Enginerrrd

That's not been my observation at all. Rationalists are some of the only people to really embrace fuzzy and probabilistic thinking. Am I missing something?

Can we add microplastics to the list?

I think the people that dismiss this concern are just as bad and unscientific. It's a pretty decent Bayesian prior to assume that regular exposure to synthetic organic compounds in quantities or concentrations that hominids didn't receive exposure to in our evolution are likely to be potentially problematic. This is especially true when they don't occur naturally in any organisms biochemical processes and yet are active enough to interact with many of these things. This is OBVIOUSLY true for things used as pesticides / herbicides. We have evolved a natural aversion to areas where all the plants and animals are dead and rotting. There are good reasons for this to be a really good heuristic.

I'll go so far as to say that almost any pesticide or herbicide is likely to be bad for vertebrates and invertebrates alike. This is really likely the case for perservatives as well, for what should be obvious reasons.

It's really not that crazy to assume they're probably not good as a default assumption.

Go into a hardware store and almost every chemical, solvent, paint, etc. that you encounter is not good for you. Eat a salmon and enjoy billions of plastic particles. Open almost any prepackaged food and you'll be ingesting all manner of dyes, perservatives, anti-caking agents, etc. etc. etc. that simply weren't around in your food environment during our evolution. It's a surprisingly good baseline assumption that these things aren't likely to be good for you.

If you think about the study design and epidemiologic studies, it should be clear that it's going to be very difficult to prove harm in a lot of cases for things that are only a little harmful, or only harmful in combination, or harmful only after 20 years have passed since exposure, etc. ...except that the science is VERY clear: something (or lots of things) associated with "processed food" is really bad for you.

> it simply does not require much intelligence (relatively speaking) to build something that points a gun at something and pulls a trigger?

I could not disagree more. A big part of that is also knowing when NOT to pull the trigger. And it’s much harder than you’d think. If you think full self driving is a difficult task for computers, battlefield operations are an order of magnitude more complex, at least.

I agree but when you’re dealing with celebrities people sometimes lie and exaggerate, and third parties sometimes extrapolate beyond any semblance of grounded facts. So most people subject to that level of scrutiny and fame are likely to have some allegations against them whether true or not.

Hendrix’s girlfriend Kathy Etchingham claims he never abused her. Some third parties dispute her claims about her relationship.

His arrest record suggests at least some type of altercation with a previous girlfriend but it’s far from clear cut to me.

People are complex and reality is complex. I myself was subject to false accusations about abuse from a disgruntled ex girlfriend (who actually WAS in fact physically and mentally abusive to me and I have the scars to prove it).

But regardless, I have zero issues reflecting on a person’s accomplishments and talents even in the context of them being a horrible person. In fact, I find that part of the intrigue of really talented people. Reality and people are quite multi-dimensional. The only general rule I know is that nobody is perfect and holding up ANYone as some example of moral perfection is almost certainly wrong.

I keep getting timeouts so I'm unable to test this. However, I have a suggestion:

What's really needed IMO is a drop-in tool to increase the ranking of thoughtful comments and decrease comments that drive engagement by making people angry. You need your tool to score comments on a scale for THAT. Combine that with policy mandating its use on algorithmically ranked sites for an audience above a threshold size and you have a tool to bring civility back to society. I don't think angry comments should be censured. I think they just should not be artificially amplified into everyone's feeds. While not perfect, there's a wonderful difference between hackernews comments and reddit comments and a great deal of it stems from the culture of self-moderation here.

Amplifying people with nuanced takes on things would go a long way honestly. As it stands, adversary countries are using this artificial anger amplification as a weapon, and its thus far been devastatingly effective.

Ethical humans are pretty hard to come by if you put them under a microscope.

>it's sort of like running a JS crypto miner in the background on your website.

To be honest, I wish the web had standardized on that instead of ads.

To be honest, my working heuristic for over a decade now has been to assume that if someone openly admits to reading 4chan without any hesitation, caveats, or embarrassment, they can quite likely be lumped in with a general basket of deplorables.

Is it totally fair? No. Is it reasonably high probability? IMO, yes. Is there likely information value on 4chan that could be difficult to find elsewhere? Probably. Is it worth my time and aggravation to sort through it? No.

Since lifespan can't follow a power law distribution, I suspect the error in variance from assuming it IS normally distributed is far less than you're suggesting.

Like even if I'm off by a factor of 2, then only ~3ish years are explainable by environment/exercise/diet/etc. Then... OK... that's really not that bad of an error in this context. That also feels a little low to me. I'd have guessed around 5-8 years anyway based on my experience with healthcare and life.

In case anyone was curious like me: the standard deviation of lifespan is ~12-15 years in developed countries.

So environmental effects, sleep, diet, lifestyle, etc (I.e. modifiable factors) maybe account for half of that, so like 6-7.5 years of variance. Which… sounds about right to me.

I have one on my watch. It’s a citizen with a circular slide rule /E6B flight computer. I need my reading glasses to use it, but it’s fun.

It can reliably get me 2 sig figs, and a decent guess at a third. But… if I think about it for a minute, I can usually get that in my head anyway. Being able to setup a ratio is great though for unit conversions and things.

It’s also really good for answering that question when driving where you’re like, ok if I go 10mph faster how much sooner will I get there which is otherwise hard to do mentally.

Most of the benefit of using a slide rule in my experience comes not from using it, but from thinking LIKE you’re going to use a slide rule. You learn to freely use scientific notation with ease, and mental estimation to get the order of magnitude right.

And just my 2 cents, but circular slide rules are where it’s at.

>... has there ever been verified science that shows exercise is unhealthy?

Yes, the extremes of endurance have certainly been shown to have a negative effect on heart health, and possibly also colon health, but the amount of exercise required to get into the danger zone here is so high almost no one that isn't a competitive athlete would achieve it. (Although, amateur marathon runners might.)

I think that the engineering is very challenging and the market for this is nonexistent.

First, anyone truly concerned about this for actual use cases just isn’t going to bring their phone with them at sensitive times. Especially after the infamous chip bag Italian meta data incident.

Second, it’s conspicuous and kinda suspicious so its use is limited to primarily virtue signaling privacy advocates or crazy people and the latter aren’t usually big spenders.

Third: the engineering sounds challenging. All that metal in an undeployed fashion is going to reflect and interfere with reception. ( it isn’t an iron man suit, it has to get packed somewhere.). That may also interfere with RF safety approvals? Finally, avoiding RF leakage is surprisingly difficult in practice.

One thing I noticed is that the water matters.

I noted that when visiting my sister down in the Bay Area, I had to steep for quite a bit less time before the bitter tannins would start creeping in. Like 1.5-2 mins tops for cheap PG Tips. But that same tea up north could sit for 3-4 minutes before the bitter tannins would creep in.

It was a marked difference so there are obviously some confounding factors. I suspect the water chemistry matters a fair amount.

I think you’re missing a major point the article mentioned. High level athletes are genetic freaks that can tolerate much higher training loads. Recovery capacity is somewhat trainable within limits but there are limits and there’s a big genetic component to that. Hormonal environment matters too, but there’s a genetic component to that as well.

So there’s a huge selection bias in the population of people that can tolerate the training loads you’re talking about without having their bodies fail them and take them out of the population you’re thinking of.

No, I mean a reference event, though you bring up an interesting subtlety. (Essentially I just mean an event that definitely happened [A particle decay, a supernova, an omnidirectional radio signal, etc] which will serve essentially as an origin point on the spacetime manifold). You are right though that technically, we need at least one observer to define the coordinates of that event initially. Once that's done however, ALL observers can order events according to the spacetime interval between any event they observe and the reference point (transformed into their coordinates) and they will ALL agree on that ordering. A "good" event here would be something that observers can compare. I think using pulsar pulses counted from some epoch is a perfectly good reference here, assuming we could communicate that omnidirectionally. The difference, as measured by the spacetime interval, between any event in any observers reference frame, and a reference event in their past lightcones is something that ALL observers that can communicate will always agree on. Observers may disagree about how many pulses have occurred since that epoch at a particular time in their coordinate time, but it doesn't matter. As long as they're comparing in spacetime intervals to a particular count on the pulsar, no disagreement will occur. i.e. the spacetime interval between the 3rd pulse and some event will always be the same since it's a lorentz invariant scalar quantity (i.e. a rank zero tensor).

Your baseball analogy has flaws: No properly defined "event" in spacetime will have dual-outcomes. The events in that case are that "a baseman tagged the base", and "a runner tagged the base". "x tagged the base first" is NOT an event, that's a comparison between events, and it's one that was done in a particular observers time coordinate, which is not the correct procedure here. No Lorentz invariant transformation between observers within the light cone will disagree that those events happened, though observers may disagree which happened first within their coordinate time.

(Note the issue of observers needing to be in the same light-cone is a superficial one. I haven't defined that precisely, but I don't need to: If observers can communicate at all, they will agree, upon communication, that an event is within their past light cone. In the context of server synchronization, this will always be true.)

Also frankly, doctor =/= expert on probiotics.

None of their training really addresses that and while they might be more qualified to read research than random layman I would not in general ascribe authority to what a random practitioner has to say about probiotics. Frankly, the research on probiotics is still very much in its infancy and a LOT remains to be figured out.

3dimensions still allows for more freedom than that though since the couch can stand on end.

I would contend that it's still useful since you'd be able to turn the corner without over-complicating it by getting it into some weird tilt position.

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!”

A tale as old as time.

You can still order them with the spacetime interval compared to a reference event, even for space like separated events.

It allows for differing elements of the set to share the same value but so does using time alone. It just also allows every observer to agree on the ordering.

Bc Assigning a distance function to elements of a set is a common way to do that in fact. It doesn’t work with just a time coordinate or space coordinate, because that’s effectively a Euclidean metric.

You just have to contend with a few nonintuitive aspects but it’s not so bad.

I think you just nerd-sniped me but I’m not convinced it’s impossible to assign a consistent ordering to events with relativistic separations.

For starters, the spacetime interval between two events IS a Lorentz invariant quantity. That could probably be used to establish a universal order for timelike separations between events. I suspect that you could use a reference clock, like a pulsar or something to act as an event against which to measure the spacetime interval to other events, and use that for ordering. Any events separated by a light-like interval are essentially simultaneous to all observers under that measure.

The problem comes for events with a space like or light like separation. In that case, the spacetime interval is still conserved, but I’m not sure how you assign order to them. Perhaps the same system works without modification, but I’m not sure.

I’m a little out of my depth, but I’d guess a lot of them would probably fall into one of two categories: Something we believe should go on forever (and not halt) if the math problem is resolved the way we expect, but theoretically could suddenly halt after some absurdly long number of steps. Or something where it halts for a given input after some number of steps unless something some counter example exists where it goes on forever.

In the first, you can’t really do anything but just keep watching it not halt but it isn’t telling you anything about the infinity to go. (Say a program that spits out twin primes, we expect an infinite number but we don’t really know)

And in the second case we’d just have to keep trying larger and larger inputs making this just an extension of the first category if we wrote a program to do that for us. And if we did find an example where it goes on forever without repeating states, how would you even know? It’d be like the first situation again.

You say that like it’s even remotely feasible at the frontier of mathematics and not a monumental group effort to turn even established proofs into such.

Most groundbreaking proofs these days aren’t just cross-discipline but usually involve one or several totally novel techniques.

All that to say: I think you’re dramatically underestimating the difficulty involved in this, EVEN if the author(s) were a(n) expert(s) in machine readable mathematics, which is highly UNlikely given that they are necessarily (a) deep expert(s) in at LEAST one other field.

I actually think math and sciences should introduce what I call "synthesis" much earlier. i.e. I don't think it's unfair to give students all the ingredients and add in a question on the exam to see if they can take those ingredients and apply it to a problem type they haven't seen before. (This is a great differentiator between C students and A students.) Or for a science class, rather than perform an experiment, I think the students should have to actually DESIGN the experiment first. (I had one laboratory exam in 2nd semester undergrad chem class that did this and it was amazing! The students also performed pretty well at it too. It consisted of being told to figure out how much zinc was in a lozenge. We were also maybe given a handy reaction formula and that was it. You had to design your analysis procedure and figure out how to get the quantity you wanted out of it, and then actually perform your analysis all within the exam period.)

I think not doing this starting in like middle school is a big part of the reason why people think math/science is useless. Unless the exact scenario they have been taught pops up, they can very rarely see the application. But the real world NEVER works this way. A problem is NEVER formulated as a straight forward well-formed problem. Figuring out how to mold it into something that you can apply the tools you know to is in and of itself a REALLY important skill to practice, and sadly, we almost NEVER practice that. Only in grad school does that type of thing come up.

If you follow the things that have been disclosed / leaked/ confirmed when they’re 20+ years out of date, then yes the probability this is true is significant.

Don't get excited.

The author also claims to have proved the twin prime conjecture. https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/The_Twin_Prime_Conject...

They don't seem to be affiliated with any university and don't seem to collaborate with anyone except this one person, Andrew Elliot.

My assessment of the probability that this is a real proof: Less than 0.1%.

Pro-tip, state your assumptions baked into the estimate. If one of them is wrong you can renegotiate price, although depending on the client, you may not always want to do that to show good will and whatnot.

The current generation of LLM's have convinced me that we already have the compute and the data needed for AGI, we just likely need a new architecture. But I really think such an architecture could be right around the corner. It appears to me like the building blocks are there for it, it would just take someone with the right luck and genius to make it happen.

On many occasions in my mathematics education I was able to figure out and use a concept based solely on its name. (e.g. Feynman path integral)

Names are important.