All of CraigMichael's Comments + Replies

We've done some things to combat that,

Are this visible at the typical user level? 

Of course you can, you just have to make the first set of wolves very small. 

Imagine fiancéespace (or fiancéspace) - as in the space of romantic partners that would marry you (assuming you're not married and you want to be). You can imagine "drawing" from that space, but once you draw nearly all of the work is still ahead of you. Someone that was initially "friendly" wouldn't necessarily stay that way, and someone that was unfriendly wouldn't necessarily stay that way. It's like asking "how do you make sure a human mind stays friendly to you forever?" We can't solve that with our lowly ape minds, and I'm not sure that we'd want to.... (read more)

IMO, I think the rationality project/LW is handling these crises far better than EA is doing.

I'm not really sure if they're separable at this point? There's so much overlap and cross-posting, it seems like they have the same blood supply.

Huh... thought I would get disagreement, but not for that reason. Thanks for the feedback. I was trying not to use terms that would appear in searches like FTX, Nick Bostrom or Max Tegmark. I did link to relevant posts where I thought it would be unclear.

Was trying not to specifically mention FTX, Nick Bostrom or Max Tegmark. I wanted to keep the audience to people who were familiar with it and not people Googling the topics who were off-forum and not EA or rationalist types. 

I tried to make that clear in the introduction. 

It was intended to be tonge-in-cheek, but okay, point taken. 

Am with you very much here. Recently decided that I need to start doing this more often. Negative karma isn't really negative karma if you've learned something from the experience.

"Successful" is an odd concept with it comes to social media. Most people would call Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, etc, successful. I think that's like saying oxycontin is successful, or McDonalds is successful, or Doritos is successful.  It depends on the point of view you're looking at it from.

There's an argument to be made that it's better to influence a small number of people profoundly, then influence a large number of people negligibly (as you might do on larger networks, where any influence you might have will be almost entirely washed away by whatever is more viral). In fact, that's why I'm on LessWrong, the scale is more apt.

I considered self-hosting, but an email server is already more complex than I want to manage and a Mastodon server is much more so.

I have no affiliation here, but there's lots of places like masto.host where you can pay to host your own instance. Sure, someone running your VM might do something awful. But... that's cloud hosting. 

I will vouch for the admin of linuxrocks.online, been on their for years (and other than some unfortunate downtime), it's been solid (in the drama-free sense). 

I’m wondering why not just call for mutual disarmament under IAEA supervision? There’s an old, but now very relevant episode of 80000 hours with Daniel Ellsberg;

https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/daniel-ellsberg-doomsday-machines/

I didn’t keep the time stamps, but he gets in to the approximate number of warheads a state should need as a deterrent, and says it's probably not more than 100.

Luisa Rodriguez has an excellent post on the EA forum with fairly current estimates of the downstream effects of a nuclear exchange between US and Russia with the 201... (read more)

Posted three examples that I thought to screencap when they occurred, but if I tracked everything there would be hundreds. https://twitter.com/craigtalbert/status/1586952770170388481?s=20&t=8BtJYArZ9wtMJrJQK2IR4g

I can't say for certain, but my hunch is that you're dead on here.

You were ahead of the curve here.

Yeah... if this happens everyone will have to make their own choices. I may or may not regret mine. Sometimes I feel like the old man here. Like I'm not sure if you were around the Internet when it was a little more wild west. Sites with content like this (CW: euthanasia) were more common. I don't want to be macabre or maudlin or put ideas in anyone's head, but I thought about keeping some of the proven materials to implement that at my disposal given current events... But with the acceleration of things recently, it's like there's a pep in my step that I ... (read more)

You booby trap your house? What if some kids stumble in or something 50 years from now?

Luisa says Rodriguez says a US-Russia exchange is 5.1 to 58 Tg of schmutz in the atmosphere. Her best guess is 31 Tg.  A NATO-Russia exchange would be larger. Important figures below. 31 Tg puts us on the edge of "nuclear autumn." Full scale NATO-Russia is probably nuclear winter.

But even if I did survive, that Hatchet-style life doesn't sound very good.

Maybe. Maybe it will be the first time you really feel alive and some of the most exhilarating moments of your life. It's better to wear out than to rust out, as our grandparents used to say. 

In general humans suck at affective forecasting, so don't discount this so quickly.

I, for one, want to see what happens. Even if it sucks. Even if it's horrible. Even if most of the people I know and love are dead. I believe in humanity, and maybe I don't make 1/2 copies of my genes but my species survives.

These are interesting thoughts.

I know this is CNN, but the source (Robert Baer) seems solid. https://youtu.be/7ZgBSYZb-gk

He says putin used information from Russian spy in the CIA to blackmail Yeltsin.

If we discovered any of them currently active, I wonder if we could deliberately feed them bits of misinformation to steer Putin one way or another?

Or maybe if the undiscovered spies could become something like ironic double agents on their own if the spies are against escalation? On their own imitative they steer things towards de-escalation? Or maybe defect at the last moment to try and stop escalation?

Have you “mentally wargamed” the CIA/MI6 option? Who would replace him? Would they be better or worse? How would Russian citizens respond? Is there anything like an automated event that is suppressed daily by Putin while he is alive but that would be triggered if he dies?

Since you seem to have thought a lot of this through:

Do you have thoughts on the possibility of pre-existing weapons caches in the US or Europe that could be activated remotely by Russia? (Nuclear, chemical, biological, etc)?

Similarly, it seems that every few years we discover Russians sp... (read more)

Marginally Compelling had a great podcast episode with Josh Centers back in March of this year on surviving a nuclear attack. https://polimath.substack.com/p/get-ready-for-nuclear-war-with-josh#details

I haven’t seen it mentioned, so I’m mentioning it.

Even with massive air strikes? Couldn’t they just carpet bomb any Ukrainian military position?

I enjoyed reading this silver-lining comment. :)

It feels less irreversible today.

Thanks. Was feeling crazy for a moment.

Had this same thought. Seems worthy of discussion.

Interesting blog post that some of Russia’s most recent nuclear tech may not work well and may be motivated more to bargain with than to use.

https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1208662/hypersonic-glide-vehicles-what-are-they-good-for/

EDIT: Similar points made here: https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/russias-massively-powerful-nukes-are-strategic-duds/

both posts are prior to Ukraine invasion.

I think it would be a mistake to believe that everything in Russia’s nuclear arsenal is 100% working order.

Sounds there’... (read more)

I suppose this is a reason to keep my AMC+ subscription. Better Call Saul was pretty good, but I didn’t use it for anything else.

Did you finish reading it?

EDIT: Removed "nuclear arsenal not working because Russia didn't bother to maintain them" as I don't find that especially likely on reflection.

What reflection changed your probability here? The probability here seems non-zero to me, and maybe likely. 
 

EDIT: not sure what the down votes are about. Curious as to what made you change your mind.

Careful about assigning anything a 100% probability.

There's potential paths that this model doesn't include. I have to believe that the Five Eyes have done some amount of work to find ways to hamstring Russias nuclear capabilities (I recall stories that "we" were able to sabotage chips in in the supply chain for Iraq's missiles, for example).  Meaning, there's a chance Russia does some kind of nuclear launch and it's horribly botched for one reason or another.  Their own incompetence, supply chain sabotage, etc. They may, then, be reluctant to launch another.

I don't know what a reasonable prior is... (read more)

I may have RSVP'd yes here but forgot this was Yom Kippur. Sorry guys, family plans tonight. 

There can be no clearer proof of the abuse of an emergency than extending it after publicly declaring that it is over.

I disagree. The pandemic is over in the sense that we've learned to live with the virus.  The pandemic is not over in the sense that the social and economic consequences are still with us. So there's a sense in which I can get it.

I know this is old—do you have your research here on lifting and testosterone?

Made it really hard for me to poop normally.

It’s also given via IV, which means bioavailability via digestion wouldn’t apply.

Searching for this on Audible now and not finding it.

Won’t make it up from Denver. Sorry man, but love that area of the state.

That's a nice back patio.

Any issues with bringing my dog?

Okay, yeah, that's a really good point. I'm going to go for 100% compliance with whatever advice I get. I'll put it on my calendar and set a reminder and I'll make sure they know I'm doing this.

Going to look for another TMJ specialist, and based the other comments here likely an osteopath and orthopedist.

I hadn't heard of this before, thank you! 

Thanks for this! I'll ask my PCP the next time I see him (hopefully soon here). 

I switched jobs recently, and it is stressful. So there's that. But with the kind of pain and stuff it feels like it has to be more than just stress, although stress could for sure have been a distal cause.

Do you feel unusually fatigued / sleep deprived? Frequent headaches? mental fog? worse at concentrating lately? short temper?

I've had sleep issues since a traumatic event around 2012. Short temper, yes, but mostly because I'm worried about this and it's kind of exhausting. Not many headaches to speak of. Concentrating has been an issue, but I think that's because my body feels weird and it's distracting. 

It could be, though. I'll discuss it with my PCP next time I see him. It's mostly a diagnosis of exclusion, yeah?

With only Google-knowledge of jaw anatomy, I don't think it's a lymph node, but I could be wrong. Feeling it now (it's better than when I posted originally, but is still fairly sore) it's feels like it's right on the masseter muscle. 

Looking at the image, it's not near the lymph nodes identified. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325947#what-are-they

Feels like it's right on the masseter as shown mid-article here:

http://cioffredi.com/tmd/

And thank you for posting! Every idea is a good one for me here in terms of feeling less hopeless. 

I've been a Wikipedia editor with various degrees of activity for... checking now... wow... 16 years. I'm somewhat unresolved about the cadre of editors that work on all things "alternative medicine" there (mostly people with the userbox linked here). My current model is that they're not granular enough about various degrees of alternative, it's too binary the way they  Like  there's currently two buckets on Wikipedia (alternative and not-alternative) there should be a few buckets: 

(1) evidence decidedly against--it's been studied and was fo... (read more)