I agree the effect is consistent enough that we should be suspicious of file drawer/p-hacking—although that’s also what you’d expect to see if the effect were in fact large—but note that they were different studies, i.e. the human studies mostly weren’t based on the non-human ones.
Adam Scholl
Karma: 2,363
My impression is that academic philosophy has historically produced a lot of good deconfusion work in metaethics (e.g. this and this), as well as some really neat negative results like the logical empiricists’ failed attempt to construct a language in which verbal propositions could be cached out/analyzed in terms of logic or set theory in a way similar to how one can cache out/analyze Python in terms of machine code. In recent times there’s been a lot of (in my opinion) great academic philosophy done at FHI.
Interesting that the Landrigan et al. review hereisonehand cited showed no effect of strength training on working memory; the review here reported no effect of aerobic exercise on working memory, but did report benefit from combined strength training and aerobic. Feels a bit fishy that each would have no effect individually, yet have an effect when combined.
In my experience this problem is easily solved if you simply unfollow ~95% of your friends. You can mass unfollow relatively easily from the News Feed Preferences page in Settings. Ever since doing this, my Facebook timeline has had a high signal/noise ratio—I’m glad to encounter something like 85% of posts. Also, since this only produces ~5-20 minutes of reading/day, it’s easy to avoid spending lots of time on the site.
Not certain, but I think when your news feed becomes sparse enough it might actually become exhaustive.
There feel to me like two relevant questions here, which seem conflated in this analysis:
1) At what point did the USSR gain the ability to launch a comprehensively-destructive, undetectable-in-advance nuclear strike on the US? That is, at what point would a first strike have been achievable and effective?
2) At what point did the USSR gain the ability to launch such a first strike using ICBMs in particular?
By 1960 the USSR had 1,605 nuclear warheads; there may have been few ICBMs among them, but there are other ways to deliver warheads than shooting them across continents. Planes fail the “undetectable” criteria, but ocean-adjacent cities can be blown up by small boats, and by 1960 the USSR had submarines equipped with six “short”-range (650 km and 1,300 km) ballistic missiles. By 1967 they were producing subs like this, each of which was armed with 16 missiles with ranges of 2,800-4,600 km.
All of which is to say that from what I understand, RAND’s fears were only a few years premature.
Grid cells are known to exist elsewhere in the brain—for example, in the entorhinal cortex. There are preliminary hints that grid cells may exist in neocortex too, but this hasn’t yet been firmly established. Displacement cells, on the other hand, have never been observed anywhere—they’re just hypothesized cells Hawkins predicts must exist, assuming his theory is true. So I took him to be making a few distinct claims: 1) grid cells also exist in neocortex, 2) displacement cells exist 3) displacement cells are located in neocortex.
The specifics of the proposal, at least, seem relatively easy to falsify. For example, he not only predicts the existence of cortical grid and displacement cells, but also their specific location—that they’ll be found in layer 6 and layer 5 of the neocortex, respectively. So we may find out whether he’s right fairly soon.
[Question] Why are the people who could be doing safety research, but aren’t, doing something else?
I expect most members of the 50, by virtue of being on the list, do have some sort of relevant comparative advantage. But it seems plausible some of them don’t realize that.
I’ve been wondering recently whether CFAR should try having some workshops in India for this reason. Far more people speak English than in China, and I expect we’d encounter fewer political impediments.
Fwiw, for reasons I can’t explain I vastly prefer just the title bolded to the entire line bolded, and significantly prefer the status quo to title bolded.
Apparently Otzi the Iceman still has a significant amount of brain tissue. Conceivably memories are preserved?
Fwiw, my experiences with DMVs in DC, Maryland, Virginia, New York, and Minnesota have all been about as terrible as my experiences in California.
CFAR: Progress Report & Future Plans
I think it’s true that CFAR mostly moved away from teaching things like explicit probabilistic forecasting, and toward something else, although I would describe that something else differently—more like, skills relevant for hypothesis generation, noticing confusion, communicating subtle intuitions, updating on evidence about crucial considerations, and in general (for lack of a better way to describe this) “not going insane when thinking about x-risk.”
I favor this shift, on the whole, because my guess is that skills of the former type are less important bottlenecks for the problems CFAR is trying to help solve. That is, all else equal, if I could press a button to either make alignment researchers and the people who surround them much better calibrated, or much better at any of those latter skills, I’d currently press the latter button.
But I do think it’s plausible CFAR should move somewhat backward on this axis, at the margin. Some skills from the former category would be pretty easy to teach, I think, and in general I have some kelly betting-ish inclination to diversify the goals of our curricular portfolio, in case our core assumptions are wrong.
So I’m imagining there might be both a question (for what types of reasons have CFAR staff left?) and a claim (CFAR’s rate of turnover is unusual) here. Anna should be able to better address the question, but with regard to the claim: I think it’s true, at least relative to average U.S. turnover. The median length Americans spend in jobs is 4.2 years, while the median length CFAR employees have stayed in their jobs is 2.2 years; 32% of our employees (7 people) left within their first year.
Ambience and physical comfort are surprisingly important. In particular:
-
Lighting: Have lots of it! Ideally incandescent but at least ≥ 95 CRI (and mostly ≤ 3500k) LED, ideally coming from somewhere other than the center of the ceiling, ideally being filtered through a yellow-ish lampshade that has some variation in its color so the light that gets emitted has some variation too (sort of like the sun does when filtered through the atmosphere).
-
Food/drink: Have lots of it! Both in terms of quantity and variety. The cost to workshop quality of people not having their preferences met here sufficiently outweighs the cost of buying too much food, that in general it’s worth buying too much as a policy. It’s particularly important to meet people’s (often, for rationalists, amusingly specific) specific dietary needs, have a variety of caffeine options, and provide a changing supply of healthy, easily accessible snacks.
-
Furniture: As comfortable as possible, and arranged such that multiple small conversations are more likely to happen than one big one.
-
Also worth noting that there are a few different claims of the sort OP mentions that people make, I think. One thing people sometimes mean by this is “CFAR no longer does the sort of curriculum development which would be necessary to create an ‘Elon Musk factory.’”
CFAR never had the goal of hugely amplifying the general effectiveness of large numbers of people (which I’m happy about, since I’m not sure achieving that goal would be good). One should not donate to CFAR in order to increase the chances of an Elon Musk factory.
I was surprised to find a literature review about probiotics which suggested they may have significant CNS effects. The tl;dr of the review seems to be: 1) You want doses of at least 109 or 1010 CFU, and 2) You want, in particular, the strains B. longum, B. breve, B. infantis, L. helveticus, L. rhamnosus, L. plantarum, and L. casei.
I then sorted the top 15 results on Amazon for “probiotic” by these desiderata, and found that this one seems to be best.
Some points of uncertainty:
Probiotic manufacturers generally don’t disclose the strain proportions of their products, so there’s some chance they mostly include e.g. whatever’s cheapest, plus a smattering of other stuff.
One of the reviewed studies suggests L. casei may impair memory. I couldn’t find a product that didn’t have L. casei but did have at least 109 CFU of each other recommended strain, so if you take the L. casei/memory concern seriously your best option might be combining this and this.