NoSignalNoNoise

• NoSignalNoNoise 29 Apr 2026 3:43 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Why no new no­ta­tions since 1960?

  Some common ones include:

  • Domain names and email addresses

  • @ to addresses a comment to a specific person in a context where that comment is visible to a wider audience

  • Hex codes for colors

• NoSignalNoNoise 8 Apr 2026 3:51 UTC

  8 points

  1

  on: Te­lescopes Need Good Lenses

  Israel is an interesting anomaly: a modern, technologically integrated society reproducing slightly above replacement. But the most persuasive explanation I’ve seen, NonZionism’s “trickle-down natalism,” attributes Israel’s fertility to the cultural influence of the Haredim, a community with precisely the direct-accountability structure this thesis predicts would be necessary.

  Aren’t the Haredi only able to live the way they do thanks to special treatment (welfare, subsidized religious schools, and until recently, draft exemptions) from the government? I wouldn’t hold them up as an example of a society that successfully sustains itself.

• NoSignalNoNoise 12 Mar 2026 23:49 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Don’t Let LLMs Write For You

  What do you mean by “but English class”?

Ba­sics of Ra­tion­al­ist Discourse

• NoSignalNoNoise 18 Feb 2026 4:36 UTC

  2 points

  −2

  on: Most Ob­servers Are Alone: The Fermi Para­dox as Default

  the fraction of configurations capable of producing complex chemistry, stable stars, and long-lived planets is extraordinarily small. The fraction capable of producing sentient technological civilizations is smaller still. This gives us a distribution of expected civilizations per configuration that is overwhelmingly concentrated at zero, with a thin tail of configurations that produce any sentience at all

  This is a strong assertion that requires justification. How much more fine-tuning does it require to get a universe where 1 of every 1000 stars has a planet that can support intelligent life than a universe where 1 of every 10^30 stars does?

• NoSignalNoNoise 18 Feb 2026 4:31 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Most Ob­servers Are Alone: The Fermi Para­dox as Default

  (A3) The fine-tuning results from cosmology extend in the relevant way: the viable region of parameter space does not merely shrink as we add requirements for habitability, but shrinks fast enough that the tail of the distribution is thinner than linear.

  This assumption is rather underspecified; what does it mean to add requirements for habitability, and how does that translate the number of habitable (or intelligent-life-supporting) planets?

• NoSignalNoNoise 17 Feb 2026 5:45 UTC

  7 points

  2

  on: Con­tra Ca­plan on higher education

  college grades are far from the best way to signal intelligence; what he doesn’t discuss is that they’re even further from the best way to signal conscientiousness … an even better signal of conscientiousness would be acquiring all the same knowledge without attending college at all

  Acquiring the knowledge without the college structure would be a more accurate signal of conscientiousness, but it would be a less legible one. Evaluating potential employees involves sifting through a large number of applicants of mostly dubious quality, and unless you have reason to pay special attention to one of them, if a signal isn’t obvious, it probably gets rounded off to zero.

  A degree from Stanvard Institute of Technology gets an employer to treat your resume as worth reading (and not just skimming). Claiming (with evidence that require crossing a non-trivial inferential distance) to have gotten the same education for $1.50 in late fees at the library doesn’t. You get about 5 words.

[Question] Why did you buy Bit­coin?

• NoSignalNoNoise 17 Feb 2026 5:11 UTC

  3 points

  1

  on: Con­tra Ca­plan on higher education

  This post seems to implicitly assume a monocausal explanation. It gives good reasons why various proposed explanations are not sufficient to explain university attendance and dismisses those explanations because they aren’t sufficient. The reality is more likely a complex mix of different reasons, and the right question isn’t which one is the reason; it’s how much of the reason is each proposed explanation.

  The Sheepskin Effect makes it pretty clear that a significant portion of the value is signaling (Wikipedia cites Caplan as claiming that “over 60% of the economic benefit” is from the degree, though it’s hard to disentangle signaling effects from selection effects). Failure to complete an almost-completed degree seems more likely to be a failure of conscientiousness than of intelligence or conformity, so that part is probably mainly conscientiousness signaling.

• NoSignalNoNoise 15 Feb 2026 23:09 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: In My Misan­thropy Era

  I’ve found my average conversation with Uber drivers to be more interesting and insightful than reading my phone.

  What have you talked with them about, and how did you start the conversations? What have you learned from those conversations?

• NoSignalNoNoise 11 Feb 2026 3:17 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: End­ing Park­ing Space Saving

  To really put a stop to this practice, there needs to be a good chance that a space saver will be gone by the time you come back. In a college town, an explicit, well-publicized policy of “if a piece of furniture is being used to block a parking space, anyone who wants it can take it” would probably accomplish this.

• NoSignalNoNoise 29 Dec 2025 23:41 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Magic Words and Perfor­ma­tive Utterances

  Neuro divergent communities sometimes smart their way out of this and eventually become exhausting to be around as everything devolves into requiring neurotic social tracking.

  Can you elaborate on that or provide some examples? I was reading along and it sounded right to me, but I couldn’t think of specific examples of it.

• NoSignalNoNoise 23 Dec 2025 3:40 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: The Revolu­tion of Ris­ing Expectations

  Provide more public goods for families. Remarkably small things can matter a lot.

  What public goods do you have in mind?

• NoSignalNoNoise 14 Dec 2025 21:22 UTC

  0 points

  −2

  in reply to: Jozdien’s comment on: No, Amer­i­cans Don’t Think For­eign Aid Is 26% of the Budget

  No. The average estimate is 26%, which implies at least 26% of the polled population give an estimate of 26% or higher, i.e. a very large gravel of respondents are either very confused or intentionally giving inflated answers.

• NoSignalNoNoise 30 Nov 2025 22:18 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: Why do some peo­ple pre­fer gifts to money?

  I have plenty of money. If there’s something I know I want that’s easy to buy for a reasonable amount of money, I’ve already bought it. If someone gives me a gift that I wouldn’t have thought to buy for myself (but which I do in fact want once I’m aware of it) or would be hard for me to buy myself (e.g. because choosing the right version of that product requires research that I lack the knowledge for) or where I have some mental block that prevents me from admitting to myself that I want it, that’s significantly more valuable to me than cash would have been.

  When I was a student and had very little money, I preferred cash.

• NoSignalNoNoise 27 Nov 2025 15:51 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Three-Monkey Mind’s comment on: Post­mod­ernism for STEM Types: A Clear-Lan­guage Guide to Con­flict Theory

  What is there to lose by playing power games with people who think that roughly all communication is power games?

  Well for one thing, it can get you dragged into negative-sum power games. Like with gambling, if you don’t know what your edge is, you’re better off not playing. If there isn’t a clear way that getting into a Twitter argument about transgenderism helps you accomplish your goals, then in the typical case you waste your time, and you take on a tail risk of ruining your reputation. It’s foolish to take that risk if it doesn’t come with enough potential upside to make it +EV.

  If you’re already stuck in such a power game, then by all means play it as such, but don’t go seeking them out.

[Cam­bridge] Petrov Day

• NoSignalNoNoise 12 Sep 2025 2:26 UTC

  9 points

  2

  on: Grat­i­tude Jour­nal Fallacy

  What are the higher utility per unit effort things you could be doing instead during that time? Did you stop doing a gratitude journal? If so, did you do those other things instead?

  I ask that because I have often found myself making the opposite mistake of one you describe: There’s something I’m considering doing (usually because someone suggested it), and I think to myself that that’s not the optimal thing for me to do, so I decide not to do it, but instead of doing something higher-value, I end up doing nothing in particular and would have been better off doing the moderate-value thing.

Think­ing Faster

• NoSignalNoNoise 3 May 2025 20:42 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Does trans­lat­ing a post with an LLM af­fect its rat­ing?

  This is perhaps a bit off topic, but why translate using a general purpose LLM rather than a tool that’s specifically for translation like Google Translate?