Kevin
Kevin’s Shortform
Covid is traumatic enough that I have no desire to retell the story annually, especially with an emphasis on my least favorite part, large group video calls. There seems to be a subset of people that find video calls really socially satisfying and a subset that’s about as large that gets very little value from video as a replacement for in person social encounters. I keep noticing that the people that like video calls project this enjoyment of video calls onto the people that just find them depressing.
Also Passover already occurs annually and happened at the peak of fear during the coronavirus pandemic. This holiday may be redudant anyway with the likely adapations of Rationalist Seder?
Dose matters enormously. Hydroxychloroquine is acutely toxic to humans, so using hydroxychloroquine requires you to balance its toxicity versus its antiviral effects. My read of the evidence is that it is ineffective to harmful at the late stages of COVID19 in the dosages high enough to “do something”, but taken in the very early stage of the disease (asymptomatic) it might keep the virus contained to its area of initial infection and prevent the disease from migrating to the lungs.
Most biotech companies in the world have pivoted to working on coronavirus. Failure to win in a year or two seems possible but failure to win over the course of a decade is much less likely, and wins could include safe genetic engineering solutions that cure both the common cold and HIV.
In NYC, pretty much everyone takes the subway from time to time, 2 meter distancing is impossible, and the underground recycled air is not good. Los Angeles is a much less dense city where most people never take public transit.
There are just not very many components here and the design isn’t solved enough that I think that would make sense.
There is however a business opportunity in solving the design challenge and then releasing an infomercial marketed light product better than existing solutions.
I thought the original builds of this used 5500k bulbs instead of 4000k bulbs.
If you aren’t price sensitive, I would try kitting this out with programmable wifi RGB LED lights. That many LED lights in close proximity to each other can create cool effects and you could make a more pleasant light palate by having each bulb at a different color temperature, or having them change to simulate the… sun.
The science says unfiltered UV light is bad for you and unfiltered IR light is good for you… darklight box?
But very unclear that staring around infrared light does anything, massive exposure to energetic IR light to you seems to be supported by evidence and human behavior in the winter.
An AI with a goal of killing or “preserving” wild animals to reduce suffering is dangerously close to an AI that kills or “preserves” humans with the goal of reducing suffering. I think negative utilitarianism is an unhelpful philosophy best kept to a thought experiment.
I’d like to test a hypothesis around mental health and different moral philosophies as I slowly work on my post claiming that negative utilitarians have co-opted the EA movement to push for animal rights activism. Has anyone done Less Wrong survey statistics before and can easily look for correlates between dietary choice, mental health, and charities supported?
I’ve started saying that we are already firmly in the era of transformative AI and I don’t thing transformative is the right word for singularity or singleton sorts of speculative AI. That rate of transformation has plenty of space to accelerate, but I like this framing because of the trend of defining AI as whatever doesn’t exist yet. Plenty of real AI has remade the world and our lives already; it seems like an improper redefinition of the word transformative to say we aren’t there yet.
Is what you describing as “tipping point AI” also something that could be classified as singleton AI? The ability for an AI to destroy other AIs in progress and computer hardware is most of the way towards creating a political singleton.
Other things worth trying are infrared saunas and infrared heaters.
I think it’s great people engineered a solution that works for their seasonal affective disorder, but I’m skeptical this is a long term population level treatment. I am biased by how subjectively unpleasant I find such lighting systems. In terms of the true physiology of the human body, the visual light energy of the sun impacts the body much less than infrared and ultraviolet light. Therefore, a true treatment for SAD suggests light therapy on non visual spectrums.
An infrared heater has much improved my winter quality of life. Now when it’s cold, I look forward to turning on the space heater, because it puts out pleasant sauna like energy instead of feeling like a blow dryer. An infrared heater puts off more negative ions than a conventional space heater. A meta review showed negative ionization of air impacts depression but their prior has them skeptical of the association without current biological mechanism. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3598548/
https://www.amazon.com/Dr-Infrared-Heater-Portable-1500-Watt/dp/B002QZ11J6/
The idea that Bayes Camp could have been the most awesome thing at Burning Man is funny to me, looking back on this.
As a speculative ecurrency investor, I am gambling for retirement.
We should have done this! How’d it go for you?
He’s a better popular non-fiction writer.
Jaan Tallinn: A Skype founder on biomonitors, existential risk and simulated realities
Is it rational to invest in Bitcoins for retirement?
You can withdraw money from a traditional IRA for a first time home purchase without penalty, I think.
I’m considering a long form post against society wide quarantine and towards individual freedom. Given successful curve flattening everywhere outside of NYC, where it’s possible that 80% of people have had the virus, huddling in fear has increasing costs over time and human life is not neccessarily of more value than the protection of human rights. It’s incredible to see how easily a populace has been totally pacified.
Is anyone willing to share anecdotes about how they’ve broken quarantine in small ways? I’ve noticed some community houses talking about best practices for merging quaranteams and certainly many romantic partners nationwide are breaking shelter in place orders to visit. What would it take for you to think that it’s ok for romantic partners to visit and community house quaranteams to merge?