(expected low-quality) pro-vegan content
You think that Elizabeth should have expected that taking an EA forum post with current score 87, written by “a vegan author and data scientist at a plant-based meat company”, and taking “what looked like his strongest source”, would yield a low-quality pro-vegan article? I mean, maybe that’s true, but if so, that seems like a harsher condemnation of vegan advocacy than anything Elizabeth has written.
Offtopic: I find it hilarious that professor Moriarty is telling us about the technology for world domination.
The first paragraph doesn’t include jacquesthibs’s original state before becoming vegetarian, leaving some ambiguity. I think you’re parsing it as “I went from vegan to vegetarian because I stopped trusting vegans”. The other parsing is “I went from omnivore to vegetarian, despite not trusting vegans, because I did my own research.” The rest of the comment makes me fairly confident that the second parsing is correct; but certainly it would be easier to follow if it were stated upfront.
AIs have a symbiotic relationship with humans. If AIs were to exterminate all humans they would also simultaneously be committing mass suicide.
Today that’s probably true, but if the capabilities of AI-controllable systems keep increasing, eventually they’ll reach a point where they could maintain and extend themselves and the mining, manufacturing, and electrical infrastructures supporting them. At that point, it would not be mass suicide, and might be (probably will eventually be) an efficiency improvement.
Humans are in symbiotic relationships with plants and animals. You can imagine what would happen if a group of humans decided it would be really interesting to get rid of all vegetation and animals—that story wouldn’t end well for those thrill seekers. Instead, we grow plants and animals and make sure they are in abundance.
People are working on lab-grown meat and other ways to substitute for the meat one currently gets from farming livestock. If they succeed in making something that’s greater than or equal to meat on all dimensions and also cheaper, then it seems likely that nearly all people will switch to the new alternative, and get rid of nearly all of that livestock. If one likewise develops superior replacements for milk and everything else we get from animals… Then, if someone permanently wiped out all remaining animals, some people would be unhappy for sentimental reasons, and there’s maybe some research we’d miss out on, but by no means would it be catastrophic.
Some portion of the above has already happened with horses. When cars became the superior option in terms of performance and economics, the horse population declined massively.
Plants seem to have less inefficiency than animals, but it still seems plausible that we’ll replace them with something superior in the future. Already, solar panels are better than photosynthesis at taking energy from the sun—to the point where it’s more efficient (not counting raw material cost) to have solar panels absorb sunlight which powers lamps that shine certain frequencies of light on plants, than to let that sunlight shine on plants directly. And we’re changing the plants themselves via selective breeding and, these days, genetic engineering. I suspect that, at some point, we’ll replace, say, corn with something that no longer resembles corn—possibly by extensive editing of corn itself, possibly with a completely new designer fungus or something.
The first explanation that comes to mind is that people usually go through school, wherein they spend all day with people the same age as them (plus adults, who generally don’t socialize with the kids), and this continues through any education they do. Then, at the very least, this means their starting social group is heavily seeded with people their age, and e.g. if friend A introduces friend B to friend C, the skew will propagate even to those one didn’t meet directly from school.
Post-school, you tend to encounter more of a mix of ages, in workplaces, activity groups, meetups, etc. Then your social group might de-skew over time. But it would probably take a long time to completely de-skew, and age 30 is not especially long after school, especially for those who went to grad school.
There might also be effects where people your age are more likely to be similar in terms of inclination and capability to engage in various activities. Physical condition, monetary resources, having a committed full-time job, whether one has a spouse and children—all can make it easier or harder to do things like world-traveling and sports.
I don’t know that that statement is false. I just have no knowledge at all about the state of the bar tonight
The technical name, for a statement made with no concern for its truth or falsehood, is bullshit.
I’m counting the time it takes to (a) develop the 250 IQ humans [15-50 years], (b) have them grow to adulthood and become world-class experts in their fields [25-40 years], (c) do their investigation and design in mice [10-25 years], and (d) figure out how to incorporate it into humans nonfatally [5-15 years].
Then you’d either grow new humans with the super-neurons, or figure out how to change the neurons of existing adults; the former is usually easier with genetics, but I don’t think you could dial the power up to maximum in one generation without drastically changing how mental development goes in childhood, with a high chance of causing most children to develop severe psychological problems; the 250 IQ researchers would be good at addressing this, of course, perhaps even at evaluating the early signs of those problems early (to allow faster iteration); but I think they’d still have to spend 10-50 years on iterating with human children before fixing the crippling bugs.
So I think it might be faster to solve the harder problem of replacing an adult’s neurons with backwards-compatible, adjustable super-neurons—that can interface with the old ones but also use the new method to connect to each other, which initially works at the same speed but then you can dial it up progressively and learn to fix the problems as they come up. Harder to set it up—maybe 5-10 extra years—but once you have it, I’d say 5-15 years before you’ve successfully dialed people up to “maximum”.
So I think in the long run, the only way biological brains win is if we simply do not build AGI.
Depends on how long you’re talking about. It seems plausible to me that, if we got a bunch of 250 IQ humans, then they could in fact do a major redesign of neurons. However, I would expect all this to take at least 100 years (if not aided by superintelligent AI), which is longer than most AI timelines I’ve seen (unless we bring AI development to a snail’s pace or a complete stop).
There is also some evidence of general-purpose cognitive benefits to walking. Reposting a comment below:
There have been studies on the subject, having people walk or not (and walk in varying conditions) and measuring their performance on some intellectual or creative task, and concluding that (a) walking does help and (b) the type of walk probably matters. First citation I found: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xlm-a0036577.pdf
Four experiments demonstrate that walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after. In Experiment 1, while seated and then when walking on a treadmill, adults completed Guilford’s alternate uses (GAU) test of creative divergent thinking and the compound remote associates (CRA) test of convergent thinking. Walking increased 81% of participants’ creativity on the GAU, but only increased 23% of participants’ scores for the CRA. In Experiment 2, participants completed the GAU when seated and then walking, when walking and then seated, or when seated twice. Again, walking led to higher GAU scores. Moreover, when seated after walking, participants exhibited a residual creative boost. Experiment 3 generalized the prior effects to outdoor walking. Experiment 4 tested the effect of walking on creative analogy generation. Participants sat inside, walked on a treadmill inside, walked outside, or were rolled outside in a wheelchair. Walking outside produced the most novel and highest quality analogies. The effects of outdoor stimulation and walking were separable. Walking opens up the free flow of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity.
Somewhat related scenario: There were concerns about the Large Hadron Collider before it was turned on. (And, I vaguely remember reading, to a lesser extent about a prior supercollider.) Things like “Is this going to create a mini black hole, a strangelet, or some other thing that might swallow the earth?”. The strongest counterargument is generally “Cosmic rays with higher energies than this have been hitting the earth for billions of years, so if that was a thing that could happen, it would have already happened.”
One potential counter-counterargument, for some experiments, might have been “But cosmic rays arrive at high speed, so their products would leave Earth at high speed and dissipate in space, whereas the result of colliding particles with equal and opposite momenta would be stationary relative to the earth and would stick around.” I can imagine a few ways that might be wrong; don’t know enough to say which are relevant.
LHC has a webpage on it: https://home.cern/science/accelerators/large-hadron-collider/safety-lhc
Oh man. My brain generates “Was this fixed with a literal s/Holtz/Hotz/ sed command, as opposed to s/Holtz/Hotz/g ?” Because it seems that, on lines where the name occurs twice or more, the first instance is correctly spelled and the later instances are (edit: sometimes) not.
Consistent typo: Holtz should be Hotz.
The reason I prefer a white car is that it absorbs less heat via sunlight. A source says “Studies have shown the difference in temperature between a white car and a black car left in the sun can be as much as 5-6 degrees after just one hour.”
For those wondering about the safety of introducing new bacteria that “outcompete” existing bacteria, Aaron Silverbook’s proposal has a safety review FAQ that, indeed, answered a bunch of my questions, starting with an anonymous question in the comments sidebar:
Q: Why is the GMO bacteria guaranteed to outcompete the native bacteria? Does it reproduce more quickly or something?
A: JH1140 secretes Mutacin 1140, a natural bacteriocin which kills native S mutans
Which is a pretty reassuring answer compared to the other alternatives one might imagine, and lends itself to generalization.
I asked ChatGPT:
Someone wrote the following message:
[...]
What did the author likely do, which “drove someone to shout …”?
Response:
Based on the context provided in the message, it seems that the author likely engaged in persistent efforts to fix a coordination or maintenance problem related to reading and writing. They might have been advocating for or trying to implement a system or activity (e.g., a reading or writing initiative) that they believed most people would prefer (X) over the current situation (Y).
However, despite some people endorsing the idea of reading and writing (X), they didn’t have enough genuine interest or willingness to invest in the transition costs or maintenance efforts required for the change. This lack of true commitment led to the frustration of the person shouting at the author, expressing that nobody else liked reading or writing as much as the author did. Essentially, the author was trying to solve a coordination problem (or maintenance problem) that didn’t have enough genuine support from others, and this led to tension and frustration.
Which is essentially what seems reasonable to guess, though it’s not very specific. My first guess as to specifics is “Elizabeth tried to organize a weekly gathering where people would pick a paper, read it, write up their thoughts, and discuss it at the meeting, and couldn’t get people to commit the time necessary, and ended up questioning someone along the lines of ‘Well, several people said it was good to practice these skills, and that the summaries are valuable public services, so why aren’t they …?’, leading to the incident at the end.” Other variations that came to mind included hiring a writing teacher for a group, or some kind of large-scale book buying, though neither of those involves both reading and writing.
n=1: “because I highly value my brain as it is, and alcohol (and other drugs) seem to mess with the brain in ways that are presumably bad” (this opinion came from middle school), and, later, “because I have two uncles who’ve struggled with alcoholism”. Also, some people have assumed I’m a Mormon (I’m an atheist).
Corollary: If you see death coming, or e.g. you have a near miss and know it was only by chance that you survived, then now’s a good time to change your beliefs. Which, actually, seems to be a thing people do. (Though there are other reasons for that.)
You quote 3-8 billion per day, then the other numbers you mention are annual numbers. 3-8 billion per day would be ~1-3 trillion per year. Seems your first reaction may have been more accurate.
Given that someone is being a clever arguer, the evidence of their argument may be taken to be evidence about the conclusion relative to what you might have expected they could come up with.
If a “clever arguer” says “Ten witnesses, named [...], all report seeing Bob murder Joe, and there are also multiple security cameras that caught it”, then that’s pretty damn strong evidence (assuming one follows up with the witnesses and gets the footage).
If a “clever arguer” says “Bob once got into a fight in middle school, so we see he has violent tendencies”, and that’s the best he managed to come up with, then it probably makes sense to update away from the conclusion that Bob murdered Joe.
Zvi has written about things of this ilk, vaguely connected to “bounded distrust”. I’ll see if I can find a link… Ok, this is a decent example of the general principle, although the counterparty isn’t a “clever arguer”:
Then we need to consider what we saw relative to what we expected to see. In general, no news is good news. If ‘nothing happens’ regarding Omicron, that continuously makes us less worried, whereas most news will make us more worried. Getting a constant string of bad news is expected, but how much of it did we get, how fast and how bad?
[...]
The person linking to this [“Gauteng hospitalizations” going up rapidly] thought it was bad news, but given the rate at which cases are increasing, it looks to me like good news. Not easy to interpret, but the hospitalization rate per infection is what matters here. Note also that positive test rate is now >20%, which means a higher percentage of cases are being missed than before.
Indeed, I’ve seen several cases recently in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aW288uWABwTruBmgF/ where people have used the “Empathy” react in a way that makes much more sense if I interpret it as “heart symbol” than as “empathy”.