michaelkeenan

Great list!

There's also Leber congenital amaurosis, a form of blindness that now has a (very expensive) gene therapy: https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017-10-12/fda-panel-endorses-gene...

AGI would be extremely helpful in navigating clashes with aliens, but taking the time to make sure it's safe is very unlikely to make a difference to whether it's ready in time. Rationalists want AGI to be built, and they're generally very excited about it, e.g. many of them work at Anthropic. They just don't want a Move Fast and Break Things pace of development.

I know you've probably already tried lots of things, and you're also inundated with ideas from others, but:

Here's a psychiatrist's guide to solving insomnia: https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/

And here's a psychiatrist's guide to solving nightmares: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/peer-review-nightmares

Prazosin is the standard drug for PTSD-related nightmares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prazosin

I tried that a few different ways and couldn't get it to work. I don't think just the title and author are enough. I'd be interested to see if anyone else can find a prompt that does it.

Two of my attempts:

https://chat.openai.com/share/5cd17ff3-e142-4a7d-91c2-0b2479...

https://chat.openai.com/share/04fd722b-8b3c-469b-a1a2-d58e64...

I've read (most of) the lawsuit[1] and unless I'm missing something, the allegations seem to be entirely guesswork, and the sex worker bans across multiple websites can be entirely explained by the SESTA/FOSTA law of 2018. The lawsuit notes that in 2018, many adult entertainers were banned from various platforms, such as Instagram, and gives some examples. It then alleges (without evidence) that OnlyFans (and MyFreeCams) models didn't experience such bans. From this, they guess (without evidence) a conspiracy: that the people behind OnlyFans and MyFreeCams conspired with Meta employees to automatically filter out their competitors, and they speculate (without evidence) that there might have been payments routed through an offshore company.

2018 was the year of the SESTA/FOSTA law, which was ruinous to many sex workers. The sudden increase in adult entertainers being banned by Instagram and others is correct, but can entirely be explained by SESTA/FOSTA. You can read about it on Hacker News – here's a link to a Hacker News search about it[2]. The top result has 715 points, linking to an Electronic Freedom Frontier column about it, which begins: "The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing Internet platforms to censor their users."

The lawsuit doesn't mention SESTA/FOSTA. It includes no evidence that OnlyFans or MyFreeCams users weren't affected by the SESTA/FOSTA crackdown, and I'm pretty sure they were. A friend of mine is successful on OnlyFans, and if I recall correctly her Instagram was banned and restated at least once. It's a standard occupational hazard for online adult entertainers.

The lawsuit only speculates that terrorist watchlists were used, just noting that they'd have been "ideal" for this: "One or more [Dangerous Individual and Organization] lists, combined with the GIFCT Shared Hash Database and URL sharing program, would have served as the ideal training data for a classifier/filtering tool to create this blacklisting effect, particularly in 2018 and 2019."

The talk of bribery is entirely speculative. After noting that OnlyFans has a Hong Kong office, and "The law of Hong Kong makes it very difficult to obtain discovery for a proceeding in a foreign court", they speculate "Radvinsky could have used either Smart Team International Business Limited Hong Kong or Fenix International Hong Kong to make the scheme-facilitating payments."

I don't read a lot of lawsuits so I don't know what's normal, but this all seems really off to me. Maybe the lawsuit only exists to cause bad press, so journalists can write pageview-harvesting lines like "OnlyFans bribed Meta to put porn stars on terror watchlist" and "OnlyFans squashed competitors in the online porn industry with the help of a bizarre scheme that bribed Meta employees to throw thousands of porn stars onto a terrorist watchlist", and then append "lawsuits" or "according to a group of explosive lawsuits".

[1] https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The same psychiatrist from the hair dryer incident in the link has written about this. He's skeptical about ADHD being a discrete condition, and generally thinks that if ADHD drugs will help you focus, taking them is reasonable whether you're diagnosed with ADHD or not:

> Psychiatric guidelines are very clear on this point: only give Adderall to people who “genuinely” “have” “ADHD”.

> But “ability to concentrate” is a normally distributed trait, like IQ. We draw a line at some point on the far left of the bell curve and tell the people on the far side that they’ve “got” “the disease” of “ADHD”. This isn’t just me saying this. It’s the neurostructural literature, the the genetics literature, a bunch of other studies, and the the Consensus Conference On ADHD. This doesn’t mean ADHD is “just laziness” or “isn’t biological” – of course it’s biological! Height is biological! But that doesn’t mean the world is divided into two natural categories of “healthy people” and “people who have Height Deficiency Syndrome“. Attention is the same way. Some people really do have poor concentration, they suffer a lot from it, and it’s not their fault. They just don’t form a discrete population.

> Meanwhile, Adderall works for people whether they “have” “ADHD” or not. It may work better for people with ADHD – a lot of them report an almost “magical” effect – but it works at least a little for most people. There is a vast literature trying to disprove this. Its main strategy is to show Adderall doesn’t enhance cognition in healthy people. Fine. But mostly it doesn’t enhance cognition in people with ADHD either. People aren’t using Adderall to get smart, they’re using it to focus.

From: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-mo...

> The arrogance of being sure you are smart enough to never make a mistake in the ideas you pick up is pernicious and deadly.

I actually really like that Slate Star Codex had a page where Scott listed his mistakes, and that he makes public predictions at the start of each year and rates whether they were correct. These are great ways to keep track of one's thinking, and more people should do it: https://web.archive.org/web/20191224063106/https://slatestar...

I wish that writer had spent fewer words describing Plomin as undemocratic, insidious, discredited, simplistic, and regressive, and more words actually explaining why he thinks Plomin is wrong.

> Getting down voted for stating facts.

I downvoted for the obnoxious phrasing of "Wrong. Try again." It goes against the first paragraph of the HN commenting guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Semmelweis was not very tactful. He publicly berated people who disagreed with him and made some influential enemies. Eventually the doctors gave up the chlorine hand-washing

Something Matthew Benjamin wrote stuck with me: "It is way more important to preserve trust, goodwill and respect than to get what you want, no matter how good what you want seems."

It seems like this can't be true - some things are surely more important than trust, goodwill and respect. What could be more important than saving lives? But this is an example of that being more true than I'd naively think.

That seems covered by this paragraph:

"Some people want to kill me or ruin my life, and I would prefer not to make it too easy. I’ve received various death threats. I had someone on an anti-psychiatry subreddit put out a bounty for any information that could take me down (the mods deleted the post quickly, which I am grateful for). I’ve had dissatisfied blog readers call my work pretending to be dissatisfied patients in order to get me fired. And I recently learned that someone on SSC got SWATted in a way that they link to using their real name on the blog. I live with ten housemates including a three-year-old and an infant, and I would prefer this not happen to me or to them. Although I realize I accept some risk of this just by writing a blog with imperfect anonymity, getting doxxed on national news would take it to another level."

Do you feel that that addresses your concerns? It seems reasonable to predict that he'd have more of those safety problems if the number of people who know his real name increases by 2+ orders of magnitude, and if it appears prominently on a website with a high rank on Google.

Not just startups (though the focus might have shifted toward them in recent years, not sure). The Wikipedia article says that Fellows are funded to "drop out of school and pursue other work, which could involve scientific research, creating a startup, or working on a social movement".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiel_Fellowship

This sounded wrong to me so I googled and according to the first source I found, the layoff and discharge rate is 1.3% in the private sector, and 0.4% across federal, state, and local government.

The data come from Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://freebeacon.com/issues/workers-private-sector-3-times...

That chart shows government spending at about 35.8% of GDP in 1980, and 37.8% now.

(I object to you calling revenue meaningless when you brought up country population.)

World medicine spending[0]: $1.2 trillion

US prescription drug spending[1][2]: $348 billion (29% of world spending)

US drug advertising[3]: $30 billion (1% of US drug spending)

Health insurance net earnings[4]: $23 billion (0.8% of US drug spending)

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/280572/medicine-spending...

[1] Median estimate from https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20180726.67059...

[2] Another source puts the US proportion of pharmaceutical revenue at 33%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/784420/share-of-worldwid...

[3] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/us-medical-marketing-r...

[4] https://naic.org/documents/topic_insurance_industry_snapshot...

According to this chart[0], world healthcare spending was $7.7 trillion in 2016, of which $3 trillion (39%) was spent by the USA. The USA really does do most of world healthcare spending, disproportionate to its population.

[0] https://www.emergobyul.com/resources/worldwide-health-expend...

> $4.5k will get you a 1 BR in the Bay Area

Average one-bedroom rent in San Francisco is $3,520, and two bedrooms is $4,550. It's much cheaper elsewhere in the Bay Area. In Oakland, average one-bedroom rent is $2,470, and two bedrooms is $3,050. $4,300 is very plausible in Oakland.

Source: https://www.zumper.com/blog/2020/02/zumper-national-rent-rep...

According to the World Bank's metric, China's percentile ranking on rule of law improved somewhat from 2010 to 2018 (eyeballing the chart, looks like it moved from 40th to 48th). This is of course not quite the same thing as an absolute increase in rule of law; if rule of law is worsening everywhere, then the ranking change could still be a decrease (though globally worse rule of law isn't my impression).

https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/Home/Reports

The NYT article we're all commenting on explains: "Studies in San Francisco and elsewhere show that price caps often prompt landlords to abandon the rental business by converting their units to owner-occupied homes."

There's a literature on this; there's no need to speculate.

Another thing worth checking is the IGM Economic Experts Panel, which covered rent control in 2012: http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/rent-control

The review includes 35 experimental studies with control groups. See table 3: "Experimental Personality Change Effect Size Estimates Comparing Treatment to Control".

Would it be feasible to genetically engineer trees to neither drop seeds nor release airborne pollen?

I like this one, made by Google - it teaches XSS vulnerabilities: https://xss-game.appspot.com/

It's been discussed on HN twice:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13021869

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7815237

Robin Hanson wrote about similar experiments in 2010: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/07/looking-too-good.html

As others here have suggested (e.g. jpfed, Tade0), it seems that extreme generosity can be regarded as establishing an undesirable behavior standard. The post suggests a workaround, if your productivity/generosity greatly exceeds others: under-report your output and give credit to others.

It's too late for me to edit this comment, but I was wrong to dismiss Sans Forgetica based on the review. I checked the paper and it notes:

> Although the more general prevalence of “desirable difficulties” (Bjork, 1994) is beyond the scope of this article, several research groups have found that disfluent fonts improve performance on memory tasks (Cotton et al, 2014, Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011; French et al., 2013; Lee, 2013; Sungkhasettee, Friedman, & Castel, 2011; Weltman & Eakin, 2014). Though some have also failed to replicate these effects (Eitel, Kühl, Scheiter, & Gerjets, 2014; Yue, Castel, & Bjork, 2013), the balance of evidence suggests that disfluent fonts may aid memory but not reasoning—presumably because reading words more slowly benefits memory, but not reasoning.

Credit to kradroy for noting the discrepancy and prompting me to check. I regret the error :(

I just checked the review with Sci-Hub, and you are correct. I was much too hasty. The memory effect is still plausible, they write:

> "Although the more general prevalence of “desirable difficulties” (Bjork, 1994) is beyond the scope of this article, several research groups have found that disfluent fonts improve performance on memory tasks (Cotton et al, 2014, Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011; French et al., 2013; Lee, 2013; Sungkhasettee, Friedman, & Castel, 2011; Weltman & Eakin, 2014). Though some have also failed to replicate these effects (Eitel, Kühl, Scheiter, & Gerjets, 2014; Yue, Castel, & Bjork, 2013), the balance of evidence suggests that disfluent fonts may aid memory but not reasoning—presumably because reading words more slowly benefits memory, but not reasoning." (my emphasis)

There was excitement when the first study showed hard-to-read fonts improved test performance in 2007[1]. Since then, there have been enough attempted replications for a 2015 review to conclude that there's no effect[2].

[1] Overcoming intuition: Metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning: http://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2007-16657-003

[2] Disfluent fonts don’t help people solve math problems: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-13746-007

Where did you learn that the whole point of peer review is to detect fraud?

The Wikipedia article on peer review says "Peer review...occasionally detects fraud, but is not designed to do so."[1]

The article cites a Nature article that says "Peer review is not currently designed to detect deception, nor does it guarantee the validity of research findings. It should, however, identify flaws in the design, presentation, analysis and interpretation of science and provide prompt, detailed, constructive criticism to improve research."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarly_peer_review

[2] https://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/nature05007....

A problem with directing people toward ineffective solutions is that it may "use up" people's limited willingness to be pro-social. Scott Alexander described a few studies on this phenomenon at Less Wrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r8stxYL29NF9w53am/doing-your...

Briefly: people manipulated into buying environmentally friendly products shared less of their money in a Dictator Game, and were more likely to lie for financial gain. (Beware that this is from 2009, i.e. pre-replication crisis, so the studies might warrant careful checking.)

Alexander: "If this is true, then anything that makes people feel moral without actually doing good is no longer a harmless distraction. All those biases that lead people to give time and money and thought to causes that don't really merit them waste not only time and money, but an exhaustible supply of moral fiber"

It looks like the Golden Gate Restaurant Association endorsed it[0]. I couldn't find a list of which restaurants are members of the GGRA, but the board of directors[1] includes people from the Bluestem Brasserie, San Francisco Soup Company, Ladle and Leaf, Extreme Pizza, Rose's Cafe, Wayfare Tavern, Souvla, Canela, Palm House, The Dorian, and Perry's.

[0] https://sf.eater.com/2018/7/25/17614570/san-francisco-corpor...

[1] http://ggra.org/about/board-of-directors/

This is a good question, and doesn't deserve a snarky response.

This is the long-term good-case scenario (using USA-focused numbers, but you can extrapolate to the rest of the world):

-Car accidents will be reduced to nearly zero, saving about 34,000 lives and 250,000 injuries each year. The NHTSA estimates that this costs $871 billion per year[0].

-Because car accidents will be much less frequent, cars can be built lighter, saving the energy that's currently spent on armor. And in the scenario where people hail rides rather than own cars, the car that transports you will be the right size for you - i.e. a one-person car for most trips - which saves a lot of energy too. The energy savings help with intra-city air pollution, climate change, and decreased costs.

-Self-driving cars free up the 50 billion hours that Americans spend driving each year. At the average wage, that's worth about one trillion dollars.

-A lot of valuable land is used for parking (14% of Los Angeles, for example[1]). Hailed robot cars wouldn't need to park, and self-owned cars can drop their owners at their expensive destinations in a central business district, and drive a few minutes away to park in a garage where they pack together much more closely than humans can park them. The freed-up space can be used for housing or other valuable uses.

-Hopefully, self-driving cars massively reduce congestion. Due to their much-faster-than-human reaction time, they can drive very close behind each other at high speeds. Two single-person cars can fit side by side in a lane. Street-side parking space can be turned into more lanes. Reduced crashes result in fewer traffic jams and lane closures. (Personally, I worry that increased car usage might exceed these effects.)

Most of these figures come from Brad Templeton's webpages about robot cars[2].

[0] http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/207567-nhtsa-car-cr...

[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/12/parking-los-a...

[2] https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/robot-cars.html