TechTakes

In the ancestral environment, infection was a top killer. Today it's a rounding error. Our immune systems are therefore set by evolution to be far too sensitive for the modern environment.

Bro what. We keep producing stronger bacteria.

Somehow I’m hoping that this is the usual eugenics rather than abject stupidity.

I don't think any of the words on that shirt are in the Bible.

Nonzero chance AI kills us before we reach the end of this probably-years-long-process, but we plant trees in whose shade we may never sit. 

You know, I didn't think it would be necessary to discuss the meaning of that line in a space where people ostensibly take long-termism seriously.

Remove one or two of those reward circuits, especially if they're poorly adapted to the modern environment, and the human becomes more generally capable. I suspect that my own inability to feel love is one example, the amygdalectomy is another, and the general pattern of high-IQ people being somewhat autistic is a third.

I managed not to click on the linked blog post about the author's inability to feel love.

S.R. Constantin's after-action report on MetaMed had a lot of this, like what happened when they decided that doctors were statistically illiterate and did not know about the power of checklists:

Some of our founding inspirations were the work of Gerd Gigerenzer and Atul Gawande, who showed that medical errors were the cause of many deaths, that doctors tend to be statistically illiterate, and that systematizing tools like checklists and statistical prediction rules save lives. ... Many of the improvements in systematization that were clearly “good buys” have, in fact, been implemented in hospitals since Gawande and Gigerenzer first wrote about them. We never saw a clear-cut case of a patient whose doctors had “dropped the ball” by giving them an obviously wrong treatment, except where the patient was facing financial hardship and had to transfer to substandard medical care. I think doctors don’t make true unforced errors in diagnosis or treatment plan that often; and medical errors like “operating on the wrong leg” that happen in fast-paced decisionmaking environments were necessarily outside our scope.

They also found that base rates work much better than personalized medicine which is exactly what Kahneman and Tversky find.

TL;DR it’s much harder than they thought it would be

Every time. The only succes they had in the wider space seems to be the EA nets. (And even those had some hiccups when people used the toxic nets to fish).

Re brain surgery.

Finally we are reaching The Expanse level of plans from LW, where they did brain surgery on people to remove their empathy.

@gerikson @BlueMonday1984

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eq2aJt8ZqMaGhBu3r/zach-stein-perlman-s-shortform?commentId=a2xgz7bevKKHQ8BEj

WTF

Definitely not a cult