Quick Takes

Back in 2020, @Raemon gave me some extremely good advice. @johnswentworth had left some comments on a post of mine that I found extremely frustrating and counterproductive. At the time I had no idea about his body of work, so he was just some annoying guy. Ray, who did know who John was and thought he was doing important work, told me: Which didn't mean I had to heal the rift with John in particular, but if I was going to make that a policy then I would need to give up on my goal of having real impact.  John and I did a video call, and it went well. He pointed out a major flaw in my post, I impressed him by immediately updating once he pointed it out. I still think his original comments displayed status dynamics while sneering at them, and find that frustrating, but Ray was right that not all factual corrections will be delivered in pleasing forms. 

Long-term melatonin usage for insomniacs was associated with doubling of all-cause mortality* New article from the American Heart Association seems pretty damning for long-term melatonin usage safety: *Caveats: 1. we just have the abstract, not the full article 2. observational study, not experimental 3. their sample is only of insomniacs, not of the general population Responses to the caveats: 1. we'll get the full article soon-ish (probably a month or so?) 2. it seems they did quite a bit of controlling? though we won't know how good their controlling was until the full article comes out 3. I can't imagine that the validity of their results for non-insomniacs is many orders of magnitude less than for insomniacs — like, maybe a factor of two or five, but that'd still be a huge effect size All things considered — this seems like a crazily high effect size. Am I missing something?

Coefficient Giving is one of the worst name changes I've ever heard: * Coefficient Giving sounds bad while OpenPhil sounded cool and snappy. * Coefficient doesn't really mean anything in this context, clearly it's a pun on "co" and "efficient" but that is also confusing. They say "A coefficient multiplies the value of whatever it's paired with" but that's just true of any number? * They're a grantmaker who don't really advise normal individuals about where to give their money, so why "Giving" when their main thing is soliciting large philanthropic efforts and then auditing that * Coefficient Giving doesn't tell you what the company does at the start! "Good Ventures" and "GiveWell" tell you roughly what the company is doing. * "Coefficient" is a really weird word, so you're burning weirdness points with the literal first thing anyone will ever hear you say, this seems like a name which you would only thing is good if you're already deep into rat/ea spaces. * It sounds bad. Open Philanthropy rolls off the tongue, as does OpenPhil. OH-puhn fi-LAN-thruh-pee. Two sets of three. CO-uh-fish-unt GI-ving is an awkward four-two with a half-emphasis on the fish of coefficient. Sounds bad. I'm coming back to this point but there is no possible shortening other than "Coefficient" which is bad because it's just an abstract noun and not very identifiable, whereas "OpenPhil" was a unique identifier. CoGive maybe, but then you have two stressed syllables which is awkward. It mildly offends my tongue to have to even utter their name.  Clearly OP wanted to shed their existing reputation, but man, this is a really bad name choice.

Learning algebraic topology, homotopy always felt like a very intuitive and natural sort of invariant to attach to a space whereas for homology I don't think I have anywhere as close of an intuitive handle or sense of naturality of this concept as I do for homotopy. So I tried to collect some frames / results for homology I've learned to see if it helps convince my intuition that this concept is indeed something natural in mathspace. I'd be very curious to know if there are any other frames or Deeper Answers to "Why homology?" I'm missing: 1. Measuring "holes" of a space * Singular homology: This is the first example I encountered, which will serve as intuition / motivation for the later abstract definitions. * Fixing some notations (feel free to skip this bullet point if you're familiar with the notations): * Let's fix some space X, and recall our goal associating to that space an algebraic object invariant under homeomorphism / homotopy equivalence. * First, a singular p-simplex is a map σ:Δp→X, intuitively representing a simplex living inside the space X. So there is a natural σ(i):Δp−1→X map which represents each of the i faces. Then, it is natural to consider the set {σ(i)}pi=0 as representing the "boundary" of the singular p-simplex σ. * To make this last idea more precise, we define singular p-chain, which is a free abelian group generated from all the singular p-simplicies of a space, denoted Δp(X). In short, its elements look like (finite) formal sums ∑σ:Δp→Xnσσ. A singular p-simplex σ is naturally an element of this group via 1σ∈Δp(X). * This construction, again, is motivated by the boundary idea earlier, since we now can define the boundary of a singular p-simplex σ as formal sum ∑pi=0σ(i)∈Δp−1(X). * In fact, the boundary of a singular p-simplex σ is actually ∑pi=0(−1)iσ(i)∈Δp−1(X). * Why? Intuition: if we draw these σ(i) of simple shapes like triangles (so σ:Δ2→X, hence σ(i):Δ1→X, which is identified with

We have finally solved an age old problem in philosophy: Gemini 3 pro is 1.2 cents per thousand tokens. Gemini 3 pro image is 13.4 cents per image. Therefore an image is worth 11167 words, not 1000 as the classicists would have it.

Is intology a legitimate research lab? Today they talked about having an AI researcher that performed better than humans on RE-bench at 64 hr time horizons. This seems really unbelievable to me. The AI system is called Locus.

I feel so happy that "what's your crux?" / "is that cruxy" is common parlance on LW now, it is a meaningful improvement over the prior discourse. Thank you CFAR and whoever was part of the generation story of that.