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This is a cultural thing. In the U.S., even if you're in bad health, if you're health isn't noticeably worse than it was last week, you say you're in good health when you're asked. It's sort of a content-free response, like responding to "How are you?" with "I'm fine".
Americans can only report their health derivative (dx/dt) :)
Who did they poll? If they polled a bunch of university students in boulder Colorado they might well have been correct in thinking themselves highly healthy. A lot of the most unhealthy groups in the US are also poor and somewhat outside te reach of casual academic sampling.
That said, although folks may not be as clueless as it seems, it's still a sad result.
A lot of the most unhealthy groups in the US are also poor and somewhat outside te reach of casual academic sampling.
I assumed that at first too. It turns out even removing the poor or minorities from the sample doesn't fix this gap.
There are more than 17 developed nations.
I guess the study used the modifier "wealthy" along with developed to explain their choice of reference class. I looked at the list and it didn't seem obviously cherry picked. What countries would you add?
The guts of the study lists one (of many) possible causes:
"getting health care depends more on the market and on each person’s financial resources in the U.S. than elsewhere".
Insurance companies should point out to their detractors that they provide a valuable service by making healthcare so inaccessible that Americans no longer have any idea how they're doing. And that given this absence of knowledge, Americans assume they're doing great.
Define "risk averse" I used to buy modalert from India and, based on its effectiveness, I feel confident it was not a fake. The biggest risk, I found out, is having a shipment confiscated by US Customs as it is a controlled substance. I received a letter telling me on no uncertain terms that if they found another shipment of modafinil addressed to me, they would prosecute me as a drug smuggler. That was more risk than I was willing to take. Since even the so-called generic modafinil in this country is so expensive, I now take Ritalin instead of modafini. Ritalin is available in a cheap generic in this country, but has side effects that the modafinil didn't have.
I received a letter telling me on no uncertain terms that if [US Customs] found another shipment of modafinil addressed to me, they would prosecute me as a drug smuggler.
You mean something like this? That's not really as meaningful as it seems. There is always some legal risk associated with doing anything since there are so many US laws that no one has even managed to count them, but a pretty serious search through legal database turns up no records of people being prosecuted for modafinil importation, ever. So that letter is 100% posturing by US Customs.
You should probably conclude from this that you're more likely to be prosecuted for illegally downloading music or jay walking.
And it's obviously everyones' personal choice to decide what level of legal risk they are comfortable with. But a rational person who wanted modafinil should be willing to order it from an online pharmacy at least as often as they're willing to pirate music or jaywalk without fear of prosecution. Otherwise their preferences for assuming legal risk are inconsistent.
In response to
'Life exists beyond 50'
Did I post this in the wrong forum or what? what's with all the down votes?
Yeah, don't be discouraged. LW is just like that sometimes. If you link to something with little or no commentary, it really needs to be directly about rationality itself or be using lots of LW-style rationality in the piece. This was a bit too mainstream to be appreciated widely here (even in discussion).
Glad to see you're posting though! You still in ATL and learning about FAI? I made a post you might like. :)
In response to
Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers
Very interesting list, thanks Louie!
I just randomly clicked on a few links for online courses, and it seems there's at least one issue: The "Probability and Computing" part points to "Analytic Combinatorics, Part I" coursera course, which is not about probability at all. The MIT and CMU links for this part seem wrong too. Someone should carefully go through all the links and fix them.
Just to clarify, I recommend the book "Probability and Computing" but the course I'm recommending is normally called something along the lines of "Combinatorics and Discrete Probability" at most universities. So the online course isn't as far off base as it may have looked. However, I agree there are better choices that cover more exactly what I want. So I've updated it with a more on-point Harvard Extension course.
The MIT and CMU courses both cover combinatorics and discrete probability. They are probably the right thing to take or very close to it if you're at those particular schools.
Thanks again for the feedback Klao.
In response to
Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers
The set theory book only links to an image of the book, not the amazon page,
Fixed. Thanks.
In response to
Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers
Should I contact you if I'm familiar with some of this material (mostly the purer mathematics, leaning away from computer science and towards category theory, plus MoR and the Sequences) and willing to learn the rest? Does SI offer summer internships?
Yep, SI has summer internships. You're already in Berkeley, right?
Drop me an email with the dates you're available and what you'd want out of an internship. My email and Malo's are both on our internship page:
http://singularity.org/interns/
Look forward to hearing from you.
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This belongs to Open Thread.
Yep, you're right. I've never used the Open Threads so I didn't know that. Thanks.