kanjus

Can't find the citation, but remember gwern mentioning a study in one of his posts on replication that found that unintuitive findings tend to be both less replicable and more cited than intuitive ones.

Psychology is the field that is most hit with replication failures and has a slew of unintuitive results that turn out to be malpractice.

These might be helpful to you and Hummingbard's creator:

https://choosealicense.com/licenses/ provides a concise rundown of a few common ones

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html: a more detailed list

https://github.com/plibither8/licensed: a CLI tool to help choose licenses (we're on HN).

Thanks for talking about this. I'm sure you've considered this already, but it'd be valuable to contact an anti-corruption charity like Transparency International about your experience. It'd probably be a drop in the ocean, but every witness report counts, even about widely known issues.

Similar tool is HNRSS: it's a wrapper for the Algolia API and allows to follow HN through best/new/etc. while filtering for queries, comments, and score.

https://github.com/hnrss/hnrss/

Feedly has an API, I started writing a script a while ago to improve some RSS feeds, including HN (by making the number of comments and the URL appear in the body), but never finished it.

If someone had the same idea, please don’t hesitate sharing.

Thanks for the heads up, I’ll be sure to check your app out!

Your approach is also kind of similar to Joplin (joplinapp.org), another open source, privacy-focused, and cross-device app, but you have more features.

I‘d recommend Zettlr instead: open source, free, local (so you own your data), great active community.

Obsidian is closed source, and I’d say its features do not justify choosing that over Zettlr (unlike something like Notion.so)

https://www.zettlr.com/

What do people think of Marginal Revolution? I get quite a lot of value from the link roundups, but find that the original content (the non-roundup posts) are about praising their ability to make predictions and their own opinion pieces (“recommended throughout”), brushing away criticism, regurgitating opinions of other experts on things they have no clue about, taking low-brow jabs at “the left“, etc.

Case in point: MR authors spent the last months arguing for the herd immunity approach, and bringing up Sweden once a week, and now apparently they were just waiting for data.

I just don’t get why they get so much readership and are seen to be similar to Slate Star Codex, Gwern, etc. (which have their own shortcomings, but are on a different level in terms of their reasoning ability).

Yous should check out languagetools.io. Like LingQ, but with a much better UI, way cheaper and chill with non-premium users, and they fund a school in Africa as well.

Zettlr is an open-source alternative [0]. It’s surprisingly feature-rich for a one-person project.

I’ve tried Obsidian, Roam Research, and others, but Zettlr is simply a much more complete piece of software.

In addition, the developer’s perspective on their work and complete belief in open-source, privacy, open standards, etc., is really heart-warming [1].

[0]: https://www.zettlr.com/

[1]: https://www.zettlr.com/post/why-zettlr-open-source

On Firefox 78.0.2, Arch, can't sign in as the pop-up keeps closing and trying to manually visit the "authorize app" url loads a blank page.

This is an interesting hypothesis about capitalism (also seems to go against “capitalist realism” theory). Can you give a few examples of what the areas that capitalism cannot get curious about are? What would be the common characteristics?

Your (a) is untrue.

For one, borders are difficult for migrants to cross: trains and coaches near borders are often checked for migrants, some borders are under police surveillance (like between France/Italy), etc.

Second, Dublin agreements force migrants to apply for asylum in the first EU country that they give their fingerprints in (ie the one where they have their first encounter with police). Most migrants have fingerprints in Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Spain, ie the countries on the outskirts of Europe. So migrants can’t just walk to the country of their choice and claim asylum, as they will be “deported”, as a rule, to a country they explicitly don’t want to be in (Italy had high acceptance rates until recently but can offer no work, Hungary is known for extreme racism and violence against migrants, etc.)

Your (b) is on point though. Italy has been asking for a fairer distribution of migrants among the Member States for some time, but the most powerful Member States like their South/Eastern European moat a lot

Your comment is contradictory. If rich people pay a lower percentage than lower brackets, that corresponds exactly to the idea that they don’t pay their share. According to your logic, if the rich represented 85% of tax dollars (an overwhelming amount) and 99% of the total wealth/income, they should be let off the hook

Your premise is appealing, but how would it fare knowing that conservatives are better at understanding liberals than liberals are at understanding conservatives (the former are able to empathise with liberals’ values, all the while holding their own as superior, whereas liberals do not consider conservative sensibilities to be ethical values at all)[1]? Don’t you think that an ability to empathise, which already exists at least in the case of conservatives, doesn’t seem to lead to more nuanced views? I’m not questioning the obvious benefits of education or injection of diverse points of view into one’s environment, only your premise.

Wouldn’t a simpler premise, making one’s bias apparent by stating a binary preference (conservative or liberal, but maybe less grossly-defined) somewhere in one’s piece of work, achieve the positive outcome of allowing readers to better analyse content, without betting on the potentially positive side-effects of trying to game a test?

[1]: https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva...

Some interesting stuff in here, but the way you present it makes it difficult to access. If I may, I would advise you to:

- make the cards browsable on your homepage instead of presenting them as a pdf

- provide some more information about a technique or some examples when a specific card is selected (all the more so since some cards are ambiguous)

- organise your cards in various groups, so as to make them easier to internalise by readers

- this is more subjective, but these techniques are applicable to more fields than online nudging (I read them in the context of managing a team), so I would remove references that narrow their scope down unnecessarily

Where did you find the techniques? Please continue working on it, I would appreciate being able to regularly come back to this resource

Your explanation very much resembles the one I used to have for not being vegan: in hindsight, it was nothing but a way to avoid the cognitive dissonance between my belief that I was a good person and the knowledge that I simply didn’t care about veganism/vegetarianism. I’m not saying it’s the same here, but your explanation is flawed on arguably every level, I hope you take the time to think about your decision more, but congrats for your 5 years of veganism

1. “I have limited energy for activism, and I distribute it wisely”: statements like these are often untrue and a way to brush away an ethical question while continuing to appear ethical (“I fly on planes, flying on planes is bad for the planet, but X [droughts in Africa] is more critical, so I prefer to think about X than about planes”). One, willpower is probably not finite, as was found in a famous recent study (granted, I conflate willpower and energy here, but they’re quite close). Two, being vegan takes basically the same amount of effort/time/money as eating animal products for someone with no medical condition. Three (more subjective), veganism is a pretty safe bet when it comes to activism, it’s a low effort/high impact part of climate change activism, which is one of the most critical things you can pour your energy into

2. “Enabling mass action is more important than my individual behaviour”: not how the world works. In theory, you could argue for veganism, even become the most respected vegan philosopher, while at the same time eating a different animal at every meal. In practice, if you’re a “do what I say, not what I do” person, the probability that someone becomes vegan after listening to you would be pretty much 0. I also have trouble imagining why anyone would see someone like this as part of the vegan community and a worthy ally when it comes to mass action

3. “Individual action makes people think they’ve done their part and not partake in mass action”: this is untrue on many levels. Individual action is what mass action is made of and the end goal basically. Most people take the strength for political commitment from their individual everyday choices, I would even say that everyday choices are what makes political commitment inevitable. I have never met an activist who is committed only on a theoretical/group level

4. “Being vegan is a chore in America”: being vegan in a rich country is arguably the closest you’ll get to finding it easy

5. “Being vegan is less pleasant than not being vegan”: I can only assume you’re speaking about taste here, which I find weird from a former vegan. The imbalance between personal gustative pleasure and the suffering of species/ecology might be the most frequent discussion about veganism, and the one that demonstrates the most obviously to all involved that eating animal products is unethical (or at least neutral)

The theory that young trees capture more CO2 than older trees has been debunked as far as I know. The best carbon sinks are older large trees: they grow at lower rates height-wise, but faster mass-wise, sequestering much more carbon. A single large tree might add the same amount of carbon to a forest within a year as is contained in an entire mid-sized tree, I’ll add some sources later

throwaway5167 didn’t imply that such companies are machiavellian rather than profit-seeking though, but that their profit-seeking nature leads them to be tolerant, even welcoming, of partnerships with actors who are machiavellian (ie driven by spying and propaganda) when that allows for more profit to be made, which is the worrying part

Cheers!

Great write-up!

> It is actually a very reasonable assumption for almost all kinds of data -- given that suitable compression is applied. Data, which is well-compressed, is essentially uniformly random.

What kinds of data are an exception? Your explanation seems to cover everything

Cool, I've found a future alternative, from no one else but the CryptPad team: spreadsheets are among their [goals][1], but will require quite a lot of time and funding, I'm continuing to look for a current alternative, but this is great news

[1]: https://blog.cryptpad.fr/2018/07/13/CryptPad-Roadmap/#Goal-1...

I should have specified my threat model above, I'd ideally want zero-knowledge encryption on all tools, since Google is a threat in my model: assume that the NGO has a database of whistleblowers that needs protection

Tools for cloud storage ([Tresorit](https://tresorit.com/)), email ([Protonmail](https://protonmail.com/)), instant-messaging ([Signal](https://signal.org/)), collaborative text documents ([CryptPad](https://cryptpad.fr/)), hard drive encryption ([VeraCrypt](https://veracrypt.fr/))

What I was able to find to replace Google Sheets:

- Google Sheets clones with a few additional collaborative features ([Zoho](https://www.zoho.eu/sheet/))

- ways to encrypt spreadsheets

- online databases ([Airtable](https://airtable.com/))

- ways to encrypt databases on servers ([Acra](https://github.com/cossacklabs/acra))

- kinda secure databases ([KoBo](http://kobotoolbox.org/) not actually encrypted but at least managed by UNHCR)