All of dspeyer's Comments + Replies
We should be reluctant to make statements which could be taken as "scientific" justification for ignoring either of the previous bullet points
Thank you for stating plainly what I suspect the original doc was trying to hint at.
That said, now that it's plainly stated, I disagree with it. The world is too connected for that.
Taken literally, "could be taken" is a ridiculously broad standard. I'm sure a sufficiently motivated reasoner could take "2+2=4" as justification for racism. This is not as silly a concern as it s...
Another class of pressures require me to recapitulate the great covid lesson of social reality vs. physical reality (I forget which rationalist citation goes here, I'm building off of a discussion at NYC Solstice):
The citation you're looking for is https://putanumonit.com/2021/04/03/monastery-and-throne/ particularly the section titled "Coordinating Social Reality"
One challenge will be the uncertainty in models. It's (comparatively) easy to say "this will reshuffle climate so that our system which assumes current climate zones will be in trouble" and much harder to say which areas will flood and which will burn.
There may be work with doing refining those models.
There may also be things we can do to increase flexibility and resiliency without knowing exactly what's coming.
But it'll be tricky.
I remember a program specifically for young women (possibly in Bangladesh, possibly linked from slatestarcodex) that specifically listed "ambition" as one of the things it wanted to foster. But participants went in wanting to be doctors and left wanting to be administrative assistants. They did not show improvement on any measured axis. Can't seem to find the link
[Repost from my FB]
I'd like to introduce a setup that's a little different from these arbitrary axes and feels truer to life...
To avoid object-level politics, I'll use Scott's (or was it Nick's?) example:
* Party A wants to increase taxes and social services 5%, and to require everyone to electrocute themselves 8 hours a day.
* Party B wants to decrease taxes and social services 5%, and to require everyone to electrocute themselves 8 hours a day.
* Party C wants to leave taxes and social services as they are, and stop the electrocutions.
"Everyone" knows that ...
This misses senses in which resources can run out.
Simplestly, there's locked-in-use. Consider Rhenium. It's about 1ppb in Earth's crust and about 1000 tonnes of it have been refined in all of history. How much can be produced without implausibly destructive mining techniques is hard to estimate. It's essentially indestructable and uncreateable. It's used in jet engines and other high-temperature high-pressure applications. The number of jet engines in service at any time is bounded by available Rhenium. After tha...
For the PPE, check out https://www.facebook.com/groups/opensourcecovid19medicalsupplies
The gender distribution is 71% male, 27% female and 2% other, according to the most recent EA survey.
Not sure how it becomes a speech, but anyone planning an EA wedding would probably be glad to read:
https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/190595156201/life-update-the-night-i-decided-i-was-going-to
I feel obligated to drop this link: https://secularsolstice.github.io/lists/gen/All_Speeches.html
Some of which could probably be adapted for non-Solstice purposes.
As I understand it, the Moderna human trial should have safety data good enough for real-world purposes in about two months. It's a test of 45 people, so if 7% of the population is infected by that time (as seems likely) and none of the vaccinated people are, that's p<0.05 that it's effective, even though they weren't deliberately testing that.
Granted, the vaccine might *not* work, in which case we need a different angle.
But if it does, the FDA will then delay it another year or two. Does anyone know of any leverage at all that could be exerted over the FDA?
From the NCMEC report:
A major contributor to the observed exponential growth is the rise of proactive, automated detection efforts by ESPs [electronic service providers], as shown in Figure 3 . Since then, reporting by ESPs increased an average of 101% year-over-year, likely due to increasing user bases and an influx of user-generated content. While automated detection solutions help ESPs scale their protections, law enforcement and NCMEC analysts currently contend with the deluge of reports in a non-automated fashion as they are required to manually reviews the reports
I doubt porn-related child abuse is growing.
NCMEC says that reports of child porn are growing, but that could easily be reports per posting, postings per image, or images per activity. NCMEC just *counts* reports, which are either a member of the public clicking a "report" button or an algorithm finding suspicious content. They acknowledge that a significant part of the rise in from broader deployment of such algorithms.
Similarly, the fraction of porn-producing activities which involve traumatic abuse is unclear. And is likely declining, judg...