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by sarahconstantin
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[-]sarahconstantin11121
  • Psychotic “delusions” are more about holding certain genres of idea with a socially inappropriate amount of intensity and obsession than holding a false idea. Lots of non-psychotic people hold false beliefs (eg religious people). And, interestingly, it is absolutely possible to hold a true belief in a psychotic way.
  • I have observed people during psychotic episodes get obsessed with the idea that social media was sending them personalized messages (quite true; targeted ads are real) or the idea that the nurses on the psych ward were lying to them (they were).
  • Preoccupation with the revelation of secret knowledge, with one’s own importance, with mistrust of others’ motives, and with influencing others' thoughts or being influenced by other's thoughts, are classic psychotic themes.
    • And it can be a symptom of schizophrenia when someone’s mind gets disproportionately drawn to those themes. This is called being “paranoid” or “grandiose.”
    • But sometimes (and I suspect more often with more intelligent/self-aware people) the literal content of their paranoid or grandiose beliefs is true!
      • sometimes the truth really has been hidden!
      • sometimes people really are lying to you or trying to manipulate yo
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Reply221
[-]davekasten434

I once saw a video on Instagram of a psychiatrist recommending to other psychiatrists that they purchase ear scopes to check out their patients' ears, because:
1.  Apparently it is very common for folks with severe mental health issues to imagine that there is something in their ear (e.g., a bug, a listening device)
2.  Doctors usually just say "you are wrong, there's nothing in your ear" without looking
3.  This destroys trust, so he started doing cursory checks with an ear scope
4.  Far more often than he expected (I forget exactly, but something like 10-20%ish), there actually was something in the person's ear -- usually just earwax buildup, but occasionally something else like a dead insect -- that was indeed causing the sensation, and he gained a clinical pathway to addressing his patients' discomfort that he had previously lacked

Reply2
3trevor
This reminds me of dath ilan's hallucination diagnosis from page 38 of Yudkowsky and Alicorn's glowfic But Hurting People Is Wrong. It's pretty far from meeting dath ilan's standard though; in fact an x-ray would be more than sufficient as anyone capable of putting something in someone's ear would obviously vastly prefer to place it somewhere harder to check, whereas nobody would be capable of defeating an x-ray machine as metal parts are unavoidable.  This concern pops up in books on the Cold War (employees at every org and every company regularly suffer from mental illnesses at somewhere around their base rates, but things get complicated at intelligence agencies where paranoid/creative/adversarial people are rewarded and even influence R&D funding) and an x-ray machine cleanly resolved the matter every time.
[-]tailcalled133

Tangential, but...

Schizophrenia is the archetypal definitely-biological mental disorder, but recently for reasons relevant to the above, I've been wondering if that is wrong/confused. Here's my alternate (admittedly kinda uninformed) model:

  • Psychosis is a biological state or neural attractor, which we can kind of symptomatically characterize, but which really can only be understood at a reductionistic level.
  • One of the symptoms/consequences of psychosis is getting extreme ideas at extreme amounts of intensity.
  • This symptom/consequence then triggers a variety of social dynamics that give classic schizophrenic-like symptoms such as, as you say, "preoccupation with the revelation of secret knowledge, with one’s own importance, with mistrust of others’ motives, and with influencing others' thoughts or being influenced by other's thoughts"

That is, if you suddenly get an extreme idea (e.g. that the fly that flapped past you is a sign from god that you should abandon your current life), you would expect dynamics like:

  • People get concerned for you and try to dissuade you, likely even conspiring in private to do so (and even if they're not conspiring, it can seem like a conspiracy). In response
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Reply
7Dagon
Thank you, this is interesting and important.  I worry that it overstates similarity of different points on a spectrum, though. In a certain sense, yes.  In other, critical senses, no.  This is a case where quantitative differences are big enough to be qualitative.  When someone is clinically delusional, there are a few things which distinguish it from the more common wrong ideas.  Among them, the inability to shut up about it when it's not relevant, and the large negative impact on relationships and daily life.  For many many purposes, "hiding it better" is the distinction that matters. I fully agree that "He's not wrong but he's still crazy" is valid (though I'd usually use less-direct phrasing).  It's pretty rare that "this sounds like a classic crazy-person thought, but I still separately have to check whether it's true" happens to me, but it's definitely not never.
5kave
I imagine they were obsessed with false versions of this idea, rather than obsession about targeted advertising?
6sarahconstantin
no! it sounded like "typical delusion stuff" at first until i listened carefully and yep that was a description of targeted ads.
1AprilSR
For a while I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about specifically the versions of the idea where I couldn't easily tell how true they were... which I suppose I do think is the correct place to be paying attention to?
4Amalthea
One has to be a bit careful with this though. E.g. someone experiencing or having experienced harassment may have a seemingly pathological obsession on the circumstances and people involved in the situation, but it may be completely proportional to the way that it affected them - it only seems pathological to people who didn't encounter the same issues.
2Seth Herd
If it's not serving them, it's pathological by definition, right? So obsessing about exactly those circumstances and types of people could be pathological if it's done more than will protect them in the future, weighing in the emotional cost of all that obsessing. Of course we can't just stop patterns of thought as soon as we decide they're pathological. But deciding it doesn't serve me so I want to change it is a start. Yes, it's proportional to the way it affected them - but most of the effect is in the repetition of thoughts about the incident and fear of future similar experiences. Obsessing about unpleasant events is natural, but it often seems pretty harmful itself. Trauma is a horrible thing. There's a delicate balance between supporting someone's right and tendency to obsess over their trauma while also supporting their ability to quit re-traumatizing themselves by simulating their traumatic event repeatedly.
1Amalthea
This seems way too strong, otherwise any kind of belief or emotion that is not narrowly in pursuit of your goals is pathological. I completely agree that it's important to strike a balance between revisiting the incident and moving on. This seems partially wrong. The thoughts are usually consequences of the damage that is done, and they can be unhelpful in their own right, but they are not usually the problem. E.g. if you know that X is an abuser and people don't believe you, I wouldn't go so far as saying your mental dissonance about it is the problem.
3Michael Roe
Some psychiatry textbooks classify “overvalued ideas” as distinct from psychotic delusions. Depending on how wide you make the definition, a whole rag-bag of diagnoses from the DSM V are overvalued ideas (e.g, anorexia nervosa over valuing being fat).
[-]sarahconstantin434

"Most people succumb to peer pressure", https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/u3919iPfj

  • Most people will do very bad things, including mob violence, if they are peer-pressured enough.
  • It's not literally everyone, but there is no neurotype or culture that is immune to peer pressure.
    • Immunity to peer pressure is a rare accomplishment.
    • You wouldn't assume that everyone in some category would be able to run a 4-minute mile or win a math olympiad. It takes a "perfect storm" of talent, training, and motivation.
    • I'm not sure anybody "just" innately lacks the machinery to be peer-pressured. That's a common claim about autistics and loners, but I really don't think it fits observation. Lots of people "don't fit in" in one way, but are very driven to conform in other social contexts or about other topics.
    • Evidence that any culture (or subculture), present or past, didn't have peer pressure seems really weak.
      • there are environments where being independent-minded or high-integrity is valorized, but most of them still have covert peer-pressure dynamics.
    • Possibly all robust resistance to peer pressure is intentionally cultivated?
      • In other words, maybe it's not enough for a person to just not happ
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Reply21
8Garrett Baker
I think the reason not to do this is because of peer pressure. Ideally you should have the bad pressures from your peers cancel out, and in order to accomplish this you need your peers to be somewhat decorrelated from each other, and you can't really do this if all your peers and everyone you listen to is in the same social group.
7localdeity
What is categorized as "peer pressure" here?  Explicit threats to report you to authorities if you don't conform?  I'm guessing not.  But how about implicit threats?  What if you've heard (or read in the news) stories about people who don't conform—in ways moderately but not hugely more extreme than you—having their careers ruined?  In any situation that you could call "peer pressure", I imagine there's always at least the possibility of some level of social exclusion. The defining questions for that aspect would appear to be "Do you believe that you would face serious risk of punishment for not conforming?" and "Would a reasonable person in your situation believe the same?".  Which don't necessarily have the same answer.  It might, indeed, be that people whom you observe to be "conformist" are the ones who are oversensitive to the risk of social exclusion.
2Gunnar_Zarncke
We call it  "peer pressure" when it is constraining the individual (or at least some of them) without providing perceived mutual value. It is the same mechanism that leads to people collaborating for the common good. The interesting question is which forces or which environments lead to a negative sum game.
6Vanessa Kosoy
I kinda agree with the claim, but disagree with its framing. You're imagining that peer pressure is something extraneous to the person's core personality, which they want to resist but usually fail. Instead, the desire to fit in, to be respected, liked and admired by other people, is one of the core desires that most (virtually all?) people have. It's approximately on the same level as e.g. the desire to avoid pain. So, people don't "succumb to peer pressure", they (unconsciously) choose to prioritize social needs over other considerations. At the same time, the moral denouncing of groupthink is mostly a self-deception defense against hostile telepaths. With two important caveats: * Having "independent thinking" as part of the ethos of a social group is actually beneficial for that group's ability to discover true things. While the members of such a group still feel the desire to be liked by other members, they also have the license to disagree without being shunned for it, and are even rewarded for interesting dissenting opinions. * Hyperbolic discount seems to be real, i.e. human preferences are time-inconsistent. For example, you can be tempted to eat candy when one is placed in front of you, while also taking measures to avoid such temptation in the future. Something analogous might apply to peer pressure.
2Gunnar_Zarncke
I think the comparison to pain is correct in the sense that some part of the brain (brainstem) is responding to bodily signals in the same mechanistic way as it is to pain signals. The desire to fit in is grounded in something. Steven Byrnes suggests a mechanism in Neuroscience of human social instincts: a sketch. 
5leogao
I won't claim to be immune to peer pressure but at least on the epistemic front I think I have a pretty legible track record of believing things that are not very popular in the environments I've been in.
5Nutrition Capsule
As for a specific group of people resistant to peer pressure - psychopaths. Psychopaths don't conform to peer pressure easily - or any kind of pressure, for that matter. Many of them are in fact willing to murder, sit in jail, or otherwise become very ostracized if it aligns with whatever goals they have in mind. I'd wager that the fact that a large percentage of psychopaths literally end up jailed speaks for itself - they just don't mind the consequences that much. This is easily explained due to psychopaths being fearless and mostly lacking empathy. As far as I recall, some physiological correlates exist - psychopaths have a low cortisol response to stressors compared to normies. On top of the apparent fact that they are indifferent towards others' feelings, some brain imaging data supports this as well. What they might be more vulnerable to is that peer pressure sometimes goes hand in hand with power and success. Psychopaths like power and success, and they might therefore play along with rules to get more of what they want. That might look like caving in to peer pressure, but judging by how the pathology is contemporarily understood, I'd still say it's not the pressure itself, but the benefits aligned with succumbing to it.
4Garrett Baker
Seems like the sort of thing that would correlate pretty robustly to big-5 agreeableness, and in that sense there are neurotypes immune to peer pressure. Edit: One may also suspect a combination of agreeableness and non-openness
3Myron Hedderson
"Peer pressure" is a negatively-valanced term that could be phrased more neutrally as "social consequences". Seems to me it's good to think about what the social consequences of doing or not doing a thing will be (whether to "give in to peer pressure", and act in such a way as to get positive reactions from other people/avoid negative reactions, or not), but not to treat conforming when there is social pressure as inherently bad. It can lead to mob violence. Or, it can lead to a simplified social world which is easier for everyone to navigate, because you're doing things that have commonly understood meanings (think of teaching children to interact in a polite way). Or it can lead to great accomplishments, when someone internalizes whatever leads to status within their social hierarchy. Take away the social pressure to do things that impress other people, and lots of people might laze about doing the minimum required to have a nice life on the object-level, which in a society as affluent as the modern industrialized world is not much. There are of course other motivations for striving for internalized goals, but like, "people whose opinion I care about will be impressed" is one, and it does mean some good stuff gets done. Someone who is literally immune to peer pressure to the extent that social consequences do not enter their mind as a thing that might happen or get considered at all in their decision-making, will probably face great difficulties in navigating their environment and accomplishing anything. People will try fairly subtle social pressure tactics, they will be disregarded as if they hadn't happened, and the person who tried it will either have to disengage from the not-peer-pressurable person, or escalate to more blunt control measures that do register as a thing this person will pay attention to. Even if I'm right about "is immune to peer pressure" not being an ideal to aim for, I still do acknowledge that being extremely sensitive to what others may
3Raemon
Is there a particular reason to believe this? Or is it more of a hope?
4sarahconstantin
it's an introspection/lived-experience/anecdotes from other people kind of thing, i don't have data, but yes i do believe this is true.
4Viliam
I think what might help is engaging with different kinds of people. A group's pressure is weaker if you also meet people who openly believe that the group is a group of idiots. You can voice your concerns without fearing disapproval; but even if some things are difficult to explain to outsiders, at least you have a mental model of someone who would disagree. But I also suspect that some people would just develop a different persona for each group, and let themselves be peer-pressured towards different extremes on different occasions.
4Gunnar_Zarncke
That is possible but maybe only more likely if the groups are very clearly separate, such as when you are in a faraway country for a long time. But if you are e.g. in a multi-cultural city where there are many maybe even overlapping groups or where you can't easily tell which group it is, it is more difficult to "overfit" and easier to learn a more general strategy. I think universal morality is something of the more general case of this.
2Viliam
Julian Jaynes would say that this is how human consciousness as we know it today has evolved. Which makes me wonder, what would he say about the internet bubbles we have today. Did we perhaps already reach peak consciousness, and now the pendulum is swinging back? (Probably not, but it's an interesting thought.)
1paragonal
Shouldn't this be weighted against the good things people do if they are peer-pressured? I think there's value in not conforming but if all cultures have peer-pressure there needs to be a careful analysis of the pros and cons instead of simply strifing for immunity from it. My first thought here aren't autists but psychopaths.
-4InquilineKea
My fear is that this will extend to many aspects of the Trump administration (just look at how it's vetting people based on who they voted for/if they believe in the 2020 election results), esp b/c some people who work in the government are now deleting their old tweets...
[-]sarahconstantin42-53
  • “we” can’t steer the future.
  • it’s wrong to try to control people or stop them from doing locally self-interested & non-violent things in the interest of “humanity’s future”, in part because this is so futile.
    • if the only way we survive is if we coerce people to make a costly and painful investment in a speculative idea that might not even work, then we don’t survive! you do not put people through real pain today for a “someday maybe!” This applies to climate change,  AI x-risk, and socially-conservative cultural reform.
  • most cultures and societies in human history have been so bad, by my present values, that I’m not sure they’re not worse than extinction, and we should expect that most possible future states are similarly bad;
  • history clearly teaches us that civilizations and states collapse (on timescales of centuries) and the way to bet is that ours will as well, but it’s kind of insane hubris to think that this can be prevented;
  • the literal species Homo sapiens is pretty resilient and might avoid extinction for a very long time, but have you MET Homo sapiens? this is cold fucking comfort! (see e.g. C. J. Cherryh’s vision in 40,000 in Gehenna for a fictional representation no
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[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply321111
[-]tailcalled1513
  • it’s wrong to try to control people or stop them from doing locally self-interested & non-violent things in the interest of “humanity’s future”, in part because this is so futile.
    • if the only way we survive is if we coerce people to make a costly and painful investment in a speculative idea that might not even work, then we don’t survive! you do not put people through real pain today for a “someday maybe!” This applies to climate change,  AI x-risk, and socially-conservative cultural reform.

How does "this is so futile" square with the massive success of taxes and criminal justice? From what I've heard, states have managed to reduce murder rates by 50x. Obviously that's stopping people from something violent rather than non-violent, but what's the aspect of violence that makes it relevant? Or e.g. how about taxes which fund change to renewable energy? The main argument for socially-conservative cultural reform is fertility, but what about taxes that fund kindergartens, they sort of seem to have a similar function?

The key trick to make it correct to try to control people or stop them is to be stronger than them. 

Reply
[-]Raemon141

I think this prompts some kind of directional update in me. My paraphrase of this is:

  • it’s actually pretty ridiculous to think you can steer the future
  • It’s also pretty ridiculous to choose to identify with what the future is likely to be.

Therefore…. Well, you don’t spell out your answer. My answer is "I should have a personal meaning-making resolution to 'what would I do if those two things are both true,' even if one of them turns out to be false, so that I can think clearly about whether they are true."

I’ve done a fair amount of similar meaningmaking work through the lens of Solstice 2022 and 2023. But that was more through lens of ‘nearterm extinction’ than ‘inevitability of value loss', which does feel like a notably different thing.

So it seems worth doing some thinking and pre-grieving about that.

I of course have some answers to ‘why value loss might not be inevitable’, but it’s not something I’ve yet thought about through an unclouded lens.

Reply
4sarahconstantin
Therefore, do things you'd be in favor of having done even if the future will definitely suck. Things that are good today, next year, fifty years from now... but not like "institute theocracy to raise birth rates", which is awful today even if you think it might "save the world".
2Raemon
Ah yeah that’s a much more specific takeaway than I’d been imagining.
[-]Chris_Leong114

I honestly feel that the only appropriate response is something along the lines of "fuck defeatism"[1].

This comment isn't targeted at you, but at a particular attractor in thought space.

Let me try to explain why I think rejecting this attractor is the right response rather than engaging with it.

I think it's mostly that I don't think that talking about things at this level of abstraction is useful. It feels much more productive to talk about specific plans. And if you have a general, high-abstraction argument that plans in general are useless, but I have a specific argument why a specific plan is useful, I know which one I'd go with :-).

Don't get me wrong, I think that if someone struggles for a certain amount of time to try to make a difference and just hits wall after wall, then at some point they have to call it. But "never start" and "don't even try" are completely different.

It's also worth noting, that saving the world is a team sport. It's okay to pursue a plan that depends on a bunch of other folk stepping up and playing their part.

  1. ^

    I would also suggest that this is the best way to respond to depression rather than "trying to argue your way out of it".

Reply1
2sarahconstantin
I'm not defeatist! I'm picky. And I'm not talking specifics because i don't want to provoke argument.
8Myron Hedderson
What about influencing? If, in order for things to go OK, human civilization must follow a narrow path which I individually need to steer us down, we're 100% screwed because I can't do that. But I do have some influence. A great deal of influence over my own actions (I'm resisting the temptation to go down a sidetrack about determinism, assuming you're modeling humans as things that can make meaningful choices), substantial influence over the actions of those close to me, some influence over my acquaintances, and so on until very extremely little (but not 0) influence over humanity as a whole. I also note that you use the word "we", but I don't know who the "we" is. Is it everyone? If so, then everyone collectively has a great deal of say about how the future will go, if we collectively can coordinate. Admittedly, we're not very good at this right now, but there are paths to developing this civilizational skill further than we currently have. So maybe the answer to "we can't steer the future" is "not yet we can't, at least not very well"?   Agree, mostly. The steering I would aim for would be setting up systems wherein locally self-interested and non-violent things people are incentivized to do have positive effects for humanity's future. In other words, setting up society such that individual and humanity-wide effects are in the same direction with respect to some notion of "goodness", rather than individual actions harming the group, or group actions harming or stifling the individual. We live in a society where we can collectively decide the rules of the game, which is a way of "steering" a group. I believe we should settle on a ruleset where individual short-term moves that seem good lead to collective long-term outcomes that seem good. Individual short-term moves that clearly lead to bad collective long-term outcomes should be disincentivized, and if the effects are bad enough then coercive prevention does seem warranted (E. G., a SWAT team to prevent a mass s
7Tao Lin
I disagree a lot! Many things have gotten better! Is sufferage, abolition, democracy, property rights etc not significant? All the random stuff eg better angels of our nature claims has gotten better. Either things have improved in the past or they haven't, and either people trying to "steer the future" in some sense have been influential on these improvements. I think things have improved, and I think there's definitely not strong evidence that people trying to steer the future was always useless. Because trying to steer the future is very important and motivating, i try to do it. Yes the counterfactual impact of you individually trying to steer the future may or may not be insignificant, but people trying to steer the future is better than no one doing that!
3sarahconstantin
"Let's abolish slavery," when proposed, would make the world better now as well as later. I'm not against trying to make things better! I'm against doing things that are strongly bad for present-day people to increase the odds of long-run human species survival.
7tailcalled
Proposal: For any given system, there's a destiny based on what happens when it's developed to its full extent. Sight is an example of this, where both human eyes and octopus eyes and cameras have ended up using lenses to steer light, despite being independent developments. "I love whatever is the destiny" is, as you say, no loyalty and no standards. But, you can try to learn what the destiny is, and then on the basis of that decide whether to love or oppose it. Plants and solar panels are the natural destiny for earthly solar energy. Do you like solarpunk? If so, good news, you can love the destiny, not because you love whatever is the destiny, but because your standards align with the destiny.
3Raemon
People who love solarpunk don't obviously love computronium dyson spheres tho
4tailcalled
That is true, though: 1) Regarding tiling the universy with computronium as destiny is Gnostic heresy. 2) I would like to learn more about the ecology of space infrastructure. Intuitively it seems to me like the Earth is much more habitable than anywhere else, and so I would expect sarah's "this is so futile" point to actually be inverted when it comes to e.g. a Dyson sphere, where the stagnation-inducing worldwide regulation regulation will by-default be stronger than the entropic pressure. More generally, I have a concept I call the "infinite world approximation", which I think held until ~WWI. Under this approximation, your methods have to be robust against arbitrary adversaries, because they could invade from parts of the ecology you know nothing about. However, this approximation fails for Earth-scale phenomena, since Earth-scale organizations could shoot down any attempt at space colonization.
2Eli Tyre
Are you saying this because you worship the sun?
2tailcalled
I would more say the opposite: Henri Bergson (better known for inventing vitalism) convinced me that there ought to be a simple explanation for the forms life takes, and so I spent a while performing root cause analysis on that, and ended up with the sun as the creator.
4Unnamed
This post reads like it's trying to express an attitude or put forward a narrative frame, rather than trying to describe the world. Many of these claims seem obviously false, if I take them at face value at take a moment to consider what they're claiming and whether it's true. e.g., On the first two bullet points it's easy to come up with counterexamples. Some successful attempts to steer the future, by stopping people from doing locally self-interested & non-violent things, include: patent law ("To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries") and banning lead in gasoline. As well as some others that I now see that other commenters have mentioned.
2Said Achmiz
It seems like it makes some difference whether our civilization collapses the way that the Roman Empire collapsed, the way that the British Empire collapsed, or the way that the Soviet Union collapsed. “We must prevent our civilization from ever collapsing” is clearly an implausible goal, but “we should ensure that a successor structure exists and is not much worse than what we have now” seems rather more reasonable, no?
2Mitchell_Porter
Is it too much to declare this the manifesto of a new philosophical school, Constantinism?
[-]sarahconstantin120

wait and see if i still believe it tomorrow!

Reply2
4sarahconstantin
I don't think it was articulated quite right -- it's more negative than my overall stance (I wrote it when unhappy) and a little too short-termist. I do still believe that the future is unpredictable, that we should not try to "constrain" or "bind" all of humanity forever using authoritarian means, and that there are many many fates worse than death and we should not destroy everything we love for "brute" survival. And, also, I feel that transience is normal and only a bit sad. It's good to save lives, but mortality is pretty "priced in" to my sense of how the world works. It's good to work on things that you hope will live beyond you, but Dark Ages and collapses are similarly "priced in" as normal for me. Sara Teasdale: "You say there is no love, my love, unless it lasts for aye; Ah folly, there are episodes far better than the play!" If our days are as a passing shadow, that's not that bad; we're used to it. I worry that people who are not ok with transience may turn themselves into monsters so they can still "win" -- even though the meaning of "winning" is so changed it isn't worth it any more.
1nc
I do think this comes back to the messages in On Green and also why the post went down like a cup of cold sick - rationality is about winning. Obviously nobody on LW wants to "win" in the sense you describe, but more winning over more harmony on the margin, I think. The future will probably contain less of the way of life I value (or something entirely orthogonal), but then that's the nature of things.
2Noosphere89
I think 2 cruxes IMO dominate the discussion a lot that are relevant here: 1. Will a value lock-in event happen, especially soon in a way such that once the values are locked in, it's basically impossible to change values? 2. Is something like the vulnerable world hypothesis correct about technological development? If you believed 1 or 2, I could see why people disagreed with Sarah Constantin's statement on here.
1ZY
I have been having some similar thoughts on the main points here for a while and thanks for this. I guess to me what needs attention is when people do things along the lines of "benefit themselves and harm other people". That harm has a pretty strict definition,  though I know we may always be able to give borderline examples. This definitely includes the abuse of power in our current society and culture, and any current risks etc. (For example, if we are constraining to just AI with warning on content, https://www.iwf.org.uk/media/q4zll2ya/iwf-ai-csam-report_public-oct23v1.pdf.  And this is very sad to see.) On the other hand, with regards to climate change (can also be current too) or AI risks, it probably should also be concerned when corporates or developers neglect known risks or pursue science/development irresponsibly. I think it is not wrong to work on these, but I just don't believe in "do not solve the other current risks and only work on future risks." On some comments that were saying our society is "getting better" - sure, but the baseline is a very low bar (slavery for example). There are still many, many, many examples in different societies of how things are still very systematically messed up.
-4StartAtTheEnd
You seem to dislike reality. Could it not be that the worldview which clashes with reality is wrong (or rather, in the wrong), rather than reality being wrong/in the wrong? For instance that "nothing is forever" isn't a design flaw, but one of the required properties that a universe must have in order to support life?
[-]sarahconstantin339

"weak benevolence isn't fake": https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/ic5Xitb70

  • there's a class of statements that go like:
    • "fair-weather friends" who are only nice to you when it's easy for them, are not true friends at all
    • if you don't have the courage/determination to do the right thing when it's difficult, you never cared about doing the right thing at all
    • if you sometimes engage in motivated cognition or are sometimes intellectually lazy/sloppy, then you don't really care about truth at all
    • if you "mean well" but don't put in the work to ensure that you're actually making a positive difference, then your supposed "well-meaning" intentions were fake all along
  • I can see why people have these views.
    • if you actually need help when you're in trouble, then "fair-weather friends" are no use to you
    • if you're relying on someone to accomplish something, it's not enough for them to "mean well", they have to deliver effectively, and they have to do so consistently. otherwise you can't count on them.
    • if you are in an environment where people constantly declare good intentions or "well-meaning" attitudes, but most of these people are not people you can count on, you will find yourself caring
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Reply2
6johnswentworth
Sounds like it's time for a reboot of the ol' "join the dark side" essay.
6Raemon
I want to register in advance, I have qualms I’d be interested in talking about. (I think they are at least one level more interesting than the obvious ones, and my relationship with them is probably at least one level more interesting than the obvious relational stance)
5Algon
The picture I get of Chinese culture from their fiction makes me think China is kinda like this. A recurrent trope was "If you do some good deeds, like offering free medicine to the poor, and don't do a perfect job, like treating everyone who says they can't afford medicine, then everyone will castigate you for only wanting to seem good. So don't do good." Another recurrent trope was "it's dumb, even wrong, to be a hero/you should be a villain." (One annoying variant is "kindness to your enemies is cruelty to your allies", which is used to justify pointless cruelty.) I always assumed this was a cultural anti-body formed in response to communists doing terrible things in the name of the common good.
[-]sarahconstantin270

links 10/25/24: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-25-2024

 

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[-]sarahconstantin153

neutrality (notes towards a blog post): https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/Ql9YwmLas

  • "neutrality is impossible" is sort-of-true, actually, but not a reason to give up.
    • even a "neutral" college class (let's say a standard algorithms & data structures CS class) is non-neutral relative to certain beliefs
      • some people object to the structure of universities and their classes to begin with;
      • some people may object on philosophical grounds to concepts that are unquestionably "standard" within a field like computer science.
      • some people may think "apolitical" education is itself unacceptable.
        • to consider a certain set of topics "political" and not mention them in the classroom is, implicitly, to believe that it is not urgent to resolve or act on those issues (at least in a classroom context), and therefore it implies some degree of acceptance of the default state of those issues.
      • our "neutral" CS class is implicitly taking a stand on certain things and in conflict with certain conceivable views. but, there's a wide range of views, including (I think) the vast majority of the actual views of relevant parties like students and faculty, that will find nothing to object to in the class.
    • w
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2Viliam
Things that many people consider controversial: evolution, sex education, history. But even for mathematical lessons, you will often find a crackpot who considers given topic controversial. (-1)×(-1) = 1? 0.999... = 1? In general, unschooling. In my opinion, the important functionality of schools is: (1) separating reliable sources of knowledge from bullshit, (2) designing a learning path from "I know nothing" to "I am an expert" where each step only requires the knowledge of previous steps, (3) classmates and teachers to discuss the topic with. Without these things, learning is difficult. If an autodidact stumbles on some pseudoscience in library, even if they later figure out that it was bullshit, it is a huge waste of time. Picking up random books on a topic and finding out that I don't understand the things they expect me to already know is disappointing. Finding people interested in the same topic can be difficult. But everything else about education is incidental. No need to walk into the same building. No need to only have classmates of exactly the same age. The learning path doesn't have to be linear, could be a directed oriented graph. Generally, no need to learn a specific topic at a specific age, although it makes sense to learn the topics that are prerequisites to a lot of knowledge as soon as possible. Grading is incidental; you need some feedback, but IMHO it would be better to split the knowledge into many small pieces, and grade each piece as "you get it" or "you don't". ...and the conclusion of my thesis is that a good educational system would focus on the essentials, and be liberal about everything else. However, there are people who object against the very things I consider essential. The educational system that would seem incredible free for me would still seem oppressive to them. That means you can have a system neutral towards selected entities (the ones you want in the coalition), but not others. For example, you can have religious toler
[-]sarahconstantin140

links 12/10/24: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-10-2024

  • https://hedy.org/hedy Hedy, an educational Python variant that works in multiple languages and has tutorials starting from zero
  • https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunking/ Patrick McKenzie on "debanking"
    • tl;dr: yes, lots of legal businesses get debanked; no, he disagrees with some of the crypto advocates' characterization of the situation
    • in more detail:
      • you can lose bank account access, despite doing nothing unethical, for mundane business/credit-risk related reasons like "you are using your checking account as a small business bank account and transferring a lot of money in and out" or "you are a serial victim of identity theft".
        • this is encouraged by banking regulators but fundamentally banks would do something like this regardless.
      • FINCEN, the US treasury's anti-money-laundering arm, shuts down a lot of innocent businesses that do some kind of financial activity (like buying and selling gift cards) without proper KYC/AML controls. A lot of bodegas get shut down.
        • this is 100% a gov't-created issue and it's kind of tragic.
      • FDIC, which guarantees bank deposits in the event of a bank run, is also ta
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2Viliam
Another interesting part from the "debanking" article:
2the gears to ascension
This is talking about dem voters or generally progressive citizens, not dem politicians, correct?
2Viliam
Nope, politicians. SBF donated tons of money to Democrats (and a smaller ton of money to Republicans, just to be sure).
[-]sarahconstantin132

links 12/13/2024:

 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.00695 Minimo, an RL agent for jointly learning both conjectures and proofs in Peano from "intrinsic motivation"

  • what is "intrinsic motivation" in RL?
    • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02298 intrinsic motivation mechanisms include:
      • reward shaping, i.e. comparing the expected value of two possible states, so that the agent gets an incremental "reward" when it moves to a state with higher expected value
      • rewards based on novelty rather than expected success, such as assigning more reward to visiting novel states, or assigning more reward to states with high prediction error relative to the agent's model of the world
      •  
  • https://github.com/p-doom/gc-minimo gc-Minimo, the "goal-conditional" version that involves subgoals
  • https://pdoom.org/ AI organization, research aimed at AGI; young, educated European team, they seem smart (to my unsophisticated eye) and idealistic (they want to share/open-source as much as possible, in contrast to secretive for-profit AI labs)
  • https://news.mit.edu/2024/noninvasive-imaging-method-can-penetrate-deeper-living-tissue-1211  new non-invasive laser imaging technique; label free; 700 nm deep.
    • aka, not useful for subcu
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6Steven Byrnes
I’ve long had a tentative rule-of-thumb that: * medial hypothalamus neuron groups are mostly “tracking a state variable”; * lateral hypothalamus neuron groups are mostly “turning on a behavior” (especially a “consummatory behavior”). (…apart from the mammillary areas way at the posterior end of the hypothalamus. They’re their own thing.) State variables are things like hunger, temperature, immune system status, fertility, horniness, etc. I don’t have a great proof of that, just some indirect suggestive evidence. (Orexin, contiguity between lateral hypothalamus and PAG, various specific examples of people studying particular hypothalamus neurons.) Anyway, it’s hard to prove directly because changing a state variable can lead to taking immediate actions. And it’s really just a rule of thumb; I’m sure there’s exceptions, and it’s not really a bright-line distinction anyway. The literature on the lateral hypothalamus is pretty bad. The main problem IIUC is that LH is “reticular”, i.e. when you look at it under the microscope you just see a giant mess of undifferentiated cells. That appearance is probably deceptive—appropriate stains can reveal nice little nuclei hiding inside the otherwise-undifferentiated mess. But I think only one or a few such hidden nuclei are known (the example I’m familiar with is “parvafox”).
4sarahconstantin
plausible...but surely walking isn't "consummatory"? And turning on the DBS doesn't cause "automatic/involuntary" walking movements.
4Steven Byrnes
Yeah, the word “consummatory” isn’t great in general (see here), maybe I shouldn’t have used it. But I do think walking is an “innate behavior”, just as sneezing and laughing and flinching and swallowing are. E.g. decorticate rats can walk. As for human babies, they’re decorticate-ish in effect for the first months but still have a “walking / stepping reflex” from day 1 I think. There can be an innate behavior, but also voluntary cortex control over when and whether it starts—those aren’t contradictory, IMO. This is always true to some extent—e.g. I can voluntarily suppress a sneeze. Intuitively, yeah, I do feel like I have more voluntary control over walking than I do over sneezing or vomiting. (Swallowing is maybe the same category as walking?) I still want to say that all these “innate behaviors” (including walking) are orchestrated by the hypothalamus and brainstem, but that there’s also voluntary control coming via cortex→hypothalamus and/or cortex→brainstem motor-type output channels. I’m just chatting about my general beliefs.  :)  I don’t know much about walking in particular, and I haven’t read that particular paper (paywall & I don’t have easy access).
[-]sarahconstantin130

"three cultures of self-criticism" https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/zzRZnCLd_

  • non-self-critical culture (Barbarians):
    • baseline assumptions:
      • people generally think they are okay and good, and they are generally right.
      • self-criticism is rare.
      • if someone is being self-critical, guilty, ashamed, etc, that indicates an unusual problem.
    • implications:
      • intense self-criticism will be taken as evidence of something actually wrong with the person -- either they really did screw up quite badly, or they have poor judgment.
      • criticism is direct and overt.
        • if someone objects to what you've done, they'll tell you straight out, and expect that this will clear the air and lead to a resolution of the problem.
        • "negative" judgments are not necessarily intended, or expected, to be painful; the listener may very well disagree with the judgment or find it helpful feedback.
        • as a corollary, nobody assumes that an ambiguous comment or facial expression is a hint at criticism or disapproval. The default assumption is that people are fine with you, that you're fine, and if there's a problem it'll become obvious.
  • pro-self-criticism culture (Puritans):
    • baseline assumptions:
      • people are generally deeply flawed; we a
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[-]sarahconstantin130

links 12/03/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-03-2024

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[-]sarahconstantin121

links 12/4/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-04-2024

  • https://substack.com/home/post/p-149058187 Gena Gorlin hosts a discussion on "psychological safety"
  • https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.21080800  new antidepressant just dropped: bupropion + dexmethorphan, appears to be more effective than bupropion alone
    • registering my concern that someday we will find that NMDA inhibitors do something bad to cognition. but all these recent studies are 6-week only and don't report any side effects that look like cognitive impairment, but maybe wouldn't have been able to pick it up even if it existed.
  • https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/13/things-that-sometimes-work-if-you-have-anxiety/ Scott Alexander on anxiety treatments.
    • "Azapirones (example: BuSpar) is, unusually, a rare drug which is specifically targeted at anxiety, rather than a being a repurposed antidepressant or something. BuSpar is very safe, not at all addictive, and rarely works. Every so often somebody comes out with a very cheerful study saying something like “Buspar just as effective as benzodiazepines if given correctly!” and everybody laughs hysterically and goes back to never thinking ab
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4Viliam
Good point in comments, that different people see different (sometimes opposite) things necessary for psychological safety. For some, it means they can speak candidly about whatever they think and feel. For others, it means that some things cannot be said in their presence. I think, you can make it both, as long as it is one-sided, e.g. in a therapy, where the client could say anything, and the therapist would be careful about their feedback. But this wouldn't work at a workplace or any other larger group... unless you split people into "those who are safe" and "those who have a duty to make them feel safe", and even then, maybe someone in the former group could make someone else from the same group feel unsafe. You make a good point that it is not enough for your boss to tell you "you can speak freely", you must also believe that it is true. (I also have a negative experience here: I was told to speak freely; I did; it had consequences.) This would probably sound more credible if other colleagues are already speaking freely. Also, if you generally don't feel like your job is at risk somehow. For example, if your performance is below the average (and by definition, half of the team is like that), you might believe that neither your performance nor the candor alone would get you fired, but their combination would.
[-]sarahconstantin90

links, 10/14/2024

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4Viliam
It is good to have one more perspective, and perhaps also good to develop a habit to go meta. So that when someone tells you "X", in addition to asking yourself "is X actually true?" you also consider questions like "why is this person telling me X?", "what could they gain in this situation by making me think more about X?", "are they perhaps trying to distract me from some other Y?". Because there are such things as filtered evidence, availability bias, limited cognition; and they all can be weaponized. While you are trying really hard to solve the puzzle the person gave you, they may be using your inattention to pick your pockets. In extreme cases, it can even be a good thing to dismiss the original question entirely. Like, if you are trying to leave an abusive religious cult, and the leader gives you a list of "ten thousand extremely serious theological questions you need to think about deeply before you make the potentially horrible mistake of damning your soul by leaving this holy group", you should not actually waste your time thinking about them, but keep planning your escape. Now the opposite problem is that some people get so addicted to the meta that they are no longer considering the object level. "You say I'm wrong about something? Well, that's exactly what the privileged X people love to do, don't they?" (Yeah, they probably do. But there is still a chance that you are actually wrong about something.) tl;dr -- mentioning the meta, great; but completely avoiding the object level, weakness So, how much meta is the right amount of meta? Dunno, that's a meta-meta question. At some point you need to follow your intuition and hope that your priors aren't horribly wrong. The situation is not symmetric, I agree. But also, it is too easy to underestimate the impact of the settlers. I mean, if you include them in the picture, then the overall Israeli position becomes more like: "Let's live together in peace, and please ignore these few guys who sometimes co
2Raemon
kinda meta, but I find myself wondering if we should handle Roam [[ tag ]] syntax in some nicer way. Probably not but it seems nice if it managed to have no downsides.
5gwern
It wouldn't collide with normal Markdown syntax use. (I can't think of any natural examples, aside from bracket use inside links, like [[editorial comment]](URL), which could be special-cased by looking for the parentheses required for the URL part of a Markdown link.) But it would be ambiguous where the wiki links point to (Sarah's Roam wiki? English Wikipedia?), and if it pointed to somewhere other than LW2 wiki entries, then it would also be ambiguous with that too (because the syntax is copied from Mediawiki and so the same as the old LW wiki's links). And it seems like an overloading special case you would regret in the long run, compared to something which rewrote them into regular links. Adds in a lot of complexity for a handful of uses.
2sarahconstantin
I thought about manually deleting them all but I don't feel like it.
1MichaelDickens
I don't know how familiar you are with regular expressions but you could do this with a two-pass regular expression search and replace: (I used Emacs regex format, your preferred editor might use a different format. notably, in Emacs [ is a literal bracket but ( is a literal parenthesis, for some reason) 1. replace "^(https://.? )([[.?]] )*" with "\1" 2. replace "[[(.*?)]]" with "\1" This first deletes any tags that occur right after a hyperlink at the beginning of a line, then removes the brackets from any remaining tags.
1MichaelDickens
RE Shapley values, I was persuaded by this comment that they're less useful than counterfactual value in at least some practical situations.
[-]sarahconstantin80
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4Viliam
I guess it is difficult to promote the brand of Tough No-Nonsense Prosecutor in the age of Defund The Police. Which is really unfortunate, because it seems like "defund the police" was actually what woke white people wanted. Black people were probably horrified by the idea of giving up and letting the crime grow exponentially at the places they live. Unfortunately, the woke do not care about the actual opinions of the people they speak for. A part of this is the natural "hype - disappointment" cycle. The 21st century is better, but we were promised that it would be 100x better, and it is only maybe 10x better, so now we feel that it sucks. What we would need, psychologically, is probably some disaster that would first threaten to destroy us, but then we would overcome it, and then feel happy that now the future is better than we expected. But we had covid, which kinda fits this pattern, except the popular reaction was opposite: instead of "thanks to the amazing science and technology of the 21st century, we have eradicated a pandemic in a year" the popular wisdom of the cool people became "it was never dangerous in the first place, the evil Americans just tried to scare us". Instead of admiring the mRNA vaccines, people seem outraged that we didn't let more people die naturally instead. Another thing is that people are bad at noticing gradual change. If you could teleport 10 or 20 years in the future, you would be shocked. But if you advance to the future one day at a time, it mostly feels like nothing happens. (Even the proverbial flying cars would be a huge disappointment if we at first got cars that can only fly 1 cm above the surface, and then every year they could get 1 cm higher.) Maybe the people who profit from the fraud want it that way, and lobby against the funding? Uhm, our experience in Eastern Europe is that police was never optimizing for us, and quite often against us.
[-]sarahconstantin60

links 12/9/24

  • https://gasstationmanager.github.io/ai/2024/11/04/a-proposal.html
    • a proposal that tentatively makes a lot of sense to me, for making LLM-generated code more robust and trustworthy.
    • the goal: give a formal specification (in e.g. Lean) of what you want the code to do; let the AI generate both the code and a proof that it meets the specification.
    • as a means to this end, a crowdsourced website called "Code With Proofs: The Arena", like LeetCode, where "players" can compete to submit code + proofs to solve coding challenges. This provides a source of
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3Viliam
Scratch is awesome for kids. My kids love it. My older daughter has afternoon lessons at school, and I help her debug her projects if there is a problem. I am not sure how I would teach her, if I had to start from zero. I found a few videos on how to make games in Scratch, and I learned a lot about Scratch from them, but sometimes the author uses in the algorithm a mathematical expression that seems a bit too complicated for a small child. For example, how to make a moving object stop right before the wall. Like, if it moves 10 pixels each turn, and the wall is 5 pixels ahead, you want it to go 5 pixels at the last step; neither 10 nor 0. The author's solution is to go 10 pixels forward, and then "repeat 10 times: if there is a collision with the wall, go 1 pixel back". (Collisions of pictures are a primitive operation in Scratch.) That sounds trivial, but because the speed could be 10 pixels per turn or -10 pixels for turn, and it's not even guaranteed to be an integer, the algorithm becomes "repeat ceil(abs(V)) times: if there is a collision with the wall, go V/ceil(abs(V)) pixels back", and which point my daughter just says "I don't get it". (This is not a problem with Scratch per se; you could limit the speed to integer, and maybe avoid the absolute value by using an if-statement and doing the positive and negative values separately; and maybe ceil(abs(V)) could be a local variable. I am just saying that the videos are generally great... but you get one or two moments of this per video.) In a bookstore I found a translation of Carol Vorderman's Computer Coding For Kids, which seems good (so it's going to be a Christmas present); the first 1/3 of the book is Scratch, the remaining 2/3 are Python. . I like the definition of disorder as domination of public space for private purposes. As I see it, the problem with informal systems of preventing disorder is that some people are resistant to shame; specifically: * assholes * criminals * homeless * mentally i
[-]sarahconstantin60

links 11/25/2024

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2Viliam
Seems to me that some women believe that when they do something, it is fundamentally different from when a man does exactly the same thing. (Something like the fundamental attribution error, or xkcd#385 but with reversed genders.) For example, if the woman gets angry and yells at someone, it is because that person was really annoying, or she was tired, etc. Simply, she acted that way because of external reasons. But if she sees a man get angry and yell at someone, it's obvious: men are inherently aggressive. (Or maybe, if she is a good feminist, it's because men are privileged.) This way, she can condemn a certain type of behavior and be really emotional about it... and then go and do exactly the same thing -- because in her mind, it is not the same thing at all. Or to use the example from the article, men are inherently rude and intrusive; she faced an interesting situation and was naturally curious about it. To be curious about an interesting thing is a perfectly normal and healthy human reaction. EDIT: I find it interesting - and sad - how the author insists, also in other articles, that their unpleasant experiences must be related to being trans, as opposed to simply being things that sometimes happen to men. For example, "when a cis woman tells a trans person to follow sexist societal rules, she does so to demonstrate her own power". In my experience (as a cis man), when someone reminds me to follow societal rules, it is typically a woman; men usually don't give a fuck about societal rules, they only warn you if you annoy them personally. Just remember the elementary school; who was the first to tell the teachers when someone did something improper?
[-]sarahconstantin60

links 11/08/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-08-2024

 

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[-]sarahconstantin60

links 11/6/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-06-2024

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[-]sarahconstantin60

links 11/05/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-05-2024

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[-]sarahconstantin60

https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-11-2024

 

  • https://www.mindthefuture.info/p/why-im-not-a-bayesian [[Richard Ngo]] [[philosophy]] I think I agree with this, mostly.
    • I wouldn't say "not a Bayesian" because there's nothing wrong with Bayes' Rule and I don't like the tribal connotations, but lbr, we don't literally use Bayes' rule very often and when we do it often reveals just how much our conclusions depend on problem framing and prior assumptions. A lot of complexity/ambiguity necessarily "lives" in the part of the problem that Bayes' rule
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6gwern
One of the interesting things I found when I finally tracked down the source is that one of the improved mazes before that was a 3D maze where mice had to choose vertically, keeping them in the same position horizontally, because otherwise they apparently were hearing some sort of subtle sound whose volume/direction let them gauge their position and memorize the choice. So Hunter created a stack of T-junctions, so each time they were another foot upwards/downwards, but at the same point in the room and so the same distance away from the sound source.
[-]sarahconstantin40

links 12/16/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-16-2024

https://people.mpi-sws.org/~dg/teaching/lis2014/modules/ifc-1-volpano96.pdf the Volpano-Smith-Irvine security type system assigns security levels to variables (like "high" and "low" security). You can either use type checking or information theory inequalities to verify properties like "information can't flow from low to high security."

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[-]sarahconstantin40

links 11/21/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-21-2024

 

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[-]sarahconstantin40

links 11/15/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-15-2024

  • https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1gleyhg/people_like_me_are_the_reason_trump_won/  a moderate/swing-voter (Obama, Trump, Biden) explains why he voted for Trump this time around:
    • he thinks Kamala Harris was an "empty shell" and unlikable and he felt the campaign was manipulative and deceptive.
    • he didn't like that she seemed to be a "DEI hire", but doesn't have a problem with black or female candidates generally, it's just that he resents cynical demographic box-checking.
      • this
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2Viliam
Seems to me that Obama had the level of charisma that Hillary did not. (Neither do Biden or Harris). Bill Clinton had charisma, too. (So did Bernie.) Also, imagine that you had a button that would make everyone magically forget about the race and gender for a moment. I think that the people who voted for Obama would still feel the same, but the people who voted for Hillary would need to think hard about why, and probably their only rationalization would be "so that Trump does not win". I am not an American, so my perception of American elections is probably extremely unrepresentative, but it felt like Obama was about "hope" and "change", while Hillary was about "vote for Her, because she is a woman, so she deserves to be the president". I guess there are people (both men and women) who in principle wouldn't vote for a woman leader. But there are also people who would be happy to give a woman a chance. Not sure which group is larger. But the wannabe woman leader should not make her campaign about her being a woman. That feels like admitting that she has no other interesting qualities. She needs to project the aura of a competent person who just happens to be female. In my country, I have voted for a woman candidate twice (1, 2), but they never felt like "DEI hires". One didn't have any woke agenda, the other was pro- some woke topics, but she never made them about her. (It was like "this is what I will support if you elect me", not "this is what I am".)
3dirk
I voted for Hillary and wouldn't need to think hard about why: she's a democrat, and I generally prefer democrat policies.
[-]sarahconstantin40

links 9/14/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-14-2024

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[-]sarahconstantin40

links 11/13/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-13-2024

 

  • https://amaranth.foundation/bottlenecks-of-aging the Amaranth Foundation's bottlenecks of aging
  • https://www.celinehh.com/aging-field Celine Halioua on what the aging field needs -- notably, more biotech companies that are prepared to run their own clinical trials specifically for aging-related endpoints.
    • a typical new biotech company never runs its own clinical trials -- they license, partner, or get bought by pharma. but pharma's not that into aging (yet) and nobody really has e
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[-]sarahconstantin42

links 10/8/24 https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-08-2024

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[-]sarahconstantin30

links 11/01/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-01-2024

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[-]sarahconstantin30

links 10/1/24

https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-01-2024

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[-]sarahconstantin20

links 11/26/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-26-2024

  • https://chrislakin.blog/archive  sensible, but not actionable for me, advice on becoming less insecure.
  • https://abundance.institute pro-progress think tank, where Eli Dourado works
  • The Myth of Er is the final scene of Plato's Republic.
    • it is a very strange story. in the afterlife, the good are rewarded in heaven and the bad are punished in hell; and then everyone lines up to choose their new reincarnated life. they get to see how each possible life will play out. people who have le
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3CstineSublime
It's been a while since I've read Plato's Republic, but isn't the Myth of Er just a abstraction of the way people make decision based on (perceived) justice and injustice in their everyday life? Just in the same way that Socrates says it is easier to read large print than small print, so he scales up justice from an individual to the titular Kallipolis, so too the day to day determinism of choices motivated by what we consider is 'fair' or 'just' is easier seen if multiplied over endless cycles of lives, than days and nights. Is it possible that Plato was saying that day to day we experience this homeostatic mechanism? (if you are rational enough to observe the patterns of how your choices affect your personal circumstances?). An example from the Republic itself: if I remember correctly the entire dialogue starts because Socrates is in effect kidnapped after the end of a festival because his interlocutors find him so darn entertaining. This would appear to be unjust - but not unexpected because he is Socrates which he has this reputation for being engaging and wise even if it is not the 'right' or 'just' way to treat him. How then should he behave in future, knowing that this is the potential cost of his social behavior? And the Myth of Er says that Odysseus kept to himself, sought neither virtue nor tyranny. That's probably the wrong reading. It's been a while since I've read it.  
[-]sarahconstantin20

links 11/18/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-18-2024

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2Viliam
It would have been nice to read A Journal of the Plague Year during covid.
[-]sarahconstantin20

links 10/30/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-30-2024

 

  • https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10136898/ FRET is a biosensor modality.
    • "FRET is a non-radiative transfer of energy from an excited donor fluorophore molecule to a nearby acceptor fluorophore molecule...When the biomolecule of interest is present, it can cause a change in the distance between the donor and acceptor, leading to a change in the efficiency of FRET and a corresponding change in the fluorescence intensity of the acceptor. This change in fluorescence can be u
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[-]sarahconstantin20

links 10/29/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-29-2024

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[-]sarahconstantin20

links 10/23/24:

https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-23-2024

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[-]sarahconstantin20

links 10/9/24 https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/yI03T5V6t

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[-]sarahconstantin20

links 8/7/2024

https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/yI03T5V6t

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[-]sarahconstantin-10

links 10/4/2024

https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-04-2024

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[-]sarahconstantin-30

links 10/2/2024:

https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-02-2024

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