HN user
Absolutely, I should have brought up risks as well. Triggering early schizophrenia is a big one, personality changes also seem like a significant concern. I'm not aware of any IQ changes- if you have a study, send it my way if you please. If you're just gesturing at the fact that long-term research is lacking, I'm very much in agreement.
It's not as though this is some thousand-year-old fence; psychadelics were illegalized under Nixon. If there was a reason other than 'they are drugs', it has not been made public, and all research at the time suggested that they should not have been illegalized. I'm open to being told I'm wrong, but 3 pages of google results did not push me in that direction.
As a depression treatment, it far exceeds the state-of-the-art SSRIs, which perform only slightly better than placebo. It's cheaper, more effective, and lasts longer. ~10% of Americans suffer from depression, and more than a third of them don't respond to SSRIs at all. Dramatically reducing the suffering of 3% of the population at net-negative cost is a big deal.
For comparison to topics-de-jour, in the US 0.3% of the population will get an abortion in a given year, 3.5% are gay/bi, 0.3% are trans, <0.03% die from gun violence (and over half are suicides potentially reduced by this treatment) each year, and about 1/40th of them are killed by law enforcement. Improvements in these areas will have a smaller effect size (ie. protecting gay marriage will not improve the lives of gay people as much as curing someone's depression will, gun control will not end all gun violence).
Big caveat here is that this treatment is relatively new, and depression treatments tend to be promising initially with results that fade in the long term. Additionally, the legalization of that treatment does not mean everyone who needs it will get it. On the other hand, depression is only one of the many issues that can be treated with psychadelics. We'll have to wait and see
Tangential: This argument comes up a lot, and I get that it's a specific example to make a general point, but are we that confident that removing Hitler from the equation means no Holocaust? It can't be denied that he had significant influence, but Nazis existed without him and antisemitism was widespread in Germany at least as far back as its founding. Am I wrong to think Hitler's contribution was not necessary for that outcome?
I would think consciousness, rather than intelligence, is the important component that should persist irrespective of humanity. Intelligence, curiousity, and creativity are important too, but on their own they don't hold moral significance. A universe of computers is not superior to a universe of atoms without something experiencing those abstractions and giving them meaning.
What does the risk profile look like for launching nuclear fuel through our atmosphere? It seems intuitively concerning, but I don't know much about nuclear.
While I think this is a solid point in general, if someone has installed weights to trick autopilot into thinking they're awake and holding the wheel, they probably know that they're supposed to be awake and holding the wheel.
This is an extreme exaggeration. If you've used Twitter since the Musk takeover and come away with the impression that you can't criticize him there, you've had a completely alien experience to mine- it seems to be the main use of the site these days.
He has banned parody accounts that don't specify 'parody' in the username, he's threatened to de-amplify negative tweets, and he's banned the ElonJet account. I vehemently disagree with all of those moves, but the idea that the site is now unusable to say anything that he doesn't like is absolutely hyperbole.
In that sense you could argue that all of astrophysics is built off of a biased sample from which we can draw no conclusions. And you may well be right, I'd think, though it is unfalsifiable.
Reality shows that countering crazy ideas with rational argument is not working very well.
Have you had a very different experience of reality than me? Apart from some very niche places, the response to crazy ideas has been insult, ignore, and call for censorship. In the rare case that any good faith response is made, it's an appeal to an authority that the crazies don't respect because it repeatedly and unapologetically lied about someone they do.
From my perspective it is abundantly evident that the decades-long push of these people out of the public and into their own spaces is the cause of our current strife. In the aforementioned niche places, election doubts were all but extinct within a month because people actually addressed them at the object level. But I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm genuinely curious about where/when you've seen rational argument fall short.
It's only enforceable if accompanied by speech. If I commit a crime with no evidence, my confession is the only thing that can convict me. I don't think it would be fair to say I'd be forbidden from confessing.
I think there's a stronger case that your purchase choice is covered as free expression or that the government can't compel you to do business with a private entity.
The critical question is whether they'll have to leap forward or fall backward. We simply cannot abide stealing an hour of sleep from our cyborg/transhuman descendants. We'd never live it down.
The Julian Calendar was good enough for centuries after the empire that invented it had fallen, which I think counts as good enough in general. That said, I'd love to read a story about tracking down some time bug a million layers of abstraction down from the state of tech in 9000AD.
Why not ask the people who were there?
What about a 'twitch plays stable diffusion' kind of thing where each visitor can enter a prompt for the next iteration?
I think it's worth mentioning that 75% was what was pitched to investors and wasn't intentionally publicized.
A traffic network's purpose is to move people from point A to point B. If you double the lanes and they fill up, you've doubled the throughput. If traffic doesn't move any faster, it's because the old traffic jams were a bigger problem than was visible. You've still alleviated the issue by allowing twice as many people to reach their destination in the same amount of time.
Is math an illusion? Math is a property of systems, as is our and our calculators ability to do it. I would argue that makes it more real.
When you see an object in reality, you're really making a series of assumptions. What you see is reflected light, and you construct a highly innacurate but useful model of what that light logically implies. Something that is external can only be perceived epistemically, as a sufficiently good guess. There's no evidence we're not in a simulation, so it's a toss-up as to whether anything physical exists at all.
Contrast the concept of self awareness. 'I think, therefore I am' is not a guess. It is a certainty, regardless of the broader context, that somewhere, something is a host to my experiences and thoughts.
Tangent: You can extend that a little bit by reasoning that you exist, therefore the things you interact with must exist as something. That doesn't get you past the possibility of the matrix, but it does escape total nihilism.
Are you so easily convinced you believe whatever political opinion Fox News is selling?
The dictionary says that to manipulate is to 'control or influence (a person or situation) cleverly, unfairly, or unscrupulously.' If you want to tack on 'when they're not selling products" for your personal use, be my guest, but then 'advertising isn't manipulation' is tautologous. And you really should have brought up that you have a special, secret definition when you told someone point blank that advertising wasn't it.
This feels like an arbitrary line to me. The host expects the ads to be rendered, and that's my problem. The advertiser expects their ads to be viewed, but that's their problem. What's the distinction?
Is it that I'm only in an implicit social contract with the person serving the content I want? Then it would be morally fine for me to block ads as long as I trick advertisers into thinking I didn't- the host only cares about whether they get paid. And what about on YouTube or Instagram, where the advertiser is the host? Google expects me to view their ads, not just render them, and I'm definitely in a social contract with them.
Or is it that they are allowed to stake a moral claim on the content of my browser, but not on my attention? Then I'd be allowed to block full-screen ads that force me to find an X, or autoplaying ads with sound, as they are forcing me to give them something they have no right to. And if I had an attention deficit disorder or a shopping addiction, all ads would be in that category. Even without such things, every ad accesses my attention without my consent, even if it's just the attention required to ignore them.
How far do you take this point? Because the social expectation is not just that you allow the ads to be served, but that you read/watch them and that they increase the likelihood of you buying the products/services being advertised. Is it immoral for me to ignore the ads that I allow them to display on my computer? And if not, what is the difference apart from the effort I'm putting in?
I guess it's one of those things where I'm seeing a different reality from everyone else, but the notion that uncensored speech is the source of our present strife is one that I don't accept. I witnessed this series of events:
1. Early 2000s created a bunch of social media websites with free speech (then meaning protection from Christian-right censorship, which was the concern at the time) as a premise. These were fine places. There were occasional nutjobs and constant arguments, but people were generally comfortable participating. I argued with racists one day, communists the next, fascists, nazis. I developed a deeper understanding of my own beliefs on those issues. I argued against but was eventually convinced by drug legalization, trans rights, abortion rights- the list is long and embarrassing.
2. These websites saw an opportunity for growth, accelerated maybe by Facebook's IPO, but starting somewhere around the late 00s. The nutjobs and arguments were a turn-off to a potentially larger user base. So they drew a line in the sand, clefting the population into the would-be-censored and the would-not-be. The would-bes had to go express themselves somewhere else. If I wanted to argue with fringe people, I had to go into their echo chamber. It was not the place for me.
3. Opinions that were common on both sides in the 90s became opinions of the right only, and then became forbidden. The line in the sand moved leftwards. Little effort was made to convince anyone that these changes were good (I agree they were); mockery and 'educate yourself, bigot' became the norm. Extremism grew rapidly in both the de jure right-leaning spaces and the de facto left-leaning spaces, because the two groups had entered into feedback loops. Remaining holdouts were forced to move because expressing correlated viewpoints was now faux pas, and they faced guilt by association.
4. Sometime around 2015, people collectively decided that everything needed to be political all the time. This was a moral imperative. My apolitical communities were overrun by propagandists of one side or another (mostly the left, but I was on Reddit so that biases things). As Trump's campaign wore on, people concluded that the issue was not enough censorship, and added more.
5. The situation worsened, and COVID made 'misinformation' the new pro-censorship buzzword. More censorship was clearly the answer. Lab-leak theorists were suppressed and the Hunter Biden story was censored weeks before the election. Any remaining general public trust in the institutions responsible and their allies faded further. Election doubts festered the same way everything else had and we wound up with Jan 6.
6. More censorship?
7. Profit
That's just my personal experience, and I recognize that others see things differently. On top of that, fascism gained power a number of times through the 1900s, which was pre-internet, and often did so in censorious environments like Weimar Germany. Things like climate change denial and anti-vax both predate mainstream social media. All-in-all, blaming the lack of internet censorship for our polarization and extremism today falls very flat for me.
Setting all of that aside, it does not make sense to me that we should restrict human rights because some corporate algorithm amplifies hateful or extreme speech. Rewrite the damn algorithm.
I do like your federated karma system, and I have also thought about things like opt-in moderation (to enable opposing voices to occupy the same space comfortably) or a small limit on comments per user per day (to prevent things like 1% of twitter users write 80% of tweets, and encourage higher effort contributions). I don't think these solutions violate free speech, and they may produce better outcomes than 'don't censor'. But 'don't censor' would be a great start.
Anonymous speech is an essential facet of free speech- maybe the most important. Getting rid of anonymity means removing the voice of the trans woman stuck in a conservative town or in the year 2000- or the Satanist, the Muslim, the ex-con, the furry, or the BDSM enthusiast. It means making corporate whistleblowers put their livelihood on the line. It means telling John Fryer, the (at the time) anonymous gay psychiatrist who spoke out in 1972 against their treatment of gay people, to sit down and shut up. It means stopping the author of African Slavery in America (probably Thomas Paine, but left anonymous) from speaking out against slavery in 1775.
In another vein, Scott Alexander needed (partial) anonymity not to speak truth to power but to keep his patients from finding him, finding a disagreement, and treating him as an enemy. Even if it were just him in that situation, you'd be robbing me of books worth of philosophy, politics, and science- stuff that has made me a better person and a better thinker.
And you'd be removing me from this conversation, because I have friends and family across the political spectrum who I would prefer not to offend, and I have heterodox views that would upset the right with leftness and the left with rightness. Perhaps you think I should be prevented from speaking openly, but you certainly can't say it's because I am avoiding feedback- I'm seeking feedback for positions I would otherwise quietly go on believing.
What is the value added that would justify taking away the rights of so many powerless? Of suppressing any ideas that are not already mainstream?
My point is that all of those things would be deplatforming even though they could replace the platform themselves for more independence, which means the argument doesn't hold. Regardless of whether Amazon deplatformed, the distinction is not based on whether Parler could have built their own servers.
And if their office building evicted them, they still wouldn't have been deplatformed because they could still buy some land and build their own office; it was their own fault for leasing office space as a service and getting burned. And if their ISP cut their access, they still wouldn't have been deplatformed because they could still start their own ISP; had they truly built their own platform, no ISP could have taken that from them. And if the power plant wouldn't give them electricity- okay I'll stop.
If you took perfectly rational people and ran the same test, you'd get the same result. Evidence that supports a position that you already have evidence for is more likely to be true. If someone showed me very compelling evidence that the world was flat, even if I was unable to find any issue with it, I still would believe that it is false. If a single counterpoint could change your belief, you never had any business claiming it as a belief in the first place.
Do you have cause to believe that repeated exposure to every side of every story won't lead the average person towards truth?
I would love to see a project to raise optimized mice using the tremendous amount of research on them. Is anyone doing that already?
Even if one sex was 10x as likely as the other to produce good research, it is still sexist bias to judge research on the basis of the author's sex. Fairness and meritocracy mean everyone gets a chance; no one should be stopped from succeeding because they belong to a low-performing group.
I think it's safe to say that this study can be treated as an anecdote because we don't know the effect size or exact methodology and it was never peer-reviewed. And I'd agree with your point if we were talking about the Nobel prize study, which evaluates people as individuals. But arguing that 'real bias' is bias that doesn't come from empirical evidence doesn't make a whole lot of sense- all bias comes from empirical evidence of varying quality.
It's still there, just much quieter
The average age of a corporate board member is ~60. If they joined the workforce at 22, it would have been in 1984. That makes it a very poor measure of present-day discrimination, because it has up to a 40 year lag on top of whatever delay exists between legislation and effect. Also, this:
A majority of companies in the S&P 500 have at least one woman on their boards, but only about a quarter have more than two, according to a study from PwC.
is an arbitrarily defined measure (I expect intentionally to make things look worse) when we care about how many women hold board seats. In 2022, 29% of board seats are held by women. In 2018 it was something like 21%. Not at all good, but nearly double the 11% you'd get for a token woman on every board (assuming the average of 8.9 seats/board from Russell 3000).