GLaDOS

Frito Bandito writes:

So what you’re saying is, sometimes people are too stupid to know what’s good for them and others, and you need a quasi-dictatorial regime to get them into doing it?

Cochran replies:

Most people won’t wear seatbelts. You don’t need a dictatorship: just a government that isn’t crazy. In 1940, the government would have imposed quarantine without much agonizing. Of course, you couldn’t have had a big AIDS epidemic back then.

A government that isn't crazy huh? (u_u)

That problem seems insolvable except it somehow has been solved from time to time.

[Link] Forty Days

GLaDOS

11y

A post from Gregory Cochran's and Henry Harpending's excellent blog West Hunter.

One of the many interesting aspects of how the US dealt with the AIDS epidemic is what we didn’t do – in particular, quarantine. Probably you need a decent test before quarantine is practical, but we had ELISA by 1985 and a better Western Blot test by 1987.
There was popular support for a quarantine.
But the public health experts generally opined that such a quarantine would not work.
Of course, they were wrong. Cuba institute a rigorous quarantine. They mandated antiviral treatment for pregnant women and mandated C-sections for those that were HIV-positive. People positive for any venereal disease were tested for HIV

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Replying to[Link] More ominous than a [Marriage] strike

GLaDOS12y

[Link] More ominous than a [Marriage] strike

You are being suspiciously simplistic here. Needing to work hard to get a bride is one of the things that most vitally supports a culture of work ethic among men. Very few other things seem to have as big an impact. Most Fields medalists probably didn't work hard primarily because they wanted to attract a wife, though I bet many of them actually did. But the culture of work ethic being normative for men certainly seems vital to supporting their efforts!

To summarize:

Men can attract women with hard work (note not about money per se, it can be status)
The above is one of the strongest factors that contributes to a

GLaDOS12y

[Link] More ominous than a [Marriage] strike

Note that this is an interesting example of a social problem dilemma as Dalrock emphasizes. Talking about something will make it worse, but unless it is talked about the fundamentals will continue to get worse. It generalizes to other problems I think. The best course of action is to beforehand determine if talking about the social problem is likely to result in change to address it, if not it shouldn't be talked about. Your opinions?

Replying to[Link] More ominous than a [Marriage] strike

GLaDOS12y

[Link] More ominous than a [Marriage] strike

I want to emphasis that because men have significantly more outliers when it comes to achievement and social outcomes (both positive and negative ) , we should expect such a change in culture to ceteris paribus result in a net decrease in very exceptional achievements. Young men are also responsible for the vast majority of violent crime. We should expect delayed marriage and drop in marriage to push in the direction of more violence as well.

[Link] More ominous than a [Marriage] strike

GLaDOS

12y

Dalrock writes an interesting article related to Dr. Helen Smith's book the Marriage Strike. I really have to bump it up on my too rapidly growing reading list. (^_^)

Dr. Helen has a thoughtful post up asking if the title of her book is an accurate description of men’s response to the changes in the law and culture. While the title of her book is extremely effective in opening the discussion (which is what it needs to do), it isn’t an accurate description of problem we face in the West. A strike can be negotiated with; offer them a bit more and they’ll get back to work. Better yet, offer a few of

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Replying toOpen Thread, November 23-30, 2013

GLaDOS12y

Open Thread, November 23-30, 2013

I don't think you should. But maybe this is because I feel the same way (;_;) despite being just someone who endorses HBD and dislikes Progressivism but thinks Moldbug wrong. I like this comment you made elsewhere much better than the one you linked to though:

Progressive takeover of a community is strongly empowered by a journalists noticing nonprogressive ideas floating there.

We've been noticing this process for a long time now. I now think I was wrong on this in the past. This should be a sign for what you call the "outer right" that we will only inflame the now inevitable escalation of status warfare, as social justice debates hijack attention... (read more)

Replying to[Link] Distance from Harvard

GLaDOS12y

[Link] Distance from Harvard

Further, those who pushed continental drift were not COMPLETELY isolated from Harvard at all! They knew the theories and the data.

He wasn't proposing complete isolation, just sufficient isolation to make fixating particular craziness difficult. It is uncharitable to think he proposed this. After all the academic community in Alpha Centauri would hardly be isolated from our own, the 4 year time lag isn't that much in academic circles, I've seen papers in some fields published abroad picked up here only after a 10 year time lag for example.

His basic argument is not that intellectual cooperation isn't useful, his argument is that intellectual cooperation is not a good way to investigate whatever... (read more)

-1

Replying to[Link] Distance from Harvard

GLaDOS12y

[Link] Distance from Harvard

The speed of light is our friend in this regard, but I expect it is more likely we will become very fast, so what is today tiny lag will become very problematic, rather than traveling to the stars. But that is getting ahead of myself, if we don't have competing craziness we might not get starships or mind emulations. (;_;) So how can we get some of the benefit of this today where we are all one with Harvard?

A commenter there writes:

Russia is an interesting case. You’ve got a whole school of Russian linguists, with roots back in the Soviet era, who think they can reconstruct really ancient language families. American linguists

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[Link] Low-Hanging Poop

GLaDOS

12y

Related: Son of Low Hanging Fruit

Another post on finding low hanging fruit from Gregory Cochran's and Henry Harpending's blog West Hunter.

Clostridium difficile causes a potentially serious kind of diarrhea triggered by antibiotic treatments. When the normal bacterial flora of the colon are hammered by a broad-spectrum antibiotic, C. difficile often takes over and causes real trouble. Mild cases are treated by discontinuing antibiotic therapy, which often works: if not, the doctors try oral metronidazole (Flagyl), then vancomycin , then intravenous metronidazole. This doesn’t always work, and C. difficile infections kill about 14,000 people a year in the US.
One recent trial shows that fecal bacteriotherapy, more commonly called a stool transplant, works like gangbusters,

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Replying toOpen Thread, October 13 - 19, 2013

GLaDOS12y

Open Thread, October 13 - 19, 2013

The point on torture being useful seems really obvious in hindsight. Before reading this I pretty much believed it was useless. I think it settled my head in the mid 2000s, arriving straight from political debates. Apparently knowing history can be useful!

Overall his comment is interesting but I think the article has more important implications, someone should post it. So I did. (^_^)

[Link] Distance from Harvard

GLaDOS

12y

This post is from Gregory Cochran's and Henry Harpending's excellent blog West Hunter.

Barry Marshall once said that if he had gone to Harvard, he would have known that stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and wouldn’t even have considered the possibility that they might be caused by a bacterium. There are a number of other important innovators that sure look as if they benefited from living as far as possible from the sources of establishment opinion. Back when continental drift was officially nonsense, quite a few geologists in South Africa and Australia thought it must be correct – partly because there are

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Replying toOpen Thread, April 1-15, 2013

GLaDOS13y

Open Thread, April 1-15, 2013

From this day forward all speculation and armchair theorizing on LessWrong should be written in Comic Sans.

[Link] Son of low-hanging fruit

GLaDOS

13y

An entry I found in the archives on Gregory Cochran's and Henry Harpending's blog West Hunter.

In yet another example of long-delayed discovery, forms of high-altitude lightning were observed for at least a century before becoming officially real (as opposed to really real).
Some thunderstorms manage to generate blue jets shooting out of their thunderheads, or glowing red rings and associated tentacles around 70 kilometers up. C T R Wilson predicted this long ago, back in the 1920s. He had a simple model that gets you started.
You see, you can think of the thunderstorm, after a ground discharge, as a vertical dipole. Its

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[Link] Diversity and Academic Open Mindedness

GLaDOS

13y

David Friedman writes on his blog.

I had an interesting recent conversation with a fellow academic that I think worth a blog post. It started with my commenting that I thought support for "diversity" in the sense in which the term is usually used in the academic context—having students or faculty from particular groups, in particular blacks but also, in some contexts, gays, perhaps hispanics, perhaps women—in practice anticorrelated with support for the sort of diversity, diversity of ideas, that ought to matter to a university.

I offered my standard example. Imagine that a university department has an

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149

Replying toOn private marriage contracts

GLaDOS13y

On private marriage contracts

Probably. Possibly. Yes.

[Video] Brainwashed - A Norwegian documentary series on nature and nurture

GLaDOS

13y

"Hjernevask" a well known (in Norway at least) documentary series that I am sure will be interesting to rationalists here is now available with English subtitles online. Produced by Ole Martin Ihle and Harald Eia a Norwegian documentarian and comedian, it casts a light on both ways in which we know people to be different as well as the culture that is academia in the Nordic country and probably elsewhere as well.

The Series

The Gender Equality Paradox - Why do girls tend to go into empathizing professions and boys into systemizing professions? Why does the labor market become more gender

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[Link] Social Psychology & Priming: Art Wears Off

GLaDOS

13y

Related to: Power of Suggestion

Social Psychology & Priming: Art Wears Off

by Steve Sailer
One of the most popular social psychology studies of the Malcolm Gladwell Era has been Yale professor John Bargh's paper on how you can "prime" students to walk more slowly by first having them do word puzzles that contain a hidden theme of old age by the inclusion of words like "wrinkle" and "bingo." The primed subjects then took one second longer on average to walk down the hall than the unprimed control group. Isn't that amazing! (Here's Gladwell's description of Bargh's famous experiment in his 2005 bestseller Blink.)
This finding has electrified the Airport Book industry for years: Science

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[Link] Power of Suggestion

GLaDOS

13y

I recommend reading the piece, but below are some excerpts and commentary.

Power of Suggestion

By Tom Bartlett
...
Along with personal upheaval, including a lengthy child-custody battle, [Yale social psychologist John Bargh] has coped with what amounts to an assault on his life's work, the research that pushed him into prominence, the studies that Malcolm Gladwell called "fascinating" and Daniel Kahneman deemed "classic."
What was once widely praised is now being pilloried in some quarters as emblematic of the shoddiness and shallowness of social psychology. When Bargh responded to one such salvo with a couple of sarcastic blog posts, he was ridiculed as going on a "one-man

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[Link] Economists' views differ by gender

GLaDOS

13y

Edit: ParagonProtege has provided a link to the original study. Thank you! (^_^)

Link.

A new study shows a large gender gap on economic policy among the nation's professional economists, a divide similar -- and in some cases bigger -- than the gender divide found in the general public.
What does an economist think of that?
A lot depends on whether the economist is a man or a woman. A new study shows a large gender gap on economic policy among the nation's professional economists, a divide similar -- and in some cases bigger -- than the gender divide found in the general public.
Differences extend to core professional beliefs -- such as the effect of

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LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Scientific misconduct misdiagnosed because of scientific misconduct

[Link] Low-Hanging Poop

[Link] Power of Suggestion

[Link] Son of low-hanging fruit

GLaDOS

GLaDOS

[Link] Forty Days

[Link] More ominous than a [Marriage] strike

[Link] Low-Hanging Poop

[Link] Distance from Harvard

[Link] Son of low-hanging fruit

[Link] Diversity and Academic Open Mindedness

[Video] Brainwashed - A Norwegian documentary series on nature and nurture

GLaDOS

Scientific misconduct misdiagnosed because of scientific misconduct

[Link] Low-Hanging Poop

[Link] Power of Suggestion

[Link] Son of low-hanging fruit

GLaDOS

GLaDOS

[Link] Forty Days

[Link] More ominous than a [Marriage] strike

[Link] Low-Hanging Poop

[Link] Distance from Harvard

[Link] Son of low-hanging fruit

[Link] Diversity and Academic Open Mindedness

[Video] Brainwashed - A Norwegian documentary series on nature and nurture

Social Psychology & Priming: Art Wears Off

Power of Suggestion