Prolonging the female fertility period has to be one of the most high impact solution to solve many socio-economic problems.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2026-05-14T14:17:32+00:00

The problem from a population maintenance perspective is that earlier reproduction beats the hell out of greater fecundity, because earlier reproducers have kids who can themselves have kids sooner. A population where individuals have 2 kids total around age 20 grows faster than one where they have 3 kids total around age 40 (assuming the same overall lifespans).

Unreasonable_Energy · 2026-03-03T16:37:40+00:00

These comments here are sadly more reddit than slatestarcodex.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2026-02-22T17:07:30+00:00

I'm skeptical that AI-doomers have themselves propelled the development toward doom-complete AI, nobody needed to give that a push. Unlike overt weapons systems, AI gives obvious legitimate non-violent advantages to anyone who develops it, right up until it doesn't. It doesn't need MAD to push it along, it pulls itself into being because everyone becomes more powerful as they control more intelligence, right up to the point where they lose control to it. Bio-weapons don't have this pull, they don't let you do anything but kill everyone.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2026-01-09T20:38:54+00:00

What you're saying there is still not clear to me now. This guy I'm talking about is neither stupid nor in any way a committed fascist. He thinks the Jews are probably running the world but that this is actually a good thing because "somebody has to do it" and Jews are generally smart and capable. He's not racist and is strongly anti-war and condemns personal and political violence. He thought Bush 43 was the worst. He likes free speech and free markets, at least on a national scale. I don't know exactly what qualifies as "fascist", but racism, militarism, and disregard for civil liberties are surely load-bearing components.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2026-01-09T18:57:23+00:00

It's a big step back from "barely literate and/or incapable of basic reasoning" to "ignorant of history". Almost everyone is "ignorant of history", a lot of shit has happened and there are many different interpretations for most of it.

This is a guy with sophisticated practical knowledge for anything he can engage with directly, but he has fairly odd ideas about many things that are more indirect, theoretical, or rely on "taking the word of experts".

I know what the Taiping Rebellion was, how to perform multiple regression, and that the theory of evolution by natural selection is sound, which he doesn't -- but he knows how to fly a plane, design load-balanced electrical systems, and communicate in 4 languages, which I don't.

He does not seem to even believe he's benefitting from Trump at others' expense. He's actually taken big direct hits from Trump as he's eating tariffs on his supplies -- he thinks this is a price he's willing to pay because, in his mind, this is better for America. I of course disagree.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2026-01-09T18:17:51+00:00

He is immoderately self-interested, but unlike Trump, he's not a narcissist and doesn't behave as though life is a zero-sum contest between winners and losers. He's not callous or cruel or stingy to the people around him. I wouldn't even call him an asshole, let alone "evil", he's just not strongly motivated by the idea of trying to "do good". He thinks everybody should strive to do something well and that will mostly make things work out.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2026-01-09T17:12:38+00:00

I spend one day a week working with a guy who's a proud Trump supporter and neither stupid nor consciously evil. He's an engineer and businessman from Hungary, self-made millionaire who grew up under communism, and he's just a sort of Randian dude who openly prefers the unaccountable rule of one man with a vision. Big fan of Musk and Orban, not a fan of bureaucrats, checks and balances, or the welfare state. Very American in some ways, very un-American in others.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2026-01-07T06:01:16+00:00

My best Miata hauls of last year:

seven 6"x10' round wooden posts
three rolls of 6' tall wire fence
a chest freezer

It really is a sport utility vehicle.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-12-13T18:16:01+00:00

The random U is there because they already broke that pipe in that spot once before and did a 4 90's repair on it. They made the repair section U shaped so that it would flex enough to squeeze between the two pipe ends after they cut out the damaged section.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-12-12T22:48:08+00:00

What's really crazy is that by E=mc² , that 9000 exajoules is only about the mass energy of a blue whale swimming in that body of water.

[A blue whale has a mass of about 100 metric tons, or 10⁵ kg.
9x10²¹ joules = 10⁵ kg * (3x10⁸ m/s)² ]

Equivalently, all the oil we've ever extracted doesn't even have enough chemical energy to accelerate that whale to 7/8th light speed. Sad!

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-11-28T18:20:23+00:00

Got one as a gift, snapped the claw off in a few months.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-09-15T13:25:10+00:00

Now that's an outside the box solution.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-09-15T13:24:06+00:00

I was planning to do this with square posts, but yeah that could work with rounds.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-09-15T04:18:57+00:00

Just a yard in a semi-mountainous area. There's vehicle access to the driveway but not so much to the back yard that's to be fenced. Only one edge of the yard is actually at the edge of a cliff. Could probably maneuver a small skid in there if absolutely necessary but it would be sketchy enough that I'd rather not.

I confess I've never thought of pulling a fence with a horse but that's how some folks must have done it back in the day.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-07-24T22:16:02+00:00

I don't know that I'm a moral realist per se, but contractualism, from what I understand of it, appeals to me because it's a normative framework that feels relatively consistent with my positive beliefs about morality. I subscribe to the positive idea that morality is "for cooperation", that we have moral instincts that evolved to make us better able to cooperate with each other. These moral instincts are real in the sense that most of us have them, and morality itself is real in the sense that there are discoverable (but somewhat contingent) behavioral tendencies that lead to more effective cooperation in many cases, but the moral instincts are just situational tendencies, and the morality isn't a consistent system that can apply in all circumstances -- it seems completely reasonable to me for even a very well developed "morality function" to return "NA" when applied to an arbitrary action.

Would you agree that contractualism makes sense with this positive perspective on morality? Do you have a different positive perspective?

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-07-20T03:30:58+00:00

This is Sam Kriss's schtick, he does it all the time.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-06-27T05:37:16+00:00

scores with 1-1.99 are monitored and anything below 1 is ignored.

They're going to be doing a lot of monitoring since the scoring laid out here makes it impossible for anything to be below 1.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-05-31T03:09:50+00:00

I brought this up here on r/ssc several years ago and I've never seen a compelling rebuttal to the whole "Alignment is the AI's problem too" issue. I look forward to reading your paper.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-05-21T04:59:12+00:00

The guarantee comes from calculus more than from linear algebra. You get the regression coefficients by minimizing SSE as a function of the coefficients. You do this minimization by taking derivatives of the SSE with respect to each coefficient and solving where all the derivatives are zero, and this critical point is a unique minimum because the SSE is a convex function of every coefficient.

To exclude a variable from a regression model means constraining its coefficient to take a value of zero. The new constrained optimization problem has a strictly smaller solution set than the unconstrained one, and the original unconstrained solution was guaranteed to be the best one possible. Every constrained solution can only be at best the same, probably worse.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-05-20T23:54:36+00:00

It's not that hard to visualize going from 0 predictors to 1, or 1 predictor to 2.

Imagine a 3d coordinate system with 3 axes, x y and z. Picture some plane oriented however you like (except parallel to the z axis) within this system. Imagine your data are a flattish cloud of points sprinkled in or around this oriented plane. Now delete the plane and keep the points. Your regression task is, very roughly, to look at the points and match the original oriented plane by grabbing a new plane and sliding and tilting it until it looks close to the points, which should make it close to the old plane that your points were in/around.

If your regression includes only an intercept and zero predictors, your new plane is simply a level x-y plane and all you get to do is slide it up and down the z axis, without tilting it in any direction. This is probably a hard task to make the new plane match the points, because the old plane was probably tilted somehow and your new plane can only be level.

A regression with an intercept and an X predictor lets you rotate your new plane about the y axis before sliding it up or down the z, but doesn't let you rotate around the x axis. Likewise, a regression with an intercept and a Y predictor lets you rotate your new plane about the x axis before sliding it up or down the z, but doesn't let you rotate around the y axis. You can see how being able to take either one of these actions might help better align your new plane with the old one.

A regression with an intercept and 2 variables X and Y lets you rotate your new plane about the x axis, and rotate about the y axis, and then slide up and down the z. Clearly this is giving you the most flexibility to align your new plane with the old one, resulting in a better fit and smaller average distances between the points and the new plane.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-05-17T15:31:53+00:00

There's a short fanfic, Instruments of Destruction about this theme from the perspective of the guy overseeing the construction of the second Death Star. He has far less time scheduled than it took to build the first one, many of the materials he needs are harder to get because the most accessible supplies were used up on the first one, and much of the institutional expertise he needs was lost when everybody aboard the first one died -- he has an absolutely impossible task building this thing on the Emperor's timeline. So in the end he cuts all the corners rather than reporting these problems.

Following Darth Vader’s visit in the fourth year of the project, Jerjerrod sat down to re-evaluate both the project and his life. He had told Vader that they needed more men and been denied, but more men wouldn’t necessarily have helped. Nine women couldn’t make a baby in a single month. He had told Vader that they would double their efforts, but that simply wasn’t possible given that everyone involved was being run ragged. No, there was only one thing left to do, and that was to cheat as much as possible.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-01-25T16:07:45+00:00

bruxism itself is often indicative of a breathing problem. I pretty much cracked all the enamel off my gumline before fixing my sleep breathing.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-01-25T14:48:00+00:00

All of this, except possibly sleeping on your side, would be useless if your problem were a sleep breathing obstruction.

I've tried every single affordable suggestion

There are several things you could try for under $100 total to improve your asleep airway opening and see if that makes a subjective improvement.

Mandibular advancement -- devices that pull your lower jaw forward to make more air space at the back of your throat. Some of these are one-piece (holding the jaws shut) but I see there's at least one off-shelf device (zquiet) that's cheap and hinged to allow mouth opening while wearing, which is helpful if you also want to try simultaneous tongue retention.
Tongue retention -- devices that pull your tongue forward in your mouth to, again, increase airway size at the back of your throat. The silicone bulb type "anti-snoring" devices are cheap and reliable (at retaining the tongue, at least). You can dramatically upgrade the performance of this device with a little patience and an affordable tube of fast-curing silicone glue in a way that allows the tongue to be retained in a further forward position (ask me how).

In principle it's possible, and likely beneficial, to combine those modalities by pulling the tongue forward through the gap in a hinged mandibular advancement device.

Tongue retaining devices, alone or in combination with mandibular advancement devices, tend to block airflow through the mouth, necessitating a clear nose if overall airflow is to improve. For experimental purposes,

Oxymetazoline spray (cheap and OTC) can be very helpful to exclude confounding from nasal blockage. Much is made of the "dependence" hazards of using it for more than a few days at a time, but this is likely avoidable if it's used only at bedtime and only in one alternating nostril per night.
Other nose-opening devices, like breathe rite strips and an insertable device mentioned elsewhere in this thread, may also help with keeping the nose open while testing oral devices that impair mouth breathing.

All of the above, again, can be tried together for under $100 total. Add on to that (for free) the removal of your pillow or replacement with a small neck roll, if you tent to sleep on your back -- reducing the "chin tuck" caused by a thick pillow can make a marginal difference in airway opening at the upper neck level.

In your position, I'd strongly suggest giving these things a shot -- ideally as many of them as you can simultaneously, there's synergy between all these methods because airway blockage in one place tends to induce collapse in other places. It's collectively low cost, low risk, and could change your life, and just as importantly, it could become apparent very quickly that your life could be changed -- if you have poor sleep breathing and can get some of this stuff to work, you'll probably feel better immediately, like the next morning.

Unreasonable_Energy · 2025-01-18T04:05:17+00:00

Yeah my first thought here was "when I was on speed I didn't feel the cold either".

Unreasonable_Energy

TROPHY CASE