Is there a way to access this without a substack subscription?
spencerb
Karma: 15
I think that tradeoffs between health risk and quality of life are very badly handled by the medial establishment. There tends to be a focus on avoiding the worst outcomes without evaluating small cumulative costs. Other examples that I’ve seen brought up are preemptively inserting IV ports (it’s just a needle, and it could save your life!) or flossing (healthy, but 2 minutes/day adds up).
On the one hand, I guess I should be supportive of medical policies that include any amount of rigorous statistics, even if it’s only for the easily quantified high-impact outcomes. However, it’s clear that including quality of life in risk assessment would save a lot of utility. I hope we see more studies trying to quantify the “this sucks” impact, especially for very invasive treatments like GFD.
I agree. Mastodon will remain on the outskirts in the same way that Whatsapp continues to dominate alternatives like Signal despite clear privacy advantages. Network size trumps any other feature for a social network.
Massage might cause problems, idk.
Practicing without a license is a crime in many jurisdictions. There’s a reason massage therapists need 1000 hours of training, certification, and regular continuing education. It’s a field susceptible to pseudoscience, so an understanding of anatomy and the medicinal risks is important to make sure you don’t screw anything up.
It is irresponsible that you are teaching others without ever being taught yourself.
I feel like there’s a bias towards overstating the impact of recent innovations. It’s easy to think of recent “revolutionary innovations” (internet! gene sequencing! cryptocurrency!), while going backwards we tend to view them as more infrequent and discrete (automobiles, steam locomotion, cotton gin). To some extent this may be a real acceleration of innovation driven by population growth, economic expansion, etc. However I think it’s also just becoming more course-grained in what we consider innovative (automobiles=combustion science + mechanical improvements + materials + road tech + …). If this is the case then extrapolating back to neolithic times we’d expect “innovations” to be very infrequent, just because we don’t know about or appreciate all the incremental improvements between them. If each refinement in stone tools is actually an accumulation of numerous developments in eg flaking techniques or geology or apprenticeship systems went into each refinement in stone tools, then that dramatically decreases the impact of any one inventor.
My company “evaluates” phishing propensity by sending employees emails directing them to “honeypots” which are in the corporate domain and signed by the corporate ssl certificates. Unsurprisingly, many employees trust ssl and enter their credentials. My takeaway was not that people are bad at security, but that they will tend to trust the system if the stakes don’t appear too high.
I agree that email is an attention-sucking mess, but I see the problem differently from jacobjacob. I would happily get all the emails from the rationality community; my problem is that email is dominated by marketing, mailing lists, etc.
I think that using earn.com is likely to exacerbate the problem of unrequested marketing emails. It is free to send messages, and the sender only pays upon receipt of a response. This is like selling advertising on a per-click-though basis rather than on a per-view basis, and if it took off I would expect spam to quickly dominate the platform. Even if the message model were modified to incur costs for sending a message, I still think that many companies would gladly pay to send messages over a trusted high-status channel (similar to how fundraisers include stickers or cash in their mailings to raise the likelihood of you reading the materials). I’m not sure that friends and contacts would value my responses enough to match corporate calculations.
One reason to escew earn.com specifically is the use of bitcoin. Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are a major waste of energy (0.2% of the global energy use currently) and should be avoided by rationalists.
Isn’t this obvious from the inheritance of non-genetic factors? I would assume that twins would care more about their adopted children then their niblings. Probably correctly; unless you think that your values are overwhelmingly heritable, children you raise personnally are going to better represent your values than genetically close children raised by someone else