nopie
1yr ago
Dictators always follow the same pattern – start with breaking the two-term rule and then break the country.
nopie
1yr ago
So, which is it – gain-of-function research comparable to millions of deaths from coal burning or hypothetical high-altitude air balloons?
We don't have any data to actually make the switch in this comparison. It is just purely emotional. Gain-of-function might be only marginally useful (like high altitude balloons) or it could open ways to innovative technologies that will cure cancer or Alzheimer or whatever.
nopie
1yr ago
I don't know even his name. Apparently he is of no significance because the system is stronger than the leader. Very timely tweet from Tabeb in this regard: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1584882478287757312
Stop complaining about the turnover in Britain. You don't seem to get it. It is much healthier and more stable than Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other nations that have NO turnover. The virtue of the system is that it does not depend on a single person
nopie
1yr ago
I don't subscribe to the view that every country is basically the same. Serious issues in poor countries are much much worse than those in rich countries.
I was a Hare Krishna for something like 20 years and would still consider myself a follower even though I have fallen behind in my practice. Maybe I wasn't a good follower because I never believed that Srimad Bhagavatam should be taken literally. I don't even believe that the sages who wrote it, believed it should be taken literally. Such kind of belief is for unsophisticated, they were smarter than that.
I would say that there is definitely a higher reality behind what we can perceive and understand but because it is so much above our experience and knowledge, we have no connection to it. But if we need to think about it, then why not in a way of beautiful myths? There are many things that ancient Indian thinkers had discovered about people and their psychology that are still relevant today. One aspect is about human sexuality, what motivates men and women and what problems they have and what are solutions. Surely, Bhagavatam wraps it all in Indian cultural layers which are not always easy to unwrap. But if you do, you find that it is close to red pill philosophy. It just seems modern societies have forgotten those things because we think that we have much better science and old traditions and knowledge are useless.
It is true about material science. Ayurveda is basically bunk, I didn't find anything useful there and modern evidence-based medicine is clearly superior. But in the areas of mental health and modern psychiatry it is clearly failing. In this regard Bhagavatam insights can still be useful.
As for Vedic cosmology and yugas and Kali-yuga, I believe it is just a poetic device to convince people to put serious effort into preventing society from decay. From one hand it is the inevitability of oncoming degradation, on the other hand Bhagavatam offers methods to delay the start of Kali-yuga. They call these methods religiosity but in the past religion was basically the same as moral and legal order. Not everything we need to do can have strict evidence basis that will be understood by all people. Sometimes we just need to follow the established order (stop at the red light for example, be kind to others even without immediate benefit, etc.) We shouldn't take the western economic stability and order as granted. It can disappear at any time like in the war between Ukraine and Russia. We just look at current stability from a very limited time period. If we extend this to a century or two, then even western countries have been involved in terrible wars and genocides. We should feel so lucky to have mostly peace and economic development in the west now.
And for stability I am not a fan of dictators (Putin, Orban, Xi, or whatever) either. We need real basis for stability, coming from people. Incidentally, Bhagavatam describes a situation of a strong dictator (King Venu) who gets killed and then the country is overrun by thieves and everything gets worse. We can prevent this, by ensuring that people learn and follow certain moral principles.
Of course, we should do GoF research very carefully and with proper safeguards. But saying that it should be banned completely is a different kind of proposal. I have no idea how valuable is GoF research as these things are very complicated but it is not always easy to predict future benefits.
I am less concerned about some occasional leaks. Covid might have leaked from the lab (with or without GoF research) but what I understand, potentially it could have arisen naturally too. Every walking immunosuppressed individual (e.g., HIV patient with poor adherence to medication or organ transplant recipient) is a breeding place of new viral mutations. In the past such people didn't live long. Today due to improved medical care their numbers are increasing significantly. I wouldn't suggest that we should stop providing medical care to such people and let them die as soon as possible out of fear that they could leak some kind of mutated supervirus.
When we talk about the elderly, the number of lives saved becomes meaningless. We should use QALY or at least months of life extended on average.
Imagine a very old and sick person gets vaccinated for covid and this extends his life expectancy by 2 years. It won't be fully enjoyable life, probably still on wheelchair and full with health crisis but it is better than nothing.
Now we can compare how many QALYs were gained by antihypertensive medicines, by statins etc. and see the actual cost-effectiveness. Covid vaccines probably were quite effective among elderly but as now statins are generic and very cheap (£2 per month on average in the UK) and covid vaccines quite expensive (£50 per dose) I doubt that the gains are greater than for statins. I vaguely remember that statins provide additional life expectancy about 7 months on average. It doesn't sound much but on society's level that's quite impressive.
nopie
1yr ago
I agree. You could say that Chornobyl was just a Russian (actually Ukrainian but during Soviet Union times the difference was not important) negligence and it shouldn't have impact on our nuclear energy policy. After all, coal burning causes even more radioactive pollution and people die in industrial accidents all around the world. Chornobyl was clearly an outlier that shouldn't prevent us from continuous development of nuclear power.
But that's not what happened. Some countries decided to completely stop using nuclear energy despite serious problems with reaching sustainability goals.
On the other hand, crypto is not a nuclear power. It has very little usefulness and most of it is hype and speculations. Maybe that's why people will not reject it even when it becomes clear that most of it has no benefit for the society.
Many rationalists support crypto because they consider that it will help to avoid government control to buy nootropics, participate in prediction markets etc. My advice is that instead of supporting crypto it is better to lobby politicians to allow to do these things legally and openly. That may take longer time and be harder to achieve but it will be much better because negative externalities from crypto are too severe and damaging that they cancel all the benefits that crypto could give us.
Many of these things are legal in other countries and they are not as great as many rationalists think. I am in Latvia now; piracetam and phenibut are manufactured by a local pharmaceutical company here, they are not only legal but doctors routinely prescribe them. What I think about them is that their effectiveness is very low. Healthcare professionals consider them as low class antidepresants/anxiolytics. They have very few adverse effects but basically they do very little.
If 50% of antidepressant effect is due to placebo effect, then prescribing something to people with moderate depression/anxiety will have 50% improvement rate. Doctors initially select medicines with less side-effects and switch to more serious antidepresants when they are not effective. It would be good if other countries used them as well but in the big scheme, they matter very little that it is not worth to use crypto to illegally buy them.
nopie
1yr ago
Chornobyl definitely had a strong impact on anti-nuclear movement and irrational fear. A lot of problems in the post-Soviet countries were blamed on Chornobyl.
nopie
1yr ago
Lithuania closed their nuclear powerstation and didn't build a new one. Russia, Belarus and Ukraine continued to build new ones only because their governments were not accountable to people and could override all resistance. I probably sound like Anatoly Karlin now but sometimes people make bad decisions.
I cannot imagine how crypto could work without exchanges.
Once I wanted to install bitcoin wallet just for interest. At that time the wallet file size was 2 terabytes large. I decided not to waste my resources on this. The same is probably true for most people with the exception of a small number of motivated people.
Without exchanges bitcoin would never get to the usage levels it has now. If you want to buy drugs with bitcoin, the seller needs to be able to use those bitcoins to buy something else. Even today there is not much use for them and most likely one needs to use exchange to get another currency that one can use to buy legal things.
I understand the original idea was that everyone mines bitcoins with their own hardware and then engages in commerce with other people. In reality as soon as exchange was started, professional miners started earning real (fiat) money.
But even if bitcoin community had managed to ban exchanges (not really sure how) and had captured sufficiently large economy to be self-sufficient (I sell pizza for bitcoins that I use to buy drugs or whatever), the government would have controlled it, to collect taxes if not for other reasons. Did you know that you have to pay tax even for barter transactions?
There is nothing special about bitcoin as originally intended. It is nothing more than digital cash. That is not sufficient to avoid government control because the government controls physical things. Not fully, not entirely but sufficiently to make it hard enough to discourage the majority.
nopie
1yr ago
Sure. I am not particularly interested in FTX blow-up. I am saying that whole crypto is misuse of talents and waste of energy, time and money(!). Sometimes we criticise that the smartest minds in Silicon Valley instead of searching for a cure of cancer and other good things, work hard on how to make people to click on ads. But crypto is much worse. Ads at least can help to connect sellers and buyers and improve economy and ultimately our standard of living. But what can crypto give us?
In comparison, Theranos failed and was fraudulent and many hundreds if not thousands of biopharma startups fail. But one of those gave us mRNA vaccine and another Harvoni (highly effective HepC treatment).
nopie
1yr ago
I also have a religion and that's fine. It still think that sometimes spending too much time, money and energy on religious activities can be a waste of human potential.
nopie
1yr ago
Thanks. I can better understand the mind of crypto supporters.
I am not completely naive and understand that any government can become totalitarian very quickly. The recent pandemic is a prime example – how leaving your home to have a walk in a park suddenly became a punishable offence. And at that time I was in Spain that is known for quite liberal attitudes and yet the police stopped me to check if I really had a receipt from the closest grocery shop to justify my walk outside. I won't even start with vaccine mandates and other restrictions.
I just don't see how crypto can help. I only see that it is even more important to work collectively even now to maintain democratic norms, to allow debate and free choice. Pandemic restrictions were supported by majority of population, so it is not only the problem of politicians turning totalitarian but the lack of understanding and information by the whole population.
The same advice I give to those who already live in countries that are slowly turning totalitarian like Russia. People should be more active in re-establishing democratic norms instead of working on crypto. It was unfortunate that Iranian emigrants are capable of much wider protests abroad than Russian ones.
nopie
1yr ago
Yes, it is true.
His conviction had nothing to do with raising the price of the drug. He broke the rules handling investors' money and investing it without giving notice and was sentenced for that. His bets turned out good and he returned the money with profit but rules are rules and he could have easily lost the money.
SBF most likely is going to jail for long time.
nopie
1yr ago
I agree that protests sometimes have very little success or no success at all in near term. However, with time they can change collective minds more effectively than armed resistance. After the WWII many Latvians took the arms and waged guerrilla war against Soviet occupation (fondly remembered as Forest Brothers). They failed and had no impact at all. What changed everything was Gorbachev's glastnost (openness) policy, people were allowed to talk freely and they decided that they don't like the Soviet system anymore. Despite what you read in history books, that was the main reason why the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
Today I learned from my aging mother that during WWII as a small child she was a refugee in camps in Germany. She might remember some details wrong but when the war ended they were let out and they had to decide: stay in Germany or go back to Latvia. She said that they had no information, no understanding about global things and they were afraid to stay in Germany (after all, Germany had started the war), so they decided to return to Latvia. Today it sounds like a monumental mistake considering that Latvia remained occupied by the Soviet Union and how different the post-war development turned to be. This just illustrates that sometimes people make bad choices because genuinely they don't know better.
Ukraine is again a good example of that as well. Areas with greater Russian loyalties are much easier to conquer by Russia. Ukraine is in a bad shape but encroaching totalitarianism is much worse with potentially poor future outcomes. Beliefs that people have in Russia about the west are main reason why this war is happening at all. Protests can nudge people to change their minds better than weapons.
nopie
1yr ago
Not everyone, only people who are misinformed.
The communist party tried to put the lid back and a coop was staged against Gorbachev and army units were sent to the Baltic countries etc. They failed because people were not afraid to talk about it anymore.
I don't know why Russians willingly blinded themselves afterwards. Of course, it was the government that gradually started to control information and played on their nationalistic feelings. Most people who support Putin, do it because they favour Russian supremacy, they want to feel that Russia is the greatest nation on earth. Globalization robs you of that. As many critics say that people in the European Union have lost their roots and exchanged their culture to material goods. When one sees oneself as a true carrier of civilization and the rest of the world as rotten, one can justify all brutalities in Ukraine.
But the reality is that Russian culture is nothing special, based on the same things that people value all around the world.
nopie
1yr ago
What purpose a wallet will have if I cannot mine or otherwise participate in decentralized network with validations? No, I didn't make a mistake. I just decided that I don't have enough available resources for this.
nopie
1yr ago
I think that modern finance is complicated and may not be optimal but overall it is working fine. It could be improved but only by people who really understand how it works and what are the actual problems. The crypto essentially proposed to restore the gold standard in a digital format. It completely ignores all the reasons why the gold standard was rejected and tries to solve non-existant problems.
The second aspect that worries me is that most crypto supporters are so much against the government that it could be called anarchist movement. I agree that any government can become dictatorship. But the solution is to make sure it doesn't instead of creating society or any aspect (like finance) that doesn't need government at all.
nopie
1yr ago
You cannot win every fight, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't put efforts to support democracy and freedom of speech.
I cannot blame EA or rationalists for not taking greater stance against the government restrictions including vaccine mandates. That's everyone's personal decision to choose the hill to die on. But I am annoyed for them to actually support restriction of speech during the pandemic out of fear from disease. When I tried to speak out in the beginning that forced lockdowns are extremely damaging and will not prevent the spread of covid significantly, they called me names. At the end I was vindicated and the governments that forced lockdowns and vaccine mandates and fired unvaccinated people from their jobs were proven wrong, and that's not even acknowledged properly.
Possibly we got into this situation because dissenting voices were subtly and unjustly suppressed on all levels, including on social media. Alex Berenson was kicked out from Twitter for saying that vaccine does not prevent the spread of infection when this information was already publicly known. I don't agree with everything he says but clearly the overzealous fact-checkers had no understanding of nuance and scientific details.
In spite of all these setbacks, I believe that the only way forward is to foster debate, free speech and democratic norms. We need to learn from these mistakes. It is not too late to fix Canadian customs law and make them to respect minorities. Concentrating too much on technical solutions makes us to lose the focus on these important aspects.
nopie
1yr ago
I am not sure what do you mean by this. Why would I even want to run some code on a supercomputer?
nopie
1yr ago
You have a specific job but I don't. Although you could say that by posting here and on reddit I am probably using code that runs on some Amazon cloud services or whatever but that is too indirect.
I just wanted to see if I could be a part of bitcoin network without any extra expense by using my own laptop. It wasn't really possible.
That is perfectly standard take for most nations. I lived in Spain and tax authorities refused to speak with me in English even though they clearly were able to. They replied that I should speak in an official language of which Spain has several – Spanish, Catalan, Basque and one more which I forget.
Russians themselves are very notorious for not willing to speak other languages and use only Russian even abroad to the maximum extent possible. The US is exception that they don't have an official language but most countries do.
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