concordDance

If I'm in green tech can I set up a charity whose goal is to raise awareness of the problems of climate change and what we can do to fight it? I'll claim that I really care about it and that's why I'm in the solar business in the first place.

That particular debate is often a semantics debate, so it isn't in the domain of science at all.

The main way I can think of off-hand to try and make it scientific is to ask about correlational clusters. And then you get way more than two genders, but you definitely get some clusters that contain both transwomen and men (e.g. if I hear a video game speed runner or open source software passion projecf maker using she/her pronouns they're trans more often than not).

> Or, maybe, "leaning left" by the standards of Zuck et al. is more in alignment with the global population.

The global population would be considered far-right by american standards. Particularly on LGBTQ matters and racism.

> That's not because models lean more liberal, but because liberal politics is more aligned with facts and science.

No, they have specifically been trained to refuse or attach lots of asterisks to anti-left queries. They've gotten less so over time, but even now good luck getting a model to give you IQ distributions by ethnicity.

Actually, even there there would be caveats. E.g. maybe Russia would benefit from climate change? Maybe the cost benefit curve with my time discounting and likely tech advancement means its not worth doing anything about now?

> They are nit trying to make it cheaper and they are not trying to make it more accessible

Should they be doing these things?

Maybe I've read too much Caplan, but credential inflation seems to be wasting the new generation's best years.

I probably have a skewed sample, but in my observations those with the best reasoning skills tended to have a mix of views that would be labelled "left" and "right". The better the reasoning skills the less likely they were to just agree with things like "trans women are women" or "capitalism is the best economic system" and the more likely they were to dissect the statement and terms.

How massive?

On the scale of concern, voter ID is way down there. You've already had both "prosecute main political opponent" and "storm the legislature".

Voter ID is very common and sensible. The UK introduced it recently and while it did disenfranchise people this was not to the benefit of the party in power when the law was introduced.

Can we have some numbers/citations on the proportion of democrat and republican voters without ID? Because I've heard that it will benefit Democrats and is a Reoublican own goal.

Yeah, but there's a big difference between dying a few months earlier when you'd already be bedridden with your mind mostly gone and dying 50 years early.

Which is why QALYs are such a good metric.

What's this a reference to? Not familiar with JIRA humiliation rituals.

I'd put the Telegraph as the right wing equivalent of the Guardian. Biased in the opposite direction but relatively reliable too.

I wouldn't call the writers excellent. The guardian is famous for its typos.

(Separately the writing style is mostly not to my taste, but that's subjective)

> you can get better IQ by investing in education, something that we do an embarrassing job of already and need to improve on.

You got a cite for this? I keep hearing that the education interventions tried in the West have universally failed to raise IQ.

Do they do much floridation though?

This stance is a bit confusing...

When it comes to things like radioactivity we assume a linear no threshhold model (e.g. that lower concentrations still have effects, just our measuring tools aren't good enough to detect it) and spend billions as a result. Why wouldn't we do the same for flouride?

> The US has had water fluoridation for 65 years, affecting 346 million people. That's a pretty big god damn sample size and long amount of time in which to observe effects. If we still have no proof of significant negative health effects, it's probably not bad for you.

The problem is there will have been a lot of confounders.

E.g. despite huge sample sizes, isolating the cause of the obesity crisis is too hard because so many different things changed at once.

The UK government is really big on doing things for our own good, but they don't seem to do much water flouridation. Which I think is some evidence that it's not a clearcut health benefit.

> Meanwhile, he deletes your account if you offend him

Willing to bet this is not true.

Could also be because rate limiting. People need to conserve their number of posts per day.

I can't tell if you're serious, but in case you are:

The Drake Equation and anthropic reasoning are both frequently discussed in rationist circles.

Words mean what people think they mean. People often mean slightly different (or very different!) things when using the same word. Often words are used non-literally. This all seemed too obvious to mention before now.

I'm afraid you'll find far more non-literal uses of "stranded" than you will find literal ones if you looked at how humans actually use words.

In fact, I'd be surprised if even 1 in 100 actual uses of the word in, say, 2023 matched the definition you've given.

"Left by your friends in an empty car park? Well, there's technically an unlocked bicycle over there..."

This is a really fascinating case of words having a venacular meaning that become fuzzy out of their normal domain. Could the astronauts have gone back to Earth in an emergency? Yes. Did they have the freedom to leave earlier? Sortof but not really. Could NASA have paid SpaceX another $200 million for an extra mission to pick up in December/January? Probably.

If your car breaks down a couple of miles from home and you call a friend and tell him you're stranded, are you lying? What if it's 20 miles away? But uber exists? What if uber is extremely expensive right now at $2000? But there's a guy next to you offering to sell you a bicycle?

In the end, to ask the question "were they stranded?" we have to unpack "stranded" and figure out what is the question we actually want answered. Is it about the feelings of the astronauts? Their preferences? The danger level they're in? Is it about Boeing's culpability? Is it about whether we can safely call Trump a liar? Musk?

The classic: https://www.readthesequences.com/Disguised-Queries

I can tell this is a polarizing comment because it's been bouncing back and forth from -1 to +5 repeatedlt, but I don't really understand why...

Maybe one of the downvoters can explain?

I thought some of those were still free. Do you have information to the contrary?

Edit: italicized

In cases like this it's best to ask why we have copyright law in the first place. Do we feel the supply of such photos is naturally lower then we'd like to such an extent that we'd grant a legally enforced monopoly on its distribution?

I've heard rumors that SpaceX suggested another mission to bring them back earlier, but as it would only have been a couple of months earlier NASA very sensibly declined (not worth >100 million to reduce their time in space by a third).

Know if there's anything to that?

Might explain some of the odd rhetoric.

> The end result is that nobody wants to buy or sell shares anymore (since they will get the raw end of the deal) and the market collapses as a result.

Finance noob question here: has this actually happened?

And related, don't non-pro traders basically always lose money on trades but still exist?

(I've been genuinely unsure why insider trading by non-decisionmakers is banned, always seemed like it would result in more accurate prices)