I took the survey.
NoSignalNoNoise
Karma: 1,737
[Question] Is there a clearly laid-out write-up of the case to drop Covid precautions?
One thing I’m curious about—what did the process of the border closing off look like, and what was going on in the weeks leading up to it? While I have no near term plans to emigrate, I often wonder what the warning signs are that it’s time to start seriously looking, and what the warning signs are that it’s time to GTFO.
Precise forecasts masquerade as accurate ones.
-- Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise
To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds. You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong.
-- Paul Graham
Self-experiment Protocol: Effect of Chocolate on Sleep
took it
Bad things don’t happen to you because you’re unlucky. Bad things happen to you because you’re a dumbass.
That 70s Show
While this is by no means an unconventional suggestion, I would consider putting it in an index fund. The fees are very low and barring societal collapse, your money will grow in the long-term without you having to do much of anything about it.
At a more meta level, the boring, conventional choice is generally the best one unless you have a compelling reason to believe otherwise.
This story makes sense for describing how people might believe conspiracy theories because they oppose lockdowns, but I don’t think a similar story would apply for opposition to vaccines. Following this line of thinking, I think the sequence of events is:
Disease breaks out.
Public health authorities respond to the disease with high-cost preventative measures.
People respond to those preventative measures by becoming hostile to public health measures.
People’s hostility to public health measures oppose vaccines even though they’re much lower cost and much more effective than the measures that led to them becoming hostile to public health measures in the first place.
The ideas of the Hasids are scientifically and morally wrong; the fashion, food and lifestyle are way stupid; but the community and family make me envious.
-- Penn Jilette
A related epistemology that is popular in the business world is PowerPointificationism, which holds that the truth of a proposition should be evaluated by how easily it can be expressed in PowerPoint. Due to the nature of PowerPoint as a means of expression, this epistemology often produces results similar to those of Occam’s sand-blaster, which holds that the simplest explanation is the correct one (note that unlike Occam’s razor, Occam’s sand-blaster does not require that the explanation be consistent with observation).
[Link] White House announces a series of workshops on AI, expresses interest in safety
Notes on Actually Trying
[Question] How much to worry about the US election unrest?
How can I alter my Big 5 personality traits? (In particular, conscientiousness and extroversion)
Instrumental Rationality Questions Thread
From the 2014 Survey:
Polyamory:
51.8% prefer monogamous, 15.1% prefer polyamorous (a lot uncertain)
But only 5.3% have more than 1 partner
Children:
36.1% want more child(ren), 28.3% uncertain, 34.3% don’t want more
Politics:
38.9% Social Democratic, 27.7% Liberal, 25.2% Libertarian
Taxes: 3.14 +- 1.212 (1 = should be lower; 5 = should be higher)
Minimum Wage: 3.21 +- 1.359 (1 = should be lower; 5 = should be higher)
Social Justice: 3.15 +- 1.385 (1 = negative view; 5 = positive view)
Ethics:
60% accept or lean towards consequentialism
Out of constructivism, error theory, non-cognitivism, subjectivism and substantive realism, none had more than a third
Cryo:
24% don’t want to, 36.7% considering, 30.8% signed up or want to be
Probability that a person frozen today will be revived: 22.3 +- 27.3% (median 10%)
Misc:
p(many worlds) = 47.6% +- 30.1%
Can we please bring back downvoting?
-- Paul Graham, The Acceleration of Addictiveness