IrenicTruth

(The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven's big fundraiser

I was frustrated by the lack of a yearly donation option or an option to make a recurring donation of less than $10/month. I almost decided not to give because this communicated that it's not worth the effort to receive contributions from small-value donors like me. And if it's not worth the effort to accept, it's certainly not worth the cost of giving.

However, I decided to give a one-time payment of $10 assuming that this was from ignorance or carelessness. If you'd like to signal that a recurring donation (or more donations from small players like me) are worthwhile, please set up with Liberapay (the GOAT for flexibility—I support plantuml at $0.13... (read more)

Is it a matter of adding a standard paragraph to NIH grants? Yes. That's what I was thinking of.

If you follow standard DEI criteria, I'm commenting on LessWrong; I don't do "standard."😉

More seriously, I apologize. I should have clarified what I meant by diversity. In particular, I mean that diverse groups are spread out in a parsimonious description space.

A pretty detailed example

As a concrete example of one understanding that would match my idea of diversity, consider some very high-dimensional space representing available people who can also do the work measured on as many axes as you can use to characterize them (characteristics of mind, body, experiences, etc.) and reduced by a technique to cause the remaining dimensions to give little mutual information about one another. Define a "diversity-growing procedure" for adding... (read more)

[I] suspect [vaccines] (or antibiotics) account for the majority of the value provided by the medical system

Though I agree that vaccines and antibiotics are extraordinarily beneficial and cost-effective interventions, I suspect you're missing essential value fountains in our medical system. Two that come to mind are surgery and emergency medicine.

I've spoken to several surgeons about their work, and they all said that one of the great things about their job is seeing the immediate and obvious benefits to patients. (Of course, surgery wouldn't be nearly as effective without antibiotics, so potentially, this smuggles something in.)

Emergency medicine also provides a lot of benefits. Someone was going to die from bleeding, and we sewed... (read more)

IrenicTruthNov 20, 2024*

If a product derives from Federally-funded research, the government owns a share of the IP for that product. (This share should be larger than the monetary investment in the grants that bore fruit since the US taxpayer funds a lot of early-stage research, only a little of which will result in IP. So, this system must account for the investments that didn't pan out as part of the total investment required to produce that product.)
Fund grants based on models of downstream benefit. Four things that should be included as "benefits" in this model are increased health span, increased capacity for bioengineering, an increased competent researcher pool, and a diverse set of researchers.

... (read more)

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Replying toWhy I’m not a Bayesian

Why I’m not a Bayesian

I shy away from fuzzy logic because I used it as a formalism to justify my religious beliefs. (In particular, "Possibilistic Logic" allowed me to appear honest to myself—and I'm not sure how much of it was self-deception and how much was just being wrong.)

The critical moment in my deconversion came when I realized that if I was looking for truth, I should reason according to the probabilities of the statements I was evaluating. Thirty minutes later, I had gone from a convinced Christian speaking to others, leading in my local church, and basing my life and career on my beliefs to an atheist who was primarily uncertain about atheism because of self-distrust.

Grounding my beliefs in falsifiable statements and probabilistic-ish models has been a beneficial discipline that forces me to recognize my limits and helps predict the outcomes of my actions. I don't know if I could do the same with fuzzy logic and "reasoning by model."

Replying toHow I started believing religion might actually matter for rationality and moral philosophy