zebrask - Network

Apr 19, 2023, 22:30

Is Metaculus like wildly overconfident here? https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6615/alcor-to-go-bankrupt-before-reviving-people/

My impression was that most rationalists who do cryonics think it's extremely unlikely but the payoff is huge. Definitely not like "60% chance it'll work for at least someone".

Jan 06, 2023, 15:44

Interesting, I didn't know this about the half-life of S-modafinil. A lot of people I talk to complain about the long half-life of R-modafinil, so it seems like switching to esmodafinil would be a major win for them:

https://moreisdifferent.substack.com/p/could-s-modafinil-be-the-new-caffeine

#nootropics

Dec 20, 2022, 17:31

Or, sticking with religion, I feel like maybe the Catholic church vs. the Orthodox church might be the Christian version of "US vs Canada", since I get the impression that the Orthodox church is similarly hierarchical with highly formal rituals, but the hierarchy and rituals are slightly different (they even do their holidays at slightly different times).

Dec 20, 2022, 17:28

Is there an equivalent comparison for Sunni vs. Shia? Or is it more like asking people to compare "People from Canada" with "People from the US", where there are a bunch of small differences, and Canadians in particular don't like being mistaken for Americans, but there's no overarching theme to the differences, it's just slightly diverging cultures.

Dec 20, 2022, 17:28

It seems to me that Catholics and Protestants are fairly easy to compare, with the most broad-brush explanation of the differences being that Catholicism has a strongly hierarchical arrangement of religious authority while most Protestant denominations have more decentralized authority. They disagree on a bunch of minor bits of doctrine that probably most people don't care about, the big differences are around the culture of religious authority and the degree to which rituals are formalized.

Dec 20, 2022, 17:27

I feel like every time someone is asked to explain the difference between Sunni and Shia, people give the same incredibly unsatisfying answer about the schism arising from a disagreement about who Mohammed's designated successor was.

No one ever seems to answer with the thing that people actually want to know, which is "What are the differences between these two groups *today*?" I'm not even sure I know the high points of the differences.

Dec 02, 2022, 21:02

The pickup truck was a horrible mistake, but I think that was specific to the lemon I bought and not to the idea of owning a pickup truck.

Dec 02, 2022, 21:01

When I moved to Texas, I bought a pickup truck. Now, three months into living in Somerville I'm actively shopping for cargo bikes.

I may be easily swayed by the prevailing culture 😅

Dec 02, 2022, 01:02

The email says they will provide students and staff "the support they need to process this and other recent events."

I can only hope that this support takes the form of a course in statistical literacy and a warning against reading the news, but somehow I suspect it is just going to attempt to validate the narrative that it is right to think about extremely rare violence and to spend our precious life trying to reduce extremely small but salient risks. 🙁

Dec 02, 2022, 00:58

Seriously, I'm sorry that the media tricked you into caring about unimportant stuff that you can do nothing about, but please don't take it out on my inbox.

Dec 02, 2022, 00:57

Looking it up, about 5 people died and maybe 20 were injured, about half of those hospitalized. According to the CDC, the low end estimate of deaths/hospitalizations from flu this year so far is 2900 / 53,000, for a 50 day period. So it's killing 10x and hospitalizing 50x as many people as that shooting *every single day*, and the only mention of flu I see is not a dedicated email, it's item 5 in a monthly newsletter. And I don't even think they need to send me that.

Dec 02, 2022, 00:50

My kid's school decided it was very important to email me about a shooting in a night club in *Colorado*, thousands of miles away from me.

When I asked them to please separate their emails into separate mailing lists for things like, "Friday is a half day" and things like, "Here is a thing that happened in the news", they acted like it was their solemn duty to tell everyone about some random shooting that happens to be in the news and didn't even happen at a school.

Nov 30, 2022, 11:38

Are you able to describe what it feels like when you are hungry? If you were trying to explain the sensation of hunger to an alien, what would you say?

Nov 26, 2022, 03:40

Just a friendly reminder from your local natalist, but having kids is really enjoyable and satisfying. 🙂