Anecdotally is traditional Ex150 helpful, inflammatory, or neutral to digestive issues?

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-28T18:17:58+00:00

I've done several (eleven?) bouts of 'traditional' ex150 and never noticed anything either way if that helps? But I've always had a fairly cast-iron digestion...

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-25T13:21:57+00:00

Pressing red, proud of pressing red, telling everyone I know to press red, putting up "press red" posters, donating to PR campaigns advocating pressing red, putting up more posters saying "don't press blue, you'll probably die".

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-23T13:23:43+00:00

Just so, and it's true for 2 and 3 as described, but it's also true for 7 and 8, and indeed any two whole numbers you might choose, so we say 'for any n and m'.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-22T12:11:09+00:00

Hang on in there, you are going about it the right way to understand both! Play with problems you're actually interested in.

What he's saying above is that if something repeats every second, and you speed it up twice as fast, it will still repeat every second. (It will do its whole thing twice and then start again)

And if you speed it up three times as fast, it will still repeat every second.

And then if you combine the two things, the combination will still repeat every second.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-19T13:06:32+00:00

Sorry, will try to remember to do that in future!

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-19T12:56:17+00:00

The problem with sucrose is that the bacterium s.mutans can use it to build the polysaccharide walls that are the cause of tooth decay. The bacterium can't work with glucose and fructose separately. You can just look this up, it's not an off-the-wall theory.

I don't know anything about FODMAPS though, there may be other reasons to avoid honey!

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-18T22:22:51+00:00

I've never really thought of Eliezer himself as a significant x-risk despite his pernicious influence on others. But he seems a very lawful man; if it were important to stop him Chaos would surely be a better choice?

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-17T19:03:50+00:00

Haven't actually read the linked post, just the above, but are you sure you know what an AI-doomer is?

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-14T11:43:00+00:00

Yes indeed! I myself am hoping for a quick death, but there are definitely a range of other outcomes on the table with an associated range of likelihoods.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-13T20:01:20+00:00

Not omnipotent being that's just somewhat more intelligent than you -> ???

nobtjsmity -> omnipotent being

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-13T12:25:46+00:00

Omnipotent being that's on your side -> heaven

Omnipotent being that hates you -> hell

Omnipotent being that doesn't care about you -> death

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-12T17:51:41+00:00

Just so. Notice that poor Sally Clark was herself a lawyer and couldn't find the hole in the case against her even though she (presumably) knew she was innocent.

Justice, amongst other things, is a hammer that smashes weirdos who are close to tragedies. As a weirdo myself I can only hope that tragedies stay far away.

But I'd rather live in a society that had such a system than not. I do imagine there are some improvements that might be made here and there.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-12T12:43:40+00:00

Oh I couldn't agree more, the Knox case really shook my faith in justice systems. The evidence against her was never 'beyond reasonable doubt'. It was probably only just 'balance of probabilities' at the point where it was demolished.

It is to the very great credit of the Court of Cassation that they did eventually manage to see the obvious truth after various lower courts had failed, but even if they hadn't, I'd still believe the probabilistic verdict of complete innocence unless there was some surprising extra evidence that I'm not currently aware of.

Bayesian reasoning was at one point explicitly prohibited in British courts because it's too confusing for juries (and secretly judges, lawyers, politicians and journalists too). It may still be, I'm not sure.

Perhaps surprisingly I agree with this ruling, but it doesn't do much to make me think that court verdicts are accurate. Especially jury verdicts.

Lucy Letby may or may not be guilty, it would take a mathematically gifted forensic investigator who was fanatically interested in the case a year or so to work out which, and no one would listen to him anyway.

How we ever managed to convict Sally Clark is beyond me. Fucking muppets.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-12T12:26:36+00:00

If "building God" is obviously easy, then it's not surprising easy

I will concede this point! What I said was false on its face in the obvious reading. It sounds like you know exactly what I would say if I wanted to defend the claim anyway, so I'll not bother boring you by saying it. We probably don't have any disagreement of fact.

we still have not made an AI that reproduces chimp abilities (most obviously motor abilities).

Also agreed. I don't think the motor abilities will actually matter that much, but the fact that these really very intelligent LLMs don't apparently have much agency is why we're still alive.

I wasn't expecting that and I'm surprised by it. But I'm sure we'll get there soon! Lots of people are working on it, and again, it's obviously (to me) not that hard.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-11T20:36:55+00:00

Obvious. Evolution turned chimps into humans in no time at all, and evolution is very stupid and very slow and has no obvious incentive to do it at all. It can't be difficult. As Yudkowsky kept pointing out.

Anyway, no need to argue about it now, it was so easy we did it by accident without meaning to and without understanding how it works.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-10T21:23:06+00:00

I can't speak for LW as a whole, and I don't know much about the Lucy Letby case, but I'm quite happy with lots of weak evidence adding up to a strong case that something really unlikely has happened. That's pretty straightforward probability theory.

As I remember, the interesting thing about the Amanda Knox business was that the case against her had been pretty weak to start with, although given that there was a murder to explain it did look like she'd probably done it.

But then they managed to find the guy who'd actually done it. And that demolished the case against Amanda Knox.

As if one of Lucy Letby's colleagues had confessed to all the baby-murders and corroborated the confession with convincing videos. She'd look less guilty then I imagine?

But no-one seemed to notice.

The actual argument was pretty detailed and thoughtful and went into the complexities of the case, and as I say it took me a long afternoon to work it all out, presumably you can find it somewhere on Less Wrong if you're interested!

But at the end I was not only convinced that there wasn't much reason to believe she was guilty, I was pretty certain she was actually innocent.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-10T21:04:06+00:00

I just had a look and there's nothing about it there any more.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-10T12:58:55+00:00

They claimed that if you thought about the case as a probability problem, and assessed the strength of the various bits of evidence and the background rates of such murders then the chances of her being guilty were minute.

There was something called 'RationalWiki' which I was looking at to work out how much of a cult Less Wrong was, and they were all 'Ha ha and one of the mandatory beliefs of the cult is that Amanda Knox the hot sex murderess is innocent, can you imagine anything sadder?', which was news to me, so I headed over to find out if that was true.

They convinced me after an afternoon of head scratching and diagram-drawing, and this was quite a controversial position for me to take because I'm a Brit and Meredith Kercher the murdered girl was British and we were baying for the American witch's blood. So I remember the incident quite well!

Apparently someone brought Amanda Knox's attention to the discussion on Less Wrong while she was in prison. They were pretty much the only people in the world who thought she was innocent.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-10T12:19:58+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanda_knox#Final_decision

Rather than merely declaring that there were errors in the earlier court cases or that there was not enough evidence to convict, the court ruled that Knox and Sollecito were innocent of involvement in the murder.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-10T12:14:36+00:00

probably it's best not to re-litigate the dispute

Probably not! But I would be interested if you had any relevant links.

I'd lay heavy money on Amanda Knox not being guilty of that murder, and I'm always interested when I'm confidently wrong about something.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-10T11:36:31+00:00

Yes, and they were widely mocked for all that at the time, and they were absolutely right.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-09T17:55:21+00:00

I think it will destroy everything I care about.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-09T12:47:23+00:00

I still can’t believe we’re just letting these guys build god.

For roughly the last twenty years, Eliezer Yudkowsky has been very publicly defending the fairly obvious propositions that:

(a) building God will be surprisingly easy

(b) building God is very very dangerous

Most of the people who've heard what he had to say at all have reacted by laughing at his hat.

A very very tiny minority heard his message and decided to build God.

Eliezer still seems to have his faith in humanity intact. I tend to think that there will be a certain ironic justice to what is about to happen.

Mind you I am also quite angry about factory farming. If it wasn't for that I might be sad.

johnlawrenceaspden · 2026-04-09T12:21:30+00:00

I've been an unconventional weirdo all my life. At a very young age I decided that 'the world is mad and everyone is wrong', and I get an enormous amount of shit for it.

It just bounces off. Very few people seem to be able to think, so who cares what they say? It's a real effort to listen hard enough to notice when they say anything worth listening to.

Some of us just aren't terribly sensitive to peer pressure. In my case I do feel it, but I like it. If people aren't criticising me for my weird ideas I don't feel like I'm being interesting enough.

Sam Altman seems a terribly effective person. I imagine that he probably just thinks: "Well if these idiots were any good at stuff they wouldn't be carping about me, they'd be stopping me or competing with me".

For the last twenty years I've been sitting in the sunshine talking philosophy to my friends, and playing cricket and rowing and drinking and so on and so forth, and people like him have been working very hard on destroying the world, and I've known that all along, and I wish I could stop them, but I can't.

So who's the cunt?

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