Yes. This is what I was looking for. It makes way more sense now. I broadly agree with everything said here. Thank you for clarifying.
By the way, I think you should consider rewriting the side note re autistic nerd. I am still a bit confused reading that.
Personally, I am strongly against this,
I got into Rationality for a purpose if it is not the best way to get me to that purpose [i.e. not winning] then Rationality should be casted down and the alternative embraced.
On the other hand, I suspect we mostly agree with our disagreement is on the definition of the word “winning”
I could have failed reading comprehension but I did not see “winning” defined anywhere in the post
I see, I failed at comprehension then, thank you for your replies
It seems that I have failed to communicate clearly, and for that, I apologise. I am agnostic on most of your post.
Let’s go back to the original quote
Hinkley Point C is an ongoing nuclear power project in the UK, which has seen massive cost overruns and delays. But if you take prices for electricity generation in 1960, and increase them as much as concrete has, you’re not far off from the current estimated cost per kwh of Hinkley Point C, or some other recent projects considered too expensive.
I understand this to mean that [plant price increase roughly in line with inflation]
this does not distinguish between [lack of innovation while everything is inflated] versus [lizard men sabotaging construction].
for [lack of innovation while everything is inflated] to hold you have to argue that [there is a lack of innovation] separately. Or is your argument in reverse? [plant price increase roughly in line with inflation] → [there must be a lack of innovation].
because some other reasons could be responsible, e.g [lizard men sabotaging construction]
Whether the lizard men exist or not I am not qualified to say. Even less to say what they are if they do exist.
You seem to believe there are no lizard men, just pure inflation. Other people seem to believe otherwise.
But [plant price increase roughly in line with inflation] does not seem to support either.
as for the rest,
yes ALARA is overblown, we shared this belief
Were regulations on nuclear, relative to appropriate levels of regulation, more expensive than regulations and legal barriers for other energy sources?
I am not sure
rules about low-level waste were driven by direct public concern about that, which forced the NRC to abandon proposed rule changes. I actually think the public concern about low-level waste was sort of reasonable, because some companies could sometimes put highly radioactive waste in supposedly low-level waste. What do you do when you don’t understand technical details but a group of experts has proven itself to sometimes be unreliable and biased?
agree to disagree here, I believe privately that the level of concern is too high compared to actual risk. But I am uneducated in such matters and the error bar is big.
ok this is not addressing my confusion, my confusion is that that particular piece of information does not distinguish between your hypothesis and many others [with one example I used].
I am not sure why nuclear power cost is so high. Maybe you are right, that nuclear energy just never had improvement since 1960 that decreased the real cost to produce electricity [though electronic component costs had gone down, although construction costs have not]. My point is that this particular piece of information does not distinguish the hypothesis.
My information is mostly from this series of blog posts.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction
Taking this at face value, can we agree that current nuclear regulations are imposing a lot of irrational costs on nuclear generators [e.g. designating extremely low radioactive material as contaminated and requiring special disposal]? I don’t know how much this cost is [let’s say >10%]. Then inflation could be 90% and unreasonable regulation 10% of the cost increase.
that particular piece of information does not help me increase or decrease these percentages.
Hinkley Point C is an ongoing nuclear power project in the UK, which has seen massive cost overruns and delays. But if you take prices for electricity generation in 1960, and increase them as much as concrete has, you’re not far off from the current estimated cost per kwh of Hinkley Point C, or some other recent projects considered too expensive.
I am sorry but this confused me, how is this section relevant?
to my understanding, you are saying that if we build an average 1960 electricity plant now [does not matter what type] then as the construction cost went up as per inflation [with concrete price as the standard], we should expect the electricity cost the same as Hinkley Point C.
I don’t understand what it has to bear on the matter of whether the cost increase on nuclear projects is from [lack of innovation while everything else is inflated] versus [random objection picked][ALARA forced nuclear plants to match construction cost of other plants rendering it impossible to be cost efficient].
so update, after consultation with a research doctor turn out I am not qualified to do it.
I need to be either a doctor, a higher ranking nurse or a nurse on research track at least.
since I am a nurse on the clinical track so I am not qualified to do the research, bummer.
people could still go to their doctor, get their blood check and give the result to me to tabulate, but it does not require me in particular.
jinx, I have applied already, not sure if I did a good job selling it though. Thanks for reminding me though.
still waiting on whether my hospital would be interested in the study.
so far community members I have spoken to said “others” should be interested, but few actually gave me a commitment, I am not pushing very hard though.
Let’s not jump the gun, I’ll look deeper into it once I am certain there is huge interest.
tbh the main thing I care about is whether those who self-designated as vegans are significantly more likely to be deficient compared to baseline and whether supplement help. Everything else is extra.
RE timeline: no problem, I am happy to wait until September or after, giving me even more time to look into it.
I am going to put a feeler out to see if there is any interest in the Lesswrong/EA community in Sydney, I would not go ahead unless 30 people plan to participate.
RE base rate: I can run blood tests on [say 10+] omnivores in the community, assuming Lesswrong/EA community to be homogenous in other aspects aside from the tested diet, [we do have 10-20x the autism/neurodivergent rate compared to general population]. That should establish Lesswrong/EA community-specific base rate [hopefully].
RE protocol: the pool should be anyone from Sydney Lesswrong/EA community I can talk into participating, divided by diet.
The result of [how many self-described vegans in the Lesswrong/EA community in Sydney are deficient in iron, Vit B12, Vit D as found in blood tests [according to so and so metric]? and would supplementation help?] should speak for itself.
RE “Real study”: yeah, it’s nice for me to talk a big game but personally, I am very pessimistic [<30%] that any test is going to be done at all. If nothing else, at least it should raise the problem to the local community consciousness.
Personally, I am a big fan [did I say big? I mean huge, humongous] of your past works and found them to be enlightening. I believe your numbers and my only complaint of your in-office test adventure was that you did not manage to establish the benefit of supplements. Which, if the stars aligned, I hope to remedy this round.
I am an omnivore, although I greatly admire those who go on vegan diets for animal suffering. I am only in this to find out what is true and if there’s anything we can do about it. My stake is that I care deeply about the community, many of them vegans. If doing vegan causes easily fixable deficiency I would really want to know.
I’ll look into the actual feasibility of this.
May I get back to you in one week?
I mean if say 20 EA vegans in Sydney got blood tests and for some reason, none of them has any iron, Vit B12, Vit D deficiency [by some metric] it would be significant evidence contradicting your belief isn’t it?
It would help me if you can outline a short sketch [don’t spend much time on it] on what you think I am going to do [both to prevent the double illusion of transparency and a type of pre-registration].
Would a replication of your study of “in-office nutritional testing” in a different EA population [say EA Sydney, Australia] be helpful?
In the sense of knowing how many self-identified vegetarians/vegans are clinically deficient in iron, Vit B12, Vit D,… [maybe even compared to omnivores]. We can then advise people on supplementation. With maybe follow-up surveys in 3,6,12 months to see if the number actually improved and if they actually feel improvement.
I am a nurse and I can take blood so that may help. I am willing to sink 40 hours into this if there is interest.
However, I have never done anything like this before and I am pessimistic [<30%] about whether this would actually happen.
Just something I’ve accidentally look into Only regarding the extraction of lithium and other rare metal from concentrated sea water.
Paradoxically, increased concentration actually WORSEN the efficacy of our current technique to extract rare metals from sea water (adsorption) which was not very efficient in the first place. Presumably from higher concentration of sodium salt. For further information you can look up extraction of uranium from desalination output.
according to wikipedia, pipeline storage of Germany is currently capable of several months
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Power_to_gas
I confess I do not know what they mean by that precisely, but I am under the impression that hydrogen storage as low pressure gas is very viable
In fact I if the pipeline can handle town gas, I don’t see why both hydrogen and natural gas can not be produced at the same time, to hit the pareto efficiency. Natural gas more heat storage per volume, hydrogen better heat storage efficiency, depending on storage capacity, projected energy production and usage a theoretically optimal mix can be calculated.
Latest results from hydrogen electrolysis research show 95% efficiency on theoretical limit converting electricity to hydrogen.
The current mass market fuel cell conversion from hydrogen to electricity is about 70% efficiency.
I am under the impression that hydrogen storage and transport for static usages are not that significantly different from natural gas. Or natural gas facilities can be converted to manage hydrogen with relatively small cost.
my personal experiences with tradies/contractor of any kind are that 9⁄10 of them are there to get you [by charging enormous amount of money], it is extremely costly to find reliable ones and online reviews are not of much help since the consumer is unable to distinguish between good and reasonably priced work from the chaff [or maybe the online reviews are faked in the first place].
isn’t what you suggest basically just rent to buy type of bussiness?
I am confused, why shame? I see nothing here to be ashamed of.
can we treat this as sunk cost fallacy? The past doesn’t matter except for when it shapes the current situation. Now identify the best way forward for your current goal and take it.
If that does not make you feel better, then does hearing that other people wasted even more time make you feel any better? A lot of people wasted a lot of their life.
I wasted 10 years of my life for a mildly different reason. I am curious as to how that makes you feel to hear.
if that does not make you feel better. Can we say that the you in the past must have had his/her reason illegible as it may be? I mean past you decided to stick it out so surely that revealed his/her preference for continuing? Can we say that unless you have stayed you would not have known it was a mistake, and you would be complaining about that branch of the multiverse too?
if that does not make you feel better. Does the fact that your post got upvote and replied to, implying that we listened and validated your feeling make you feel better?