeed a post karma is divided by whatever, then I expect all 0 karma post to appear at the same position, and I expect the first person who votes to have a strong influence leading to herding, in particularif the personvotes the post to zero or lower. Right?
The list is very long, so it is hard to make a screenshot. Now with some hours of distance, I reloaded the homepage, tried again, and one 0 karma post appeared. (Last time, it did definitely not, I searched very rigorously.)
However, according to the mathematical formula, it still seems to me that all 0 karma post should appear at the same position, and negative karma posts below them?
No, all tags are on default weight.
I don't think so. But where could I check that?
Very helpful, thanks! So I assume the parameter b is what you call starting age?
I ask because I am a bit confused about the following:
- If you apply this formula, it seems to me that all posts with karma = 0 should have the same score, that score should be higher than the score of all negative-karma posts and negative-karma posts should get a higher score if they are older.
- All karma>0 posts should appear before all karma=0 posts and those should appear before all negative-karma posts.
However, when I expand my list a lot until it íncludes four posts with negative karma (one of them is 1 month old), I still do not see any post with zero karma. (With "enriched" sorting, I found two recent ones with 0 karma.)
Moreover, this kind of sorting seems to give really a lot of power to the first one or two people who vote on a post if their votes can basically let a post disappear?
The source for this is an economics paper using old-school macro techniques to measure the correlation between life expectancy and the unemployment rate.
Note that the policy conclusion of the paper includes "It is worth clarifying that with this claim, we do not want to suggest that policymakers should refrain from ordering lockdowns, as necessary lifesaving measures, but rather that, if they decide to do so, they should provide alongside enhanced health and economic support for the most vulnerable portions of the population."
Moreover, note that the sentence "Unemployment shock is expected to cause 890,000 additional deaths over the next 15 years." like the whole text you cite seems to suggest a counterfactual of people just continuing their normal work and normal life. While it is surely debatable how effective lockdowns were, their justification was not only saving the lives of old people, but also avoiding an uncontrolled breakdown of the economy; and without a lockdown, many people would probably also have lost their job or stayed home. In some cases, a lockdown ordered by the government may allow more targeted help to those affected.
Is there an explanation somewhere how the recommendations algorithm on the homepage works, i.e. how recency and karma or whatever are combined?
"There probably is an evolutionary adaptation that influences (at least probabilistically) the child's sex depending on the social situation."
Hm, if this were the case, I would expect either someone had already found evidence for it, or there were at least some plausible mechanism?
There is a difference between these two problems: aging is possibly solved by regular market forces because people have a willingness to pay for buying a solution for themselves.
Yes, it can be this simple, says new paper.
The link does not seem to work.
Gaby, it seems, cannot imagine any reason one might think that children are good or that the country would be better off with more of them. They couldn’t mean what they say about demographic collapse and our dependence on growth. They couldn’t be genuine in their values. It must be a political takeover, or racism.
To understand either Gaby Del Valle's reaction or your reaction to Gaby Del Valle's reaction, it would be helpful if you wrote anything about the conference. Judging based on my prior, it is likely that people organizing such a conference are not orthogonal to other general political ideology.
(My datapoint: people promoting more births etc were invited to different podcasts and it was mentioned they had a podcast of their own as well, so I searched that and was surprised that it seemed to be filled with almost cartoonish politics.)
I completed it.
In your opinion, why do kids need such devices to get that independence if kids had that independence before those devices existed?
Are there good and comprehensive evaluations of covid policies? Are there countries who really tried to learn, also for the next pandemic?
Here was the combined effect
Where do the numbers come from?
Having read something about self-driving cars actually being a thing now, I wonder how the trolley-problem thing (and whatever other ethics problems come up) was solved in the relevant regulation?
Bryan Caplan: Conformity drives a lot of fertility behavior. The main driver of the Baby Boom really was, “Everyone else is having big families; we should, too.”
Is that just a claim or does he provide evidence for that?
- Except then we started shaming ‘incorrectly’ having children directly.
- We have also continuously raised the bar on what counts as ‘incorrect.’
This is not so obviously correct, or at least the "bar" seems multidimensional. Some decades ago, it was a shame for an unmarried couple to have children, and in particular it was a great shame for a single mother to have children. At least where I live that has changed.
The problem is that the shaming we used to do mostly did have an underlying societal purpose.
This claim would be stronger with some examples.
"Most people who want them all fired would be totally fine paying the extra salaries indefinitely. "
That is likely wrong, but in any case it's just a claim and should be phrased like that.
"Stephanie Murray reports that the village thing can still be done, and in particular has pulled off a ‘baby swapping’ system that periodically pools child care so parents can have time for themselves."
Maybe there is more detail in the linked blog but just from this post it sounds like a reinvention of Kindergarten.
Offering $7,500 total is likely on the high end of what is practical before people start inefficiently gaming the system.
What does that mean? The wikipedia article Child benefit lists several examples of child benefit systems that yield more than $7,500.
The most important fact about politics in 2024 is that across the world, it's a terrible time to be an incumbent. For the first time this year since at least World War II, the incumbent party did worse than it did in the previous election in every election in the developed world. ...
What influence does the exclusion of "years where fewer than five countries had elections" in the graph have?
Does this question require that there is only one big filter per species?
I appreciate that you posted a response to my question. However, I assume there is some misunderstanding here.
Zvi notes that he will not "be engaging with any of the arguments against this, of any quality" (which suggests that there are also good or relevant arguments). Zvi includes the statement that "AI is going to kill everyone", and notes that he "strongly disagrees".
As I asked for "arguments related to or a more detailed discussion" of these issues, you mention some people you call "random idiots" and state that their arguments are "batshit insane". It thus seems like a waste of time trying to find arguments relevant to my question based on these keywords.
So I wonder: was your answer actually meant to be helpful?
So you think that looking up "random idiots" helps me find "arguments related to or a more detailed discussion about this disagreement"?
In Fertility Rate Roundup #1, Zvi wrote
"This post assumes the perspective that more people having more children is good, actually. I will not be engaging with any of the arguments against this, of any quality, whether they be ‘AI or climate change is going to kill everyone’ or ‘people are bad actually,’ other than to state here that I strongly disagree."
Does anyone of you have an idea where I can find arguments related to or a more detailed discussion about this disagreement (with respect to AI or maybe other global catastrophic risks; this is not a question about how bad climate change is)?
Expecting that, how do you prepare?
It is an interesting question how justified this stereotype is, given that many regulations aim at creating a single market and reducing trade barriers.
Comparing EU growth to the US is hard for different reasons, for instance demography but also the decarbonization efforts of the EU.
I know the internal European discourse, which is why I think depicting politicians in Europe as being mostly impervious to "pro-growth ideas" seems like a strawman. It is mainstream in the EU to try to find ways for higher economic growth rates. Everybody is talking about deregulation, but there are very different ideas what kind of policies would lead to higher growth rates.
are not completely impervious to pro-growth ideas
Depicting "eurocrats" as mostly impervious to "pro-growth ideas" seems like a strawman.
This stuff is scary: I've seen degrowthers
It is unclear how strongly related such degrowthers are to the beyond-growth conference people used as an example in the previous sentence.
European parliament even hosted a degrowth conference.
The linked abstract does not contain the word "degrowth". The title is "Beyond growth: Pathways towards sustainable prosperity in the EU", the abstract is relatively unclear but - among other things - seems to criticize GDP as a measure, and talk positively of "research and innovation". The executive summary of the study that can be found there seems to talk positively of delivering "greener and more sustainable growth through technological or social innovations" and of "decoupling of economic growth from increased emissions of carbon dioxide". So in general, this seems to be about limiting the growth of the usage of natural resources in order to stay within sustainable levels.
Europe has become known as a hub of degrowth.
It is unclear what this claims is supposed to mean. The characters "europ" do not appear in the Conclusions of the linked article. It is not clear what the fact that some authors of papers covering "degrowth" come from Europe, whatever that means in the specific paper, is supposed to prove.
In the last weeks, I saw some posts or comments arguing why it would be in the self-interest of an extremely powerful AI to leave some power or habitat or whatever to humans. This seems to try to be an answer to the briader question "why should AI dobthings that we want even though we are powerless?" But it skips the complicqted question "What do we actually want an AI to do?" If we can answer that second question, then maybe the whole "please don't do things that we really do not want" quest becomes easier to solve.