All of Dr. Birdbrain's Comments + Replies

Can you say more about what kind of changes you implemented?

A perhaps more interesting interaction is with wills that are managed by trusts. My understanding is that you can put conditions on how the money in a trust will be disbursed to your heirs, for example "as long as they maintain a minimum GPA in college". I have heard lawyers make outrageous jokes like adding a clause that says "as long as they don't marry that person".

It's quite reasonable to expect that some will add a clause to their trust that says "this only pays out if they have placed themselves on the lifetime no-gambling list".

a google search suggests desoxyn might be just be a brand of pharmaceutical-grade meth

Would you mind publishing the protocol?

It has been 3 months, is there an update?

I like (and recommend) creatine. It has a long record on the research literature, and its effects at improving exercise performance are well known. More recent research is finding cognitive benefits—anecdotally I can report I am smarter on creatine. It also blunts the effects of sleep deprivation and improves blood sugar control.

I strongly recommend creatine over some of the wilder substances recommended in this post.

Actually I think the explicit content of the training data is a lot more important than whatever spurious artifacts may or may not hypothetically arise as a result of training. I think most of the AI doom scenarios that say “the AI might be learning to like curly wire shapes, even if these shapes are not explicitly in the training data nor loss function” are the type of scenario you just described, “something that technically makes a difference but in practice the marginal gain is so negligible you are wasting time to even consider it.“

The “accidental tast... (read more)

Creatine is an incredibly powerful intervention. It improves energy management and decreases fatigue at the cellular level, in every single one of your cells. I expect you will notice cognitive enhancements as well as improved energy. However, I personally experience sleep disruptions if I take it on days when I do not exercise. Your mileage may vary, just a note that you might experiment with how much you take and how often you take it if you experience sleeplessness, night sweats, and/or vivid nightmares :)

In my personal experience, cutting carbs makes s... (read more)

I wear my backpack on my front rather than my back, and hug it as I run.

I started doing this after a trip to Tokyo, during which it was brought to my attention that it was rude of me to get on the subway and let my backpack on my back become a hazard to people around me, since I could not see what it was doing behind me.

I don't know enough about your situation to say anything productive. I know that the PhD journey can be confusing and stressful. I hope you are able to have constructive conversations with the profs at your PhD program.

I wonder if it in fact provides useful orientation?

• Sometimes people seem clueless just because we don't understand them, but that doesn't mean they are in fact clueless.
• Does this framework actually explain how diffusion of responsibility works?
• This framework explicitly advises ICs to slack off and try to attain "political playing cards" in an attempt to leapfrog their way into senior management. I wouldn't consider that to be a valuable form of orientation.
• In the absence of a desire to become part of the "sociopath class", the model seems to advice ICs to

It seems to me that the SCL framework is unnecessarily cynical and negative. When I look out at my company and others, the model seems neither accurate nor useful.

• The framework suggests that an IC/loser can get promoted to senior management/sociopath by underperforming and "acquiring playing cards". I have never seen anybody get promoted from IC to senior management, much less by first underperforming. I have of course heard anecdotes of underperforming ICs that get promoted to middle management, but I have never heard of the leapfrog to senior management.

Thanks--could you elaborate on what was fixed? I am a newbie here. Was it something I could have seen from the preview page? If so, I will be more careful to avoid creating unnecessary work for mods.

Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch" presents several examples of PD-type scenarios in which honor/conscience-style mechanisms fail. Generally, honor and conscience simply provide additive terms to the entry of the payoff matrix. These mechanisms can shift the N.E. to a different location, but don't guarantee that the resulting N.E. will not produce negative effects of other types. This post was mainly meant to provide a (hopefully) intuitive explanation of N.E.