yosame

People are more lenient on farming because humans need agriculture to survive. Obviously not all agriculture is necessary for survival, but it's something that in some way provides real tangible benefits for everyone.

On the other hand, if AI data centres all disappeared today, humanity would continue on completely fine.

Posting a claude chat is not actually helpful. The chat doesnt't even cite any sources.

I think this post is a decent summary, the answer is a soft maybe: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/should-i-worry-...

Second-gen tablets might increase dementia risk by a small-to-medium amount (there's almost certainly still a small degree of CNS activity, and we don't know what causes dementia in the first place), but researching it will be difficult. Dementia is hard to research because of how long it takes to develop, and it's poor coding within health data, and antihistamines are hard to research because they're not often prescribed and aren't available in the health data.

If it's a large effect, those factors wouldn't matter, but smaller risks are harder to detect and more sensitive to bias. If you want to minimise dementia risk, then reducing antihistamine use might be warranted, but you're probably better off addressing the risk factors we do know about: https://www.dementia.org.au/brain-health/risk-factors-develo...

In my experience with health data, the dates are usually offset by a random but constant amount for each person (e.g. id 12345 will have all their dates shifted by +5 weeks) to avoid identification by dates.

Unfortunately the sequence of treatments and locations are usually enough to identify someone, especially if it's a rarer condition.

Not really, you still have to validate the structures it estimates, which minimises any speed gains.

It can help a little bit in the early stages of drug design, but even if it was perfect (which it's not), there's a massive gap between understanding a protein structure, and understanding how a drug will or system will interact with it.

In a broader sense, understanding the structure of a protein is only a small part of drug development. Unfortunately biology is complicated, and we're an extremely far way away from solving it.

I mean the difference is that you just take one in the morning? Which makes adherence easier, makes sure that the delay is constant rather than variable, and reduces abuse liability.

(As an aside, there are more complex extended release mechanisms than just delayed bead release - like lisfexamfetamine is a inactive prodrug, so cleaving the lysine off the amphetamine is rate limited. This has the effect of extended the duration of effect, and reduces the potential to abuse by snorting/iv/etc).

I'm pretty sure this take is incorrect on multiple accounts. Trans demographics tend to skew towards trans women by about a third, not trans men - at least in all the research I've come across.

And regardless, increased acceptance and awareness of different gender identities can very plausibily explain increased numbers, not "social contagion". Calling it a contagion is pretty indicative of your underlying beliefs here.

Hilariously, this is the second Sam that wants to collect everyones iris's for nefarious purposes

Why would ChatGPT replace google search when search also has AI? At best they'd steal some of Google's market share, which I'd imagine would decline with embedded ads.

Could you share a guide for how you did this? I've got a TCL TV, and it's constantly frustrating how it shows laggy ads.

Edibles wouldn't have enough sugar to singularly cause diabetes.

There was a study where they tested the effects of ADHD meds on test performance and perceived performance. It found that stimulants increased perceived performance for everyone, but actual test scores were only improved for people with ADHD.

This is a good overview of the literature: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/1...

In countries with subsidised health care there's still an incentive to solve these problems, since the solution will lower healthcare costs.

How is footage that musk himself reposted misinformation?

I don't think it's any worse than any other form of media (like reading comments on hacker news instead of reading the article)

Calling trans men "distraught girls" is just pure transphobia.

Proof:

https://www.accc.gov.au/by-industry/digital-platforms-and-se...

It's called the news media bargaining code. Technically speaking, the law isn't enforced since Google/Meta chose to voluntarily pay the link tax, rather than be put on the list that would force them to pay. But, at the end of the day it's the same effect.

Because they won't be forced to provide identification directly, they'll be forced to provide an age verification token that's linked to government identification. It's the same end result (a way to link your identity to the sites you use), but with extra steps.

And honestly with the government's track record when it comes to privacy and technology, I don't think they deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Well to be fair, big pharma doesn't release preclinical results the same way that academia does. There might be no published work to support the hypothesis, but that doesn't mean they haven't done preclinical work.

They absolutely can be patented, look at what happened with esketamine. If these molecules work, pharma will just change them slightly (or reformulate) and sell them at a premium.

I don't think crypto wpuld help in this instance, they'd still have to turn it into fiat to do anything with it.

I'd argue that it's harder to quit compulsive eating than it is to quit compulsive smoking. You can't go cold turkey on food

Because they still have a developed (if atrophying) visual cortex to generate the visual hallucinations.

Using the term "hooked" to describe using a prescribed drug for a chronic condition is pretty moralistic.

Are cystic fibrosis patients hooked on Trikafta? Are people with high blood pressure hooked on ace inhibitors? Or are they taking a medication to control their symptoms and improve their health?

Technically you don't need to take a drug to control your weight, and you could do it all naturally (although this is also debatable, given genetics). However, the reality is that most obese people don't have the time, money, circumstance, genetics or willpower to control their weight themselves. Ozempic is a shortcut to better health outcomes in these patients, why shouldn't they take it?

Do you mean 50 years without maintenance? I would be shocked if major bridges weren't designed to last indefinitely.

I feel like context is far more important than the actual answer.

If you want to develop your skills, it's just as important to be aware of the things that aren't the answer, rather than just a single hyper-specific curated answer.

Since it's a personal anecdote from a biased source, I'd say it's probably not reputable.

Season 1 is definitely the weakest season, especially at the start. There's definitely still wacky humour in the rest of the show, but it loses the family guy cutaway gags.

I'd personally recommend giving season 2 a shot, if you still don't like it then the shows probably not for you.

I'll definitely admit to some bias here, I've been reading Scott's content for 7ish years and I've gone from loving his content to being increasingly skeptical about his writings.

Something I feel Scott (and rationalists in general) tend to do is obfuscate their points in large walls of text, that allude to their actual reasons for writing without directly stating it. Aside from the beginning and end of the post, he never mentions the context or specifics, and just talks about broad counterarguments against selection bias in general. He doesn't bring up relevant specifics like "Aella does polls about sex to an audience she cultivated by doing porn", which seems like an obvious source of bias to me. Instead he gets the best of both worlds, if someone criticizes internet surveys he can point them to the post, without including any specifics that can be easily argued against. It requires a similarly sized wall of text to respond, which most people won't bother with. I personally used to argue that's just how he writes and it's not intentional, but stuff like the email leaks made me change my mind on that [1].

I do wish I'd picked a better example though, what I'm really trying to say is that Scott is definitely capable of analyzing a topic in bad faith. He has his biases like the rest of us, and they get infused into his writing.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/gWeIK6c

In Australia at least, you need to maintain records showing testing of each batch and equipment calibration. Government auditors can come at anytime to review the records, and will shut things down if records are missing/altered/or lacking. Pharmaceutical manufacturers aren't constantly shutting down, so we can assume contamination is fairly low.

It's essentially the thesis of the post. I will say the "exactly" part was a bit hyperbolic.

He starts by stating that people say his surveys and Aella's Twitter polls (which he calls surveys) have selection bias, meaning the conclusions don't count.

He then goes on to say (paraphrasing): "people say surveys have selection bias, but don't think real scientific studies have selection bias" and in the next paragraph says "but scientific studies do have selection bias and that's ok." Note that in this section, he is implictly relating scientific studies with his and aellas surveys.

In the section that starts with "selection bias is disasterous if", he gives a narrow view of why and when it's bad: "only if you're doing a poll or census that should include everyone". He neglects to say the ways in which it's bad for literally all science (it's a massive problem in drug RCTs, but he literally uses RCTs as a point for why selection bias isn't so bad later on).

In the next few paragraphs he says that selection bias is fine for correlations, and gives some examples of when scientific studies have selection bias that we accept (I'm not going into details here because the post is long, and I'm on my phone).

So he's said why selection bias is present in science, and that it's only really bad for census's and polls. He then concludes, "hey guys stop saying surveys are bad because selection bias, science is also biased".

In this post he starts by bringing up a critism of Aella's 'research', which she uses data from Twitter polls for. He then implicitly equates surveys and scientific studies, and says "look, science is biased too, so selection bias isn't bad". He then concludes, "so stop saying surveys are a bad because of selection bias".

He might not literally say "twitter polls are exactly as good evidence as a scientific study", but the point of the post was to detract from the valid criticisms against his and Aella's posts that use survey/twitter poll data by saying "science does it too".