A Luna moth caterpillar spends its life eating the leaves of a host tree and grows to more than ten times its original length in about six weeks before it pupates. The adult which emerges some time later has no functioning mouthparts and only survives for about a week. What...
Note: All the posts I have found so far describing the tag filtering system are clearly out of date, so I would appreciate a good description of its features in general, preferably one that includes illustrative screenshots, whether or not it answers my specific questions. This would be a useful...
There is one other important difference between drugs (as currently regulated) and supplements: insurance doesn't pay for supplements. Insurance companies today frequently refuse to pay for drugs they claim are ineffective or unnecessary. While they typically rely on FDA recommendations, privately controlled pharmacy benefit managers set criteria which can differ from the FDA's. Insurance companies have an incentive to find reasons to refuse to pay for some, but not all, drugs, and deciding based on whether the drug is actually useful is a Schelling point. Big insurers and PBMs could conceivably afford to test new drugs, if sufficiently motivated.[1] To be sure, there are numerous opportunities for companies to profit by lying, colluding,... (read more)
A Luna moth caterpillar spends its life eating the leaves of a host tree and grows to more than ten times its original length in about six weeks before it pupates. The adult which emerges some time later has no functioning mouthparts and only survives for about a week.
What possible reason could explain this seemingly self-destructive strategy?
After metamorphosis, an adult gains two important features: flying and mating. It specializes to its comparative advantage: dispersing its offspring. A moth that finds a new source of food succeeds not by eating, a waste of its expensive adult features, but by making new caterpillars which can eat many times more efficiently. The moth's purpose, after... (read more)
Note: All the posts I have found so far describing the tag filtering system are clearly out of date, so I would appreciate a good description of its features in general, preferably one that includes illustrative screenshots, whether or not it answers my specific questions. This would be a useful reference to have however simple the functionality appears.
(How) can I accomplish the following using LessWrong's tag filtering system? If any is not currently possible, consider it a feature request.
For this particular question, the FAQ apparently makes no reference to the tagging/filtering system, which, going by the posts I found, reached something close to its present state two years ago (but has changed since then - the two-year-old posts are out of date and I haven't found a more recent relevant one).
Also, I notice there is a one-year-old comment:
Oh, I'm terribly sorry. The FAQ has gotten a bit out of date and is due for an update. Since it was written, the frontpage been changed. Curated posts are now the first few posts listed in the "Latest" section, the ones that have stars to the left of their titles.
Sorry for the confusion!
The referenced section of the FAQ remains unchanged since then.
I recently wanted to find some information about how-the-site-works (because I was trying to use the UI to do something[1] and not getting the results I expected) and could not find any easy way to look up this kind of information. Information is distributed across many posts of varying ages, and I can only determine whether something is still accurate by finding more recent information that contradicts it. Old posts may have screenshots depicting an older version of the site, where even if the same functionality is still available now, it doesn't necessarily work quite the same. I think documentation of site features needs to be available in one place that is kept... (read more)
Has anyone tried to map relationships between (at least some) LessWrong posts?
What I'm looking for would be some kind of overview of what connects to what that could be parsed without clicking through links recursively. If I assume a chronologically earlier post cannot refer to a later one, I expect this type of structure to have interesting properties. A practical application that comes to mind is to inform an algorithm to decide what to give attention.
To define a relationship, links from one post to another would be a good if imperfect metric (not all links represent the same type of relationship, and not all relationships are represented by explicit links).
Glacial ice preserves a record of seasonal temperature variations as each yearly layer of snow accumulates and then partially erodes. The accumulating ice also preserves particles from the atmosphere such as pollen. Ice cores extracted so far from Greenland extend at least 100,000 years and from Antarctica more than 800,000.