That doesn’t mean we can get a good estimate of the effect size. Dustin Moskovitz speculates such folks can instead go to Harvard, which is nearby. That’s a fair point,
This is nonsense. Harvard was already far more locked down than MIT will be. I omit the more important point.
Are you assuming that electricity is free? My understanding is that the cost of silicon is small compared to the cost of electricity, if you run the chip all the time, as in this article. For example, this gpu costs $60 and consumes 300 watts = 2700 kwh/year = $270/year, at $.10/kwh. This one costs 10x and consumes 3x, so its price is not negligible, but still less than a year of operation. Plus I think the data center rule of thumb is that you should multiply electricity by 2 to account for cooling costs.
This will have a very large effect on the total compute bought, numbers which only appear in the graph. The headline numbers—the optimal times—depend mainly on the exponential form of the improvement in efficiency. If the time for the cost of silicon to be cut in half is same as the time for the amount of electricity needed to be cut in half (Moore’s law vs Koomey’s law), then you should get roughly the same answer. Koomey’s law used to be faster, but after the breakdown in Dennard scaling, it seems to be slower.
If you want a GPU-specific version of Koomey’s law, I don’t know. Does that data set of GPUs have watt ratings?
Tucker jumps from outside feedback to feedback from skeptics. Why isn’t feedback from a meditation community sufficient? Martin’s subjects were certified enlightened, so apparently it isn’t, but a meditation community should have a lot more experience with failure modes.
Sorry, I should have been clearer: I’m not talking about the course. I’m talking about the people Martin studied before creating the course. These results are already common. I doubt that Martin is promoting special techniques more likely to produce them than other methods.
If dissociation is the opposite of enlightenment, maybe the same mind-hacking techniques that can produce enlightenment can produce dissociation.
The usual claim about enlightenment is that it doesn’t reduce the pain, but that it makes pain less distracting. Trouble sleeping doesn’t match that. I think that people usually imply that acknowledging pain reduces stress responses. The guy didn’t just say that he was peaceful, he said he wasn’t stressed. It would be one thing if he acknowledged his tense muscles and said that his enlightenment helped him function despite them, but the implication is that he simply denied them. We don’t have a transcript of such a question, but the article talks about lots of participants having false beliefs about muscle tension and appearing serene. Richard linked to excerpts about that and other negative quotes, not all of which I see as dissociation.
Note that the people Martin studied were systematically wrong about what they looked like to the external observers. They sound disassociated from their bodies. This sound bad, and, in fact, the opposite of enlightened: suffering more, noticing it less.
Over the course of a week, his father died, followed very rapidly by his sister. He was also going through a significant issue with one of his children. Over dinner I asked him about his internal state, which he reported as deeply peaceful and positive despite everything that was happening. Having known that the participant was bringing his longtime girlfriend, I’d taken an associate researcher with me to the meeting to independently collect the observations from her. My fellow researcher isolated the participant’s girlfriend at the bar and interviewed her about any signs of stress that the participant might be exhibiting. I casually asked the same questions to the participant as we continued our dinner conversation. Their answers couldn’t have been more different. While the participant reported no stress, his partner had been observing many telltale signs: he wasn’t sleeping well, his appetite was off, his mood was noticeably different, his muscles were much tenser than normal, his sex drive was reduced, his health was suffering, and so forth.
Saying that Hoover was externally compromised would be a ridiculous response to someone saying that he was internally compromised. But I wasn’t talking about Hoover, because I bothered to read you before responding.
I don’t see how this is any way relevant to my comment. I didn’t say anything about the mafia 50 years ago. I seems to me like it exists for purely formal reasons, to produce the deceit that you have responded to my comment.
But let me word my comment differently: the FBI is never corrupted. The problem is that its purpose is to control and destroy information. It is at war with humanity, including the American public. You can see this just by looking at its behavior in this case.
The FBI may not have much of a record of outside corruption, but it has a long track record of corruption by the government, mainly coverups of anything and everything, but also corruption by the CIA.
How on earth do these cameras specifically along his cell go out at the same time as Epstein is hanging himself?
Did they go out recently? Has anyone claimed that they were working the week before? A simple hypothesis is that only half of the cameras in the building work at any given time. This hypothesis is easy to check: just go through all the cameras. Has the FBI done that? Do they want to know? Do they want us to know? It would be harder to determine if the guards never check prisoners and always falsify records, but it might be possible to check by reviewing camera footage.
Yes, the median driver is much better than the mean driver. But what matters is the mean, not the median.
If we can replace all drivers by robots, what matters is whether the robot is better than the mean human. Of course, it’s not all at once. It’s about the marginal change. What matters is the mean taxi driver, who probably isn’t drunk. Another margin is the expansion of taxis: if robotaxis are cheaper than human taxis, the expansion of taxis may well be replacing drunk or tired drivers.
On twitter, Alyssa suggests $50. Why do you put it so much higher?
Kevin Simler goes on to explain that he was talking about biological and social phenomena and he’s not sure about physical phenomena.
Why do planets exist? You might think that gravity is a positive feedback mechanism. The larger a planet gets, the more it attracts other mass. I think that this is correct for black holes, but not quite correct for gravity in the Newtonian regime: a planet attracts other matter, but this gives it the energy to fly away again. I think a more fundamental mechanism is electro-magnetism making matter “sticky.” It gives matter internal degrees of freedom, so that energy can be dissipated as heat, allowing inelastic collisions in which matter aggregates into larger bodies. Dark matter has gravitational interaction but not EM interaction, so it doesn’t form planets, but only a diffuse density field. But why is it denser around galaxies? If galaxies attract dark matter, that suggests that gravity is enough to provide positive feedback all on its own. For that matter, the existence of galaxies suggests that.
He also mentions mountains. Mountains seem to exist, or at least mountain ranges. They are caused by tectonic plates. I guess that plates exist because of positive feedback causing them to merge. But whatever reason, mountain ranges do not exist because of a positive feedback phenomenon to which they contribute; they are side effects of tectonic plates.
Do mountains exist? What does it mean to exist? I can give a precise description of “the point of highest elevation within 10 miles,” (or 10 feet!) which must exist without reason. Such indexical descriptions identify features, but do not suggest that they should have reasons for existing, or a shorter description. Most mountains look like they are differentiated from their neighbors as the result of noise and we should not expect reasons for their individual existence. Whereas mountain ranges are a more natural category and we should expect more definite explanations. That explanation is the collision of specific plates, which appear causally prior. Also, plates are much older than the mountain ranges on their borders. Plates might exist because of positive feedback causing them to grow, in which case the particular plates exist because of noise in their seeding a long time ago.
My understanding is that the meaning of 青 did not drift because of increasing western contact so much as abruptly change with a single cause:
But the real change came during the Allied occupation of Japan after World War II, when new educational material started to circulate. In 1951, teaching guidelines for first grade teachers distinguished blue from green, and the word midori was shoehorned to fit this new purpose.
The previous sentence in the source does talk about crayons in 1917, though.
Your obesity source is using BRFSS. You should go directly to BRFSS, where you can get mean BMI, rather than %obesity. By county.
But BRFSS does not really have county data. It samples 400k people per year. If spread uniformly by county, that would be pretty good coverage of the 3k counties, but it weights by population and thus only lightly samples rural counties. But people want maps, which are dominated by rural counties, so it smooths out its patchy data. This produces the maps at SMTM and SSC with their sharp lines at state borders.
Here are a couple of very simple points that I don’t think should be controversial which I think are useful to frame the discussion.
First, there is a linguistic issue: what is a bureaucracy? Is it any large organization? Is it a rigid organization? Is it a corrupt organization? People use it in all these ways.
Blame-minimization is a theory of bureaucratic decay. If all bureaucracies are bad, why do they exist? If everyone agreed that they are bad, why don’t we tear them down? They are sometimes created to provide fake jobs, but usually they are created because they are expected to work and the attention at the beginning makes them work. You can’t explain them with just a principle of decay because that inherently can’t explain the starting point, only the trajectory. Compare Samo Burja.
Where did you get this graphic?
The thing that seemed most crazy to me was DC, which I was shocked to find is correct.
But the international list is crazy. 3 in Russia? 2 in Japan? 1 in France?
Do you have any links to news coverage about the ISP-level ban? This says that Sweden has interpreted it that way, but I don’t see coverage of other countries. This claims that the order isn’t clear, but links to a secret order that specifically mentions ISPs and seems to also include blocking archive.org.
How is the ban implemented technically? DNS? IP?
The rules were very clearly stated 15 years ago that politics are 100% on topic.
I would distinguish terraforming from irrigation. It sounds like you are talking about setting up a self-contained system to irrigate the land every year, whereas I would restrict terraforming to a permanent climate change, so that it rains and desalination is no longer necessary. This is what people mean when they talk about terraforming the Sahara. The desert was green five thousand years ago when the pyramids were built, so it probably has multiple equilibrium climates and a sufficient intervention could get it to jump to the other. I don’t know how plausible this is for other deserts. The idea is to irrigate a bounded number of times to grow appropriate trees to trap water.
A permanent change could be much cheaper per acre because the solar panels and desalination plant can be reused for new parcels. The downside is that this probably has large gains from scale: air flows freely between neighboring parcels and thus humidity is an externality. Whereas the whole point of a self-contained system is that you can start small.