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Agree, I don't follow the logic from step 1 → step 2 either - it seems obviously nonsensical. Maybe there are a few intermediate steps missing that show the chain of logic more clearly?

If you've played around with Auto-GPT, you'll notice that it's not very capable and it's very very hard to get it to do what you want... continually diving off into tangents or getting stuck in "do_nothing" loops.

I think the exact opposite (though I appreciate your responses and upvoted).

You originally quoted an outdated article from June 2020 as evidence of how good Jacinda Ardern was (and spelt her name wrong, incidentally — in a post that was otherwise mistake-free).

Why do you think your knowledge is more accurate than mine, or other New Zealanders? That's a very arrogant claim to make!

You could make the case that NZ is blinded by personality politics and dislikes Ardern on that basis, but you'd first have to make the case that Ardern was an effective leader of the country, using more than an article written only 3 months after Covid started.

Here's a statistic: Ardern was elected in 2018, and a major policy was Kiwibuild: build 100,000 houses by 2028 (10,000 per year). In May 2021 (latest numbers I can find) the total built was 1,058. It's rumoured that most of these were bought from private developers to boost the numbers.

Were you aware of this (the lack of execution on own policies)? What basis did you use to judge that Ardern had done an excellent job, other than running with your preconceived notions/finding evidence to confirm your current opinion?

Ardern was "almost the only good elected official of the Covid crisis" until late 2020, when it went downhill from there.

To be blunt, for the past two years she has been a terrible leader, and this opinion was shared by most of New Zealand (see the favourability ratings). Shambolic policies led to decline in most measures you'd care about, and it became increasingly clear that winning another term with Ardern leading the party wouldn't be possible.

I guess this is to say that picking Jacinda Ardern as an example of "some of the very best leaders" is misguided, and weakens the point for anyone who is aware of the state of NZ post-2020.

International media tended to depict her favourably, but I don't think it was due to ideological bias — she is a good speaker, a great statesperson and was excellent at depicting New Zealand internationally.

Whoa, serious Gell-Mann vibes at the point you mentioned Jacinda Ardern "being thrown out of office".

Jacinda Ardern resigned voluntarily. At the time, her net favourability was -1%, down from a high of +32%.

Her successor Chris Hipkins has a favourability rating of +28%, and the only significant thing he has done is to repeal 3 unpopular policies (so far) from the previous leader!

How can I deliberately practise empathetic listening? When a situation comes up in life I forget everything — I would like to train the empathy reflex so that's the first thing I turn to when trying to help.

It seems to me that rounding infinitesimal chances to zero gives the greatest realised expected value during your life. Chance of winning the lottery? Infinitesimal = rounds to zero = don't buy lotto tickets. Chance of income increasing if you learn programming? > 5% = consider learning programming. There are so many different things one can do, and only a limited number that can be done with the time and resources we have. Jettison the actions with infinitesimal chances in favour of actions with low-to-likely levels of probability.

Across all universes, if every one of you plays the lottery every week, a very small percentage of you will end up highly wealthy — but that doesn't help the rest of you, who are $40 per week (compounding) poorer. In terms of utility, the first $50m that the rich yous win will deliver much more utility than the next $50m. Average utility will be higher if every you had $50m, rather than a small percentage of yous having $500m. This suggests a focus on actions with smaller payoffs but higher probabilities.

A lot of gut issues are a combination of:

  • Allergies to food. Diagnose and treat by cutting the most common offenders from your diet first: gluten, eggs, nuts, dairy. If there's no improvement and you're desperate, cut everything from your diet except rice and water, and add foods one-by-one until you isolate the culprit.
    You may have an intolerance to food which isn't an allergy, e.g. coeliac disease. These can be diagnosed by a colonoscopy.
  • Allergies to other things in the environment that are causing issues, e.g. fragrances.
  • SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth). Diagnose by doing a SIBO breath test, and treat with a combination of antibiotics for the initial cull, pre and probiotics until you develop a healthy flora, then be very wary of having antibiotics from then on.
  • SIBO is often caused by a hereditary inability to absorb a certain type of dietary sugar, e.g. fructose (fructose malabsorption) or lactose (lactose malabsorption). When eating foods containing that sugar, you don't digest it, which leads to an overgrowth in bacteria which consume that sugar. Diagnose by doing a SIBO test, treat by avoiding that food and/or taking enzyme supplements to help you digest it.
  • (I don't know any scientific basis for this point, but it seems to be this way from observation) There seems to be certain 'types' of people: red meat people, white meat people, no meat people or it-doesn't-matter people. If your diet is heavily slanted towards one of the 'types', it's worth trying out the other types to see if you do better on that diet.

There's a few supplements which are generally useful, and good to have in the toolkit:

  • Slippery elm powder in capsule form is a great soother, forming a mucus-like material in your guts.
  • Activated charcoal capsules are useful for soaking up toxins in the gut, which is an issue experienced with SIBO-related bacterial die off. Be careful with over-supplementing with these, because it will soak up nutrients also.

Conducting a nuclear test indicates a much higher willingness to use nuclear than just keeping them in storage does.

A thought occurred to me, and it's so logical, I concluded that it must be true.


Is this satire?

Russia will detonate a nuclear weapon in Russia. In other words, Russia will do a nuclear test. Like North Korea did.

With (literally) a nuclear option, pushing the nuclear button is a last resort.
The path there is through various escalations, without any individual step being too overt.

For example, if Putin wants to demonstrate their willingness to use nuclear weapons, he can:

  1. Create unusual movement/activity at one of their nuclear bases, in a way that it is visible to other countries
  2. Carry out a nuclear test inside Russia
  3. Carry out a nuclear test in some deserted area outside of Russia
  4. Carry out testing of the delivery mechanism (ICBM? Via airplane?) just without a nuclear warhead
  5. Carry out a nuclear test close to/on the Ukraine border
  6. Use nuclear weapons in 'his' territory (the illegally-annexed areas of Ukraine) to put down 'illegal' resistance
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