Nathan Barnard

Lots of people who have primarily known me over the last two years I think have a pretty incorrect impression of me in a lot of ways because I've spent the last 2 years being seriously mentally ill for a year and then moderately mentally ill for a year.

It's so good! (and on audible if that's signfgiant for you)

have you read Deng Xioping and the transformation of china

Yeah i think some of the darker findings from anthropolgy are so interesting.

i would love a hot take

found writing really brutal for the last 3 weeks, and now it's so easy

I'm reading "By Steppe, Desert and Ocean" at the moment and "Blood and Iron" - both excellent (and the first is free on audible although that may be less relevent you than it is to me

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The audiobook for Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves is 70% off until January 2! Excellent stocking stuffer for anyone who wants to bask in misery about pandemics, climate change, and other catastrophes during the holidays :)

YouTube video by Peter Singer Ingrid Newkirk on Animal Experimentation

Ingrid Newkirk, the co-founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (@officialpeta.bsky.social), talks about the disturbing reality of animal experimentation, highlighting the many animals subjected to tests that cause them to suffer without benefitting humans.

does anyone have strong nuclear winter takes

(and good practice particuarly when one has a strong emotational reaction)

I don't think that this is equvilent - to be very clear - but I think in hindsight the social democracts were wrong not to play dirty in weimar.

Again, I think that this action is, in expectaton, one of the worst a modern president will take, and i'm steelmanning because it is good practice.

My gut reaction is that I strongly agree and think that this is horrific.

I slightly wonder if there are good tit for tat game theroy reasons to do this.

I think almost certainly not, but that's my steelman of the case for it.

NEW: Why do we always think crime is rising, even when it isn’t?

This week I looked at one of the big data mysteries. Britain is 2/3 less violent than the 1990s; thefts were higher pre-lockdown

Why, then, doesn’t it feel like it?

1/8

@thetimes.com

🔗 www.thetimes.com/article/b63d...

FWIW I think your shutdown problem work is pretty ambitious (although perhaps should be viewed as a special case because it's applying results in mature field to a large problem in an immatuture one, which perhaps gives us a priori reason to think that one can gain traction on the largest problems)

My guess is that this is also feild depdendent, and the younger the peak of the feild is the more ambitious one should be early on. Of course there's also a training compoant and you have more inside knowledge on this than me.

I think in areas where it's difficult, aiming for results which are unlikely on priors is socially harmful. Social psychology is the obvious area where this is the case.

I think a subtility here is around how easy false positives are to detect. In formal subjects, where I think it's roughly easist, I think it's worthwhile being very ambitious because it's easy to verfiy.

If you could know ex ante of course how likely you were to do paradigm shifting work then that would be great, but that's not obvious to me (perhaps outside of pure maths but even then most fields medalists were not IMO medalists.)

But like the EV seems worth it? Academia is extremely heavy tailed, and although plausilby for induviudal students this is bad advice with respect to their prudential interests, it could still be socially valueable for most people to take these longshots.

Literally all of mine are children's authors.

alexlizhill.com | Alex Hill | Substack Former logician. Aspiring health economist. Thinking about philosophy, econ, public health, history, feminism, and lots of other things! Click to read alexlizhill.com, by Alex Hill, a Substack publica...

Verified my account, so my handle is now my (new) domain name, alexlizhill.com (which is where you can find my Substack now).

It was super easy, see bsky.social/about/blog/4...

somewhat forshadowing a more serious post on christianity

Ranking the Narnia books It's my blog and I'll write what I want to

a different tone from the rest of my blog open.substack.com/pub/thegoodb...

you would do such a public service if you could write something up that explains how the flavours of monism work i'm so confused

I think it's hard to answer this question for alian civiliations because I don't know how common eusolciality is and other weird stuff, but like I think it's surprising that we have wikipeadia which i think is what you were trying to get at

We've just launched our AI Benchmarking Hub!
This is a new platform for rigorous, independent evaluations of AI model capabilities, featuring interactive visualizations and in-depth analysis. (1/8)

epoch.ai/blog/introdu...

Why Do Progressives Like Islam? 1.

this is Huemer post in question
fakenous.substack.com/p/why-do-pro...

A response to Michael Huemer on why progressives like Islam I initially wrote this as a note which I couldn't post and it would make me sad if I couldn't post it somehow

A reply to a Michael Huemer post from march thegoodblog.substack.com/p/a-response...