spencerb

• spencerb 4 May 2024 21:38 UTC

  11 points

  0

  on: In­tro­duc­ing AI-Pow­ered Au­dio­books of Ra­tional Fic­tion Classics

  Is there a way to access this without a substack subscription?

• spencerb 18 Feb 2024 6:46 UTC

  6 points

  5

  on: Celi­acs don’t need to live in fear

  I think that tradeoffs between health risk and quality of life are very badly handled by the medial establishment. There tends to be a focus on avoiding the worst outcomes without evaluating small cumulative costs. Other examples that I’ve seen brought up are preemptively inserting IV ports (it’s just a needle, and it could save your life!) or flossing (healthy, but 2 minutes/​day adds up).

  On the one hand, I guess I should be supportive of medical policies that include any amount of rigorous statistics, even if it’s only for the easily quantified high-impact outcomes. However, it’s clear that including quality of life in risk assessment would save a lot of utility. I hope we see more studies trying to quantify the “this sucks” impact, especially for very invasive treatments like GFD.

• spencerb 13 Feb 2024 8:10 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: interstice’s comment on: Where is the Town Square?

  I agree. Mastodon will remain on the outskirts in the same way that Whatsapp continues to dominate alternatives like Signal despite clear privacy advantages. Network size trumps any other feature for a social network.

• spencerb 17 Dec 2023 5:34 UTC

  −4 points

  −1

  on: Les­sons from mas­sag­ing my­self, oth­ers, dogs, and cats

  Massage might cause problems, idk.

  Practicing without a license is a crime in many jurisdictions. There’s a reason massage therapists need 1000 hours of training, certification, and regular continuing education. It’s a field susceptible to pseudoscience, so an understanding of anatomy and the medicinal risks is important to make sure you don’t screw anything up.

  It is irresponsible that you are teaching others without ever being taught yourself.

• spencerb 31 Aug 2022 15:17 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: How much im­pact can any one man have?

  I feel like there’s a bias towards overstating the impact of recent innovations. It’s easy to think of recent “revolutionary innovations” (internet! gene sequencing! cryptocurrency!), while going backwards we tend to view them as more infrequent and discrete (automobiles, steam locomotion, cotton gin). To some extent this may be a real acceleration of innovation driven by population growth, economic expansion, etc. However I think it’s also just becoming more course-grained in what we consider innovative (automobiles=combustion science + mechanical improvements + materials + road tech + …). If this is the case then extrapolating back to neolithic times we’d expect “innovations” to be very infrequent, just because we don’t know about or appreciate all the incremental improvements between them. If each refinement in stone tools is actually an accumulation of numerous developments in eg flaking techniques or geology or apprenticeship systems went into each refinement in stone tools, then that dramatically decreases the impact of any one inventor.

• spencerb 26 Sep 2020 15:33 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: philh’s comment on: Honor­ing Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2020

  My company “evaluates” phishing propensity by sending employees emails directing them to “honeypots” which are in the corporate domain and signed by the corporate ssl certificates. Unsurprisingly, many employees trust ssl and enter their credentials. My takeaway was not that people are bad at security, but that they will tend to trust the system if the stakes don’t appear too high.

• spencerb 12 Aug 2019 16:46 UTC

  4 points

  on: Could we solve this email mess if we all moved to paid emails?

  I agree that email is an attention-sucking mess, but I see the problem differently from jacobjacob. I would happily get all the emails from the rationality community; my problem is that email is dominated by marketing, mailing lists, etc.

  I think that using earn.com is likely to exacerbate the problem of unrequested marketing emails. It is free to send messages, and the sender only pays upon receipt of a response. This is like selling advertising on a per-click-though basis rather than on a per-view basis, and if it took off I would expect spam to quickly dominate the platform. Even if the message model were modified to incur costs for sending a message, I still think that many companies would gladly pay to send messages over a trusted high-status channel (similar to how fundraisers include stickers or cash in their mailings to raise the likelihood of you reading the materials). I’m not sure that friends and contacts would value my responses enough to match corporate calculations.

• spencerb 12 Aug 2019 15:37 UTC

  0 points

  on: Could we solve this email mess if we all moved to paid emails?

  One reason to escew earn.com specifically is the use of bitcoin. Proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are a major waste of energy (0.2% of the global energy use currently) and should be avoided by rationalists.