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.
6mo ago
provide vouchers to homeless people and to require hotels to report vacancies daily and accept vouchers if they have room
New startup idea: uber for staying in hotel rooms, where hotels pay background-checked people to stay in hotel rooms to prevent them from being vacant.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
[Omicron]
<1%? My vague memory is that there were a lot of variants, and that in general 'virus mutates to spread more and be less harmful' is fairly common, so imo there's not that much reason to believe this.
For a random variant I'd agree. But omicron was really weird in a lot of ways though, and I'd actually put this one at more like 30% (and 80% that something weird and mouse-shaped happened).
- Omicron was really really far (as measured by mutation distance) from any other sars-cov-2 variant. Like seriously look at this phylogenetic tree (figure 1 in this paper)
- The most recent common ancestor of B.1.1.529 (omicron) and B.1.617.2 (delta, the predominant variant at the time) dates back to approximately February 2020. It is not descended from any variant that was common at the time it started spreading.
- The omicron variant spike protein exhibited unusually high binding affinity for the mouse cell entry receptor (source)
- Demand for humanized mice was absurdly high during the pandemic - researchers were definitely attempting to study coronavirus disease and spread dynamics in mouse models.
The astute reader will object "hey that just sounds like a researcher who couldn't get enough humanized mice decided to induce sars-cov-2 to jump to normal mice, and then study it there. Why do you assume they intentionally induced a jump back to humans rather than accidentally getting sick from their research mice". To which I say "the timing was suspicious, the level of infectiousness was enormously higher in humans which I don’t think I'd expect in the absence of passaging back through humanized mice, and also hey look over there a distraction from my weak arguments".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
For each of the following, I think there's a nontrivial chance (call it 10% or more) that that crackpot theory is true.
- The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.
- The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.
- Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.
- Israel has at least one satellite with undisclosed purpose and capabilities that uses free space point-to-point optical communication. If true, that means that the Jews have secret space lasers.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
8mo ago
Jury duty is an example of a service that people are universally compelled to provide. So looking at the working conditions and pay of jurors may also be instructive towards answering this question.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
Analysis, Context, Hook, Own Opinion.
ACHOO.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
An economic zone that cannot or will not pay its soldiers sufficiently well that they are willing to fight because the pay is worth it considering the risk does not deserve the name of "economic zone". It's legitimate for economic zones to exist, and there are benefits of being an economic zone rather than a nation, but if a geopolitical body goes that route they should not expect to reap the benefits of being an economic zone while getting culturally-unified-nation levels of devotion in their armed forces.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
10mo ago
I personally quite like the standard of "if you're going to bring up a controversial topic it should be because you personally care about and have a well-thought-out stance on the topic, and you are willing to either defend your stance or change your mind".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
Concrete note on this:
accusations that they promised another, "Chloe", compensation around $75,000 and stiffed her on it in various ways turned into "She had a written contract to be paid $1000/monthly with all expenses covered, which we estimated would add up to around $70,000."
The "all expenses" they're talking about are work-related travel expenses. I, too, would be extremely mad if an employer promised me $75k / year in compensation, $10k of which would be cash-based, and then tried to say that costs incurred by me doing my job were considered to be my "compensation".
Honestly most of what I take away from this is that nobody involved seems to have much of an idea of how things are done in professional settings, and also there seems to be an attitude of "the precautions that normal businesses take are costly and unnecessary since we are all smart people who want to help the world". Which, if that's the way they want to swing, then fine, but I think it is worth setting those expectations upfront. And also I'd strongly recommend that anyone fresh out of college who has never had a normal job should avoid working for an EA organization like nonlinear until they've seen how things work in purely transactional jobs.
Also it seems to me based on how much interest there was in that infighting that effective altruists are starved for drama.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11mo ago
I dunno, my highest voted comment ever had lots of formatting and upwards of 50 links.
And looking at my top comments in general, and also specifically those ones that have been AAQC'd, I see that "strong thesis supported by a bulleted or numbered list" seems to do well.
I do agree that eloquent and passionate rants also do well here, but I think that effortposts with backing links are also well-received when people put in the effort to make them.
Were you thinking of some particular well-formatted and linked post(s) that didn't get the support you expected it to recently?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
Use words is for take my idea, put in your head. If idea in your head, success. Why use many "proper" word when few "wrong" word do trick?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
10mo ago
Maybe it's that they don't like one set of ghouls appropriating their grief?
That's my read on it. Specifically I expect that, if you believe that discrimination is bad, and also your child has just been murdered, it's extremely traumatic to have a set of ghouls come in and tell you that the murder of your child was because of people like you who believe discrimination is bad. It's not that the other set of ghouls pushing a narrative are good, it's that at least the other set of ghouls isn't trying to appropriate a tragedy that happened to you to oppose everything that you believe in and push a narrative that it's your fault that your child was murdered.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
• The poker player. This is the hardest to explain, they they seem to be able to read people, manipulate people and navigate around smart people in a manner that no one can. They aren't immediately obvious as the smartest in any room, but they somehow always get their way. Often end up CEOs or millionaires somehow.
As someone who has actually played poker at a reasonably competitive level, I think this type of intelligence should be broken into two almost orthogonal components.
- The edge-seeker: Is always tracking many possibilities, always tracking prices, and always looking for small exploitable ways that others are doing things wrong such that this person can eke out some small benefit from taking advantage of that weakness. Think "theory-heavy poker player" or "Jane Street employee" - not necessarily great at textbook math (though probably at least "pretty good"), but excellent at quickly building up very detailed models and ruthless at discarding models that don't provide an edge.
- The politician: Always tracking the expected mental states of others, viewing things from their perspective in order to figure out what signals to send to maximize the chance that that person acts in a way beneficial to the politician. Think "used car salesman", "politician", or "con artist" (but I repeat myself)
As a note, in actual poker games we call the second type "fish", and the key to making money at poker is to ensure you're sitting at a table with a lot of people like that.
Anyway, in terms of the question at hand I'd add a couple of more feminine-coded types of this kind of thing where excellence really does make a notable difference.
- The teacher: Like the politician, tracks the probable internal mental models of many people at once. However, instead of using this knowledge to exploit weaknesses, instead seeks to refine their mental models to be more useful to them.
- The diplomat/organizer: Tracks the motivations of multiple possibly conflicting parties, tries to mediate communication between them to come to a mutually agreeable solution
- The gossip: Tracks the goings and doings of a significant number of people, and also the interests and biases of those people, in order to share the juiciest news and secrets with the people who will react the most strongly to them (hey, I didn't say all of the female-coded types were going to be prosocial)
Of course instead of calling them "male-oriented" and "female-oriented" it might be more accurate to call them "systems-oriented" and "people-oriented". Systems-oriented thinking does scale much better than people-oriented thinking in the best case, although I think if you look at the median case instead of the outliers that's probably flipped.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
There's probably even a few people doing that! But it's not the bulk of what we're seeing.
What you're seeing is driven largely by what is most outrageous to see, and thus most likely to be shared and appear on your feeds and in the news. The people saying "damn this sucks, I don't even know what a good solution looks like but murdering innocent civilians in their homes for offenses committed by their countrymen doesn't seem like a good solution" are not having their opinions amplified to the whole world.
Maybe I just have an unusually levelheaded community, but most of the takes I've heard from people I actually know in real life look more like "damn this sucks, I hope it doesn't get too much worse" than for cheering for the deaths of Israeli or Palestinian civilians.
Why do discussions of white nationalism always feel the need to explicitly mention rejecting violence?
Rhymes with "Yahtzee". The last notable time white nationalists gained power did not go so well, and it is generally agreed that it did not go so well, so people with opinions that resemble that generally want to clarify that their viewpoints do not end up in that generally-agreed-to-be-bad place.
As to why the same isn't true of e.g. communists? Honestly I have no clue, but I think that indicates a problem with the communists.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
8mo ago
This post is not directly about the holocaust. It is instead about a case where someone claimed that a mass grave existed in Canada based on scans with ground-penetrating-radar (GPR), but that claim did not pan out.
As a note, GPR has ever been used to as evidence for the existence of mass graves from the Holocaust. The above post does not directly state that though.
I don't think this particular post is an instance of the "make a strong claim and then deflect when called to justify it" pattern. Though if you don't care about the CW surrounding residential schools in Canada you might still not find it interesting.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
"Oh, the Motte, that's the site with the Nazis" - that's not a reaction one particularly wants to deal with, is it?
I think, in my ideal world, it would be "The Motte, that's the site where no position is censored for being outside the Overton window, not even literal holocaust denial, as long as you can be civil and support your arguments. And somehow the quality of discourse is still better than pretty much any other political discussion forum".
But it's a very fine line between that and "The Motte, that's the newest fsr right echo chamber, like Gab / Voat before it. It's where all the witches and bigots and crazy people go when all of the normal person platforms have banned them. Sad, but what else could you possibly expect from a forum that doesn't even ban literal Nazis".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
How the heck does anyone accumulate a bankroll of $20M if they can only make at best $50/hour grinding at the lower stakes?
They don't. The people playing those games are not professional poker players choosing that particular game because they've done the math and established that playing that game is Kelly optimal. They're compulsive gamblers who are good at poker and like high-stakes bets. Making things more complicated is that you have people like Phil Ivey who are both very good poker players that have a massive edge in terms of skill, and are also compulsive gamblers.
As a side note, if you look at the most successful poker players you're going to see cases where luck played a substantial part in their success (i.e. they made Kelly overbets, and got lucky and won those bets). Asking how to be successful at that level is like asking how to be successful at playing the lottery.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
I personally can't see how eyes might evolve for the first time but I accept that it happened.
Off topic, but this is my area so I can't resist.
The key thing to understand about the evolution of complex biological systems is that they didn't just pop up fully-formed. Instead, they evolved through a series of small changes to simpler systems. The changes which worked better than the original were passed on to the next generation, and the next generation had a more functional but more complex version of that system. The story of the eye's development goes something like this:
Billions of years ago, a cell contained some retinal. Retinal is a simple molecule that has a special property: when light hits it, one of its double bonds can switch between the cis and trans conformations. The cell can then extract energy (in the form of a proton gradient across a membrane) by flipping it back. Being able to harvest energy from light was a massive advantage, and this adaptation spread like wildfire. An explosion of thriving life turned the world purple.
Once cells had retinal, their internal chemistry would change depending on whether they were exposed to light. This allowed cells to adapt their behavior based on the presence or absence of light.
Fast forward to multicellular life. Organisms could save energy by having cells express only the proteins they needed for their specific functions. The PAX genes allowed for specialization of cells based on their location, and clusters of photosensitive cells evolved into the first eye spots. If an animal had two eye spots on different sides of its body, it could tell the direction of light, helping it orient which way was up.
Over time, eye spots became cup-shaped, allowing them to distinguish light from more directions. The deeper the cup, the better it could do this. Eventually, the cups closed over at the top, turning into pinhole cameras with images projected onto a layer of photoreceptors at the back. Organisms like nautiluses can see blurry images with eyes like these.
Finally, lenses made of clear proteins with different refractive indices came along. Selective pressure favored organisms that could see better, pushing for the development of lenses—specifically, lenses shaped to focus light more precisely onto the retina.
So that's how eyes evolved for the first time—through steady selective pressure stacking small adaptations, one after the other, all the way from basic photosynthesis to the human eye.
Reality doesn't need to sound plausible to be true, but it usually does end up making sense once you understand the driving mechanisms.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
My answer would be something along the lines of "keep civilian casualties low enough that France does not regret choosing to ally with you" (or slightly more precisely, "don't have policies that impose costs on your allies that are high enough that they would not have allied with you if they knew what your policy was").
I don't have a solid answer for what that number would be, that would depend on the scope of the operation and the expected costs and benefits of doing that operation over the expected costs and benefits of doing the next-best thing. But I would imagine that number is pretty high.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11mo ago
I'm convinced a sufficiently smart AI could build and deploy nanobots in the manner Yud proposes.
I'm not convinced that's possible. Specifically I suspect that if you build a nanobot that can self-replicate with high fidelity and store chemical energy internally, you will pretty quickly end up with biological life that can use the grey goo as food.
Biological life is already self-replicating nanotech, optimized by a billion years of gradient descent. An AI can almost certainly design something better for any particular niche, but probably not something that is simultaneously better in every niche.
Though note that "nanobots are not a viable route to exterminating humans" doesn't mean "exterminating humans is impossible". The good old "drop a sufficiently large rock on the earth" method would work
Ensure that they have lots of neutral or positive experiences with trans people, ideally in contexts where transness doesn't matter (e.g. building some cool open source tool as part of a team that includes someone trans).
Changes the question from "is trans bad" to "is Piper, who built the state visualization tool we all use, bad".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5mo ago
I’ll be honest I have come down on the Toner being correct and Altman deserved to be fired side of the coin.
I think if the board had just led with that a lot of people would have agreed. "Leader tries to dismantle the structures that hold him accountable" is a problem that people know very well, and "get rid of leader" is not a controversial solution to that problem.
But in fact the board accused Altman of being a lying liar and then refused to stand behind that accusation, even to the subsequent CEOs.
There's gotta be something else going on.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11mo ago
Yeah, but the difference is that his boss was doing wrong and unethical things, and so doing whatever he said was a bad thing.
And honestly, on the meta level I don't even disagree with the sentiment that working to further the aims of a group can be good if the group is doing good things and bad if the group is doing bad things. It's not an incoherent position to hold. The people who are saying things like "protect trans children" do not see themselves as bad people who are bent on tearing apart the social fabric, that's how their opponents see them.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4mo ago
Ooh, one more! Epistemic status: fun to think about.
In 1956, it was hypothesized that under certain natural conditions, you could get a natural fission reactor if uranium was sufficiently concentrated. The geological conditions required are extremely particular.
In 1972, a uranium enrichment site in France discovered that their uranium samples from one particular mine in west central Africa were showing different isotope ratios than expected (specifically different U235 concentrations than expected). There was an investigation, and it was included that 2 billion years ago, the site of the Oklo mine was a natural nuclear reactor, and that explained the missing U-235.
As far as I can tell, there are no other examples of natural nuclear reactors anywhere on Earth.
The conspiracy theory is "some of the U-235 up and walked away, and the natural fission reactor thing was a cover story".
I don't think it's super likely to be true -- the evidence in the form of xenon isotope ratios and such is pretty convincing as long as it wasn't fabricated wholesale -- but it's still one of the more suspicious things I've seen.
It "works" but:
In summary, -2/10 do not recommend.
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