mikbp
Karma: 127
[Question] Why is the war in Ukraine particularly dangerous for the world?
2. The disadvantage for a virus in causing humans to have symptomatic illnesses in is in tension with the fact that to succeed, viruses need to make human cells stop doing what they’re supposed to do, and start reproducing the virus, which is by definition going to mean our bodies working less well.
I’m ignorant on the topic, but I don’t fully understand this point. I mean, it makes total sense but isn’t covid infectious several days before symptoms appear? This seems to contradict the point. So, is it impossible / or very hard for a virus to reproduce a lot without causing symptoms to its host? Or what is impossible / very hard is “only” to keep the host symptom-free for a prolonged period of time?
And one more, probably stupid, question: could the main symptom of an infection be a general (false) feeling of well-being? For example, by making the hosts segregate specific hormones. That would hide from the hosts the fact that their bodies have troubles, no?
[Question] About probabilities
Why is driving slow less predictable than stopping?
A zebra crossing is similar to a Yield sign, just giving way to pedestrians instead of other cars.
I love to listen to stuff. Books, articles, podcasts, music, radio… But I must warn the audience that modern life leaves us very few opportunities for mind-wander, and that listening to articles/books while doing chores, commuting, exercising, etc. diminishes these even further. So be mindful of this and try freeing some time for you to wander / not concentrate in anything.
Thanks, I’ll take a look.
I just want to emphasize that “Making your own path can be exhausting and stressful”. And I’d add overwhelming. I have the strong tendency to make my own path rather than following the default one —for me this does not have to do with having agency but lacking it; I’m actually learning to use my agency to not deviate too much— and I am the opposite of effective. I learned a lot and I’m able to do and understand mostly anything by myself, without any help, but this came at the cost of wasting lots of time, and spending long periods confused about my next (career) steps and struggling to show the relevant actors that I’m perfectly able to take them —if you don’t take the usual path, make sure you are good at selling yourself!—. My point is that you should be very aware of this and account for your capabilities so you do not over-deviate too fast. Go one step at a time :-)
[Question] Review & rebuttal of “Why machines will never rule the world: artificial intelligence without fear”
To read a website in your computer (blog post, news article, etc):
If you use Firefox, the built-in tool “Reader view” (you can access it pressing F9 or clicking a small Written-paper-icon at the right-most side of the url bar, left of the Bookmarking star) has an option to listen to the text. You can control the speed (up to a point, it does not allow to speed it up enough, in my view) and the voice. It is not awesome, but for the standards of the (free) text-to-speech options, I find it good and used it very often. A very useful plus of the Reader view is that it indicates the approximate time one would need to read the text.
If you use Chrome, you can download an extension called Reader View. It basically does the same than the Firefox Reader View (and it looks very similar as well, I actually believe that it is deliberate). There are other extensions offering more or less the same. I settled for this one because it also indicates the approximate time one needs to read the text.
Reading PDFs with headers/footers:
Every app I tried suck at reading PDFs with headers/footers! I have not found a way to make the reader ignore them. However, there is an hilarious workaround: open the pdf file with MS Word and use the in-built tool to read the text. It takes a while for word to open long pdfs, but Words “understands” the pdf’s headers and footers (it formats them as headers/footers in word), and the reading tool do not read them.
All these are not perfect but alright in my opinion. However, listening to (or reading+listening to) a text with too many citations is very tedious. (Free) readers do not handle them well. They read them with a very weird and slow pace.
I know there are posts in LW that mention a behaviour and/or productivity tip of the form “if/when X happens, do Y”. I don’t know how this is called so I am not able to find any. Could anybody point me to the right direction, please?
I haven’t gone through the literature you mention, so I may be off, but I am puzzled by your comment. It seems obvious to me that the effect of parents on very important factors is clear.
Just, for example, in what kind of job or studies the children choose. On average, children are much more likely to have jobs similar to those of the people they know well, just because they have much more inside knowledge. Children of parents with PhD are much more likely to get a PhD, etc. If parents influence this, why would they not have influence in other factors?
Maybe the studies only account for cognitive factors such as IQ and not in shaping the children decisions?
Still, it seems also clear that parents can actively worsen those (induce anxiety, fear, traumatise...), which would already be a strong incentive to learn and try to educate children as well as possible. Are such effects not long-term? Anecdotal evidence suggests me the contrary: one has to actively work to heal from it, meaning that the effect is long-lasting. And if having a bad influence on one’s children is possible, why should it not be possible to have a good one? Again, anecdotal evidence seems to show that some families are actually better than others helping their children develop (of course, this could be entirely a genetic thing).
Other ideas that come to mind are income and orphanages. Income seems to have a large influence in IQ, why should then parenting not have it? And people who used to live in orphanages are said to often have cognitive problems (I have no idea, just repeating “commou knowledge” for this one).
Am I writing about effects not accounted for in those studies?
Time-logging programs and/or spreadsheets (2022)
if they decide to break the rules, that’s their choice
The point is that your proposal incentivises people to break the rules and cross unsafely; which is the opposite of what the proposal intends.
On the other hand, having zebra crossing more often incentivises people to use them.
The appropriate question here is what is more unsafe? 1) significant amounts of people crossing in random places, or 2) cars not being forced to stop before zebra crossings.
For me, in normal conditions 1) is clearly more unsafe, as car drivers must be paying attention to the traffic anyway. And I’d guess that this is the actual case, otherwise zebra crossings would not have been adopted.
It is not literally forcing anyone but it is effectively forcing everyone. Or don’t call it forcing if you want, but it is what people are going to do.
Note that moving a zebra crossing just 200 m means having to walk 400 m more, so 5 minutes walking. For people with reduced mobility it is much longer. [edited to add the ending ‘d’ in reduced]
Good design is not about the theory it is about what happens in practice. Search for, for example, the design failure of Brasilia. Super well designed on plan, a failure in practice. Something similar is repeated once and again.
Less accurate, not less predictable ;-)
What is the difference with the yield sign? Or are you also against the yield sign?
A designated pedestrian crossing without an associated stop sign or traffic light is just very, very bad design.
Why should this be bad design? I find it would be even more stupid to have to stop all the time (stop sign) or when the light is read but no one wants to cross. The traffic lights with a button for pedestrians are useful in some circumstances, but in many they are even more stupid (eg. often the pedestrian would have been able to cross without a problem but is forced to press the button, wait that the traffic light changes and cross, and then several cars have to stop and wait). Of course, in places with a lot of traffic and pedestrians traffic lights are the right choice, but IMO outside the city centres this is often not the right choice.
I’m not sure this is so everywhere, but in Europe one is supposed to drive carefully when approaching a zebra crossing. It is not that the guy I mention above was super-reckless -just that it is easy and useful to signal it when one wants to cross. I could easily stop on time because I drove slow and had him and the crossing in my focus, as one is supposed to do.
I live in Germany and I do something similar… but it has to be always. If you are close to a zebra crossing most cars will stop to let you cross even if you haven’t made any intent to cross, so you have to do all kinds of theatre to make it clear that you are not going to cross (in that moment).
But the other day I understood why they do it (I almost never drive). I was driving approaching a zebra crossing an a guy who was walking in the same direction but through the sidewalk just turned 90º and continued walking when he reached the zebra crossing. He didn’t signal the turn at all and didn’t even look before crossing. He even stared at me annoyed that I did not stop before. It was like, “dude read my mind, I was going to turn all along”.
This system is so inefficient and stupid. The best moments are when people do not realise they are close to a zebra crossing (or they don’t give a damn) and cars approaching stop to let them cross. I’ve seen someone making several cars stop because they were just waiting for something in front of a zebra crossing and the traffic was low enough so that one driver would not see the previous car stopping for nothing.
Oh, in the US this is dangerous, isn’t it? (I mean, legally)
Thanks you very much! That’s a great answer!
To be fair, it had never occurred to me that completing a PhD could be genetically driven… It seems quite plausible, actually (however, not completing one seems much less correlated to me).
Yes, I’m more skeptical now! Still, I’m also skeptical of these studies, though (maybe because I have not reviewed them myself—nothing persona!--, which I actually doubt I will do...).
AFAIK, there were very well know studies strongly relating IQ to genes (which implied that e.g. black people have lower IQ) that are now being refuted and the new ones link it much more to the socio-economic status of the family. I guess the difference is only the degree of correlation (you say it yourself that socio-economic status has an impact), but what I heard/read is that difference is quite large.
In addition, I can not square these studies you mention with other good research. E.g. gratitude journaling seem to have a huge effect improving mental health, and this is something that can be easily taught at home.
My guess to put everything together is now that the world is very messy, such effects very difficult to measure, and that most education is good enough to avoid trauma but still very sub-optimal (difficult to find the signal within lots of noise). In addition, probably, educating techniques work differently for different children (which would not be surprising and would largely explain that education is sub-optimal).
I’m interested in your thoughts :-)