https://twitter.com/alexeyguzey/status/1728549209949995299
InquilineKea
Karma: 84
Semaglutide would save more animal lives than doubling the percent of vegetarians (and I have sources)
InquilineKea’s Quick takes
Brain organoids are a way to quickly get functional/morphological significance readouts of intelligence-related genes (or genes related to other functions), so they are useful as a way of studying intelligence.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/science/articles/10.3389/fsci.2023.1148127/full
As a huge, huge moonshot, one could investigate avian brain organoids as an alternative substrate for intelligence (they are way more space-efficient than mammalian brains, and potentially could do way more compute in a small (manageable) volume if appropriately cultured and unbounded...
[Question] How can I see all comments I saved/upvoted like what I can do in LessWrong?
As N=1, I became vegetarian in 7th grade. Extreme levels of disgust-sensitivity [PETA is good at this] fueled this decision and I feel like I want to puke if I taste meat (I suspect disgust-sensitivity isn’t as big of a factor in utilitarian EAs who go veg*)...
The factors were:
personal interactions with chickens I had when staying over at a Woodinville farm (and then personal interactions with a Bellevue Chinese restaurant where I felt angered at how insensitive people were killing the aquarium fish right on site just for dishes (I was seeing murder at site). I stopped eating fish/chicken first, before I stopped eating all the other meats.
PETA [and other veg*n advocacy sites] successfully grossing me out (eg “poop-contaminated meat”) to the extent that I could not stand the taste of meat anymore. I did try fish once for the hell of it last year (when food was low) and still disliked the taste
I was kind of obsessed with animals (Wildlife Factfile, Grolier, watching Wild Discovery, a book on fish my mom once checked out of the Redmond library which gave me intense appreciation of all the different species of fish [1]) and environmental protection even in my very early years [eg I was a super-notorious environmentalist in 2nd grade, and started freaking out about climate change in 5th grade due to an unusually hot summer in Denver]. This is partly because of the green (or at least pro-animals) messages that are sent in a lot of children’s reading material
Intense rage/hypocrisy at how humans were treating animals in general. Also me being mad at my parents for how little they cared [even though I didn’t mind it as much in friends if they didn’t go veg]… (contrarianism against parents...)
a Seattle Times article about calorie restriction (and vegetarian diets are very obviously lower in calories). Along with all the health reasons (eg no saturated fat). Health factors were not the primary factors back then, but I would say that they are overwhelmingly the reason I now stay vegetarian (ofc to me there are still a million arguments for and almost none against, so it doesn’t make sense for me not to be veg*).
During 7th grade, I remember all the vicious vegetarianism debates on Age of Kings Heaven/HeavenGames [lol @ f18fett’s weird arguments against vegetarianism, as well as all the right-wingers who were against it], especially when I joined in with the other compassionate/left-wing forumers on those massive debate threads.
Going vegetarian + going to college early were the two kinds of contrarianism that I took that I am proudest of.
[1] Never realizing that it would cause intense amounts of family fighting when I finally took the plunge and became vegetarian. Ofc, this was not the end of family fighting over food (when I later also decided to turn against rice)
(a good number of people feel just as fine on a vegan diet as a non-vegan one [example] - most of the potential “costs” are in terms of energy/vitality which they will feel if they feel it). I am ovo-vegetarian and I have reasonably high iron levels myself. From the limited studies available, vegans have lower ACM than even vegetarians do.
It’s important for people to get an ION Panel to test for amino acid deficiencies (these are hard to order w/o a doctor)
Scientists found three genes linked with vegetarianism and another 31 genes that are potentially associated.
Several of these genes, according to the study, are involved in lipid (fat) metabolism and/or brain function including two of the top three (NPC1 and RMC1).
“My speculation is there may be lipid component(s) present in meat that some people need. And maybe people whose genetics favor vegetarianism are able to synthesize these components endogenously,” Dr Yaseen said.
=====
4.2. Long Term Health Outcomes
Estimating the long-term health outcomes of eating certain things is difficult because food is highly bound up in the culture we live in and culture correlates to just about every health outcome you could possibly imagine. Even less conveniently, nutritional science is highly anti-inductive; if a particular food group is identified as being healthy people with an interest in being healthy flock to that food group, and people with an interest in being healthy are likely to be healthy for a bunch of reasons regardless of diet.
So here’s a nice headline result: vegetarians have less heart disease with extremely high certainty, and probably less cardiovascular disease and cancer too. Most of the studies in that meta-analysis have had some of the really obvious stuff adjusted away (race, income, etc.) but not all studies adjust for all confounders, and we should be cautious about trusting studies that ‘adjust for confounders’. If you ignore confounders then the answer is clear; eating vegetarian is good for you in every single way we can measure (including, possibly, circulating testosterone in defiance of stereotypes about meat eaters!).
If you are interested in confounders: There are a handful of cool natural experiments, taking groups with reasons to eat certain food but not bother with the associated healthy lifestyles, which are the closest we are likely to come to a true experiment in this area. In particular, the American Adventist Health Studies are pretty much state of the art in the field from what we can see. Adventists have quite unique dietary habits, brought about by religious prohibitions on certain foodstuffs which some Adventist churches follow and some don’t. Consequently, if you are an Adventist you are functionally ‘randomized’ into different food-eating conditions depending on which church you attend, and this randomization can be exploited by researchers.
Based on the Adventist Health Studies, a vegetarian diet increases life expectancy by around 3.6 years. The less meat you eat, the healthier your BMI and the less likely you are to get diabetes.
Overall we might expect lacto-ovo vegetarians to have a health related quality of life around 10% better than a meat eater, with most of this benefit being apparent 20 years after making the switch to a vegetarian diet.
You could complicate this picture a lot (especially by introducing future discounting) but we think the general principle that if you value life-years towards the end of your life you should likely go vegetarian is well demonstrated by the data:
One final point on how meat might affect your lifespan; there is a growing awareness of the fact that industrially produced meat is an ideal breeding ground for zoonotic disease, and that those diseases can mutate and jump to humans very quickly. Previous pandemics such as H1N1 (‘swine flu’) and H5N1 (‘bird flu’) may have originated with farmed animals, and were rapidly spread by the close contact of unhealthy animals and global nature of the meat supply chain. At the margin, eating meat probably increases the probability of a global pandemic but there isn’t good evidence on how much your individual consumption affects things at the margin.
In the model we take the Adventist study result at almost face value, estimating that eating vegetarian will increase your lifespan by 3 years, and include constant low costs due to possible nutritional deficiency and moderate benefits to health that appear later in life.
- EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem by (LessWrong; 28 Sep 2023 23:30 UTC; 318 points)
- EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem by (29 Sep 2023 4:04 UTC; 123 points)
- Vegetarianism is mostly genetic, claim Wesseldijk et al. by (17 Jan 2024 12:24 UTC; 21 points)
- 's comment on EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem by (29 Sep 2023 16:37 UTC; 20 points)
There are many neurofeedback clinics and companies like Peak Brain Institute (they track brain waves and some people report drastic benefits, esp w/cognitive control, in response). The studies could be higher-quality and attract a broader range of people. They could also be way more widespread (also see what Neurable/Neurosity are doing). I tried neurofeedback once and can certify that I did feel very differently afterwards (in a good way!) but these protocol are usually very expensive (near-term AGI makes this matter way less). Many neurofeedback protocol try to increase the ratio of “high cognitive control” brainwaves (like gamma) over “low cognitive control” brainwaves (like the default mode network ones involves in daydreaming or that let mind wandering/outside stimuli overwhelm one’s ability to have consistent plans that stay coherent through overly emotional stimuli)
Alex Milenkovic is studying the brainwaves of gamers! It’s an important population b/c it is so easy to study+draw data out of.
I know Tomas Roy (at the Geneva Neurocenter) has special neurofeedback protocol for people with ADHD (one of his grad students investigates it) - and it is tested/scientific in a way that other protocol are not (though other protocol/montages record more data). I tried out one of them. Another professor at the institute, Daphné Bavelier, studies gamers.
I know some people who have set up a transcranial magnetic stimulation machine.
Jhourney is a startup (with super-legit people) focused on neurofeedback=> meditation.
On the topic of more general mind enhancement/cyborgism, see https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vEtdjWuFrRwffWBiP/we-have-to-upgrade?commentId=7PBCydEDR8zptmLQY
I know many people have dissociated themselves from the nootropics community b/c none have been individually shown to on average be more effective than modafinil, but combinations can make a difference and there are some people who market them and make it frictionless for people to try/test them.
Reducing brain aging rate is also more tractable on average than increasing intelligence (esp b/c most people on Western diets have brains that shrink way faster than they should) ⇒ and is the most important way to maximize a brain’s integrated lifetime total compute, and there are many ways to reduce this.
FYI for the Caesar’s $1500 bonus bet..
“f) Bet Credit stake is not included in any winnings from a redeemed Bet Credit.”
I bet on the Rockies winning against the Padres (they were an underdog) and I only got $2430 out of $1500 invested. If I had used that bet credit on an overdog that won, I would have lost money on net. [this is different for some of the other sites]
----
Also you HAVE to get the FIRST DEPOSIT right on DraftKings—I wrecked my first bet there by depositing only $25 and then placing a microbet just because I was scared… (I should have placed my first microbets on the other sites)
---
Shrug, I think I’m only up $1300 across sites mostly due to some impulsive microbets that choked up my “guaranteed free bets”
For most people, it’s better to use https://www.caichinger.com/blog/2018/04/19/kelly_criterion4/ than expected value
Does the Bonus Bet token for DraftKings only apply for the first wager you put money for? (it’s “up to $5000”, but if you bet for less than $5000 [eg only make a deposit of $500], are you not filled in for 5,000 ever?)
Has GPT4′s release affected things for people here?
Value my time/attention more than ever before (don’t spend time/attention on degenerate things or things [even minor inconveniences like losing what I’m trying to precisely say] that amplify outwards over time and rob my ability to be the highest-impact person I can be). Interesting things will happen in the next 4-5 years.
Be truer to myself and not obsess so much about fixing what I’m weak in that isn’t super-fixable. I have weird cognitive strengths and weird cognitive weaknesses
Freak out way less about climate change (tbh super-fast fusion timelines are part of this)
In general trust my intuition (and what feels right to me) way way way more, and feel much less emotional onus to defend my “weird background” than before (I always seem to have the “weirdest background” of anyone in the room).
I am still just as longevity-focused as I am (especially in the scenario where some slowdown does seem to happen) and think that longevity has relevant for AI safety (slowing down the brain decline of AI researchers is important for getting them to realistically “keep in control with AI” and “cyborg-integrate”)
The upside to downside ratio of Adderall becomes more “worth it” for its level of neurotoxicity risk (also see @typedfemale on twitter)
Also microplastics/nanoplastics too
https://forum.longevitybase.org/t/how-to-reduce-microplastics/126/16
https://waterpurificationguide.com/water-filters-that-remove-microplastics/
The smallest can get through the blood brain barrier and they are this generation’s air pollution
Also how does one stress-test tendency to reveal infohazards when one is under severe stress, like anger, despair, desperation, or mania?
Ideally one would stress-test as little as possible..
Does pretending that one isn’t employed by X (one can have plausible deniability when one says that “one is employed by a stealth AI organization”—and there are enough stealth AI organizations out there that one can pretend to be employed by any of them), when one is in fact employed by X, help reduce the temptation to spread infohazards? (in which case—if someone is secretly employed by institution X but does not want to say that they’re employed by X, how would they pretend not to be a NEET so they wouldn’t face the social stigma associated with being NEET?)
FYI—the emotional toll of keeping secrets can be lower for some people with trolling/shitposting tendencies b/c there are fewer expectations for them to produce a directionally truthful answer to prompts about their main project. roon is kind of a shitposter, and many people don’t expect him to provide a truthful answer on what projects he is working on. Trolls/shitposters (or just people with crazy ADHD) also have less difficulty with announcing alternative unserious projects they’re working on (which can serve as decoys)! [or they may also present themselves as having a relationship with X very different from their actual relationship with X]. ALSO trolls/shitposters just know how to distract people away from temptation (this does not always work esp in front of extremely high-agency players, but works enough to be worth mentioning).
Also, DO NOT MAKE INFOHAZARDS HILARIOUS (the more hilarious, the more tempting it is for some to share them).
The volatility of some people drastically decreases when given permanent economic security—for some other people they are inherently volatile whether or not they have economic insecurity. Some people have something they’re really missing that (once filled up with economic security or once their emotional neediness needs are filled) ⇒ makes them much more reliable to not get into emotionally volatile situations long-run.
I’m also curious if psychedelic use is predictive of leaking (or not leaking) infohazards. I would guess that some people are much more risky with them, while it does not affect the ability of others to leak infohazards (they increase volatility in some and decrease volatility in othe. It could be that some people may only be employable at infohazard-y corporations once they swear off all unsupervised psychedelic use (just like I know EAs who quit psychedelic use upon entering politics).
Also as a final note—I think others are more tempted to to leak secrets if they think they have access to highly desireable information...
PS: READ ABOUT THE MANHATTAN PROJECT—THAT WAS CHOKE-FULL OF (TIME-LIMITED) INFOHAZARDS.
How does one translate mathematical/high-level agenty-foundations guidelines into code/instructions that an RL agent (or any AI agent, including a scaling laws one) can follow?
Has anyone noticed that nightmares are also associated with “bad trips” from psychedelics, given that psychedelics are “waking dreams”? (the fear of a bad trip is what interferes with many of the profoundly beneficial effects of psychedelics transpiring to a broader population ⇒ significantly blunts their “healing potential”)
Was Cremieux considered to be one of the HBD/eugenics people?
[Twitter also kept pushing him into my feed even though I didn’t follow him...]
If you look at the schedule of events(https://schedule.manifest.is/Manifest?view=text), Jonathan Anomaly is the only person who is very clearly HBD (the Collins allegedly, and then there’s Stephen Hsu, who’s HBD-adjacent). From the surface, it doesn’t look like the HBD participants got any extra-special visibility? (though they just might be especially conspicuous in how unfiltered they are in bringing the topics out ) Gene Smith is there and has a post on gene editing for intelligence but AFAIK has never been associated with the HBD crowd (and doesn’t get into the controversial social aspects) [also, gene-editing, unlike eugenics, can help empower the “have nots”].