I work at the Centre for Effective Altruism as a contact person for the EA community. I read a lot of LessWrong around 2011 but am not up to date on whatever is happening now.
juliawise
Karma: 4,146
>As a community we produce more way more breastmilk than we can use!
This doesn’t really seem right to me; or at least it relies on mothers’ volunteer work to pump, sterilize, and store their milk. If you actually need to get rid of extra milk, pumping and dumping is way easier than keeping the milk clean and cold. And if you have an oversupply, pumping a lot is how to continue having an oversupply.
This is sort of like claims that we could produce lots of vegetables if everyone turned their front yard into a miniature farm and spent their spare time doing subsistence agriculture; technically true but not how most people want to spend their time.
Other health claims: breastfeeding slightly reduces risk of breast cancer in the mother and increases chance of colorectal cancer and breast cancer in the child.
Crosspost: Developing the middle ground on polarized topics
We’ve done the local public school, yes. More thoughts here: https://juliawise.net/school-your-mileage-may-vary/
Raising children on the eve of AI
Generally they’re opposed to using toys not as intended. It is kinda dicey given they can’t easily see if anyone is at the bottom of the slide, but the worst that happens is someone gets knocked over.
Thanks, adding!
True. The “arm fracture” one on the Victoria chart seems pretty concrete, though.
What are the results of more parental supervision and less outdoor play?
I didn’t read it all, but a couple thoughts:
Betadine is a brand name for a povidone iodine product—they’re not different things.
Robitussin DM has both an expectorant (seems good) and a cough suppressant. A cough suppressant might not be what you want if you want the gunk to get out of your lungs. If there’s a “productive” cough I’d think it’s better to just cough.
Apparently this was my husband’s approach:
8-year-old: Will humans go extinct in my lifetime?
Him: Definitely not
8-year-old: Why?
Him: If you’re alive, humans aren’t extinct yet
8-year-old: That doesn’t make me feel better
I haven’t had this conversation with my kids because they haven’t asked, but I think the main things they disvalue about death are 1. their own death and 2. separation from people they love. I think the additional badness of “and everyone else would be dead too” is less salient to young kids. There might actually be some comfort in thinking we’d all go together instead of some people being left behind.
One of my kids got interested in asteroid strikes after learning about how dinosaurs went extinct, about age 4. She’d look out the window periodically to see if one was coming, but she didn’t seem disturbed in the way that I would be if I thought there might be an asteroid outside the window.
Even if we’d had the conversation, I’d expect this to be a pretty small factor in their overall quality of life. Actual loss of someone they know is a bigger deal to them, but learning about death in general seem to result in some bedtime tears and not a lot of other obvious effects.
Thank you for adding this!
Nose / throat treatments for respiratory infections
Thanks for this post, I saved it as comfort reading after a hard day.
On how anybody would invent knitting—
I can kind of imagine grokking it if you started with something like finger weaving. (There are a couple of problems here, like starting with loops rather than a single long string, and the product is not obviously useful.)
I wonder how much we know about the history of cat’s cradle? The material is going to be hard to recognize in archeological sites, since it’s just a single loop and if it breaks somewhere it will just look like a string / piece of sinew. So I doubt we know much about how long ago people were first playing games with loops of string. But I could imagine the game and more practical fiber arts could have cross-pollinated.
Secular Solstice for children
I don’t know what the supposed changes in growing and processing wheat are, but a lot of that will presumably have happened by the stage it’s flour. So doing the mixing and baking yourself might not change anything.
I think of one of the main experts here as Kevin Esvelt, the first person to suggest using CRISPR to affect wild populations. Here’s an article largely based on interviews with him that he recommends, explaining why he’s against unilateral action here:
”Esvelt, whose work helped pave the way for Target Malaria’s efforts, is terrified, simply terrified, of a backlash between now and then that could derail it. This is hardly a theoretical concern. In 2002, anti-GMO hysteria led the government of Zambia to reject 35,000 tons of food aid in the middle of a famine out of fear it could be genetically modified. Esvelt knows that the CRISPR gene drive is a tool of overwhelming power. If used well, it could save millions of lives, help rescue endangered species, even make life better for farm animals. If used poorly, gene drives could cause social harms that are difficult to reverse. . . .“To the extent that you or I say something or publish something that reduces the chance that African nations will choose to work with Target Malaria by 1 percent, thereby causing a 1 percent chance that project will be delayed by a decade, the expected cost of our action is 25,000 children dead of malaria,” Esvelt tells me. “That’s a lot of kids.””
An EA contacted me who knows Kontsevich and is considering reaching out to him. If you want to coordinate with that person, let me know and I can put you in touch.
And “goal factoring” is a technique for figuring out what you actually want and different ways to get there.