My favorite quote from flipping through LessWrong to find something passingly entertaining:
You only multiply the SAT z-score by 0.8 if you're selecting people on high SAT score and estimating the IQ of that subpopulation, making a correction for regressional Goodhart. Rationalists are more likely selected for high g which causes both SAT and IQ
(From the comments for "The average rationalist IQ is about 122".)
Saying that Excel is not and never was a good solution for any problem feels like a rather blinkered, programmer-brained technique.
xcancel link, since nitter.net is kaput.
New diet villain just dropped. Believe or disbelieve this specific one, "fat" or even "polyunsaturated fat" increasingly looks like a failure as a natural category. Only finer-grained concepts like "linoleic acid" are useful for carving reality at the joints.
Reply:
This systematic review and meta-analysis doesn't seem to indicate that linoleic acid is unusually bad for all-cause mortality or cardiovascular disease events.
Yud writes back:
And is there another meta-analysis showing the opposite? I kinda just don't trust those anymore, unless somebody I trust vouches for the meta-analysis.
Ah, yes, the argumentum ad other-sources-must-exist-somewhere-um.
Yud is against seed oils, right? Or was that Siskind? I have a vague memory of the topic coming up but was unable to substantiate it in the 22 seconds of archive-searching that I was willing to do.
"What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?"
su;dr
(saw URL; didn't read)
You don't even have to be well-known to get crank attention. Post anything with "quantum" in the title on the arXiv and they'll find your e-mail.
Source: this is one of the few times when I can say "trust me, bro" and be entirely sincere about it
eyelid twitches
One thing that may not be visible from outside the profession is that there are a lot of steps in between air-hockey tables and the research frontier, especially for the part of the frontier that gets the most press — black holes, Large Hadron Collider stuff, quantum computing, etc. Wanting to understand any of those things at a level better than (bong rip) man, like, quantum mechanics, dude, requires systematic study. Doing that entirely on one's own might not be impossible, but it's damn hard.
Today's news....