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All of greylag's Comments + Replies

I for one warmly welcome Drunk Edward Tufte to LW!

Data scientist (frowning) “this here are the culture war edgelords, these (gestures) are people who repost memes wantonly, but THESE (points at much taller larger treemap cell, on a log scale) are normies who had a bad breakup and said something like “f* men”. Oh, and these guys over here are sex positive and used the same words while meaning more or less the opposite”

Elon Musk and Solar Futurism

greylag4mo10

average price throughout the whole day

Oh, right, that’s the important bit. Solar glut can’t increase the instantaneous price but its effects on average (mean?) price are less clear

3Samuel Hapák4mo

No. Average price must go down. The evening price might go up—it might go up even to the level where the average price doesn’t change at all, but it can’t go up to the level where average price would rise. Think about it. You run a nuclear plant. Suddenly, due to solar competition, the day price went to 10%. You can’t turn nuclear off just during the day, so you keep it running and lower your day price to 10% as well. Your costs didn’t change, so to keep the same level of profitability, you need to rise the night price to 190%. This way your revenue doesn’t change. There is no reason why you would be able to rise the price above that level.

Elon Musk and Solar Futurism

greylag4mo10

What's the point of building a solar farm when the grid is already flooded when the sun is shining?

Batteries, yes, but also, the sun is non-binary! Additional solar/wind capacity won’t generate power in still conditions at night, but slower winds and overcast weather and low evening sun all will, and depending on the relative price of solar (increasingly cheap) it may be optimal to oversize solar such that you have absurd overcapacity at summer noon, but require less (relatively expensive) storage (paraphrasing Tony Seba)

2AnthonyC4mo

Yes, at conferences I've been to the discussion is increasingly not "How will we afford all the long term energy storage?" so much as "how much of a role will there be for long term energy storage?" Personally I'm fairly confident that we'll eventually need at least 4-16 hrs energy storage in most places, and more in some grids, but I suspect that many places will be able to muddle and kludge their way through most multi-day storage needs with a bunch of other partial solutions that generate power or shift demand.

Elon Musk and Solar Futurism

greylag4mo20

solar actually makes power more expensive because you still need all the non-solar generation after the sun goes down but you leave it idle during the day

How can you possibly make something more expensive by producing a glut of it? Making prices more variable, yes; making plant that has been optimised for baseload less well optimised for its new job, sure.

5transhumanist_atom_understander4mo

I seen the argument made by Robert Bryce and Alex Epstein, who don't suggest economic models, but the reason it's at least not obvious to me is that we need to consider supply, demand, price as functions of time. Solar produces a glut of electricity during the day. It makes sense to me that it would increase the price of electricity in the early evening, when solar isn't generating but demand is still high. It would do so by reducing the profitability of building natural gas plants to supply those hours, which results in either fewer natural gas plants (if demand is elastic) or the prices rising until they're profitable (if demand is inelastic). How this affects the average price throughout the whole day I don't know.

Don't Associate AI Safety With Activism

greylag4mo172

Increasingly activists are seen as defect-bots

To coin a phrase, huge if true.

2Viliam4mo

I guess it depends on the political bubble. So this may not necessarily be about activists as such, but about some political bubbles increasing recently (something something Russia Today something something Trump).

The problem with psychology is that it has no theory.

greylag9mo180

Priming, since debunked

The more dramatic “talk about getting old to people and they’ll walk slower” examples were debunked. The more pedestrian examples, as with word-association, “appear to be well-established” (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.345.6196.523-b), judging by a few minutes’ examination of Wikipedia (which common-sense supports: trying to NON-word-associate, as with certain panel & improv comedy games, is strikingly difficult)

In the meantime, large language models were created by mass-producing epicycles and training them (What ... (read more)

gwern9mo133

What happens when macroeconomists mass-produce epicycles? You get DGSE models which would take thousands of years of data to train (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.16224.pdf).

Didn't Shalizi's paper you cite trying to school the economists turn out to be wrong and irreproducible due to source code bugs? He hasn't updated his post appendix on the matter despite saying 2 years ago that the fixes would be quick and he was sure the numerical results would still prove the point.

Evaporation of improvements

greylag10mo10

"A slow sort of country!" said the [Red] Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" -- Alice through the Looking-Glass

Should rationalists be spiritual / Spirituality as overcoming delusion

greylag1y30

THANK YOU! In personal development circles, I hear a lot about the benefits of spirituality, with vague assurances that you don't have to be a theist to be spiritual, but with no pointers in non-woo directions, except possibly meditation. You have unblurred a large area of my mental map.

(Upvoted!)

greylag1y20

(Epistemic status: shitpost)

You‘re a kitty!

greylag1y10

How does knowing about Ukraine’s draft affect an NYT reader’s opinion of the war? I mean it’s not going to be like

Reader: “Ukraine’s justified in defending itself from Russia!”
NYT-whistleblower: ”But Ukraine drafted soldiers to do it, and the NYT didn’t tell you!”
Reader: ”Oh, well, screw those guys, Ukraine should lose!”

… so what is it like?

Some ways a reader could respond include:

More instinctive patriotic fervour (Glory to Ukraine’s presumably-voluntary heroes!) (… and this seems like the likely propaganda angle in question)
Increased salience of hellishn

... (read more)

3Viliam1y

Steelman: If you mistakenly assume that all Ukrainian soldiers in this war are volunteers, it would mean that X people oppose the Russian invasion so much that they are literally willing to risk their lives to stop it. When you learn that actually most Ukrainian soldiers are drafted, you should decrease your estimate of X. (Yes, some of those soldiers really want to defend their homeland; and some of them kinda want their homeland to remain independent, but would prefer to increase the chances of their own survival; and finally some of them actually want to become a part of Russia, but are forced against their will to fight against.) Ukraine being a "hybrid regime" and Zelensky being not very popular right before the war is indirect evidence that many people might oppose the official policy of resisting Russia, and that Ukraine might be the kind of country that would send them to die by thousands regardless. For an American reader, assuming that all Ukrainian soldiers are either professionals or volunteers would be an easy mistake to make. NYT is lying by omission by not mentioning this fact (frequently enough). The expected reaction of a reader is probably something like: "I assumed, based on the number of soldiers, that opposing Russia is very popular among the Ukrainians... but now I realize that those soldiers were literally forced at gunpoint to go fighting, so this is actually not evidence of a popular support... now I have no strong evidence either way, and maybe the fact that NYT was manipulating me in a certain direction should make me update in the opposite direction... so the conclusion is somewhere between 'Russia is right' and 'we actually don't know who is right', and in either case we should stop interfering." . This of course works better if the reader has no other information about Russia and Ukraine. Then again, that might actually be the case for a typical NYT reader.

Status-oriented spending

greylag1y10

downvoted for the "affiliate link" rickroll.

(Epistemic status: shitpost)

You know the rules, and so do I

Status-oriented spending

greylag1y80

I am confused. None of these are particularly social-status-improving, or, for that matter, social-status-worsening, because none of them are conspicuous. If you buy a tailored suit or an expensive car or an expensive house, people can see that you own it, and the extravagance signals wealth (or can be interpreted as materialism or lack of prudence); none of the things on the list seem to qualify. What am I missing?

2Adam Zerner1y

Yeah, more visible things like suits and cars are more status-signaling than something like hiring a house cleaner. The latter could be status-signaling if it comes up in conversation, but I that's a little limited, and so I don't think they were great examples for me to focus on in the post. They're just what came to my mind.

If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them

greylag1y30

Hm. Now I thought I’d heard of gender dysphoria/transgender/etc showing up in brain imaging (eg. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26766406/) and while “develop like female brains” would be bounding happily ahead of the evidence, that seems at least like sporadic snorting noises from the garage in the night time

3ChristianKl1y

The fact that someone finds a brain pattern that describes gender dysphoria but thinks that brain pattern does not warrant the description of looking like female brain patterns, to me does not look like evidence pointing in the direction that gender dysphoria is associated with female brain patterns. Vul et al's voodoo neuroscience paper is also worth reading, to have some perspective on these kinds of findings.

7tailcalled1y

I can't confidently make claims about all brain imaging studies as I haven't read enough of them, but as a general rule studies that claim to find links between neurology and psychological traits are fake (same problem as candidate gene studies, plus maybe also the problem of "it's not clear we're looking at the right variables") unless the trait in question is g (IQ). This applies not just to the trans brain studies, but also to the studies claiming to find the sex differences in brain structure (while large sex differences in brain structure do exist, the ones that have been found so far appear to be completely uncorrelated with psychological traits that have sex differences once you control for sex, so they do not mediate the relationship between sex and those psychological traits).

Rishi to outline his vision for Britain to take the world lead in policing AI threats when he meets Joe Biden

greylag2y48

(Epistemic status: shitpost)

Plan to uplift Royal Corgi may cause constitutional crisis

Arguments Against Fossil Future?

Answer by greylagJun 04, 202330

If Epstein’s thesis is, broadly, “cheap energy from fossil fuels is awesome and climate change isn’t that bad”, weaknesses would be likely to fall somewhere under these, classified in increasing controversy:

Climate change might be worse than he’s positing. Particularly, climate is a global system we only partly understand, and our error bars for the effects of inadvertently perturbing it may be quite large
Cheap energy may be obtainable from non-fossil sources. Epstein is keen on nuclear energy (why?), but, as AnthonyC points out, solar & wind are getti

... (read more)

Arguments Against Fossil Future?

greylag2y10

… climate change is not an existential risk… Earth isn't going to become Venus, or anything like that

Last I heard, the big question was what positive-feedback “tipping points” exist, and at what CO2-level they become triggered. This would give quite wide error bars on what average heating is caused by a given quantity of cumulative emissions. If we can burn all the fossil fuels, turn the rainforests to desert, and vaporise all the methane clathrates, and still not end up like Venus, that’s… reassuring, I guess

3AnthonyC2y

Doing all that would be very bad. Not Venus, but enough to greatly decrease Earth's carrying capacity for humans and everything else, for a long time. We really should want that not to happen. But methane clathrate release turns out not to be as rapidly self-reinforcing as once feared, and at this point there's no longer an economic or technological reason to think we'll need to keep using fossil fuels and cutting down rainforests long enough to get to that point. We're already seeing slowdowns in net deforestation, in part because in some countries there is net reforestation, though rainforests in particular are being lost faster in part because these exist mostly in less developed countries, but even then it's (2020 aside) slowing down.

Sun-following Garden Mirrors?

greylag2y102

A town in Norway did it: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170314-the-town-that-built-a-mirror-to-catch-the-sun

2jefftk2y

That's so neat! Seeing the Town Square lit up like that in the middle of so much deep shade looks really computer generated. I wonder in person how quickly it starts to feel normal?

Wolf Incident Postmortem

greylag2y30

(Epistemic status: lyrics)

I’m not too clear about what you just spoke. Is that a parable, or a very subtle joke?

aphyer2y142

If you're making false claims of your incomprehension, it's clear that you've missed the moral dimension. When you truly can't get what someone is saying, remember today and the games you were playing. It takes people effort to give added proof...and they won't put that in for the boy who cries wolf.

The horror of what must, yet cannot, be true

greylag3y10

Or to take a stronger example, someone you deeply care about must be alive because you deeply love them, and at the same time you also know for certain that they are dead.

Isn’t this the “denial” psychological defense mechanism, famous for its role in Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief? In the reality the unfortunate thing is true; the impossibility is in the mind of the observer tripping circuit breakers.

Request for nice questions to think about while trying to sleep

greylag3y00

(Epistemic status: shitpost)

Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, but with a large number of trained sheep

Misleading Boiler Error Message

greylag3y30

Story prompt: overengineered boiler bootstraps self to sentience, discovers climate change, goes on strike

Is there a term / better way of phrasing the general case where an intervention helps certain individuals do better at zero-sum games but doesn’t provide any external value?

Answer by greylagDec 20, 202160

“Pareto efficiency“ - Pareto efficiency, or Pareto optimality, is an economic state where resources cannot be reallocated to make one individual better off without making at least one individual worse off (from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pareto-efficiency.asp)

and “arms race”, if that counts as a nicer way, or some allusion to the Red Queen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race)

1freedomandutility3y

These are also perfect, thank you!

Second-order selection against the immortal

greylag3y-10

Epistemic status: shitpost

Second-Order selection against My Immortal

Voting for people harms people

greylag4y30

If you think we‘ve got too much Culture War, vote for people/policies/things that in your opinion will diminish the Culture War (give or take other values, obviously).

(This is a consequentialist argument)

5CraigMichael4y

That’s not possible. Imagine watching people a game play a game of tug-of-war between teams representing the left and the right, it’s like regular tug-of-war except the ropes can become infinitely long and at any point the members of the audience can jump in and join their favorite team if their side is losing (or can go at punch someone on the winning side if they’d prefer). When you say “pick the side of the tug-of-war that will stop the tug-of-war” it tells me that you don’t understand the game that’s being played. No one involved wants to stop it, and there’s a nearly inexhaustible set of audience members on either side. You need to stop people from participating in the intrinsically harmful game and get them to play a pro-social one. The only way you can do that is to say “I’m not playing in the tug-of-war” and if you get enough people to do that, you deprive the game of the resources it needs to continue and can change the game.

X-Risk, Anthropics, & Peter Thiel's Investment Thesis

greylag4y60

(Epistemic status: earworm)

No-one will have the endurance to claim on his insurance / Lloyd’s of London will be loaded when they go! - Tom Lehrer, “We will all go together when we go”

What if we should use more energy, not less?

greylag4y30

I’ve yet to delve into it, but RethinkX - a think tank, doubtless with an axe to grind - take similar ingredients and produce a result pointing in the opposite direction: RE is cheap, storage is relatively expensive, so the optimal solution is RE overcapacity with storage filling the gap that remains, and volatile energy prices, often very low, sometimes quite high. A large gas- or coal-fired power plant is not at all optimised for this market, and they don’t advise you to own one. See, for example: https://www.rethinkx.com/energy-lcoe.

I think there are ve... (read more)

What if we should use more energy, not less?

greylag4y10

The need for backup dispatchable power means that even if RE were free, it would still not be cheaper, because you still have to have the backup dispatchable power stations

This is somewhat true for the capital cost of the backup/dispatchable plant, but not the operating cost, which includes fuel, and any notion of the cost of the emissions (whether via carbon tax, cap and trade, or notional non–financial cost) (and, as far as AGW is concerned, the emissions are the important factor here).

Scout Mindset and Latter-Day Saint Apostasy

greylag4y20

See also: “Preachers who are not believers“ (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491000800113)

What Do GDP Growth Curves Really Mean?

greylag4y70

GDP is more of a measure of economic activity than value

Upvoting for this insight.

5jmh4y

I do agree that the distinction should be made and should be known, and that the confusion around the interpretation be reduced. At the same time calling it an "insight" appears to be due to either that very confusion or ignorance of the actual subject matter. https://thesolutionsjournal.com/2016/02/22/a-short-history-of-gdp-moving-towards-better-measures-of-human-well-being/ (Note -- I take the meaning of "value" above to refer to the more subjective utility-type meaning and not simply the price value for accounting at some aggregate level.) Perhaps a more interesting question here might be why so many people, and specifically non-lay people who really should know better (professional economists, professional financial journalist, governmental staff and representatives), keep slipping into the error in framing/rhetoric if not flat out error in thought.

Matt Levine spots IRL Paperclip Maximizer in Reddit

greylag4y10

(Epistemic status: quoting 80s action movie, metaphor)

”Welcome to the party, pal!”

Social media: designed to be bad for you & for society

greylag4y30

Whales, to use the metaphor used by casinos.

Social media: designed to be bad for you & for society

greylag4y30

Another aspect: if you built software intended to deliberate on people’s needs and problems and then formulate plans and collect volunteers, the result would look fairly thoroughly not like Facebook. Any system for collating, corralling and organising different opinions and evidence would, also, look not at all like Facebook. You might end up with an argument map[1], or some “garden and the stream”[2] mix of dialogue and accumulated wisdom.

TL;DR: social software intended to avoid or ameliorate the problems we see with Facebook might function very little li... (read more)

1matto4y

Wow, thanks for those links. I've spent a few hours going down the garden/stream rabbithole. I can't believe I hadn't seen it before - though I've seen tools like Roam or the Zettelkasten and such, and of course I've read the Vanevar Bush article, but somehow it never occurred to me that maybe we already have working, albeit relatively not so popular, systems that work very differently than Facebook.

6gwern4y

I like the warren & plaza description of bi-level communities for productive discussion. 'Garden and stream' seems to overemphasize wikis as a mechanism, when it's really about persistence & specialization for filtering (eg Usenet discussion groups feeding into FAQs).

3matto4y

That's a good point. Another way to look at the difference between Facebook and X would be that Facebook/Twitter/etc. lean heavily on self-expression. Very little of the content on those sites actually aim to contribute to something, like a dialogue or body of knowledge. I think this is why communities focused around specific goals, say, writers, weight lifters, or rationalists do not do their work over Facebook/Twitter/etc. Some might use those to stay in touch, but the serious work gets done on yee old phpbb forums and the like, where self-expression is not the main point.

Social media: designed to be bad for you & for society

greylag4y10

The way echo chambers work seems to be popularly mis-explained.

How’s it’s explained: everyone you encounter agrees with you

How it actually works: everyone you encounter who you disagree with appears to be insane or evil. Next time you encounter someone who disagrees with you, you expect them to be insane or evil, causing you to act in a way that seems to them to be insane or evil. Iterate.

2tailcalled4y

That second phenomenon seems to be a thing, though I wouldn't use the word "echo chamber" to refer to it. More like "polarization" or "radicalization".

Social media: designed to be bad for you & for society

greylag4y30

(Epistemic status: guesswork)

Hypothesis: more addictive may well not actually be more profitable. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if social media engagement was Pareto-distributed, with the most active people quite possibly not the most lucrative customers for advertisers to advertise to. This is immaterial if effectiveness-of-advertising is Goodharted into ”page impressions”, but a pile of Nash Equilibria which only works because multiple parties are Goodharting against noisy proxies can collapse abruptly.

3Viliam4y

So, kinda like... most people never click on any Facebook ads, but there is a small fraction of morons that click on all of them... but there is no simple known method to make the morons stay on the website longer without also making everyone else stay longer? (Exaggerated to make a point.) Sounds possible.

Covid vaccine safety: how correct are these allegations?

greylag4y70

Whether or not this case has merit, the systematic censorship thing seems real to me... when the antivaxxers have a point, the mainstream isn't allowed to admit it

”Social media trying to tackle disinformation with blunt instruments and causing collateral damage” seems to me very much true. Censorship of information about side-effects…? Well, it seems like “the covid vaccine makes you feel terrible 24-48 hours afterwards for some people” seems like common knowledge; I’m sure I’ve been advised after the flu vaccine to stay still & nearby for ten mi... (read more)

7gilch4y

Informed consent is important. I don't recall being informed about accumulation in bone marrow or ovaries, or the risk of myocarditis or the risk of brain fog at the time I got my shots. Maybe some of these side-effects weren't known at the time. But that the vaccine didn't stay in the muscle and therefore might have systemic effects was news to me, and they're asserting that this was known at the time. I've been experiencing persistent palpitations recently. It had not occurred to me that this could be due to the vaccine until I watched this video. I believed the mainstream line that the vaccines are safe and effective. I still think they're effective. The evidence for that is very strong. I'm less confident that they're safe now. Confirmation bias is a serious concern when reactions are this delayed though. People develop health issues all the time for all sorts of reasons. If they're primed to think the vaccine could have long-term side effects, they'd probably attribute all sorts of things to the vaccine that are mere coincidence. So individual anecdotes are pretty weak evidence, but this noisy data is still worth collecting to see if any patterns emerge. On the other hand, if we've all been primed to think the vaccines are safe (and we have been), then we won't make the connection at all and don't even report the data, and this is one of the main concerns from the video. The issue has become too politicized for society to be objective about it. Legitimate concerns get you labeled as an antivaxxer.

...and then sometimes, for no clear reason, they innately become good.

greylag4y*10

I can't say he just "grew out of it" because a lot of evil people remain evil as adults

”They grew out of it” isn’t invalidated as a phenomenon because it’s success rate is less than 100%!

“They grew out of it” does appear to be what happens to a lot of high-school bullies, from conventional wisdom & personal experience. I believe many petty criminals, also, grow out of it - opportunistic crimes are primarily a young man’s game.

Is there a term for 'the mistake of making a decision based on averages when you could cherry picked instead'?

Answer by greylagMay 26, 202120

Nominate “statisticians’ duck hunt”, after this joke

Three statisticians go duck hunting. They see a duck and the first statistician shoots, hitting two feet to the left of the duck. The second statistician shoots, hitting two feet to the right of the duck. The third statistician leaps up in joy, yelling, "We got it!"

Covid cafes

greylag4y60

Guess: people are craving normalcy, and aren’t doing the math.

Technological stagnation: Why I came around

greylag4y160

(Epistemic status: lame pun)

I don't believe 1970 had significant deployment of ... EDM, or probably a bunch of other process I'm forgetting about

It was called “disco” in the 70s

Review: The Gioconda Smile

greylag4y10

Hm.

What if you read the story as if you were in the 1920s, and less accustomed to short stories peopled by irredeemable spherical bastards than we now are? (Especially in Real Literature, as opposed to, say, sci-fi or MLP fan fiction)

What if you read it using some sort of Christian ethics (souls, redemption) rather than modern consequentialist philosophy (harm to sentient beings)?

What if you read it as if you were a spectacular chauvinist and view the female characters‘ plight as unworthy of consideration?

Can we get people to shut up on public transportation?

Answer by greylagNov 28, 202080

Highly addictive smartphone game, playable only when the phone detects (gps, accelerometer, Bluetooth beacons) that the player is on a train/bus/tram (Working title: Pokémon Shut The **** Up). Bonus: game becomes unplayable if phone can hear that people are talking. Bonus bonus: synergistic use of conversation detection alongside Bluetooth “exposure notification“.

greylag4y20

This is not the bidet I was expecting.

Memory reconsolidation for self-affection

greylag5y60

Thank you for the comprehensive answer!

Memory reconsolidation for self-affection

greylag5y30

Last Thursday, I realized that none of the people who ever hurt me did it because there was anything fundamentally wrong with me. I don’t mean that as in “realized intellectually”...

Huh.

Ok, maybe this is like reversing advice, but that seems like quite a thing to realise. Even on an intellectual level. Unless “fundamentally” is doing a lot of work. I mean, suppose I got into an argument with a family member where I said something abrasive which they took personally then said something hurtful to me. Is this not about me being abrasive? Is being abras... (read more)

Kaj_Sotala5y130

I would say that "being abrasive" may be something wrong that you did, but it's not something fundamentally wrong with you. This is a little tricky, but I'll try.

The distinction is one of actions being wrong versus people being wrong. In either case, you may feel bad because you were abrasive, but the "object that the badness is associated with" is different.

If something that you do is wrong, then it's possible for you to change that in the future. You were abrasive, but you recognize that it was wrong to be abrasive, and as a result you may do something s... (read more)

Which headlines and narratives are mostly clickbait?

greylag5y30

I think the easiest strategy is to look at those people and groups that are defamed and censored. If you know that establishment gatekeeping doesn't want you looking a particular way then there's bound to be something worth looking at there

That... doesn’t feel super-valuable. For a start, sampling the political opinions of people who regard “the establishment“ as the outgroup is going to disagree very strongly with such ideas as ”We live safe and comfortable lives in a world of great privilege and things are only getting better by the day”.

Othe... (read more)

5Stuart Anderson5y

Covid 10/15: Playtime is Over

greylag5y20

So if it isn’t ethical to allow the virus to spread, nor is it ethical to lock down your population to stop it, then it’s…

(epistemic status: assuming good faith)

... “test, trace, treat and isolate”?

1Zvi5y

Except it's not ethical to test at any practical cost, privacy rules mean you can't trace, we all know the rules about treat, and we already know what we think about isolate!

Rationality and Climate Change

greylag5y10

I’m surprised at these EROI figures: that solar PV is producing energy at very low levalised cost but utterly pathetic EROEI fails the sniff test. A quick scoot through Wikipedia finds a methodological argument (comments on https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544213000492?via%3Dihub).

3Jay5y

Part of it is that high-performance solar cells require single-crystal silicon or gallium arsenide. The purification process for semiconductors is extremely energy intensive. The device fabrication processes are resource and energy intensive as well. But yes, storage is also a huge problem (especially for winter heating, etc.)

Rationality and Climate Change

greylag5y10

If you impose a large carbon tax, or other effective global policy of austerity that reduces fossil fuel use without replacing that energy somehow, you're just making the whole world poor

For the case that our civilisation’s energy efficiency is substantially below optimal, see [Factor 4](https://sustainabilitydictionary.com/2006/02/17/factor-4/) (Lovins & Lovins, 1988)

Covid 8/27: The Fall of the CDC

greylag5y10

Wearing a mask is vital to preventing Covid-19 infection

I’m wearing a mask because I think they are a reasonable intervention and in the hope that me wearing one encourages other people to wear one. (It sounds like they’re more effective at protecting everyone else than protecting the wearer). I‘m not sure which simulacra level this is (1.1, game theoretic axis?)

2Zvi5y

Yes, also in the hopes that it helps encourage others to wear them. As Silver_Swift says it's fine to use that. It can even be Level 1 - you're providing a true Bayesian update to others about whether masks work and what the consequences of wearing one would be!

4Silver_Swift5y

You're not limited to one simulacrum level per unit of information. What you're describing is just combining level 1 (reasonable intervention) and level 2 (influencing others to wear a mask).