Avoid News, Part 2: What the Stock Market Taught Me about News

Posted by Peter on June 13, 2021
Posted in: Investing, Politics. Tagged: .

It’s been a decade since I blogged about the benefits of avoiding news.

In that time I mostly followed the advice I gave. I kicked my addiction to The Daily Show in late 2016 after it switched from ridiculing Trump to portraying him as scary (probably part of a general trend for the show to be less funny). I got more free time, and only missed the news a little bit.

Then the pandemic hit.

I suddenly needed lots of new information. Corporate earnings releases were too slow.

Wikipedia, Our World in Data, Metaculus, and some newly created COVID-specific web sites partly filled that gap. But I still needed more, and I mostly didn’t manage to find anything that was faster or more informative than the news media storyteller industry.

That at least correlated with higher than normal stress. I suspect that paying attention to the storytellers partly caused the stress.

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The Alignment Problem

Posted by Peter on April 15, 2021
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews. Tagged: .

Book review: The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values, by Brian Christian.

I was initially skeptical of Christian’s focus on problems with AI as it exists today. Most writers with this focus miss the scale of catastrophe that could result from AIs that are smart enough to subjugate us.

Christian mostly writes about problems that are visible in existing AIs. Yet he organizes his discussion of near-term risks in ways that don’t pander to near-sighted concerns, and which nudge readers in the direction of wondering whether today’s mistakes represent the tip of an iceberg.

Most of the book carefully avoids alarmist or emotional tones. It’s hard to tell whether he has an opinion on how serious a threat unaligned AI will be – presumably it’s serious enough to write a book about?

Could the threat be more serious than that implies? Christian notes, without indicating his own opinion, that some people think so:

A growing chorus within the AI community … believes, if we are not sufficiently careful, the this is literally how the world will end. And – for today at least – the humans have lost the game.

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Functional Medicine

Posted by Peter on March 10, 2021
Posted in: Health. Tagged: .

Mainstream medicine has become increasingly standardized over the past few decades.

Standardization has some benefits: reduced inequality, improved procedures for minimizing mistakes, and increased predictability. Those attributes are often easier to verify than health effects.

Standardization is not so great for promoting innovation (standardizing a few building blocks may promote innovation, but that’s not what medicine has done). Yet medicine is an area where we have a relatively high need for more innovation.

It would be nice if one system of medicine provided everything that I want from medicine. Just like it would be nice if one company could provide all my transportation needs, or every type of food that I want, or an operating system with all the software that I want to use.

Alas, none of those seem close to being feasible this decade. Yet I get the impression that many more people expect it of medicine than is the case for food or transportation.

I’ve reached an age when it’s valuable to ask a good deal from medicine. So in addition to a standard doctor, I’ve engaged with a competing “brand” of medicine.

Specifically, the functional medicine practitioners at Chris Kresser’s Adapt180.

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Geography of Thought

Posted by Peter on February 6, 2021
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , .

Book review: The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently… and Why, by Richard E. Nisbett.

It is often said that travel is a good way to improve one’s understanding of other cultures.

The Geography of Thought discredits that saying, by being full of examples of cultural differences that 99.9% of travelers will overlook.

Here are a few of the insights I got from the book, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have gotten from visiting Asia frequently:

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Dirt

Posted by Peter on January 17, 2021
Posted in: Miscellaneous, Politics. Tagged: , , .

TL;DR: loss of topsoil is a problem, but not a crisis. I’m unsure whether fixing it qualifies as a great opportunity for mitigating global warming.

This post will loosely resemble a review of the book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, by David R. Montgomery. If you want a real review, see Colby Moorberg’s review on Goodreads.

Depletion of topsoil has been an important cause of the collapse of large civilizations. Farmers are often tempted to maximize this year’s production, at the cost of declining crop yields. When declining yields leave an empire unable to feed everyone, farmers are unwilling to adopt techniques that restore the topsoil, because doing so will temporarily decrease production further. The Mayan civilization seems to have experienced three cycles of soil-driven boom and bust lasting around 1000 years per cycle.

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The End of Alzheimer’s Program

Posted by Peter on December 26, 2020
Posted in: Book Reviews, Health. Tagged: , .

Book review: The End of Alzheimer’s Program, by Dale Bredesen.

This sequel to The End of Alzheimer’s is an attempt at a complete guide to a healthy lifestyle.

Alas, science is still too primitive to enable an impressive version of that. So what we end up with is this guide that would overwhelm anyone who tries to follow it thoroughly, while still lacking the kind of evidence that would convince a skeptic.

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I Lose My COVID Bet

Posted by Peter on December 20, 2020
Posted in: Health, U.S. Politics. Tagged: .

Last month, I conceded defeat in my bet (with Robin Hanson) that US COVID-19 deaths would be less than 250,000.

My biggest mistake was thinking voters would care about results, and unite against a common enemy as they did in WWII. I should have been more aware of the tendency to treat natural deaths as more acceptable than deaths due to a hostile agent. Robin clearly did better at evaluating this.

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