All of jayterwahl's Comments + Replies

Re: elevated oral cancer risk in ALDH-deficient populations—I asked our dentech advisor Dr. Justin Merritt about it, and he said approximately,

The acetaldehyde cancer risk they describe is legit for AFR populations. However, connecting that risk to Lumina-derived ethanol production is where the argument becomes suspect. 

Their argument is that a cariogenic diet (ie, sugar-rich) might produce sufficient ethanol in the mouth from Lumina to trigger local acetaldehyde production that damages the local epithelium; that the admittedly small total amounts of

Hi! I'm Aaron, Lantern Bioworks is my company. 

Thanks. Similar to the concern of "could the bacteria colonize the vaginal tract after oral sex?" this is exactly the sort of edge-case risk we wanted to identify.  We want to reward that safety-red-teaming by paying you $500. Send me your paypal, venmo, or crypto address at your leisure. 

(The bug bounty is still $100 by default, but this was high-effort and we appreciate it. If anyone has more potential bugs to submit, email me at aaron@lanternbioworks.com !) 

"Things we can't talk about" in a relationship is another form of technical debt

I was a negative utilitarian for two weeks because of a math error

So I was like, 

If the neuroscience of human hedonics is such that we experience pleasure at about a 1 valence and suffering at about a 2.5 valence, 

And therefore an AI building a glorious transhuman utopia would get us to 1 gigapleasure, and an endless S-risk hellscape would get us to 2.5 gigapain, 

And we don’t know what our future holds, 

And, although the most likely AI outcome is still overwhelmingly “paperclips”, 

If our odds are 1:1 between ending u... (read more)

Where did you hear that TTS inspired dath ilan's Governance? 

Move Over, Insect Suffering: The Insect Vibing Hypothesis

I’m pretty bullish on “insect suffering” actually being the hedonic safe-haven for the planet’s moral portfolio

So as a K-selected species, our lives are pretty valuable, in terms of parental investment, time-to-reproductive-fruition, and how long we expect to live.  As such, the neuroscience of human motivation is heavily tilted towards avoiding-harm; I think the studies say that people feel gains/losses at about +1/-2.5 valences; so, loss is felt much more sharply. (And maybe the average human ... (read more)

Is the average human life experientially negative, such that buying three more years of existence for the planet is ethically net-negative?

(I predict that would help with AI safety, in that it would swiftly provide useful examples of reward hacking and misaligned incentives)

I imagine that WW3 would be an incredibly strong pressure, akin to WW2, which causes governments to finally sit up and take notice of AI.

And then spend several trillion dollars running Manhattan Project Two: Manhattan Harder, racing each other to be the first to get AI. 

And then we die even faster, and instead of being converted into paperclips, we're converted into tiny American/Chinese flags

I suspect that some people would be reassured by hearing bluntly, "Even though we've given up hope, we're not giving up the fight."

Not sarcastically! I wanted to have a Hard Mode available for those whose fasting was going well. 

Vavilov et al certainly did it with seeds available.

I propose we surround ourselves in edible seeds, too. 

Fair critique! Changed. 

1. From my email exchange with Deadwyler, I took away that DARPA lost interest, and Deadwyler himself disappeared to go work for tobacco companies. And because orexin occurs naturally in the brain, it can't be patented, which means that it's hard to make money on it. 
   
   (I would expect a snortable cure for sleep would be worth something regardless, but I'm not a pharma company, so what do I know.) 
    
2. Felt very different from modafinil; on a moda all-nighter I feel just mostly normal, kinda headachey, and a numbed fatigue. On orexin I still felt like

I predict that is an overly-optimistic reason for why they're rejecting the vaccine.