Malmesbury
I think this works well to describe the behavior of small, well-mixed groups, but as you look at larger societies, it gets more complicated because of the structure of social networks. You don’t get to see how many people overall are wearing face-masks in the whole country, only among the people you interact with in your life. So it’s totally possible that different equilibria will be reached in different locations/socio-economic classes/communities. That’s probably one reason why revolutions are more likely to fizzle out than it looks. Another problem arising from the structure of social networks is that the sample of people your interact with is not representative of your real surroundings: people with tons of friends are over-represented among your friends (I had a blog post about this statistical phenomenon a while ago). I’m not sure how one could expand the social behavior curve model to account for that, but it would be interesting.
The film has a very clear target audience, and 100% of this target audience will self-identify as the group of nice fashionable reasonable science-believers. The other tribes will probably never see the film, or if they do, they’ll see themselves portrayed with such disdain that they’ll just end up distrusting scientists even more. Nobody will update. I’m afraid the main effect of this kind of film is to further entrench the [belief in X] ~ [cool/uncool] correlation, which is generally a bad thing.
My impression was that the comet was a metaphor for climate change specifically, rather than x-risk in general. It turns out that I agree climate change is a serious threat, so I’ll consider it a good thing if spectators take it more seriously after seeing DLU. But there is nothing in the film-making process that automatically steers the writers towards legitimate issues. It could have been a “GMOs cause cancer” plot line instead (there are scientists who say that in real life, but nobody takes them seriously – just like in the film!).
2. The survey report you link to includes the following figures: (1) about half of all respondents in their survey who had experienced >= 4 instances of discrimination and violence in the last year attempted suicide in that year; (2) among all respondents in their survey, 7.3% attempted suicide in the last year. To me, that looks as if suicide rates among trans people are much more to do with actually being treated badly than with fearing they will be treated badly. (If so, I am cautiously optimistic that those terrible trans activists trying so hard to raise awareness of transness and reduce the extent to which trans people are regarded as strange and sinister are in fact making it less likely that any given trans person attempts suicide.)
Here is a possible counter-argument to this: if social pressure and discrimination cause suicides, we would expect the suicide rates of trans people to increase after hormonal treatment or surgery. After all, before transition, gender dysphoria is not particularly visible. From the point of view of most people who are not intimately familiar with the person, a pre-transition trans looks just like someone cis. After transition, however, they may or may not “pass”, and in many cases it is immediately obvious that they are trans (e.g. MtF still having a male voice unless they do the fancy vocal cords surgery). But we observe exactly the opposite: gender-affirming surgery greatly reduces the suicide rate of trans people.
Note that I don’t think that trans activists are causing the suicides either. My working hypothesis is that gender dysphoria (as in, not feeling at ease in your own body) is horrible by itself, and is the cause of suicides. Hormones and surgery might make the trans-ness more visible, but if it alleviates the mismatch between your body map and your actualy body, it might still be a net benefit.
For extreme anonymity, you can probably learn from Gwern, who has a post about hardcore ways to protect your identity.
Metric for success: if people accuse you of being Satoshi Nakamoto, you’ve made it.
Sure, all these stories totally sound like urban legends, but the sweeteners are out there and I don’t see how they could have been discovered otherwise (unless they were covertly screening drugs on a large number of people).
The “random sampling” that causes genetic drift is applied once every generation, asexual or not, so the optimal number of types depends on the ratio of generations that are asexual vs sexual. The Constable & Kokko paper has a mathematical model to quantify how many asexual generations you need for 2 being the optimum, and it turns out that most isogamous species are well into that regime.
That being said, you’re entirely right when you ask “why is the equilibrium 2 instead of 3 or 5 or different for different species?” – Constable’s model and empirical data is only for isogamous species like baker’s yeast. It seems plausible that our isogamous ancestors were in the same regime, and then anisogamy evolved and kind of locked us into a 2-types configuration. But that’s mostly speculation, I don’t think we have any clear empirical data that confirms this hypothesis. That’s still open to investigation.
Another thing I didn’t mention is that the organelle-competition hypothesis naturally leads to 2 types, so it could simply be that.
Standford’s collection of ancient data visualizations
https://exhibits.stanford.edu/dataviz
Complexity Explorables: interactive toys to learn about complex dynamical systems.
http://complexity-explorables.org/
The current state of AIDS in the European Union
https://www.politico.eu/article/aids-european-state-of-play/
Evolution of word usage in Scientific American over the last 150 years
Which and how body parts are described in literature, according to gender
https://pudding.cool/2020/07/gendered-descriptions/
Heatmap of mortality rates over the last centuries, by age, country and gender
https://jschoeley.shinyapps.io/hmdexp/Historic usage of the word “ass”
https://pudding.cool/2019/10/slang/ (and anything by The Pudding really)
Simulated dendrochronology of USA immigration
https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/
According to this paper, the “root” factor is how much effort each parent invests in caring about offsprings, as in some species the male is the primary caregiver. But that’s really hard to measure and check empirically, so they instead measure “the maximum number of independent offspring that parents can produce per unit of time”, and they find very good agreement with which sex faces the most intense competition.
On notable exception is the hippocampus, where the males both face intense competition and invest more resources in the offspring. Because of course it had to be hippocampi.
As far as I understand, the tails coming apart and the moment attribution are two different, superimposed problems. The tails coming apart is “Nigeria has the best Scrabble players in the world, but the persons with the richest English vocabulary in the world are probably not Nigerian”. The moment attribution is “the best Scrabble players in the world are Nigerian, but Nigerians are probably not the best Scrabble players in the world”. In the first case, we are talking about the distribution of country scores for two correlated variables, in the second we are talking about the distribution of individuals within a country for a single variable.
Also, thank you for bringing up Nigerian Scrabble, that would have made a somehow funnier example than NK’s math olympiads.
it’s no biology lab
I’m afraid you’re overestimating how well biologists follow the safety procedures. I wouldn’t be surprised if we all had fluorescent bacteria in our guts.
The n°1 reason why I said not mention fungi is that I’m absolutely not a mycologist and I wouldn’t be able to talk about them. So I greatly appreciate that you do it! Typically, I had never heard of glomeromycota, despite them apparently being involved in symbiosis with 80% of plants. I like to think that I have a decent understanding of the living world, and then I’m constantly reminded that I don’t, and probably nobody does...
That single broader idea belongs in a single paragraph. Do not split ideas unnecessarily; and certainly do not combine them.
That’s interesting, I usually don’t think about this when writing. I will in the future.
On using words precisely: I find it more useful to think about how the reader will use the text to make an inference about what’s going on in my head. Of course words have official labels that say what they are supposed to mean, but in pratice what matters is how you think I think, and how I think you think I think (you’ll recognize a Schelling point). This may be correlated with the dictionary definitions, but it doesn’t have to. For example, the word pratice doesn’t exist, yet you can understand the meaning of this paragraph just as precisely as if I had written practice. Maybe it’s just my experience, but thinking in this way makes writing feel less constrained.
Yes, I’m pretty sure there is some diminishing return after some decades (though, apparently, they hit pretty late for bamboos). Now if we stick to the absurd model with no diminishing returns, we can imagine a mutant that almost never reproduces, but when it does, it suddenly covers the entire planet, erasing all the other strains that have been growing exponentially in the meantime. The limit where it doesn’t reproduce at all is when a bamboo in a forest appears dead, but will eventually turn the entire universe into copies of itself when comes the Armageddon.
In the riddle’s world, there are indeed competitive labor markets. The firm would hire the woman if they could. It turns out they can’t, because of the mystery phenomenon.
I know little about machine learning, so that may be a dumb question: in linguistic there is an argument called the poverty of stimulus. The claim is that children must figure out the rules of language using only a limited number of unlabeled examples. This is taken as evidence that the brain has some kind of hard-wired grammar framework, that serves as a canvas for further learning while growing up.
Is it possible that tools like EfficientZero help find the fundamental limits for how much training data you need to figure out a set of rules? If an artificial neural network ever manages to reconstruct the rules of English by using only the stimulus that the average children is exposed too, that would be a strong counter-argument against poverty of stimulus.
It’s hard to believe that scientists would deliberately manipulate their findings. The risk of getting caught and discredited is just too high – oh wait.
Oh, that’s a really good point. Actually, it might be common for chemists to work with panels of related molecules, while in clinical trials they only work with one purified drug candidate. This makes it less likely for them to discover things by accident. Surely a piece of the puzzle!
(Sorry I missed your comment)
Here by “reproduce” I just meant “make more copies of itself” in an immediate sense (so reproductive fitness is just “how fast it replicates right now”). For example, in Lenski’s long-term evolution experiment, some variants were selected not because they increased the bacteria’s daily growth rate, but because they made it easier to acquire further variants that themselves increased the daily growth rate. These “potentiating” variants were initially detrimental (the copy number of these variants decreased in the population), and only after a long long time they took over the population. So, according the definition of reproductive fitness I used, they lead to a lower reproductive fitness – the reason they were eventually selected for is not that they’re good for reproduction, but that they’re good for evolvability. Of course, you can say that eventually they increased in copy number, but that would be defining “reproduction” in a different way, that I find less intuitive.
Now, is that other definition (how gene copy number increases over the long term) what evolution ultimately selects for? I’m not sure. To quote Kokko’s review on the stagnation paradox:
“Trees compete for sunlight and attempt to outshade each other, but when each tree consequently invests in woody growth, the entire forest must spend energy in stem forming and—assuming time or energy trade-offs—will be slower at converting sunlight into seeds than a low mat of vegetation would have been able to. Every individual has to invest in outcompeting others, but the population as a whole is negligibly closer to the light source (the number of photons arriving in the area is still the same). This is why in agriculture, externally imposed group selection to create shorter crops has improved yields.”
She gives other examples. In these cases, the number of individuals tend to decrease over time, even in the long run.
What do you mean by curating? So far I’ve tried to answer the questions and objections when I saw them, are there some I’ve missed? (Obviously I don’t pretend to be able to answer everything). Also, do you think there are some clarifications that I should add to the main text?
Next year, we should give the Sneerclub reddit a big red button to destroy LW, and have a big red button here to destroy Sneerclub. Nuclear war is more fun when it’s not all like-minded people.