I never get them—not for two decades. I have very strong teeth and everything has been fine. But I was quie confident. If I had regular cavities I would get it done. YMMV.
Likelihood of cancer—quite low; cost of getting it—quite high.
Likelihood of cavities—higher; cost of getting them—lower.
It’s hard to figure small numbers times big numbers when you don’t really have either. :)
Definitely getting that book. I wanted something to take me past Arendt’s book, which never really seemed to get to the banality of it all. Will check it out.
My autistic child used to be terrified of the lawn mower, even if he was inside. We couldn’t use the mixer, the vacuum, or even the shower without him freaking out.
He went from terror to thinking these things were cool: if I cut the grass, he comes out to play nearby with his toy mower; he loves to vacuum. And—glory of glories—the shower is boring.
So I think for him at least, it’s a progression from WAY TOO MUCH to fascinating and fun to bo-ring.
This leads me to wonder: if it’s possible for a stimulus to be overwhelming but not too overwhelming, if exposure therapy might help rather than just making him freak. It’s worth a try.
Oops, just thought of this: he loves slurpy noises near his ears. Shouldn’t that be way too stimulating? It would be for me or anyone else I know! Seems autism is both about avoiding/muting stimuli and seeking them out.
I think we can at least answer, why have 2 sexes rather than, 3, 4, or whatever.
Assuming the benefit of sex is to mix up genes with others’ (seems reasonable, as that’s what it does!),
In one generation 2 sexes mixes in 50% others’ genes to 3 sexes mixing in 66%; not a huge difference. In 4 generations, it’s 94% to 99%.
So the benefit of the extra sex isn’t huge, but the cost of getting the third may be (just as the cost of finding one mate can be high, esp. if you’re somebody’s prey and need to both be noticed and not be noticed at the same time).
For me, the case for doing this has not sufficiently been made. I read two sets of arguments for it. On this page, essentially, “aging is the leading cause of death,” which is funny—like engagement is the leading cause of marriage—but more seriously: to attempt to abolish aging is largely about fighting death. Pointing out aging kills doesn’t take us anywhere until we’ve shown death needs to go.
On the linked page about “pro-aging trance,” it was that if I’m still asking that question, I must be in a trance, and that’s not exactly sound.
I don’t have convincing arguments for death that I’ve thought through. The ecosystem would collapse, but maybe we could prevent that by almost never having children, if we can figure a way to convince everyone. It used to be said that a new paradigm in science takes hold when all the old scientists die, but maybe we can make scientists more flexible. And more creative, as they say a new physicist (say) does all his important work in his 20′s. Anyway, it seems there are a lot of problems to address.
To me the biggest parallel I see in this to existing work is to that of program correctness. It is as hard IMHO to prove program correctness (as in: this program is supposed to sort records/extract every record with inconsistent ID numbers/whatever, and actually does) as it is to write the program correctly; actually, I think it’s harder. So I never pursued it. Now we see a really good reason to pursue it. And even w/ conventional, non-AI programs, we have the problem of precisely defining what we want done.
It’s kind of aside, but I think this about safety systems in general. Don’t give me a backup system to shut down the nuclear reactor if the water stops pumping; design it so the reaction depends on the water. Don’t give me great ways to dispose of a chemical that destroys your flesh if it touches you; don’t make the chemical to begin with. Don’t give me a super-strong set of policies to keep the function-gained virus in the lab; don’t make function-gained viruses. Wish they’d listened to that last one 3 years ago.
Admittedly it may be too late in a lot of ways. We can’t make it so if our civilization founders we can prevent mass starvation; not starving depends on modern farming. And we probably can’t make it so we can just pull the plug on AI if it starts going all Skynet: the companies or nations that don’t pull the plug may be able to bankrupt those that do. Sometimes survival of the fittest sucks.
When Alice rejects a bad poem, that’s a true-positive.
I think you meant true-negative?
I will definitely check out the “proofs for young earth” thing. A related issue is patching a problem: SA and Africa look like they fit together, and at the current rate of drift they haven’t had time to separate in 10K years (haven’t checked this, but surely it’s right), so maybe they separated 6K years back in a single day. If C14 is really low in things we think are 10M y old (I’m making this up but it fits), maybe they’re a few thou years old and a few thou years ago there was very little C14 around.
At one point, IIRC, I thought pain, or at least exhaustion, was meritorious. My mother and grandmother sure did. They’d have contests!
Later, I saw thru that. Play is more productive than work for the same task. Go for the joy. That sort of thing.
But think about it from the perspective of someone with chronic illness, or severely overworked, or in a great deal of emotional pain (death of a spouse or child, or other reasons). You’ll have heard the analogy of spoons (https://www.healthline.com/health/spoon-theory-chronic-illness-explained-like-never-before). Such a person must plan out the amount of effort she’s able to put forth in the day, and allocate it to what she finds most important. And suffering pain does take it out of people.
I’m not ill, but I am getting old (first time I have ever said that!), and I am being gentle with myself now. If there’s something that is really unpleasant, I let myself take major breaks before or after or both.
Yet I still tell students: your work should be joy to you.
I think both sides are right.
I’m having a disconnect. I think I’m kind of selfish too. But if it came to a choice between me dying this year and humanity dying 100 years from now, I’ll take my death. It’s going to happen anyway, and I’m old enough I got mine, or most of it. I’m confident I’d feel the same if I didn’t have children, though less intensely. What is causing the difference in these perspectives? IDK. My 90-year-old friend would snort at the question; what difference would a year or two make? The old have less to lose. But the young are usually much more willing to risk their lives. So: IDK.
I miss the old forums. (LW is on the way to this, but the format is a little more social-media.) When I moved from reading novels, and discussing things on threads, to social media posts, my concentration was shot. Maybe coincidence, but when I dumped FB (I never did Twitter) my concentration improved slightly as I recall. Point is that it seems that reading longer things helps me concentrate longer, and reading 5-second things does the opposite. FWIW.
IDK where else to say this, so I’ll say it here. I find many LW articles hard to follow because they use terms I don’t know. I assume everyone else knows, but I’m a newbie. Ergo I request a kindness: if your article uses a term that’s not common English use (GT3, alignment, etc.), define it the first time you use it.
There is also a tremendous amount of make-work.
My uni has 2 new layers of management between professor and president (was 2, now it’s 4) since 1998. Recently we noticed a scary budget shortfall. They decided to reorganize. After reorgnization...kept those extra 2 layers.
My doc’s office joined a big corporation. It was ACA (Obamacare). They would have had to hire another clerical worker to handle the extra paperwork.
This blog post is about something else, but buried in it is the number of clergy for various US denominations. Whether the denomination is growing or shrinking, the administrators’ numbers explode. https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/5910/
Many of us have produced dissertations or technical papers that will likely never be used for anything. And there are way more people whose job it is to produce science. Yet scientific innovation continues to decline (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5). I think it’s easy to miss how shocking this is. We have way more people working with way better equipment, with previously unavailable computer support, not just in the West but all over the world. We should have invented flying cars, the Terminator, and the flux capacitor by now. How much of a researcher’s time is spent on innovation, and how much on grants, paperwork, and publicizing?
I don’t know why we have so much work that didn’t need to be done before. My guess is there was always pressure to do this but now we’re rich enough we can afford to pour money into things that don’t produce benefit. But it’s just a guess.
I’d guess it’s overabundance of working-class workers relative to the need. But recently I’m seeing claims that the elite are overabundant: for example, there aren’t enough elite slots for the next generation, so Harvard’s acceptance rate has gone from 30-odd% to around 1%; and would-be middle-class young people are having to stay with mom and dad to save on rent while working long hours. How can there be an oversupply of all different classes of workers? If it’s that automation makes us all way too efficient, shouldn’t that make us rich and leisured rather than overworked and desperate?
(IDK what most people think abt just abt anything, so I’ll content myself with many aren’t ready to accept.)
Secularism is unstable. Partly because it gets its values from the religion it abandoned, so that the values no longer have foundation, but also empirically because it stops people from reproducing at replacement rate.
Overpopulation is at worst a temporary problem now; the tide has turned.
Identifying someone with lots of letters after his name and accepting his opinions is not following the science, but the opposite. Science takes no one’s word, but uses data.
If A says B thinks something and B says, No, I think that’s crazy, B is right. That is, mind reading isnt a thing.
What matters about the 2020 US election isnt Trump. It’s whether we know how to get away with fraud in future elections and whether we’ve taken steps to prevent it. Uh-oh.
Rage at people on the other team who want to join yours is a baaaad idea.
Conservatives are already suspicious of AI, based on ChatGPT3′s political bias. AI skeptics shd target the left (which has less political reason to be suspicious) and not target the right (because if the succeed, the left will reject AI skepticism as a right-wing delusion).
Apparently clarity is hard. Because although I agree that it’s essential to communicate clearly, it took significant wrapping my head around it to digest this post, to identify its thrust. I thought I had it eventually, but looking at comments it seems I wasn’t the only one not sure.
I am not saying this to be snarky. I find this to be one of the clearer posts on LessWrong; I am usually lost in jargon I don’t know. (Inferential gaps? General intelligence factor g?) But despite its relative clarity, it’s still a slog.
I still admire the effort, and hope everyone will listen.
Are the Schedule’s times in Eastern Daylight Time?