Possibly pointless nitpick:
When it comes to things like lesbian firefighters, beware base rates! There are a lot more heterosexual women than homosexual women, so it can still be true that, even though the percentage of lesbians who become firefighters is greater than the percentage of straight women who become firefighters, most women that are firefighters are not lesbians.
Duncan was very unhappy with his experience and his treatment as a CFAR employee and his interactions with Anna Salamon in particular, including being pressured into doing things against his better judgment. If he prefers not to go into details, I’ll respect his wishes, but after following him for a while I’ve got somewhat of a handle on what happened.
This is definitely a warning shot, but it’s not quite there yet. Being able to infect and kill cells in a lab isn’t necessarily enough for a virus survive “in the wild”; it has to be able to survive environmental conditions and immune responses, reproduce itself inside the cells, and then be transmitted to new hosts. Still, this could definitely end up being pretty scary in a hurry.
Weight is such an extreme determinative factor in combat sports that an untrained 250-pound couch potato could walk into any boxing gym and absolutely demolish a 100-pound opponent with decades of training.
You later link to a video of an early UFC match in which a much heavier person is beaten by a much lighter person when the lighter person kicks him in the face. But yes, that doesn’t happen very often, especially when both are fighting in the same style.
The point being that not having (mathematically) simple and low-dimensional values doesn’t make for values that aren’t going to produce something incredibly useless. The most “complex” thing in the world is random noise.
Dr. Seuss is also generally fun for adults to read to children. (The illustrations do a tremendous amount of work in that regard.)
Related: https://youtu.be/mZYu7DnsCF0?si=Gn0pZhlGlM-SXGNU
I also noticed the similarity!
Has he read Green Eggs and Ham?
So more like this guy, then?
Thank you!
This guy certainly knew how to wear the clown suit...
I asked the default Claude “Do you like cats?” and this was the response:
I find cats fascinating from a behavioral and biological perspective! They have such interesting combinations of traits—being both independent and affectionate, having remarkable hunting instincts even as house pets, and showing complex social behaviors that we’re still learning about.
What draws me to discussing cats is how they seem to have this perfect balance of mystery and familiarity. They’ve been companions to humans for thousands of years, yet they maintain this sense of wildness and unpredictability that makes them endlessly interesting to observe and think about.
Do you have cats, or are you thinking about getting one? I’d be curious to hear what sparked your question!
FWIW, although this post isn’t directly about anyone in particular, the LessWrong comment section in particular may have gotten a bit less confrontational recently in a way that makes it less hostile to Duncans.
I have an example of how ask culture can fail.
Suppose you’re a manager in a corporation. There’s an urgent and difficult problem that needs attention, and you want to know if anyone would want to work unpaid overtime so they can make more progress. You don’t want to force unpaid overtime on anyone if it would be a significant inconvenience for them, but you also know that someone might say yes anyway in order to look like a better worker (and become more likely to get raises and promotions). So you can’t just ask everyone outright and expect an honest answer—you’re stuck implementing some version of guess culture with regards to asking people to work unpaid overtime, because a clear and unambiguous request isn’t going to be refused even if you think it ought to have been.
To make this work though, you have to be able to eat short term losses and think on longer horizons.
A wise man once said that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. In actual practice, it turns out that, even if you’re 100% correct that a bubble exists, it’s still really hard to make money by betting against it, because the only ways to do that involve holding onto an investment that is constantly hemmoraging money until the moment when the bubble finally does “burst”. If the market persists in undervaluing an asset you can just HODL and come out ahead in the long run, but if you try to HODL a short position, you just keep on losing more and more money every day the bubble fails to burst.
(hopes this is a joke)
I’m reminded of a related reason for “anticipacitory coverups”...
Remember, you can’t be wrong unless you take a position. Don’t fall into that trap.
-- Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook
But for me (a cis man), that dynamic has no relation whatsoever to sexual attraction, except in the opposite direction (sexual attraction can make an interaction feel high-stakes). I think this is a difference between most cis men and most cis women.
I am not entirely sure that this is the case.
I once read an article about a woman who had done extraordinary well in a quiz-show style academic competition for college students and then watched a video of her team winning the final round of the championship because she answered all the questions herself, and my immediate reaction was “That was the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen”.
3 votes
Overall karma indicates overall quality.
3 votes
Agreement karma indicates agreement, separate from overall quality.
People that disclose a conflict of interest usually aren’t any less biased in practice than people who don’t disclose the same conflict, even though they’re generally perceived as more trustworthy. :/