KnotGodel
1yr ago
Recently, there was a series of studies demonstrating that ADHD medications are both much less helpful than previously thought (boost lasts for only two years or so) and with much worse side effects, including heightened risks of dementia later in life.
The studies you linked are from 2006-2011. How is that "recently"?
KnotGodel
1yr ago
I think you're missing a distinction.
The mods are generally balanced. I could even be convinced they're slightly biased in favor of people on the left.
The commenters here definitely skew anti-mainstream and anti-woke, which is very close to being synonymous with skewing rightwards in the post-2016 era. This has gotten more and more blatant over the last several years, imo.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
KnotGodel
1yr ago
You are conflating two different theses:
-
Historical discrimination is the primary driver of group outcomes
-
discrimination does necessarily lead to lesser outcomes
I believe both are false, but you only disprove the latter claim, despite claiming to disprove the former. The latter is much easier to disprove.
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$300k in debt isn't that huge when the median physician pay is $350k - at 6% interest and 40% taxes it drops your take-home from $210k to $192k.
-
The much larger cost for doctors is the opportunity cost of going to medical school and one or more residencies. The median doctor graduates from medical school at age 30 and then still has years of residency(ies) to go. Making peanuts for a decade+ after college for the types of driven/conscientious/smart people who go to medical school is an enormous opportunity cost, dwarfing the literal debt (e.g. discount rate of 5%, forgone earnings of $100k per year, for 10 years = $1.26m at the end.
-
It's not really an "enormous financial risk". The 6-year graduation rate from medical school is 96%, and virtually all of them find a residency. That is, an admission offer from a medical school is as close to a "golden ticket" as you can get in life. The only risk is whatever time you invest in getting in to medical school beyond undergrad - a risk that, for most people, is 0-4 years.
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Finally, re people being underwater. This can happen, but it usually stems from specific decisions - i.e. spending many years trying to get into medical school, switching specialties late in the game, refusing to give up on a very selective specialty, choosing to do academic medicine in a high cost-of-living area, etc.
I think there are two important lenses here.
Via the probability-theory lens, we must distinguish between
- the propensity for the coin to land on heads - unknown
- the subjective (in the Bayesian sense) probability Yudkowsky assigns to the coin landing on heads on the next flip
Under a Bayesian epistemology, the former is reasoned about using a probability density function (PDF) by which (approximately) every number between 0 and 1 is assigned a subjective probability. Then, when we observe the flip we update using the likelihood function (either x for heads or 1-x for tails). What you're talking about is essentially how spread out Yudkowsky's current PDF is.
The other lens is markets-based, which I've touched on before. Briefly, for reason that are obvious for anyone in finance, there is a world of difference between
- believing a stock is worth X
- offering to buy the stock for X+0.01 from anyone and sell it for X-0.01 to anyone
In real life, the bid-ask spread that market makers offer depend on a great number of factors including how informed everyone else in the market is relative to themselves. On this lens, credible intervals (or whatever phrase you want to use) are not things individuals have in isolation, they are things individuals have within a social space: if you're with a bunch of first-graders, you might have a very tight bid-ask spread when betting on whether a room-temperature superconductor was just discovered; if you're with a bunch of chemist PhDs, you're going to adopt an extremely wide spread (e.g. "somewhere between 5% and 95%").
KnotGodel
4mo ago
The entire purpose of this exercise is to consider how likely the South was to either choose to end slavery on its own or consent to have it chosen for them without bloodshed. The relevant metric, therefore, is how important slavery was to the South.
More concretely, the Civil War depended on individual state governments choosing to secede, so the geographic concentration of slavery in the US is extremely relevant. If slavery was evenly distributed in the US, I
- strongly don't think the Civil War would have been on the table to begin with
- tentatively think slavery would have been ended in the 1870s or 1880s
KnotGodel
4mo ago
The Modelbot that is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking - Sam was exceptionally smart within formal models (epitomized by HFT crypto algorithms) and not really exceptional outside of formal models (e.g. the verbal argument of "what if something goes wrong")
KnotGodel
4mo ago
I don't think trying to convince an ally's citizens to secede is generally considered a wise geopolitical move. Would you rather
- have Canada as a close ally
- make the Canadian government dislike us for decades (centuries?) but we get the honor of adding a few millions citizens - citizens who probably average half the US average income, which means they will probably be net-government recipients rather than payers.
Seems like an easy choice to me.
KnotGodel
5mo ago
Also, general question, how do people go about archiving posts here with many reference links that risk bitrot? Recursive wget into an mht?
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine works pretty well for this purpose. There's even an extension that makes it pretty easy to archive specific pages that you worry won't be archived due to lack of visibility.
Alternatively, just use File > Save Page As...
Alternatively, alternatively, it's not that challenging to use selenium-wire to intercept every HTTP request a dummy browser makes if you really want to automate saving a bunch of webpages, and very few websites have good defense against that level of scraping (at least, if you keep you QPS low enough).
KnotGodel
5mo ago
You also don't have to feel like you are losing status if I fuck your wife in front of you, or force you to blow me, but I would suggest not doing so demonstrates a lack of self respect
IMO, the problem with both of those is not that I'm losing status.
All else equal, all wealth should be taxed equally (say, flat 1%/y) , not income from wealth. Current tax laws encourage bubbles and poor investing. Just buy a garbage bond or shitcoin and uncle sam will barely touch it, but god helps you if you invest in a company actually making money. And don’t give me the hard-luck grandma story.
Hmm - I haven't heard this take before. Let me do some quick math, courtesy of the Markowitz model. Suppose you have two investment options:
- stocks that returns Norm(A, B)
- risk free interest rate: i
Let e be your risk aversion and let x be the the proportion of your portfolio you are investing in stocks
U = xA + (1-x)i - exxB
dU/dx = A - i - 2exB
x = (A - i) / (2eB)
Capital gains scales returns by k and variance by k^2 (where k = 1 - tax_rate):
x = (kA - ki) / (2ekkB) = (A - i) / (2ekB)
As taxes go up, k shrinks from 1 towards 0, which makes x increase. Therefore, capital gains taxes cause increased risk tolerance.
A wealth tax reduces returns by k:
x = ((A-k) - (i-k)) / (2ekkB) = (A - i) / (2ekB)
This is the same, so a wealth tax doesn't affect risk tolerance.
It’s like a poll tax on wealth, and like a poll tax, it’s very tax efficient.
I don't think this can be true. The chief academic argument against capital gains taxes is that they impose a 100% tax on consumption in the far future, which is maximally distortionary. The same is true of a wealth tax.
The problem with income tax is that it discourages economically beneficial behaviour, like working or good investing.... the state, counter-productively, eggs you on to be a bum and to stack your wealth under the mattress (ignoring inflation). Your lazy bum money should be taxed at least as much as superstar cancer-curing money.
I personally think that if society had no welfare, a flat income tax would be either not distortionary or push people to work more. Note: historically people worked much more and (e.g.) wages being 4x lower because your country is poor is equivalent to a 75% flat tax today.
I have an elegant mathematical model illustrating this result, but I think I've force-fed this forum with enough math already.
Cool post, but
It should not be a rocket science to isolate these factors, actually, it would amount to a very cool paper with plenty of citations. So where is this paper?
There are plenty of papers on the life expectancy gender gap in general. This one for instance looks at why the gap has narrowed in Sweden by looking at the contribution of different causes. They find "External causes of morbidity and mortality" (i.e. accidents, self-harm, assault) explained 15.1% of the gap in in 1997 and 21.2% of the gap in 2014 - conclusions that seem to broadly match yours.
However, I take your point about the lack of such papers. Given the political leanings here, I suppose commenters will point out that this hasn't stopped similar gender pay gap analysis. There is truth to that, so allow me to point out factors that don't boil down to "it isn't fashionable in this zeitgeist."
Such papers on the gender pay gap are almost always just glorified linear regressions. This makes the causal claims questionable, but also makes it clear why such papers are easier to write than a mortality gap paper would be. To do pay analysis, you can just survey 10k people, which will give you about 10k pay datapoints. You ask those people a battery of standardized questions. You plug-and-chug in a linear regression model. Done. If you tried that for mortality, you'd survey 10k people, which will give you ~150 death datapoints after a year. That's not enough to do any kind of definitive regression with lots of controls.
So, for mortality research, you will realistically need hundreds of thousands of people, which means you are realistically using either medical records or government records. If the latter, privacy and lack-of-standardized-questionnaires will make it a struggle. If the latter, privacy and lack of asking-relevant-questions will make it a struggle.
And, so, to do This Paper on the life expectancy gap, you are stuck integrating results from multiple other papers/fields. It's easy to subtract specific causes-of-death (as you did and the paper I linked to above did). But you want more, you want to control for smoking, drugs, alcohol, "meat consumption and overall life style". Here you run into serious correlation≠causation issues. Sure, the link you used claims that smokers live 10 years shorter, but there is no RCT - how much do we trust that as a causal claim? Ditto for the other things. Another issue is that the linear-regression-doer can include interaction terms, while the literature-review-using-various-sources paper cannot.
I'm not saying there is no impact on what-is-popular regarding what is published in academia, but there are serious differences between researching the gender mortality and pay gaps.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Agnosticism (i.e. confidence in belief) is on a separate axis from atheism (i.e. direction of belief). The vast majority of atheists will be agnostic. Most religious people will be gnostic. There are some gnostic atheists but they're mostly just strawmen.
I've never understood this way of discussing (a)theism. What's wrong with just using probabilities like we do with every other belief? What does the confidence-direction distinction add to the epistemology/discussion?
KnotGodel
1yr ago
If the guy was a Jain or something of that nature, I could respect this viewpoint
Why would him being a Jain change anything?
The question is not "is this prediction correct", the question is "can you do better".
And I'm not trying to be dismissive. It doesn't have to be your own analysis - do you have a pundit who can do better? An organization? A MIT professor?
Just as Nate Silver can predict elections "wrongly", the market can get predictions "wrong" - but that doesn't mean I have a better source of future predictions or that a better source even exists.
To predict housing prices, I look at the single futures market that averages ~1 trade per day and where 75% of trades involve a single man. Do I trust it? Does that question even make sense? It is, in a sense, just a single expert's predictions - but at least he puts money on the line and is even a market maker - a degree of exploitability you'd expect to create a degree of honesty. It's certainly less efficient than the trading of Walmart stock, but can I (or an institution I can identify) do better? I don't think so...
And so we come to this. Someone on this forum makes a claim with pretty minimal actual justification - probably mostly just intuition, but possibly a bunch of unshown work. Do I trust their predictions more than the bond market's? No - not even close.
So, under the naive assumption that we seek "truth" on this forum rather than "feeling smart" - the market is the best forecast until someone actually puts in the work to identify a better one.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
In practice, I can go to the CDC website and see that their nutrition recommendations are terrible
The first page I found seems reasonable?
- Emphasizes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and fat-free or low-fat milk and milk products
- Includes a variety of protein foods such as seafood, lean meats and poultry, eggs, legumes (beans and peas), soy products, nuts, and seeds.
- Is low in added sugars, sodium, saturated fats, trans fats, and cholesterol.
- Stays within your daily calorie needs
[ hmm - I can't seem to get lists to work well inside quotes ]
KnotGodel
1yr ago
I haven't followed this much (like read ~2 articles on it), and I'm probably naive, but I've always intuitively felt that verdicts passed by a randomly chosen jury are probably typically reasonable regarding political motivations. What makes you think differently? (either in this case or in general)
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Right. Their point was that your theory is true, but that the equivalent theory is plausible for transgender women and would explain the "evidence" put forth by Dolly (cited by the OP).
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Exactly. Additionally, you need to demonstrate anger at the idea of a compromise to signal to Russia that you will Never Surrender™, so that, when a compromise does happen, you'll be in a stronger negotiating position.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Those are good points. I still think him living is much more likely; but you've given me significant pause.
My theory is that as the population turns over from immigrants to second generation and black immigrants move into Markham and Richmond they'll become a very reliable conservative voting
All the reasons you gave for the first generation to be conservative will be weaker for the second generation as they assimilate: weaker family values, weaker in-group bias, less upward mobility. Meanwhile, they will probably be more educated.
Doesn't that all point to the second generation immigrants being more liberal than their parents?
KnotGodel
2mo ago
Is it common to have role models apart from your father, for happily married parents?
Older brothers?
More generally, I guess the pre-requisite for a male role model is that you spend a significant amount of time with men as a child. I feel like, for most boys in the US, only the men in their nuclear family qualify.
Everyone thinks their own altruism is effective. EAs deliberately try to choose the most effective, which the vast majority of people don't consider attempting and act confused if you suggest it.
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