faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
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User ID: 884
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3d ago
Key search terms "stylometry" and "social media":
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4d ago
$100k for the machinery seems plausible to me -- you can see details of their proposed setup here (relevant sections are "Carbon capture", "Electrolyzer", and "Chemical reactor", the rest of that post is fluff). "Low maintenance" remains to be seen, but there's no reason in principle that it couldn't be.
But again, the viability of the entire project rests on the idea that in some places the marginal cost of power will be close to zero or even negative a substantial fraction of the time, and yet those places are accessible enough to construct one of these plants. If that's not the way the future pans out, this project winds up not being so viable.
So the answer to
So how is this thing supposed to be competitive with natural gas in any reasonable place ?
Is "It's not. But not every place is reasonable".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
6d ago
Why can't it be real? The Haber-Bosch process is at least as impactful of an "air + energy + water -> bulk useful material" process, and it's real and cost-effective.
Anyone who comes up with some process that
- Has low infrastructure costs
- Produces some industrially valuable product
- Spins up and down quickly, and tolerates long idle periods (i.e. starts producing the product as soon as you feed it power, stops when you stop feeding it power, and doesn't have issues if it doesn't start again for a long time)
has a license to print money when power costs dip to zero or below. Which they already do from time to time, and if solar power continues to be deployed more and more, that situation will happen more often.
Terraform's "power -> methane" thing certainly isn't efficient, compared to other forms of grid energy storage, but what it is is scalable. Basically it seems to be a bet on "power prices will be zero / negative some fraction of the time in some locations", which seems likely to happen if solar keeps being deployed at the current rate, or if any country anywhere in the world gets serious about fission power.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
6d ago
What is a hyperdunbarist? Googling the term literally shows only this comment.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
6d ago
Also useful if your car has bluetooth but it's janky.
I drove a corolla until it started giving me trouble (around 300,000 km), followed by a prius until that started giving me trouble (around 400,000 km), both were IMO quite good cars. I think you should be able to get a lightly used one that is <10 years old within your budget in Scotland, and that should have all the creature comforts you want.
That said, for bluetooth specifically, for $20, you can get a thing which plugs into the cigarette lighter of a car and does bluetooth pairing and then broadcasts to a radio frequency (choose a dead channel), which you can then tune your car radio to. In my experience they work well enough that you never think about them once you've done the initial 2 minutes of setup - your phone just automatically pairs when you get in the car, and the car speakers play what your phone is playing.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
6d ago
I think the guideline should be "the topic keeps coming up over and over again in the threads for separate weeks, and the conversation in the new week tends to reference the conversation in older weeks". Covid, when it was a thing, absolutely qualified as that. Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine were somewhat less of this, since each week's thread tended to be about current events more than about continuing to hash out an ongoing disagreement. Trans stuff, I think, qualifies for this, as it does seem to be the same people having the same discussion over and over. Can't think of too many other examples.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
6d ago
Don't pin it and I think it's fine. The people who want to have that discussion can subscribe to the thread. A second such containment thread for rationalist inner-circle social drama would also be nice. Maybe a third for trans stuff.
I think "topics that tend to suck all the air out of the room when they get brought up go to their own containment thread, anyone who cares to discuss that topic can subscribe to the thread, containment threads only get pinned if there's at least a quarter as much past-activity in them as in the typical CW thread" would probably be an improvement.
TBH if someone is put off by the fact that holocaust denial stuff gets put in a dedicated thread rather than banned I think they would probably be put off by the speech norms here anyway, best that they discover that early. I personally find the discussion tiresome and poorly argued, but I don't think there's a low-time-investment way to moderate on that basis, at least not yet. Maybe check back in 3 years and LLMs will be at that point, but for the time being.
All that said, I am not a mod, nor am I volunteering to spend the amount of time it would take to be a mod, so ultimately the decision should be made by the people who are putting in that time and effort.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7d ago
The topic of this thread isn't "the evidence we have about the history of World War II", it's "internal discussion and navel gazing about what norms we want to have in this community", which is a topic of endless interest on this site. A similar thing happens on any thread that mentions Aella.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7d ago
The constant debates between the Napoleon deniers and their opponents are sucking all the air out of the room. What do you do?
Containment thread? It worked pretty well for covid, when covid stuff was sucking all the air out of the room.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7d ago
I challenge the premise "somewhat optimized", we are currently living in dysgenic age.
The optimization happened in the ancestral environment, not the last couple hundred years. Current environment is probably mildly dysgenic but the effect is going to be tiny because the current environment just hasn't been around for very long.
Alternatively, we could just skip detection on which alleles have low IQ and just eliminate very rare alleles, which are much more likely to be deleterious (e.g. replace allele with frequency below given threshold with its most similar allele with frequency above threshold) without studying any IQ.
I expect this would help a bit, just would be surprised if the effect size was actually anywhere near +1SD.
In your hypothetical bet, how would result "IQ as intended, but baby brain too large for pregnancy to be delivered naturally" count?
If the baby is healthy otherwise, that counts just fine.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7d ago
Congratulations!
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
7d ago
In terms of why I'm not so active it's mostly the "had a kid 2 months ago" thing, not anything to do with Motte quality.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
19d ago
This line of argument reminds me of the "to get people to ride public transit, you don’t have to fix the issues with public transit, you just have to make the experience of traveling by car much much worse" argument I see sometimes.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
I think the relationship between game theory and morality is more like the one between physics and engineering. You can't look at physics alone to decide what you want to build, but if you try to do novel engineering without understanding the underlying physics you're going to have a bad time. Likewise, game theory doesn't tell you what is moral and immoral, but if you try to make some galaxy-brained moral framework, and you don’t ay attention to how your moral framework plays out when multiple people are involved, you're also going to have a bad time.
Though in both cases, if you stick to common-sense stuff that's worked out in the past in situations like yours, you'll probably do just fine.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
Morality has nothing to do with game theory
I disagree pretty strongly with that -- I think that "Bob is a moral person" and "people who are affected by Bob's actions generally would have been worse off if Bob's actions didn't affect them" are, if not quite synonymous, at least rhyming. The golden rule works pretty alright in simple cases without resorting to game theory, but I think game theory can definitely help in terms of setting up incentives such that people are not punished for doing the moral thing / incentivized to do the immoral thing, and that properly setting up such incentives is itself a moral good.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
If you have a bunch of physical resources you could use to build infrastructure which will provide a moderate amount of value per year over the coming decades, or in goods which will provide a large amount of value now but no further value in the future, that gives you the options of "invest in the future" vs "consume now". If the default action is "invest in the future", and you make the decision to consume now instead, I think that reasonably counts as "borrowing against the future".
On the object level of this thread, it's debatable whether allowing more immigration is borrowing against the future or investing in the future, and it probably depends to some extent on how generous you expect future entitlements to be, but "is our current policy borrowing against the future" is a real and meaningful question.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
You'll be happy to know that I did in fact throw some fairly substantial amounts of money at jefftk and friends for their wastewater surveillance / sequencing / anomaly detection project. Significantly prompted by us having this conversation.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
The Against Malaria Foundation is a pretty solid choice, and is the one that makes up most of my charitable contributions. If you care more about quality than about quantity of life, you might also consider Deworm the World. Their pitch is also refreshingly concrete and not "woke" at all:
More than 913 million children are at risk for parasitic worm infections like soil-transmitted helminths and schistosomiasis.
These infections mainly occur in areas with inadequate sanitation, disproportionately affecting poor communities. Children infected with worms are often too sick or weak to attend school because their body can’t properly absorb nutrients. If left untreated, worm infections lead to anemia, malnourishment, impaired mental and physical development, and severe chronic illnesses.
A safe, effective, and low-cost solution does exist — in the form of a simple pill taken once or twice a year. Regular treatment reduces the spread of the disease and helps children stay in school and live healthier and more productive lives.
Since 2014, Deworm the World has helped deliver over 1.8 billion deworming treatments to children across several geographies – for less than 50 cents per treatment. We work closely with governments to implement high-quality and cost-effective mass deworming programs which are resulting in dramatic reductions in worm prevalence.
Every year, GiveWell publishes a detailed analysis of the cost effectiveness of each charity in a spreadsheet that documents their assumptions and their model. If you care to do so, you can also make a copy of the spreadsheet and plug in your own numbers, though I basically never do that.
But yeah, no reason to give money to a global health charity that has politics you hate. The impact per dollar between the listed global health charities just doesn't vary by all that much.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
I am not arguing that you can't get a single standard deviation of gain using gene editing, and I am especially not arguing that you can't get there eventually using an iterative approach. I am arguing that you will get less than +1SD of gain (and, in fact, probably a reduction) in intelligence if you follow the specific procedure of
- Catalogue all of the different genes where different alleles are correlated with differences in the observed phenotypic trait of interest (in this case intelligence)
- Determine the "best" allele for every single gene, and edit the genome accordingly at all of those places.
- Hopefully have a 300-IQ super baby.
The specific thing I want to call out is that each of the alleles you've measured to be the "better" variant is the better variant in the context of the environment the measurements occurred in. If you change a bunch of them at once, though, you're going to end up in into a completely different region of genome space, where the genotype/phenotype correlations you found in the normal human distribution probably won't hold.
I don't know if you have any experience with training ML models. I imagine not, since most people don't. Still, if you do have such experience, you can read my point as "if you take some policy that has been somewhat optimized by gradient descent for a loss function which is different from, but correlated with, the one you care about, and calculate the local gradient according to the loss function you care about, and then you take a giant step in the direction of the gradient you calculated, you are going to end up with higher loss even according to the loss function you care about, because the loss landscape is not flat". Basically my point is "going far out of distribution probably won't help you, even if you choose the direction that is optimal in-distribution -- you need to iterate".
Actually waiting for gene edited baby to grow is slow, and illegal
Yep. And yet, I claim, necessary if you don't want to be limited to fairly small gains.
Arguing that than it would break well before 1 SD, is... just wishful thinking. There's still a lot of low hanging fruit.
Note that this is "below 1SD of gains beyond what you would expect from the parents, and in a single iteration". If you were to take e.g. Terry Tao's genome, and then identify 30 places where he has "low intelligence" variants of whatever gene, and then make a clone with only those genes edited, and a second clone with no gene edits, I would expect the CRISPR clone to be a bit smarter than the unaltered clone, and many SD smarter than the average person. And, of course, at the extreme, if you take a zygote from two average-IQ parents, and replace its genome with Tao's genome then the resulting child would probably be more than 1SD smarter than you'd expect based on the IQs of the parents, because in that case you're choosing a known place in genome space to jump to, instead of choosing a direction and jumping really far in that direction from a mediocre place.
Maybe technical arguments don't belong in the CW thread, but people assuming that the loss landscape is basically a single smooth basin is a pet peeve of mine.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
I thought it was claimed by the birds this year?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
You were off by a year.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
Why would you assume "aliens" not "previous Earth civilization" in that case?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
So literally some takes from 5 years ago and a different account, which, if I'm correct about which name you're implying guesswho used to post as, are more saying "in practice sexual assault accusations aren't being used in every political fight, so let's maybe hold off on trying drastic solutions to that problem until it's demonstrated that your proposed cure isn't worse than the disease".
Let he who has never posted a take that some people find objectionable cast the first stone.
Yes, because the baseline for "randomly guessing" is 1/5612 ("twitter user @fluffyporcupine matches this specific one of the 5612 facebook users"), not 1/2 ("twitter user @fluffyporcupine is/is not the same user as facebook user Nancy Prickles").
Doesn't scare me for personal reasons -- I'm trivially identifiable, you don't need to resort to fancy ML techniques. But if you're actually trying to remain anonymous, and post under both your real name and a pseudonym, then perhaps it's worth paying attention to (e.g. spinning up separate throwaway accounts for anything you want to say that is likely to actually lead to significant damage to your real-world identity and doing the "translate to and from a foreign language to get changed phrasing without changed meaning" thing).
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