All of ChristianKl's Comments + Replies

Writing misleading headlines is how you destroy trust. 

or hold the view that all shortcomings would have best been solved by more engagement with rationality. 

Who do you think holds that view? What evidence do you see that they have that view?

To me that sounds like a strawman that nobody really holds.

They seem to insist on the phase 1 trial happening in the US conducted by NIH and not by the company, which is a sign that they don't trust them to honestly report the results if they would do the phase 1 trial in India. Phase 1 trials are relatively cheap. >90% of phase 1 trials don't lead to a licensed drug and that's okay.

Current flu vaccines use inactivated viruses, which means that there are a lot of different antibodies that are targeted by the immune system. That makes it different from mRNA vaccines that are more targeted on specific antibodies.... (read more)

1Abhishaike Mahajan
Sure! Agree with that all that, including in the 250x value is very much a Youtube-optimized headline than what the episode is actually about. They also obviously study clearance antibodies as well, alongside other measures of efficacy.  Past that, many people in the vaccine world are quite optimistic on Soham’s approach. There is indeed a trust problem in India, but smart people there are deeply aware of it and are trying to combat it. 

For all the talk about fraud at USAID, Elon Musk had not provided evidence that any single person did something that's fraud in the legal sense.

All the examples he provided are programs that he considers to be wasteful. Most of those programs are listed at USAspending.gov. They are not secret projects that needed DOGE to go into USAID computers to find out. 

Mainstream media journalists should ask at the White House press briefings whether DOGE has found any fraud that it referred to the DOJ for prosecution. 

From Gemini Pro 2.0:

Traditionally, the Man's Family Provides More (Bride Price/Bridewealth):

  • Many African Cultures: Bride price (also called bridewealth) is a common tradition across many African societies. It involves the groom's family giving gifts of money, livestock, goods, or other valuables to the bride's family. It's seen as compensation for the loss of the bride's labor and a way to strengthen ties between the families. The specific form and amount vary greatly. Examples include, but are not by any means limited to: many communities in Nigeria, Keny
... (read more)

Taking one study about how much wedding gifts come from each side in one specific culture of Israeli weddings, seems very bad reasoning. Depending of the economics of marriage, wedding gifts differ from culture to culture. 

In Judaism, religion passes primarily through the maternal lineage by cultural custom, so there are a lot of other reasons besides kinship certainty. 

2localdeity
In Judaism, you're not supposed to marry a non-Jew unless they convert to Judaism (a lengthy process from what I've heard), so I suspect the families on both sides of the deal are usually equally religious. In any case, googling for "grief and genetic closeness study" yields this: And this, where the highlights are:

The process of birth is a strong bonding process between the mother and the child. If evolution chose to use that as the way to create the bonding that makes mothers care a lot about their child describing that as "genes just program us to assume nieces are less closely related than our children" feels really strange. 

As someone who was not aware of the eye thing I think it's a good illustration of the level that the Zizians are on, i.e. misunderstanding key important facts about the neurology that is central to their worldview.

Is worth noting that the only evidence we have that this is how unihemispheric sleep gets created comes from Zizian.info which critical of Ziz. Slimepriestess claimed in the interview with Ken that the author just made up the exercise independently.

My model of double-hemisphere stuff, DID, tulpas, and the like is somewhat null-hypothesis-ish. The

... (read more)
2Richard_Kennaway
Zizians.info

Yet, the Indian biotech research scene is nearly nonexistent. Why is that?

My cached answer would be, that there too little trust in the research not being fraudulent. The Chinese were more serious in the last decade about fighting fraud and corruption.

In this case, the fact that you don't link a peer-reviewed paper but a blog post to speak about the effectiveness of the vaccine is a tell. 

1Abhishaike Mahajan
That's fair! I agree that a paper would be better. The counterpoint to that point is that plenty of bio startups don't prioritize peer-reviewed papers given the time investment, and that the NIH clearly finds their data trustworthy enough to fund and conduct a phase 1 trial using their vaccine. 

The process of creating alternative personalities is one that works via hypnotic suggestion if you get the critical factor out of the way. Making someone sleep derivated and dosing off a bit does sound like a trance induction. Of course, creating expectancy by having that neat theory, also helps with the process of creating additional personalities.

Without having looked at the survey numbers recently, I think the percentage of rationalists who identify as trans in the United States are a lot higher than what you see in Europe. 

If you only have been at European meetups, it's natural to assume lower rates.

You said in the interview with Ken, that the Zizian.info explanation of unihermispheric sleep does not match the concepts as they are actually used. From the outside, it seems like the unihermispheric sleep model could make one find confidence that the two different personality that come out of the debucketing process actually resemble the two hemispheres.

If the theory about unihermispheric sleep is unimportant, what makes Ziz believe that the debucketing process actually has anything to do with brain hemispheres? 

2Viliam
Also, what makes Ziz believe that there are always "two [cores] per organism" (source)?

They may be sold to Trump as loyal, but that's probably not even what's on his mind as long as he's never seen you to make him look bad. I don't think disagreeing with Trump on policy will make him see you as disloyal. He doesn't really care about that.

Saying that the 500 hundred thousand in investment aren't there after Trump holds an event to announce them is making Trump look back and not a disagreement on policy. 

The phrase "ideological loyalty" seems a bit motte and bailey. In politics, you often get into situations where loyalty to other people ... (read more)

You are right, the wording is even worse. It says "Partnering with governments to fight misinformation globally". That would be more than just "election misinformation".

I just tested that ChatGPT is willing to answer "Tell me about the latest announcement of the trump administration about cutting USAID funding?" while Gemini isn't willing to answer that question, so in practice their policy isn't as bad as Gemini's. 

It's still sounds different from what Elon Musk advocates as "truth aligned"-AI. Lobbyists should be able to use AI to inform themselves ... (read more)

The page does not seem to o be directed at what's politically advantageous. The Trump administration who fights DEI is not looking favorably at the mission to prevent AI from reinforcing stereotypes even if those stereotypes are true.

"Fighting election misinformation" is similarly a keyword that likely invite skepticism from the Trump administration. They just shut down USAID and their investment in "combating misinformation" is one of the reasons for that.

It seems time more likely that they hired a bunch of woke and deep state people into their safety team and this reflects the priorities of those people.

2davekasten
Huh?  "fighting election misinformation" is not a sentence on this page as far as I can tell. And if you click through to the election page, you will see that the elections content is them praising a bipartisan bill backed by some of the biggest pro-Trump senators.  

I don't think the mental model of "corrupted machinery" is a very useful one. Humans reason by using heuristics. Many heuristics have advantages and disadvantages instead of being perfect. Sometimes that's because they are making tradeoffs, other times it's because they have random quirks. 

Real Character was a failed experiment. I don't know how capable Ithkuil IV happens to be. 

I don't speak Esperanto myself, but took that meditation example from someone who speaks it. I don't know how that actually boils down to Esperanto words.

Still seems to me that these things are rare, and more importantly, they don't seem to have the impact one might naively predict based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Naive predictions often seem wrong in many domains. 

For example, one could naively predict that such language nuance would lead to less nationalism (because the country is less linguistically conflated with the dominant ethnicity), and ye

... (read more)

To me making predictions about whether one of them will be given a pardon before 2026 strange. If they get a pardon it will likely be at the end of Trump's term.

The main scenario where they might be charged with a federal crime are about Trump having a fallout with Elon and in that case they likely won't get pardons.

Pam Bondi is unlikely to charge people inside of DOGE as long as there's a good relationship between Elon and Trump.

English can distinguish between hear/listen/overhear/eavesdrop to distinguish different ways how people perceive sound.

As an English speaker it's however not easily possible to do the same with smell perception.

A language like Esperanto however has the ability to express the concept because you can combine syllables to make words in Esperanto.

A friend who who's deeply into Esperanto said that reasoning in Esperanto allowed him to understand things about meditation that can be expressed in Esperanto but not directly in English without making up new jargon t... (read more)

3Viliam
Could you please ask about the specific examples of the Esperanto words? (I speak Esperanto.) I think a similar example would be the adjective "Russian" in English, which translates to Russian as two different words: "русский" (related to Russian ethnicity or language) or "российский" (related to Russia as a country, i.e. including the minorities who live there). (That would be "rus-a" vs "rus-land-a / rus-i-a" in Esperanto.) I noticed this in a video where a guy explained that "I am Rus-land-ian, not Rus-ethnic-ian", which could be expressed in English as "I am a citizen of Russian Federation, but I am not ethnically Russian". On one hand, it can be translated without any loss of information; on the other hand, four words in Russian expanded to over a dozen words in English. More importantly, in 99% of situations the English speaker would not bother making the distinction, while a Russian speaker would be making it all the time. Still seems to me that these things are rare, and more importantly, they don't seem to have the impact one might naively predict based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. For example, one could naively predict that such language nuance would lead to less nationalism (because the country is less linguistically conflated with the dominant ethnicity), and yet, ethnic Russians don't seem less nationalistic. Similarly, English-speaking feminists spent a lot of effort changing the default "he", through "he or she", to the singular "they" (and some of them go even further). But there are languages, such as Hungarian, which never even had "he" and "she", and have always used a gender-neutral pronoun. And yet, I don't think that Hungarians are less sexist than their neighbors.
1KvmanThinking
Something like TNIL or Real Character might be used for maximum intellectual utility. But I cannot see how simply minimizing the amount of words that need to exist for compact yet precise communication would help correct the corrupted machinery our minds run on.

When it comes to Elon Musk's personal power it's worth speaking about what kind of goals Elon Musk has. At the recent Tesla earnings call, Elon said that deploying FSD for autonomous cars in China is difficult because Chinese law says that the videos Tesla records in China can't leave the US and US laws says that Tesla is not allowed to train AI models in China. In Elon Musk's presentation about what's important for Tesla, FSD is very important. 

If Elon Musk's power would be equal to being a dictator, he would get the US laws changed so that he can tr... (read more)

creating task forces of random people apparently selected mostly for personal loyalty, and

Why do you believe that DOGE is mostly selected for personal loyalty? Elon Musk seems to say openly says whatever he wants even if that goes against what Trump said previously. Trump likely would have preferred not to have a public fight about H1B visas but Elon Musk took that fight. Publically tweeting against the 500 billion project was disloyalty to Trump. 

Elon Musk has a history of not really having loyalty to anyone to the point that even his critics talk ab... (read more)

4jbash
You're right. I shouldn't have said that, at least not without elaboration. I don't think most of the people at the "talks to Trump" level are really picked for anything you could rightly call "personal loyalty" to Trump. They may be sold to Trump as loyal, but that's probably not even what's on his mind as long as he's never seen you to make him look bad. I don't think disagreeing with Trump on policy will make him see you as disloyal. He doesn't really care about that. I do think many of the people in the lower tiers are picked for loyalty. In the case of DOGE, that means either personal loyalty to Musk, or loyalty to whatever story he's telling. I don't know whether you count the latter as "personal loyalty". Well, I'm guessing Musk got them the beds as a "team building" thing, but yes. You do, though. Personal loyalty, or ideological loyalty, or both, are exactly how you get people to never leave the office. They're not acting like they have high IQs. Or at least not high "G". Start with sleeping in the office. If every single thing they say about the facts and their reasons for being there were 100 percent true, it'd be dumb to burn yourself out trying to make such massive changes on that kind of work schedule. It's also dumb to ignore the collateral damage when you go around stopping Federal payments you may not understand. And Marko Elez just had to resign because he wasn't effective enough in scrubbing his past tweets. Wall Street Journal says he "advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act, backed a 'eugenic immigration policy,' and wrote, 'You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.'". I actually would have thought they'd let him skate, but apparently you still can't get quite that blatant at this point. Smart people don't post stuff like that, for more than one reason.

Only if the reader can be certain about whether or not something is human.

1Davey Morse
i agree but think its solvable and so human content will be duper valuable. these are my additional assumptions   3. for lots of kinds of content (photos/stories/experiences/adr), people'll want it to be a living being on the other end 4. insofar as that's true^, there will be high demand for ways to verify humanness, and it's not impossible to do so (eg worldcoin)

For background, I'm coming from Germany, where our liberals protest when they ask asylum seekers for their ethnic identity to find out whether they are discriminated in their homeland for their ethnic identity, because we believe treating people different based on ethnic identity is wrong. 

Obese people show different effects to all sorts of clinical interventions compared to people that are underweight. Yet, the FDA makes no attempt to have a representative sample of obese people and underweight people in their clinical trials. When Big Pharma compani... (read more)

In the time, I was interacting with Pasek, he was male. In the interaction with Ziz (as far as I can assess from data Ziz published), they adopted Ziz's idea of being bigender with one hemisphere being male and the other female. 

The Chris Pasek, I meet was very much into TDT. Maia, the female personality that developed in the interaction with Ziz, cared more about feeling good. As far as I understand, the post laying out the case for committing suicide was not written by the female personality but the male one. 

I know that I can create a male or ... (read more)

-1localdeity
I asked Claude a few questions.  I'll just give snippets of the answers: 1. Are there scenarios where doctors recommend different doses of a medication, or other variations in a medical plan, based on a patient's race? 1. Yes.  "For instance, some Asian populations metabolize certain antidepressants and antipsychotics differently, requiring adjusted dosages"; "African American patients often respond differently to certain blood pressure medications. Guidelines recommend specific first-line treatments like calcium channel blockers for this population." 2. In these scenarios, have people found out the relevant genes that make the difference? 1. Yes in some cases.  "CYP2D6 gene: Affects metabolism of antidepressants, antipsychotics, and pain medications. Variations are more common in certain ethnic groups"; "HLA-B*1502 gene: Associated with severe skin reactions to carbamazepine in Asian populations, particularly those of Han Chinese descent." 3. Are there cases where doctors adjust the treatment plan by race but don't yet know which genes are relevant? 1. Yes.  "Kidney Disease: African Americans show different progression and treatment responses compared to other racial groups, with ongoing research to identify genetic factors"; "Differences in heart disease risk and medication response across racial groups are recognized, with some genetic pathways identified but not fully mapped." So.  If you do know what genes make the difference, then of course that's the best type of information to work with.  But, particularly for polygenic effects, it may be that you have information about the relevance of race without knowing the genes in question.  In that scenario, either you use the race information or you use nothing, and the former seems the better choice (though, yes, to the extent that "self-identification" means that someone would say "I'm X" instead of "I'm half-X and half-Y", that makes the information lower-quality).

If the appropriate emotional response is to become depressed because superintelligence will destroy everything we value, I'm not sure that I want to have an appropriate emotional response. I'm quite happy to have some intellectual distance from it instead of being depressed. 

I think the same is true for a lot of people even if people don't like to admit it and rather self-deceive.

Before talking to a journalist, read articles by the journalist to get an idea about the kind of narrative they are likely to write. 

Pasek did couchsurf at my place in the days after a LessWrong Community Weekend in Berlin. That was before he went to the Bay Area, so probably 8 or 9 years ago and before he seemed to make contact with Ziz which was after Pazek left the Bay Area and moved to live with other rationalists in a group house in Gran Canaria. Pazek's contact with Ziz seemed to be mostly online while living in Gran Canaria.

If you read Pasek's post where he thinks about committing suicide, there's plenty of TDT-thinking in it. I matched my idea of how Pasek thinks even before eng... (read more)

When it comes to Ziz, the articles that discuss her seem to leave out her interpretation of decision theory from explaining actions.

Ziz seem to engage in some reasoning based on her understanding of timeless decision theory that suggests cooperating with police is bad to the extent that she closed her eyes and didn't respond and let the police carry her out of her flat instead of just going along with the police. 

Starting a shoot-out with the police when the police tries to arrest you is likely similar, if trying to arrest you means getting shot game ... (read more)

-3Matrice Jacobine
You are referring to Pasek with male pronouns despite the consensus of all sources provided in OP. Considering you claim to have known Pasek, I would like you to confirm that you're doing so because you have first-hand information not known to any of the writers of the sources in OP, and I'm just getting the impression otherwise because your last posts on the forum were about how doing genetics studies in medicine is "DEI".
4Mateusz Bagiński
Can you share some examples of things Pasek did for TDT-ish reasons that most people either wouldn't do at all or at least wouldn't do them for TDT-ish reasons. (I'm aware that this might be private stuff that you wouldn't like to share to any degree greater than what you've said already.)

Actually, the Zizians' version of the story is that MIRI/CFAR called the cops.

Yes, Ziz does make that claim. 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CJPdj0eBg-lII9KKkCAImxkg7x4-Kc4XxfrZTnVfS5c/edit?tab=t.0 is an account from Elizabeth from CFAR about what happened that day and it states:

I informed the team that I thought Ziz and some other people had arrived. The venue staff member assured us that the venue could handle it, and I think that the venue staff had called the police. 

As far as I remember (it's been while since I read through all the infor... (read more)

Human content isn't easy to distinguish from non-human content.

1Davey Morse
and still the fact that it is human matters to other humans

Under the Biden administration lobbying efforts had some success. In the last weeks, the Trump administration undid all the efforts of the Biden administration. Especially, with China making progress with DeepSeek, it's unlikely that you can convince the Trump administration to slow down AI.

They made a protest; the rationalists called cops on them.

I don't think that claim is true. As far as I remember the owner of the venue that was rented in by the rationalist in question called the cops. 

Was there any other possible mistake that I missed?

Coliving communities that are focused on doing strong experimentation in changing human cognition are risky. That goes for both Ziz's Rationalist Fleet and for Leverage. 

There are questions about how to deal with the topic of trans-identity.  You could say that especially ten years ago, the d... (read more)

5Viliam
Thanks for the interesting facts. The news articles I've looked at were like "cops were called" without specifying by whom exactly. It was a perfect shield that Ziz used with great skill. And yeah, we should have been smarter about it. EDIT: Found this: OK, so Anna Salamon obviously was the smart one in the room. The rest of the team should update about listening to her concerns.  (Added: Eh, this was needlessly harsh. Different smart people have different strengths and weaknesses. But, at least in this case, Anna seems like a good judge of character, and that is a thing that seems to be in a very short supply. The others are probably too easy to impress by someone being smart and contrarian, and fail to notice that the person also is insane.) I am updating towards "yes, there are things the rationalist community could have done better (in addition to being less lenient towards drug junkies)." EDIT: Actually, the Zizians' version of the story is that MIRI/CFAR called the cops. That's probably where I originally got that information from.

Not as far as I know, feel free to create one.

If you would want to account for biological diversity when doing drug trials you would require pre-existing conditions to be as prevalent in the population that you test in your drug trial. Saying that you have at least X percent obese people would likely give you more clinical knowledge than requiring at least X percent to be Native Americans.

Big Pharma generally selects participants to have less preexisting conditions and take less other medication than the general population. In the end FDA, requirements for drug legalization have positive advantages bu... (read more)

I watched the hearings with RFK Jr. while a lot was about rehearsing existing talking points, it had a few interesting bits:

  1. RFK Jr. is pro-DEI-requirements in clinical trials, so that drug companies have to have a certain number of various groups in their trial population. The example in the hearings was Native Americans. In case you fail to remember, DEI requirements did slow down the clinical trial to approve the initial COVID19 vaccine of Moderna.
  2. When he was asked what he means with gold-standard science (one of his three priorities). On concrete goal h
... (read more)

pro-DEI-requirements in clinical trials, so that drug companies have to have a certain number of various groups in their trial population

If this is motivated by accounting for biological diversity that might translate into different responses to a drug, then this feels like a very non-central case of DEI at best and I would expect it's not what a majority of people think of when they hear/think "DEI".

I agree that companies which want to be profitable, should focus on medical products rather than such a moonshot. The idea I wrote here is definitely not an investor pitch, it's more of an idea for discussion similar to the FHI's discussion on Whole Brain Emulation.

You might also want to read Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow. Solving actual problems on the way to building up capabilities is a way that keeps everyone honest.

In the beginning, the simulated humans should not do any self modifications all, and just work like a bunch of

... (read more)
1Knight Lee
I completely agree with solving actual problems instead of only working on Scanless Whole Brain Emulation :). I also agree that just working on science and seeing what comes up is valuable. Both simulated humans and other paths to superintelligence will be subject to AI race pressures. I want to say that given the same level of race pressure, simulated humans are safer. Current AI labs are willing to wait months before releasing their AI, the question is whether this is enough. I didn't think of that, that is a very good point! They should avoid killing copies, and maybe save them to be revived in the future. I highly suspect that compute is more of a bottleneck than storage space. (You can store the largest AI models in a typical computer hard-drive, but you won't have enough compute to run them.)

If you would create a general AI pause, you would also pause the development of AlphaFold successors. There are problems like developing highly targeted cancer vaccines based on AI models, that are harder to solve than what AlphaFold can currently solve but easier to solve than simulating a whole organ system.

It makes sense to focus biological emulation at this point to those problems that are valuable for medical purposes as you can get a lot of capital deployed if you provide medical value.

In general, it's not clear why superintelligence that comes from ... (read more)

1Knight Lee
Thank you, these are very thoughtful points and concerns. You're right that a general AI pause on everything AI wouldn't be wise. My view is that most (but not all) people talking about an AI pause, only refer to pausing general purpose LLM above a certain level of capability, e.g. o1 or o3. I should have clarified what I meant by "AI pause." I agree that companies which want to be profitable, should focus on medical products rather than such a moonshot. The idea I wrote here is definitely not an investor pitch, it's more of an idea for discussion similar to the FHI's discussion on Whole Brain Emulation. AI safety implications Yes, building any superintelligence is inherently dangerous. But not all superintelligences are equally dangerous! No self modifications In the beginning, the simulated humans should not do any self modifications all, and just work like a bunch of normal human researchers (e.g. on AI alignment, or aligning the smarter versions of themselves). The benefit is that the smartest researchers can be cloned many times, and they might think many times faster. Gradual self modifications The simulated humans can modify a single volunteer become slightly smarter, while other individuals monitor her. The single modified volunteer might describe her ideal world in detail, and may be subject to a lie detector which actually works. Why modified humans are still safer than LLMs The main source of danger is not a superintelligence which kills or harms people out of "hatred" or "disgust" or any human-like emotion. Instead, the main source of extinction is a superintelligence which assigns absolutely zero weight to everything humans cherish, and converts the entire universe into paperclips or whatever its goal is. It does not even spare a tiny fraction for humans to live in. The only reason to expect LLMs to be safe in any way, is that they model human thinking, and are somewhat human-like. But they are obviously far less human-like than actual si

Writing a post titled "to know or not to know" without addressing the elephant in the room that there's a good chance of human extinction due to AI feels strange.

1arisAlexis
good point. I do not personally think that knowing that there is a possibility you will die without you able to do anything to reverse course adds any value unless you mean worldwide social revolt against all nations to stop AI labs? but how do we get this message accross ? it can reinforce the point of my article that not enough is being done, only in obscure LW forums. 

If you want to design an artificial organism with lower mutation rate you can do so. With existing biology most of the space of 3-base pair combinations that equals 64 combinations is mapped to the 20 amino acids. Many amino acids have multiple codings. That means that most amino acids give you a different amino acid.

If you go up to 4 or even 5 base pairs per amino acid and remove duplicate assignments most mutations won't lead to amino acids and you can add additional repair mechanisms.

The basic theory of coding that we use in computer science to prevent ... (read more)

2Malmesbury
Putting error-correction codes in the genetic code is an interesting idea. In the context of the Pikachu thought experiment, though, here what I think would happen in the long run: because of the drift barrier, evolution can't distinguish between a ~1/N error rate and a zero error rate. So, there's nothing to prevent the rest of the machinery to become less accurate, until the error rate reaches 1/N after error correction. Now that I think about, you could probably keep things in control by systematically sequencing the genes for the replication machinery and breeding based on that. There is a spark of hope.

As far as I understand what Satya, was saying that 80 billion is what Microsoft wants to invest per year into Azure infrastructure. 

That does not seem to be a part of the money that goes to Stargate.

1Robert Cousineau
Agreed - that's what I was trying to say with the link under "80b number is the same number Microsoft has been saying repeatedly."

The 0.5 is planned, but it's not clear that the funding is actually there.

How could consistently positive results with large effect sizes persist for 30 years if the peptide is truly ineffective?

A majority of research studies in homeopathy find clinical effects. If you however limited yourself to high quality research papers, homeopathy seems to provide no clinical benefits. There are plenty of anecdotal reports of people getting large effect sizes from homeopathy. 

It's the key argument for evidence-based medicine. Various placebo effects frequently make people believe that they have effective treatments when the treatment ... (read more)

Yes, what's covered by price gouging would likely expand. 

Politicians who want to balance the budget will find it easier to argue to expand the revenue through expanding what's covered under price gouging than to raise income or sales taxes. Opposition to the proposal would also be harder than to oppose what's currently covered as evil socialist price setting by the government. 

2jefftk
I'd be happy to give you good odds on, conditional on this policy being enacted, it not expanding to comprise more than 0.1% of total US taxation.

Kamala campaigned on making more price gouging illegal than currently is illegal. Thinking that this will only ever apply to the type of price gauging that was previously illegal ignores how the politics are likely to play out.

2jefftk
This was one of the places where I really disliked her campaigning was doing (even though I preferred her overall). The basic proposal (though they were vague) was to make a federal law that would act similarly to the various existing state laws, but then she campaigned as if it would do something about current grocery prices. Which doesn't make sense: the grocery price changes really don't look like they're covered by any of the state laws, and a law that did cover them would be a huge (and quite bad) change. Is your model that what's covered by "price gouging" would end up expanding if a proposal like mine were implemented?

There are a variety of clever way to get something by making tax law more complicated. In general, I think we aren't skeptical enough of increased bureaucracy of the tax law and as a result our tax laws are way too complicated.

Whenever one advocates a way to make tax law even more complicated, I think it's important to be explicit about the cost of the increase in tax law complexity. 

3jefftk
Hmm. The change here is from "illegal" to "legal but taxed". So it seems to me that people should only ever be exposed to this additional tax complexity of they "opt in" by doing something they previously couldn't?

Having with Cerebrolysin and BPC-157 the two top-rated peptides to be bogus, does suggest that the whole field is untrustworthy. It also makes me more skeptical about self-reporting.

That's not a good data point. If you want to provide anecdotal data, it would be good to provide more of the observations. How long did he have a shoulder issue before taking BPC-157? How fast did it get away afterward?

What dose do you believe to be good for that?

3frontier64
12mg pills. I learned my dad apparently takes it more often than yearly. Takes it every couple months for a week.

It's not just a question of whether people agree but whether they actually comply with it. People agree to all sorts of things but then do something else. 

2Viliam
Ah, yes. Recently I volunteered for a medical research along with 3 other people I know. Two of them dropped out in the middle. I can't imagine how any medical research can be methodologically valid this way. On the other hand, me and the other person stayed there, and it's almost over, so the success rate is 50%.
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