Why do you believe that US government/military would not be convinced to invest more in AGI/ASI development from being convinced of the potential power in AI?
Possible to say anything more about the story?
Presumably the reason for such spam is that someone who's already been hacked once is more likely to be an easy target.
Re the straight male STEM nerds: shouldn't that be a good market for women who are into that stuff regardless, due to the uneven gender ratios? Like, if a community is heavily male dominated in the gender ratio, then presumably women in the community will need less traditional attractiveness to be competitive (relative to other communities), even if the guys primarily cared about traditional attractiveness?
Well, I'll give you some context. I am Scandinavian, and inclined to answer "no". Here's why:
Making my parents proud does not really feel like one of my main goals. I care about having a loving relationship with my parents, and I care about my parents being healthy, happy etc. I know they are proud of me, but it doesn't feel like an important goal in itself.
Note: They do have very similar values and we're all generally happy with the relationship.
Also, they don't have any narrow standards for being pleased, rather the opposite. Like, I have dif...
"Counterargument: There are things that are illegal but which people don't really consider immoral, like stealing a notepad from your office. Taking depositor funds as a "loan" is worse than this, but of a similar status. There's a notion that "if you win, it's not unethical"—like the story (celebrated in business circles) of Fedex gambling their last $6,000 of investor funds in a casino, without which the company would've failed. It seems okay because of social context—the majority of cryptocurrency funds do this sort of thing."
The analogy here doesn't wo...
Looks like some text is missing:
"I do not expect this to ... How expensive is doing it this way?"
Given that AFAIK there's been virtually no cases (1%?) among people who hadn't had sexual relations it seems like it transmits really ineffectively via non-sexual means. Why would it suddenly start infecting lots people in other ways, like via surfaces?
Re the nicotine restriction proposal: Smoking is a big deal though. It kills a lot more people than covid, and in slow horrible ways. If the proposal to ban nicotine in cigarettes works as intended it would save a ton of lives and prevent a ton of suffering. Few political proposals have had the potential to do that much good.
Genuine question, in the full on nuclear war scenario presumably most people wouldn't have food supplies and just starve. Do you expect to be able to protect your food supplies from organized plundering armed gangs? Eg former criminal gangs, or former police/military?
With a full scale nuclear war supply chains will collapse. How will you survive starvation? And if you have enough food or food production capacity, how will you be able to protect it from armed gangs?
Agree that empirical performance is a very important way to assess experts.
Unfortunately it can be tricky. In the RCT example, you need expertise to be able to evaluate the RCT. It's not just about knowing about their existence, but also you'd need to be able to eg avoid p-hacking, file-drawer effects and other methodological issues. Especially in a high stakes adversarial landscape like national politics. Joe Biden himself doesn't have enough expertise to assess empirical performance using RCTs. And it's unclear if even any of his advisors can.
Aren't those excess deaths just the direct covid deaths, from the unlucky few younger people who got covid and died from it?
"Sweden has a higher population than the other countries listed so total numbers are not comparable. That alone doesn't explain all the difference."
The numbers I'm citing above are population normalized. They are total excess deaths per million (and per 100k in the economist link).
"It's unclear to me why https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline?tab=map&country=MEX~RUS~ZAF and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-deaths-per-million-covid come to such different conclusions."
Ah, that data isn't cumula...
Yeah, precisely that page. Scroll down to the graph:
"Excess mortality: Cumulative number of deaths from all causes compared to projection based on
previous years, per million people, Dec 19, 2021
"The cumulative difference between the reported number of deaths since 1 January 2020 and the projected number of deaths for the same period based on previous years."
Sweden 883
Finland 411
Denmark 154
Norway 110
Iceland 92
Proportions are similar if you check out the economist's data below: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-per-100k-economist?co...
Yeah, I agree that excess death data is preferable when available. For some reason Dumbledore's Army's original link isn't working for me ("page not found"). So I haven't yet seen state by state excess mortality data. But if it actually doesn't find any difference between the red/blue states that would undermine the argument from the NYT article above.
Looking at Our World in Data's limited cumulative excess mortality data Sweden has 2-8X higher excess mortality during the pandemic compared to other Scandinavian countries (with similar vaccination rates). T...
Hm. I wonder if there's really a " minimal difference between the outcomes of US red states and blue states". From the graph here it looks like red states had ~40% higher mortality per capita: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/briefing/covid-death-toll-red-america.html
Maybe that's more from lower vaccination rates, than lockdowns - but it still undermines the argument that´s based on no significant red/blue state differences.
Yeah, it's overconfident to claim that lockdowns are "almost certainly net negative". This stuff is complicated.
But it's also not certain that lockdowns were "definitely a huge net positive" for older people. For example, for my 90 year old grandmother the life-saving benefits are much larger than for younger people. But the costs of a couple years in lockdown has also been huge for her. She's been persistently depressed, and her health has deteriorated a lot. Presumably from not moving around much any more. She's felt really bad about life since the pande...
And if things get bad?
Ben just posted a reply to comments on his Palladium article, including the comments here on LessWrong.