Caffeine’s a strong drug for me, except I have a huge tolerance now because I consume so much coffee. One night a few years ago, after I had quit caffeine for about a month, I was picking away at a bag of chocolate almonds while doing homework, and after a few hours I noticed that I felt pretty much euphoric. So yeah, this is good info to have if you’re trying to get off caffeine.
stoat
Karma: 116
This sounds familiar to me. I’m 32 and I definitely remember hearing stuff like this. I remember in elementary school (so, late 80s early 90s) seeing the Canada food guide recommend a male adult eat something like up to 10 servings of grains a day, which could be bread or pasta or cereal. You were supposed to have some dairy products each day, maybe 2-4. And maybe 1-3 servings from Meat & Alternates.
I remember that pretty much all fat was viewed (popularly) with caution, at least until Udo Erasmus came out with his book Good Fat, Bad Fat.
But I do recall a clear message that soda and snacks were unhealthy. It wasn’t as though soda was thought ok just because it was low fat / high carb.
My own experience is that it is fairly easy to identify points of confusion, and the hard part is finding a book or whatever, at the right level, to address that specific point. This is a tough problem to solve with self-teaching.
I happened upon this website once previously and couldn’t quickly come to an assessment of the project, before moving on. I assume from your comment you feel this is a worthwhile project? I’d be interested to hear your take on it.
This seems like a great question to me and I’m bummed I can’t answer it. But here’s a toy model that might help a bit.
Take a 2-dimensional spacetime shaped like the surface of a vertical cylinder, with space being the 1-dimensional equatorial circles, and time going vertically. Some of the straight lines in this space are slanted lines just going around and around the cylinder forever, and objects following those as world lines would sort of appear to oscillate around a point traveling along an exact vertical world line.
Anyway that model’s only 2-dimensional, and the bigger problem is it’s not the right type of geometry (it’s Riemannian not Lorentzian). Also the cylinder is flat, not curved. But maybe it still helps.
For what’s actually ideal, I would suggest (if you find it interesting) reading about technical clothing for mountaineering and winter camping and adapting that to city fashion—but if you want some helpful more affordable tips, what works for me is many layers.
For example, long sleeve undershirt and long underwear from Walmart. T-shirt over the undershirt, cheap sweatshirt hoodie over that. Thin pajama style pants over the long underwear. For me anyway, this can be completely comfortable under an outer layer of only jeans and just an autumn jacket up to maybe −15C or −20C.
Thin cotton gloves under big mitts or heavier gloves. Thin socks under heavy socks. For items where it’s more difficult to layer, such as a toque or scarf (or socks if shoes limit the room), wool is pretty good and is affordable, thick, and sturdy at Army Surplus stores, at least here in Canada.
I would also suggest, don’t neglect extremities or any body parts. For example, I remember once my thighs being very cold wearing only jeans (no long underwear), even though I had an extremely warm parka and was walking briskly.
I’ve found personally that even fairly thin pajama type pants, if you have say two layers under jeans, can keep you pretty comfortable even up to maybe −30C. Since you have in mind a meetup, I feel that even for example students on a budget, could get extremely adequate winter clothing this way at a Walmart in Canada that would enable them to stand outside inactively for 3-4 hours at up to −25C, say.
I think The Economic Consequences of Noise Traders is one of those papers.
I agree that the type of action needed to address the parenteral nutrition example would be very unlikely to arise from a hypothetical online crowd action platform.
I think much of the purpose here is to brainstorm what the most effective version of such a platform could look like, and thereby also get a picture about what class of problems such a platform might be able to address or help with.
Is your position that that class of problems is small, and/or those problems are better addressed by existing solutions anyway? Maybe that’s right. We are largely brainstorming here to gauge whether a marginal improvement is possible (and probably hoping that a big improvement is).
Actually Raemon asked specifically about such possible negative outcomes here. I only point it out because I think you make a valuable point and I’d be interested to see any further discussions of it.
Thanks a bunch that is the one!
I have a foggy memory of someone here (I think it was gwern) linking to an article about simulation interface design. It built up examples based on a bird’s eye view of a car steering down a road. I haven’t been able to find it, anyone know a link to the article?
I can tell you a reason I’ve cryocrastinated. I don’t expect the reason to hold up under scrutiny. It held up under my half-hearted scrutiny, but so what? I have low confidence in my own ability to be rational. In fact, I’d be grateful if someone can eliminate this worry for me.
So, the reason is concern about dystopian or hellish scenarios. For a cartoon of such a scenario, think I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
One thought I had was that these scenarios are so unlikely that if I felt they warranted avoiding cryonics, I’d also feel they warranted preventative suicide. I’m confused about where I stand on this, but in any case preventative suicide is an action I am absolutely unable to take, whereas not signing up for cryonics is easy.
Thanks if you can straighten this out for me.
Thanks! FWIW your high opinion of the project counts for a lot with me; I will allocate more attention to it and seriously consider donating.
Definitely interested, especially if there are more details you can give about the options bets you mentioned in this comment.
I’m only vaguely informed about options with no experience buying them, so I likely need to learn more before I can ask useful questions about this, but I don’t want to miss the opportunity to say I’d definitely be interested in any thoughts you might be considering posting, since I’m interested in this type of general bet on AI progress.
Anyway, I know you can’t give investment advice and don’t expect you to teach me how options work, so I guess I’m just hoping for details that help figure out if I’m thinking about this correctly, specifically with respect to using options to bet on certain short AI timeline scenarios.(For concreteness, my general understanding is something like: say I decide the bet to make is on GOOG stock. So I set aside $X per month to buy “long call” options on GOOG as you indicate in this comment. And I should be prepared to typically lose all of that $X each month, unless the bet pays off.)
In the book Mere Thermodynamics by Don S. Lemons published in 2009, I was quite surprised to read: “While the caloric theory of heat is plausible and to this day remains useful in limited circumstances …”
This is the only book on thermodynamics I’ve ever read, so I can’t really elaborate on those limited circumstances, unfortunately.
On occasion I’ve reflected about whether I care about a beautiful statue no one would ever see. Let’s say it’s in a hole somewhere. I don’t know whether I care or not, but it seems possible to care.
You can modify the question a bit. What about a statue not just that no one would ever see, but that no one would ever know about. Or what about a statue that’s impossible to ever even know about, like in a separate universe or something.
I’ve got nothing concrete to add about that, just that your point 1. made me think of these questions I’ve asked myself.
I have a low attention span but I read through your entire document and when I reached the end I was surprised because I had the impression I was still reading the preliminary part. So, for what it’s worth, I found it easy to get through.
Does UDASSA include concepts like the “observer graph” and “graph machine” that Muller describes in the paper? Is Muller just filling out details that are inevitable once you have the core UDASSA concept?
Same problem for me. And I agree, seems like it would take a lot of ingenuity to turn a solution to this problem into a viable business. Maybe products aiding rat-race opt-out strategies, coordination tech enabling 20 hour work weeks.… I don’t really have any specific ideas.
But to answer the second question, I feel like I would pay a great deal for something like this. Hard to quantify since solutions offered might be partial, and a total solution might eliminate income, etc.; but just to illustrate (and ignoring things like extreme saving for early retirement, etc.) between the options A. and B. ---
A. $80,000/year at 40 hours a week
B. third party company L somehow enables me to earn $40,000/year at 20 hours a week in the same job with the same employer as above, but company L takes a 25% cut of my pay (so $10,000 a year to company L)
--- I’d gratefully choose option B. (which is just to give a sense of my intuitive preference, not saying I’d defend the merits of that choice necessarily).
Michael Vassar makes some observations about this in this chat from about 37:50-40:30. He begins describing something called a “hexayurt tridome”, some kind of portable desert structure, and finishes saying “for the cost of engineering the 2016 Toyota Corolla and with the level of engineering skill required to engineer the 2016 Toyota Corolla it would probably be possible to engineer a house that would cost less than a Toyota Corolla and that could be deployed more easily and be adequate for any climate pretty much anywhere in the world where there’s a reasonable amount of free space”.