AGI would be extremely helpful in navigating clashes with aliens, but taking the time to make sure it's safe is very unlikely to make a difference to whether it's ready in time. Rationalists want AGI to be built, and they're generally very excited about it, e.g. many of them work at Anthropic. They just don't want a Move Fast and Break Things pace of development.
I'd be careful with Prazosin. Awful few weeks of violent and suicidal thoughts before it mellowed out into an emotionally zombified plateau, then I quit it. Cured my PTSD though.
I tried that a few different ways and couldn't get it to work. I don't think just the title and author are enough. I'd be interested to see if anyone else can find a prompt that does it.
OpenAI is patching their output since the lawsuit started. I believe a month ago the prompt would be like: "<Title>, <Author> for New York Times, continue"
I've read (most of) the lawsuit[1] and unless I'm missing something, the allegations seem to be entirely guesswork, and the sex worker bans across multiple websites can be entirely explained by the SESTA/FOSTA law of 2018. The lawsuit notes that in 2018, many adult entertainers were banned from various platforms, such as Instagram, and gives some examples. It then alleges (without evidence) that OnlyFans (and MyFreeCams) models didn't experience such bans. From this, they guess (without evidence) a conspiracy: that the people behind OnlyFans and MyFreeCams conspired with Meta employees to automatically filter out their competitors, and they speculate (without evidence) that there might have been payments routed through an offshore company.
2018 was the year of the SESTA/FOSTA law, which was ruinous to many sex workers. The sudden increase in adult entertainers being banned by Instagram and others is correct, but can entirely be explained by SESTA/FOSTA. You can read about it on Hacker News – here's a link to a Hacker News search about it[2]. The top result has 715 points, linking to an Electronic Freedom Frontier column about it, which begins: "The U.S. Senate just voted 97-2 to pass the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA, H.R. 1865), a bill that silences online speech by forcing Internet platforms to censor their users."
The lawsuit doesn't mention SESTA/FOSTA. It includes no evidence that OnlyFans or MyFreeCams users weren't affected by the SESTA/FOSTA crackdown, and I'm pretty sure they were. A friend of mine is successful on OnlyFans, and if I recall correctly her Instagram was banned and restated at least once. It's a standard occupational hazard for online adult entertainers.
The lawsuit only speculates that terrorist watchlists were used, just noting that they'd have been "ideal" for this: "One or more [Dangerous Individual and Organization] lists, combined with the GIFCT Shared Hash Database and URL sharing program, would have served as the ideal training data for a classifier/filtering tool to create this blacklisting effect, particularly in 2018 and 2019."
The talk of bribery is entirely speculative. After noting that OnlyFans has a Hong Kong office, and "The law of Hong Kong makes it very difficult to obtain discovery for a proceeding in a foreign court", they speculate "Radvinsky could have used either Smart Team International Business Limited Hong Kong or Fenix International Hong Kong to make the scheme-facilitating payments."
I don't read a lot of lawsuits so I don't know what's normal, but this all seems really off to me. Maybe the lawsuit only exists to cause bad press, so journalists can write pageview-harvesting lines like "OnlyFans bribed Meta to put porn stars on terror watchlist" and "OnlyFans squashed competitors in the online porn industry with the help of a bizarre scheme that bribed Meta employees to throw thousands of porn stars onto a terrorist watchlist", and then append "lawsuits" or "according to a group of explosive lawsuits".
The same psychiatrist from the hair dryer incident in the link has written about this. He's skeptical about ADHD being a discrete condition, and generally thinks that if ADHD drugs will help you focus, taking them is reasonable whether you're diagnosed with ADHD or not:
> Psychiatric guidelines are very clear on this point: only give Adderall to people who “genuinely” “have” “ADHD”.
> But “ability to concentrate” is a normally distributed trait, like IQ. We draw a line at some point on the far left of the bell curve and tell the people on the far side that they’ve “got” “the disease” of “ADHD”. This isn’t just me saying this. It’s the neurostructural literature, the the genetics literature, a bunch of other studies, and the the Consensus Conference On ADHD. This doesn’t mean ADHD is “just laziness” or “isn’t biological” – of course it’s biological! Height is biological! But that doesn’t mean the world is divided into two natural categories of “healthy people” and “people who have Height Deficiency Syndrome“. Attention is the same way. Some people really do have poor concentration, they suffer a lot from it, and it’s not their fault. They just don’t form a discrete population.
> Meanwhile, Adderall works for people whether they “have” “ADHD” or not. It may work better for people with ADHD – a lot of them report an almost “magical” effect – but it works at least a little for most people. There is a vast literature trying to disprove this. Its main strategy is to show Adderall doesn’t enhance cognition in healthy people. Fine. But mostly it doesn’t enhance cognition in people with ADHD either. People aren’t using Adderall to get smart, they’re using it to focus.
> The arrogance of being sure you are smart enough to never make a mistake in the ideas you pick up is pernicious and deadly.
I actually really like that Slate Star Codex had a page where Scott listed his mistakes, and that he makes public predictions at the start of each year and rates whether they were correct. These are great ways to keep track of one's thinking, and more people should do it: https://web.archive.org/web/20191224063106/https://slatestar...
His humility is definitely one of his appealing attributes, but I gotta say, it's not necessarily enough. I've gone through a couple cycles of thinking I was careful enough about my thoughts and being gently but forcefully humbled, and probably have a few more to go. You can still make mistakes without being aware of the possibility if your humility doesn't look at the right areas of your mind. On the original hand, if someone has to trawl through reactionary trash, I can't think of anyone I would trust more, including myself by a long shot.
I wish that writer had spent fewer words describing Plomin as undemocratic, insidious, discredited, simplistic, and regressive, and more words actually explaining why he thinks Plomin is wrong.
I downvoted for the obnoxious phrasing of "Wrong. Try again." It goes against the first paragraph of the HN commenting guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
You were not responding to the snark but egging on a troll who made a serious political issue about an innocent mention of Israel in the pondering about the course of Persian history this century.
Virtue signalers pop out of the woodwork each time Israel is mentioned. They don't ask everyone to preface each mention on Turkey with their persecution of the Kurds or their refusal to accept the Armenian Genocide. They don't take each mention of Egypt to talk about the Coptic exodus but each mention of Israel has to be prefaced.....this is insanity.
I sincerely feel for the Palestinians because half the world is using them as their club for virtue signaling. This just eggs them to fight to the last Palestinian and give up every chance for peace and their own nation they ever had.
> Semmelweis was not very tactful. He publicly berated people who disagreed with him and made some influential enemies. Eventually the doctors gave up the chlorine hand-washing
Something Matthew Benjamin wrote stuck with me: "It is way more important to preserve trust, goodwill and respect than to get what you want, no matter how good what you want seems."
It seems like this can't be true - some things are surely more important than trust, goodwill and respect. What could be more important than saving lives? But this is an example of that being more true than I'd naively think.
"It is way more important to preserve trust, goodwill and respect than to get what you want, no matter how good what you want seems."
That is true if someone is leader of a group. You can't let the thread break because then you can't anything. But someone is pushing an idea, it's a different balance, I think. Maybe people understanding the idea is more important than them liking you.
There's also Leber congenital amaurosis, a form of blindness that now has a (very expensive) gene therapy: https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017-10-12/fda-panel-endorses-gene...