RedMan

• RedMan 25 Nov 2020 16:38 UTC

  1 point

  on: Sny­der-Beat­tie, Sand­berg, Drexler & Bon­sall (2020): The Timing of Evolu­tion­ary Tran­si­tions Suggests In­tel­li­gent Life Is Rare

  Of ‘we are first, we are freaks, we are fucked’ cat­e­gories of great filter ex­pla­na­tions, I think (con­sis­tent with this pa­per) we are definitely freaks, it looks like we may be first (at least in the parts of the uni­verse that might in the­ory be reach­able with ex­ist­ing physics/​von neu­mann probes), and the jury is out on whether we are cur­rently fucked (I’m a pes­simist, I think we might be like the pa­tient who ate a bot­tle of Tylenol, feel­ing fine, but definitely dead in a few days due to im­pend­ing liver failure)

• RedMan 24 Nov 2020 12:16 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: RedMan’s comment on: What will the eco­nomic effects of a 3 week quaran­tine be? 3 months?

  An­ti­body tests are here but are not be­ing used to re­open (wor­ries that peo­ple will var­i­o­late to go back to work, if that’s the case wtf is wrong with your econ­omy).

  Pro­phy­laxis and symp­tomatic re­lief ap­pears to be ‘Vi­tamin D to miti­gate the bradyk­inin storm’: https://​​www.na­ture.com/​​ar­ti­cles/​​s41598-020-77093-z “As per the flex­ible ap­proach in the cur­rent COVID-19 pan­demic au­thors recom­mend mass ad­minis­tra­tion of vi­tamin D sup­ple­ments to pop­u­la­tion at risk for COVID-19.” Sure ok, one weird trick that ac­tu­ally works, nice.

  Rapid PCR and in New Zealand, full genome se­quenc­ing for con­tact trac­ing is a thing, awe­some. Rapid anti­gen tests are a thing too, but not helping the econ­omy.

  Idk about what works in hos­pi­tals, but ven­tila­tors and fen­tanyl scare me more than ‘happy hy­pox­emia’ so if I’m con­scious enough to say don’t take me to a hos­pi­tal, that’s what I’m say­ing. Remde­sivir is not widely available enough for me to bother think­ing about.

  The DIY corona vac­cine ap­pears from what re­search has been done to be safe (no biol­o­gists who took it died) and ac­cord­ing to an­i­mal model stud­ies, effec­tive. I have the where­withal to con­struct it if I want, I haven’t both­ered, there­fore I prob­a­bly won’t screw with the offi­cial one when it hits.

  Based on pre­sent death rates and the state of the econ­omy, quaran­tine wasn’t worth it.

  Edit: my best guess about ‘long hauler’ symp­toms is that they’re con­sis­tent with per­ma­nent dam­age to the lungs and long term low-mod­er­ate hy­poxia, lung trans­plants and oxy­gen bot­tles are re­ally the only treat­ments for that (if you can cure scar­ring and re­gen­er­ate lung tis­sue, let the as­besto­sis and sili­co­sis com­mu­ni­ties know), so long-haulers are prob­a­bly screwed. Vi­tamin D should limit or halt this pro­cess.

  This su­per­com­puter model seems trust­wor­thy so far: https://​​el­e­men­tal.medium.com/​​a-su­per­com­puter-an­a­lyzed-covid-19-and-an-in­ter­est­ing-new-the­ory-has-emerged-31cb8eba9d63

• RedMan 30 Oct 2020 18:33 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Robert Lynn’s comment on: What risks con­cern you which don’t seem to have been se­ri­ously con­sid­ered by the com­mu­nity?

  In­stead of up­load­ing hu­mans to cre­ate a large mess of AIs, let’s con­nect hu­mans to­gether as soon as it’s safe to do so (maybe at first only the el­derly and bedrid­den, even­tu­ally any­one who can wear a hat) then add ma­chines and maybe even an­i­mals (sup elephants and dolphins) to cre­ate a sin­gle gi­gan­tic wor­ld­brain. As com­puter simu­la­tions of brain tis­sue get bet­ter, the AI will go from be­ing mostly hu­man to mostly ar­tifi­cial. The death of a fully in­te­grated hu­man body wouldn’t cause an in­ter­rup­tion in that hu­man’s con­scious­ness, be­cause most of it would be dis­tributed across the en­tire wor­ld­brain.

  I be­lieve that ex­tant tech­nol­ogy could be used to do this and ac­tu­ally wrote up a tech­ni­cal pro­posal that I didn’t dis­sem­i­nate (it wasn’t great and I didn’t see any­one be­ing per­suaded by it so I trashed it). The tech­ni­cal risk is mostly in test­ing and some as­sump­tions about the way the brain works that I view as ‘plau­si­ble’ given the state of the art, but far from ‘proven’

• RedMan 10 Jun 2020 5:08 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Rudi C’s comment on: Why isn’t as­sas­si­na­tion/​sab­o­tage more com­mon?

  Us­ing the sug­gested frame­work, those would be class 2 not class 3. https://​​www.forbes.com/​​sites/​​su­san­tar­dan­ico/​​2012/​​03/​​28/​​en­tire-man­age­ment-team-kil­led-a-ceos-turnaround-story/​​ ac­ci­dent or suc­cess­ful class 3 as­sas­si­na­tion? As I un­der­stand it, anal­y­sis of these situ­a­tions can be aided by wear­ing the cor­rect head­gear: https://​​tvtropes.org/​​pmwiki/​​pmwiki.php/​​Main/​​TinfoilHat

• RedMan 5 Jun 2020 3:26 UTC

  8 points

  on: Why isn’t as­sas­si­na­tion/​sab­o­tage more com­mon?

  https://​​en.m.wikipe­dia.org/​​wiki/​​Rise_and_Kill_First at least one group of peo­ple ap­pear to have ac­cepted at least some of your ar­gu­ment.

  Fur­ther­more, as­sas­si­na­tions fall into three cat­e­gories:

  Where the as­sas­sin takes credit af­ter­wards (for in­timi­da­tion, brag­ging to sup­port­ers, etc), where a third party is blamed (to pre­vent reprisals be­ing di­rected at the source), and where it is un­clear that an as­sas­si­na­tion was performed (wow IBM got screwed hard by that plane crash).

  From the per­spec­tive in the OP, it is clear that there is a de­tec­tion challenge. The most use­ful cat­e­gories (to an as­sas­sin) are the third and the sec­ond, the least use­ful is the first. An ex­ter­nal ob­server will see only the first cat­e­gory, and a po­ten­tial sub­set of the sec­ond cat­e­gory, but is un­likely to see many mem­bers of the third cat­e­gory.

  Maybe they’re very com­mon, and you’re just not see­ing the ob­vi­ous.

• RedMan 13 May 2020 3:51 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: gilch’s comment on: The Great­est Host

  And the ab­solute most at­trac­tive job for a psy­chopath is ‘de­ter­miner of who is and is not neu­ropsy­cholog­i­cally fit’.

  If you’re a shitty hu­man there’s money to be made as a child psy­chol­o­gist lev­er­ag­ing that. Abuses are com­mon and it’s not hard to is­sue a pitch like the fol­low­ing: “pay me 30k and I won’t tell the court you’re an un­fit par­ent and send your kids to the foster care sys­tem”.

• RedMan 26 Apr 2020 12:22 UTC

  1 point

  on: Prospect­ing for Con­cep­tual Holes

  Did you ac­tu­ally learn to speak piraha? Every­one I know to­tally re­fused to par­ti­ci­pate, so I dropped the idea.

• RedMan 22 Apr 2020 9:29 UTC

  3 points

  on: So­lar sys­tem colon­i­sa­tion might not be driven by economics

  Cmon dark side of the moon space telescope and weapons test range.

• RedMan 22 Apr 2020 9:27 UTC

  3 points

  on: Databases of hu­man be­havi­our and prefer­ences?

  https://​​hraf.yale.edu/​​ gl

• RedMan 22 Apr 2020 8:56 UTC

  1 point

  on: What are some fun ways to spend $100,000?

  A 100k pot­latch is easy.

  If male, do a dan­ger­ous look­ing ac­tivity that demon­strates your mas­tery of some ac­tivity with /​ in front of a group of your clos­est friends, then bring them to a wild party with plen­tiful dopamine ag­o­nists and easy sex with at­trac­tive women (co­caine and hook­ers).

  If fe­male, pay young and at­trac­tive fe­males to do your bid­ding, dress your­self up to be as pretty as you can, and go some­where where you can be seen by as many (ideally high sta­tus) peo­ple as pos­si­ble.

  Re­peat un­til out of money.

  Try to avoid al­co­hol, strip clubs, slot ma­chines, and canned hunt­ing, as they are cheap and shitty imi­ta­tions.

  En­ron’s in­ner cir­cle did com­pany re­treats with atv rid­ing fol­lowed by wild par­ties. Larry Elli­son owns a fighter jet and pays a 25k noise fine when­ever he takes it out at 3am.

  I ini­tially wrote a lot more, with ac­tivity recom­men­da­tions, but re­ally this cov­ers it.

  If you do want spe­cific ad­vice, it’s available, just in­vite me to the party.

  You know, for sci­ence.

• RedMan 12 Apr 2020 20:23 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: App-Based Disease Surveillance After COVID-19

  I would be sur­prised if you could not figure out if two peo­ple are screw­ing with mod­er­ate con­fi­dence us­ing noth­ing but de­mo­graphic data and lo­ca­tion based meta­data dumped into a ML al­gorithm. The price of false pos­i­tives is a few un­nec­es­sary tests, and is there­fore su­per low, so it doesn’t even have to be that good of a sys­tem.

  Tin­der data could be pur­chased to build out the ini­tial al­gorithm, and if there are still challenges, vol­un­teers could be so­lic­ited for val­i­da­tion data.

  Mix­ing in pub­lic so­cial me­dia (in­sta­gram) and ac­tual com­mu­ni­ca­tions con­tent might help, but af­ter val­i­da­tion of the lo­ca­tion sys­tem, prob­a­bly isn’t nec­es­sary, but could be an­a­lyzed us­ing robots rather than hu­man re­view, which is ap­par­ently ac­cept­able for other pur­poses.

  Is it morally jus­tified to use lo­ca­tion meta­data (gps), pub­lic so­cial me­dia (in­sta­gram), com­mu­ni­ca­tions meta­data (con­tact lists), and com­mu­ni­ca­tion con­tent to enu­mer­ate close con­tacts that may have spread res­pi­ra­tory viruses? If so, how could it be wrong to use the ex­act same dataset to fight other dis­eases with mas­sive so­cial bur­dens.

  I mean sure, some peo­ple might cry about their pri­vacy, but the data isn’t theirs, courts have es­tab­lished that it be­longs to the com­mu­ni­ca­tion com­pa­nies, all of whom are ap­par­ently on board with meta­data as­sisted surveillance for se­cu­rity and now pub­lic health.

  Google and Ap­ple are build­ing the Blue­tooth tracker, the Chi­nese gps app with color cod­ing for ex­po­sure risk is a thing, face­book checked in­sta­gram to see if peo­ple in Italy are so­cial dis­tanc­ing. No­body is cry­ing about any of these things. This is just a pro­posal to use the same datasets for the same rea­son.

  Any­one who ar­gues can be la­bel­led pro dis­ease and pushee out of the pub­lic de­bate, just like any­one who com­plains about flu track­ing soft­ware can be asked, ‘do you want old peo­ple to die’?

  The ini­tial sys­tem could be in­stru­mented with a color cod­ing scheme, and an app. When peo­ple go to dr offices, part of the ba­sic vi­tals check at the start of a visit is the doc­tor run­ning a database check and sug­gest­ing test­ing for var­i­ous con­di­tions based on the color code. The app to check your own color code sta­tus could be down­loaded by in­ter­ested users. ‘Show your color’ would be­come some­thing peo­ple just ask each other dur­ing in­ti­mate en­coun­ters.

  Most ju­ris­dic­tions already re­quire that pos­i­tive tests for cer­tain pathogens (STIs are on this list) be re­ported to a cen­tral au­thor­ity by doc­tors, this is a long-stand­ing thing and no­body with an opinion that mat­ters ques­tions it:

  https://​​medline­plus.gov/​​ency/​​ar­ti­cle/​​001929.htm

  Govern­ments could im­ple­ment this pro­posal with­out much pub­lic de­bate by just rol­ling out a corona app, adding fea­tures for differ­ent classes of res­pi­ra­tory dis­ease, then adding fea­tures for the rest of the ‘re­portable pathogens’ that are trans­mit­ted by differ­ent means. The model could be de­vel­oped in house us­ing already available data (re­ported tests and lo­ca­tion meta­data).

  We can look back at this post in five years and see how things have moved. Good luck stop­ping it if you think this is morally re­pug­nant as you ap­par­ently do.

• RedMan 12 Apr 2020 11:51 UTC

  1 point

  on: Law school taught me nothing

  So three years with a good anki deck would be more valuable than sit­ting classes in terms of re­mem­ber­ing the use­ful stuff?

App-Based Disease Surveillance After COVID-19

• RedMan 9 Apr 2020 11:30 UTC

  5 points

  on: Trans­porta­tion as a Constraint

  https://​​en.m.wikipe­dia.org/​​wiki/​​Flash_Crowd

  This and the other 4 sto­ries from a math­e­mat­i­cian turned sci-fi au­thor have aged well. Hope you en­joy them as much as I did when I read them.

• RedMan 6 Apr 2020 12:31 UTC

  −6 points

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: What Sur­prised Me About Entrepreneurship

  Hy is amaz­ing, and I want to learn more about your small data ap­proach. I do not work in quant finance

• RedMan 27 Mar 2020 16:13 UTC

  3 points

  on: What will the eco­nomic effects of a 3 week quaran­tine be? 3 months?

  We need a rapid test to iden­tify peo­ple with im­mu­nity, so they can go back to work.

  Quaran­tine is worth it, hos­pi­tals are over­whelmed, but it is failing, and will con­tinue to fail. The sooner we can iden­tify peo­ple who have got­ten it and re­cov­ered, then put those peo­ple to work in high ex­po­sure oc­cu­pa­tions, the sooner we can restart the econ­omy.

  The classes of treat­ment needed here are as fol­lows:

  Rapid pcr test: ex­pen­sive, and needed for surveillance of key work­ers, as well as con­tact trac­ing. We have this, but it won’t scale.

  Vac­cine: this en­ables erad­i­ca­tion, but is a min­i­mum of 18 months away, and the effort may fail

  Post ex­po­sure pro­phy­laxis: some­thing given be­fore or im­me­di­ately af­ter ex­po­sure that stops the dis­ease in its tracks (health­care work­ers need this, if an­ti­malar­i­als do the job, yay we know those are safe and effec­tive pro­phy­lac­ti­cally)

  Symp­tomatic re­lief: some­thing given when early symp­toms show, which pre­gents the de­vel­op­ment of catas­trophic symp­toms (the malaria drug will hope­fully fit this)

  Catas­trophic care: more and bet­ter ven­tila­tors and ways of man­ag­ing ards/​cy­tokine storm. Gl with this, we wanted it be­fore thia crisis.

  Rapid an­ti­body test: iden­ti­fies pa­tients who are ex­posed. Two weeks af­ter a pos­i­tive test, if the pa­tient hasn’t been ad­mit­ted to a hos­pi­tal, it will be safe to say that that par­tic­u­lar pa­tient will not re­quire that level of care and is prob­a­bly no longer con­ta­gious.

  We need the rapid an­ti­body test, and we need about a billion of them, do rol­ling tests, if some­one has a pos­i­tive test and thinks they had symp­toms > 1 week prior, re­turn them to work and tell them to avoid any­one with a nega­tive test for a week, if they can.

• RedMan 22 Mar 2020 0:30 UTC

  1 point

  on: Ra­tion­al­ists, Post-Ra­tion­al­ists, And Ra­tion­al­ist-Adjacents

  Is there a work­ing defi­ni­tion for anti-ra­tio­nal­ist?

• RedMan 21 Mar 2020 23:58 UTC

  1 point

  on: The ques­tions one needs not address

  I think that peo­ple have to use ab­strac­tions and be­liefs taken on faith just to ex­ist in the world. I also think that if you are not re­ally dis­ci­plined about stat­ing your ‘I just as­sume blank to be true’ be­liefs, you will end up with a bunch of un­stated as­sump­tions worm­ing their way into your psy­che that will lead you to weird and un­healthy places (would SSC cat­e­go­rize this as ‘Moloch’?)

  Pu­ri­tan­i­cal sex­ual be­liefs (those prac­ticed by 1600s Pu­ri­tans in Mas­sachusetts Bay) are in my opinion a good ex­am­ple of po­ten­tially healthy, but ut­terly ir­ra­tional dog­mas. To sum­ma­rize (I have a source some­where):

  Mar­ried sex is a sacra­ment, un­mar­ried sex is a grave sin. (Mar­ried be­ing a so­cial state that is easy for two peo­ple to en­ter but hard for them to leave)

  Con­ceiv­ing chil­dren is im­por­tant and good.

  Both par­ties much achieve or­gasm dur­ing the act of in­ter­course to con­ceive a child.

  Lack of sex­ual satis­fac­tion is grounds for di­vorce by ei­ther party.

  The de­tails of ‘sex’ are ex­plic­itly left un­defined.

  One of those be­liefs (or­gasm and con­cep­tion) is ob­jec­tively false, but may be so­cially use­ful. The oth­ers are sim­ply com­mu­nally agreed upon truths.

  Ra­tion­al­ism that leads to nihilis­tic he­do­nism and acra­sia seems like a bad idea, even if life is pointless and the uni­verse is ac­tively hos­tile. I think I’m in step with this com­mu­nity’s ethos when I as­sert that most peo­ple ac­ci­den­tally end up with a va­ri­ety of false be­liefs. I think I break with the rest of this com­mu­nity in my as­ser­tion that main­tain­ing care­fully cho­sen, but ob­jec­tively false, be­liefs is a good idea.

  Life has been way bet­ter since be­com­ing an ad­her­ent of https://​​warham­mer40k.fan­dom.com/​​wiki/​​Chaos_Undivided

  You should try it!

• RedMan 19 Mar 2020 7:38 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: waveman’s comment on: More Dakka for Coron­avirus: We need im­me­di­ate hu­man tri­als of many vac­cine-can­di­dates and si­mul­ta­neous man­u­fac­tur­ing of all of them

  From a strictly lolber­tar­ian per­spec­tive, good vac­cines are a shitty busi­ness to be in, shitty vac­cines are a great busi­ness to be in.

  Real vac­cine: cap­i­tal in­ten­sive, may or may not suc­ceed de­spite best efforts, side effects will prob­a­bly be pre­sent, re­quires that you pro­duce in­sane amounts and suc­cess­fully mar­ket to ev­ery po­ten­tial cus­tomer or it doesn’t work. In the best case where you ac­tu­ally achieve max­i­mum dis­tri­bu­tion, the pathogen is gone, and you’ll never sell an­other one, so if you didn’t profit in the first rush, you’ll never see your money again.

  Alex jones col­loidal silver: I tell you it works, if you’re not dead in a year, you’re ob­vi­ously an­other satis­fied cus­tomer, here buy an­other bul­lshit vac­cine from me.

  Se­cond product is bet­ter for the sel­ler than the first, cap­i­tal in­vest­ment is zero, mar­ket­ing cost can find effi­cien­cies in cost per cus­tomer, re­peat busi­ness is prob­a­ble.

  If you can come up with a busi­ness model that makes good vac­cines prof­itable in the cur­rent en­vi­ron­ment, ab­sent ag­gres­sive gov­ern­ment sub­sidies, you should start that busi­ness and shout your model from the roof­tops, be­cause most peo­ple in biotech would (an­grily) agree with my sum­mary.

  Source: have thrown this at many biotech ex­ec­u­tives and gov­ern­ment officers in­volved in vac­cine pro­curem­rnt. Have got­ten head nod­ding.

• RedMan 19 Mar 2020 7:25 UTC

  1 point

  on: How can we pro­tect economies dur­ing mas­sive pub­lic health crises?

  Here’s the squeeze. Jobs slow down, peo­ple are told to quaran­tine, peo­ple who are pay­check to pay­check fail to make rent. Peo­ple rent­ing to them have mort­gages, they don’t get rent, they miss their mort­gage pay­ment.

  That hap­pens enough, bank is now a land­lord, bank does not want to be a land­lord, house rots, ten­ant is booted.

  Same for a busi­ness, busi­ness op­er­ates on mar­gin, cus­tomers stop pay­ing, mar­gin debts not paid, bank now owns failing busi­ness. Bank does fire­sale, func­tion­ing busi­ness is now a pile of auc­tioned off crap.

  Mone­tary policy tools (zero in­ter­est rate overnight loans, no re­serve re­quire­ment) don’t trickle down to the masses. I can’t get a zero in­ter­est loan, nei­ther can any­one who is pay­check to pay­check, but I sure can get ex­tor­tionate rates from a pay­day lender or a credit card! I also can’t ne­go­ti­ate my ex­ist­ing rates to zero in­ter­est.

  If some­one wants a new loan for a new ven­ture, now is a great time, maybe.

  If you are the Fed and want to in­ter­vene to pro­tect banks mar­gins, do what you’re do­ing. The banks now own a bunch of small busi­nesses and houses. If you want to help small busi­ness own­ers and home­own­ers, maybe buy soon to be delin­quent debt from the banks at a deep dis­count, for­give por­tions of it, sell it back to the banks at a profit later. Is this quan­ti­ta­tive eas­ing?

  If you want to pro­tect ev­ery­one...I have this idea and need to be told why it is dumb (se­ri­ously, not an economist, pretty sure this sucks just don’t see why)

  Use IRS es­ti­mates of in­come from the pre­vi­ous year, cre­ate ‘uni­ver­sal eco­nomic ma­nipu­la­tion fund’. Every month, ev­ery­one, based on tax bracket gets ei­ther a check or a bill, the amount is un­known prior to the end of the month. In fat years, ev­ery­one pays, in bad times when the Fed needs to “drop $100s from he­li­copters” the check is big, biggest at the bot­tom. No­body can rely on it as a source of liv­ing ex­penses and be­come ‘welfare or UBI de­pen­dent’, but a sud­den wind­fall gets spent in­stantly by peo­ple at the bot­tom and lets peo­ple do things like make rent, pay util­ity bills, and go gro­cery shop­ping.

  Again, I’m sure this is stupid, I just don’t see why. If it isn’t stupid, please call some­one wth ac­cess to Mnuchin and tell him.