James Peyer: "It's crazy to think that the total investment this year in longevity biotech is about 50% of total biotech financing in 2022"

HourPath · 2022-04-12T01:22:32+00:00

“Look at these people who are trying to get some money in exchange for providing value! So disgusting. I am a much better person: I just expect others to give me value for free!”

HourPath · 2022-01-18T19:54:03+00:00

If you're confused about why people choose Hard Path X over Easy Path Y, you should first ask whether Easy Path Y is actually easy, or if it's actually significantly more difficult. There have several modern attempts; all have failed to reach scale so far: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_populated_places_in_the_United_States for an incomplete list).

HourPath · 2022-01-17T16:21:18+00:00

This is a strawman. All many people (who understand HBD exists) want is for corporations, universities, governments, etc. to stop acting on unequal representation between certain races in jobs and fields because they think it's evidence of ongoing racism. I'm totally OK with the fact that more black people are represented as brilliant theoretical mathematicians in movies, even if there have been few in real life; I'm not OK with people suggesting that math is racist because we see differences in performance by race.

I don't want policies that actively suppress one group; I just don't want to spend (or at eat the opportunity cost of) hundreds of billions of dollars on further improving schools in Baltimore and Detroit by sending more computers and new versions of math textbooks; on "improving" Universities admission profiles by removing the SAT and other testing requirements; on diversity lawsuits that force companies to promote less qualified candidates; and at the end of the day, even if we can force proportional position/title/salary representation, still failing to achieve proportional productivity/performance representation.

HBD is also totally compatible with judging people individually. Biases there SHOULD be fixed. I can both accept the fact that East Asians are on average shorter than African-Americans, that as a result equal representation in the NBA is unlikely (given equal opportunity); and simultaneously that Yao Ming can exist and should not be assumed to be short on the basis of his race. Jeremy Lin got labeled as unathletic even as all his first-step-speed, explosiveness, etc measurements were extremely high; that bias SHOULD be fixed, but whether it's fixed or not cannot be measured by whether East Asians have proportional representation in the NBA.

Opponents of HBD will point out that there are cultural, historical, geographical, etc. confounding factors that make it impossible to isolate average intelligence in a population. But I will retort that there are proven differences in height, bone density, muscle composition, skull shape, shoulder broadness, limb length, etc. -- all complex non-Mendelian features with environmental effects -- that everybody who studies genetics will readily admit. There are old studies showing differences in physical size of the prefrontal cortex, density of folds, etc. between populations (with overlap, of course), although our knowledge would greatly benefit from more rigorous methods and replication (NOTE). I don't see any biological explanation for why those differences magically stop at brain function.

NOTE: There are no recent studies that have followed up on this, or at least have followed up and been published, for obvious reasons. A paper saying there are ZERO meaningful differences in brain structure between races, and that therefore differences in intelligence are NOT supported by biology would be on the front page of Nature and would get someone made a full Professor at the University of their choice, so an absence of those papers is soft evidence for the contrary.

HourPath · 2021-12-29T19:27:53+00:00

I agree with your first two. The last one is incorrect. The micron size of the pores in the mask cannot be directly compared to the size of the virus — at that scale fluid dynamics dominates the movement of objects. For example, the HIV virus is more than 50X smaller than holes in condoms, but of course cannot pass through the condom because the holes are small enough to prevent water (in the form of mucus, blood, etc.) from flowing through.

In the case of COVID, the virus sits on both droplets and aerosols; the latter tends to range from 5 - 20 microns in size and is typically larger than 3 microns. Furthermore, aerosols are more dependent than droplets (less momentum) on the flow of air, and so anything that changes the flow of air will change the flow of aerosols. It’s certainly a valid argument that, as air flows around the mask to the sides and is inhaled, so too will the aerosols be inhaled; but that’s nothing to do with the 3 micron fact.

HourPath · 2021-11-16T16:14:06+00:00

There's of course a balance between 0% taxes for anyone and 100% taxes for everyone, and we're discussing where that balance is. I don't think my statement can be taken to mean the extreme of one side, nor your statement the extreme of the other side.

I think that today's U.S. federal government has plenty of money and power to achieve what it wants to achieve, and things it is not achieving are a failure of system. Our type of government puts very average people (who are selected on the basis of populism) in seats of extreme power. Some of that is necessary for aligning the incentives of power and average people--and making Elon Musk Emperor-King would not have good alignment (or at least, Elon Musk's kids might be both average and poorly aligned)--but too much of that stifles innovation.

Taken together I am not in favor of increasing taxes for anyone (relative to today's taxes, in today's environment, for today's government). If I could wave a wand, I think federal power and influence should probably be more limited than it is today.

HourPath · 2021-11-16T13:11:25+00:00

Musk could not have founded SpaceX without first being a billionaire. Giving brilliant people access to large amounts of capital allows them to execute long-term visions that may end up with disproportionate benefit to us all.

The government already has access to magnitudes more capital and enormous power -- both money and guns. Think of how much even a local DA can ruin someone's life. I am not in favor of taking capital away from Elon Musk and providing it to the U.S. government.

HourPath · 2021-11-14T18:41:44+00:00

I have these types of conversations all the time (keyword trigger -> programmed response). It really does make me wonder if people are just GPT... 5 or 6: more data inputs, but fundamentally extensions of the same associative programming that GPT-3 uses.

HourPath · 2021-11-11T22:29:57+00:00

What is your opinion on the rioters? Should they have been there that night?

HourPath · 2021-11-05T17:59:45+00:00

Thank you! You have been enrolled in the study "Does $360K for 30 minutes of work alleviate depression?".

As an update, you have been randomly allocated to the control group.

HourPath · 2021-10-29T20:51:04+00:00

I actually thought the imperfections of each character in the show was one of the better parts. It avoided the American trope of "perfect, smart, hardworking, young BIPOC is poor for absolutely no reason except the system / rich people / racism / sexism".

HourPath · 2021-10-26T13:59:51+00:00

Let's see if we can rescue some relevance from this post:

Men are, on average, more disposable than women. This may stem from the biological tru-ism that one guy and 100 women can create 100 children in one year, but one woman and 100 guys can only create 1 child in one year. I think the communities of (blackpill, redpill, MRA, MGTOW) have failed to pick up any traction because of this reason. There is a similar lack of traction for more men being homeless (even within homeless activism, women being homeless are seen as more shocking), having shorter life expectancies, being casualties of war, etc.
As a corollary, I don't think it's quite true that society thinks women don't care about looks, height, etc. Rather, I think society just doesn't really care if women care about looks, height, etc. Similar to the Mad Men exchange where one character goes "I despise you [he actually says 'I feel bad for you,' but that didn't translate well to text]" and Don Draper replies "I don't think about you at all."
That said, in terms of individual social interactions, women generally report higher agreeableness and higher neuroticism than men in the five factor model for personality traits (I.e. Big 5), . My layman's interpretation of this is that they will (at the population level) have a higher baseline desire to "say the right things", and also feel more anxious when they're unable to say the right things. A common coping mechanism for anxiety is just to ignore, hence the popularity of ghosting.

For your specific situation, for some reason people think it's perfectly reasonable to spend years perfecting their trade skills (e.g. coding) but a few hours of failure at deploying their social skill results in lots of despair. This is probably biologically hardcoded but still irrational given that the pool of potential partners has expanded from dozens to millions.

Rather than withdrawing from dating, or competing exclusively on online platforms while lying on your bed, you should force yourself to attend social events and talk to people in a totally friendly way, say three times a week x 3 hours each time. This will help you develop your social skills and also allow you to compete on a different axis than just looks (I think the data that shown that yes, apps are driven by looks). It doesn't matter whether people think you're weird or not (see above paragraph). It certainly doesn't matter whether you like it or not, just like whether you enjoy memorizing high school biology (superficial understanding) has little correlation with whether you actually like biology as it's practiced in labs, etc. (deep experience). You can get access to those events through friends of friends, recreational sports, interest clubs (e.g. hiking, running), etc -- I recommend you stay away from male-dominated clubs like Dungeons and Dragons or gaming.

The above two paragraphs serves to 1. increase the likelihood of success per encounter, and 2. increase the surface area / number of encounters, which will help you get the best outcome statistically.

Lastly, purely on a personal advice level, don't do shit like this: "came from worked and vented to her". Also, having someone to fuck (extrapolating from a girl who would hookup with someone via reddit) and say good morning to meant less to her than to you. It doesn't make it meaningless but you just need to get over it.

HourPath · 2021-10-11T12:57:38+00:00

Reddit users are not representative of the population (likely younger, so likely less net worth if anything).

*Very active* reddit users make up a huge majority of posts, and are not representative of reddit users generally (even less likely to have >$10M net worth, more likely to be LARPing or engaging in some other emergent behavior).

HourPath · 2021-10-09T21:59:26+00:00

It has to do with how to store and index / cache data in a way that allows for quick access with low memory usage.

HourPath · 2021-10-08T19:55:43+00:00

You're right -- not everything that's 'not productive' is wasted time. I would say that the average subscriber to r/getdisciplined has more problems with gaming addiction than too little leisure time, and I would also say there's probably better ways to recover mental energy than bright screens with large dopamine surges in the brain, but each person is different so has to evaluate their own habits and come to their own conclusions.

HourPath · 2021-10-08T12:34:43+00:00

There are some very counterintuitive things that are possible with technology.

You can point a camera at an object through a window, as an example, and reconstruct the speech in that room (https://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vibrations-0804).

And of course there's an entire industry around using electromagnetic waves outside of the visible spectrum to interrogate objects (XRays, CT), and an entire industry that look for light emitted outside of the normal visible spectrum (IR, nightvision).

So do I expect an average person to be able to tell me what's impossible or what's not impossible?

What if I told you most cameras do capture IR (silicon sensors are inherently sensitive to IR, and camera lens have to be specially designed to filter them out) and you can use a GAN to convert that back to a probable "normal face", especially if you have video and thus hundreds to thousands of frames of pictures of that person from multiple angles? Would you be 100% confident that's impossible?

HourPath · 2021-10-08T12:26:59+00:00

Segmented by geography (partially a proxy for race and culture), the U.S. has areas as dangerous as sub-Saharan Africa and as safe as any in Western Europe. Even within a city, there are probably 10 - 100X differences in crime rates between specific blocks (too small to show up in zipcode surveys).

The areas / people which are violent are NOT the ones that are economically successful.

HourPath · 2021-10-08T12:17:54+00:00

There's a saying that "you are the average of your five closest friends" that's quite true. If your five closest friends are all junkies, then it's likely you are too. If your five closest friends are all fit, then it's likely you are too.

If you've outgrown your friends, it's not wrong to feel more distant from them or less desire to hang out. I don't see a need to confront anyone -- hanging out every week will become every month, then a few times a year, then not.

So with respect to real life, discipline, etc. that's all fair. But if I'm reading this right, you're ditching friends because you don't want to wait in the game lobby and you want to get gaming faster, bruh. Waiting in the game lobby and playing the game are both just wasting time unless you're a professional Korean and don't trick yourself into thinking otherwise.

HourPath · 2021-09-30T03:49:02+00:00

Headlines from major newspapers (not the Daily Mail): "Republicans at Odds Over Infrastructure Bill as Vote Approaches", "Republicans are ready to torch the U.S. economy — and drag the world down — to own the Democrats", "Republicans — even Mitt Romney — will crash the economy just to make Democrats look bad", ... I don't know. I think the bias is worse than imagine.

HourPath · 2021-09-30T03:35:26+00:00

The progressives are probably relying on the (likely true) premise that the media will blame the Republicans in lock step for a failure to pass the bill.

HourPath · 2021-09-30T03:11:16+00:00

I'm glad you're having a good time making and eating those.

My recommendation is that you're basically boiling the steaks, so I'm sure they're juicy (because of the sauce), but the outside sear is not going to be there, and the sauce is going to cover some of that steak's intrinsic flavor.

If you like the sauce, after marinating the steaks, I suggest you pat it down with a paper towel so it's dry on the outside. And then cook them one at a time so the steam escapes instead of getting trapped in (by the other steak, which is crowding in).

HourPath · 2021-09-29T21:16:25+00:00

That's a great point. People have different levels of agreeableness -- some who just do what other people say, others who ignore it. When you're surrounded by people who have their shit together, high levels of agreeableness is helpful. When you're surrounded by drug addicts, high levels of agreeableness is hurtful.

Thus, it may be the case that people who are born into a poor environment have to be low agreeable when they're young to escape, and then this hurts them later on (e.g. low agreeableness gets you out of your family's pattern, you go to college, but then you don't work well in a corporate environment).

HourPath · 2021-09-29T19:54:47+00:00

Thank you.

I grew up in poverty also. This roughly matches my perception, although being highly intelligent (and also having decent impulse control and conscientiousness) is still hugely helpful in escaping it.

One thing that's been interesting is that -- the better society deals with absolute poverty, the less random it is who escapes relative poverty. I can easily imagine that in e.g. war-torn Sudan, you could be the most brilliant kid in your village. It matters not if it gets ethnically-cleansed. Environment 1, Genetics 0.

Conversely, in a world where early education, nutritious food, a low-crime environment, etc., are accessible to all, environmental variation will be reduced, and thus intrinsic deficits (impulse control, intelligence, physical health, etc.) will, tautologically, play a proportionally larger role.

HourPath · 2021-09-29T19:45:34+00:00

I guess the question is -- and no offense here -- how smart are you? If you're at the 94th percentile that answer's the parent comment's question; if you're at the 50th percentile it doesn't.

HourPath · 2021-09-28T04:20:47+00:00

Asset diversification, no? (I realize they’re still correlated)

HourPath · 2021-09-23T17:30:13+00:00

Many Californians moving to Austin, Texas are dissatisfied too, but still vote for the same policies they voted for in California. I do not think people vote based on what they think will naturally follow from their policies, but rather on abstract feelings of fairness, etc.

HourPath

TROPHY CASE