For those who haven't heard, NIH and NSF are no longer processing grants, leading to many negative downstream effects. I've been directing my attention elsewhere lately and don't have anything informative to say about this. However, my uninformed intuition is that people who care about effective altruism (research in general,...
You walk into a store that sells two identical candies. Would you buy the candy that ordinarily costs $2 at 50% off (for one dollar), or the candy that ordinarily costs 10$ for 80% off (for one dollar)? In an isomorphic situation, sparrows preferred the latter deal. http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/publications/pdf/kacelnik_marsh_2002_animbehav_costs.pdf
Is there any 80,000/CFAR statement on Trump or are you just talking about the personal writings of individual people who happen to work in these organizations?
(Also, did you consistently think it was wrong for them to fervently espouse the AI-as-existential risk narrative?)
Perhaps that's also a reason, but the role of insulin / leptin resistance in causing hunger pangs (contractions of the stomach) in situations when additional food is not actually required is pretty well established.
You're missing the fact that tightly controlled feedback mechanisms govern appetite. That's what allows maintaining weight in the real world. Magically add 20lbs (or an apple a day) to a healthy person and they'll feel correspondingly less hungry.
impact on how much calories people spend simply moving their own bodies
Actually, it's mostly going to be the metabolism of the tissue (extra fat tissue needs flood flow, temperature regulation, energy for cellular processes etc too), and that can be significant, although not as much as hunger regulation.
Yes, that is the ideal, and it's true that the three consequences you mention are positive consequences (Assuming more effort makes you more likely to arrive at correct answers, which it usually does although I imagine there are diminishing returns past a certain point - you might notice a lot of very smart people putting a lot of effort into politics and still disagreeing.)
The thing is you must weigh information-gathering and evaluation concerning GMOs against every other possible action you could take with those resources.
Let's focus on the goal which most plausibly requires understanding GMO
for my personal health and safety
Well, let me tell you how i went about researching my personal health... (read more)
yes.
We don't want "are you rich, do you smoke" because the selection effect (we are rich because we were born upper middle class, and we're not powerful because powerful people have better things to do than explore the internet until they land on odd forums).
Otherwise the value of an idea is judged by the types of people who happen to stumble upon them.
What we want is "After being exposed to the ideas, did you get richer", "did you quite smoking", etc. Before after.
why aren't they leveraging their high IQs
IQ is just another selection effect confound to control for. Priors say there is absolutely no way rationality training will alter your IQ (and besides the IQ data is mostly from standardized test scores taken in high school anyhow) If high IQ people land up here that just means high IQ people crawl the internet more and stick around more.
First: check whether the issue is really important: With some exceptions (voting correctly, believing the correct afterlife and not getting sent to hell) If you aren't in a position to interact with the evidence it's probably not something you meaningfully have control over. (Most things for which it is important for you to personally understand have measurable consequences to you. Why do you need the right answer to the GMO question, what would you even do with the right answer?).
Then:
-Figure out exactly what the claims really are and try not to conflate different claims (GMOs will do what, exactly?)
-Consider the possibility that the entire premise is silly ("Is God one or... (read more)
Do you have an opinion concerning whether this is better characterized as "non-response to the benefits of exercise due to pathology" vs. "immunity to the harmful effects of a sedentary lifestyle"?
Basically, is being a non-responder good or bad? Eyeballing that graph it does look like untrained non-responders might be a bit fitter than responders - but of course the first thing we should assume is ceiling effect.
(And of course there's many 3rd options - orchid/dandelion trade offs and such)
Agreed.
(By the way, I never was suggesting that religion caused people to not desire earthly longevity. I was saying that the fact that nearly all human religions often feature immorality suggest that nearly all humans find it difficult to understand and accept true-death and wish for immortality on some level.
Furthermore I was saying that if someone happily believes in an afterlife, we should probably count them as desiring immortality even if they claim to desire an earthly death. I'm disagreeing with the idea that we should take claims of wishing to die at face value - I think that most who would turn down an eternal life (assuming good health, companionship, purpose, and so on) are either mistaken about what they prefer, or mistaken about the universe.
With many exceptions, of course.)
For those who haven't heard, NIH and NSF are no longer processing grants, leading to many negative downstream effects.
I've been directing my attention elsewhere lately and don't have anything informative to say about this. However, my uninformed intuition is that people who care about effective altruism (research in general, infrastructure development, X-risk mitigation, life-extension...basically everything, actually) or have transhumanist leanings should be very concerned.
The consequences have already been pretty disastrous. To provide just one, immediate example, the article says that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has shut down. I think that this is almost certain to directly cause a nontrivial number of deaths. Each additional day that this continues... (read more)
You walk into a store that sells two identical candies. Would you buy the candy that ordinarily costs $2 at 50% off (for one dollar), or the candy that ordinarily costs 10$ for 80% off (for one dollar)?
In an isomorphic situation, sparrows preferred the latter deal.
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/publications/pdf/kacelnik_marsh_2002_animbehav_costs.pdf
There's a large class of viable pharmaceuticals which don't see the light of day because their unpatentability causes companies not to fund the clinical trials which would be necessary to clear regulatory approval.