All of benjaminikuta's Comments + Replies

How do you know one effect is bigger than the other? 

1James Stephen Brown
I don't mean to assert that one effect is bigger than the other, more that together they create a vicious cycle. No one disputes that bad decisions can lead to poverty, that's common sense, or that other factors influence it, but if poverty itself is a multiplier it stands to reason that that needs to be addressed as part of any potential solution. The next post (dropping Saturday) is about how, in such coordination problems, multiple factors must align in order for any one solution to be effective.

I would bet that sunscreen dwarfs all other effects in the long run 

7Anders Lindström
You mean in a positive or negative way? Harmful? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5615097/ , and/or useless? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447210/ 

"At least one adult member of the applicant's household must be documentably employed at the time of the application"

1Steve French
Great!

Can I subscribe to your newsletter?

This isn't anything fundamentally new, is it? You could have the same discussion in the past about say, books. Goods and services that exist only in the realm of ideas have been around for ages. 

I was in California for a wedding, but give everyone my regards. See you next time! 

One of the highest rated photos in the Optimized Dating discord server is a guy posing with his cats. 

Couldn't they just tax bitcoin mining and come out ahead overall? 

2Noosphere89
Potentially, but that would require a lot of bitcoin people to admit that government intervention in their activity is at least sometimes good, and given all the other flaws of bitcoin like having irreversible transactions, it truly is one of those products that isn't valuable at all in the money role except in extreme edge cases, and pretty much all other inventions had more use than this, which is why I think that in order for crypto to be useful, you need to entirely remove the money aspect via some means, and IMO, governments are the most practical means of doing so.

I don't see how this can't reasonably be called procrastination. 

1Neil
These are all sub-types of procrastination. In my experience, thinking about this as "procrastination" is less helpful than ignoring that word entirely and finding the specific reason why I'm procrastinating instead. I'm not trying to redefine procrastination, only saying that you may want to taboo it. 
1tcheasdfjkl
Here it is! 

Parents think it's not okay to roll a toy down the slide, seriously? 

3juliawise
Generally they're opposed to using toys not as intended. It is kinda dicey given they can't easily see if anyone is at the bottom of the slide, but the worst that happens is someone gets knocked over.

Regardless of the cause, there's something to be said for being so dedicated. 

Seems impractical if your income is a salary, which is quite common. But anyway thanks for posting this, it's very interesting. It's cool that there's a whole well documented community devoted to the workings of tax collection from an adversarial perspective. 

High income rats are presumably disproportiatly likely to want a passport. 

Don't be so influenced by what Netflix deems suitable to show you. 

Worrying about extinction is one thing, and we're nowhere near that point, but does the pro fertility case rely on the philosophical assumption that more people is better? Surely you can see how some people might not find that very compelling.

2Radford Neal
I think that various "pro-fertility" people have a variety of motivations. But "more people are better" ought to be a belief of everyone, whether pro-fertility or not.  It's an "other things being equal" statement, of course - more people at no cost or other tradeoff is good.  One can believe that and still think that less people would be a good idea in the current situation.  But if you don't think more people are good when there's no tradeoff, I don't see what moral view you can have other than nihilism or some form of extreme egoism. BTW: I'm not ruling out an expansive definition of "people" - maybe gorillas are people, maybe some alien species are, maybe some AIs would be - but I think that's outside the scope of the current discussion.

I think plenty of guys would be willing to settle for less than perfect. 

Could this work with email? Some emails are productive, and some are procrastination. 

I share your frustration. I made ONE downvoted comment and then was restricted for quite some time. 

1Alex Vermillion
I wanted to muse on this more: Part of the back of my mind wondered if the comment was "bad enough" to be worth it, but then I realized it doesn't really matter, because the tradeoff is average positive karma versus single negative karma. If you have an average karma of +3, then a single -50 will take an extremely long time to recover from, even if it was something silly like your comment being misinterpreted as hostile. On balance, I agree with you, but I thought it was worth sharing why.
3GeneSmith
No, nothing new yet. I've just been buying a bit of the major AI-related companies; Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and TSMC.

Just wanted to register my complaint that I find it somewhat annoying to be rate limited, and somewhat surprising this wasn't targeted more specifically at new users, which was the impression I got from earlier posts. Also I would have commented earlier, but each time I thought to do it was when I was rate limited, lol. 

You can get long term leverage buying deep in the money calls and rolling them.

Hey, is this still happening?

Related, but, I've talked with multiple rats who, after some convincing, basically admitted, "Yeah, assuming it would actually work, I suppose I actually would push the nuclear button, but I would never admit it, because saying so would have various negative effects." 

I also oppose the prior against financial advice, especially crypto, considering Bitcoin is one of the ways "rationalists should win". 

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MajyZJrsf8fAywWgY/a-lesswrong-crypto-autopsy

"An underappreciated element is that dishwaters calibrate how much cleaning they do based on the amount of dirt on the dishes."

Interesting. How? 

4ChristianKl
https://www.quora.com/How-does-a-dishwasher-sense-the-dirtiness-of-the-dishes

Kinda amazing that the dishwasher cleans the baked on cheese effectively. 

2jefftk
See also: Put Dirty Dishes in the Dishwasher.

When I canvassed for a political campaign, it was one of the most fun jobs ever because we all lived and partied together. 

The stock market has never declined over a 20 year period, but it has declined over 10 year periods, so if you're particularly risk averse, that could be quite the difference. 

Do you have a source for the misconception being common? 

2GeneSmith
No. This is drawn from my own personal experience reading comments by otherwise knowledgeable academics or professionals in the ART industry. It's also something I read online a lot in forums such as reddit. Inevitably one of the top comments on most articles about human genetic engineering is along the lines of "we don't understand anywhere close to enough about genetics to make the proposed changes". If this is really important to you I can probably find some examples.

The reactionaries might say that the decline of fighting is indicative of the downfall of the masculine western man. 

>standardization and interoperability (e.g. email, the Web

Unfortunately, we're seeing some unwinding of this, as the dominance of gmail makes it impractical to self host (because they refuse to deliver your mail), and with the rise of apps rather than web pages. 

5mingyuan
What, lockdown? Absolutely not. Sticking around in Berkeley? I don't know, probably

These posts are so very wholesome and I enjoy them thoroughly. 

The markets are in moderately fake money, but Manifold dollars do represent charitable contributions

 

They can also be redeemed for high quality shirts! 
 

Also some users are willing to trade real money for Manifold money. 

Backup citizenship! There were some posts about it here I think. 

Plenty more examples. Toiletries for an overnight bag, for one. 

1comsciftw
Benjamin Ikuta, crazy to see you here hah
1Simon Berens
Yeah, this isn't something I have an ugh field around, but having portable versions of travel stuff like shampoo, skincare, and chargers ready to go is nice.

It makes sense that Ukrainian bond yields went up after the invasion, but why did they go up and down more recently? 

1Celer
I wish I knew! Nobody has yet explained it to me, nor do I have any theories I am particularly confident in.

I joined the Optimized Dating discord server and got better photos. 

The most important thing I learned is that if you find yourself in an emergency situation, it is better to do almost anything rather than nothing. Again, if someone stops breathing for any reason, they have only minutes to live. They are dead by default, unless someone intervenes. There is very little you can do to them that is worse than cutting off their oxygen.

In fact, it is probably better to attempt CPR or the Heimlich maneuver than to do nothing, even if you have never been trained and are only guessing, or mimicking what you have seen on television.

 

Unfortunately the legal system doesn't reflect this. 

Unfortunately the legal system doesn't reflect this. 

This claim seemed worth checking, especially since there are multiple legal systems and it would be awful to discourage people from saving lives in one jurisdiction based on the flaws of another, so I looked into it briefly.

From my quick investigation, I think that being sued for providing medical assistance is not a serious concern in the USA, Canada, and the UK (and probably not in most other places but I didn't read much about other places)[1]. Laws protecting rescuers from lawsuits exist in many... (read more)

Does anyone have a link to the LessWrong slack? 

How can you tell he's sad? 

Typically board members are elected by shareholders, and an attacker can win a proxy fight with a relatively small portion of the shares if he can convince other shareholders. 

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