npostavs

Karma: 163

npostavs 14 May 2024 1:32 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Radford Neal’s comment on: Monthly Roundup #18: May 2024

But how can you know that? Couldn’t there be actual insider sources truthfully reporting the existence of such discussions?

Yes, I perhaps should have said “I think there is a 99% chance this is made up”. As a general rule, I think any politically charged story based on “anonymous insider sources” should be considered very low credibility, and if there is no other support, then a 90+ chance of being made up is about right. More credibility points lost in this case for the only source being a tweet from a guy who seems to be advertising some kind of passport acquisition service.

There can simultaneously be an crisis of immigration of poor people and a crisis of emigration of rich people.

The tweet’s screenshot doesn’t seem to be talking about rich people in particular being the ones leaving (which I think is usually termed “capital flight”; that is, the money leaving is more important than the people).

npostavs 13 May 2024 23:24 UTC
8 points
0
on: Monthly Roundup #18: May 2024
Canada also is looking to impose a $25k penalty and double its ‘exit fee’ for citizens who leave the country, to ‘curb the emigration crisis.’
This is made up, apparently.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/monthly-roundup-18-may-2024/comment/56269684
https://www.yahoo.com/news/users-spread-unfounded-claims-impending-163724801.html
Recent headlines are about too much immigration (e.g., https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canada-stuck-in-population-trap-needs-to-reduce-immigration-bank/), so ‘emigration crisis’ doesn’t make much sense.

npostavs 18 Apr 2024 3:52 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Odd anon’s comment on: Mid-conditional love
Unless you also think the United States is an outlier in terms of spouses who don’t unconditionally love each other, I guess you have to endorse something like Kaj_Sotala’s point that divorce isn’t always the same as ending love though, right?

npostavs 17 Apr 2024 15:59 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: Reconsider the anti-cavity bacteria if you are Asian
Hmm, they changed it yesterday.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20240416225318/https://www.luminaprobiotic.com/faq
- https://web.archive.org/web/20240411113548/https://www.luminaprobiotic.com/faq

npostavs 17 Apr 2024 13:17 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Odd anon’s comment on: Mid-conditional love

probably the majority of spouses unconditionally love their partners.

How do you square this with ~50% of marriages ending in divorce?

npostavs 15 Apr 2024 22:33 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Reconsider the anti-cavity bacteria if you are Asian

a good trade for immunity to cavities and gum disease.

If you throw in immunity to bad breath

FYI, https://www.luminaprobiotic.com/faq ~~says~~ used to say

This strain doesn’t do anything to protect against gum disease, or bad breath.

npostavs 22 Mar 2024 12:24 UTC
1 point
0
on: AI #56: Blackwell That Ends Well
And he thinks Hermes 2 Pro is ‘cracked for agentic function calling,’
I don’t understand what the word ‘cracked’ means here; “broken” or “super awesome” or …?

npostavs 31 Jan 2024 4:04 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Anders Lindström’s comment on: Win Friends and Influence People Ch. 2: The Bombshell

persuade/inspire/motivate/stimulate etc is just the politically correct way of saying what it actual is, which is manipulation.

Persuade has a fairly neutral connotation for me, that is “I was persuaded to give 10k to a scammer” and “I was persuaded by a friend to quit my day job” both seem correct to me. I would nominate that as the word for describing what it “actually” is, rather than “manipulation” which seems overly negative/cynical.

npostavs 29 Jan 2024 14:44 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: David Burns Thinks Psychotherapy Is a Learnable Skill. Git Gud.
Might be this one: https://feelinggood.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/evaluation-of-therapy-session-v-1-for-article.pdf

npostavs 29 Jan 2024 5:16 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Andrew Burns’s comment on: David Burns Thinks Psychotherapy Is a Learnable Skill. Git Gud.
I think anorexia is in a different category because the patient often doesn’t want to get better. David Burns talks about it a little on https://feelinggood.com/2019/11/25/168-ask-david-the-blushing-cure-how-to-heal-a-broken-heart-treating-anorexia-and-more/, where he mentions that some sort of therapy with a 50% success rate is good.

The rapid cure stuff is mainly about depression and anxiety disorders, I guess agoraphobia should count (with the caveat that the patient has to be well enough to reach the therapist’s office). Certainly whether it “could take years” is the crux of the matter; David Burns very much denies it should ever take nearly that long.

npostavs 28 Jan 2024 17:00 UTC
2 points
0
on: David Burns Thinks Psychotherapy Is a Learnable Skill. Git Gud.
David Burns also has his own podcast, many episodes of which are example live sessions of this rapid cure (see https://feelinggood.com/list-of-feeling-good-podcasts/ and search for “live therapy”, or https://feelinggood.com/podcast-database/ which has a fancy Javascript interface allowing filtering on tags).

He does often make the explicit claim on his podcast, that 90% of patients can be cured in one or two sessions (plus one more for “relapse prevention”). It’s a bit hard to know how much of this is from a selection effect on the patients though. I’m pretty sure I recall him also mentioning that he only treats (people studying to be) therapists for liability reasons now that he doesn’t have an active clinical practice with insurance. And I think when he had on one of the app developers, they mentioned in passing that they had discussed some social anxiety issues, but it sounded like there wasn’t any dramatic breakthrough on that.

Anyone knows a psychologist like that?

I don’t personally, but you could check out https://www.feelinggoodinstitute.com/, they say “Expect meaningful change within five therapy sessions”; I assume that means five 1 hour sessions and probably one 2 hour session is more effective than two 1 hour sessions (due to time wasted on recalling previous context, breaking flow, etc).

npostavs 28 Jan 2024 3:41 UTC
54 points
47
on: Don’t sleep on Coordination Takeoffs
A big part of understanding the culture of futility is understanding how traumatic it is when the bad guys win. When SBF, the Luke Skywalker of crypto, and CZ, the Darth Vader of crypto, go head to head and CZ emerges victorious. Then CZ says “Ha! serves you right for being an idiotic do-gooder” and everyone cheers.
Didn’t we actually learn that they were both bad guys? I find this example confusing.

npostavs 4 Jan 2024 14:47 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: cat2’s comment on: Dating Roundup #2: If At First You Don’t Succeed
I was kind of surprised by this too; I found this study which seems to support it though: https://theconversation.com/we-studied-what-happens-when-guys-add-their-cats-to-their-dating-app-profiles-144999

In our study, we recruited 1,388 heterosexual American women from 18 to 24 years old to take a short anonymous online survey[...] Most of the women found the men holding cats to be less dateable. This result surprised us, since previous studies had shown that women found men with pets to have higher potential as partners. They also thought the men holding cats were less extroverted and more neurotic, agreeable and open. Importantly, they saw these men as less masculine, too. [...] Women who self-identified as “cat people” were more inclined to view the men pictured with cats as more dateable or say they had no preference.

npostavs 27 Dec 2023 23:52 UTC
6 points
1
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: NYT is suing OpenAI&Microsoft for alleged copyright infringement; some quick thoughts
The NYT paywall ~~doesn’t~~ didn’t do anything if Javascript is disabled.

EDIT: I’ve noticed recently that NYT articles are cut-off before the end now, even without JavaScript. I wonder if the timing of this paywall upgrade is related to the lawsuit?

npostavs 13 Dec 2023 16:10 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Foyle’s comment on: Significantly Enhancing Adult Intelligence With Gene Editing May Be Possible

No particular reason why we can only have 42 chromosomes

Isn’t having extra chromosomes usually bad? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisomy

(PS the usual number is 46)

npostavs 29 Nov 2023 23:48 UTC
2 points
−7
on: ChatGPT 4 solved all the gotcha problems I posed that tripped ChatGPT 3.5

What is an example where two negative numbers multiply to give a negative number?

Since you didn’t specify real numbers, it seems like -i * -i = -1 should fit?

npostavs 2 Nov 2023 22:40 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Saying the quiet part out loud: trading off x-risk for personal immortality

We know roughly how to achieve immortality

Isn’t the assumption that once we successfully align AGI, it can do the work on immortality? So “we” don’t need to know how beyond that.

npostavs 15 Oct 2023 14:01 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: Nathan Helm-Burger’s comment on: Will no one rid me of this turbulent pest?

then you could spread the pesticide (and not other pesticides) in the region

This would affect other insects in addition to the targeted mosquitoes, right? This seems strictly worse than the original gene drive proposition to me.

npostavs 11 Oct 2023 23:09 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: House Beaver’s comment on: Sam Altman’s sister, Annie Altman, says Sam has (severely) abused her

A survey shows that gay male teenagers are several times more likely to conceive girls than straight male teenagers.

Does “conceive” mean “have sex with” here? Because according to what I think of as the standard definition of that word, you would be saying that gay male teenagers are more likely to produce female offspring (which sounds pretty silly). Did the survey use that word?

npostavs 6 Oct 2023 12:34 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: AI #32: Lie Detector
Also asked (with some responses from the authors of the paper) here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/khFC2a4pLPvGtXAGG/how-to-catch-an-ai-liar-lie-detection-in-black-box-llms-by?commentId=v3J5ZdYwz97Rcz9HJ