Nintil

Favorite blogs about aging, biotech: - https://www.ldeming.com/longevityfaq - https://nintil.com/ - https://srconstantin.github.io/tag/aging.html - https://www.celinehh.com/

I agree! The best websites are those maintained by individuals without a profit motive. Here's a short list that I've started collecting: - Kevin Kelly: kk.org - Patrick Collison: patrickcollison.com - Patrick McKenzie: kalzumeus.com - David Perell: perell.com - Berthub.eu - Alexey Guzey: https://guzey.com/ - https://www.gwern.net/index - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ - https://dcgross.com/ - Paul Graham: paulgraham.com - https://nintil.com/ - Laura Deming: https://www.ldeming.com/ - Sam Altman: https://blog.samaltman.com/ - Casey Handmer: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/

My favourite ones (mainly tech or bio related): - https://www.gwern.net/index - https://guzey.com/ - https://nintil.com/ - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ - https://waitbutwhy.com/

I'm glad that Scott is back (and that Substack will make it easy for him to get paid for his work). That said, some of the best things about Slate Star Codex were stumbling on the archives, going down a rabbit hole of old LessWrong posts, the links in the blogroll. Substack is much worse than a standard WordPress blog when it comes to that sort of casual reading and creating a permanent home for posts that are timeless. [1] I'm all for creators being paid for their work, I just hope that SSC doesn't lose anything that made it special with the new platform. [1] Applied Divinity Studies / Nintil on Substack: https://nintil.com/substack-milquetoast

Here's a fantastically detailed 2019 review of replications of Bloom's work: https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/ As is oft the case, the conclusion is 'it's complicated'.

Love this humorous approach to anti-natalism; Sarah Perry wrote a great book that deals with the topic a bit more seriously and is definitely worth checking out: https://nintil.com/2016/11/30/suicide-fast-and-slow-book-review-every-…

> There were valid reasons to not be friendly to USSR. Does this justify USSR entering friendship pact with Germany, thus enabling it to start the war? This is not about "friendship pact", this is about non-aggression pact. Was Poland not justified in entering a non-aggression pact with Germany? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Polish_declaration_of_non… Was France not justified in entering a non-aggression pact with Germany? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement#Consequences > Never mind that this protection buffer would not have been needed if Germany did not expand its invasion... which it did thanks to USSR siding with it. Dubious twist of logic. Good questions/points, but we're judging decisions made at the time with the hindsight of decades after the war. I don't think it was clear to anyone who would've joined the war, which sides would've won, and the likelihood of such events. Every country, depending on the circumstances, was probably trying to do what's best for them. Either avoiding war, or exploiting the messy situation by expanding their territory by annexing small part of neighboring states. In fact, after seeing what happened to Poland, I think that every party in such agreements realized that they could provide, at best, temporary respite and delay confrontation (but that's not a weird isolated phenomenon: circumstances changes, and that provides ammunition to arguments that old agreements are not valid…

Thank you for kind words. This is hard won advice, I hope it will be of some use. Looking back it's frightening how fast our life comes and goes, with two decades of learning just to become prepared for two decades of peak adulthood, to have some chance to make sense of it all. About metformin. I'm neither a doctor nor a biologist, but if life science jobs paid more, I'd heartily studied for a bio degree and worked in this profession. I'm a slightly educated gentleman who has read his Molecular Biology of the Cell and some hundreds of scientific papers of varying quality. It's my hobby. While it is true that there is a vast universe of "dietary supplements" that do nothing reliably measurable in homo sapiens, and then there are some legit FDA-approved drugs that don't work as intended in most individuals of homo sapiens either, I think there are varying degrees of evidence to support the claim that some approaches to life extension do work, if slightly, for many average human beings. And then there is an interesting question of increasing healthspan, not just lifespan. There is a spectrum of quality of evidence, with gold standard being high-powered double blind randomized controlled trial, followed by lower-powered RCT studies, followed by not-really-double-blind studies, followed by replicated large observational studies, small observational studies, and then studies in nonhuman primates, mice, worms and yeast cells. Even this evidence is not ideal, given financial…

The story around Bloom's two sigma is a bit complex https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/

We didn't. The USSR had 100% employment long ago[0], and all the poverty that goes with it. This isn't like that, as it isn't funded through taxes. This is private companies experimenting with their money, and risking downstream cost increases that may cause people to go elsewhere, as they do when they try anything new. This is much better than just funding people regardless of productivity through forced taxes. [0] https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-achieving-full-employment

Where is your data for these claims? Here is something you mind find enlightening: https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-food/

Here is a response, that PC himself references on his site: https://nintil.com/building-skyscrapers-and-spending-on-major-projects… Excerpt: > So all in all, if we control away war, and increasing complexity, and the fact that you can't optimise people beyond a certain point, and sprinkle on top some regulation-induced slowdown it's not clear that there has been a slowdown or stagnation in general for major projects.

This article [1], linked from original article, looks at the effects of direct instruction and mastery learning across various studies. I did not read it all but it concludes from randomized interventions that these approaches have a beneficial outcome on students when compared to alternatives (though not as high as two standard deviations as previously suggested). 1: https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/

In Ricón's Fund People Not Projects III article [0] he relates: > Ioannidis et al. (2014) note there are 15M scientists that published anything in the 1996-2011 period, but only 1% that has published every single year in this period. This smaller 150k-strong group accounts for 40% of all papers and 87% of all papers with >1000 citations. One percent seems like a good size for a major niche; those who do the bulk of the publishing. This is important, but if that's the only niche you're looking at you're bound to miss 99 percent of what you want to find. [0] https://nintil.com/newton-hypothesis Edit: Maybe the people that need to be funded most are secretaries for some of the other 99 percent.

Just read this relevant and interesting article on "Scaling Tacit Knowledge": https://nintil.com/scaling-tacit-knowledge

Here's a good review of the research around this problem: https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/ The author concludes (IMO, but you should read it yourself) that while tutoring does have positive effects, the 2 Sigma effect size measured by Bloom was probably an outlier.

I am immediately reminded of the Soviet union's full employment policy, and the absurd jobs they had to invent in order to fulfill it. As a matter of fact they regarded a lack of unemployment as a clear indicator of the superiority of socialism over capitalism. More on this : https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-achieving-full-employment/ With that said, I expected an article on post-work society. I'm a little bit disappointed.

This is a recent HN thread and Post you might find interesting. https://nintil.com/newton-hypothesis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25787745 Due to career and other reasons, there is a publish or perish crisis today. Maybe we can do better by accepting not everyone can publish ground breaking results, and it's okay. There are lots of incompetent people in academia, who later go to upper positions and decide your promotions by citation counts and how much papers you published. I have no realistic ideas how to counter this.

Probably all of the above. Fun fact: No one knows how percentage of GDP the Soviets were spending on their military, but 10% is the low estimate. (See second figure.) The fifth figure should put to rest the idea that the Soviets tried to meet an increase in US military spending in the 80s. They didn’t. In fact, the president exact opposite is true. The US increased spending due to an increase by the Soviets in the mid 1970s. Soviet spending didn’t really increase at all in the 1980s. https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-military-spending/

Valter Longo? Nutrition science is fuzzy. It isn't like physics or mathematics. Water fasting, calorie restriction[2], keeping your protein low and having a joyful life[1] seem convincing to me (Blue Zones), but I am yet another layman here. [1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-ha… [2] https://nintil.com/longevity/

You can find another FAQ here for more related reading https://nintil.com/longevity

> Instead, the starving people were the peasants who had their produce expropriated, which was sold to acquire the imported materials and machinery that the soviets could not yet produce themselves. That's kind of misleading, given how the average USSR citizen had more food on their plate than even in the US https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-food/ ...are you thinking of the pre-WW2 famines?

This was already done under socialism in the eastern side of Europe after the Second World War. Jobs had to be created that were unnecessary, or a single job was split between 2-3 people. Keyword is "full employment" if you want to google it, for example: https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-achieving-full-employment/ Resulted in overmanning (a sort-of "hidden unemployment") and lead to work shortages for new projects.

To be fair: this is not true. > in 1976, only two thirds of Soviet families had refrigerators https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-durable-goods/ Surely not as widespread as in the US, but your view of the USSR might not correspond to reality.

> there's a foreign disinformation campaign smearing the program Do we have any evidence of this? > Remember that time we bankrupted the USSR in an arms race? This time we're doing it to ourselves The Soviets spent 25% of their national income on their military in 1980 [1]. Most years, it was above 10%. In contrast, the United States spends low single digits of its GDP on its military [2]. [1] https://nintil.com/2016/05/31/the-soviet-union-military-spending/ [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS

This links to a lot of good stuff: https://nintil.com/2016/04/09/why-ayn-rand-is-not-and-ought-not-be-tak… As a philosophy / ethics person who has studied and read a lot of philosophers and never her, even from basic argument structures of hers there are fallacies galore that show no sign of being addressed. I think the view is a magnet towards selfish people looking for justification of their views. I think her arguments, when viewed objectively (ironically), have the effect mentioned in the top level comment of pushing people away from the pitfall conclusions she makes.

This guy takes a crack at exactly what you propose. The factors you mention do not undermine the manifesto's thesis. https://nintil.com/2017/08/07/why-so-few-women-in-cs-the-google-memo-i…

Some other hypothesis: - Newton - predicts that most advances are made by standing on the shoulders of giants. This seems true if you look at citations alone. See https://nintil.com/newton-hypothesis - Matthew effect - extends successful people are successful observation to scientific publishing. Big names get more funding and easier journal publishing, which gets them more exposure, so they end up with their labs and get their name on a lot of papers. https://researchonresearch.org/largest-study-of-its-kind-shows-that-th… If I was allowed to speculate I would make a couple of observations. First one is that resources play a huge role in research, so overall progress direction is influenced more by the economics rather than any group. For example every component of a modern smartphone got hyper optimized via massive capital injections. Second one is that this is a real world and thus likely some kind of power law applies. I don't know the exact numbers, but my expectation is that top 1% of researches produce way more output than bottom 25%.

> AI tools and tutors never can and never should replace teachers. This part confused me on several levels. Let's break it down. --- 1. Tutors (human) can not replace teachers on a mass scale True, and the article touches on this: human tutors simply don't scale! 2. Tutors (human) should not replace teachers False. Bloom's 2-sigma problem [0] states that on average, 1-1 tutored students outperform 98% of classroom-educated students. (!!!) Therefore, if we could replace 1:30 education with 1:1 education, the evidence very strongly says that we should. In other words, the only reason we have teachers, instead of tutors, is because we don't have enough tutors. If we had enough tutors, we would simply 1-1 tutor everyone -- assuming our goal is educational achievement. 3. AI tutors can never replace human tutors This is a strange claim. It seems to imply that all technological progress will suddenly cease after today -- not just in AI, but human-computer interfaces, robotics, etc.? (Note: the article doesn't make this specific claim, so perhaps I'm straw-manning here.) I don't expect convincingly human androids for a while. But are androids really necessary for teaching math? GPT-4o seems to do fine! [1] --- As far as the tech goes, I think the only thing missing is memory and personalization. Currently GPT doesn't know what I know, and what I don't know. What is the dependency graph of knowledge? (KhanAcademy had one, but they've taken it down...) Where in that…

First off, because of Bloom's two sigma effect [0], public schools will never be able to match the experience of a good homeschool. Unless you're talking about class sizes of four, each headed by someone who has mastered the material, the level of achievement possible under homeschooling will, in general, vastly outstrip what a public school offers. Second, you can't talk about school funding unless you talk about both administrative bloat and teacher's unions. As long as teachers can keep voting themselves raises and escaping even the most basic levels of accountability for their results, money will not solve the public school crises. And administrative employment has grown by 75% over less than a decade -- 10x the growth in teacher employment during the same time. [1] So sure, you solve the bloat and local control issues, there's plenty of money for instruction and classroom resources. 0: https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/ 1: https://www.educationnext.org/growth-administrative-staff-assistant-pr…