aharrison

Assuming your question is in good faith, the answer is: when you rent something on AWS, you are paying for total cost of ownership sliced out. When you run something on your gaming rig GPU, you already paid for the machine/GPU - now you are "just" paying for electricity and depreciation. So if you have a gaming rig sitting around while you are writing a web app or whatever, let it do some science for just the cost of electricity.

Can corroborate, same problem of OOMs. Regardless, this is excellent work. Thank you for sharing.

You will note that I did not say "scam" anonymous call. I said "anonymous call" which includes both real and anonymous calls. Police officers should respond with force dictated by the circumstances of their situation, trained in such analysis, and held accountable to their decisions - both as individual officers and as departments. The source of the initial investigation should have little if any impact on the level of force used in the encounter.

I'm a little surprised you didn't mention anything about police being held accountable when responding with unreasonable force to anonymous tips. If we are going to start talking about fixing this issue, I'm not sure getting rid of blocked numbers is going to materially impact these outcomes.

Likewise, what is your recommendation on eliminating the threat of burner phones?

That is an excellent essay and it scares the crap out of me, because I see it play out every day in both directions and it often does feel exactly like epistemic learned helplessness.

There are so many biases that affect individuals (hindsight, hyperbolic discounting, confirmation, etc) that to get correct answers, you have to look at and trust other accounts. You have to do studies, you have to trust those studies, and you have to track actual hard evidence.

But large enough systems become increasingly opaque, and it can be hard to test your web of trust empirically. This reduces huge organizations to cargo cult behavior, or worse, fundamentally unsound behavior because "it worked for me."

I don't know what to do about this besides what CFAR is trying, which is to get people better at weighing evidence and changing their damned minds. You have to constantly be asking yourself: "what would the world look like if this were true? What would the world like like if it wasn't?" It is hard work, but I think it is critical to our continued improvements as a civilization and a species.

We knew what he meant, which was the point of the communication. He is making a general observation about data, not a formal proof.

I will second this and say that in my opinion it gets better as you go along, although it gets tedious in parts. Be prepared, it is a long story.

I don't have a citation either way, so I will just say that I noticed a reaction to oats just like a reaction to gluten. Could be that mine were contaminated, could potentially be that I am allergic to oats as well.

One of my favorite things about Soylent is that it provides a "reasonable" but consistent baseline for doing these sorts of tests. Until Soylent there wasn't a non-medical meal replacement that at least theoretically tried to be everything you need. Once Soylent has been battle tested for awhile, we can start doing actual experiments with controlled variables around diets. If we can get that far without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we will potentially upend how we do nutritional testing.

I tried this, and here was my experience:

1. I am gluten intolerant, so swap out oat flour for almond flour. Swap out B complex supplement for marmite. Also, calling marmite "real food" is a bit of a stetch in my estimation.

2. After the first week, realized I was probably mildly allergic to casin, swapped to coconut milk.

3. After the first week after that change, noticed I am probably also mildly allergic to banana. Cut it completely.

So what I ended up with was a high fat low carbohydrate equivalent that isn't too bad. I actually drink this pretty regularly, and it is extremely filling. However, calling this guy an idiot is disingenuous to say the least; his work is going through considerably more scrutiny than Soylent Orange, and it contains considerably less allergens. Depending on who you talk to, up to 15% of people are gluten intolerant[1] and so, when keeping risks in mind, we should be cognizant of the dangerous of various proposals.

All in all, I actually do like (my modified) Soylent Orange, but ad hominem attacks are unnecessary and "real food" is a suprisingly slippery concept. Hell, coconut and almonds are common allergies too!

I agree and have run into that problem myself. Unfortunately, fixing that impression takes time and to my knowledge there isn't any real way to explain the problem with "Platonic truth" as a tangent off of a discussion around research journals, for instance. It requires a full step back and a couple hours of discussion to explain it at all, if you haven't been exposed to it before.

If anyone has any recommendations on that front, I am all ears.

In my experience, when most engineering-oriented people use the word truth, they (wittingly or unwittling) mean the pragmatic definition of "allows us to make stronger-than-previous predictive models about something". Most of the argument in philosophy of science circles strikes me as meta-interesting, not eminently relevant to the practice of science.

Especially when dealing with psychology, a lot of those "what, exactly, is an electron" sort of deeply epistemological statements are not really asked, because we have enough trouble with the simplistic models we have.

So yeah, my recommendation (for what it is worth) is to always assume "most predictive model available" when someone says truth, and be aware that you are making that assumption and that simplification.