I work at the Centre for Effective Altruism as a contact person for the EA community. I read a lot of LessWrong around 2011 but am not up to date on whatever is happening now.
juliawise
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juliawise’s Shortform
Should people who care about AI safety go harder for broad-based movements (in the US)?
Humans in Control is one such attempt. Irreplaceable is another that just launched. I’m surprised that I barely hear about these in EA and rationalist spaces. They’re focused on a range of things the public dislikes about AI, and maybe x-risk will get lost in that broad range. But they seem to me like they might have a better chance of landing with typical members of government than purely x-risk focused movements. Or are at least worth supporting in parallel.
Should all of us be doing more of stuff like contacting our elected officials?
why do you believe that your background check will be able to distinguish those workers who might produce safety problems from those that don’t?
+1, this does not feel actually protective. Of the many problems my house has been through (mercury under the floorboards, department of public health told us the mercury was gone but it was definitely not, roof installed improperly so it rained inside, contractor turned out to be a fraudster, electrician claiming he had no idea if there was lead in the walls of our 1920s house so he was not going to clean up dust, landlord thought we were witches) a lack of background checking is not something that stands out to me. Even the fraudster had good reviews, which it turned out he had written himself. I think they just have plenty of work, it’s not their house, and they don’t especially care about doing a good job.
Installing an under-counter jar opener was a win for our household.
It’s so grippy that it gouges the lid sometimes, so I use it for disposable lids like tomato sauce but less for things like “a mason jar I intend to use again, which my husband has screwed on way tighter than I can unscrew.”
The genealogy site Jeff linked to (Family Search) was helpful for both of us in finding documentation. https://www.reddit.com/r/Canadiancitizenship/ also helpful for practical info about the process.
Hat tip @alyssavance for writing about this!
Additional thing I learned after getting a private teacher, telling her “teach water safety”, and seeing what she teaches my preschooler: Have the child learn to jump in, turn around, grab the edge, and climb out. Default when they fall in is to continue facing the same direction (toward the expanse of the water, rather than turning back to the edge of the pool.)
>acne/eczema/dry skin on people’s faces after being exposed to this
UVA and UVB are used to treat eczema, not sure if UVC has any effect.
I’m an EA who benefitted from rationality
This is great, Jeff and I have been trying to figure this out.
A lot of lessons include learning to float on your back. This makes sense for babies, who are more chub and less bone. It seems like ability to do this for kids and adults depends a lot on how buoyant you are, and my kids are not built for it. One of mine managed to backfloat once under perfect conditions, but I’m assuming any amount of panic / waves / etc would sink her. So I’ve stopped trying to use “learn to swim” time for this, and they can practice it “water play” time if they want.
Another question is whether to learn a standard method for treading water vs develop your own style. Both Jeff and one of my kids have developed something non-standard that works for them, and with the other kids I’m unsure how much to teach them the more standard method vs “you do you.” Some of both, I guess.
I wonder how much early swim lessons are a proxy for parental conscientiousness, awareness of drowning as a risk, and income. The study considered controlling for income and then decided to instead control for “less than high school education vs more than high school education” on the part of the relative answering the questions. :(
There’s a difference between who plans to leave their career and who ends up leaving.
Some paths:
- childcare is more expensive than one partner earns after taxes, and it’s cheaper for one parent to stay home.
- managing work / commute / child appointments (especially if they have special needs) / child sickness / childcare is so overwhelming that a parent quits their job to have fewer things to manage. Or they feel they’re failing at the combination of work and parenting and must pick one.
- the family is financially secure enough they feel they can do ok on one income, even though they’re not at their wits’ end.
Once you start looking at content in this direction, the algorithms will feed you pro-full-time-mom content. Start searching for things like “homeschool preschooler” and I bet you’ll get plenty of videos extolling full-time motherhood made by people hoping to become Ballerina Farm.
Why we’re still doing normal school
If you like this post, you might like the game https://flora.metazooa.com/ where you guess a plant by narrowing down its taxonomy.
Jeff did it by burning a set number of matches to ash in the room, and testing the particulates with an air quality monitor. https://www.jefftk.com/p/testing-air-purifiers
And “goal factoring” is a technique for figuring out what you actually want and different ways to get there.
>As a community we produce more way more breastmilk than we can use!
This doesn’t really seem right to me; or at least it relies on mothers’ volunteer work to pump, sterilize, and store their milk. If you actually need to get rid of extra milk, pumping and dumping is way easier than keeping the milk clean and cold. And if you have an oversupply, pumping a lot is how to continue having an oversupply.
This is sort of like claims that we could produce lots of vegetables if everyone turned their front yard into a miniature farm and spent their spare time doing subsistence agriculture; technically true but not how most people want to spend their time.
Other health claims: breastfeeding slightly reduces risk of breast cancer in the mother and increases chance of colorectal cancer and breast cancer in the child.
Crosspost: Developing the middle ground on polarized topics
We’ve done the local public school, yes. More thoughts here: https://juliawise.net/school-your-mileage-may-vary/
Someone I know was asked by his coworkers to use the word “lightcone” in a sentence. “I’m worried the lightcone will be filled with computronium.”
“Ok, I’ve learned that ‘lightcone’ is a noun.”