RedMan

Karma: 162

RedMan 13 Sep 2021 20:19 UTC
3 points
on: The Coordination Frontier: Sequence Intro
Elinor Ostrom’s work on collective management of common pool resources doesn’t get enough credit.

Transaction and monitoring costs and capability are critical, but are usually handwaved; there’s no mention at all in the OP of the importance of building an arrangement that is easily monitored and tested by all participants, even though in real world case studies, the presence or absence of that factor is often the difference between success and failure.

RedMan 13 Sep 2021 18:10 UTC
3 points
on: How factories were made safe
I second the comment about workers not caring. If you’re on a job site being the person who tells people to make sure they’re properly tethered, gets a hose for the dust hazard, or make demands about grounding the electricity before doing work...you won’t be popular.

System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) STAMP and CAST from Nancy Leveson at MIT is an absolutely amazing tool for thinking and I recommend anyone interested in hazard analysis and protection look at it. It is revolutionary for safety analysis of industrial processes in general, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone attempt to apply its’ principles to AI risk (if I’m wrong, please link the work, I’d love to read it).

RedMan 8 Sep 2021 21:08 UTC
0 points
in reply to: skeptical_lurker’s comment on: I read “White Fragility” so you don’t have to (but maybe you should)
You’re absolutely right, the word vicious is redundant. Colloquially, the word racist is understood to include any negative attribute (such as viciousness) that could be ascribed to a person.

RedMan 8 Sep 2021 20:59 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: All Possible Views About Humanity’s Future Are Wild
I think you’re making a great case for optimism. Based on your last line, I don’t think our positions are too far apart.

Laser brooms on the ground are a heavier infrastructure investment than just the rocket, and they haven’t been built yet. Rockets with no brooms are cheaper and easier. So needing the broom raises the threshold, perhaps the raised threshold is still in reach, but at some theoretical point, it will not be.

The fossil fuel comment was more in the direction of ‘if we insist on burning everything currently in the ground, the runaway greenhouse effect is lethal to the species at 500-1000 year timelines’.

I assert that we could screw ourselves permanently, in this century, by digging into a hole (through inadequate investment of non renewable resources like helium or failure to solve engineering challenges) which we cannot exit before we wreck our habitat (plenty of non co2 scenarios for this). I’m not sure how much pessimism is warranted, I certainly don’t think that failure is inevitable, but I absolutely do think it’s on the table.

RedMan 8 Sep 2021 18:12 UTC
1 point
on: All Possible Views About Humanity’s Future Are Wild
I think that humanity could definitively fail to colonize the galaxy this century.

I don’t see how the non-renewable resources needed to reach space could last 100,000 years in light of business as usual climate scenarios that lock in to permanent failure (uninhabitable earth) at 500-1000 years in the future.

We may be in the beginnings of a kessler syndrome right now (meaning, the cascading collisions are in progress and cannot be stopped, but the timescale is long enough that we will not be locked out of good orbits for decades to centuries), and even if we are not, an incident with any of the ‘small swarm sat’ constellations (starlink/blue origin) could lock the door on large scale space projects for centuries to milennia, which is time we do not have.

Success requires us to master living (with reproduction) in microgravity and a fully self contained environment, the human-machine interfaces needed for virtual life, the large scale engineering required to build factories on celestial bodies or in space itself, and the energy to power it all. We’re nowhere near any of that, and might have a few decades or as much as a century to solve those challenges, but probably not much more. Maybe a general intelligence could create a von neumann probe and working rocket that escapes earth with a minimum of resources in terms of time, manufacturing capacity, and material; but the minimum will never be ‘zero’ and increasing constraints are certain to increase the difficulty; possibly to the point of impossibility.

A few errors or incidents (massive solar flare, nuclear war, large accident in space, climate catastrophe, etc), or even just failure to reach certain technical milestones in time, could mean that at a certain point, (possibly today?), the spare capacity for this sort of massive scale investment of nonrenewables with limited to no return for the humans living on earth making the investment decision just simply won’t be available.

I dont think we’ve lost the race against the clock yet, but it looks to me like there absolutely is one in progress, and while people alive today may not colonize the galaxy, they may find themselves in a position to definitively say that the human race and its’ robots will not.

RedMan 8 Sep 2021 8:11 UTC
6 points
on: I read “White Fragility” so you don’t have to (but maybe you should)
I think most people, including people in this thread are vicious racists and do not know it, and that their vicious racism stems from their rationalism.

Here is a simple question to determine whether you practice racism:

“Do you believe that test scores and academic achievements prior to academic or professional training are indicative of increased competence, or are all graduates of a professional program identically competent on graduation day?”

If you believe the latter (all graduates of medical school X are uniformly competent doctors), you are not a folk racist.

If you believe that SAT/GRE/GPA/other factors considered in medical school admission predict greater competence of medical school graduates (a higher score going in makes for a better doctor coming out), then when confronted with a choice between two doctors who on paper are graduates of the same program in the USA, but one is African American, and one is Asian Pacific Islander, you should always judge the AAPI as probably more competent, because the standards for admission that they were held to were higher (most programs practice some form of affirmative action, there may be examples of programs where this is not true, but at many prestigious institutions, it absolutely is).

I assert that the latter is perfectly rational, and would be considered by most Americans as ‘folk racist’, I don’t think Robin would approve either.

The antiracist position appears to be that the ritual of education that empowers one to ‘doctor people’ is expensive, and can only be performed for a limited number of people, so racial balance in provision of access to the ritual is critical. There are no intrinsic attributes which impact one’s ability to doctor people, it all stems from the power invested in them by the performer of the ritual of education (a prestigious ritual in a place of power like Harvard imparts greater doctoring acumen than one performed somewhere less prestigious).

RedMan 1 Sep 2021 23:45 UTC
6 points
on: Training My Friend to Cook
If I expressed to a friend “I want you to teach me this skill, here is some time allotted to me and you spending time together, use it however you please”, I wouldn’t feel manipulated or upset about any of this.

Don’t shoot the dog is an awesome book.

RedMan 1 Sep 2021 22:42 UTC
1 point
on: [Sponsored] Job Hunting in the Modern Economy
Not that anyone here has ever used Fiverr exactly like this...

RedMan 1 Sep 2021 0:51 UTC
10 points
in reply to: Carlos Ramirez’s comment on: Could you have stopped Chernobyl?
A simple sigle act of rebellion (punching the expert) might, at best result in ‘start the experiment while I go get some ice, man, wtf is up with that guard’ or maybe ‘lets do it tomorrow’.

I think that the AN explosions are often preceeded by this conversation:

Intern: “Whoa that’s a lot of AN in a pile, are you sure it’s safe to have an explosive stored like that? Don’t best practices say we should store it in separate containers below a particular critical size?”

Boss “But then I can’t store it in a giant silo that’s easy to load an arbitrary quantity onto trucks from.” / “But space here in the hold/special shipping warehouse is at a premium, all that empty space is expensive. It’ll be fiiiine, besides that best practice is dumb anyway, everyone knows it’s only explosive if u mix it with fuel oil or whatever, it’ll be fine”

Intern: “What if there’s a fire?”

Boss” “The fire department will have it under control, it’s just fertilizer. Besides, that one fire last year was a fluke, it won’t happen again”

AN itself is an explosive (it contains a fuel and an oxider in the chemical structure), but is too insensitive to use as such. Like many explosives, temperature and pressure affect its sensitivity significantly. Critically, AN is an insulator, and with enough heat, will chemically degrade exothermically. So, in a big enough, hot enough, pile of AN, some of the AN in the middle is decomposing, the pile is trapping the heat, and making the pile that much hotter.

The best guesses I’ve seen for how the disasters develop involve that hot spot eventually getting hot enough, confined enough, and mixed with the degradation products of AN enough that it goes boom, and the explosion propagates through the entire hot, somewhat confined/compressed pile, creating impressive scenes like the one in Beirut.

The West, Texas explosion happened within a month of the Boston bombing. It killed more people, destroyed more property, and was completely preventable. The surviving boston bomber is in prison, nobody who made the decisions at the fertilizer plant suffered any consequences.

I think I’m the only one who found that confusing.

RedMan 28 Aug 2021 13:43 UTC
1 point
on: Could you have stopped Chernobyl?
How dare you suggest that fearless Fauci deserves a punch in the nose from a red-capped brigand!

No fire or proper structural means of keeping it in small enough buckets could prevent disasters like texas city, west, texas; and beirut: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26547622/

RedMan 23 Aug 2021 23:54 UTC
3 points
on: A Better Web is Coming
The tagging system reminds me of Archive of Our Own and the tag-wranglers.

It couls take off with some blockchain for buzz, like maybe a distributed ledger system for karma?

RedMan 22 Aug 2021 22:09 UTC
1 point
on: Covid 8/19: Cracking the Booster
What’s the math on the ‘default unvaccinated’ treatment plan of
1. get a covid test if sick
2. if test is positive, treat with fluvoxamine and regeneron mabs?
Is there a point where the ‘reduced vaccine effectiveness’ curve crosses that default treatment?

Obviously a vaccinated person could do that protocol in addition to the vaccine, so this isn’t a true comparison.

RedMan 17 Aug 2021 15:42 UTC
0 points
on: Coase’s “Nature of the Firm” on Polyamory
I really like the analogy in the OP, but no mention of paternity assurance or anxiety about infectious disease in the OP is confusing. The first, and to a lesser extent, the second seem to be some the primary drivers for long term monogamy.

I assert that now that paternity tests are available, and it’s theoretically possible for the state to easily care for a new human, monogamy in the form of marital restrictions on women’s sexuality, and obligatory paternal investment into children are probably both functionally obsolete, but persist because culture tends to be sticky.

Personally, I found that sexual jealousy is pointless, though I prefer deep longer term bonding instead of short term sexual relationships, someone having STIs (all of which are preventable/treatable) is an indication of irresponsibility that probably means that a relationship with me won’t last, and for entirely emotional reasons, and I would attempt to raise/be involved with any child who is genetically mine (but will avoid a child of a partner which is not). Unbundling the other stuff massively improved my life, I have great platonic relationships with people I’m (glad to) not having sex with anymore, and great sexual relationships with people with whom I wouldn’t be able to live with and don’t share any hobbies/other interests. I recommend it.

I pay my taxes, so child poverty and poor education shouldn’t be a thing in my community (even though it is)

RedMan 8 Jun 2021 5:37 UTC
1 point
on: What to optimize for in life?
Ataraxia and Aponia.

If the eudaimonic state is unavailable, or likely to become unavailable in the future, determine what obstacles exist to achieving it, and conquer that obstacle, maintain a eudaimonic state while doing so if possible.

Thanks go to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus

It has been fun so far

RedMan 8 Mar 2021 23:04 UTC
1 point
on: D&D.Sci III: Mancer Matchups
Demon is chaotic evil, cannot directly influence events, and has no direct knowledge of the situation. The demon doesn’t know which side actually summoned him. Therefore, advice should literally be random.

RedMan 7 Mar 2021 14:53 UTC
1 point
in reply to: tanagrabeast’s comment on: Seven Years of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom
Thank you for the detailed response! I used it for learning knot tying. It seemed to work, wanted to know if anyone else had tried it for anything like that.

RedMan 6 Mar 2021 14:54 UTC
−1 points
on: Seven Years of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom
Did you get IRB approval for these human studies on children?

Are you familiar with Direct Instruction, which is reminiscent of the Mennonite school?

Have you ever tried SRS for muscle memory?

RedMan 4 Mar 2021 23:15 UTC
1 point
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: What other peptide vaccines might it be useful to make?
Thank you for educating me.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3979841/

Existing approaches to toxoids like aflatoxin and ricin use specially built molecules where something immunoreactive is modified to be bonded to an antigen. A peptide vaccine that doesn’t require the chemistry would be pretty cool.

The vaccine for morphine works the same way. The immune system recognizes the opiate pharmacophore and binds to it, so that opiates don’t bind to their receptors and therefore, heroin rats don’t get high. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3558830/

RedMan 3 Mar 2021 7:27 UTC
2 points
on: What other peptide vaccines might it be useful to make?
I’ve always wondered if it could be used for organic fungal toxins and other common airborne hazards

RedMan 26 Feb 2021 1:12 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Wedchidna’s comment on: What’s your best alternate history utopia?
Aldous Huxley’s introduction to the unfinished ‘Hopousia’ by JD Unwin was always inspiring, I can’t come up with a good block quote to leave here, but if you’re into utopias, you might like it. I haven’t gone and read the rest of the book, so maybe as far as forwards go, it isn’t so great.

http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Hopousia_or_The_Sexual_and_Economic_Foundations_of_a_New_Society