All of epiphi's Comments + Replies

This is nice to see, I’ve been generally kind of unimpressed by what have felt like overly generous handwaves re: gray gooey nanobots, and I do think biological cells are probably our best comparison point for how nanobots might work in practice.

That said, I see some of the discussion here veering in the direction of brainstorming novel ways to do harm with biology, which we have a general norm against in the biosecurity community – just wanted to offer a nudge to y’all to consider the cost vs. benefit of sharing takes in that direction. Feel free to follow up with me over DM!

Anecdata on:

Our understanding of the melatonin cycle strongly suggests melatonin taken first thing upon waking up would work for this, but as far as I know this has never been formally investigated. The best I can find is researchers saying that they think it would happen and being confused why no other researcher has investigated this.

I once accidentally took 0.3mg melatonin around 9:00am in the morning, and the subsequent few days felt almost exactly like my experience of recovering from quite bad jetlag after returning from a timezone 5-6 hours earlier than mine.

Thank you for your idea and for sharing these links. I just listened to the Anthropocene Reviewed on the Seed Potatoes of Leningrad (linked in another comment, starts at 11:40) and How Nikolay Vavilov, the seed collector who tried to end famine, died of starvation while eating a late dinner before the fast begins. It was a little painful to feast on pita sandwiches and french fries while hearing about people dying of starvation, but it felt a little appropriate, too; in my life, famine is more or less ended, and that wouldn't have been a guarantee for my a... (read more)

Another way to separate these two concepts is whether you're trying to hold yourself to an internal or external standard. This is captured by this Lois McMaster Bujold quote (though she uses "reputation" where you might use "PR"):

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will.

To me, internal vs. external seems like the more crucial distinction than "fixed standard" (reputation) vs. "modelled reactions" (PR) that you describe in the post.

It's not confusing that Nigeria, in particular, has few cases. They have a really well-developed containment (disinfection + contact tracing + case isolation) infrastructure.

During the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic, an Ebola-positive patient showed up in Lagos, one of the most dense cities on the planet, and yet the country only ended up with 20 cases total.

My understanding (can't seem to find a great citation for this, learned it from a CDC person at a conference) is that Nigeria's internationally-funded efforts to eradicate polio (no wild polio since

My experience of taking melatonin a few hours before bed is very similar to what Gwern described as the self-discipline benefit:

Speaking from personal experience, I know that one of the obstacles to sleeping well is going to sleep at all. Even though one knows that one ought to go to bed on time, and that not doing so will cause problems, it’s hard to actually do it. One wants to finish the book, chat with friends, play a game, etc. It is even more difficult when one doesn’t feel tired. For me, I had a chronic akrasia problem with going to sleep; in coll

I'm appreciative of you bringing up counterfactuals and do think they're important to consider.

As someone who regularly hosts events at REACH, my counterfactual locations would be a room on UC Berkeley campus or in a public library. These have some disadvantages compared to REACH:

• The campus rooms require a Berkeley student to unlock open the door to the building, which means one of the organizers has to sit out the first 15 minutes of the meetup, either standing by the door or wandering in and out to let people in.
• The library would allow us to expose fa

I'm curious about the reasoning behind that statement, too.

This suggestion would unnecessarily concentrate donations among people with existing social connections to one another, no? I don't expect that I personally know the world's highest-leverage people. Even if I know some of them, I expect that organizations that dedicate resources to finding high-leverage people or opportunities (GiveWell, EA Funds, etc.) will fund opportunities with a better expected value than those that happen to be in front of me.

Is the reasoning here that those or... (read more)

I think sufficiently imprecise praise can even be net-negative for someone's worth, because their internal monologue might still be doubting or denying your praise. I wrote a post a few years ago on how to provide Specific Positivity:

With specific positivity, you try to give someone evidence that they should be praised, rather than praise itself. They don’t bristle or argue, because all you’ve given them is a description of your own experience. The recipient of your compliment can then use your descriptive evidence to compliment themselves. This is th