Misc

Adversarial Collaboration by Daniel Kahnman

Link

Orexin and the quest for more waking hours

This post claims that a genetic mutation causes some people to produce more orexin, which reduces the need for sleep. We didn’t evolve this mutation as orexin promotes feeding and energy expenditure, but we don’t really have that problem in the modern world.

Patenting naturally occurring chemicals

There’s no incentive to use naturally occurring chemicals as medicine, as you can’t patent them.

The end of Europe’s energy crisis is in sight

This article claims that the massive reduction in gas prices in Europe in winter ’22 is thanks to our “advanced capitalist economies”: we sent a strong price signal, and everyone responded.

Societies change their minds faster than people do

This article claims that changes in public opinion don’t always come from people changing their minds, but come from older generations being “replaced” by younger generations. This is true for whether communist books should be removed from libraries, legalized abortion, and government spending on black lives. However, legalized gay marriage seems to be due to individuals changing their mind.

(I imagine that newer generations being larger amplifies this effect.)

Axiology, Morality, Law

This post distinguishes between axiology, morality and law:

We distinguish between all of these, and should prioritize law-over-mortality-over-axiology. The reason is this order gets a lot of benefits like social trust, and we’re often not smart enough to operate directly in the axiology frame (we should trust our moral instincts!).

Relation to offsets

The axiology/morality/law framing leads to allowing “offsets” in axiology, but not in morality or law. Killing one person to save another is wrong, but carbon offsets are OK.

The Demographic Catastrophe

Post.

Reasons for fertility decline

Economic decline

Economic intervention

Probably won’t work:

Social decline

Solutions

Inadequate Equilibria

From the book review.

The story of Viktor Zhdanov

Article. Viktor Zhdanov convinced WHO to try to eradicate smallpox. This was possible at the time due to (1) vaccines existed and could be easily transported, (2) that smallpox only spreads through humans, (3) that WHO funded this across the world.

Activated Charcoal for Hangover Prevention

Post.

Alcohol vs. ethanol

Alcohols are assembled from carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms. When >2 carbons are present, it is an ethanol (aka ethyl alcohol). Ethanol is found in beer, wine, and liquor.

Example ethanol molecule

Digestion cycles

Digestion happens in a cyclic process:

This means that drugs can be digested for a long period of time (hours).

Ethanol digestion process

What ethanol by-product causes hangovers?

Likely acetate. Acetate induces hangover headaches in mice, and AcH gets metabolized very quickly.

Methanol

Effect of Activated Charcoal

Clear vs. dark liquors

Dark liquors have more methanol, and studies show they lead to worse hangovers.

From worst-to-best: brandy, red wine, rum, whisky, white wine, gin, vodka, and pure ethanol.

Juices in hangovers

Smallpox

Wikipedia.

Black death

Wikipedia.

Heavier-Than-Air Flight Is Impossible

Post. Quotes several prominent thinkers saying that heavier-than-air flight is impossible, and uses this as a motivation to be ambitious.

Winograd schema

A challenge to understand sentences where a single word change can resolve ambiguities in different ways. For example:

The city councilmen refused the demonstrators a permit because they feared/advocated violence.

When to use a semicolon

The Lottery of Fascinations

Post. Disentangles \(g\) factor stuff from interests. We draw from the lottery of fascinations, and this determines what drives us and thus what we’re good at.

Shake Hands with the Devil

Conflict background

Heterozygote advantage

Wikipedia. Where having one copy of a gene has better fitness than two (e.g. if it causes a disease) or zero (e.g. provides no advantage).

The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project | Slate Star Codex

Post.

1890-1920 Budapest produced many scientists that advanced physics through nuclear power & quantumn mechanics. Scott claims this is due to Budapest having a high proportion (25%) of Jewish people, and points to this paper that finds that Ashkenazi Jews have higher intelligence (+1 std!) compared to the general population due to continued repression. Ashkenazi Jews are also susceptible to genetic diseases related to neural growth. This increased intelligence vs. genetic diseases tradeoff could have increased fitness due to repression of Jews.

Opinion: It seems unlikely that we’d see such a large evolution in intelligence over a relatively short period, but I’ve not read the MIT paper.

Genome size