All of Baisius's Comments + Replies

I was in Natchitoches, unfortunately, so a bit away from you. I met a guy once from Munroe. But I've since moved to Virginia, so I probably won't be attending any hypothetical LA meetups.

Huh. A sister (chemical) plant to mine manufactures HPMC in Belgium. That's probably what's making the actual barrier. I wonder how necessary the other ingredients are.

3ChristianKl
I think the other ingridients are there to kill the virus cells that make it onto the barrier. 

I only give 10%, but that is enough to make itemizing deductions worth it for me, when combined with my mortgage interest. I am also looking to retire early (or at least become financially independent and increase donations substantially). Good financial advice is always relevant to everyone.

Three hundred dollars is a pretty minimal deduction. I expect there are at least a few effective altruists on here who have significant enough charitable contributions that it still makes sense to itemize deductions even with the increase in the standard deduction.

1Ericf
Mentally, I categorize "donating half your income" as "exceptional circumstance" and trust people in that 1% sliver of the population to make the right choice for them. Also, too, heavy donors probably aren't the same people looking to retire early

cash contributions to charity have a special call-out

Is this true? I don't think it is. From irs.gov: "You may deduct charitable contributions of money or property made to qualified organizations if you itemize your deductions."

1Ericf
From https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/how-the-cares-act-changes-deducting-charitable-contributions Here's how the CARES Act changes deducting charitable contributions made in 2020: Previously, charitable contributions could only be deducted if taxpayers itemized their deductions. However, taxpayers who don't itemize deductions may take a charitable deduction of up to $300 for cash contributions made in 2020 to qualifying organizations. For the purposes of this deduction, qualifying organizations are those that are religious, charitable, educational, scientific or literary in purpose. The law changed in this area due to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. The CARES Act also temporarily suspends limits on charitable contributions and temporarily increases limits on contributions of food inventory. More information about these changes is available on IRS.gov.

I found my favorite strategy for responding to salary questions on r/negotiation several months back: "Right now I'm focused on trying to figure out if this job is a good fit for the direction I want to take my career. If we both decide it is, I'm sure we can come to an understanding on salary."

Then, if they press: "Well I don't think it's fair to consider just salary in comparing job offers. I'd have to look at a total holistic benefits package to fairly compare two offers."

Then if they insist: "Look, you and I both know that my naming a desired salary puts me at a negotiating disadvantage. Please don't ask again." At this point, you probably don't want to work at this company anyway.

Two notes:

  1. I'm in a pretty high tax bracket, but I still do Roth IRA/401k contributions. This is because if you are maxing out your accounts (which if your goal is "early" retirement, you almost certainly will be) you are protecting more real dollars from taxes. The contribution limits are the same regardless of whether you contribute on a traditional or Roth basis. If I can protect $6000 and never have to pay taxes on it or protect $6000 that I'll eventually have to pay taxes on, I'd rather take the tax penalty now and protect more real dollars. I never se
... (read more)
4Ericf
Note: As of 2017, mortgage interest is (effectively) no longer tax deductible for families, because the Standard Deduction was increased, making all deductions that aren't given special treatment moot (cash contributions to charity have a special call-out, and there may be others like student loan interest - consult your tax professional, I am not one). If you are single, and have a large mortgage, the amount of interest(and other deductions like property taxes) over your standard deduction does provide some tax advantage. This was a bigger deal back pre-2000 when mortgage interest rates were ~6% instead of the ~3% they are now: prices have gone up, and more of the monthly payment is non-deductible principal, not interest.
2tryactions
Re 1: This is a good point; I did the math on this at some point for myself and ended up still landing on traditional by a large margin (even though I wanted it to turn out pure Roth for simplicity).  But it'll be dependent on your expected tax rates, opportunities for low-tax conversion, and your retirement timeline (more tax-advantaged money dominates on longer timelines). Also yeah, I skipped backdoor and mega-backdoor to keep things simple.  The goal was to give people a linkable 90/10.  The outcome I was aiming for is that people read, get the important parts of the memetic package, and then some of them will dive in more to find things like that for themselves -- for instance, they're mentioned in the flowchart I linked. Re: tax advantages of homes, yeah .  Homes are probably a better long-term expected value than I make them sound for this and other reasons.  Still, transaction costs suck, and I think they stop being a good idea if you buy/sell them too often -- I've heard you need to hold ~5 years on average to break even on transaction costs vs mortgage advantage, but haven't done the math myself.  I am biased toward the flexibility of being able to change my physical location in order to take better jobs, decrease my commutes, decide to decrease my expenses, etc.  If you do buy a home, you can ameliorate these concerns by just buying a small home so that you can more easily decide to eat the proportional transaction costs if necessary. Re: financing things at low interest rates to instead invest in the market, I agree this is correct to maximize expected value but 1. it's not all that big of an impact for things smaller than a house or new car and 2. I think most people would do better by avoiding the over-spending tendency that credit brings, and the negative psychological effects of future spending obligations.   If you're buying a house or new car regardless and can get a low interest rate, I agree you should take out low interest debt instead of buy

Interesting. I didn't realize that (wasn't active on LW at the time). Is Scott not interested in cross posting?

7ChristianKl
Some of Scotts posts draw a lot of political discussion and there are concerns to what extend it's good to have those posts on LessWrong.  The decision to import posts was made on a case by case basis, I'm not sure whether by Scott or someone else. 

Does Scott's contract with Substack prevent automatic cross-posting here? I really do loathe Substack as a UI.

We never had automatic crossposting with SlateStarCodex, so it's not trival to say that we should have it now with the new website. 

5Dagon
Inoreader lets me subscribe to the feed (URL https://astralcodexten.substack.com/feed/, which looks like standard RSS to me), so it doesn't seem that Substack is intentionally limiting access to their site.

One of the differences is that transmission is, for obvious reasons, much, much easier to control on an island. Hawaii isn't doing nearly as badly as the rest of the United States, for example.

I downloaded the dataset from OurWorldinData and estimated the % of cases coming from the UK strain based on the GSAID chart (Note: It's unclear what exactly they mean by "Week 47", so the percentages might be off by up to 7 days, but I did my best.) If there is better data on this, (In particular, an updated GSAID dataset) please let me know, I couldn't find any. I would be happy to redo the below analysis with data past 11/16.

On the below charts, the top chart is total Covid cases. The bottom chart is total Covid cases broken down by strain. I started th... (read more)

"It’s clear that [testing] demand greatly exceeds supply."

Is this true? Are people that want tests unable to get them? Or do people just not want to get tested? Or did we tell people early in the pandemic that testing capacity was limited and that they shouldn't get tested unless they've been exposed and people still believe that now? I suspect it's the last.

I've had three tests, all paid for 100% by insurance (I think it would be $64 w/o insurance, IIRC). Turn around time on the first (early June) was three days, second (Nov) was three days, and the third... (read more)

9jonluca
Anecdotal, but I've lived in a few cities in the United States over the past few months, and testing still varies wildly: In Los Angeles, during July and August, testing was great. I could get tested whenever I wanted, in a drive through test that never took more than 20 minutes. There were a ton of people getting tested, but the overall operation was efficient, so they were able to process a huge volume of cars (6 lanes, probably around 4 minutes per car) per day. I got tested > 5, < 15 times here.  In New York (Manhattan) things were not as easy. I've been able to do walk in testing at a lab, but it was a 2 hour wait. I've done this twice, and once left due to the wait. This is what is available to the general public. Note that I also get tested through work, and thats self service and reports are within 24 hours, but this is not available to the public. I've been tested >20 times for work, and only twice on my own.  In Montana, we could only get a COVID test if we were 1) prescribed one by the doctor and 2) scheduled an appointment before hand and 3) had an exposure or "reason" we were being tested.    Anecdotally I'd agree that testing demand greatly exceeds supply. A few key locations have matched their testing availability supply with the demand, but by and large the demand still exceeds it across the majority of the United States. I don't think the public conscious still thinks of testing as in the early days (dont get tested unless you show symptoms) - most large metropolitan areas is now used to relatively frequent tests when available, and more rural places simply don't have the same access to testing, so they don't get tested unless they know they've been exposed.  Again, this is anecdotal and not grounded in facts or figures from objective sources. These are just my observations over >20 tests in the past 150 days.

Great list. Thanks for posting.

20. The 20-20-20 rule: Every 20 minutes of screenwork, look at a spot 20 feet away for 20 seconds. This will reduce eye strain and is easy to remember (or program reminders for). 

I noticed my eyes were horribly bloodshot yesterday, so I just downloaded a Chrome extension that will remind me to do this every 20 minutes. (File under: Automate literally everything)

23. (~This is not medical advice~). Don’t waste money on multivitamins, they don’t work. Vitamin D supplementation does seem to work, which is important because d

... (read more)
1ErickBall
Some people think that multivitamins are actually harmful (or at least cause harms that partially cancel out the benefits) because they contain large amounts of certain things like manganese that we may already get too much of from food.
2papercuts
Regarding the multivitamins, since you said "more than you wanted to know", if you have the time it might be worth taking a look at something similar to these Nutrient Reference Values and comparing with the amount of the nutrients in the multivitamin: https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/about-us/publications/nutrient-reference-values-australia-and-new-zealand-including-recommended-dietary-intakes I had heard that multivitamins are mostly useless (but I can't remember where) because it is impossible/expensive to physically fit everything into a pill. After looking up the recommended intakes, I noticed that many of the quantities of each of the vitamins in the multivitamins I looked at were basically negligible compared to the recommend intakes. I stopped these multivitamins and started taking a few specific vitamins similar to those you mentioned. As you said, I have no idea if they are achieving anything. Those recommended intakes are specific to Australia/New Zealand, but I suppose many countries must publish their own so you could pick one you trust. It does seem to be a theme that government health departments often don't recommend supplements (e.g. https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/vitamins-and-minerals).

That's interesting. Do you have specific examples? I'd be interested the context where he said that. I do agree if that reduced Eliezer's contribution that was a significant negative impact.

My concern is more rooted in status. LW is already associated enough with fringe ideas, I don't think it does us well to be seen endorsing low-status things without evidence. Imagine (as an extreme example, I'm not trying to equate the two) if I said something about Flat Earth Theory and then if I was challenged on it said that I didn't think it was an appropriate place to discuss it. That's... not a good look.

5ChristianKl
There are two issues here. First, being too much concerned with signaling status is exactly what this sequence challenges.  Second, even if status is your core concern moving a discussion that's about an abstract principle to one that's about personal romantic experience is a low status move.  The key question of Zvi's post is "The world would be better if people treated more situations like the first set of problems, and less situations like the second set of problems. How to do that?". I gave an example of how to think about one of this example in the second set to move it towards the first. I pointed to the way out of the maze. Yes, going out of the maze is low status but that's the point. Thinking well through the example takes a bit of a Straussian perspective. 

I think if you don't want to debate or defend controversial statements it's probably best to just not make them in the first place.

3ChristianKl
That's the kind of thinking that drove Eliezer from posting on LessWrong. I think it's pretty harmful for our community. 

I guess I'll introduce myself? Ordinary story, came from HPMOR, blah blah blah. I was active on 1.0 for awhile when I was in college, but changed usernames when I decided I didn't want my real name to be googleable. I doubt anyone really remembers it anyway. Quit going there when 1.0 became not so much of a thing anymore. Hung out with some of the people on rationalist Tumblr for awhile before that stopped being so much of a thing too. If you recognize the name, it's probably from there. Got on Twitter recently, but that's more about college football than ... (read more)

3habryka
Welcome! Hope you like it on the new LW, and feel free to ping me in the Intercom bubble in the bottom right if you ever run into any problems.

Am I the only one who doesn't understand the Moderna Efficacy Table you screencapped?

39/1079 is an infection rate of 3.61% (They have 96.7%, which I assume means virus free? But that doesn't match)

They say 7 out of 996 got infected who got one dose of the vaccine. That's an infection rate of 0.703%. 0.703% / 3.61% = 19.4%, which I would call an 80.6% "effective" vaccine. They show a percentage of 87.5%?

None of this really matters, I guess, because the overall point is the same. Obviously one dose is ~pretty effective for varying definitions of "pretty". But it's still not clear to me what kind of math they're doing.

2Joe Collman
It's also worth looking at the next table for Moderna one-dose severe-COVID-prevention efficacy: Vaccine group: 2 / 996 Control group: 4 / 1079 Efficacy: 42.6% (-300.8, 94.8) [95% CI] Huge error bars and little data, but certainly doesn't support a guess of ~80% efficacy at preventing severe cases. In the end it's the transmission that matters, but I suppose there's a danger based on public perception: if one dose turns out to have under 50% efficacy for severe cases it's not going to make anyone feel safe. If the sub 50% applies to deaths too, then you'll have many reports of "X took the vaccine, caught Covid and then died". I assume Moderna wouldn't be crazy about this either. Not great PR if everyone broadly remembers that vaccines stopped Covid, but specifically remembers that Moderna's failed to save their friend's granny. While there's short supply, it doesn't particularly matter if a load of people don't want to take it. Once there's a large supply, that changes - and if there's a largely baked-in misperception that the vaccine(s) suck(s), it's likely to be unhelpful. In some sense it's analogous to the mask situation: [Take action likely to reduce confidence in X] ---> [Free up supply of X to allow efficient targeting] ---> [Suffer consequences of longer-term low confidence in X] Here the confidence-reducing action wouldn't be a lie, but that's not the only consideration.
1Daniel V
I'm having trouble with it too and I think Zvi misinterpreted it as well- the far right column is the VE.
2Joe Collman
My best guess on that table, looking at the full report (caveat: I am emphatically not an expert): 1) The VE calculations look correct: they're almost precisely what I get by division of my naïve incidence rate calculations. I assume the small discrepancy is due to the data's being discrete: if you have 7 cases out of 996, your best prediction of incidence rates won't be precisely 7/996. 2) From my guess the numbers in brackets in the first two columns aren't percentage rates at all. Rather they are "Surveillance time in person years for given endpoint across all participants within each group at risk for the endpoint". This description is at the bottom of the table, without any asterisk or similar. I assume that this is an error: there was supposed to be an asterisk for that from the bracketed number in the first two columns. This seems plausible for the data: the pre-14-days numbers are under half of the post-14-days numbers, and the median follow-up time was 28 days. But it's entirely possible that I'm wrong.

I wasn't trying to suggest that the discourse doesn't exist. I agree its existence is self-evident. Nor was I trying to censor you. I think your first comment was a good one.

My point was that you made a controversial statement ("For a majority of women that behavior isn't attractive.") for which the only evidence you offered was the existence of a controversy surrounding it. Then when someone told you that didn't match their experience (a comment that was upvoted significantly, indicating this is likely true for many people, as it is for me) and asked you to support that claim, you declined to offer any more evidence of your original claim. That is the behavior that I don't think belongs here, and I stand by that.

5ChristianKl
Having a community norm that assumes that if someone provides evidence against a claim you are making that obligates you to spend more time to make the claim in more depth is bad. It's generally better if people spent their time to argue in a way they believe to be productive and good for LessWrong. You find plenty of times that people don't spent more time and effort when challenged by other people. The difference in this case is that I explained why I made that decision explicitely. A position that it's bad to do that explicitely instead of just not replying is one for censorship. 

I'm interested in attending. But it is unclear how I might actually do that, even on the Facebook event. This seems like a barrier to entry you all did not intend.

5Raemon
I updated the post to say:

I don't think this is the place for unsupported theses. 

4ChristianKl
The thesis that the discourse exist is not unsupported. There's no reason to discuss every topic at every depth. Your comment might be a good practicle example of motive ambiguity. It provides no useful value to censor theses in cases where there are reasons not to discuss them in depth. At the same time speaking to censor serves for signaling.  I would expect Zvi here not to be pro-censorship but pro-speaking in cases where there are barriers to speak.

I was more making a point about the value of a credit score - mine is near perfect anyway. I have a mortgage and three permanent credit cards that I maintain, and no real blemishes.

0listic
How do you get to know your credit score?

Also, as I understand, it's actually better not to cancel the cards you sign up for (unless they have an annual fee), because "average age of credit line" is a factor in the FICO score. Snip them up, set up auto-pay and fraud alerts and forget about them, but don't cancel them.

It does not seem like the expected value of the probability of something slipping through the cracks would pay for the marginal increase in the credit score.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
0benkuhn
For people who would otherwise not have multiple credit cards, the increase in credit score can be fairly substantial. In addition to Dorikka's comment, you are not liable for fraudulent charges; usually the intermediating bank is.
1Dorikka
Disagree. Autopay minimum and set up charge alerts for anything that goes to the card. Approve of your heuristic in general - in thos case, though, the automation works well and reliably.

It's not clear that this maps to colloquial use of the terms "feminine" and "masculine" then. I think most would consider them opposite ends of the same spectrum.

7Nornagest
There are aspects of the Western gender roles that are opposed to each other at least to some extent: emotionality vs. stoicism, active vs. passive romantic performance. But there are also aspects that aren't. Blue is not anti-pink. Skill at sewing doesn't forbid skill at fixing cars. These might resolve in people's perceptions to positions on some kind of spectrum of male vs. female presentation, but they won't show up that way on surveys measuring conformity with stereotype. Indeed, that suggests a possible mechanism for these results. Assume for a moment that people prefer to occupy some particular point on the perception spectrum. But people often like stuff for reasons other than gender coding, so it'll sometimes happen that people will be into stuff with gender coding inconsistent with how they'd prefer to be seen. That creates pressure to take up other stuff with countervailing coding. If people respond to that pressure, the net result is a weak positive correlation between stuff with masculine and feminine coding.

I'm losing a lot of confidence in the digit ratio/masculinity femininity stuff. I'm not seeing a number of things I'd expect to see.

First, my numbers for correlations don't match up with yours. With filters on for female gendered, and answering all of BemSexRoleF, BemSexRoleM, RightHand, and LeftHand, I get a correlation of only -0.34 for RightHand and BemSexRoleM, not -0.433 as you say. I get various other differences as well, all weaker correlations than you describe. Perhaps differences in filtering explain this? -.34 vs -.433 seems to be high for this ... (read more)

There isn't necessarily any problem with a small positive correlation between masculinity and femininity. The abstract of what I think is the original paper (I couldn't find an ungated version) says that "The dimensions of masculinity and femininity are empirically and logically independent."

About 10 percent of A.I. researchers believe the first machine with human-level intelligence will arrive in the next 10 years. Nearly all think it will be accomplished by century's end.

My first thought upon reading this was "Holy crap! Really?!" as I began revising my own probability/risk estimates. Then I realized that people probably also said this in the 1950s. How much are other people updating on this?

9Paul Crowley
This looks to me like a misunderstanding of Müller & Bostrom 2014. The actual figure is that 50% of AI researchers give a 10% probability of HLMI by 2022. Müller, V. C., & Bostrom, N. Future progress in artificial intelligence: A survey of expert opinion. In V. C. Müller (Ed.), Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence. Berlin: Springer. 2014

Ruston is in northern Louisiana, about an hour from Shreveport and an hour and a half from Natchitoches.

I have done a number of things.

I have a problem staying awake when I drive. Unrelated, I wanted more intellectual stimulation in my life. So I started downloading podcasts to listen to while I drive instead of music, which, while not the intended benefit, engage my brain and keep me more awake. Intellectual stimulation is up too.

I started getting back into trying to read and post (albeit under the name of a new account not tied closely to my real name) on LW, tumblr, and a couple others.

I got a promotion (well, I'm training for the promotion that I'll get ... (read more)

0[anonymous]
Kilts?
1Gunnar_Zarncke
Great idea. Very unconvential but - well - rational. For the more traditionally minded I'd recommend bathrobes. I hear these can be worn all day long at home without too much fuss even in the case of surprise guests. And they often feature pockets.
6Toggle
The Utilikilt seems to be a 'masculinized' equivalent, without the specific and possibly inappropriate social signaling of a true plaid kilt. I have never worn one and can't vouch for comfort, but it's a way to get the general skirt form in public settings without being visibly gender-deviant. At worst it will read as a bit geeky, I think. (Of course, the gender fuckery may be part of the fun here, in which case a kilt is obviously not going to meet your needs.)

As a woman, I find skirts super comfortable but with some major problems that don't come up if you're just hanging around the house.

  • The lack of pockets is extremely inconvenient. I'd be afraid of losing a purse with a wallet in it, so I basically can't go out in a skirt unless it's cool enough out that it's reasonable to wear a jacket (since those have pockets). There do exist skirts with acceptable pockets, but the selection is very small and if you're as cheap as I am there just aren't any options.

  • Some skirts (not all!) restrict leg motion enough to make it inconvenient to bike or run.

2polymathwannabe
Actually, there are some fashionable male skirt designs that can be worn outdoors and even at the office.

I've wondered why men don't wear skirts

Some do, they just call them kilts.

This seems like a case of privileging the hypothesis. Why should we have to show that early retirement + EA volunteering is superior to working a standard job and donating free cash flow, and not the other way around?

You can also be motivated by "Earning to Give", or something to the same effect. That was largely the point of my thread.

Probably because it's largely composed of or at least represented by the kind of people who REALLY like living in places like NYC and the Bay Area, which are the opposite of frugal.

This is actually a point I have made to myself about the movement.

keep working a high-paying job for sometime regardless. That way, he could gain valuable experience, and use the money he earns to eventually become financially independent, i.e., 'retire early'. Then, when he is age forty or something, he can do valuable work as a non-profit manager or researcher or personal assistant for free.

This is a career path I am very seriously considering. At the very least, I will continue to invest/save my money, if for no other reason that it doesn't seem intuitively obvious to me that I should prefer saving 100 lives this y... (read more)

Thanks for such an in-depth reply.

I'm a vegan for ethical reasons. I'm not rigid about it, (the bean burgers I mention contain small amounts of eggs, for example) but I definitely watch which animal products I consume. If there weren't healthy ways to get something critical, I would probably make an exception. I tend to believe that there is a vegan substitute for just about anything, however I'm open to be proven wrong.

I just set up a Chronometer account, that seems like a good service. Is there a way to put exact recipes in? I put in my breakfast this mo... (read more)

1TylerJay
You're welcome, I'm just glad you found it helpful. And yeah, Cronometer is great. You can add both custom foods and custom recipes. Just click the "Foods" tab at the top and you can create a recipe. I have some of the things I make pretty often in there, like certain smoothies and other things that I always use the same proportions of. You can also create custom foods if the brand of some product you buy has a very different nutrient profile from their defaults, you can enter it as a custom food (though you will often miss out on some of the micronutrient data that they have, so be careful with this, or copy the micronutrient info that you don't know about product from one of their default database foods). Similarly, if there are duplicate records for a certain food you want to use, try looking at a few different ones to see which one has the most complete micronutrient data, then make sure you use that one. And the Profile tab lets you set your targets for macro and micronutrients. That's really all you need to know. With this, you can find out for yourself if you might be getting too little or too much of anything and then experiment with different interventions. I would recommend making sure you don't forget to track any fats or cooking oils you use. That way, you'll know if you're getting too much omega 6. The preset allowances for n-6 are probably too high. I encourage you to do your own research on the subject, but my personal recommendation is to try to keep your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio under 4:1. (Keep in mind only EPA and DHA count towards your n-3 number. "Other" omega-3s are only 3% bioavailable) Again, let me know if you have any questions and good luck!

A few other things have been causing me look at supplements, and this thread is making me seriously consider developing a regimen. I'm not sure where the best place to start is. On an intuitive level, there are a few supplements that seem like they would be common sense for me:

  1. Melatonin - I just started working a shift schedule, 7 day shifts / 4 off / 7 graveyard shifts / 2 off / 7 evening shift / 1 off. It seems common sense that melatonin would increase quality of sleep, which is a large problem with the rotating sleep schedule. I see one of the result
... (read more)
5TylerJay
I would recommend Melatonin over Valerian root. The reason you don't sleep during the daytime is hormonal. Hormones are entrained by light/dark cycles, meal patterns, and exercise. Melatonin is the hormone your body produces to make you tired and to go to sleep. When you're exposed to high-energy visible light (blue is the primary culprit, followed by green) your body does not produce melatonin. When that light goes away, your body starts producing it again. However, just blacking out your room is not usually enough to make you sleep during the day because of the natural entrainment of sleep patterns; Your body produces melatonin not just when it's dark, but when it is used to going to sleep. Melatonin supplements basically let you circumvent that whole problem because you don't have to wait for your body to produce the melatonin. Once your'e asleep, your body's natural systems take over, continuing to produce melatonin, regulating your sleep-stages, and basically allowing you to sleep normally. Valerian root is a GABA-ergic compound (specifically, a GABA-a receptor agonist, like benzodiazepines, ambien, and alcohol) which means it does not function on your melatonin pathways, it's a sedative. Alcohol and Benzos are well-known to disrupt your sleep cycles and to favor deep sleep over REM sleep which makes it less restful and can lead to dependence. You can also end up with a glutamate-rebound effect that wakes you up when your body overcorrects after the valerian wears off. Basically, you should think of Valerian as a GABA-ergic sedative/hypnotic drug like Benzos (xanax, ativan, valium, etc.) or alcohol, not as a supplement. Just because it doesn't require a prescription does not mean it is not a drug. If you can't tell, I'm not a fan of Valerian. I'm personally pretty sensitive to excitatory rebound effects, but I definitely got them from Valerian. I would definitely recommend staying away from that stuff. Regarding your other points: First of all, as a vegan,

I'm not sure any of those things measure incorruptibility.

0the-citizen
Agreed, but I think they'd have some correlation, and I strongly suspect their absense would predict corruptability.

For those that have mentioned a lack of a ruler, I used this one online: http://iruler.net/.

Might be worth it to link in the survey, if it's still editable.

7A1987dM
First thing I thought was ‘I'm not sure it's accurately calibrated’, but since we're measuring ratios it doesn't matter.

You should probably Rot13 this. I scanned the comments before I did the survey, and I couldn't remember why I was so confident in the correct answer, but I was.

Completed. Very excited to see the digit ratio data.

To me, it's more about financial independence than early retirement. Financial independence gives you the options to do a lot of different things; "retire" and volunteer for an effective charity, continue working and donate 100% of your income to charity, continue working and balloon your nest egg to establish a trust to be donated to an effective charity upon your death, etc. The knowledge that you are 100% financially independent gives tremendous security that (as well as it's other benefits, such as decreasing stress) allows someone to comfortably and without consideration give large amounts of money.

5Lumifer
In the context I treat them as synonyms. Ahem. That is an excellent way to stop being financially independent in short order.
5A1987dM
Well, Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman are.

What are some strategies for pursuing this? I considered trying to write something, but it seems that the central message of "people are kind of bad at spending money efficiently and you are a people and you are probably bad at it too" is hard to convey without being rude, and unlikely to succeed. Particularly when you're, in effect, going to be asking them to give their money away instead of saving it for retirement.

4Evan_Gaensbauer
Oh, well, I've actually received requests to write something up, except for Less Wrong. For the record, I'm unsure why there isn't more about personal finance on Less Wrong, let alone within effective altruism. I figure readers of Less Wrong will be more amenable to being told they're bad at thinking about stuff. On top of that, if they're already intending to give away their money, it wouldn't be that much of a problem. Alternatively, if people do save enough for retirement, then they could spend several extra decades volunteering for effective charities for free. Anyway, I figured that we spread the ideas more among the community as it already exists, and then the dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people who integrate it into their own effective altruism lifestyles could brainstorm how to make it amenable to the general public.

I have a question about the Effective Altruism community that's always bothered me. Why does the movement not seem to have much overlap with the frugality/early retirement movement? Is it just that I haven't seen it? I read a number of sites (My favorite being Mr Money Mustache, who retired at age 30 on a modest engineer's salary) that focus on early retirement through (many would say extreme) frugality. I wouldn't expect that this, or something close to it, would be hard for most people in the demographic of this site. It seems to me that the two movement... (read more)

3drethelin
Probably because it's largely composed of or at least represented by the kind of people who REALLY like living in places like NYC and the Bay Area, which are the opposite of frugal. In regards to early retirement, there's something of an obsession with maximizing productivity as well as earning to give, both of which run counter to retirement.
1[anonymous]
Thanks for the link. I had not heard of that site, but I really enjoy it.
8jpl68
Are you asking why EAs aren't more concerned with frugality?

This is a question that's been bothering me for some months as well, ever since I encountered Early Retirement Extreme a few months ago.

We here in Vancouver have substantial overlap between the meetups for Mr. Money Mustache, effective altruism, rationality, and life extension. It's weird, because there's about a dozen people who are all friends, so we go to each other's meetups lots.

Anyway, much of what the effective altruism community is comes from what was popular in its precursor communities. Less Wrong, academia, and the non-profit world don't all focus on the early retirement movement. If frugality isn't a value in effective altruism lifestyles yet, then let's see if we can't make that happen.

Possibly donating money is easier when it's funging against luxuries than when it's funging against early retirement, and it's hard for people who don't plan on retiring early to read and follow frugality advice that's framed in terms of how much better financial independence is than whichever luxury?

May want to add Slate Star Codex as an exception to the referrals question.

Time in community question needs to be updated to 7 years for the start of the community.

Might be worth it to specify aggregate Karma if you have multiple accounts. (This is an account that I started using after I decided I no longer wanted to use my real name. I mostly lurk anyway, though.)

It would be worth it to add a "no meetups in my area" option to the meetups question.

The header for part eight is listed twice.

I wasn't thanks. I'll try to read that sometime when I get a chance. At first glance though, I'm unsure why you would want it to be logarithmic. I thought about doing it that way too, but you then you lose the meaning associated with average error, which I think is undesirable.

2rocurley
So, let's say you want a scoring rule with two properties. You want it to be local: that is to say, all that matters is the probability you assigned to the actual outcome. This is in contrast to rules like the quadratic scoring rule, where your score is different depending on how the outcomes that didn't happen are grouped. Based on this assumption, I'm going to write the scoring rule as S(p), where S(p) is the score you get when you assign a probability p to the true outcome. You also want it to play nicely with combining separate events. That is to say, if you estimate 10% of it being cloudy when it actually is, and 10% of it being warm outside when it actually is, you want your score to be the same as if you had assigned 1% to the correct proposition that it is warm and cloudy outside. More succinctly: S(p)+S(q)=S(pq). If you add in the additional caveat that some scores are not 0, then you are forced by the above statement to a logarithmic scoring rule. Interestingly, you don't need to include the requirement that it be a proper scoring rule, although the logarithmic scoring rule is proper.

Hi. I'm Baisius. I came here, like most, through HPMOR. I've read a lot of the sequences and they've helped me reanalyze the things I believe and why I believe them. I've been lurking here for awhile, but I've never really felt I had anything to add to the site, content wise. That's changed, however - I just launched a blog. The blog is generally LW themed, so I thought it appropriate. I wouldn't ordinarily advertise for it, but I would particularly like some help on one of the problems I explored in my first post. (see footnote 3)

One of the things that's ... (read more)

1Unnamed
Welcome! For assessing prediction accuracy, are you familiar with scoring rules?