See, your first mistake here was not to consult with John Wentworth and Paul Christiano about thermodynamics.
I bet you didn’t even ring up JeffTK!
So much for the rationalist virtue of scholarship..
Randomized, Controlled
Karma: 661
Overall, this post is a bit confusing—it’s like someone from a completely different society was suddenly transported to modern USA. What are you asking / telling us?
I had a similar reaction, I had the impression that Zvi is more worldly and jaded than the median LWer.
High quality, interesting, funny writing has been a difficult to manufacture signal up till now. It’s possible GPT-n will change that. But folks on LW are probably filtering for people who will filter for making real pretty with the letter forms.
A small bit of anecdata in favor of the vasoconstriction mechanism: I’m about two weeks into a flare up of upper back soreness/tightness/yeck. It’s been a bit chronic/mild for… maybe six months, but I did some stuff that flared it up to… 1.3/10ish two weeks ago. Uncomfortable, and concerning, but not crazy. What was worrying was that it didn’t seem to be resolving. Sitting at the computer definitely made it worse. I tried some alternations to my seating (currently not very ergonomic for logistic reasons that are taking time to fix). Adding lower back support pillows didn’t help. I tried a bunch of self massage; possibly made it slightly worse. I tried a bunch of gentle mobilization and some moderate weight resistance training. Possibly made it slightly worse. I tried walking a lot. That… tended to make it slightly better, but the effect went away quickly if I spent time sitting. I read this post and tried shoving a hotwater bottle down the back of my t-shirts while working at the computer. That produced a large improvement gradient. I guess you could tell the story that the heat is counter the vasoconstriction. The effect doesn’t seem to be present if the water bottle is room temperature, but I also haven’t tried that much.
It’s not the most practical solution—I just got a kneeing chair, and have a proper office chair en-route too. But it’s def been helpful.
I have been the only weirdo I know of who wears a P100. I say this to emphasize that I’ve been taking covid seriously.
I don’t see any reason to believe covid will be over in two months, or N months, for any value of N less than “however long it takes for humans to come into a new equilibrium with a novel virus.” I don’t know how long that will be, but 2 seems wrong.
As someone who’s worn a p100 a lot, I can also say it’s hardly cost free. It has all sorts of social, convenience, physical and psychological costs. Maybe those costs are <<< than your covid risk cost. But they do exist. Personally, it’s not obviously correct to me any more that the p100 is the right thing to reach for right now. Mine is currently broken, and I expect I will order a new one, but I’m also kind of happy to “just” be wearing n95s right now.
For an answer that follows a very different intuition, take a look at Does Cosmological Evolution Select for Technology? by Jeffery Shainline. This is up there with aestivation and infinite ethics on the fun idea scale. He gives a nice summary at 2:13:23 on Lex Fridman’s podcast to around 2:38. Highly recommend listening to the relevant clip on Fridman, it’s pretty great. The entire episode is really interesting, and also contains some other supporting context for Shainline’s arguement. Caveat: I haven’t read the paper yet. The abstract is:
If the parameters defining the physics of our universe departed from their present values, the observed rich structure and complexity would not be supported. This article considers whether similar fine-tuning of parameters applies to technology. The anthropic principle is one means of explaining the observed values of the parameters. This principle constrains physical theories to allow for our existence, yet the principle does not apply to the existence of technology. Cosmological natural selection has been proposed as an alternative to anthropic reasoning. Within this framework, fine-tuning results from selection of universes capable of prolific reproduction. It was originally proposed that reproduction occurs through singularities resulting from supernovae, and subsequently argued that life may facilitate the production of the singularities that become offspring universes. Here I argue technology is necessary for production of singularities by living beings, and ask whether the physics of our universe has been selected to simultaneously enable stars, intelligent life, and technology capable of creating progeny. Specific technologies appear implausibly equipped to perform tasks necessary for production of singularities, potentially indicating fine-tuning through cosmological natural selection. These technologies include silicon electronics, superconductors, and the cryogenic infrastructure enabled by the thermodynamic properties of liquid helium. Numerical studies are proposed to determine regions of physical parameter space in which the constraints of stars, life, and technology are simultaneously satisfied. If this overlapping parameter range is small, we should be surprised that physics allows technology to exist alongside us. The tests do not call for new astrophysical or cosmological observations. Only computer simulations of well-understood condensed matter systems are required.
Thanks for this, Elizabeth.
Do you have any thoughts on trying to use a PReP protocol with herpes antivirals? I spent about twenty minutes the other day doing some initial searches (just duckduckgo didn’t have time to get into pubMed), and didn’t turn up anything. Valaciclovir inhibits viral DNA synthesis and is, I believe, fairly safe/mostly well tolerated.
Alarming that it freely “lies” (?) or hallucinates or whatever is going on, rather than replying “I don’t know”.
sorry to be a rube, but.. why is dredging important? I would guess to make shipping lanes and harbors accessible to larger ships, but is shipping lane and harbor capacity a serious bottleneck? Is dredging capacity one? Is it something else?
Oooooh, these are much better than the ones I was got from nightcafe (I just checked, I was actually using “CLIP guided diffusion”.)
DALL-E 2′s marshes and sunset marshes are slightly better than what I was getting.
I used nightcafe.studio, a VQGAN+CLIP webservice a bunch in March for the worldbuilding.ai entry I was working on. I found it.. okay for generating images that I could then edit in photoshop, but it took many many tries to get something decent. I’d be particularly interested in seeing what DALLE-E 2 does with these prompts:
“Beautiful giant sunset over the saltwater marsh with tiny abandoned buildings in the distance” “Glass greenhouse with a beautiful forest inside, with people and drones flying” “People dropping into a beautiful marsh from flying drones on a sunny day” “Happy children hanging from flying drones on a sunny day beautiful storybook illustration”
I’m not sure that “first-amendment style free speech” is a good frame for discussing speech issues on the internet. Much of what the internet, and social media does, is provide amplification rather than just speech. Maybe there should be more theorization of what rights and expectations citizens should have w/r/t being able to scale or amplify their speech.
As a kid I developed something that basically is a body scan. I worried about monsters while I was lying in bed. At some point I started imagining a field of green energy starting at the very bottom of my feet and working its way very slowly up each leg, then my torso, down my arms, and finally to the very top of my head. Once I was cloaked in this protective green shield I was safe, as long as I didn’t move. It broke if I moved. But if I stayed still I could then inflate it outwards, enveloping my house, neighborhood, city, and eventually the entire world in a protective shield.
I’m skeptical of the idea of a collective unconscious, but still find it an interesting/odd coincidence (and/or weak evidence in favor of a collective unconscious) that I basically developed a body scan practice 35 years before I ever learned anything about meditation, and that it also included a universalist component, enveloping the entire world in protection.
I’m sorry you’ve had to go through this. I wish it was otherwise.
How come these are spoilers?
Wait, rather than some cuckoo idea that this is related to altitude or marginally less cuckoo lithium theory, what if it’s about regional cuisine and eating habits?
Pronunciation is left as an exercise to the reader
A modest spelling reform to increase autologicity, symmetry, and readability.
Also, before and during WW2, Japan had the most shockingly horrifying death-cult-y style leadership and culture. Dan Carlin does a good job sketching this in his Supernova in the East series.
But shortly after than it’ll be available to everyone and we’ll have lost another useful signal