Another interesting one (and perhaps a bit squicky to some): if there are cells in an apple, are they typically alive when you eat the apple? How about cells in meat? How do you know?
Rachel Shu
Karma: 374
AI Psychosis, with Tim Hua and Adele Lopez
I think that this is a minor point, yes, not the main point. It’s a subtlety that many miss, not the key reading.
But likewise, I’ve found a prod in Omelas that goads me personally more than the main theme does. It’s the unspoken “and if you’re that unsatisfied with that perfect city, with one single justifiedly suffering child, what in god’s name are you doing about this world, with so much less good, and so much more suffering, so much less justified?”
Specifically the folinic acid hypothesis is that this is an atypical autoimmune-instigated form of CFD, not the genetic type which typically manifests very rapidly. Look up Folate Receptor Alpha Autoantibodies. My strongest claim is that something environmental may be causing an uptick in autism, even accounting for its strong heritability; with a subset of that claim being “maybe vaccines”. I don’t believe this strongly enough to write more than a shortform pondering it.
Introducing the Mox Guest Program
The putative method by which leucovorin (folinic acid) might be a cure for some subtype of autism is that folate receptor autoantibodies (FRAAs) block normal sources of folate reaching the brain, causing a form of Cerebral Folate Deficiency (CFD). It’s claimed that folinic acid is an atypical source of folate which can still reach the brain in someone with those antibodies. On this theory, that subtype of autism is an autoimmune disease.
No conclusive evidence links vaccinations to autoimmune diseases, but conditional on folinic acid working, we should maybe look more closely at what would cause the autoimmune disorder, and update positively on some version of the vaccine theory?
I have been experiencing something similar recently on semaglutide, although my hypothesis was simply calorie deficit homeostasis. I’d previously dieted and lost 18 lbs without, and the main difference was the willpower required to do it, the fatigue and associated anhedonia was the same. This might be different if you’re not at all tired?
Would “explain this concept to a younger child” be a better classroom assignment?
What was the point about the carpet rods? You seemed like you were going somewhere interesting with that!
FYI, Mox will also be open to LessOnline ticketholders in the week between LessOnline and Manifest. This is more for people who are flying in a few days early and just need a place to get work done, for socializing highly recommend buying a ticket to Arbor summer camp!
FYI, Mox will also be open to LessOnline ticketholders in the week between LessOnline and Manifest. This is more for people who’ve got a flight out a few days late and just need a place to get work done, for socializing highly recommend buying a ticket to Arbor summer camp!
The code to enter is 1112# ! If you’re new to the space, come up to the 4th floor and I, Mattie, or Austin will help you get oriented :)
The idea of kill markets are of course not so new. One prominent example was the practice of paying bounties for Indian scalps which was practiced by various US government and white civilian entities during frontier conflicts against natives. They were not the first to adopt this practice but they were the ones to spread it across the continent. This incentivized wholesale extermination of native nations, and predation on innocents, rather than mere military submission, a common outcome of those frontier wars.
Post-Manifest coworking at Mox
Pre-LessOnline coworking at Mox
Reminded me of Ozy’s post “The Life Goals of Dead People”, where guilt/anxiety/trauma makes you choose to live smaller and reduce variance
I did follow that turn, I just am confused by the examples you chose to illustrate it with. The first examples of Bell Labs and VC firms I agree match the claim, but not the subsequent ones.
I am imagining an accountability sink as a situation where the person held responsible has no power over the outcome, shielding a third party. So this is bad as in the airline example (Attendant held responsible by disgruntled passenger, although mostly powerless, this shields corporate structure, problem not resolved), and good as in the VC example (VC firm held responsible by investors for profits, although mostly powerless, this shields startup founders to take risks, problem resolved successfully).
And if this is the frame you’re using, then I don’t see how the ER doctor and ATC controller examples fit this mold?
Maybe I’m just misunderstanding the structure of the essay, but I’m a bit confused by the second half of this essay — you begin to argue that there are benefits to designing accountability sinks correctly, but it seems like most of your subsequent examples to support this involve someone disobeying the formal process and taking responsibility!
The ER doctor skips process, turns over triage, and takes responsibility. His actions are defended by people using out-of system reasoning.
The ATC skips process, comes back, and takes responsibility. Her actions are defended by people using out-of system reasoning.
etc for Healthcare.gov, Boris Johnson, etc. They were operating in the context of accountability sinks which discouraged the thing they ultimately and rightly chose to do, within the system they would have been forgiven for just following the rules.
Likewise, the free market example given feels like the total opposite of an accountability sink! The person who has the problem is in fact the person who can solve it. The free market does have a classic accountability sink, in the form of externalities, but how it’s framed here seems like a perfect everyday example of the buck stopping exactly where it should stop.
Possibly, but then you have to consider you can spin up possibly arbitrarily many instances of the LLM as well, in which case you might expect the trend to go even faster, as now you’re scaling on 2 axes, and we know parallel compute scales exceptionally well.
Parallel years don’t trade off exactly with years in series, but “20 people given 8 years” might do much more than 160 given one, or 1 given 160, depending on the task.
On Dwarkesh’s podcast, Nick Lane says that “(the reason for) Large genomes. To have a multicellular organism where effectively you’re deriving from a single cell, that restricts the chances of effectively all the cells having a fight. … So you start with a single cell and you develop, so there’s less genetic fighting going on between the cells than there would be if they come together.”
Has anyone made the formal connection between this and acausal trade? For all I know this is exactly where the insight comes from, but if not, someone should fill in the gap.