zerobits

https://wetware.engineering

A site about the most effective techniques to improve your memory, intelligence, and effectiveness. Built with a custom software stack, want to put more time into it soon.

Selection of posts:

· Adults learn faster than children: challenging a discouraging myth that children are suited for learning more than adults. (https://wetware.engineering/adult-learning)

· A new curriculum: The topics we fail to emphasize in school. Was on HN front page for a bit. (https://wetware.engineering/curriculum)

· Everyday memory palaces: How to increase your memory by orders of magnitude, and apply that in daily life (https://wetware.engineering/memory-palaces)

· How to draw a 4D hypercube: Wrap your mind around higher dimensions. (https://wetware.engineering/hypercube)

I was pretty excited about this result until actually going through the quiz.

They give you so many hints, I don't think you can draw conclusions from this.

For example:

- In multiple videos an ape is eating, and another ape is trying to grab food out of their mouth. The options presented are like: "Give me that food" or "Move to a new position". Obviously the food is relevant.

- In multiple videos a larger ape presents its back to the other, while the smaller moves towards hopping on or grooming it. Clearly this is the "climb on my back" or "groom me" options.

In addition to providing a highlighted illustration, multiple choice, and slow-mo replays, it really just seems like this quiz was (intentional or not) designed to show an obvious positive result. Looking forward to better research on this.

Can anyone explain these timelines better? Can we throw more money at this and scale much faster? Are safety/regulation considerations the main bottleneck?

This has gotta be one of the most important investments for humanity and our planet. Hard to fathom these timeline predictions in the same world where mRNA vaccines and various spacecraft have scaled in <1 year.

The author did not claim that Delta's origin was a lab leak. Just that there was one isolated case of it. And so it stands to reason, other lab leaks may also be occurring.

This is one of the best articles I’ve read in awhile - thank you!

Here's an attempt at a summary of this article:

· Became dominant strain in South Africa in like a week (way faster than Delta). Must be either a superspreader event, much more transmissible, or much more evasive of antibodies.

· No real data on that cause, and no evidence for increased lethality. Will find out in next 1-2 weeks probably. Decent chance this becomes dominant worldwide and US soon, but not clear if that will be a problem or not.

· The one worrying data we know is the variant has a lot more mutations than other variants, which would make it likely to evade vaccine/antibody treatments – but not necessarily the other kinds of treatments.

· WHO not recommending countries to limit travel. Also problematic that vaccines aren't updating for new variants, and good chance FDA will be the bottleneck there.

I couldn’t find the headline/title anywhere in the slides. Where is that from?

I didn’t assume that of you at all, I actually had assumed the opposite and that you had experience in the area.

I agree it would be challenging to have deep and useful markets, but perhaps there’s more innovation to be made there — and many of these high level markets that are top of public consciousness I’d expect to have plenty of liquidity.

It’s a bit presumptuous that these folks don’t understand what makes markets work.

They went into quite a bit of detail but can’t cover everything. Most of the examples were quite top of funnel, fire the CEO markets, economic impacts of new laws being passed. I wouldn’t expect for major bills or companies there would be any shortage of liquidity there.

It’s typical of comments in any forum to mostly be critical, but what takes more guts and cleverness is to connect the dots to improve upon the idea. You seem to have a good mind so I’d encourage you to try applying it in that way.

We’re not going to get large scale randomized controlled trials for marijuana use any time soon.

We can definitely debate the methods.. but the findings from this growing body of evidence should probably be the ‘default’ stance, until we see more causal or controlled correlational evidence pointing the other way.

That is not what the study showed. They controlled for health and exercise.

In fact, the study they cited which also showed an increase in stroke risk actually showed cannabis users exercised more.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?author=T+Parekh&au...

Well it’s a +63% relative increase. Not so tiny.

It’s strange that all of the comments are looking for ways to dismiss this result (and this seems to happen generally with negative cannabis findings online).

Is it not entirely possible a drug and method of consumption which stresses the cardiovascular system increases odds of an adverse cardiovascular event?

Yeah, I think some light editorializing would help here even if the list content stayed the same.

One of my favorite Wikipedia pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists

I find the awesome lists not to be that useful. Mainly because they seem to include way too many things.

Rather than 10 library/book/etc. recommendations on every topic, I'd love just a few: "Best beginner book" .. "Best advanced book" and a few alternatives.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't get very different results or value from just Googling the same topics.

I don’t think it’s a green screen, it appears to be a painted wall — you can see the seams and perspective to it.

You would think – but viruses don't necessarily become less deadly.

The virus wants to maximize transmissibility, and that might require trading off further against the host's health and increasing its death rate.

An example is Myxoma virus. It was intentionally introduced to pest Australian rabbit populations (to cull them) and studied.

After ~30 years of evolution, they found the dominant strain had a 70-95% death rate and left long-lasting lesions. Other strains with higher (~99%) and lower (~50%) death rates weren't as stable & prevalent.

Once a virus is transmitted (enough), what happens to the health of its host is irrelevant.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/immunology-and-microbio...

There was a pretty high severe systemic adverse rate in the high dose group (20%). Severe local response rate was 5% in the middle dose. [1]

I have no idea how this compares to other vaccines, and you can pessimistically extrapolate a bit from this tiny, healthy sample from the high dose (n=15 in middle dose group).

I'd imagine some % of people when this scales to millions will have a bad response, and the high dose group might provide some model of the worst cases.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2022483

Yes, but at some threshold wouldn’t this indicate a problem?

103F+ fevers are relatively rare from typical vaccines, and from my understanding a lot of the damage from COVID is immune response related.

mRNA vaccines and our immune responses to these are uncharted territory, so I’m not sure how much we can reason by analogy from other vaccines vs. first principles.

Thanks for the valid correction.

I didn’t mean to be disingenuous. I forgot they rejected that dosage.

Overall, the picture does look potentially concerning for the side effects of that vaccine and efficacy is still unclear.

The Moderna mRNA vaccine was producing 103 degree fevers (and passing out) in a Phase 1 volunteer. [1]

If that's the reaction in small sample with a healthy 29 year old (most volunteers had high fevers), I can't imagine old or unhealthy people will be unharmed. I was more concerned about the mRNA vaccines being at risk initially.

Things aren't looking great...

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/26/moderna-vaccine-candidat...

Apparently this isn’t a huge recent change —- it was at 47% of young adults at the same time last year (now it’s 52%).

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...

Despite 80% of comments focusing on Wolfram's pompousness, this is an interesting expansion of cellular automata to arbitrary dimensions.

Coincidental timing of publication - one day after John Conway's passing. We may be in a n-dimensional Game of Life after all.

yes, this is a starting point. I agree this topic has considerable depth which I omitted.

there are 100s of great resources (Wolfram Alpha, Khan Academy, GitHub, Wiktionary, to name a few) and techniques (Google search tricks like using quotes, site: tag, etc., good habits like avoiding distractions) to augment Internet learning

you could evenly weight this area like any other class, and expect to spend many hours on it.

I actually do think most of the topics I mentioned are 'covered'. But many were covered briefly, as a day or week long unit in my personal experience, instead of as a core area.

My point isn't about crossing these items off a checklist, but re-balancing the effort we put towards these core skills, instead of memorizing arcane trivia about U.S. history, literary figures, and some impractical Math/English skills that seem to be more of the focus.

I went to a "good" school, whatever that means, but I've found myself and many of my peers lacked many of the skills and deeper understanding of these topics even during/after university.

I still meet many people who don't quite understand what a stock is, and most people seem surprised to hear Wi-Fi is a type of invisible light. Many people seem to be pretty bad at communication. About 1/3 of the US seems to not be convinced we are actually apes.

I agree with you -- we need to find better ways to teach deeper understanding rather than rote memorization.

at a minimum, it would've been nice to spend less time on brain-numbing repetitive tasks and test preparation.

there is value in memorization as a precursor to true understanding, you can't have understanding without association

examples:

- math: memorization of single digit addition/multiplication makes higher digit arithmetic easier, and comes in handy in higher-level math

- music: memorization of scales unlocks better ability to play & improvise songs (before deeper knowledge of how it relates to other notes/scales/modes, how this connects to dividing the frequencies of air waves, etc.)