Recent Discussion
As johnswentworth recounts in Core Pathways of Aging, as an organism ages active transposons within it's stem cells duplicate and that mechanism might lead to increased average transposons count in stem cells. Those transposons then produce DNA damage which in turn leads to cell senescence.
If that hypothesis is true, there's evolutionary pressure to keep the count of active transposons low. That evolutionary pressure is greater in organism that reproduce at a later age then for organisms that reproduce at an earlier age.
As Bret Weinstein describes, breeding protocols for lab mice have lab mice reproducing at an earlier age then mice that live in the wild because it's economical to make the mice reproduce at a young age. Weinstein made the hypothesis that this leads to laboratory mice...
I'm finally beginning to feel that I have a clear idea of the true nature of counterfactuals. In this post I'll argue that counterfactuals are just intrinsicly a part of how we make sense of the world. However, it would be inaccurate to present them as purely a human invention as we were shaped by evolution in such a way as to ground these conceptions in reality.
Unless you're David Lewis, you're probably going to be rather dubious of the claim that all possibilities exist (ie. that counterfactuals are ontologically real). Instead, you'll probably be willing to concede that they're something we construct; that they're in the map rather than in the territory.
Things in the map are tools, they are constructed because they are useful. In other words,...
The underlying thought behind both this and the previous post seems to be the notion that counterfactuals are somehow mysterious or hard to grasp. This looks like a good chance to plug our upcoming ICML paper, w
hich reduces counterfactuals to a programming language feature. It gives a new meaning to "programming Omega." http://www.zenna.org/publications/causal.pdf
In partisan contests of various forms, dishonesty, polarization, and groupthink are widespread. Political warfare creates societal collateral damage: it makes it harder for individuals to arrive at true beliefs on many subjects, because their social networks provide strong incentive to promote false beliefs. To escape this situation, improving social norms and technology may help, however if only one side of a conflict becomes more honest, the other side may exploit that as a weakness, just as conquerors could exploit countries were less violent. Coming up with rules analogous to rules of war, may help ratchet partisan contests toward higher levels of honesty and integrity over time, enabling more honest coalitions to become more competitive. What follows is a naïve shot at an ethos of what such rules...
I am not sure that is actually true. There are many escalatory situations, border clashes, and mini-conflicts that could easily lead to far larger scale war, but don't due to the rules and norms that military forces impose on themselves and that lead to de-escalation. Once there is broader conflict though between large organizations, then yes you often do often need a treaty to end it.
Treaties don't work on decentralized insurgencies though and hence forever wars: agreements can't be credibly enforced when each fighter has their own incentives and veto power. This is an area where norm spread can be helpful, and I do think online discourse is currently far more like waring groups of insurgents than waring armies.
I’ve previously outlined many of the best options for securing a second residency, and some reasons you may want to do so.
Panama had one of the most unique, accessible, and attractive programs for doing so. Unfortunately, this program’s rules will be changing on August 20th, becoming much more restrictive, to the extent that I likely would not have mentioned the program under the new rules.
I’m interested in putting together a trip for EAs and Rationalists interested in securing Panamanian permanent residency, and in 5 years potentially citizenship, under the existing rules. I believe that there are some significant benefits to securing second citizenship, and to doing so under the existing Panamanian rules, together.[1]
Currently, I’d like to assess interest for this trip before taking further action. I previously...
That's good to know, thanks!
Painscience.com and Hargrove's "A Guide To Better Movement" are pretty good for a model of predictive processing and the roll of the nervous system in chronic pain and movement. I still don't feel like I have a good model of bone and joint health in general, however. Eg, I'm currently nursing a flare up of patelo-femoral pain in my left knee. I've done a number of things over the past few months to deal with it, with some success, including buying and reading Painscience's book length patelo-femoral tutorial. Recently I've had a bit of pain in my foot, possibly in the tibiocalcaneal or tibionavicular tendons. I find that even though I now know a fair amount about PFS and the way the nervous system processes pain, these...
Considering the current covid hysiteria and censorship on social media platforms I'm finding it hard to find reasoned discussion of Geert Vanden Bossche's ideas. They seem to be centered around vaccine immune escape and original antigenic sin. If you have anything to contribute please do. Thanks
Rationalism seems somewhat like a proto-religion to me. It has norms of behavior very different from society at large. It has apocalyptic prophecies which it's members strive to stave off. Still, what's missing? I think a few things:
- Rituals
- Symbols
- A community
- Institutions around which to build a rationalist life
- The normalization of rationalism as a central identity rather than a peripheral one or a non-identity
Rituals
Rituals come in many shapes and sizes. Some rituals are recurring and universal. Passover, Petrov Day or Eid all happen once a year at the same time for all believers. Others are singular and specific to the individual. A Bar-mitzvah, Hindu marriage or Irish wake all happen at different times for different individuals and mark transitions from one part of life to another. Some are happy....
Say you're an evil scientist. One day at work you discover a protein that crosses the blood-brain barrier and causes crippling migraine headaches if someone's attention drifts while driving. Despite being evil, you're a loving parent with a kid learning to drive. Like everyone else, your kid is completely addicted to their phone, and keep refreshing their feeds while driving. Your suggestions that the latest squirrel memes be enjoyed later at home are repeatedly rejected.
Then you realize: You could just sneak into your kid's room at night, anesthetize them, and bring them to your lair! One of your goons could then extract their bone marrow and use CRISPR to recode the stem-cells for an enzyme to make the migraine protein. Sure, the headache itself might distract them,...
Looking at alcohol consumption by country, however, East Asia seems pretty middle of the pack. The main trends seem to be Europe and majority European-settled countries are rather high, and the Middle East and North Africa are very low (religious prohibition).
https://ourworldindata.org/alcohol-consumption
Since the west is high, the rest is low, or not so-high, with parts of East Asia overlapping parts of the west, it seems like these genetic predispositions aren't as strong in effect as someone might predict given the culture. I have heard Japanese a... (read more)
I listened to an interview with Patrick Collison were he claimed that when coding one should always optimize for speed - even when speed is not an issue. (Presumably because it leads to good coding practices, clean code, less build up of unnecessary functionality etc.)
Assuming that is correct - and I think there is something to it - it makes me wonder: is there something similar that one could optimize for in life? Life is such a multivariate thing that it can at times be hard to know what to prioritize.
What parameter is a candidate for having most positive side effects on your life when optimized?
I think Patrick is giving bad advice. Almost always optimize for readability and future updates, all other considerations are specific to need. Idiomatic and efficient implementations are a a very good habit, but "optimize" implies making tradeoffs.
Other aspects of life are similar - almost always optimize for the long-term, but the specifics of what that means is individual.
They also duplicate in other somatic cells but in cells that have a low half life it doens't matter as much.
You don't get anything in return just like you don't get anything in return for getting infected with COVID-19.
You need evolutionary pressure to prevent transposons from constantly doublicating and accumulating in the DNA of your lineage.
Getting completely rid of transposons would be all up... (read more)