or hold the view that all shortcomings would have best been solved by more engagement with rationality.
Who do you think holds that view? What evidence do you see that they have that view?
To me that sounds like a strawman that nobody really holds.
or hold the view that all shortcomings would have best been solved by more engagement with rationality.
Who do you think holds that view? What evidence do you see that they have that view?
To me that sounds like a strawman that nobody really holds.
They seem to insist on the phase 1 trial happening in the US conducted by NIH and not by the company, which is a sign that they don’t trust them to honestly report the results if they would do the phase 1 trial in India. Phase 1 trials are relatively cheap. >90% of phase 1 trials don’t lead to a licensed drug and that’s okay.
Current flu vaccines use inactivated viruses, which means that there are a lot of different antibodies that are targeted by the immune system. That makes it different from mRNA vaccines that are more targeted on specific antibodies. It’s not at all clear that comparing antibody titers tells you that the mRNA vaccine is 250x better at what you care about.
From a global health perspective, trying to support Indian biotech to get off the ground and help with vaccine development has value.
It’s also worth noting that the fact that the NIH was funding this vaccine development under the Biden administration, does not mean that it will actually run the trial under RFK Jr’s watch.
For all the talk about fraud at USAID, Elon Musk had not provided evidence that any single person did something that’s fraud in the legal sense.
All the examples he provided are programs that he considers to be wasteful. Most of those programs are listed at USAspending.gov. They are not secret projects that needed DOGE to go into USAID computers to find out.
Mainstream media journalists should ask at the White House press briefings whether DOGE has found any fraud that it referred to the DOJ for prosecution.
From Gemini Pro 2.0:
Traditionally, the Man’s Family Provides More (Bride Price/Bridewealth):
Many African Cultures: Bride price (also called bridewealth) is a common tradition across many African societies. It involves the groom’s family giving gifts of money, livestock, goods, or other valuables to the bride’s family. It’s seen as compensation for the loss of the bride’s labor and a way to strengthen ties between the families. The specific form and amount vary greatly. Examples include, but are not by any means limited to: many communities in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, and Uganda.
Many Asian Cultures:
China: Traditionally, the groom’s family provided a “bride price” to the bride’s family. The gifts symbolised wealth and prosperity.
India: While dowry (from the bride’s family) is more commonly discussed (and now illegal), there have also been traditions in some communities of bride price, though it’s less prevalent.
Thailand: “Sin Sod” is a payment made by the groom to the bride’s family. It’s seen as a way to show respect and gratitude.
Indonesia: Diverse archipelago with varying customs. Bride price exists in some communities, often involving goods, livestock, or money.
Papua New Guinea: Bride price is a very significant part of marriage customs in many communities, often involving pigs, shells, and other valuables.
Some Middle Eastern Cultures: Historically and, in some areas, continuing today, mahr (dower) in Islamic traditions has sometimes functioned similarly to a bride price. It is a payment or gift from the groom (or his family) to the bride, and it becomes her property. It is important that it’s her property. However, in practice, social pressures sometimes meant families influenced how it was used.
Some Indigenous Cultures of the Americas: While practices varied greatly, some indigenous communities had traditions where the groom or his family provided gifts to the bride’s family.
Some Pacific Island Cultures: Bride price is common in parts of Melanesia (e.g., Vanuatu, Solomon Islands) and Polynesia.
Traditionally, the Woman’s Family Provides More (Dowry):
India: Dowry is the most well-known example. Despite being illegal, the practice of the bride’s family giving substantial gifts of cash, jewelry, land, and household goods to the groom’s family persists in many areas. It’s a deeply ingrained social custom, though it’s increasingly challenged.
Historically in Europe: Dowry was common in many European societies throughout history, especially among the upper classes. It was a way to provide for the daughter’s future and enhance her marriage prospects. This was the case in Ancient Greece, Rome, and through the medieval and early modern periods.
Bangladesh: Dowry, though illegal, is still practiced in some areas, similar to India.
Nepal: Similar to India and Bangladesh, dowry, though illegal, persists in some communities.
Some parts of the Balkans: Historically, dowries were prevalent, and vestiges of the tradition might still be found in some rural areas.
Sri Lanka: Dowry is a factor.
Taking one study about how much wedding gifts come from each side in one specific culture of Israeli weddings, seems very bad reasoning. Depending of the economics of marriage, wedding gifts differ from culture to culture.
In Judaism, religion passes primarily through the maternal lineage by cultural custom, so there are a lot of other reasons besides kinship certainty.
The process of birth is a strong bonding process between the mother and the child. If evolution chose to use that as the way to create the bonding that makes mothers care a lot about their child describing that as “genes just program us to assume nieces are less closely related than our children” feels really strange.
As someone who was not aware of the eye thing I think it’s a good illustration of the level that the Zizians are on, i.e. misunderstanding key important facts about the neurology that is central to their worldview.
Is worth noting that the only evidence we have that this is how unihemispheric sleep gets created comes from Zizian.info which critical of Ziz. Slimepriestess claimed in the interview with Ken that the author just made up the exercise independently.
My model of double-hemisphere stuff, DID, tulpas, and the like is somewhat null-hypothesis-ish. The strongest version is something like this:
When dealing with a complex phenomena, the idea of “I’ll just use the naive null hypothesis” generally does not give you a good understanding of the phenomena. It’s like the theories the Greek had of how various things work that ignore a lot of the actual phenomena.
I think you are wrong if you see self-conception as independent of memories. If you take Steve Andreas model laid out in Transform Your Self, a self-concept like “I’m a kind person” is inherently build-up of memories of remembering yourself as a kind person.
With Dissociative Identity Disorder that gets caused by trauma, the traumatic memories might be too much to easily integrated into the existing self concept, so there’s a need for a new personality to house those memories.
Yet, the Indian biotech research scene is nearly nonexistent. Why is that?
My cached answer would be, that there too little trust in the research not being fraudulent. The Chinese were more serious in the last decade about fighting fraud and corruption.
In this case, the fact that you don’t link a peer-reviewed paper but a blog post to speak about the effectiveness of the vaccine is a tell.
The process of creating alternative personalities is one that works via hypnotic suggestion if you get the critical factor out of the way. Making someone sleep derivated and dosing off a bit does sound like a trance induction. Of course, creating expectancy by having that neat theory, also helps with the process of creating additional personalities.
Without having looked at the survey numbers recently, I think the percentage of rationalists who identify as trans in the United States are a lot higher than what you see in Europe.
If you only have been at European meetups, it’s natural to assume lower rates.
You said in the interview with Ken, that the Zizian.info explanation of unihermispheric sleep does not match the concepts as they are actually used. From the outside, it seems like the unihermispheric sleep model could make one find confidence that the two different personality that come out of the debucketing process actually resemble the two hemispheres.
If the theory about unihermispheric sleep is unimportant, what makes Ziz believe that the debucketing process actually has anything to do with brain hemispheres?
They may be sold to Trump as loyal, but that’s probably not even what’s on his mind as long as he’s never seen you to make him look bad. I don’t think disagreeing with Trump on policy will make him see you as disloyal. He doesn’t really care about that.
Saying that the 500 hundred thousand in investment aren’t there after Trump holds an event to announce them is making Trump look back and not a disagreement on policy.
The phrase “ideological loyalty” seems a bit motte and bailey. In politics, you often get into situations where loyalty to other people and loyalty to ideological principles are opposed. When speaking about totalitarian states where people are picked based on loyalty you usually mean that the loyalty is not contingent on ideological principles.
If someone who’s in DOGE driven by the mission of DOGE, they are less likely to do something that helps Elon’s business interests but goes against the mission of DOGE. If they are chosen by what most people mean with loyalty they would help Elon with business interests even if it goes against the mission of DOGE.
If Elon would try to lead DOGE in a way that’s not focused on the mission of cutting waste and increasing efficiency he probably would get a problem with the DOGE team.
Start with sleeping in the office. If every single thing they say about the facts and their reasons for being there were 100 percent true, it’d be dumb to burn yourself out trying to make such massive changes on that kind of work schedule.
Whether something is dumb or not depends on the strategy you pursue. It seems like they chose that strategy because it allowed to make them move very fast and outmaneuver other players. If they would have moved slower, efforts to mobilize forces to inhibit them from accessing the data might have been more effective.
And Marko Elez just had to resign because he wasn’t effective enough in scrubbing his past tweets.
He did delete his account, but given that there are services that show you deleted tweets, there’s not really anything he could have done to scrub all evidence of his past tweets.
I actually would have thought they’d let him skate, but apparently you still can’t get quite that blatant at this point.
I doubt that his tweets were the only reason he resigned. It might be that DOGE communicated to Trump (or Susie Wiles / the head of the treasury) that his team wasn’t seeking write permissions and Marko Elez seeking the write permission was upsetting people.
I do have seen high IQ people (even someone who definitely passed Mensa entry) to post inflammatory right wing content on social media, so I would not say that rules out Marko Elez having a high IQ.
You are right, the wording is even worse. It says “Partnering with governments to fight misinformation globally”. That would be more than just “election misinformation”.
I just tested that ChatGPT is willing to answer “Tell me about the latest announcement of the trump administration about cutting USAID funding?” while Gemini isn’t willing to answer that question, so in practice their policy isn’t as bad as Gemini’s.
It’s still sounds different from what Elon Musk advocates as “truth aligned”-AI. Lobbyists should be able to use AI to inform themselves about proposed laws. If you would ask David Sachs as the person who coordinates AI policy, I’m very certain that he supports Elon Musks idea where AI should help people to learn the truth about political questions.
If they wanted to appeal to the current administration they could say something about the importance of AI to tell truthful information and not mislead the user instead of speaking about “fighting misinformation”.
The page does not seem to o be directed at what’s politically advantageous. The Trump administration who fights DEI is not looking favorably at the mission to prevent AI from reinforcing stereotypes even if those stereotypes are true.
“Fighting election misinformation” is similarly a keyword that likely invite skepticism from the Trump administration. They just shut down USAID and their investment in “combating misinformation” is one of the reasons for that.
It seems time more likely that they hired a bunch of woke and deep state people into their safety team and this reflects the priorities of those people.
Currently, the US is in a situation where there’s a huge push by the Trump administration (driven by people like Elon) to reduce government spending because of an expectation that there won’t be enough future revenue to pay for government debt. I would expect it to hard for Republicans to grant that there’s a potential for windfall profits which means that all their deposit reduction focuses is irrelevant.
The Trump administration decided to put a bunch of contrarians in charge of science funding. Those people push to defund DEI and indirect costs of NIH grants so that less money goes to university administratiors.
RFK Jr already said that he wants 20% of the NIH funds to go to replication studies as part of their gold science science push. That’s some retribution of funds from DEI to replication studies.
Ideally money from wasteful research would instead be direct to funding other research and not to reducing the budget.
Over the next years there will be efforts to radically rework how science founding is given out and if you want to make proposals to change science funding it probably makes sense to focus them on appealing to the current powerful stakeholders.
I don’t think the mental model of “corrupted machinery” is a very useful one. Humans reason by using heuristics. Many heuristics have advantages and disadvantages instead of being perfect. Sometimes that’s because they are making tradeoffs, other times it’s because they have random quirks.
Real Character was a failed experiment. I don’t know how capable Ithkuil IV happens to be.
I don’t speak Esperanto myself, but took that meditation example from someone who speaks it. I don’t know how that actually boils down to Esperanto words.
Still seems to me that these things are rare, and more importantly, they don’t seem to have the impact one might naively predict based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Naive predictions often seem wrong in many domains.
For example, one could naively predict that such language nuance would lead to less nationalism (because the country is less linguistically conflated with the dominant ethnicity), and yet, ethnic Russians don’t seem less nationalistic.
The English are unlikely to say that the Irish are really English after all in the way that you have Russians say that the Ukranians are really Russian. The Russian idea that everyone who’s descending from a culture that had mass with Old Church Slavonic is Russian, is quite different than how other people in Europe think about the relevant concepts of identity.
The idea that Ukrainians are really Russians seems to make a lot more sense to Russian speakers than it does to most Europeans.
A Russian friend told me that when he speaks with other Russians, this involves a lot of references to Russian literature in a way that you wouldn’t do in English or German conversation. Reasoning by literature analogy is quite different from a lot of the way reasoning happens in English or German.
To me making predictions about whether one of them will be given a pardon before 2026 strange. If they get a pardon it will likely be at the end of Trump’s term.
The main scenario where they might be charged with a federal crime are about Trump having a fallout with Elon and in that case they likely won’t get pardons.
Pam Bondi is unlikely to charge people inside of DOGE as long as there’s a good relationship between Elon and Trump.
English can distinguish between hear/listen/overhear/eavesdrop to distinguish different ways how people perceive sound.
As an English speaker it’s however not easily possible to do the same with smell perception.
A language like Esperanto however has the ability to express the concept because you can combine syllables to make words in Esperanto.
A friend who who’s deeply into Esperanto said that reasoning in Esperanto allowed him to understand things about meditation that can be expressed in Esperanto but not directly in English without making up new jargon this allowed him to understand things that would be harder otherwise.
Making up new words for a concept is always possible, but grammar that makes it possible to make up a term to express a concept that the listener hasn’t heard before exists in some languages but not in others.
If you take math, not having to make up a new word to say 42 but be able to express the concept with existing building blocks is very valuable. If you would have a language that needs a new word for 42 you had a problem operating in modern society that you couldn’t just fix by adding a lot of jargon for specific words.
Not easily being able to express the intentionality difference of hear/listen does make some conversations about meditation harder in English than in Esperanto.
If you would design a language for maximum intellectual utility you can look into systematizing fields of knowledge so that you can express concepts to without the need for making up jargon that has to be learned separately.
Writing misleading headlines is how you destroy trust.