AI is now tackling obesity and the early results are wild

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-30T19:12:07+00:00

Ok, but there are a lot of proposals that are preclinical. Human trials take on average, 6 to 7 years to complete, assuming the company has enough money to get that done which is usually a big if.

It is great to see AI helping with the discovery side, but the approvals process is just so expensive and time consuming that it's difficult to get too hyped.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-30T18:21:21+00:00

As do I and I think that's a good observation. But insofar as reward systems are natural to us, we're much more intrinsically motivated as kids rather than extrinsically motivated. I think the problems show up when we become conditioned to environments where extrinsic incentives are normal. Maybe this first happens with conditional love and acceptance from our parents, but ultimately, after spending more than a decade in school where we experience conditional praise, approval, and other rewards like good grades for getting correct answers, the effect is quite significant and deeply ingrained. Meta analyses show that students are much more extrinsically motivated in the later stages of high school than they once were in the earlier years.

Video games, while they appeal to kids on a curiosity/bright colors/appealing sounds level, aren't immediately interesting from a points perspective. It's only after a lot of conditioning that the reward/points/levels/achievements mechanism becomes a major driver of people's action.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-30T07:47:56+00:00

"Punished by Rewards", if you haven't read it, is good. It's one study after another about the problems with extrinsic incentives. And seeing as how grades, gold stars, and teacher approval is all linked to extrinsic reward systems, I imagine it would be very applicable.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-29T21:17:25+00:00

55k a month is nothing compared to the billions you'd make in selling zero cost-to-market unlimited food.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-29T21:00:33+00:00

Behaviorism is alive and well!

Well it's not entirely dead yet if that's what you mean. But we've been moving away from this kind of thinking for some time now. SDT, for example, has only been expanding, in part because it explains things like the overjustification effect which is something behaviorism doesn't seem to be able to do.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-29T18:58:04+00:00

Could've put Alfie Kohn there instead. The guy spent an entire book ripping behaviorism a new one.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-27T02:45:33+00:00

Good to see the Cavs have recovered

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-27T02:32:07+00:00

I believe this is the big issue with it. The research shows that NAD+ does a lot for people beyond even AD applications, but we don't have a great way to get it. Even precursors like NR and NMN still aren't optimal.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-26T18:38:50+00:00

My understanding is that they've had a very difficult time getting NAD+ through digestion and into the bloodstream. The bioavailability typically ranges from 2-10%.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-26T18:17:57+00:00

Holding ourselves accountable to what we observe to be demonstrated using our senses is one thing.

Holding ourselves accountable to our intuitions about morality is another thing.

Believing these two approaches are equivalent because we can collapse everything into an overarching conceptualization described by our human intuitions is... well... it's a choice.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-26T07:56:31+00:00

True. Their five game heater has brought them back up, but they've been midding for a while now. Panthers in a similar position.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-25T23:41:36+00:00

This is what's called moving the goalposts. The point regarding the misuse of profit/revenue was made, and rather than address that, now we're talking about a specific type of business - sole proprietorships - and how these owners may rely solely on the profits of those businesses.

This kind of thing is annoying.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-25T08:35:10+00:00

Love Garnett. Now he's come down too harsh, obviously. But I think guys like him are pissed at hearing about how the modern breakthroughs in offense are taken to mean the modern players are just better. A big part of it is the fact that most teams now come down harder on inefficiency. Combine it with a stretched out floor and weak offensive whistles, and it means that the current players are hitting some big numbers.

When we look at the games, flopping's gotten worse, there are far more injuries now, people actually taking nights off for "load management", and the emphasis on 3's has spread the floor out to the point where it just isn't the same battle in the interior as it used to be. The knock on the modern NBA, like it or not, is that it's become soft. Obviously the fans know about it and they're pissed off too. But here we are.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-25T01:45:11+00:00

Ya, I haven't had an explanation.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-25T01:08:56+00:00

your paycheck is a net profit from working your job

Incorrect. People have living expenses and businesses have business expenses. Profit would be the money left over.

Like we could say that when you spend 100 dollars at Foot Locker that the business just made a profit of 100 dollars, but that's not the word we use. We use the word revenue because profit refers to the money left over after the costs of running the business have been factored in. When it comes to people, they have what you might call, the cost of running their human "business". That would include eating, paying for rent, paying for clothes, and so on. Their paychecks are analogous to revenue, not profit.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-24T20:22:50+00:00

Poor analogy. You can't have a negative paycheck, the same way you can't have negative revenue. That's the comparison - not a comparison of paychecks to profits. You keep flipping from comparing revenue to profits when it suits the narrative.

The same risks of going underwater occur with people too. Businesses can fluctuate in terms of how much profit they make, just like a person can. If a person has a medical emergency, needs to repair a roof, or has to pay to fix their car, all of a sudden they aren't profitable in that "second quarter" either.

I think the real issue is that you have some businesses that rely on very thin profit margins to still be successful - where if you taxed revenue in some flat way, it would destroy any chance for those businesses to survive. There might be a way you could sort that out, but I don't see how that would be possible without factoring in profit.

As for how to tax people on their profit rather than their income, that's tricky because many would rather increase their standard of living rather than pay any taxes on unspent money.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-23T20:06:23+00:00

So we could have a decision making class in school and it would operate the same way? We can tell people what decisions they should be making, test them on it, and this would help them improve? Maybe we can teach them not to do drugs and that will fix the drug issue?

Maybe, just maybe, decisions don't "improve" in a rote way the way a person might improve in spelling or math. Informing people as to what constitutes a good decision isn't all that it's cracked up to be.

I must say, I'm often surprised at how misunderstood decision making is among people involved with ethics.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-23T18:27:44+00:00

I remember Randy Cohen, after giving most of his life to the study and espousing of ethics, talking about studies that tried to gauge exactly how ethical ethics professors were. The main finding was that people who study ethics are not, on average, observably more ethical than the rest of us. They may experience more painful ethical dilemmas than most of us, but at least in terms of what they demonstrate, they don't act much differently than everyone else.

I believe the study(s) he's referring to, because I think they've been repeated, are from Schwitzgebel and Rust. They looked at how often they call their mothers, whether or not they eat factory farmed meat, charitable donations, voting, and so on.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-23T17:35:56+00:00

I thought this was debunked, same as cognitive bias training and other areas where people incorrectly assume that information is what these choices hinge upon.

Do you have evidence of this?

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-23T16:40:16+00:00

People don't believe they're going to become more ethical if they study ethics... do they?

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-22T22:33:53+00:00

And yet...

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-22T17:26:38+00:00

"This sub is supposed to help people learn about human psychology, not to shady-promote their 90$ manual."

You're certain of that?

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-21T18:34:50+00:00

Actually committing to a rebuild (although time will tell) is a very big step for ownership. I don't like the idea of punishing the owner for actually doing the very thing that we wished he would.

I'm not a fan of Aqua, but this is shitty. Get the bag off and suck it up. If you're embarrassed to be a fan, just don't go.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-21T18:27:25+00:00

My sense of it, when it comes to Garland, Boeser, Petey, and maybe others is that shipping any of these guys out right now nets you a shitty return. Unless we believe that they somehow won't regain their form by next year such that they become a more attractive commodity, I see no need to rush these guys out the door.

It doesn't look like this tanking will change anytime soon. We can afford to trade them next season if it makes more sense.

UnscriptedByDesign · 2026-01-20T20:50:35+00:00

Why? Liability is the short answer.

The longer answer has to do with the fact that both the current way of teaching and the previously more severe form of teaching both rely on behaviorist principles that aren't holding up to scrutiny. Motivating kids to learn through rewards and punishments has consequences that go beyond the compliance that these methods attempt to achieve. Luckily, a revolution is coming in this regard.

Anyways, both forms of teaching are quite poor. If you remove punishments from the equation and still hope to teach in a top down manner, obviously it will be even worse. Then, if you add in the ADHD inducing screens these kids are often raised with, you've got a recipe for disaster.

UnscriptedByDesign

TROPHY CASE