All of bortrand's Comments + Replies

I like this post. It goes along with something I had noticed during the Trump presidency when there were a lot of claims that Trump was “destroying democracy”, which is that a lot of the things that people like about the US system is not democracy, but really separation of powers. A democratically elected populist imposing his will over other government institutions is not a breakdown of democracy (well, maybe in this specific case where he lost the popular vote, you could argue that), but a breakdown of the separation of powers.

It is not a happy coinciden... (read more)

How much of the work to create better hardware can be done in a computer’s head, though? I have no doubt that smarter being can create better hardware than we have now, but are there other real world limitations that would very quickly limit the rate of improvement. I imagine even something much smarter than us would need to experiment in the physical world, as well as build new machines (and mine the necessary materials) and do a lot of actual physical work that would take time and that computers can not obviously do 10,000x faster than humans.

I recently started making a similar distinction in my life and using the word “toxic”

Thanks. This is helpful context. The class I took was only a year ago, so I don’t feel like that obviously fits the “this information is just outdated” narrative, but I am genuinely unsure whether it was good advice at this point. On the margin my statement may have been too strong, and I don’t want to suggest that never using a tourniquet is correct, but I do think it’s probably correct for people to know the risks and alternatives before applying one.

Definitely agree. Especially if you're training is limited (but even if it isn't) making sure someone reaches emergency services should be your top priority. If you need to attend to the injured person, pointing out a specific person and telling them to call 911 is a good approach. It's more likely to get done quickly if a specific person feels it's their responsibility than if it's unclear whose job it is.

One (potentially) big exception to the doing something is better than doing nothing rule, is applying a tourniquet. I have heard in my wilderness safety class that if you apply a tourniquet to a limb, it will probably need to be amputated, and this should only be done if you're confident it's necessary. Applying pressure to a wound that you're bleeding from should always be the first thing you try.

I added the "potentially" above, because I'm having trouble verifying that claim online. The Mayo Clinic says "Having a tourniquet in place for two or fewer hour... (read more)

Yeah, I was thinking this same thing. I feel like I’m social sciences I’m more concerned about researchers testing for too many things and increasing the probability of false positives than testing too few things and maybe not fully understanding a result.

I feel like it really comes down to how powerful a study is. When you have tons of data like a big tech company might, or the results are really straightforward, like in some of the hard sciences, I think this is a great approach. When the effects of a treatment are subtler and sample size is more limited, as is often the case in the social sciences, I would be wary to recommend testing everything you can think of.

I’m by no means an expert on the topic, but I would have thought it was a result of both object-level thinking producing new memes that society recognized as true, but also some level of abstract thinking along the lines of “using God and the Bible as an explanation for every phenomenon doesn’t seem to be working very well, maybe we should create a scientific method or something.”

I think there may be a bit of us talking past each other, though. From your response, perhaps what I consider “uncoupling from society’s bad memes” you consider to be just generat... (read more)

“The success rate of, let's build a movement to successfully uncouple ourselves from society's bad memes and become capable of real action and then our problems will be solvable, is 0.“

I’m not sure if this is an exact analog, but I would have said the scientific revolution and the age of enlightenment were two (To be honest, I’m not entirely sure where one ends and the other begins, and there may be some overlap, but I think of them as two separate but related things) pretty good examples of this that resulted in the world becoming a vastly better place, l... (read more)

This is very interesting. I find this somewhat persuasive and am updating in the direction of being more afraid of getting covid. That being said, I think I'm still pretty far from your level of concern.  I can think of three places where I think we may disagree.

1. I find your example in K very odd, in that it requires 100/900 people without covid to get illnesses that are as bad as long covid, but only 10/100 people who had covid to have similarly bad symptoms from long covid. It would be weird if we lived in a world where people without covid are so mu

In my own limited research, I found dihydromyricetin (used in Asian hangover cures for years as oriental raisin tree extract) to have the most compelling scientific evidence for it, and I've tried some products that contain it and given them to my friends, and anecdotally, they seem to have some effect (though it's hard to say for certain it's not just placebo).  Anecdotally, it seems to work best if you take it both before and after drinking (or between drinks).

That being said, I find your arguments pretty convincing and may add some activated charco... (read more)

I would guess that most people who are serious enough about these types of questions to be involved in animal EA would probably distinguish between different animals.  I feel like after reading about (sorry, I'm not going to take the time to dig up the sources) the subject and talking to some people in the EA community, my views are now approximately:

-80% confident factory-farmed, caged, chickens are net negative (agree they're less similar to humans, but the conditions are so bad, that the physical pain alone seems very bad)

-70% confident factory-far... (read more)

I think this is a really cool idea. Good luck with your fast.

At the risk of undermining your post by second guessing the decisions of people made 80 years ago under duress, I can't read that article without thinking "If they were needed there, alive, to guard the seeds, maybe they should have eaten some of the 370,000 seeds?"  To be clear, that does not diminish my respect for their restraint (I certainly could not have done that) or Vavilov's contributions.

I had a vague expectation that I was supposed to do something strategic but I wasn’t sure what. (It turns out this was in fact false)

Actually, unlike a standard second price auction where it's game theory optimal to just bid your fair value, there is a strategic element to this game, since the price you bid or offer will affect the clearing price.  In this case, the price at which your P(trade_occurs) * expected_utility_gain_from_trading is maximized is probably not your true fair value.  To give one simple example, if you were 100% confident their bid would be higher than your fair, you would definitely want to offer above your fair so that the mid price is higher.