Rank: #10 out of 4859 in peer accuracy at Metaculus for the time period of 2016-2020.
ChristianKl
Karma: 36,664
80%/90% confidence is enough to be action-guiding (IMO) but I wouldn’t call it “high” [...] So maybe my subjective credences aren’t good.
Have you done any calibration practice?
There are local efforts that help with building a coalition that has power for global efforts and local efforts that make it harder to build coalitions. Using political violence makes it harder to build coalitions.
It was quite hard for RFK Jr. as opposition to the two-party system to appear on TV despite polling decently at a time. Does that also put the US in “not a democracy” territory? I would better see that as a sign that you have some bad TV networks.
I think there’s a huge difference between making threats yourself and either doing something because you were threatened or fear to be threatened in the future?
It does not need to be a threat, it can also just be about having the statement on record so that in the future if anyone asks you can point to you being on record that you explicitly reject political violence.
Isn’t the attempt of trying to get people off blood diamonds a lot about DeBeers not wanting people to buy diamonds that don’t come from DeBeers?
What makes you believe that the population thought the became soft on immigration?
When enrolling in daycare, there’s a spike of infections, then a decay afterwards, which you would expect if you started developing resistance to infections. So they are acquiring immunity, that is clear; the question is whether this acquired immunity is (on net) beneficial.
It’s also about how long lasting the immunity is. If the immunity lasts 1-2 years, you aren’t gaining that much.
This does remind me of Gunnar creating a linkpost for Childcare : what the science says. According to it daycare seem to raise cortisol levels in the children.
We used to be told that Orbán concentrated power in a way that Hungary isn’t a real democracy anymore. That was the justification for the US to meddle in it’s politics to fight Orbán.
Even when stopping the meddling and reversing course didn’t cause Orbán administration to fall, I think this illustrates both the emptiness of the propaganda claims of Hungary not being a democracy and the relative lack of power of the meddling attempts.
For behavior to be the cause of why Australian have more skin cancer, they would need to behave differently.
I’m not aware of anyone having documented that Australian behave significantly differently.
Orbán Viktor reign ended after being prime minister since 2010. Quite interestingly, this happened after US government policy switched under Trump in 2025 from funding opposition media against Orbán to be pro-Orbán.
I’m not sure exactly why this happened but it feels remarkable to me.
Australia (and especially Northern Australia) seems to have more ultraviolet radiation. I don’t think it’s behavioral. Arizona does not have equal ultraviolet radiation.
Another corollary is that if you do want to have sensitive discussions with other LessWrong users, don’t exchange potential sensitive information via private messages but switch to secure messengers like Signal.
Political organizing to stop AI development is potentially a target
Employees of AI companies that share nonprivate information are potentially a target
When I have meet people who had a lot of training in nonviolent communication in workshop settings, they often seem to me quite needy and shy. I think there’s a good chance that the framework of getting people to focus on their needs just makes them more needy. If you need to have a need to ask for something than that creates an incentive for you to develop more needs.
“You are smart” and “You are stupid” are both judgements. Judgements are both about agreeing as a community about what’s desirable and what’s undesirable. The constrain individuals in a way that makes them adapt to community norms. At the same time, it provides grounding. It wouldn’t surprise me that taking away that grounding makes people more shy, needy and depressed.I think there’s a good chance that the social justice discourse took part of it’s notion of words as violence from nonviolent communication while unfortunately not getting the part about empathy and instead intellectualizing. There’s an idea that if you just build enough safe spaces where people are shielded from violent words you end up with people that are psychologically healthy. Human psychology might not work that way and instead people just become more depressed and anxious.
That doesn’t mean that a lot of judgements and constraints of individuals don’t create harm, but generalizing to those things being fundamentally bad might not be helpful.
If you use language to project power while lacking the social status to justify your power claims you stop getting invited to parties.
That happens whether or not your communication is violent in the way NVC conceptualizes violence.
From the meta-analysis you link:
There was no significant difference following mammography (0 days: 95% CI, −190 to 237 days), prostate cancer screening (37 days; 95% CI, −37 to 73 days), colonoscopy (37 days; 95% CI, −146 to 146 days), FOBT screening every year or every other year (0 days; 95% CI, −70.7 to 70.7 days), and lung cancer screening (107 days; 95% CI, −286 days to 430 days).
I don’t think that disagrees with me. Their 95% confidence interval contains both the possibility that it may cost you 146 days and gain you 146 days.
It’s been suggested that the phrase “no evidence” is quite often a bad sign.
The examples brought forward are about cases where no studies have been run to find out the answer. We did run the studies for colonoscopy and the found no statistical significant effects on lifespan.
bone soup (need to cook for 6 − 48 hours)
Bone soup certainly is one of the best sources, I still have to write another post on bone soup. I’m skeptical of the 6-48 hours. That timeframe optimizes magnesium, potassium and calcium yields but it has the chance to break down the hyaluronan in ways that mean that you get shorter spike and not the 24-48 hours of effect that you get from the bacteria in your stomach doing the work of breaking it down.
I’m planning to go for 90 minutes first boil + 60 minutes second boil in a pressure cooker myself.Skin (whether from chicken or other animals) is certainly another valid source. Skin does have elastin breakdown products that bone soup doesn’t have. I haven’t made up my mind of the merits of wanting to consume those, but I would note that ChatGPT calls them “usually pro-inflammatory”.
Having good magnesium levels is certainly helpful for a lot of bodily progresses. I think there’s a common belief that among people who supplement a lot that many people suffer from magnesium deficiency than have too much magnesium.
soy products, e.g. tofu (via phytoestrogens, supports hyaluronan production)
Trying to understand the merits of tofu and phytoestrogens is probably worth it’s own post, but not one I’m particularly interested in writing at the moment.
citrus fruits (via naringenin, blocks hyaluronan dstruction)
I would not translate “blocks hyaluronan destruction” into “helps with hyaluronan production”. I think a healthy body does break down hyaluronan and recreates it and if you hamper that by reducing the breakdown you probably get more problems then benefits.
I did explicitly write about microbiome effects. The bioavailability paper Simec et al 2023 that Benquo mention does argue that their findings point towards systematic regulatory effects.
“The poor bioavailability (~0.2 %) of oral hyaluronan indicates that the mechanism of action is the result of the systematic regulatory function of hyaluronan or its metabolites rather than the direct effects of hyaluronan at distal sites of action (skin, joints). [...] The results of the present study suggest that orally ad-ministered HA is degraded to oligosaccharides by bacteria in the cecum, and oligosaccharide HA migrates to the skin through the blood or lymph. It is expected that the absorbed oligosaccharide HA participates in the various effects of orally administered HA”
Most of what I wrote focuses on systemic regulatory action through CD44 activation. Benquo’s hypothesis of all effects being due to microbiome effects might be true, but it’s a contrarian position that’s not held by the people who actually did the bioavailability research. Simec does not even mention Benque’s hypnothesis as one worth considering an running experiments to see whether it’s true.
I do think Benque’s hypnothesis is valid enough that someone in the field should run an experiment, especially given that microbiome interventions can both help with skin and joint outcomes, but when writing a post like this, I think it’s fine to not be contrarian and go with the views of the people running the bioavailability experiments instead of making contrarian interpretations on them.But I also think that sort of problem is pretty likely in a thoroughly human-written post too
I think it’s more likely that that I’m going to argue a contrarian position instead of just going with the views that the scientists who are experts in the field hold when I’m written a human-written post, but I don’t think that’s an improvement. When it comes to writing like this, I think LLM’s helping grounding the argument from the perspective of domain experts is an improvement.
It’s pretty dissimilar. A hunger strike works because you can easily end it at any point. On the other hand, you can’t easily undo having your leg cut off.