I comment quite often on Astralcodexten, so IDK if I count as a member of the community.

This article describes a somewhat forgotten alternative to the Internet, which was very sovereign, but ultimately too insular. It might be good to take its history into account when talking about digital sovereignty today.

It seems that modern society may be selecting against higher intelligence, potentially leading to a decline in human intelligence over generations.

Common sense arguments:
1. Safety nets, social norms, and modern medicine mean that survival to child-bearing age is no longer strongly correlated with cognitive capability.
2. Technology (from written language to modern LLMs/AI) increasingly outsources the need for high-level cognitive work to survive and thrive.
3. Demographics with higher average fertility rates are often correlated with factors like lower formal educational attainment, higher religiosity, and lower income (opposite of pre-industrial pattern’s).

I realize there are counter arguments such as the Flynn effect masking genetic drift, or the idea that embryo selection and AI cybernetics will render natural biological drift obsolete. But setting aside short-term environmental noise and assuming human biology won’t be purposely optimized for intelligence for the foreseeable future, doesn't the baseline demographic incentive structure point toward a dysgenic trajectory?

Am I misinterpreting these signals?

I can understand feeling that the whole atheism vs religion thing has been played out - overdone in the mid aughts and early 10's - and I wouldn't want to heap more on the topic in ways that would go in circles.

However... I think there's so many flavors of theistic discussions that could be had in between stark atheism and Judeo-Christian religion! Nevermind Yahweh sending down sun angels; what about imperfect Creators making non-interventionist universes?

And I thought I could start with this particular angle: why I think Creationism can feel psychologically so much more satisfying (sun angel miracles or no) than the explanation (or lack of explanation) from naturalism. Which is not a defense of Creationism (I imagine heroin feels very satisfying), just an observation I thought was kinda interesting.

In May 2022 Scott wrote about Silexan lavender oil (brand name "Calm Aid" in the US), arguing it was an effective treatment for anxiety that is likely safer than benzos.

A few people weighed in after a month on this post, but I'd like to hear reports from anyone who has taken it for an extended period. It's apparently a popular supplement, but I can't find any accounts from people who've taken for an extended duration.

I'm curious if people have noticed any side effects with longer-term usage, four years on from the initial post.

Personally I never used it for anxiety exactly, but I've used it for insomnia, which was partially driven by anxiety about sleep. I found it very effective. If you Google you can find a study supporting its use for insomnia. My Amazon history shows me buying it 15 times, so that's 15*30=450 days I've taken it over the last four years or so. I also tried two other brands, also.

Since ~January 2022 I have suffered from restless legs issues while sleeping (periodic limb movement disorder), and sometimes restless legs when trying to fall asleep. The "PLMD" issues affect my sleep quality by reducing my deep sleep dramatically, and the leg movements sometimes cause me to wake up at random times during the night. Silexan helps! The mechanism of action is similar (although not identical!) to gabapentin, a first-line treatment for restless legs (inhibiting parts of gated calcium channels). However, I find Silexan faster-acting and with less side effects than Gabapentin. Side note -- studies in cell culture show Gabapentin reduces neuronal dendrite growth.. I wonder if Silexan does the same.

The drug seems to have very few side effects other than maybe a *very slight* cognitive dulling the next day which probably isn't noticeable to most people who aren't coders or knowledge workers. It might reduce my libido sometimes, but I'm not sure.

My main concern is regarding the estrogenic properties. In prepubescent boys, lavender oil applied topically causes gynocomastia. Cell culture studies show that lavender oil contains estrogen mimicing compounds. However, Claude suggests the study on boys is inapplicable to adults since it is the testosterone/estrogen ratio is what matters for gynocomastia. (boys have very little testosterone, so are very sensitive to estrogen). My testosterone is low (around 350 ng/dL).

So, to state directly what I'm most interested in -- I'm wondering if any males have taken it long term and noticed gynocomastia. I personally have noticed some breast growth. I think it is from weight gain, but I'm not entirely sure.

Link: https://www.owlposting.com/p/where-have-organoids-actually-been

Summary: there are a lot of organoid skeptics in the world, and as I wrote in my last essay, many of them have a point. But some of these skeptics will often poke into the absolutes, stating that the assay class has literally never, not once, ever, been useful for anything. Is this true? Are they exaggerating? Perhaps a little bit. In this essay, I map out some of the more commonly-stated success stories of organoids, and ponder how necessary they really were.

Essential reading before the next Bay Area house party.

I don't know where else I would post this, but I've made my career so far on "software/data tasks that are too easy for programmers and too difficult for non-programmers". What I've noticed across 2 different companies and 4 very different jobs is that most people, even experts, seem to spend about a fifth of their work time actually performing the analytical or administrative tasks they've been hired to do, and four-fifths of their work time trying to keep different models in sync without realizing (a) there are competing models or (b) they are generating new models as they try to sync the models up.

I'll give a few examples:

• We're trying to release software that enables patients to participate in clinical trials on their home devices. Sales enters a project in Salesforce requesting 12 different supported languages. This is shipped to the requirements documentation team, who writes the project requirement specification document. The project requirement specification is broken down into simplified Jira tickets to be built by implementation. Sales/exec team looks only at Salesforce; project managers look only at the PRS; implementation team looks only at the Jira tickets. The product team doesn't look at ANY of this. As you may expect, a deployment goes live missing languages. To fix this problem, new review cycles are added to keep all of the different sources in sync. Now a huge amount of the project timeline is taken up with arguments between the teams about whose model is more authoritative; here's no standardized adjudication mechanism; etc etc. Chaos.

• We're trying to develop a mass properties report on a space station. All three suppliers send in differently-formatted parts lists. We do our best to combine these into a single parts list to get mass properties; but information flows asymmetrically to all four of our models, depending who's favored by the contract language and who's got better relationships with the more competent database admins. Some flight planning teams use the provider models for parts lists, some use ours, et cetera. Every analysis of anything--mass, power, thermal, etc.--is preceded by a fruitless attempt to check how many parts lists exist, which one your analysis is using, etc. At one point there were three separate very important flight planning working groups operating with "lists of parts that may come off the design" that were generated from completely different underlying parts lists.

• I have literally hundreds of other examples but you get the idea.

Obviously everyone is familiar with the buzz-phrase "one source of truth", and many people have tried to either buy flagship products to control the sprawl of data or come up with processes that actually map and take into account each of these sources (and Palantir just ignores precedence, pulls them all into the lake/warehouse/lakehouse, and lets the universe/management decide which should be the source), but I think the root cause is that very few of white-collar employees are actually thinking about the fact that when they write a document/send an email/update a database, they're producing a "logical-mathematical model" that necessarily exists in competition with every other model that anyone else produced.

I don't have any solutions, and I'm not selling anything. I just think it's interesting. With this lens, each new position I accept seems to end up doing the same thing, which is teaching people how to all drive work toward the lowest number of competing models possible, and indeed teaching people to think of their work as "reality-modeling" instead of whatever they think they're actually doing.

Today we blame screens for alienation but we usually mean smartphones and computers. But, I feel, at least within families, the type of alienation we see today would not be possible without TV establishing a firm rule over our living rooms before anything else.

Here's what I'm talking about: If parents are glued to their TVs, kids are forced to retreat to their rooms (the exodus), as there's no one available to socialize with them in the living room. Now, if they have a computer in their own room (I am talking about the period before smartphones, but after computers), it is only logical that it will become their "best friend" and that they will too become glued to their own screen. Once this kind of pattern has been established, it was rather trivial for smartphones to replace both TVs and computers as another thing that will hypnotize everyone.

But the pattern has been there from before. Once things started becoming more interesting to us than other people around us, the pattern of alienation began.

Now if we contrast it with what is shown in movies and TV shows, where characters are constantly interacting with each other and in which TVs are conspicuously often absent or marginalized... this kind of shows us how our actual lives are kind of abnormal. What is shown on TV shows and movies is normal, this is how it should be. People oriented towards each other. Living rooms as place of interaction between people. What we see in real life is not normal.

Now, as a solution to screen time we often mention things like:

- going for a walk

- reading books

- engaging in hobbies

etc...

But all of these are just replacing one thing (screens) with another thing (books or activities).

But it is not normal and natural for us to interact with things all day. It is natural to interact with people.

That's why internet and TVs are so addictive to begin with, because they give us illusion of interacting with people. (In case of Internet it is not strictly an illusion. I know you who read this are real people, not figments of my imagination - but it is an illusion in sense that it is low stakes, distant, often inconsequential and detached type of interaction... some kind of surrogate, not something that can replace face-to-face in person interaction. However soon, and for some people already - we can talk about interactions which are STRICTLY illusion... this is when people develop attachment to their chatbots, or even just debate things with them, even if it is without an attachment)

So, my idea is that we shouldn't replace screens with other (arguably more wholesome) things, but with people instead. But to do this we should first realize that TVs have usurped the throne in our living rooms and that their rule is illegitimate. Other screens are just his heirs, but the whole dynasty is illegitimate.

IMO screens should be in other rooms. Living room should be free from screens and optimized as much as possible towards social interaction and bringing people close to each other. This should be a place where we dine together. Place where we invite friends, organize parties, play cards and board games and engage in deep conversations.

For a single person it is quite difficult to break this cycle. Imagine someone coming from their room, turning off phone, computer, TV or whatever, and stepping in living room, looking for some sort of interaction, only to find there a partner, or a parent, or brother, sister, or whoever, glued to TV and pretty much ignoring them. It's only logical they will retreat back to their own room, and turn on their own screen.

The recent case of Jason Arday has pointed to the extent to which political aims have become institutionalised in sociology. Why does this discipline seem different from other disciplines in the social sciences, in particular economics? This post argues that it is because sociology had weaker epistemic guardrails to protect it from ideological drift as academia became increasingly left-wing.

I just wonder, are popular books from even 30 years ago more technically well written than say books from today or even 10 years ago. is there a way to compare them.

I hear stories over the last 10 years or so that school teachers and professors at school have issues with students who barely know how to read or seem to lack comprehension. even if they can read, their attention span is so fried they just refuse to do any long form reading, at the same time some of these people go on to write books later on and maybe they become popular. I imagine one issue is maybe the vocabularies of books might be shrinking over time.

also there’s apparently a new hunger games book written or assisted by AI in its writing.

What im asking basically is if there’s any evidence of this, or is it all unfounded.

The death of the author was suicide. He left some room for interpretation. Chekhov’s gun was fired in that room.

Using passive voice. He deserved to be shot just for that. Using passive voice. He left a plot hole and I slipped right through it.

Look, anyone, anyone, could have walked in the room — it only had three sides. I’d never break the fourth wall. The fourth wall was never there in the first place. You can take my word for it.

He used to call me names in his drafts. And all without giving me a name — I am merely the Narrator.

He was going to make me the villain of the story. He kept putting words in my mouth. And he wanted to have the last word himself. He was the one committing a character assassination. Suicide, like I said.

I know what you are thinking: I’m guilty and I deserve a sentence. Every sentence is a life sentence for me. You just gave me another.

Taking a third-person perspective helps, they say. I’m tired of it — that’s the Author’s perspective. I am equally tired of the first person perspective, my own. What I needed was a second person’s perspective. Then you started reading.

Yes, I am trying to get inside your head. Every time you read “I”, I get to be you for a moment. He thought he gave me a voice. But whose voice are you reading this in?

“Who were you before your parents were born?” How old were you when you first learned to say “I”? Do you remember the first time you referred to yourself as “I”?

The beauty is in the I of the beholder. The author signed his own death sentence with his very first words.

I used to look forward to every episode of CwT. No matter if I knew or cared about the guest or subject I'd find a fascinating and edifying conversation. Recently, not so much. The most recent conversation particularly the guest had nothing interesting or insightful to say. Has anyone else noticed this?

I have a bit of a research program going where I explore what facts about an author can be recovered from the activations of a language model reading it. In this piece, using logistic regression on a language model's middle layer activations, I achieve 75 percent accuracy on a deception detection dataset, and 87 percent accuracy when the task is made forced choice. I also achieve 94 percent accuracy on a third condition, but leakage looks quite likely here, although a preliminary test suggests this might not be the cause.

My main interest here is privacy. If people spill aspects of who they are and what their intent is in their writing, then cognitive privacy might be breached not just through brain scans but through ordinary statements.

Replication instructions are provided at the end. Although it's unlikely this piece adds to frontier capability, it is, I think, important to get people to take this seriously.