pandamonium
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pandamonium has not written any posts yet.
What a fruitful question. There are already things I deemed impossible that I managed to make happen :)
So two examples of what feel impossible now (but still in the realm of reality, not like wanting to eat the concept of a color x) ) :
Preventing the general European move towards fascism (even achieving that in my country, France, would be amazing). Feels impossible because :
Many competent and intelligent people already attempted that, without success.
I don't think these kind of mass movements are controllable by one person. It feels like they behave following laws we don't necessarily know but can hardly break.
I tried a little my hand at politics, it seems like a
Thanks for the idea ! I've never seen it before. I just tried it and unsurprisingly discovered that I feel way more motivated with three reasons than with one. As a fun example, it made me try to brush my teeth in a manner that feel like massaging my teeths and gums, which is quite pleasant while still efficient.
I have been in the Light World, then the Dark and I've been working on escaping it for years, with partial success. It felt good to read this essay, the fact that the move is doable but takes a ton of work and time resonates with my expérience. It's a small example, but the example of the child psychopath who recovered thanks to professionnal help gave me hope. I have had to renunce to parts of my integrity, empathy and trust in the world and others in order to deal with difficult situations and build for myself a safe environment. I am working on gaining them back, but woah that's hard !
Some... (read more)
I agree with the fact that there are many examples of exponential growth in real life, but this post seems to overstate their importance.
Here, I feel that approximating a little quantity to zero led to a false conclusion. A lot of cool (and I guess bad) things in life are present in small quantity and it's enough for them to be valuable and have a strong impact. There is one ethical breeder of the breed of dogs you love in France (example taken from a friend ;) ) : that's all you need ! If you were limited to the main topics in conversations, it would get boring very fast. Thankfully, there are plenty of small new topics of conversations that appear when you talk to new people ! And, taking an example closer to LessWrong, you only need one powerful AI with weak safeguards to get the world into trouble.
Disclaimer : I would not pay and want to pay that much money anyway - so I am not your intended audience
I'd trust you more (and I would think members of the rationalist community would too) if you gave several metrics, even if some of them are not so good, with explanations. Right now, it seems you chose a metric so that it looks good.
More metrics would take more time but not much if you have the data easily available. This would be my suggestion :
You can provide three percentages ( like when one provides three quantiles instead of just the mean of data values) :
Ah yes, you're right. I don't know why but I made the mental shortcut that the mutation rate was about the DNA of cows / humans and not the flu virus.
The general point still holds : I am wary of the assumption of a constant mutation rate of the flu virus. It really facilitates the computation, but if the computation under this simplifying hypothesis leads to a consequence which contradict reality, I would interrogate this assumption.
It's surprising to have so few human cases considering the large number of cows infected if there is a human-compatible viron per cow.
Another cause of this discrepancy could also be that due to the large mutation rate,... (read more)
I am no biologist but I thought it would be fun to give it a try. Hoping it's not too late to participate.
For the purpose of this experiment, I assumed everything written in sound scientific papers was right, as I had neither the time nor the knowledge to do a proper truth-check.
Here is what I found :
The fact that we see very few human cases compared to what we could expect for a virus which can become human-compatible with a single point mutation could be partially explained by the heterogeneity of the mutation rate over the genome:
I would like to highlight that the advice is sexist and not unisex as stated. All these steps for a guy to meet as many partners as they can in order to really find one which fit their goal, and the advice for the woman is only to actively pursue people they are attracted too ? If the goal was really for any person to meet the best partner for them, it would ensue that women, as rational agents, should also try to maximize their encounters with men, to maximize the chance to find a man who is a great fit to their preference. The advice given here for women (while helpful,... (read more)
The discussion on the impact on false positive / false negatives would be more fair if you also discussed the negative impacts implementing bayesian punishment would have. For example, if you start giving small punishments for crimes with low credence of guilt, that would not be punished in the current system, this will add its lot of false positive.
I would not be confident it would be a good idea to implement this in our current justice systems. It may have a negative impact on people's faith in justice (is it deserved ? yeah ! is it good ? not sure) and my view of the justice system is that it's an essential... (read more)
Thank you for this post, it gives more precision (and actionable precision !) to the narrative that extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation that I have seen elsewhere.
The link to Goals as Excuses or Guides by Fishbach & Dhar is now broken. A quick search didn't give me any new legal and free link to a pdf, though I expect it to be on scihub.