This blog has permanently moved to substack! You can find it at https://nothingismere.substack.com. A sample blog post from the new Nothing is Mere, now with less mereness than ever before: A Near-Term Policy for Not Getting Killed by AI Hundreds of scientists, including three of the four most cited living AI scientists, have said that AI poses [ ]
My guess is that The Sandman is the best comic yet created. I ve been super excited to see it adapted to film or TV for a long time, and now a Netflix adaptation (of the beginning of the story) exists. The adaptation is OK? There are a lot of fun things about it. And it [ ]
This is a quick set of excerpts I m putting together for easy reference. Elizabeth van Nostrand wrote an Aug. 30 blog post, Long Covid Is Not Necessarily Your Biggest Problem, concluding that for vaccinated people under 40 with =1 [comorbidity], the cognitive risks of long covid are lost in the noise of other risks they [ ]
in four bullet points. • Institutional failure. Chinese officials suppressed early information about the virus. The WHO and the US CDC consistently spread misinformation and shoddy science throughout the course of the pandemic, and showed a shocking inability to understand and communicate basic distinctions like we don t know whether X versus we know that [ ]
Bryan Caplan s The Case Against Education argues that education mostly serves a signaling function—it s an easy way of proving to prospective employers that you re a relatively smart, hard-working, mainstream member of society—and only a small part of education (maybe 20%) exists to help people learn anything or build any skills. Excerpts from Julia Galef s interview [ ]
A grab bag of interesting links and news: ___________________________________________ The first COVID-19 human challenge trials have been approved in February 2021, instead of February 2020. If this is a good idea now, when the benefits are vastly lower and the risks are only slightly lower, then it was probably also a good idea a year [ ]
Suppose that American politics decomposed into ~four houses , representing different perspectives and different sets of virtues (and vices). What might they be? My first attempt: [epistemic status: playing around with narratives] ___________________________________________________________________ Coeptis The nietzschean house. Some combination of everyone benefits when we stay out of the way and…
Miscellaneous links and discussion from the past month: Brown, Wai, and Chabris Can You Ever Be Too Smart for Your Own Good? Linear and Nonlinear Effects of Cognitive Ability Despite a longstanding expert consensus about the importance of cognitive ability for life outcomes, contrary views continue to proliferate in scholarly and popular literature. This [ ]
The following is a long excerpt from an unpublished paper I wrote in 2012-2013, mostly before I was enmeshed in rationality-community ideas. The paper was a response to David Chalmers hard problem of consciousness, described well in Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness and Consciousness and its Place in Nature. Chalmers gives various arguments [ ]
_________________________________________________________________________ My co-worker Eliezer Yudkowsky recently made the case on social media that Trump s candidacy raises national security concerns qualitatively more serious than the sort you see in a normal US presidential race: Every election, the Chicken Littles of both parties make a big deal out of how this year s election opponent is the…
