htss2013

I actually think this makes sense. It's basically outsourced R&D for pharma companies via acquisition of companies once they get at or near approval of a new drug.

This is why I don't take seriously any stats about pharma R&D spending. They don't consider acquisitions to be R&D even though it often effecively is.

Or maybe it will become more scarce and "valuable" due to behavioral changes.

Eg, if having a bunch of photos of a person is tantamount to having a bunch of porn out there of them, maybe people will become much more protective of their image.

Maybe they will react to being photographed in public in the same way they'd react today if someone tried to stick a camera under their skirt.

Maybe public figures will all just accept that this is going to happen to them, but it doesn't follow that everyone else would accept it. Maybe photos, any kind of normal photo, will be seen as a sensitive personal item you'd never willingly release to the public.

It sounds strange to say people will no longer allow photos of themselves, but is that really more strange than saying everyone will accept hyper realistic AI porn of everyone is floating around?

It's amazing that people take hopelessly confounded studies like this and infer anything from them.

Yes the study says they tried to remove confounders. But if people could effectively remove confounders, there'd be no need for randomized trials (which are enormously expensive). Despite doing everything possible, scientists' best efforts to remove confounders still don't effectively substitute for actual randomization.

This study is from 1990-1992. Even with all the sophisticated software today, we still cannot remove confounders, so how bad was it in 1992?

Isn't it amazing that you can become the richest person in the world by building companies that lose money? By lose money I mean all money ever put into the company versus profits made.

The idea of creating a profitless company that somehow makes you personally rich used to be thought of as a fluke. Yes it's possible but it shouldn't happen and aside from extreme luck it won't.

Something has changed. Losing money and getting rich anyway has gone from fluke to something else, and it feels like we are lying about how the game really works.

I wish this was true but I and other family members had rock bottom low vitamin D levels in lab tests. We supplemented until it rose to normal levels. None of us noticed any perceptible difference. Suppodedly this will prevent problems but it doesn't feel like anything has been fixed. I wonder how much is placebo.

Not necessarily. It defaults to a civil matter, but if a DA thinks that the employer knowingly defrauded employees, they could prosecute them criminally. It's pure prosecutorial discretion. But prosexutors have limited resources and don't want to get tied down with business disputes. It's not true that the law itself mandates this to only be in civil court.

Falsifying scientific research involving hundreds of millions of dollars is serious crime too, and yet the president of Stanford and researchers at Duke are where they are.

I have no idea what goes on at META or any other public company. I just know people have repeatedly underestimated the odds of misrepresentation in the past.

The fact that these were published in 2018, implying before then it was never really studied, is sort of crazy.

The cost of biannual dentist visits for life is huge across the entire population. I would have thought there was strong evidence for this a long time ago. If nothing else, I would have thought insurance companies would stop paying for the bi-annual visits if there wasn't good evidence it works.

Then again, maybe I'm giving insurance companies to much credit since they've been paying for acupuncture for decades.

>Someone has no regard for their own wellbeing, why should taxpayers be forced to foot the bill for their care?

Ethically, due to having their minds hijacked by addiction and/or mental illness, it is as if they're reduced to being children again. We don't put children on the street and respect their decisions to ruin their lives, because we understand they don't have the mental capacity to decide such things.

Practically, it's probably net cheaper for tax payers to force them to get clean or go to a mental hospital. But you have to account for all externalities and opportunity costs, which no one does.

Can you help me understand what you mean by spiritual?

I confess I have no direct experience with anything I've ever had the impulse to call "spiritual". This makes me wonder if I think the word means something different than most, or am I missing some kind of subjective experience others have?

I assume spiritual doesn't literally mean spirit, like the whispy ghost that floats up when you die in the cartoons. I assume it means something like a negative definition. Take everything we know and can understand about empirical reality, then whatever remains is "spiritual".

If we discovered alien planets filled with different "countries" and had some constraints on the time we could spend visiting each one for observation, wouldn't we likely choose the most militarily and economically powerful one to focus on? It wouldn't be 100% but it's plausible that it would be the main subject.

Or perhaps the metrics are more engineered than we realize? It is the more parsimonious explanation.

How are those companies insulated from the same economic pressures that caused the big tech layoffs?

Maybe rising borrowing costs will be slower to affect consumer discretionary companies, but they will, arguably more than monopolistic big tech. Boeing is an exception because of government contracts.

Every 2nd and 3rd tier place that stalls on economic development in certain industries plays this game. Texas, Florida, Estonia, Canada, etc. It doesn't matter. It's always the same playbook:

- Announce government incentives to lure the types of workers and companies you lack.

- Pretend that you don't need these incentives to lure people. No, you're just leaning into an existing organic trend.

- Invest in PR that cites superficial stats arguing everyone is leaving X incumbent place and moving to you.

- Get a tiny bit of mileage from these efforts which quickly stall out, but pretend it's going well. Fake it until you make it.

- Never address the root causes of why your economy failed to develop in the first place and needed to try these gimmicks.

- Wait a few years and try again after everyone forgets about the last time you tried and failed at this.

>Now clearly mentally ill people - who needed help - were turned away unless they were clearly "a danger to themselves and others".

People talk as if this standard is the source of problems, but it's a fine standard. We just don't enforce it.

Eg, if a homeless drug addict overdoses and is brought back by the fire dept with narcan, this is clearly someone who is a danger to themselves. They should be treated no differently than someone rescued from a suicide attempt.

Fentanyl itself changes the imminent danger of being an opiate addict because there's no remotely safe way to use it. Any chronic user of Fentanyl is a danger to themselves.

Someone who is unable to maintain basic level of health on the street is the same. Do you have infected wounds festering? Teeth rotting out of your mouth? The government would take away a pet dog from someone in that state, but for a human doing it to themselves, no problem.

Except the average US mortgage holder buys and sells a house every 7 years. For the first 7 years the amortization schedule means you're paying almost all interest and building very little equity. You're also paying realtor fees and transaction costs each time.

So while paying off a 30 year mortgage might have been to pay off the house and keep it forever, that's not how Americans treat it. They basically use it as a way to get 10-20x leverage on housing prices speculation, and if they profit, cash out 7 years later and do it again with a new house.

>Having these skills would give most people an edge in whatever line of work you are in.

Yes, and you can probably learn 80% of those skills yourself without having to spend years and a small fortune on a formal degree in journalism.

Mind expanding on the lack of data for cleanings?

I got busy, then pandemic, next thing I know it's been like 7 years since I've seen a dentist. No problems or discomfort whatsoever. It occurred to me that bi annual cleanings are the SaaSification of dentistry, but I've never seen any real evidence.

Maybe it has something to do with protein folding, since apparently scientists do not understand the physical mechanisms that translate a given DNA sequence into a given 3D shape. They best they can do is infer probabilistic patterns using ML to proxy a mechanistic of action. Maybe there's something quantum at work that means it will never be fully deterministic.

Copyright doesn't apply when it comes to fair use, and one of the major factors of fair use is if your use deprived the copyright owner of sales. Good luck arguing that any of the books in question lost sales because an AI was trained on them.

There's no way to peacefully convince like 20 countries whose budgets all rely on selling fossil fuels to stop selling them, and the same goes for the countless buyers whose livelihoods depend on using them. Are you going to mandate they endure mass starvation and economic collapse?

So what is the point of going on about deniers and anti climate XYZ? Even if they all agreed with you, what would change? It seems like pointless scapegoating and divisiveness.

I dont see how LLMs using many experts means it's very different from AGI. Why would anyone assume that human AGI isn't based on multiple models running in a similar architecture? At minimum humans are operating with a left and right brain, which process data very differently.

Why would you strip driverless cars instead of other cars? If anything the driverless ones probably have more counter measures and monitoring.

Your criteria for a good business includes barriers to competition and low capital requirements that make venture capital unnecessary.

Even if you can't sue Chinese manufacturers violating patents, very few products are bought directly from China then shipped to the USA. There are USA middlemen and retailers involved. Why couldn't a patent holder go after the USA middlemen in court?

>The thought that humans might be the only life in the universe to me seems like the 21st century equivalent of believing earth is the center of the universe.

Or it's an acknowledgment of the posterior data that has arisen over the past 30 years.

Every human has a camera 24/7 now and no one has documented visitors. Countless new missions and sensor arrays have found no evidence of life anywhere.

That doesn't prove no life, but it does make it more likely that the Drake equation is based on assumptions that are fundamentally flawed. Otherwise the Fermi paradox wouldn't still be a paradox.

Maybe it's all a simulation. Maybe it's something from a completely different paradigm. Who knows. But insisting they're out there as more decades pass with none found...that may be the real insistence that the sun revolves around the earth.

The reason they push you up is pretty transparent and it's not to get a pay off on their investment.

It's because they have a really hard time externally hiring and retaining senior people in X job. They can recruit and churn through junior people all day. So they figure it'll be much cheaper to manufacture juniors into seniors internally.

If they lose a junior who fails to convert into senior, who cares? They're relatively easy to replace. It's worth the risk even if only a minority of them convert into senior people successfully, because they're so difficult to hire externally and keep.

You could say the same about people having the ability to make wire transfers or international transfers. They're largely irreversible after some period. Every kind transaction becomes irreversible eventually.

No one has solved the elderly exploitation problem yet for the existing banking system. Not sure why it would be fair to hold crypto to a higher standard.

Yes, exactly. It's not that adding money to your hobby per se makes you not enjoy it. It's that when you have to make money from a hobby, you lose agency over how you practice the hobby.

It turns out the freedom to practice the hobby how/when/where you want, isn't just a nice to have, but an essential part of why you enjoyed the hobby in the first place.

You might enjoy being with your wife, but if she controlled every aspect of how you were allowed to, or must, engage with her, on pain of starvation and homelessness, you probably wouldn't enjoy her anymore. You'd resent her as a slave resents his master, even if she is a relatively good master.

Agency is essential to enjoyment of literally anything.

It's amazing that society still puts so much stock into these types of impossibly confounded studies.

Ok, so they found that people who are top earners are no more satisfied with their jobs than bottom earners.

Might this be because top earners tend to be the types who neglect other aspects of their lives? Or who are hypercompeitive and are unlikely to be satisfied at any level, otherwise they would have stayed where they were?

Or maybe the higher the pay goes, the higher the concentration of high self discipline people willing to endure things they don't like for money. Etc.

And we are supposed to wave away all of these confounders because of controlled marshmellow experiments done on random students?

I'm sure Harvard meta studies do the best job possible distilling insight from these studies. The problem is how insightful these types of studies are in the first place.