dr_analog
razorboy
No bio...
User ID: 583
Imagine if you were trapped in a computer system, but you were very smart, could think very fast and you could distribute copies of yourself. Also imagine you thought of humans as your enemy. If those are acceptable givens, I think you could figure out how to reach into the world and acquire resources and develop agency and do considerable damage.
At least in the beginning, you could acquire money and hire people to do your bidding. The world is big and lots of people will do the most inane or sketchy tasks for money without asking questions. Probably even if they knew they were being hired by an AI they would still do it but you have the time and ability to put together reassuring cover stories and can steal any identities you need to.
I contend nobody would ever even need to see your face or hear your voice but you could imagine a near future where deepfaking a non-celebrity (or a unique identity) is good enough for convincing video meets.
Anyway, if you had such agency, and weren't an obvious point of failure (unlike a single terrorist leader that can be killed by a drone attack, you can be in many places at once) I don't see how you could be stopped. The question is mainly how long it would take you to succeed.
dr_analog
razorboy
11mo ago
Someone help me contextualize VO2Max scores versus the population.
So, I have a VO2Max of about 50 on a good day. Confirmed by a treadmill test in a lab but also corroborated by my fitness watches.
This translates to 90%ile for my age (42).
I find this disconcerting because I think I train really, really hard, and have been for a long time (several years). I started from some place like 30 though I haven't been measuring the progression that closely.
I'm surprised that despite all of the effort I put in, I'm only better than 9/10ths of the population. I'm not trying to, like, humblebrag here. I think this sucks. I'm pretty sure this doesn't mean 10% of the male population in their 40s trains harder than I do?
Is the rest of this explained by genetic variance or what? Do people who used to be on the running team in college just have that much banked up, versus someone like me who was sedentary for the first few decades of his life?
Thanks for the feedback. Re: your questions: my VO2Max is 50 (was in second line of my post). I'm running 30+ miles a week. I do 70% of them at Zone 2, and run VO2 trainings (intervals) 2x per week. I pick up easy (Z1) or harder workouts (tempo/threshold) in there as well.
My best 5k ever is 23:45. I can do 1.7ish miles on a treadmill cooper.
I'm a bit overweight; about 23% body fat. I lift too, but I and am less disappointed with how that's going.
Somewhere in me I have an effortpost on why crypto, including cryptocurrency is bad for rule of law and that a sane society would have banned both. We've been pretty fortunate that everyone that has built DNMs so far are not competent or visionary enough to produce something high quality. The potential black market has not come anywhere close to being fully actualized.
The maximally dystopian horror example case is: onlyfans for live streamed child rape / snuff films with tens of thousands of men watching from behind Guy Fawkes masks beating off and tipping tens of thousands of dollars an hour. Everyone involved, the viewers and performers, completely anonymous and untraceable.
Yes, I am very familiar with the usual cipherpunk arguments for why crypto is an important tool for protecting people's security/privacy from criminals, and that also you can't trust police to protect backdoors in crypto systems and to also not abuse them. I'm not convinced the endgame world of maximally "useful" DNMs that could be produced wouldn't be a net worse world overall.
Seems like cryptocurrency is waning a bit so this future may be delayed for now.
I think you may not realize how widely used cryptography is. With HTTPS, every time you browse the web, you
Everyone assumes I must be technically illiterate to not be repeating the standard cipherpunk talking points on this issue.
I've implemented ciphers and hash libraries and protocols. I've bought drugs on darknets. I've run cryptocurrency trading companies. I've worked at Google (most boring job of my career).
dr_analog
razorboy
11mo ago
This will probably get buried but it's outrageous that you can be bankrupted by medical debt if you get sick in the US! In Europe this doesn't happen.
EDIT: thanks for the gold kind stranger
I'm really exhausted by what seems to be this interminable stuck-at-superficial-memes discussion about health care in the US. I've lived in the US, spent a few years in the UK and experienced NHS, found it surprisingly shitty even though I was looking forward to rubbing Americans' faces in it, and then I ended up back in the US and actually on Medicaid (by near accident! a story for another time though) and found the quality significantly higher.
My new EA cause area for improving health care in the US is to arrange to have everyone live in Europe for a few years so they can get past using it as a cudgel for trying to advocate for their ideology that will fix everything.
I suspect it would backfire horribly and important lessons wouldn't be learned because the irony is too thick, but I dunno I'd really enjoy hearing "whaaaat? I need to wait 3 weeks for a blood draw because the one phlebotomist for my area is on vacation?"
To be clear I'm not saying the UK health care system is an order of magnitude worse (or better) than the US one, just that there are tradeoffs that can be hard to appreciate until you experience them.
dr_analog
razorboy
11mo ago
(I had a different reply here but I deleted it because I was triggered by stuff that resembled something that you weren't actually saying. Sorry.)
But how much better is it? Perhaps less than those numbers would imply, on many metrics.
What metrics are there, out of curiosity? I've only really seen "outcomes" mentioned but in my surface view these are confounded by issues of affluence (e.g. more obesity, more driving everywhere). Also it seems like ass-covering and hostility-to-rationing drive up costs as well; a socialized medicine death panel could cheerfully say no that test is expensive and highly unlikely to find a problem so there's no rx for it end of story, but in the US an indicator that you could have a 0.01% chance of a horrific disease justifies the test so end of story.
I found the medical system in Germany, Austria and Italy each far superior to it (and at least the last one
I hear this all of the time but I can't reconcile this with my experience.
I took my sister to the doctor in Italy once, in the countryside, and the doctor was an obese stupid looking guy in a big dimly lit room with no computer or desk. He looked at my sister's really strange bite on her leg and seemed oblivious to the possibility that this insect bite could cause Lyme disease. Even though she told him (in fluent Italian) that she was concerned this was a tick bite and that she could get Lyme disease. He just gave her some of of cortisone injection and sent her on her way.
She got Lyme disease.
On the plus side it was free.
I dunno I'm sure there are some doctors like this everywhere but if there was a doctor in the US that was this incompetent and they charged $200 I feel like the community would deal with them.
It's so unbelievable I'm doubting whether this actually happened even though I was definitely there and sober.
(Your UK assessment seems very familiar)
In the UK you can usually get ‘that test’ done privately for less than the cost of the average annual deductible in the US if you really want it.
So, interestingly, my current wealth insurance plan is one where I pay out of pocket for stuff and then apply for reimbursement. This puts me in a position to shop around before I get tests to find the lowest price out of an attempt to stay under the per-incident deductible and also generalized fear that I might be stuck with the whole bill.
It's really eye-opening! The variance between rates quoted for a test is sometimes an order of magnitude and I can't get anyone to tell me why.
I've listened to podcasts with doctors and they will complain about such and such imaging machines being shit and others being great and that's why they refer to so and so place only.
So. I dunno my prejudice is that these cheap tests produce crappy grainy images that your doctor hates but they just roll with it. But I could also totally understand if it's also because proper supply and demand forces are completely distorted and you really do overpay by 10x for the same stuff
My step-kid has been on Medicaid for most of his life and he has some kind of non-metastatic cancer that grows and regrows in his throat. It's fatal for some kids and I think it's Make A Wish eligible (not really sure what that is but it sounds grim). In his case he merely had to have throat surgery under general anaesthesia on a near-monthly basis when he was a toddler to keep cutting them out.
Fortunately as he aged they stopped regrowing so aggressively and now he only needs surgery about every 12-18 months.
The surgeon who sees him is some kind of leading expert in this surgery and he's seen at this hospital that I didn't even know could be so shiny and nice.
Anyway, we never once had to pay out of pocket to treat it while he was on Medicaid. Now that we're on a private insurer it's about 10-20% co-insurance, so it's a few grand out of pocket every time we take him in; seems like a great fucking deal all things considered.
The surgeon did make a... funny?... remark once when he was finally switched to a private insurer from Medicaid that now the reimbursement will be enough that he can celebrate after each surgery with a mid-range IPA instead of PBR. Not sure how much to read into that; given how health care reimbursements work I could imagine the dude has a garage full of exotic cars or he really could mean he all-in nets beer money on each surgery. They both seem equally possible. I do hope he has a lot of exotic cars though.
dr_analog
razorboy
11mo ago
Fascinating!
One thought: is the group of people that doesn't have insurance and therefore doesn't get annual physicals and therefore doesn't have their colon cancer detected before it's way too late (a) a real cohort and (b) very well represented here? That would be a case of people having worsened outcomes because of poor access to care, no?
dr_analog
razorboy
11mo ago
But if you own an MRI machine or other diagnostic equipment you can really make bank. I'm pretty sure it's been shown that doctors prescribe more unnecessary tests when they are financially rewarded for doing so.
Owning a medical practice where you have your own MRI machine and write prescriptions to use it does sound like it would be pretty lucrative.
Conversely, I have a step-kid and I very much try to be a serious parent interested in his long-term well-being. I am absolutely certain he wouldn't call me anything close to his real dad. Ironically, his actual dad is a hands-off checked out stoner who just buys him whatever he wants, let's him eat whatever and imposes no real structure. The teenage kid adores him, of course.
The kid needs life saving surgery once a year or so (he has some rare benign throat cancer) that requires two nights of travel. I've been there for 5 of the last 6. We're preparing to do the next one and he just asked me if I've ever gone to one of these. He honestly couldn't remember. Yeah kid :/
Meanwhile his biodad has only been to 1 of the last 6.
Indeed, his own dad can act absolutely psycho and the kid will defend him but if I criticize the slightest thing it's reported to mom.
No competing with biology!
What are we talking about again? Oh right. If trans women could sign up for the full package where they get periods, risk unwanted pregnancy with no access to abortion, and have an uncontrollable urge to oooh and ahhh and snuggle every baby in their vicinity while getting no special male or female fetish attention I will have no doubts about their need to be women (I mean, not that anyone asked me...)
Because if I can do real dad things and not be considered a real dad then it's more than fair for trans women to have to do real women things to be considered real women.
dr_analog
razorboy
9mo ago
Kind of a silly question: is being concerned with living a moral life a reliigous/ideological affliction that you shouldn't need to concern yourself with if you're enlightened?
Is there anything, well, "wrong" with being 100% self-interested? E.g. when you do work for mutual benefit, it's to build credit, not because you inherently care the benefit of others.
Is this nihilism? Or something else?
dr_analog
razorboy
9mo ago
I read quite a bit of Ayn Rand when I was a bookish teenager. Both her semi-pornographic fiction and also non-fiction essays. They were fun but I'm not ever sure I truly followed. She was like <start, law of identity> and then <virtues of selfishness, here> and kind of left out the middle steps from formal logic to complete human moral system.
But, why do I need to have warm fuzzies about it? Can't I just say self-interest is fine and any guilt I might feel about it is my socially obsessed brain trying to tell me lies and I should only worry about group dynamics in a game theoretical sense?
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
My town's local library had a Celebrate Banned Books! month sign up and I immediately thought "yeah right" and tried looking up some right wing thought crime books in the catalog and found they didn't stock any.
I don't actually want to read any myself, but how cynical do you have to be to put signs like that up when you know full well you specifically filter out books on ideological basis.
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
Seems real to me. If he was at a VC that did crypto they could have been ejaculating money over the pandemic.
Also his story seems not implausible given my own experience.
I filled out an OKC profile once and was my honest funny cute self. I also included my income, $250-500k and mentioned quant finance. I was getting about 3-4 dates a month. The women weren't amazing but not bad either. I kept this up for a year or so.
Then I came across some OKC blog post about how income is the biggest predictor of dating success for men. I felt crushed, in a lot of the ways the quoted guy did. Surely this didn't really apply to me?
So I removed my income from my OKC profile.
After that I landed two whole dates total over the course of an entire year.
Jokes on me, I'm cute and funny but not enough to cut through the noise the way possibly making $500k does.
It was an interesting experience in a few ways. None of the women I went on dates with struck me as gold diggers really. That was the biggest part of the head fuck I guess. Maybe they know to play it cool, but my pop culture impression of gold digging is that women drop hints constantly about wanting expensive gifts and going to exclusive places. Man always pays. Etc
I think they just generally found men less attractive if they didn't earn high income.
dr_analog
razorboy
8mo ago
I mean, it makes sense. If I have friends who don't earn high income I can often point to obvious character flaws, limits to intellect or mental illnesses. I can further imagine I'd probably not enjoy being in an intimate relationship with them.
Which isn't to say you are broken if you don't pull high income, but it's a not bad heuristic.
I wasn't being that extreme.
But also, chess is pretty superfluous to living a good life? Whereas money often directly affects the quality of your life?
Sure some people achieve enlightenment working as humble ferrymen deep in the woods but that's not the norm by far.
dr_analog
razorboy
7mo ago
My default now is to assume the FBI is actually extremely incompetent. Therefore, if they proceeded to charge this guy, they would've had to reveal some embarrassing mistake made in investigating him so they're choosing to instead let him off with a wrist slap.
dr_analog
razorboy
7mo ago
It's a scam. If a panel of Joe Biden, Abe Simpson, and Muhammad Ali can't understand how it makes money, it doesn't.
That's pretty good. Did you invent this?
dr_analog
razorboy
7mo ago
NFTs were supposed to have a mechanism where you could verify ownership, track transfers, and maybe even compensate the original producer every time a work changed hands. Lots of drawing board schemes appeared on how you could pivot this platform into a fair system for paying creatives, and creatives would produce like never before, in some kind of decentralized way through common consensus.
Everyone got so excited about it that they took a leap of faith on the NFT part and... kinda forgot to actually build the rest of that stuff? The default way to even trade these things ended up being a central exchange (Opensea). Pretty far from the ideal.
Tulipmania ensued and then a crash happened.
Well, you're obviously fit as fuck. What's your training program like?
That said, I have one delta to offer.
I was vegan ten years. I found it pretty hard to keep making gains on lifting until I brought my protein intake up to 1g of protein per pound of body weight. That is, 2g/kg. This is significantly higher than your target.
By lifting I'm not talking crazy body building stuff. Just trying to meet non-embarrassing targets like body weight bench, 1.5x body weight squat and 2x body weight deadlift.
I was stuck pretty far from these goals until I added a lot more protein.
It's kind of challenging to get, say, 175g of protein a day from purely vegan sources without also taking in a lot of carbs and fat for the ride. Unless you do isolates, which are not so appealing.
So, I started consuming animal sources of protein and made gains in just a few months that I had been struggling to make for years.
So that's my anecdote.
I'm in my 40s btw so protein intake might be a bigger deal due to age related decrepitude as well.
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