I don't think it was articulated quite right -- it's more negative than my overall stance (I wrote it when unhappy) and a little too short-termist.

I do still believe that the future is unpredictable, that we should not try to "constrain" or "bind" all of humanity forever using authoritarian means, and that there are many many fates worse than death and we should not destroy everything we love for "brute" survival.

And, also, I feel that transience is normal and only a bit sad. It's good to save lives, but mortality is pretty "priced in" to my sense of how the world works. It's good to work on things that you hope will live beyond you, but Dark Ages and collapses are similarly "priced in" as normal for me. Sara Teasdale: "You say there is no love, my love, unless it lasts for aye; Ah folly, there are episodes far better than the play!" If our days are as a passing shadow, that's not that bad; we're used to it.

I worry that people who are not ok with transience may turn themselves into monsters so they can still "win" -- even though the meaning of "winning" is so changed it isn't worth it any more.

I thought about manually deleting them all but I don't feel like it.

links, 10/14/2024

• https://milton.host.dartmouth.edu/reading_room/pl/book_1/text.shtml [[John Milton]]'s Paradise Lost, annotated online [[poetry]]
• https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace [[AI]] [[biotech]] [[Dario Amodei]] spends about half of this document talking about AI for bio, and I think it's the most credible "bull case" yet written for AI being radically transformative in the biomedical sphere.
  • one caveat is that I think if we're imagining a future with brain mapping, regeneration of macroscopic brain tissue loss, and understanding what brains are doing well enough to know why neurological abnormalities at the cell level produce the psychiatric or cognitive symptoms they do...then we probably can do brain uploading! it's really weird to single out this one piece as pie-in-the-sky science fiction when you're already imagining a lot of similarly ambitious things as achievable.
• https://venture.angellist.com/eli-dourado/syndicate [[tech industry]] when [[Eli Dourado]] picks startups, they're at least not boring! i haven't vetted the technical viability of any of these, but he claims to do a lot of that sort of numbers-in-spreadsheets work.
• https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/shapley-values [[EA]] [[economics]] how do you assign credit (in a principled fashion) to an outcome that multiple people contributed to? Shapley values! It seems extremely hard to calculate in practice, and subject to contentious judgment calls about the assumptions you make, but maybe it's an improvement over raw handwaving.
• https://gwern.net/maze [[Gwern Branwen]] digs up the "Mr. Young" studying maze-running techniques in [[Richard Feynman]]'s "Cargo Cult Science" speech. His name wasn't Young but Quin Fischer Curtis, and he was part of a psychology research program at UMich that published little and had little influence on the outside world, and so was "rebooted" and forgotten. Impressive detective work, though not a story with a very satisfying "moral".
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Elwes [[celebrities]] [[Cary Elwes]] had an ancestor who was [[Charles Dickens]]' inspiration for Ebenezer Scrooge!
• https://feministkilljoys.com/2015/06/25/against-students/ [[politics]] an old essay by [[Sara Ahmed]] in defense of trigger warnings in the classroom and in general against the accusations that "students these days" are oversensitive and illiberal.
  • She's doing an interesting thing here that I haven't wrapped my head around. She's not making the positive case "students today are NOT oversensitive or illiberal" or "trigger warnings are beneficial," even though she seems to believe both those things. she's more calling into question "why has this complaint become a common talking point? what unstated assumptions does it perpetuate?" I am not sure whether this is a valid approach that's alternate to the forms of argument I'm more used to, or a sign of weakness (a thing she's doing only because she cannot make the positive case for the opposite of what her opponents claim.)
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10080017/ [[cancer]][[medicine]] [[biology]] cancer preventatives are an emerging field
  • NSAIDS and omega-3 fatty acids prevent 95% of tumors in a tumor-prone mouse strain?!
  • also we're targeting [[STAT3]] now?! that's a thing we're doing.
    • ([[STAT3]] is a major oncogene but it's a transcription factor, it lives in the cytoplasm and the nucleus, this is not easy to target with small molecules like a cell surface protein.)
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLARITY [[biotech]] make a tissue sample transparent so you can make 3D microscopic imaging, with contrast from immunostaining or DNA/RNA labels
• https://distill.pub/2020/circuits/frequency-edges/ [[AI]] [[neuroscience]] a type of neuron in vision neural nets, the "high-low frequency detector", has recently also been found to be a thing in literal mouse brain neurons (h/t [[Dario Amodei]]) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10055119/
• https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2024/10/the-failed-concepts-that-brought-israel-to-october-7/ [[politics]][[Israel]][[war]] an informative and sober view on "what went wrong" leading up to Oct 7
  • tl;dr: Hamas consistently wants to destroy Israel and commit violence against Israelis, they say so repeatedly, and there was never going to be a long-term possibility of living peacefully side-by-side with them; Netanyahu is a tough talker but kind of a procrastinator who's kicked the can down the road on national security issues for his entire career; catering to settlers is not in the best interests of Israel as a whole (they provoke violence) but they are an unduly powerful voting bloc; Palestinian misery is real but has been institutionalized by the structure of the Gazan state and the UN which prevents any investment into a real local economy; the "peace process" is doomed because Israel keeps offering peace and the Palestinians say no to any peace that isn't the abolition of the State of Israel.
  • it's pretty common for reasonable casual observers (eg in America) to see Israel/Palestine as a tragic conflict in which probably both parties are somewhat in the wrong, because that's a reasonable prior on all conflicts. The more you dig into the details, though, the more you realize that "let's live together in peace and make concessions to Palestinians as necessary" has been the mainstream Israeli position since before 1948. It's not a symmetric situation.
• [[von Economo neurons]] are spooky [[neuroscience]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Economo_neuron
  • only found in great apes, cetaceans, and humans
  • concentrated in the [[anterior cingulate cortex]] and [[insular cortex]] which are closely related to the "sense of self" (i.e. interoception, emotional salience, and the perception that your e.g. hand is "yours" and it was "you" who moved it)
  • the first to go in [[frontotemporal dementia]]
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14952-3 we don't know where they project to! they are so big that we haven't tracked them fully!
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3953677/
• https://www.wired.com/story/lee-holloway-devastating-decline-brilliant-young-coder/ the founder of Cloudflare had [[frontotemporal dementia]] [[neurology]]
• [[frontotemporal dementia]] is maybe caused by misfolded proteins being passed around neuron-to-neuron, like prion disease! [[neurology]]
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6838634/
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06548-9.pdf inject the bad protein into a mouse and it really does spread!
  • https://researchfeatures.com/cell-cell-transmission-proteins-core-neurodegenerative-disease/ something similar might be happening in [[Alzheimer's]] as well
  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3943211/ the spread of [[ALS]] through the brain is consistent with cell-to-cell transmission of misfolded proteins
  •  

Therefore, do things you'd be in favor of having done even if the future will definitely suck. Things that are good today, next year, fifty years from now... but not like "institute theocracy to raise birth rates", which is awful today even if you think it might "save the world".

"Let's abolish slavery," when proposed, would make the world better now as well as later.

I'm not against trying to make things better!

I'm against doing things that are strongly bad for present-day people to increase the odds of long-run human species survival.

https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/10-11-2024

• https://www.mindthefuture.info/p/why-im-not-a-bayesian [[Richard Ngo]] [[philosophy]] I think I agree with this, mostly.
  • I wouldn't say "not a Bayesian" because there's nothing wrong with Bayes' Rule and I don't like the tribal connotations, but lbr, we don't literally use Bayes' rule very often and when we do it often reveals just how much our conclusions depend on problem framing and prior assumptions. A lot of complexity/ambiguity necessarily "lives" in the part of the problem that Bayes' rule doesn't touch. To be fair, I think "just turn the crank on Bayes' rule and it'll solve all problems" is a bit of a strawman -- nobody literally believes that, do they? -- but yeah, sure, happy to admit that most of the "hard part" of figuring things out is not the part where you can mechanically apply probability.
• https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YZvyQn2dAw4tL2xQY/rationalists-are-missing-a-core-piece-for-agent-like [[tailcalled]] this one is actually interesting and novel; i'm not sure what to make of it. maybe literal physics, with like "forces", matters and needs to be treated differently than just a particular pattern of information that you could rederive statistically from sensory data? I kind of hate it but unlike tailcalled I don't know much about physics-based computational models...[[philosophy]]
• https://alignbio.org/ [[biology]] [[automation]] datasets generated by the Emerald Cloud Lab! [[Erika DeBenedectis]] project. Seems cool!
• https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306453015009014?via%3Dihub [[psychology]] the forced swim test is a bad measure of depression.
  • when a mouse trapped in water stops struggling, that is not "despair" or "learned helplessness." these are anthropomorphisms. the mouse is in fact helpless, by design; struggling cannot save it; immobility is adaptive.
    • in fact, mice become immobile faster when they have more experience with the test. they learn that struggling is not useful and they retain that knowledge.
  • also, a mouse in an acute stress situation is not at all like a human's clinical depression, which develops gradually and persists chronically.
  • https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359644621003615?via%3Dihub the forced swim test also doesn't predict clinical efficacy of antidepressants well. (admittedly this study was funded by PETA, which thinks the FST is cruel to mice)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Exactly! [[semiconductors]] the Wiki doesn't mention that Copy Exactly was famously a failure. even when you try to document procedures perfectly and replicate them on the other side of the world, at unprecedented precision, it is really really hard to get the same results.
• https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/research/funded-research/optimization-african-killifish-platform-rapid-drug-screening-aggregate [[biology]] you know what's cool? building experimentation platforms for novel model organisms. Killifish are the shortest-lived vertebrate -- which is great if you want to study aging. they live in weird oxygen-poor freshwater zones that are hard to replicate in the lab. figuring out how to raise them in captivity and standardize experiments on them is the kind of unsung, underfunded accomplishment we need to celebrate and expand WAY more.
• https://www.nature.com/articles/513481a [[biology]] [[drug discovery]] ever heard of curcumin doing something for your health? resveratrol? EGCG? those are all natural compounds that light up a drug screen like a Christmas tree because they react with EVERYTHING. they are not going to work on your disease in real life.
  • they're called PAINs, pan-assay interference compounds, and if you're not a chemist (or don't consult one) your drug screen is probably full of 'em. false positives on academic drug screens (Big Pharma usually knows better) are a scourge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-assay_interference_compounds
  • sadly, while they make automated PAINs alerts, they don't work for shit. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5411023/ sorry, shut-ins and cheapskates; you might have to talk to an actual chemist.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_bovine_serum [[biotech]] this cell culture medium is just...cow juice. it is not consistent batch to batch. this is a big problem.
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-021-00372-0 [[biology]] mice housed at "room temperature" are too cold for their health; they are more disease-prone, which calls into question a lot of experimental results.
• https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm [[science]] the famous [[Richard Feynman]] "Cargo cult science" essay is about flawed experimental methods!
  • if your rat can smell the location of the cheese in the maze all along, then your maze isn't testing learning.
  • errybody want to test rats in mazes, ain't nobody want to test this janky-ass maze!
• https://fastgrants.org/ [[metascience]] [[COVID-19]] this was cool, we should bring it back for other stuff
• https://erikaaldendeb.substack.com/cp/147525831 [[biotech]] engineering biomanufacturing microbes for surviving on Mars?!
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8278038/ [[prediction markets]] DARPA tried to use prediction markets to predict the success of projects. it didn't work! they couldn't get enough participants.
• https://www.citationfuture.com/ [[prediction markets]] these guys do prediction markets on science
• https://jamesclaims.substack.com/p/how-should-we-fund-scientific-error [[metascience]] [[James Heathers]] has a proposal for a science error detection (fraud, bad research, etc) nonprofit. We should fund him to do it!!
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Bik [[metascience]] [[Elizabeth Bik]] is the queen of research fraud detection. pay her plz.
• https://substack.com/home/post/p-149791027 [[archaeology]] it was once thought that Gobekli Tepe was a "festival city" or religious sanctuary, where people visited but didn't live, because there wasn't a water source. Now, they've found something that looks like water cisterns, and they suspect people did live there.
  • I don't like the framing of "hunter-gatherer" = "nomadic" in this post.
    • We keep pushing the date of agriculture farther back in time. We keep discovering that "hunter-gatherers" picking plants in "wild" forests are actually doing some degree of forest management, planting seeds, or pulling undesirable weeds. Arguably there isn't a hard-and-fast distinction between "gathering" and "gardening". (Grain agriculture where you use a plow and completely clear a field for planting your crop is qualitatively different from the kind of kitchen-garden-like horticulture that can be done with hand tools and without clearing forests. My bet is that all so-called hunter-gatherers did some degree of horticulture until proven otherwise, excepting eg arctic environments)
    • what the water actually suggests is that people lived at Gobekli Tepe for at least part of the year. it doesn't say what they were eating.
    •  

I'm not defeatist! I'm picky.

And I'm not talking specifics because i don't want to provoke argument.

wait and see if i still believe it tomorrow!

I think I agree with this post directionally.

You cannot apply Bayes' Theorem until you have a probability space; many real-world situations, especially the ones people argue about, do not have well-defined probability spaces, including a complete set of mutually exclusive and exhaustive possible events, which are agreed upon by all participants in the argument. 

You will notice that, even on LessWrong, people almost never have Bayesian discussions where they literally apply Bayes' Rule.  It would probably be healthy to try to literally do that more often! But making a serious attempt to debate a contentious issue "Bayesianly" typically looks more like Rootclaim's lab leak debate, which took a lot of setup labor and time, and where the result of quantifying the likelihoods was to reveal just how heavily your "posterior" conclusion depends on your "prior" assumptions, which were outside the scope of debate.

I think prediction markets are good, and I think Rootclaim-style quantified debates are worth doing occasionally, but what we do in most discussion isn't Bayesian and can't easily be made Bayesian.

I am not so sure about preferring models to propositions. I think what you're getting at is that we can make much more rigorous claims about formal models than about "reality"... but most of the time what we care about is reality.  And we can't be rigorous about the intuitive "mental models" that we use for most real-world questions. So if you're take is "we should talk about the model we're using, not what the world is", then...I don't think that's true in general. 

In the context of formal models, we absolutely should consider how well they correspond to reality. (It's a major bias of science that it's more prestigious to make claims within a model than to ask "how realistic is this model for what we care about?") 

In the context of informal "mental models", it's probably good to communicate how things work "in your head" because they might work differently in someone else's head, but ultimately what people care about is the intersubjective commonalities that can be in both your heads (and, for all practical purposes, in the world), so you do have to deal with that eventually.