hg00

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hg00 Sep 28, 2021, 9:49 PM
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in reply to: FlippingRed’s comment on: Review: The End Is Always Near
https://xkcd.com/808/

If it worked, militaries would be using it to… Ditch boot camp and instead harden soldiers for battle by having them participate in group therapy

I think you’re both too credulous of the research you linked, and extrapolating from it too confidently.

hg00 Jul 23, 2021, 2:31 AM
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in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Jimrandomh’s Shortform Posts
The advice I’ve heard is to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables of different colors to get a variety of antioxidants in your diet.

Until recently, the thinking had been that the more antioxidants, the less oxidative stress, because all of those lonely electrons would quickly get paired up before they had the chance to start mucking things up in our cells. But that thinking has changed.

Drs. Cleva Villanueva and Robert Kross published a 2012 review titled “Antioxidant-Induced Stress” in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences. We spoke via Skype about the shifting understanding of antioxidants.

“Free radicals are not really the bad ones or antioxidants the good ones.” Villanueva told me. Their paper explains the process by which antioxidants themselves become reactive, after donating an electron to a free radical. But, in cases when a variety of antioxidants are present, like the way they come naturally in our food, they can act as a cascading buffer for each other as they in turn give up electrons to newly reactive molecules.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/food-matters/antioxidant-supplements-too-much-of-a-kinda-good-thing/

On a meta level, I don’t think we understand nutrition well enough to reason about it from first principles, so if the lore among dietitians is that people who eat a variety of foods are healthier, I think we should put stock in that.

Similarly: “Institutional sources consistently overstate the importance of a varied diet, because this prevents failures of dietary advice from being too legible; if you tell someone to eat a varied diet, they can’t blame you if they’re diagnosed with a deficiency.” But there’s a real point here, e.g. suppose that you have just a few standard meals, but all of the high-magnesium food items are being paired with phytates, and you end up magnesium deficient.

hg00 Jul 14, 2021, 6:40 AM
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in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: [Link] Musk’s non-missing mood
An interesting missing mood I’ve observed in discussions of AI safety: When a new idea for achieving safe AI is proposed, you might expect that people concerned with AI risk would show a glimmer of eager curiosity. Perhaps the AI safety problem is actually solvable!

But I’ve pretty much never observed this. A more common reaction seems to be a sort of an uneasy defensiveness, sometimes in combination with changing the subject.

Another response I occasionally see is someone mentioning a potential problem in a manner that practically sounds like they are rebuking the person who shared the new idea.

I eventually came to the conclusion that there is some level on which many people in the AI safety community actually don’t want to see the problem of AI safety solved, because too much of their self-concept is wrapped up in AI safety being a super difficult problem. I highly doubt this occurs on a conscious level, it’s probably due to the same sort of subconscious psychological defenses you describe, e.g. embarrassment at not having seen the solution oneself.
What links here?
- hg00's comment on My experience at and around MIRI and CFAR (inspired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of experiences at Leverage) by jessicata (Oct 21, 2021, 12:55 AM; 0 points)

hg00 May 28, 2021, 4:40 AM
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on: [Prediction] What war between the USA and China would look like in 2050

Hiding an aircraft carrier battle group on the open sea isn’t possible.

This think tank disagrees.

hg00 Oct 28, 2020, 6:03 AM
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on: Does playing hard to get work? AB testing for romance
Looking forward to the results.

hg00 Oct 7, 2020, 6:59 AM
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on: Can we hold intellectuals to similar public standards as athletes?
Somewhere I read that a big reason IQ tests aren’t all that popular is because when they were first introduced, lots of intellectuals took them and didn’t score all that high. I’m hoping prediction markets don’t meet a similar fate.

hg00 Oct 6, 2020, 1:01 PM
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in reply to: crockodile’s comment on: Universal Eudaimonia
It’s fiction ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I guess I’ll say a few words in defense of doing something like this… Supposing we’re taking an ethically consequentialist stance. In that case, the only purpose of punishment, basically, is to serve as a deterrent. But in our glorious posthuman future, nanobots will step in before anyone is allowed to get hurt, and crimes will be impossible to commit. So deterrence is no longer necessary and the only reason to punish people is due to spite. But if people are feeling spiteful towards one another on Eudaimonia that would kill the vibe. Being able to forgive one person you disagree with seems like a pretty low bar where being non-spiteful is concerned. (Other moral views might consider punishment to be a moral imperative even if it isn’t achieving anything from a consequentialist point of view. But consequentialism is easily the most popular moral view on LW according to this survey.)
A more realistic scheme might involve multiple continents for people with value systems that are strongly incompatible, perhaps allowing people to engage in duels on a voluntary basis if they’re really sure that is what they want to do.
In any case, the name of the site is “Less Wrong” not “Always Right”, so I feel pretty comfortable posting something which I suspect may be flawed and letting commenters find flaws (and in fact that was part of why I made this post, to see what complaints people would have, beyond the utility of sharing a fun whimsical story. But overall the post was more optimized for whimsy.)

hg00 Oct 6, 2020, 4:01 AM
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in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Rationality and Climate Change
For some thoughts on how climate change stacks up against other world-scale issues, see this.

hg00 Oct 6, 2020, 3:45 AM
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in reply to: Isnasene’s comment on: Universal Eudaimonia
Yep. Good thing a real AI would come up with a much better idea! :)

Universal Eudaimonia

hg00Oct 5, 2020, 1:45 PM

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6 comments2 min readLW link

hg00 Sep 30, 2020, 10:33 AM
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in reply to: Diffractor’s comment on: Needed: AI infohazard policy
It seems to me that under ideal circumstances, once we think we’ve invented FAI, before we turn it on, we share the design with a lot of trustworthy people we think might be able to identify problems. I think it’s good to have the design be as secret as possible at that point, because that allows the trustworthy people to scrutinize it at their leisure. I do think the people involved in the design are liable to attract attention—keeping this “FAI review project” secret will be harder than keeping the design itself secret. (It’s easier to keep the design for the bomb secret than hide the fact that top physicists keep mysteriously disappearing.) And any purported FAI will likely come after a series of lesser systems with lucrative commercial applications used to fund the project, and those lucrative commercial applications are also liable to attract attention. So I think it’s strategically valuable to have the distance between published material and a possible FAI design be as large as possible. To me, the story of nuclear weapons is a story of how this is actually pretty hard even when well-resourced state actors try to do it.
Of course, that has to be weighed against the benefit of openness. How is openness helpful? Openness lets other researchers tell you if they think you’re pursuing a dangerous research direction, or if there are serious issues with the direction you’re pursuing which you are neglecting. Openness helps attract collaborators. Openness helps gain prestige. (I would argue that prestige is actually harmful because it’s better to keep a low profile, but I guess prestige is useful for obtaining required funding.) How else is openness helpful?
My suspicion is that those papers on Arxiv with 5 citations are mostly getting cited by people who already know the author, and the Arxiv publication isn’t actually doing much to attract collaboration. It feels to me like if our goal is to help researchers get feedback on their research direction or find collaborators, there are better ways to do this than encouraging them to publish their work. So if we could put mechanisms in place to achieve those goals, that could remove much of the motivation for openness, which would be a good thing in my view.

hg00 Sep 21, 2020, 6:57 AM
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on: EA Relationship Status
Dating is a project that can easily suck up a lot of time and attention, and the benefits seem really dubious (I know someone who had their life ruined by a bad divorce).
I would be interested in the opposite question: Why *would* an EA try and find someone to marry? I’m not trying to be snarky, I genuinely want to hear why in case I should change my strategy. The only reason I can think of is if you’re a patient longtermist and you think your kids are more likely to be EAs.

hg00 Aug 8, 2020, 2:26 PM
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in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—June 2020
I spent some time reading about the situation in Venezuela, and from what I remember, a big reason people are stuck there is simply that the bureaucracy for processing passports is extremely slow/dysfunctional (and lack of a passport presents a barrier for achieving a legal immigration status in any other country). So it might be worthwhile to renew your passport more regularly than is strictly necessary, so you always have at least a 5 year buffer on it say, in case we see the same kind of institutional dysfunction. (Much less effort than acquiring a second passport.)
Side note: I once talked to someone who became stuck in a country that he was not a citizen of because he allowed his passport to expire and couldn’t travel back home to get it renewed. (He was from a small country. My guess is that the US offers passport services without needing to travel back home. But I could be wrong.)

hg00 Aug 8, 2020, 6:46 AM
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—July 2020
Worth noting that we have at least one high-karma user who is liable to troll us with any privileges granted to high-karma users.

hg00 Jun 24, 2020, 5:44 AM
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on: Do Women Like Assholes?
I was always nice and considerate, and it didn’t work until I figured out how to filter for women who are themselves lovely and kind.
Does anyone have practical tips on finding lonely single women who are lovely and kind? I’ve always assumed that these were universally attractive attributes, and thus there would be much more competition for such women.

hg00 Jun 6, 2020, 10:01 PM
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on: Most reliable news sources?
The Financial Times, maybe FiveThirtyEight
hedonometer.org is a quick way to check if something big has happened

hg00 Jun 6, 2020, 8:41 AM
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in reply to: CarlShulman’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—June 2020
Permanent residency (as opposed to citizenship) is a budget option. For example, for Panama, I believe if you’re a citizen of one of 50 nations on their “Friendly Nations” list, you can obtain permanent residency by depositing $10K in a Panamanian bank account. If I recall correctly, Paraguay’s permanent residency has similar prerequisites ($5K deposit required) and is the easiest to maintain—you just need to be visiting the country every 3 years.

hg00 Apr 26, 2020, 8:41 AM
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on: The Chilling Effect of Confiscation
I think this is the best argument I’ve seen in favor of mask seizure / media misrepresentation on this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/g5yh64/us_federal_government_seizing_ppe_to_what_end/fo6pyel/

hg00 Nov 6, 2019, 10:02 PM
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on: Judgment, Punishment, and the Information-Suppression Field
Downvoted because I don’t want LW to be the kind of place where people casually make inflammatory political claims, in a way that seems to assume this is something we all know and agree with, without any supporting evidence.

hg00 Oct 14, 2019, 4:31 AM
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in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: Open & Welcome Thread—October 2019
The mental models in this post seem really generally useful: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs

hg00

Univer­sal Eudaimonia

Universal Eudaimonia