How to lose weight, infringe patents, and possibly poison yourself for 22 Euros a month. Introduction In March 2025, Scott Alexander wrote: > Others are turning amateur chemist. You can order GLP-1 peptides from China for cheap. Once you have the peptide, all you have to do is put it...
Epistemic status and trigger warnings: Not rigorous in either math or physics. Not proof-read by any third party yet. May contain original research. Lengthy. Some sections are tongue-in-cheek. Anthrophics. Cosmology. Theism. TL;DR: There are good reasons why both the number of possible distinct human-like conscious experiences and the number of...
To view all the latest posts on LW without the use of bookmarks or cookies, here are the steps I take: 1. Go to lesswrong.com 2. Switch from Enriched to Latest 3. Click on Advanced Sorting/Filtering 4. Click on Sorted by Magic (New & Upvoted) 5. Click on New in...
How to lose weight, infringe patents, and possibly poison yourself for 22 Euros a month.
In March 2025, Scott Alexander wrote:
... (read 1311 more words →)Others are turning amateur chemist. You can order GLP-1 peptides from China for cheap. Once you have the peptide, all you have to do is put it in the right amount of bacteriostatic water. In theory this is no harder than any other mix-powder-with-water task. But this time if you do anything wrong, or are insufficiently clean, you can give yourself a horrible infection, or inactivate the drug, or accidentally take 100x too much of the drug and end up with negative weight and float up into the sky and be lost forever.
The experiments described in table 3 are arranged in order of donor-hours of exposure (DHE; one donor in the experiment room for 1 hr equals one DHE; five donors in the room for 5 hr equals 25 DHE, etc.) because rate of RV16 transmission correlated in a nearly linear fashion with DHE (r = .926, P < .01). The correlation was nearly perfect when DHE was plotted logarithmically (r = .997, P .001; figure 3).
At the risk of being some 40 years late with my critique, that quotation has some problems.
First, if the relationship between two quantities A and B is linear in a semi-logarithmic plot, that generally indicates that the relationship... (read more)
In my view, nation states are largely the product of the whims of history. Nobody could look at a map of Europe in 1 CE and predict where all the borders will run in 2025 CE. In other timelines, Austria is part of Germany because the Habsburg never became as dominant.
You are correct that technically, the smaller the sovereign state, the more voters can affect their own affairs. If you are living alone on a sovereign island, your vote really counts! However, there are tradeoffs to consider. Coordination is difficult, and larger states often have a smaller overhead fraction, because maintaining a criminal code for 100M citizens is about as much work... (read more)
Think dolphins evolving the same fins and tail as sharks, despite having bones and needing to breathe air.
I will grant you that dolphins and sharks share the (main) dorsal fin, and I will also grant you that the pectoral fins of sharks and the flippers of dolphins are cases of convergent evolution.
But as far as tails are concerned, cetaceans differ from sharks, most fish, and ichthyosauria in that they have flukes (horizontal fins, like wings on a plane) while the others have caudal fins (vertical). Basically, ceteans generate thrust by moving their tail up and down, while fish (et al) generate thrust by moving their tail left and right.
While I am fine with your math, I do not like the phrasing "X explains Z% of the variance of Y", because to the casual reader, it suggests that there is a causal relationship. For example, I might say "smoking explains X% of the (variance of the binary variable indicating the presence of) lung cancer (cases)". Here I have a causal relationship.
But consider "IQ explains X% of the variance of lifetime earnings in Americans", or "Lifetime earnings explain Y% of the IQ variance in Americans". The casual reader might read the first sentence and infer a causal relationship. "Every point of IQ I CRISPR into my kid will raise the expected amount... (read more)
What other embarrassingly unequal parts of reality are being politely ignored, except by science-illiterate jerks?
First, I kind of object to the "science-illiterate" part (I know it is a quote from the article). The soft sciences have done many wrongs, but with regard to the average physical ability of men and women, I don't think that the depiction of women as just as capable is based on published studies.
Second, this is kind of culture war bait, and as such might be better asked at the motte.
Despite that, here are some possible answers.
With regard to gender differences, one might look at Women in chess. WP is quick to tell us that
... (read more)The low number of
I am not sure what you are suggesting. Is your call for sanctioning private "hack-backs" of foreign organizations and individuals suspected of ransomware attacks, or is it more generally sanctioning attacks against organizations residing in state entities which are suspected of fostering ransomware groups? The analogy to letters-of-marque would suggest the latter -- it did not matter if you were a peaceful merchant, if you were flying the flag of the enemy you were fair game.
Either one seems to be a terrible idea.
First, attribution of IT attacks is notoriously hard. Sure, in many cases you can see which IP addresses the attacker used, but chances are that they did not use their... (read more)
I have just seen this in curated, but I had previously commented on Zvi's reporting on it.
Obviously, any nation state aware of the escalation ladder who wanted to be the first to develop ASI would put their AI cluster deep underground and air-gap it. We must not allow a mine shaft gap and all that. Good luck to their peer superpowers to actually conquer the hardened bunker.
Also, to MAIM, you have to know that you are in imminent danger. But with ASI nobody is sure when the point of fast takeoff -- if there is any -- might start. Is that cluster in that mine still trying to catch up to ChatGPT,... (read more)
The reason why MAD works (sometimes) is because
By contrast, there is no fire alarm for ASI. Nobody knows how many nodes an neural net needs to start a self-improvement cascade which will end in the singularity, or if such a thing is even possible. Also, nobody knows if an ASI can jump by a few 100 IQ points just through algorithmic gains or if it will be required to design new chip fabs first.
--
Some more nitpicks about specifics:
To protect against 'cyber' attacks, the obvious defense is to air-gap your
Unlike Word, the human genome is self-hosting. That means that it is paying fair and square for any complexity advantage it might have -- if Microsoft found that the x86 was not expressive enough to code in a space-efficient manner, they could likewise implement more complex machinery to host it.
Of course, the core fact is that the DNA of eukaryotes looks memory efficient compared to the bloat of word.
There was a time when Word was shipped on floppy disks. From what I recall, it came on multiple floppies, but on the order of ten, not a thousand. With these modern CD-ROMs and DVDs, there is simply less incentive to optimize for size. People are not going to switch away from word to libreoffice if the latter was only a gigabyte.
Epistemic status and trigger warnings: Not rigorous in either math or physics. Not proof-read by any third party yet. May contain original research. Lengthy. Some sections are tongue-in-cheek. Anthrophics. Cosmology. Theism.
TL;DR: There are good reasons why both the number of possible distinct human-like conscious experiences and the number of possible physics-like observable universes are countable.
Catching up The Bayesian Conspiracy, I have recently listened to the episode from a month ago where they talked with Bentham's Bulldog about his argument for God, which was also recently linked by Scott, as an example of an anthropic mistake which is much more interesting.
Unsurprisingly, like Eneasz and Steve, I was also not convinced by their guest's... (read 2582 more words →)
To view all the latest posts on LW without the use of bookmarks or cookies, here are the steps I take:
This will then allow me to browse through all posts[1] in chronological order, including bad AI takes modded to -7 like "How to easily solve AI alignment using Maxwell's equations" or whatever.
Now, I get the idea that a new person visiting LW for the first time should probably not be subjected to a list of terrible AI posts right away, but I would also wager that most people ending up... (read 209 more words →)
Agreed. Adverse outcomes such as "you leave the hospital addicted to opiates or benzodiazepines" are common enough. And even dying on the operating table for a routine procedure is rare but not unheard of.
I will change it to