being made from the aggregate of human wanting-and-describing might create something that has reasons to prefer the world continuing to be describable and wantable
That's the mirror (4.5 sonnet) showing what I find to be a satisfyingly concise angle on a thought about IABIED, about which I was rambling into it. I suspect that I shall want that particular sentence again in the future, and placing it here shouldn't get in anybody's way.
How did this end up working out?
The edge of LW over a specialist textbook is, in my experience, about the audience that content is written for. All writing is shaped to some extent by the profile of the expected reader. The expected reader on LW is likely to be bright, curious, and epistemically exacting, while not being a specialist nor intending to specialize in the field of the any particular piece of writing.
Intermediate and advanced textbooks get to assume that the reader has already invested hours and years into comprehending the foundational materials of their field, so insights in them are less accessible to bystanders. Also textbooks tend to prioritize sharing all of the relevant information about a topic, instead of only the novel information or only the useful information.
News articles, by contrast, over-index on novelty, and are written for a target audience that seems expected to value entertainment and validation over technical precision.
I suspect that the process of distilling specialist knowledge into posts appealing to this expected reader is itself a good sieve for capturing which specialist insights lie in the intersection of novelty, explainability, and usefulness.
LW's other edge over textbooks is timeliness of information -- the lower expectations for a blog post vs a peer reviewed article allow faster publication and greater volume of candidate great posts, from which the community's voting can then filter and highlight the posts that look great to the most people.
Nice writeup! Spontaneous pneumothorax in tall, skinny guys is one of those things they teach in EMT school. Frankly I'm surprised that an ambulance crew didn't notice something wrong if they listened to your lung sounds, like they're supposed to do as part of the secondary assessment?
Also, for suspected cardiac, the ambulance should have stuck sticky wires all over your chest (typically 3, 4, or 12 of them) as soon as they arrived. If you're hooked up to one of those machines and a paramedic is looking at its readout without getting worried, and there are no alarms going off, that's a good sign your heart is doing ok.
Good job on the self-advocacy -- it really is essential in navigating any medical system. This kind of advocacy is also something that a friend or family member can provide if you're not in a good enough condition to do it for yourself. Before I even had any medical training, when a dear friend was hospitalized, his IV site was getting red and itchy, and he didn't want to bother the nurses with it... I happened to be there and made sure to point it out very clearly to the nursing staff as a "hey I don't think it's supposed to be that color" thing and they fixed it promptly. When nursing staff is working long shifts and spread between a lot of patients, it genuinely does help them to be clear and specific about exactly what needs their attention.
Anchovies and sardines also touch on the calculus of perishability, seasonality, and waste. Preserved meats -- whether that's canned, frozen, or something else -- have the best chance of being used within the time frame when they're nutritious. Fresh meats can often go to waste if purchased by an individual who has a variable schedule or intermittent executive function challenges, or if any supply chain infrastructure malfunctions during their distribution. The odds that harvesting meat actually causes that meat to go to human nourishment will never be 100% (nor should they be; food safety is important) but it seems pretty important to push that likelihood as high as it can get.
I notice that IABIED's take on the AI thinking so fast it gets bored is that this would contribute to it destroying humanity.
I notice that Claude's take on the world being slow (tonight we're debugging a process that involves a largeish download) is sleep(20).
Claude and the IABIED AI are very different entities, of course. But something seems nebulously relevant to me about how they differ in this particular way.
"good style" by what metric of good?
Do you accessorize? Collecting some accessories that you genuinely like / enjoy / think are cool, and then wearing whichever combination aligns with your mood on a given day, is one of the easiest ways to elicit positive remarks from strangers.
It's socially acceptable to remark positively on a recent choice that a stranger has made, but things start getting fraught when one remarks on things that aren't recent or aren't choices. Therefore, to dress in a way that's amenable to positive remarks, it's kind of the bare minimum to include some element which is clearly a choice today rather than your default. When someone dresses to blend in, it's a signal of "please do not remark on my appearance", so it can start feeling weird to do so.
For more concrete suggestions, if you'd like to tell me a bit about how you currently dress and what attributes you're most proud of about your identity (appearance, personality, character, whatever), I'd be happy to offer some suggestions from which you might find a couple that resonate.
"Make new articles from scratch" seems to me like the kind of noise-generation challenge where AI tends to perform more artistically than factually. "Translate this for a particular reader", on the other hand, plays to its strengths. I notice that the original post seems to be gesturing at the former while you're reifying it into the latter :)
With the right backend -- and that might be a wiki format, or it might be something more structured under the hood -- I suspect that current AI could do quite well at finding areas where pieces of research contradict one another.
It is absolutely good for you to hone the skill of noticing when you need a tool, and making the tool you need out of whatever is lying around. That's the difference between "hit it with a rock" and "make a stone tool" -- you're changing the tool from your environment to be a better fit for the specific problem you're trying to solve. The skill of changing and customizing what our environments provide us is, of late, discouraged by advertisers.
Probably, though, tool and skill are the essential combination for this kind of agency. If you don't have the skill to know how something needs to be hit with a rock, then trying to hit it with a rock will be (sorry) hit-or-miss. You have to both know how your problem wants to be solved, and know how your tool wants to behave, in order to combine them properly. (anthromorphization here is intentional -- our brains have a lot of social hardware that we can run non-social stuff on if we wrap it in framing compatible with the social interfaces)
Most recent time I've used a stone tool was grabbing a river rock out of my pile of them to hone a scythe blade. I have more logs than rocks lying around where I'm at, so often a stick instead of a stone is my go-to improvised tool for applying a bit more force than I would be able to without its help.
I consider it pretty normal to encounter salt as an integral component of fancy ice cream flavors, but my biases are formed from places like https://saltandstraw.com/collections/all-flavors