What's your actual credence of it being true?
When it comes to popular treatments there are reasons why other people use those treatments. Generally, other people using a treatment is some evidence that it works. If the other people however use the treatment because it produces big effects in short time frames that have nothing to do with health benefits that means them using the treatment is less evidence that it works.
I do think that in the world we are living there's a sizeable number of approaches in the New Age / alternative medicine category that share "surprising short term effect" + "doe... (read more)
I don't think that key facts are often sourced via Wikipedia. On the other hand many facts that you find in an newspaper article aren't the key facts.
We also see few such attacks on some sources which The Powers That Be do trust, notably journal articles (though such attacks don't never happen).
I think we see plenty examples where corportation hire experts to write papers that come to conclusions that are in their interest.
When it comes to the link it's worth noting that the only reason the papers in those cases where detected as being fake was because they did stupid mistakes like copying images. Given that's where the threshold lies, more sophisticated misconduct is likely to often say undetected. All the while replication rates are low.
From the Bayesian perspective you have a model of the world according to which different treatments have different likelihoods of having effects. Then you pay attention to reality and if reality doesn't behave in the way your model predicts your model has to be updated. That's the core of what epistemic rationality is about, being ready to update when your beliefs don't pay rent.
If you want to go for the maximum of epistemic rationality, write down your credence for the effects of a given treatment down and then check afterwards how good your predict... (read more)
I'd be curious whether you found any applications for phenomenological methodologies in the area of medical research/clinical practice.
There is no evidence that chiropractic adjustments are any better than a placebo at relieving back pain
Your link doesn't go to the page about chiropratic interventions in general which is https://www.cochrane.org/CD005427/BACK_combined-chiropractic-interventions-for-low-back-pain and which does suggest that there's a small effect which just isn't stronger then mainstream treatments.
... (read more)It wasn't a true aspiring-rationality a-ha moment for me at the time, but it should have been. (I think this was before I encountered HPMOR.) The human b
I don't buy that the power that be don't want to manipulate Wikipedia because it's believed to be unreliable. In many cases newspaper journalists these days believe Wikipedia to be reliable enough to use it as a source for some claims with gives you citogenesis. Books like Trust me I'm lying speak more in detail about how you can do the citogenesis dance as a PR person.
Wikipedia does deal with a huge amount of vandalism but succeeds in holding it at bay well enough to have the quality it has.
Germany is currently governed by a coalition between the major center-left and center-right party if you want to use the traditional terms. That's something different then one of two parties right or left from center.
The head of government in the German system also has a lot less power then a US president.
New parties are able to enter parliament and as long as they have >5% and gets seats nobody sees those votes as wasted.
In the normal state the human body has ten times as much bacteria cells and a bunch of phages that attack those bacteria.
Bacteria phages don't infect human cells, which many part of the immune system do care about. Whether the immune system will start attacking some phages depends a lot on the context.
In many cases when fighting an infection you have the problem that the host immune system doesn't effectively work.
In periodontitis for example periodontopathogens like Porphyromonas gingivalis, synergistically disarm host defence systems as a rec... (read more)
One of the papers I read through spoke about it that way. https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/97619/does-n1-methyl-pseudouridine-occur-naturally-in-any-rna is also interesting in saying that tRNAs of most archaea contains it.
Googling "1-methyl 3'-pseudouridine" brings up 14 hits not all actually containing the term and some on facebook. I think this refers to N1-methylpseudouridine.
From a EU report on Moderna's vaccine:
The RNA contains modified N1-methylpseudouridine instead of uridine to minimise the indiscriminate recognition of the mRNA by pathogen-associated molecular pattern receptors (e.g. TLRs
There's a paper that also suggests that's in Pfizers vaccine.
Googling it + FDA doesn't show any discussion that you would likely see if it's the reason that the FDA rejected other ... (read more)
I do mind, after having spent several minutes annotating images of self-driving cards
I think it's worst when you have edge cases like the Google Captcha that shows 16 tiles and you have to choose which tiles contain the item they are looking for and some of the tails contain it only a little bit on the edge.
Karma, the amount of people reached by a post and the impact it has on people correlate with each other but neither determines the others.
What is your advice now?
How about looking at the posts that he writes? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MSpfFBCQYw3YA8kMC/violating-the-emh-prediction-markets and https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ybQdaN3RGvC685DZX/the-emh-is-false-specific-strong-evidence are posts that advocate concrete trades.
Looking at the other posts it seems he shares some other advice at some EA groups.
Why do you believe it isn't a combination of both?
Having extreme political opinion is unfortunately correlated with being politically engaged. A majority of the people who don't have extreme opinions aren't engaged enough for a project like this. Even in the general population a majority doesn't vote in primaries.
I would expect that it makes more sense to focus on voting reform in individual states then to build up such a pesudo party.
I'm not talking about sterilization of the human body but sterilization of the hospital enviroment. It leads to selection effects for bacteria that are adapted to the hospital enviroment.
If you have plants in a room then part of the room is filled with bacteria that interact with plants and that creates a more diverse microbial enviroment. Having plants in a room makes it more likely that a random bacteria in the room is a plant pathogen compared to a human pathogen.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2014.00491/full#B7 is a pape... (read more)
Contra the idea that the internet is to blame, polarization seems historically to be the "natural" state in both the USA and elsewhere. To get less of it you need specific mechanism that have a moderating effect
The US got steadily more polarized along political lines over the last decades by metrics such as how important it is for people that their spouse shares their party affiliation while getting less polarized along race by those metrics.
Matt Talibbi's Hate Inc is a book that describes the process over the last decades well.
It seems to me that a winner-take-all election for an immensely powerful head of the executive branch of the government necessarily creates a two-party system (or something similar to a two-party system, as has happened in Germany), even if you ignore all other issues.
Germany has neither a winner-take-all election nor a two-party system.
Given the numbers COVID-19 vaccines are less effective against asymptomatic infections then they are against symptomatic infections. We also see them to be more effective against hospitalization then against symptomatic infections.
Given that death is at the tail, they are likely more protective against death then asymptomatic or symptomatic infections.
The effect they have on long Covid is less clear. Long Covid won't kill you immediately but can plausibly cost you a few years of lifespan.
Young women have significant risk of blood clots because the pill has significant risk of blood clots and they are the demographic for the pill.
The fact that we see the cases in that group suggests that it's not about "certain age groups" but taking the pill.
Speaking about "certain age groups" might be the result of too much political correctness getting in the way.
In order for antibiotic resistance to be relevant, you have to get infected in the first place, and if hospitals were consistent about sterilization then they wouldn't have infection rates any higher than any other buildings.
It's the sterilization that creates the niche in which those bacteria thrive because they face less competition then they would face in other normal buildings which are populated by diverse bacteria. No matter how much you sterilize you are not going to go to zero bacteria in a space occupied by humans and when human are a primary vector of moving bacteria around in the space you select for bacteria's that actually interact with humans.
To be fair, they didn't know which doses where contaminated at the time and there was no test to determine which doses were contaminated.
I unfortunately know very little about building bridges, so I can't really tell how a new paradigm might improve the status quo. It might be possible to switch the composition of a bridge in a way where it can be created in a more automated fashion then it's currently created.
When it comes to actually preventing infections I do think there's room for a new paradigm that replaces "let's kill all bacteria" with "let's see that we have an ecosystem of bacteria without those that are problematic".
Moving to that new paradigm for infections has similar problems to improving on cancer treatment and prevention.
Some things we basically understand: building bridges and skyscrapers, treating and preventing infections, satellites and GPS, cars and ships, oil wells and gas pipelines and power plants, cell networks and databases and websites.
If we understand basically understand building bridges, then why are we building so few new bridges and those that we build end up being so expensive? The fact that building bridges with the advanced technology we have today isn't cheaper but more expensive then building bridges 100 years ago suggests to me that we don't und... (read more)
Elevators that don't have a way to ventilate themselves might be very risky. A few days ago I was thinking. Well isn't it smelly in here. Sometimes it smells like someone smoked. It's possible that the exhald coronavirus stays a while in the air in the elevator.
I think reading this I update towards using them less reading this.
You don't need to add other hypothesis to know that there might be unknown additional hypothesis.
If Adams Express paid $10 a month on $500 of stock, that’s a 24% annual dividend yield, which is far better than any similar investment today, and presumably this easily covered the payments on the loan.
When I read the tales of crypto-markets on LessWrong, there are also people who speak similarly about yield. There's risk but the same might be true with the stocks back in the day.
Similarly, if you have to hit
w
more than a few times, you're probably doing something wrong.
Do you mean that for both doing "4w" and "wwww"?
Antibody buildup against polyethylene glycol or PEG. One issue of concern was voiced in The Importance of Poly(ethylene glycol) Alternativesfor Overcoming PEG Immunogenicity in DrugDelivery and Bioconjugation:
... (read more)The administration of PEGylated drugs can lead to the production of anti-PEG antibodies(anti-PEG immunoglobulin M (IgM)) and immune response (Figure 1) [30]. Due to these phenomena,the PEG-conjugation of drugs/NPs often only provides a biological advantage during the first dose of a treatment course. By the second dose, the PEGylated agents have been
Let's think about an example. I want to move my cursor.
I might be in a situation when 3W, lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll, / with something else $b are all valid moves to get at my target location for the cursor.
This has probably something like 3-5 seconds latency because I not only have to think about where my cursor should go about also about the way to get there.
On the other hand without VIM, having a proper keyboard that makes arrow keys easy to reach I might have a latency of maybe 700 milliseconds.
VIM frequently costs mental processing capacity because I have to model my code in my head in concepts like words (for w and b) that I wouldn't otherwise.
Consider two hypothesis: A says that everyone has a 1/6 chance of dying. B says that everyone else has a 1/6 chance of dying, but I survive for sure.
There's no reason to only consider those two hypothesis.
If I would trust my memory, which I likely wouldn't given the stakes my available data only suggest that there's something that's in common with my trials that's not the case for the average person.
It could be that I did all my previous tries at a specific outside temperature and at that temperature prevents the bullet from getting fired... (read more)
When it comes to buying air purifiers it's worth noting that noise pollution likely also negatively affects cognition, so you likely not only want to optimize for performance of clearing the air but for low noise as well.
The main concern I had was that it leads to a development of polyethylene glycol resistence. After talking this through with a doctor, I now believe that 1-2 doses of the vaccine are unlikely to have a significant effect but still some that giving significantly more doses (for example 2 every year to target changing viruses) could lead to such an effect.
I already fully isolate, and would only value my freedom a bit, whereas I value my health a lot.
Human contact is very important for human health. The idea that you can fully isolate without paying a price for it in health seems questionable to me. Humans are not constructed to live healthy lifes in isolation from other humans.
That's true, but I think you're being very optimistic, both in the ability of defendants and defense council to ignore or evaluate information the other side in an adversarial system claims is their true opinion
At would expect that in the beginning after the reform defendants and defense council would not trust the probability at all.
I would expect that trust in the numbers will only come when the system works well that they provide valid information.
... (read more)I think both are possible, and would be very valuable, but can't be achieved without much deeper
The issue is not just more choices but more choices to achieve the same result. In programming languages Python achieved a large user-base through being easy to use with it's core principles like "there should be one obvious way to do things".
I have 5 open on my laptop right now, and it's not because I want to! Vim provides a unified set of key bindings among practically every editor, which normally have very different ways of doing things.
The problem is that it's not dependable when you can use the Vim shortcuts within user editors. If I use IdeaVim... (read more)
Is it faster to look at the keyboard and type with one finger, or touch-type with all ten?
Touch typing doesn't increase the amount of choices if you do it properly. If you learn touch typing properly there's a single finger that's responsible for a single key.
As your vocabulary has grown, has your speech slowed down?
That's a bad comparison because as my vocabulary grew I also get better got speaking.
In cross language comparisons more choices, do slow down speakers. Speakers of a language with fewer phomenes are faster at speaking a single phoneme then speakers of a language with more different phonemes.
For any given thing you want to do imagine what it would take to do it without Vim
This reminds me of the person with whom I was arguing about what takes how long on Anki and who was saying that his own judgement of what takes how long is superior to the Anki statistics where I know how the code works and which actually measures the time correctly.
Human imagination is not good at estimating what tasks have how much latency.
This really isn't my experience. Once you've practiced something enough that it becomes a habit, the latency is significantly lower.
How much experience do you have with measuring the latency of things to know what takes 400ms and what takes 700ms?
Anecdotally, I've pretty consistently seen people who're used to vim accomplish text editing tasks much faster than people who aren't, unless the latter is an expert in keyboard shortcuts of another editor such as emacs.
Even if total time for the task is reduced the latency for starting the task might still be higher.
My recollection is that in studies of how humans respond to feedback, there are large differences between even relatively short periods of latency.
I would expect using VIM to increase latency. While you are going to press fewer keys you are likely going to take slightly longer to press the keys as using any key is more complex.
I can point to dozens of little things that are easier with vim, conversely, nothing is harder because you can always just drop into insert mode.
There's the paradox of choice and having more choices to accomplish a task c... (read more)
A lot of ways to extract profit from having brought the souls involve some form of blackmail that's both unethical and a lot of labor.
There are a lot more ethical ways to make a living that also pay better for the labor.
most Christians believe that souls exist on a different metaphysical plane than your brain or an EM
Even if that's true, do you think that the EM has a link to the same metaphysical human who was uploaded or does the soul that was linked to the human is not linked in any way to the EM?
It takes a human hundreds of hours to get to that level of play strength. Unless part of building GPT-4 involves letting it play various games against itself for practice I would be very surprised if GPT-4 could even beat an average Go bot (let's say one who plays at 5 kyu on KGS to be more specific) 50% of the time.
I would put the confidence for that at something like 95% and most of the remaining percent is about OpenAI doing weird things to make GPT-4 specifically good for the task.
But after that I persisted and now it’s actually faster.
How do you know?
A lot of research is wrong for one reason or another. If a scientist finds out that a paper of someone wrote contains errors the usual process is to write a new paper. Science progresses through new papers and everyone accepts that old papers often contain errors and are overtaken by new research.
The only thing that might be research misconduct is to to forge your research results by not changing the data you publish. Given how hard it is to persue people for massive fraud it's however unlikely that anybody will argue in present day academia that leaving o... (read more)
Why do you believe that you are actually faster with Vim? I used Vim quite a while a bit and it usually still requires thinking to use it. I haven't seen any evidence that Vim actually makes programs faster that goes beyond programmers feeling faster. Do you have evidence for that, either through measuring your own performance or through another source?
In Germany where I live a prosecutor has a legal obligation for prosecuting cases of crimes if he believes the defendent is guilty. A prosecutor is not allowed to say "Well this law is stupid so I won't prosecute people for breaking it" while in the US that's within the rights of a prosecutor. This right allows for plea deals to happen in the US.
If you change this basic part about what the mandate of the prosecutor happens to be, you will suddenly get a lot of very bad laws enforced that currently aren't enforced. If laws against oral sex in some states su... (read more)
Overall I'm very skeptical that the enforcement mechanism you proposed to incentivize prosecutors to be honest is anywhere near strong enough.
The incentive it's as strong as the desire for people who evaluate the prosecutors want it to be. You can also make it stronger by linking it to bonus payments if you want. If you do pay prosecutors any bonuses it would make sense to do that, but I think it's generally better to pay prosecutors a fixed salary.
In any case, even if many prosecutors give crapy numbers those numbers can just be ignored by the defen... (read more)
This seems like a surprising claim to me. I don't see how "repair at a certain rate" would happen in the underlying biology. On the other hand, I would expect that some error are of a quality that the error detection mechanisms don't catch them.
Does anybody know more details?