It not being linked on Twitter and Facebook seems more like a feature than a bug, given that when I asked Gwern why a page like this doesn't already exist, he wrote me he doesn't want people to mock it.

> I really like the importance Tags, but what I would really like is a page
> where I can just go through all the posts ordered by importance. I just
> stumbled over another importance 9 post (iron rules) when I thought I had
> read all of them. Clicking on the importance tag, just leads to a page
> explaining the importance tag.

Yeah, that is a mix of 'too hard to fix' and 'I'm not sure I want to
fix it'. (I don't know how Hakyll works well enough to do it
'normally', and while I think I can just treat it as a tag-directory,
like 'meta/importance/1', 'meta/importance/2' etc, that's a little
awkward.) Do I *want* people to be able to go through a list of
articles sorted by importance and be able to easily mock it - avoiding
any actual substantive critique?

I went through Gwern’s posts and collected all the posts with importance 8 and higher as of 2024-09-04 in case someone else was searching for something like this.

10

• How Often Does Correlation=Causality?
• Why Correlation Usually ≠ Causation
• The Scaling Hypothesis
• Complexity no Bar to AI
• The Algernon Argument
• Embryo Selection For Intelligence
• Life Extension Cost-Benefits
• Colder Wars
• Metamagical Themas: Sanity and Survival
• The Existential Risk of Math Errors

9

• Iodine and Adult IQ meta-analysis
• Lithium in ground-water and well-being
• Melatonin
• Modafinil
• Modafinil community survey
• Nicotine
• Why Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs
• Machine Learning Scaling
• The Hyperbolic Time Chamber & Brain Emulation
• The Iron Law Of Evaluation And Other Metallic Rules
• Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning
• Are Sunk Costs Fallacies?
• Plastination versus Cryonics
• Silk Road 1: Theory & Practice
• Darknet Market Archives (2013–2015)
• The Melancholy of Subculture Society

8

• The Replication Crisis: Flaws in Mainstream Science
• How Should We Critique Research?
• The Narrowing Circle
• Zeo sleep self-experiments
• When Should I Check The Mail?
• Candy Japan’s new box A/B test
• The Kelly Coin-Flipping Game: Exact Solutions
• In Defense of Inclusionism
• Bitcoin Is Worse Is Better
• Time-lock encryption
• Easy Cryptographic Timestamping of Files
• GPT-3 Creative Fiction
• RNN Metadata for Mimicking Author Style
• Terrorism Is Not About Terror
• Terrorism Is Not Effective
• Archiving URLs
• Conscientiousness & Online Education
• Radiance: A Novel

The recent post on reliability and automation reminded me that my "textexpansion" tool Espanso is not reliable enough on Linux (Ubuntu, Gnome, X11). Anyone here using reliable alternatives?

I've been using Espanso for a while now, but its text expansions miss characters too often, which is worse than useless. I fiddled with Espanso's settings just now and set the backend to Clipboard, which seems to help with that, but it still has bugs like the special characters remaining ("@my_email_shorthand" -> "@myemail@gmail.com").

In particular, I think you might need to catch many escape attempts before you can make a strong case for shutting down. (For concreteness, I mostly imagine situations where we need to catch the model trying to escape 30 times.)

So instead of leaving the race once the models start scheming against you, you keep going to gather more instances of scheming until you can finally convince people? As an outside reader of that story I'd just be screaming at the protagonists that clearly everyone can see where this is going where scheming attempt number 11 is just good enough to be successful. And in the worlds where we catch them 30 times successfully it feels like people would argue: this is clear evidence that the models aren't "actually dangerous" yet, so let's keep scaling "responsibly".

There is probably a lot of variation between people regarding that. In my family meds across the board improved people's sleep (by making people less sleepy during the day, so more active and less naps). When I reduced my medication from 70mg to 50mg for a month to test whether I still needed the full dose, the thing that was annoying the most was my sleep (waking up at night and not falling asleep again increased. Falling asleep initially was maybe slightly easier). Taking it too late in the afternoon is really bad for my sleep, though.

Things I learned that surprised me from a deep dive into how the medication I've been taking for years (Vyvanse) actually gets metabolized:

• It says in the instructions that it works for 13 hours, and my psychiatrist informed me that it has a slow onset of about an hour. What that actually means is that after ~1h you reach 1/2 the peak concentration and after 13 hours you are at 1/2 the peak concentration again, because the half-life is 12h (and someone decided at some point 1/2 is where we decide the exponential starts and ends?). Importantly, this means 1/4 of the medication is still present the next day!

Here is some real data, which fit the simple exponential decay rather well (It's from children though, which metabolize dextroamphetamine faster, which is why the half-life is only ~10h)

• If you eat ~1-3 grams of baking soda, you can make the amount of medication you lose through urine (usually ~50%) go to 0^[1] (don't do this! Your body probably keeps its urine pH at the level it does for a reason! You could get kidney stones).
• I thought the opposite effect (acidic urine gets rid of the medication quickly) explained why my ADHD psychologist had told me that the medication works less well combined with citric fruit, but no! Citric fruit actually increase your urine pH (or mostly don't affect it much)? Probably because of the citric acid cycle which means there's more acid leaving as co2 through your lungs? (I have this from gpt4 and a rough gloss over details checked out when checking Wikipedia, but this could be wrong, I barely remember my chemistry from school)
• Instead, Grapefruit has some ingredients known to inhibit enzymes for several drugs, including dextroamphetamine (I don't understand if this inhibitory effect is actually large enough to be a problem yet though)
• This brings me to another observation: apparently each of these enzymes is used in >10-20% of drugs: (CYP3A4/5, CYP2D6, CYP2C9). Wow! Seems worth learning more about them! CYP2D6 gets actually used twice in the metabolism of dextroamphetamine, once for producing and once for degrading an active metabolite.

Currently still learning more about basics about neurotransmitters from a textbook, and I might write another update once/if at the point where I feel comfortable writing about the effects of dextroamphetamine on signal transmission.

Looking forward to the rest of the sequence! On my current model, I think I agree with ~50% of the "scientism" replies (roughly I agree with those relating to thinking of things as binary vs. continuous, while I disagree with the outlier/heavy-tailed replies), so I'll see if you can change my mind.

The technical background is important, but in a somewhat different way than I'd thought when I wrote it. When I was writing it, I was hoping to help transmit my model of how things work so that people could use it to make their own decisions. I still think it's good to try to do this, however imperfectly it might happen in practice. But I think the main reason it is important is because people want to know where I'm coming from, what kinds of things I considered, and how deeply I have investigated the matter.

Yes! I think it is beneficial and important that someone who has a lot of knowledge about this transmits their model on the internet. Maybe my Google foo is bad, but I usually have a hard time finding articles like this when there doesn't happen to be one on Lesswrong (only can think of this counterexample I remember finding reasonably quickly).

Raising children better doesn't scale well. Neither in how much ooomph you get out of it per person, nor in how many people you can reach with this special treatment.

What (human or not) phenomena do you think are well explained by this model? I tried to think of any for 5 minutes and the best I came up with was the strong egalitarianism among hunter gatherers. I don't actually know that much about hunter gatherers though. In the modern world something where "high IQ" people are doing worse is sex, but it doesn't seem to fit your model.