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Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013
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Today is the thirty-fourth anniversary of the official certification that smallpox had been eradicated worldwide. From Wikipedia,

The global eradication of smallpox was certified, based on intense verification activities in countries, by a commission of eminent scientists on 9 December 1979 and subsequently endorsed by the World Health Assembly on 8 May 1980. The first two sentences of the resolution read:

Having considered the development and results of the global program on smallpox eradication initiated by WHO in 1958 and intensified since 1967 … Declares solemnly that the world and its peoples have won freedom from smallpox, which was a most devastating disease sweeping in epidemic form through many countries since earliest time, leaving death, blindness and disfigurement in its wake and which only a decade ago was rampant in Africa, Asia and South America.

Archaeological evidence shows evidence of smallpox infection in the mummies of Egyptian pharaohs. There was a Hindu goddess of smallpox in ancient India. By the 16th century it was a pandemic throughout the Old World, and epidemics with mortality rates of 30% were common. When smallpox arrived in the New World, there wer... (read more)

[-]Emile260

This deserves some music:

Old King Plague is dead,
the smallpox plague is dead,
no more children dying hard
no more cripples living scarred
with the marks of the devil's kiss,
we still may die of other things
but we will not die of this.

Raise your glasses high
for all who will not die
to all the doctors, nurses too
to all the lab technician who
drove it into the ground
if the whole UN does nothing else
it cut this terror down.

But scarce the headlines said,
the ancient plague was dead,
then they were filled with weapons new
toxic waste and herpes too,
and the AIDS scare coming on
ten new plagues will take its place
but at least this one is gone.

Population soars,
checked with monstrous wars
preachers rant at birth control
"Screww the body, save the soul",
bring new deaths off the shelves,
and say to Nature, "Mother, please,
we'd rather do it ourselves".

Old King Plague is dead,
the smallpox plague is dead,
no more children dying hard
no more cripples living scarred
with the marks of the devil's kiss,
we still may die of other things
but we will not die of this, oh no,
we will not die of this.

-- Leslie Fish, The Ballad of Smallpox Gone

[-][anonymous]170

The virus currently only still exists as samples in two freezers in two labs (known to the scientific community). These days I think that that is overkill even for research purposes for this pathogen, what with the genome sequenced and the ability to synthesize arbitrary sequences artificially. If you absolutely must have part of it for research make that piece again from scratch. Consign the rest of the whole infectious replication-competent particles to the furnace where they belong.

EDIT: I found a paper in which smallpox DNA was extracted and viruses observed via EM from a 50 year old fixed tissue sample from a pathology lab that was not from one of the aforementioned collections. No word in the paper on if it was potentially infectious or just detectable levels of nucleic acids and particles. These things could be more complicated to 100% securely destroy than we thought...

[-]knb100

With any luck, Polio will be next.

At risk of attracting the wrong kind of attention, I will publicly state that I have donated $5,000 for the MIRI 2013 Winter Fundraiser. Since I'm a "new large donor", this donation will be matched 3:1, netting a cool $20,000 for MIRI.

I have decided to post this because of "Why our Kind Cannot Cooperate". I have been convinced that people donating should publicly brag about it to attract other donors, instead of remaining silent about their donation which leads to a false impression of the amount of support MIRI has.

This post and reading "why our kind cannot cooperate" kicked me off my ass to donate. Thanks Tuxedage for posting.

0[anonymous]
.

Would anyone else be interested in pooling donations to take advantage of the 3:1 deal?

3Tripitaka
I'd be interested, but only the small sum of 100$. Did anybody else take you up on that offer? Of course I'd like to verify the pool-persons identity before transfering money.
8somervta
You sir, are awesome.
3Brillyant
Interesting. It certainly seems to make sense for the sake of the cause for (especially large, well-informed) donors to make their donations public. The only downside seems to be a potentially conflicting signal on behalf of the giver. I'm not sure this is true. Doesn't MIRI publish its total receipts? Don't most organizations that ask for donations? Growing up Evangelical, it was taught that we should give secretly to charities (including, mostly, the church). I wonder why? The official Sunday School answer is so that you remain humble as the giver, etc. I wonder if there is some other mechanism whereby it made sense for Christians to propogate that concept (secret giving) among followers?
9Tuxedage
Total receipts may not be representative. There's a difference between MIRI getting funding from one person with a lot of money and large numbers of people donating small(er) amounts. I was hoping this post to serve as a reminder that many of us on LW do care about donating, rather than a few rather rich people like Peter Thiel or Jaan Tallinn. Also I suspect scope neglect can be at play -- it's difficult to, on an emotional level, tell the difference between $1 million worth of donations, or ten million, or a hundred million. Seeing each donation that led to adding up to that amount may help.
3Viliam_Bur
Yes, because it would show how many people donated. Number of people = power, at least in our brains. The difference between one person donating 100 000, or one person donating 50 000 and ten people donating 5 000 is that in the latter case, your team has eleven people. It is the same amount of money, but emotionally it feels better. Probably it has other advantages (such as smaller dependence on whims of a single person), but maybe I am just rationalizing here.
6gwern
There may not be anything to explain: the early Christian church grew very slowly. Perhaps secret almsgiving simply isn't a good idea.
0Brillyant
Hm. Possibly. Though it does still seem to be a rather popular convention in churches today to adopt an interpretation of secret offerings. I would imagine popular interprations of scriptures on giving would evolve based on the goals of the church (to get $$$), and kept in check only by being believable enough to the member congregations. Tithing seems to work for the church, so lots of churches resurrect it from the OT and really shaky exegesis and make it a part of the rules. If tithing didn't work for the church, they could easily make it go away in the same way they get rid of tons of outdated stuff from the OT (and the NT). Secret offerings seems similar to me. I'd imagine they could make the commands for secret giving go away with some simple hermeneutical waves of the hand if it didn't benefit them.
5ChristianKl
This gives the church an information advantage. Information is power. It gives them the opportunity to make it seem like everyone is donating less than their neighbors.
1drethelin
or that "Christians" donate a lot when it's really just a few of them.
0Brillyant
Ah. So the leaders can give the ongoing message to "give generously" to a group and, as long as the giving data is kept in secret and no one ever speaks to anyone else about how much they gave, then each member will feel compelled to continue to give more in an effort to (a) "please God" and (b) gain favor in the eyes of the leaders by keeping up with, or outgiving, the other members. Is this what you are saying? If not can you elaborate?
5ChristianKl
Look at Mormons. They have a rule that you have to donate 10% of your income. If you don't than you aren't pleasing god and god might punish you. In reality the average Mormon doesn't donate 10% but might feel guilty for not doing so. If someone who would donate 7% would know that they donate above average, they would feel less guilty about not meeting the goal of donating 10%.
0Brillyant
Sure, but why 10%? Why not 15%? Or 20%? It is possible that they are setting the bar too low. You might have many people who would have given 30% had not the command been for 10%, but for 30%?
7ChristianKl
Yes, it is. Choosing that particular number might not be optimal. But there a cost of setting the number to high. If you set it too high and people don't think they can reach that standard they might not even try.
0Brillyant
Right. I'd guess 10% is not an arbitrary number, but rather is a sort of market equilibrium that happens to be supportable by a certain interpretation of OT scripture. It might have just as well been 3% or 7% or 12% as these numbers are all pretty significant in the OT, and could have been used by leadership to impose that % on laypeople. In any case, in my experience within the church, there are tithes... AND then there are offerings which include numerous different cause to give to on any given Sunday. It was often stated these causes (building projects, missions outreaches, etc.) were in addition to your tithe. It is funny to me... it is almost like the reverse of a compensation plan you'd build for a team of commissioned sales people. Instead of trying to optimize the plan to best incentivize for sales performance by motivating your sales people to sell, the church may have evolved their doctrines and practices on giving to optimize for collecting revenue by motivating your members to give. Ha.
0gjm
This is of course no argument against anything substantive you're saying, but while the numbers 3,7,12 are certainly all significant in the OT the idea of percentage surely wasn't. I can see 1/3, or 1/7, or 1/12, though.
0Brillyant
Good point. Though, from my recall, there isn't much basis in the OT for the modern day concept of tithing at all, percentage or otherwise. Christianity points to verses about giving 1/10th of your crops to the priest as the basis. If they really wanted to change the rules and up it to 1/7th, or 12% or anything they want, they could come up with some new basis for that match using fancy hermeneutics. This is sort of what is happening right now with homosexuality. Many churches are changing their views. They are justifying that by reinterpreting the verses they've used to condemn it in the past. In fact, you can pretty much get the Bible to support any position or far-fetched belief you'd like. You only need a few verses... and it's a big book. This is one of my favorites.
2drethelin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithe
-12V_V
[-]TsviBT330

PSA: If you want to get store-bought food (as opposed to eating out all the time or eating Soylent), but you don't want to have to go shopping all the time, check to see if there is a grocery delivery service in your area. At least where I live, the delivery fee is far outbalanced by the benefit of almost no shopping time, slightly cheaper food, and decreased cognitive load (I can just copy my previous order, and tweak it as desired).

[-]Metus130

This makes me wonder: What are some simple ways to save quite some time that the average person does not think of?

Stop watching TV.

Sleep enough.

8solipsist
Move close to where you work (even if it means you have to live in a smaller place).
2hyporational
If you don't have a car, study in the bus/train or take the commute as a bicycling exercise if the distance is relatively short and you can take a shower.
2Desrtopa
Possibly cooking very large meals and saving the rest. If you want to save money by cooking from scratch rather than buying prepared food or eating out, it can help to prepare several meals worth at a time.
2lmm
Pay for an online assistant. It makes you feel awkward but I hear it's quite effective.
0[anonymous]
Dave Asprey claims that you can get by fine on five hours of sleep if you optimize it to spend as much time in REM and delta sleep as possible. This appeals to me more than polyphasic sleep does. Link Also I was intrigued when xkcd mentioned the 28 hour day, but I don't know of anyone who has maintained that schedule
5NancyLebovitz
Dan Aspey claims he can do well on 5 hours of sleep, and then makes a further claim that any other adult (he recommends not trying to do serious sleep reduction until you're past 23) can also do well on 5 hours. To judge by a fast look at the comments, rather few of his readers are trying this, let alone succeeding at it. Do you have any information about whether Aspey's results generalize?
7A1987dM
I am under the impression that nearly anybody who talks about sleep is guilty of Generalizing from One Example.
0[anonymous]
Not really.
1Gunnar_Zarncke
There are by now some quite extensive studies about the amount of required or healthy sleep. Sleep is roughly normal distributed between 5 and 9 hours and for some of those getting 5 or less hours of sleep this appears to be healthy: Jane E. Ferrie, Martin J. Shipley, Francesco P. Cappuccio, Eric Brunner, Michelle A. Miller, Meena Kumari, Michael G. Marmot: A Prospective Study of Change in Sleep Duration: Associations with Mortality in the Whitehall II Cohort. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2276139/pdf/aasm.30.12.1659.pdf So probably Dave Asprey is one of those 1% for this is correct. Some improvements (or changes) may be possible for most of us though. You can get along with less sleep if you sleep at your optimum sleep time (which differs depending on your genes esp. the Period 3 gene) and if you start to sleep quickly. Polyphasic sleep may significantly reduce your sleep total but nobody seems to be able what the health effects are. It might be that it risks your long time health.

Another benefit for me is reduced mistakes in picking items from the list.

Some people don't use online shopping because they worry pickers may make errors. My experience is that they do, but at a much lower rate than I do when I go myself. I frequently miss minor items off my list on the first circuit through the shop, and don't go back for it because it'd take too long to find. I am also influenced by in-store advertising, product arrangements, "special" offers and tiredness in to purchasing items that I would rather not. It's much easier to whip out a calculator to work out whether an offer really is better when you're sat calmly at your laptop than when you're exhausted towards the end of a long shopping trip.

You'd expect paid pickers to be better at it - they do it all their working hours, I only do it once or twice a month. Also, all the services I've used (in the UK) allow you to reject any mistaken items at your door for a full refund - which you can't do for your own mistakes. The errors pickers make are different to the ones I would, which makes them more salient - but they are no more inconvenient in impact on average.

4hyporational
Alternative: buy a freezer and buy your food in bulk.
6bramflakes
My family does this and it's not such a good idea. Old forgotten food will accumulate at the bottom and you'll have less usable space at the top. Chucking out the old food is a) a trivial inconvenience and b) guilt-inducing. Unless it's one of those freezers with sliding trays.
4hyporational
I have one of those. I thought the chest models are antiquity.
4Lumifer
They are standard in the US. It's like washers: top-loaders dominate in the US and front-loaders dominate in Europe.
0Prismattic
I disagree with this. Having lived in the US my entire life (specifically MA and VA), I've been in very few homes that had chest freezers, and as far as I recall, none that only had chest freezers (as opposed to extra storage beyond a combination refrigerator/freezer). I'm not willing to pay to resolve this difference of perception, but if one wanted to do so, the information is probably available here.
2Lumifer
I am not sure we disagree. I'm not saying that people are using chest freezers instead of normal refrigerators. I'm saying that if a family buys a separate freezer in addition to a regular fridge, in the US that separate freezer is likely to be a chest freezer.
0Nornagest
Here on the West Coast I've seen both standing and chest models, although combination refrigerator/freezers are far more common than either. I associate the chest style with hunters and older people, but that likely reflects my upbringing; I wouldn't hazard a guess as to which is more common overall.
4Lumifer
Assuming you are largely indifferent between fresh and frozen food (a data point: I'm not).
0hyporational
I find this a false dichotomy. Care to muster a rebuke?
9Lumifer
Empiricism! :-) Most of the food that I eat doesn't freeze or doesn't freeze well (think fruits and vegetables). Frozen meat is OK for a stew but not at all OK for steaks. I find -- based on my personal experience -- the texture, aromas, etc. of fresh food to be quite superior to those of frozen food.

Ah, it's funny how easily I forget food isn't just about fueling your cells.

I was expecting some sort of a nutrition based argument.

I would point out that it's unwise to ignore one of the major sources of pleasure in this world :-)

0[anonymous]
Must... resist... mentioning a particular stereotype about northern Europe.
2Vaniver
I hear that if you stir-fry vegetables, then frozen is a better option. (I eat most of the vegetables I eat raw or dehydrated, neither of which seem to do well if you freeze them first.)
4Lumifer
I think it depends on whether you can get your heat high enough. The point of stir-frying frozen veggies is to brown the outside while not overcooking the inside. Normally this is done by cooking non-frozen veggies at very high heat but a regular house stove can't do it properly -- so a workaround is to use frozen.
0NancyLebovitz
How does freeze-them-yourself compare to buying vegetables which are already frozen?
3tut
The good kind of already frozen vegetables are much tastier, have better texture and have kept more of their nutrients. That is because an ordinary freezer is not nearly quick enough to preserve most vegetables.
0Lumifer
Industrially-frozen food is frozen much faster which is good. A house freezer is not powerful (or cold) enough to freeze food sufficiently fast.
0Vaniver
I hear that buying them already frozen is cheaper, more sanitary, and less work, but I haven't looked into it myself.
1drethelin
re: steaks, that's just not accurate. Frozen steaks are great! I say this as someone who filled his freezer with a quarter of a cow.
0Lumifer
Maybe I just don't know how to deal with frozen steaks, but for me fresh-meat steaks are much, much juicier.
1Bakkot
For those in the community living in the south Bay Area: https://www.google.com/shopping/express/
0John_Maxwell
Regarding food in particular, I'm still wishing Romeo Stevens would commercialize his tasty and nutritious soylent alternative so I could buy it the same way I buy juice from the grocery store.

New work suggests that life could have arisen and survived a mere 15 million years after the Big Bang, when the microwave background radiation levels would have provided sufficient energy to keep almost all planets warm. Summary here, and actual article here. This is still very preliminary, but the possibility at some level is extremely frightening. It adds billions of years of time for intelligent life to have arisen that we don't see, and if anything suggests that the Great Filter is even more extreme than we thought.

Now that is scary, although there are a few complications. Rocky bodies were probably extremely rare during that time since the metal enrichment of the Universe was extremely low. You can't build life out of just hydrogen and helium.

Is that a relevant number?

Doesn't the relevant number of opportunities for life to appear have units of mass-time?

Isn't the question not how early was some Goldilocks zone, but how much mass was in a Goldilocks zone for how long? This says that the whole universe was a Goldilocks zone for just a few million years. The whole universe is big, but a few million years is small. And how much of the universe was metallic? The paper emphasizes that some of it was, but isn't this a quantitative question?

4JoshuaZ
I agree that a few million years is small, and that the low metal content would be a serious issue (which in addition to being a problem for life forming would also make planets rare as pointed out by bramflakes in their reply). However, the real concern as I see it is that if everything was like this for a few million years, then if life did arise (and you have a whole universe for it to arise), as the cooldown occurred, it seems highly plausible that some forms of life would have then adopted to the cooler environment. This makes panspermia more plausible and thus makes life in general more likely. Additionally, it makes more of a chance for life to get lucky if it managed to get into one of the surviving safe zones (e.g. something like the Mars-Earth biotransfer hypothesis). I think you may be correct that this isn't a complete run around and panic level update, but it is still disturbing. My initial estimate for how bad this could be is likely overblown.
2Douglas_Knight
I'm nervous about the idea that life might adapt to conditions in which it cannot originate. Unless you mean spores, but they have to wait for the world to warm up. As for panspermia, we have a few billion years of modern conditions before the Earth, which is itself already a problem. I think the natural comparison is the size of that Goldilocks zone to the very early one. But I don't know which is bigger. Here are three environments. Which is better for radiation of spores? (1) a few million years where every planet is wet (2) many billion years, all planets cold (3) a few billion years, a few good planets. The first sounds just too short for anything to get anywhere, but the universe is smaller. If one source of life produces enough spores to hit everything, then greater time depth is better, but if they need to reproduce along the way, the modern era seems best.
0JoshuaZ
Why this happened on Earth? It is pretty likely for example that life couldn't originate in an environment like the Sahara desert, but life can adapt and survive there. I do agree that spores are one of the more plausible scenarios. I don't know enough to really answer the question, and I'm not sure that anyone does, but your intuition sounds plausible.
2Douglas_Knight
There's barely any life in the Sahara. It looks a lot like spores to me. I want a measure of life that includes speed. Some kind of energy use or maybe cell divisions. I expect the probability of life developing in a place to be proportional to amount of life there after it arrives. Maybe that's silly; there certainly are exponential effects of molecules arriving the same place at the same time that aren't relevant to the continuation of life. But if you can rule out this claim, I think your model of the origin of life is too detailed.
0JoshuaZ
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Do you mean something like the idea that if an environment is too harsh even if life can survive the chance that it will evolve into anything beyond a simple organism is low?
2Nornagest
We should have the data now to take a whack at the metallicity side of that question, if only by figuring out how many Population 2 stars show up in the various extrasolar planet surveys in proportion with Pop 1. Don't think I've ever seen a rigorous approach to this, but I'd be surprised if someone hasn't done it. One sticking point is that the metallicity data would be skewed in various ways (small stars live longer and therefore are more likely to be Pop 2), but that shouldn't be a showstopper -- the issues are fairly well understood.
2Douglas_Knight
The paper mentions a model. Maybe the calculation is even done in one of the references. The model does not sound related to the observations you mention.

I don't think this is frightening. If you thought life couldn't have arisen more than 3.6 billion years ago but then discover that it could have arisen 13.8 billion years ago, you should be at most 4 times as scared.

The number of habitable planets in the galaxy over the number of habituated planets is a scary number.

The time span of earth civilization over the time span of earth life is a scary number.

4 is not a scary number.

6Douglas_Knight
If it were just a date, then, yes, a factor of 4 is lost in the noise. But switching to panspermia changes the calculation. Try Overcoming Bias [Added: maybe this is only a change under Robin Hanson's hard steps model.]
2khafra
It changes my epistemic position by a helluva lot more than a factor of 4. If an interstellar civilization arose somewhere in the universe that is now visible, somewhere in a uniform distribution over the last 3.6 billion years, there's much smaller chance we'd currently (or ever) be within their light cone than if they'd developed 13.8 billion years ago.
0passive_fist
It's potentially scary not because of the time difference, but because of the quantity of habitable planets. It's understood that current conditions in the Universe make it so that only relatively few planets are in the habitable zone. But if the Universe was warm, then almost all planets would be in the habitable zone, making the likelihood of life that much higher. As I said in my reply to JoshuaZ though, the complication is that rocky planets were probably much rarer than they are now.
-1Leonhart
It's the scariest number.
9bramflakes
There weren't any planets 15 million years after the Big Bang. The first stars formed 100 million years after the Big Bang, and you need another few million on top of that for the planets to form and cool down.
5drethelin
It seems to take a lot more than 15 million years to get from "life" to "intelligent life". According to the article this period would only have lasted for a million years, so at most we would probably get a lot of monocellular life arising and then dying during the cooloff.
2[anonymous]
1 - why should no intelligent life arising from a set of places that were likely habitable for only 5 million years (if they existed at all, which is doubtful) be surprising? 2 - I raise the possibility of outcomes for intelligent life that are not destruction or expansion through the universe. Edit: Gah, that's what I get for leaving this window open while about 8 other people commented
0JoshuaZ
See the conversation with Doug up subthread.
0DanielLC
Does it add billions of years? That's not saying that life could have arisen and survived since 15 million years after the Big Bang.
2Shmi
The paper implies that it only adds millions of years, not billions. Once the CMB cools down enough with the expansion of the Universe, the Goldilock conditions disappear. The CMB temperature is roughly inversely proportional to the age of the Universe, so 300K at 15 million years becomes just 150K 15 million years later.

I decided I'd share the list of questions I try to ask myself every morning and evening. I usually spend about thirty seconds on each question, just thinking about them, though I sometimes write my answers down if I have a particularly good insight. I find they keep me pretty well-calibrated to my best self. Some are idiosyncratic, but hopefully these will be generally applicable.

A. Today, this week, this month:

  1. What am I excited about?
  2. What goals do I have?
  3. What questions do I want to answer?
  4. What specific ways do I want to be better?

B. Yesterday, last week, last month:

  1. What did I accomplish that am I proud of?
  2. In what instances did I behave in a way I am proud of?
  3. What did I do wrong? How will I do better?
  4. What do I want to remember? What adventures did I have?

C. Generally: 9: If I'm not doing exactly what I want to be doing, why?

5curiousepic
How long have you been doing this, and have you noticed any effects?
1sakranut
For about a month and a half, though I forget about 25% of the time. I haven't noticed any strong effects, though I feel as if I approach the day-to-day more conscientiously and often get more out of my time.
0wadavis
For a term in university I followed a similar method. Every day I would post 'Today's Greatest Achievement:' in the relevant social media of the time. There was a noticeable improvement in happiness and extra-curricular productivity as I more actively sought out novel experiences, active community roles, and academic side projects. The daily reminder led to a far more conscientious use of my time. The combined reminder that I spent all weekend playing video games and broadcasting to my entire social circle that that was my greatest achievement in the past 48 hours was in a mindless video game led to immediate behavior changes.
2Shmi
That's the hardest of them all, still searching for answers.
0[anonymous]
What does it mean for "you" to not be doing exactly what you "want"? Do you downplay or ignore your not-conscious thought processes?

Are there any translation efforts in academia? It bothers me that there may be huge corpuses of knowledge that are inaccessible to most scientists or researchers simply because they don't speak, say, Spanish, Mandarin, or Hindi. The current solution to this problem seems to be 'everyone learn English', which seems to do ok in the hard sciences. But I fear there may be a huge missed opportunity in social sciences, especially because Americans are WEIRD and not necessarily psychologically or behaviorally respresentative of the world population. (Link is to an article, link to the cited paper here: pdf)

The plural of "corpus" is "corpora". I don't say this to be pedantic, but because the word is quite lovely, and deserves to be used more.

7Douglas_Knight
If a hypothetical bothers you, maybe you should hold off proposing solutions and instead investigate whether it is a real problem.
7gwern
I'm not sure losing the non-English literature is a big problem. A lot of foreign research is really bad. A little demonstration from 5 days ago: I criticized a Chinese study on moxibustion https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/TisYM64ckLM This was translated into / written in English and published in a peer-reviewed journal (Neural Regeneration Research). And it's complete crap. Of course there is very bad research published by the West on alternative medicine too, but as the links I provide show, Chinese research is systematically and generally of very low quality. If China cannot produce good research, what can we expect of other countries?
3Douglas_Knight
The language that I think most plausibly contains a disconnected scientific literature is Japanese.
3Metus
Some time ago someone linked a paper indicating that there are benefits to fragmentation of academia by language barriers as less people are exposed to some kind of dominant view allowing them to come up with new ideas. One cited example was anthropology which had a Russian and an Anglosphere tradition. I'd assume there not to be any major translation efforts as being a translator isn't as effective as publishing something of your own by far.
7Viliam_Bur
Publishing your own scientific paper brings you more rewards, but translating other person's article requires less time and less scientific skills (just enough to understand the vocabulary and follow the arguments). If someone would pay me for doing it, I would probably love to have a job of translating scientific articles to my language. It would be much easier for me to translate dozen articles than to create one. And if I would only translate the articles that passed some filter, for example those published in peer-reviewed journals, I could probably translate the output of twenty or fifty scientists.
3Username
It seems like there could definitely be money in 'international' journals for different fields, which would aggregate credible foreign papers and translate them. Interesting that they don't seem to exist.
3Richard_Kennaway
How effective would it be to use human expertise to translate just the contents pages of journals, with links to Google Translate for the bodies of the papers? Or perhaps use humans to also translate the abstracts? Does anything like this exist already?
2satt
Idea that popped into my head: it might be straightforward to make a frontend for the arXiv that adds a "Translate this into" drop-down list to every paper's summary page. (Using the list could redirect the user to Google Translate, with the URL for the PDF automatically fed into the translator.) As far as I know no one has done this but I could be wrong.
1Metus
This chain is so interesting. As a grad student I could translate some papers and make some decent money in such a hypothetical regime.
2NancyLebovitz
The Body Electric mentioned that the Soviets were ahead of the west in studying electrical fields in biology because (not sure of the date-- sometime before the seventies) electricity sounded to much like elan vital to the westerners.
0Douglas_Knight
Which Body Electric? I don't see it in Becker and Selden, but maybe I don't know what to look for.
0NancyLebovitz
Possibly this Body Electric. It's at least about the right subject, but I'd have swore I'd read it much earlier than 1998, and my copy (buried somewhere) probably had a purple cover. The cover on the hardcover looks more familiar, and at least it's from 1985. Wikipedia makes it sound like the right book. Where were you searching? You had the authors right.
0Douglas_Knight
I looked at that book on google books. I searched for "Soviet," "elan," etc, and did not see the story you mentioned. Added: Amazon says that the book uses these words a lot more than google says, but I didn't look at many hits.
-2byrnema
That's interesting. I read your comment out of context and didn't know you were making a comment about the language. I agreed that I don't like thinking about electricity in animals (or more strongly, any coordinated magnetic phenomena, etc) because of this association. There is a similarity in the sounds, ("electrical" and "elan vital") but also the concepts are close in space ... perhaps the Soviets lacked this ugh field altogether.
0NancyLebovitz
I was using "sounded like" metaphorically. I assume they knew the difference in meaning, but were affected by the similarity of concepts and worry about their reputations. I guessed that the Soviets were more willing to do the research because Marxism was kind of like weird science, so they were willing to look into weird science in general. However, this is just a guess. A more general hypothesis is that new institutions are more willing to try new things.
0ChristianKl
If you know English and Mandarin, you might make an academic career out of writing meta analysis of topics discussed in Mandarin research papers.
3Barry_Cotter
I am not professionally involved in these fields but I have read that among those who are there is a very jaundiced opinion of Chinese and Indian scientific research. If none of the following hold completely ignoring their publications is apparently a good heuristic; at least one foreign co-author or one who did their doctorate in the first world or an institution or author with a significant reputation. Living in China and having some minimal experience with the Chinese attitude to plagiarism/copying/research makes this seem plausible. I doubt anyone's missing anything by ignoring scientific articles published in Mandarin. I make no such claims for social sciences.
[-]ESRogs180

I'm expecting China to have an increasing role in global affairs over the next century. With that in mind, there are a couple of things I'm curious about:

  • Does anyone have an idea of how prevalent existential risk type ideas are in China?

  • Has anyone tried to spread LW memes there?

  • Are the LW meetups in Shanghai, etc. mostly ex-pats or also locals?

Thanks!

[-]knb170

Gregory Cochran has written something on aging. I'll post some selected parts, but you should read the whole thing, which is pretty short.

Theoretical biology makes it quite clear that individuals ought to age. Every organism faces tradeoffs between reproduction and repair. In a world with hazards, such that every individual has a decreasing chance of survival over time, the force of natural selection decreases with increasing age. This means that perfect repair has a finite value, and organisms that skimp on repair and instead apply those resources to increased reproduction will have a greater reproductive rate – and so will win out. Creatures in which there is no distinction between soma and germ line, such as prokaryotes, cannot make such tradeoffs between repair and reproduction – and apparently do not age. Which should be a hint.

...

In practice, this means that animals that face low exogenous hazards tend to age more slowly. Turtles live a long time. Porcupines live a good deal longer than other rodents. [...] Organisms whose reproductive output increases strongly with time, like sturgeons or trees, tend to live longer. The third way of looking at things is t

... (read more)

Life is a concept we invented

Discussion of why it plausibly does not make sense to look for a firm dividing line between life and non-life.

Just because a boundary is fuzzy doesn't mean it's meaningless.

6Anatoly_Vorobey
It just doesn't matter very much - certainly not enough to keep wrangling over the exact definition of the boundary. As long as we understand what we mean by crystal, bacterium, RNA, etc., why should we care about the fuzzy dividing line? Are ribozymes going to become more or less precious to us according only to whether we count them as living or not, given that nothing changes about their actual manifested qualities? Should they? -- Karl Popper, from The Poverty of Historicism
1spxtr
Why did you post this quote? It seems like a good example of diseased thinking, but I'm not sure if that was your point.
2ESRogs
Are you saying you think the quote exhibits diseased thinking or just that it was about diseased thinking? To me, the quote seemed to clearly make the same point that Anatoly's first paragraph did, so it seems straightforward why he would include it.
0spxtr
The quote says that biologists don't deal with questions such as "what is life?" because that's essentialism and that's Bad. Similarly, physicists certainly don't study ideal systems like atoms or light. The disease is in the false dichotomy.
2ESRogs
Oh, hmm, I thought what he was saying about atoms and light is not that physicists don't study those things, but that they don't study some abstract platonic version of light or atom derived from our intuitions, but instead use those words to describe phenomena in the real world and then go on to continue investigating those phenomena on their own terms. So, for example, "Do radio waves really count as light?" is not a very interesting question from a physics perspective once you grant that both radio waves and visible light are on the same electromagnetic wave spectrum. Or with atoms we could ask, "Are atoms really atoms if they can be broken down into constituent parts?" These would just be questions about human definitions and intuitions rather than about the phenomena themselves. And so it is with the question, "What is life?" That's what it seemed like Popper was saying to me. Did you have a different interpretation? Also, I'm not sure I've understood your comment -- which dichotomy are you saying is a false dichotomy?
2spxtr
Asking whether radio waves really count as light is just arguing a definition. That's not interesting to anyone who understands the underlying physics. Notice that the questions he gives for essentialists are actually interesting questions, they're just imprecisely phrased, e.g. "what is matter?" These questions were asked before we'd decided matter was atoms. They were valid questions and serious scientists treated them. Now these questions are silly because we've already solved them and moved on to deeper questions, like "where do these masses come from?" and "how will the universe end?" When a theorist comes up with a new theory they are usually trying to answer one of these essentialist questions. "What is it about antimatter that makes it so rare?" The theorist comes up with a guess, computes some results, spends a year processing LHC data, and realizes that their theory is wrong. At some point in here they switched from essentialist (considering an ideal model) to nominalist (experimental data), but the whole distinction is unnecessary. Yes, they most certainly do. QED is an extremely abstract idea, derived from intuition about how the light we interact with on a classical level behaves. This is called the correspondence principle. String theorists come up with a theory based entirely on mathematical beauty, much like Plato.
1Anatoly_Vorobey
I think you're reading Popper uncharitably, and his view of what physicists do is about the same as yours. He really is arguing against arguing definitions. "What is matter?" is an ambiguous question: it can be understood as asking about a definition, "what do we understand by the word 'matter', exactly?", and it can be understood as asking about the structure, "what are these things that we call matter really made of, how do they behave, what are their properties, etc.?". The former, to Popper, is an essentialist question; the latter is not. Your understanding of "essentialist questions" is not that of Popper; he wouldn't agree with you, I'm sure, that "What is it about antimatter that makes it so rare?" is an essentialist question. "Essentialist" doesn't mean, in his treatment, "having nothing to do with experimental data" (even though he was very concerned with the value of experimental data and would have disagreed with some of modern theoretical physics in that respect). A claim which turns out to be unfalsifiable is anathema to Popper, but it is not necessarily an "essentialist" claim.
0ESRogs
Oh, hmm. I see now that we were interpreting Popper differently, and I may have been wrong. If Popper did mean to exclude that kind of inquiry, then I agree with you that he was misguided. In that case, it sounds like you would agree with the rest of Anatoly's comment, just not the Popper quote. Is that right?
0spxtr
That's right, more or less.
0ESRogs
Gotcha, thanks!
2Alsadius
Which disease are you referring to?
2fubarobfusco
"Diseased thinking" here is probably jargon; see Yvain's 2010 post "Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease".
0passive_fist
The definition of life matters because we want to be able to talk about extraterrestrial life as well.
7Anatoly_Vorobey
The precise definition of life will not be the thing that will determine our opinion about possible extraterrestrial life when we come across it. It will matter whether that hypothetical life is capable of growth, change, producing offspring, heredity, communication, intelligence, etc. etc. - all of these things will matter a lot. Having a very specific subset of these enshrined as "the definition of life" will not matter. This is what Popper's quote is all about.
2passive_fist
It's possible that extraterrestrial life will be nothing but a soup of RNA molecules. If we visit a planet while its life is still in the embryonic stages, we need to include that in our discourse of life in general. We need to have a word to represent what we are talking about when we talk about it. That's the only purpose any definition ever serves. If you want to go down the route of 'the definition of life is useless', you might as well just say 'all definitions are useless'.
2Shmi
My favorite example is challenging people to show that stars (in space) are any less alive than stars (in Hollywood).
4David_Gerard
What's the Darwinian evolution involved in stars? (Are you thinking of the hypothesis that universes evolve to create black holes?)
5Shmi
What I meant is that stars are born, they procreate (by spewing out new seeds for further star formation), then grow old. Stars "evolved" to be mostly smaller and longer lived due to higher metallicity. They compete for food and they occasionally consume each other. They sometimes live in packs facilitating further star formation, for a time. Some ancient stars have whole galaxies spinning around them, occasionally feeding on their entourage and growing ever larger.

Don't traits have to be heritable for evolution to count? I'm not an expert or anything, but I thought I'd know if stars' descendants had similar properties to their parent stars.

0NancyLebovitz
Descendant stars might have proportions of elements related to what previous stars generated as novas. I don't know whether there's enough difference in the proportions to matter.
2JGWeissman
Can you give an example of a property a star might have because having that property made its ancestor stars better at producing descendant stars with that property?
0Shmi
Sorry, I'm not an expert in stellar physics. Possibly metallicity, or maybe something else relevant. My original point was to agree that there is no good definition of "life" which does not include some phenomena we normally don't think of as living.
0A1987dM
See here.
2Jayson_Virissimo
Do stars exhibit teleological behavior?
0Shmi
Why do you ask?
2Jayson_Virissimo
Isn't teleology fundamental to some conceptions of life?
0Shmi
Feel free to elaborate.
0passive_fist
What's wrong with 'A self-sustaining (through an external energy source) chemical process characterized by the existence of far-from-equilibrium chemical species and reactions.'?
3RolfAndreassen
Suspect you would have a difficult time defining "external energy source" in a way that excludes fire but includes mitochondria. Which equilibrium? Stars are far from the eventual equilibrium of the heat death, and also not at equilibrium with the surrounding vacuum. Not clear whether viruses, prions, and crystals are included or excluded.
0passive_fist
True; what is meant is a simple external energy source such as radiation or a simple chemical source of energy. It's true that this is a somewhat fuzzy line though. I specifically said far-from-equilibrium chemical species and reactions. The chemistry that goes on inside a star is very much in equilibrium conditions. Viruses are not self-sustaining systems, so they are obviously excluded. You have to consider the system of virus+host (plus any other supporting processes). Same with prions. Crystals are excluded since they do not have any non-equilibrium chemistry.
0RolfAndreassen
I do not see how this answers the objection. All you did was add the qualification 'simple' to the existing 'external'. Is this meant to exclude fire, or include it? If the former, how does it do so? Presumably plant matter is a sufficiently "simple" source of energy, since otherwise you would exclude human digestion; plant matter also burns. Again, which equilibrium? The star is nowhere near equilibrium with its surroundings. Neither are humans... in a vacuum; but viruses are quite self-sustaining in the presence of a host. You are sneaking in environmental information that wasn't there in the original "simple" definition.
0passive_fist
Look at my reply to kalium. To reiterate, the problem is that people confuse objects with processes. The definition I gave explicitly refers to processes. This answers your final point. I already conceded that it's a fuzzy definition. As I said, you are correct that 'simple' is a subjective property. However, if you look at the incredibly complex reactions that occur inside human cells (gene expression, ribosomes, ATP production, etc), then yes, amino acids and sugars are indeed extremely simple in comparison. If you pour some sugars and phosphates and amino acids into a blender you will not get much DNA; not nearly in the quantities that it is found in cells. This is what is meant by 'far from equilibrium'. There is much more DNA in cells than you would find if you took the sugars and fatty acids and vitamins and just mixed them together randomly. I feel like we're talking past each other here. I explicitly (and not once, but twice in the definition) referred to chemical processes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_equilibrium
0RolfAndreassen
Ok, chemical equilibrium. This does not seem to me like a natural boundary; why single out this particular equilibrium and energy scale? I think you're missing my point, which is that I don't see how your definition excludes fire as a living thing. I don't think it does. A human in vacuum is alive, for a short time. How do you distinguish between "virus in host cell" and "human in supporting environment"?
0passive_fist
Because the domain of chemistry is broad enough to contain life as we know it, and also hypothesized forms of life on other planets, without being excessively inclusive. I tried to answer it. The chemical species that are produced in fire are the result of equilibrium reactions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion . They are simple chemical species (with more complex species only being produced in small quantities; consistent with equilibrium). Especially, they are not nearly as complex as compared to the feedstock as living chemistry is. They are both part of living processes. The timescale for 'self-sustaining' does not need to be forever. It only needs to be for some finite time that is larger than what would be expected of matter rolling down the energy hill towards equilibrium.
0kalium
In what sense are parasitic bacteria that depend on the host for many important functions self-sustaining while viruses are not?
0passive_fist
As I said, you have to consider the system of parasite+host (plus any other supporting processes). I think a lot of the confusion arises from people confusing objects with processes that unfold over time. You can't ask if an object is alive by itself; you have to specify the time-dynamics of the system. Statements like 'a bacterium is alive' are problematic because a frozen bacterium in a block of ice is definitely not alive. Similarly, a virus that is dormant is most definitely not alive. But that same virus inside a living host cell is participating in a living process i.e. it's part of a self-sustaining chain of non-equilibrium chemical reactions. This is why I specifically used the words 'chemical process'.
0kalium
So this is a definition for "life" only, not "living organism," and you would say that a parasite, virus, or prion is part of something alive, and that as soon as you remove the parasite from the host it is not alive. How many of its own life functions must a parasite be able to perform once removed from the host in order for it to be considered alive after removal from the host?
0passive_fist
Precisely. As the definition says. It must demonstrate non-equilibrium chemistry and must be self-sustaining. Again, 'simple forms of energy' is relative, so I agree that there's some fuzziness here. However, if you look at the extreme complexity of the chemical processes of life (dna, ribosomes, proteins, etc.) and compare that to what most life consumes (sugars, minerals, etc.) there is no ambiguity. It's quite clear that there's a difference.
0NancyLebovitz
Are you sure that all life is chemical? There's a common belief here that a sufficiently good computer simulation of a human being counts as being that person (and presumably, a sufficiently good computer simulation of an animal counts as being an animal, though I don't think I've seen that discussed), and that's more electrical than chemical, I think. I have a notion that there could be life based on magnetic fields in stars, though I'm not sure how sound that is.
0passive_fist
I guess it depends on your philosophical position on 'simulations'. If you believe simulations "aren't the real thing", then a simulation of chemistry "isn't actual chemistry", and thus a simulation of life "isn't actual life." Anyways, the definition I gave doesn't explicitly make any distinction here. About exotic forms of life, it could be possible. A while ago I had some thoughts about life based on quark-gluon interactions inside a neutron star. Since neutron star matter is incredibly compact and quarks interact on timescales much faster than typical chemistry, you could have beings of human-level complexity existing in a space of less than a cubic micrometer and living out a human-lifespan-equivalent existence in a fraction of a second. But these types of life are really really speculative at this point. We have no idea that they could exist, and pretty strong reasons for thinking they couldn't. It doesn't seem worth it to stretch a definition of life to contain types of life we can't even fathom yet.

Any good advice on how to become kinder? This can really be classified as two related goals, 1) How can I get more enjoyment out of alleviating others suffering and giving others happiness? 2) How can I reliably do 1 without negative emotions getting in my way (ex. staying calm and making small nudges to persuade people rather than getting angry and trying to change people's worldview rapidly)?

I'd recommend Nonviolent Communication for this. It contains specific techniques for how to frame interactions that I've found useful for creating mutual empathy. How To Win Friends And Influence People is also a good source, although IIRC it's more focused on what to do than on how to do it. (And of course, if you read the books, you have to actually practice to get good at the techniques.)

5Dan_Weinand
Thanks! And out of curiosity, does the first book have much data backing it? The author's credentials seem respectable so the book would be useful even if it relied on mostly anecdotal evidence, but if it has research backing it up then I would classify it as something I need (rather than ought) to read.
7Ben_LandauTaylor
According to wikipedia, there's a little research and it's been positive, but it's not the sort of research I find persuasive. I do have mountains of anecdata from myself and several friends whose opinions I trust more than my own. PM me if you want a pdf of the book.
3ESRogs
I would like to offer further anecdotal evidence that NVC techniques are useful for understanding your own and other people's feelings and feeling empathy toward them.
2erratio
Thirded. The most helpful part for me was internalising the idea that even annoying/angry/etc outbursts are the result of people trying to get their needs met. It may not be a need I agree with, but it gives me better intuition for what reaction may be most effective.
1ChristianKl
When it comes to research about paradigms like that it's hard to evaluate them. If you look at nonviolent communication and set up your experiment well enough I think you will definitely find effects. The real question isn't whether the framework does something but whether it's useful. That in turn depends on your goals. Whether a framework helps you to successfully communicate depends a lot on cultural background of the people with whom you are interacting. If you engage in NVC, some people with a strong sense of competition might see you as week. If you would consistentely engage in NVC in your communcation on LessWrong, you might be seen as a weird outsider. You would need an awful lot of studies to be certain about the particular tradeoff in using NVC for a particular real world situation. I don't know of many studies that compare whether Windows is better than Linux or whether VIM is better than Emacs. Communication paradigms are similar they are complex and difficult to compare.
1jsalvatier
I found NVC is very intuitively compelling, have personal anecdotal evidence that it works (though not independent of ESRogs, we go to the same class).
3Manfred
In addition to seconding nonviolent communication, cognitive behavior therapy techniques are pretty good - basically mindfulness exercises and introspection. If you want to change how you respond to certain situations (e.g. times when you get angry, or times when you have an opportunity to do something nice), you can start by practicing awareness of those situations, e.g. by keeping a pencil and piece of paper in your pocket and making a check mark when the situation occurs.
2byrnema
I also want to learn how to be kinder. The sticking point, for me, is better prediction about what makes people feel good. I was very ill a year ago, and at that time learned a great deal about how comforting it is to be taken care of by someone who is compassionate and knowledgeable about my condition. But for me, unless I'm very familiar with that exact situation, I have trouble anticipating what will make someone feel better. This is also true in everyday situations. I work on figuring out how to make guests feel better in my home and how to make a host feel better when I'm the guest. (I already know that my naturally overly-analytic, overly-accommodating manner is not most effective.) I observe other people carefully, but it all seems very complex and I consider myself learning and a 'beginner' -- far behind someone who is more natural at this.
3hesperidia
In this kind of situation, I usually just ask, outright, "What can I do to help you?" Then I can file away the answer for the next time the same thing happens. However, this assumes that, like me, you are in a strongly Ask culture. If the people you know are strongly Guess, you might get answers such as "Oh, it's all right, don't inconvenience yourself on my account", in which case the next best thing is probably to ask 1) people around them, or 2) the Internet. You also need to keep your eyes out for both Ask cues and Guess cues of consent and nonconsent - some people don't want help, some people don't want your help, and some people won't tell you if you're giving them the wrong help because they don't want to hurt your feelings. This is the part I get hung up on.
5TheOtherDave
The "keep your eyes out for cues" works the other way around in what we're calling a "Guess culture" as well. That is, most natives of such a culture will be providing you with hints about what you can do to help them, while at the same time saying "Oh, it's all right, don't inconvenience yourself on my account." Paying attention to those hints and creating opportunities for them to provide such hints is sometimes useful. (I frequently observe that "Guess culture" is a very Ask-culture way of describing Hint culture.)
0byrnema
Yes, I would like to improve on all of this. I haven't found the internet particularly helpful. And I do find myself in a bewildering 'guess' culture. Asking others (though not too close to the particular situation) would probably yield the most information.
1Shmi
What is your reason for wanting to?
2Dan_Weinand
I find myself happier when I act more kindly to others. In addition, lowering suffering/increasing happiness are pretty close to terminal values for me.
2Shmi
You say Yet you said earlier that Does this mean that you feel that you do enjoy it but not "enough" in some sense and you want to enjoy it even more?