random78965

At that point, a more salient question would be whether anything at all exists outside our minds.

Honestly, why bother about the wider world when this provides an excellent filter for those both principled enough to quit Twitter and competent enough to join Mastodon? Sure, you'll have a high false negative rate (i.e., some great folks won't join), but the people who do will probably be more interesting to you than the average person.

I see! My intuition was that it would be hard to evaluate efficacy without RCTs - I assumed low effect sizes, which I guess is not necessarily true for many drugs.

Agreed that there should be a faster way to trial drugs and get them to market. Though I've heard that the "slowness" of the FDA is actually overstated; not sure how true that claim is.

I think all your criticisms of randomized controlled trials (apart from the ethical one) apply to your suggested approach, no?

RCTs are the gold standard for demonstrating efficacy precisely because of the controls. I agree that they're not going to give you enough info about potential side-effects - a thorough monitoring program is definitely necessary for that.

But without RCTs, showing that a drug works would be much harder. How would you weed out the snake oil?

Not a dev, but I've often seen software that acknowledge their dependencies in About sections and on their websites. Is that particularly intrusive? Especially given that you could always use the GPL too if you want.

A zero, I think.

The haiku at the end is not a haiku, technically.

As a non-business person, I imagine that folks would typically want some correctness guarantees, which seem near-impossible with today's LLMs. What kind of business use-cases do they enable? Probably a failure of imagination on my part, but I can't think of many tasks that can be done consistently well by AI that can't also be done with simpler software.

My intuition is that browser plugins based on some federated system (e.g. Mastodon, Matrix) could enable this. Why complicate browsers even more? (No expertise here, so I'm probably missing the big picture)

I'm not sure, that's not my area of expertise! I think it's pretty well-replicated that IQ is more predicted by genetics than any other factor; however, my understanding is that variation in IQ within an ethnic population is much greater than variation between populations. If a population mean is significantly different from others (which appears to be the case with Ashkenazi Jews and Asians), I'd expect the effect to be primarily environmental, not genetic.

I don't know enough about the inheritance of intelligence to be sure of this at all, though.

Cultural emphasis on educational achievement and hard work, for one.