Not my field but I have a couple friends who do research in that space. They say that it is a big gain in efficiency in research in microbiology, but that it is in most practical senses not viable to edit the human genome, because it is not really possible to run a clinical trial that modifies the genome within our standards for ethics, and even if you did set up such a trial measuring something like effect on cancer rates from editing an embryo would take literally a lifetime.

I knew some people who were very close with Josiah Zayner, the villain on John Oliver's episode on genetic engineering, and that's the problem he was trying to circumvent by normalizing self experimentation. He basically saw very large amounts of latent social good, and no viable path to actualizing it. So he said fuck it, I'll do it to myself, and maybe other people will follow me, and maybe we'll figure a little bit of it out.

That's all before accounting for the fact that we don't have that much confidence in our understanding of all of the effects of specific genes let alone how they all work together. We just know that some genes are strongly correlated with particular outcomes. We don't know all of the other things that change when we flip that gene. So it's kind of like if I gave you a needle that can easily and cheaply flip bits in your computer's hard drive to change the programming for the first time ever. Like, okay, theoretically that is profound. But you don't understand the way the operating system was using the bits at all, and in this analogy flipping the wrong bit can kill a person. In such a case obviously you don't go around flipping bits.

We're just not in a position to really do that class of work yet regardless of the fact that we have the tools to do it, and the road there is very unclear, is what they tell me.

I went from working class, rural family to tech executive and I relate to some of this but not the core concept. I definitely struggle to relate to my family, don't feel any attachment to my blue collar roots basically at all nor do I aspire to. Luckily my parents have grown a lot and we're still close, but extended family is harder.

But I don't agree at all that you can never fit in with upper class people. I feel very comfortable socially with venture capitalists, angel investors, people who own even weird businesses, people involved in higher level policy, honestly probably more comfortable than with any other group of people. My favorite conversations are about arcane aspects of strategy around big socioeconomic problems, and those are more or less by definition the domain of powerful people. I'm open about my background and people are nice about it, it doesn't really create distance. People tend to respect it if anything.

Sure, I'm almost comically bad at golf, and my friend I work for is extremely good at it. I just set expectations that I'm terrible at golf and turn it into a joke, make up some absurd strategy for why I really wanted that position in the woods, I used to use a 1 iron and a 13 wood as a joke, and it's fine as long as you're good company and have other things you bring to the table. You don't have to be the best at every single thing your friends do.

I don't code switch at all. I would speak the exact same way to a homeless person in skidrow or to Barack Obama. Honestly it only causes problems the other way, where I should probably code switch the other way. My partner often calls me out on confusing people, talking about Camus and Sartre to a construction worker talking about feeling rudderless or something.

But I skew the other way to do that less than I probably should because people value authenticity. I think the poor and drifting Prince Myshkin's acceptance into a powerful family in Dostoevsky's The Idiot is actually pretty accurate with respect to the dynamic. A person that has things a lot of people would do a lot to separate them from is going to have their guard up until you demonstrate that you are valuable, authentic, and aren't trying to take anything from them. That is rare to them.

Maybe another big part of it is that I have no doubt at all that I belong in the room. If anything I'm usually more doubtful of whether the other person, who didn't do the same amount of work to get there, deserves to be there. I know with my friend I work for he was used to yes men and he liked that I openly disagreed with him about a pretty arcane aspect of corporate governance in like the third sentence after meeting him. That kind of interaction, someone authentically disagreeing with them about something in their life, and in a way that the other person has nothing to gain, is rare for them.

I grew up working class with a single mother and am now pretty well off. By far the biggest change is that money changes from being a real thing that controls your life to an abstract concept that is more like a scoreboard.

Growing up basically everything was decided by money, what we ate, what I did, whether I had equipment, whether to go to the doctor, what dental work I did or didn't get, I had to get a job early in highschool, so my free time was decided by it. I remember talking one time to my mom and she told me that money is the main constraint for everyone, and I told her that I didn't think that was true for my friends' families, because it wasn't. She could not imagine that not being true.

I still get annoyed about prices and such, will choose not to do something if it costs more than I think it's worth. But it's more like a revulsion to the wastefulness of that thing, not because spending time that money actually affects my life.

The front and general proportions are great but I worry about the backend. If they could visually bring that overhang slant that points towards the wheels all of the way down, leave a lot of the middle space open, then I think it could look killer.

Unfortunate that the bumper there looks so bulbous though, not sure what kind of design trickery could possibly make that work. It just looks very bulky. Straight line to the wheel with some negative space in the middle would cut down on the visual weight a lot and look great I think, if it were legal

It's game theory, you can write a proof that first post the past election systems converge to two party systems. It's not some quirk of our system, but the inevitable outcome of the way we count votes.

3.4: Why should I believe a prediction market’s consensus over my own opinion?

This is the same argument as “the prediction market will always be at least as accurate as the top expert” only with you in the place of the top expert.

Either prediction markets are at least as smart as you are, or you can get rich quick. The argument here is the same as “at least as smart as the smartest expert” argument in 2, except replacing “the smartest expert” with “you”. But just to lay it out explicitly:

Suppose you were smarter than some prediction market. Then if you disagreed with the market, usually you would be right and it would be wrong. So look for cases where you disagree with the market, buy those shares, and you will make money in expectation. Repeat until you are rich or the mispricing has been corrected.

I like this because it’s a good empirical test, and one that many people have tried. If you think you’re smarter than the prediction markets, bet on them and see what happens! I think most people will find that (over the long run) they lose money, and eventually this will cure them of their delusion that they can beat the markets.

A few people might find that (over the long run) they do win money, just as a few people (eg Warren Buffett) can consistently win money on the stock market. Hopefully those people will quit their day jobs and become full-time prediction market traders. They’ll become multimillionaires, and their hard work will ensure that prediction markets stay more accurate than the rest of us.

I'm more or less arguing that this part doesn't hold for predictit in particular. Although I'm making a somewhat weaker case in that I'm not asserting that my current opinion is more accurate than predictit so much as I'm asserting that I believe many people could produce systems for identifying mispricings given a level of effort that would mostly not be justifiable for them with the bet sizing constraints, and regardless of whether I actually am one of those people I feel that same disincentive. In such a case the accuracy of the market would be expected to be reliably lower than the global maximum of the accuracy of all potential participants.

FWIW I do default to prediction markets for probabilities of outcomes in problems I haven't thought a lot about. Biden's odds of withdrawal would be one.

I also suppose that even if experts can't directly capitalize on sophisticated strategies in a way that makes it worth it to them, if there are experts already publishing a relevant analysis then a much simpler strategy becomes available to everyone of copy-nate-silver. That strategy will then on average win if the expert really is better than the market, and thus will end up being deployed by a lot of people with much lower levels of effort needed on their part. So maybe experts can be one rung removed and 3.4 will still mostly hold for all potential participants, so long as those experts actually publish their predictions. Although I think those experts mostly don't model the problems at all in the status quo, let alone publish the results.

There are caps on bet sizes on predictit, $850 per question. That's why I personally don't participate, because it requires too many bets to be worth my while with an $850 max position per question, especially with there only being a couple markets per problem category, so most markets are a completely different set of analyses to run. My attention is just worth more elsewhere, as is probably the case for most people who would be really good at it, say would be qualified to work in alpha discovery at a hedge fund.

I suspect this significantly reduces the efficiency of the market, especially with calibrating on smaller errors in pricing, because a 10% expected return on $850 is not really worth thinking about the market at all. Like if a market thinks it's a 70% chance of Biden dropping out and I think it's 40%, it's just too much mental work to seriously try to calibrate predictions for an EV of <$1k with a lot of variance and where the fundamentals are changing so constantly.

It only really makes financial sense to pay attention where there are radical underestimates of probabilities, like where you can stake an $850 position at $0.02 and have a reasonable chance of bringing it home close to $1. That probably does keep it from being egregiously wrong. It might also make sense with arbitraging internal inconsistencies, but still, bet sizing and small universe of contracts is going to make it hard to make it worth building and running that system.

This kind of does make it a hobbiest platform IMO.

Wow, the concept had the potential to be one of the most beautiful cars ever made.

Argh, I was so disappointed. The rear end on the concept is even better than that angle, and even worse on the ioniq 6, with no relationship between the two rear end designs whatsoever.

It's extremely dependent on the person, but it's much better to just not find out who is who, especially with family.

It's important to keep a wall there. My family and friends know I'm well off, because it's just obvious to some degree just from what I do day to day and for work, but they have no clue how much, which is on purpose. Frankly I hope they think I'm in debt up to my eyeballs rather than living way below my means and debating when to retire. Like, my friend I work with told me the other day that he went to his family gathering in a huracan the other weekend. I would never, ever do that. Even when I get a nice car I will still drive the honda to the family events.

Where I've slipped up there's been some friction, but I just was extremely clear that that was going to ruin our relationship and I wasn't going there, they could drop it or accept having no relationship.

It's not a thing at all really hanging out with childhood friends that I am closer with and still have common interests with (like skiing or skateboarding), since we're focused on those and I don't think they really even care other than that hanging out and doing our shared hobbies and bullshitting is fun. The rest is all irrelevant. Notably, I also don't make it a thing, and I am engaged and excited when they tell me about their lives. I've had people hedge telling me about their promotion and say they know it's nothing to me, and I try to shut that hesitation down and be genuinely excited for people, let it just be about them.

With people I don't have anything in common with anymore it can be weird, hard to find anything to talk about so the difference becomes more apparent. Like, I sympathize with someone working dead end jobs and barely getting by, and I can speak to that from my upbringing, but I can't really identify with that experience anymore. Like, a lot of the working class common topics of camaraderie there feel weird to pretend it applies to me. Like, I don't have a manager, or a shift, or hours, and to me dollars are an abstract number on a screen rather than a real thing constraining my life now. I can't really riff about that struggle because my struggle is different now.

With newer friends from my industry this isn't a thing at all, I'm an open book as long as they are playing in the same general ballpark. That's why a lot of people just change their friend groups entirely. But I don't generally find people who fit both sides of what I care about as one single person. Stacking multiple orthogonal rare traits on top of each other results in like zero people at the intersection.

It looks like an m2 that spent too much time at golden corral and is now in its awkward obese adolescence instead of evoking a kind of silly and endearing childishness. It weighs 1600 lbs more than my hybrid SUV lol.

Electric drivetrain excuse is bs. Model s plaid weighs 600 lbs less than the new m5. The model X plaid still weighs less than it with 1000hp and three rows of seats. Hell, the existing X5 weighs less. It weighs as much as the base X7. Panamera hybrid weighs less. Almost everything weighs less. Idk what bmw is thinking.

This thread is a reply chain on a comment about someone's parents spending all of the money their grandparents made, not the parents spending money they earned.

The parents weren't entitled to that money either, and when being given so much by someone who doesn't have to give you anything, you should respect the values of the person who gave you the gift. Given the person handing you the inheritance chose to give you money rather than spend it all frivolously, it seems pretty obvious that their preference would be for their kids to take care of the family fortune and pass it along, not spend it all frivolously.

I mean, it depends on the grandparents intentions.

I would bet almost anything given two choices, one where their wealth compounds over generations and leaves a legacy, and the other where their kids drive fancy cars and leave nothing to their kids, they would be offended by the latter. The grandparents obviously didn't make that choice for themselves or they wouldn't have given their kids anything either.

If not and the grandparents really made all of that money because they wanted to see their kids spend it all on themselves, then sure.

If the parents made the money then it's an entirely different discussion, they are the one who earned it so it's all on them.

As a financially secure middle aged person who built a good career in your 20s, will you wish you had spent your 20s somewhat differently? I mean yeah sure, maybe, probably even. Everyone has regrets. Life is a complicated balancing game and the future is uncertain. You will have some things you wish you did differently no matter what you do.

But will the thing you regret be that you didn't spend enough time in your room alone watching Netflix? Of course not. No one has ever looked back on their life and wished they spent more time looking at a screen. The very idea that that is even a possibility is absurd. They wish they had taken more risks, spent more time with family and friends, more fully explored what life had to offer, and been less financially stressed.

One thing is for damn sure, as a financially insecure middle aged person without a real career or future, you will absolutely, beyond any doubt, regret the time you spent sitting in your room by yourself not making any progress towards anything. Is that thing you will wish you made progress to your current career? Maybe not. Maybe you need to find a new one. But you will wish you did something in the real world, whether that be a career, helping your family more, or doing a motorcycle tour of Asia, whatever.

Also I'm 30 and I still can do everything I could do when I was 18, and don't have any more responsibilities than I had then really (granted I've been out of the house and taking care of myself since 18). Like, this last year I learned to surf, learned new flips I had never done snowboarding, and I've been traveling without living anywhere in particular. I still do cliffs and chutes snowboarding, gnarlier ones than when I was 18 even, am trying to find a slot to do the highest elevation gain day hike in the US, etc.

I can do all of this because I made money in my 20s, and I've kept myself in good shape working out and eating well. My 30s are going to be way easier than my 20s were as a result, if I want them to be, which I don't think I do honestly.

My dad's life honestly isn't that different than mine in his 60s, still skis and mountaineers, travels pretty much every month. He can do that because he worked hard until he could retire, retired enlisted army after enlisting at 18, and then some more work after. If you take care of yourself and just don't get very unlucky you can do pretty much everything until then, let alone 40.

FWIW I have some regrets about not working harder on my friendships in my 20s, keeping people together, but that's about it. I definitely don't wish I worked less hard. I wish I had worked harder if anything, so I would both be stronger and could stop caring about money sooner.

It's always better to wish for broader shoulders than a lighter load, because life is going to throw weight on you either way without you having the choice.

My grandma died from dementia and Biden at the debate reminded me of the earlier stages. The later stages were incomparably worse, of course.

People have a natural desire to understate their unfair advantages as well as to avoid statements that sound arrogant, to sound humble.

This is one of those rare cases where those both line up in the same direction. You get to both downplay your privilege and sound like a good person at the same time. And on the converse, you would be both reinforcing that you were born with an unfair advantage while also sounding like a bad person, which is ironically not a smart thing to do in almost any environment.

This generally flavor of social environments is so deeply rooted that it's probably not even really conscious. It just feels icky. As another commenter wrote, nietzsche has a lot of applicable writing.

Is happiness not the most important life outcome? A natural aggregation of everything else weighted by how much it matters?

You don't think there's anyone more electable? I would vote for almost quite literally anyone else, donate for almost any remotely justifiable candidate, where I would not consider Biden or Trump to meet that bar. Certainly every single other 2020 primary candidate meets that bar for me, and I'd probably extend it to approximately every blue senator, governor, and large city mayor, a meaningful percentage of red ones too.

I mean, ground it in day to day life. Would you trust him to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture? I would not feel confident sitting on a flat packed chair he assembled. I don't think I would feel very comfortable riding in a car he was driving. I certainly wouldn't trust him to negotiate a contract for me if he was my dad.

I don't know why anyone thinks that this is not going to carry the day. Nate Silver said it perfectly

https://www.natesilver.net/p/joe-biden-should-drop-out

an 86-year-old president would be disqualifying under any other circumstance. And I can’t really blame any voter for thinking otherwise. In a political environment full of misinformation and distrust, that Biden is 81 and seeking to be president until he’s 86 is something rare: an unassailable, objective fact. If I were a single parent supporting three kids on a minimum-wage job, who barely had time to follow the news, could you really fault me for thinking the one thing I know is that this guy is too fucking old to be president?

I'll still vote for him while viewing it as a proxy vote for his admin and Kamala Harris, but I view it as a very chaotic thing to accept only in the face of even more chaos on the other side from a guy only very slightly less old, would really rather have almost anyone else under 70.

That's macro economics, there's also microeconomics, which is basically the study of how individuals and firms interact with each other to manage resources. Markets for investments are one of the most significant kinds of markets so an economist can't avoid understanding how capital markets, common investment instruments, etc, behave and are used.

Finance is to economics as engineering is to physics.

Hard yes, would love to vote for him, would even donate, maybe even volunteer, hell I'll do your laundry John, alright fuck it I'll join your campaign and fellate you under the table if that's what it takes Mr Stewart, whatever it takes for it to be worth it for you just please god save us. SAVE US JOHN, IF YOU SEE THIS SAVE US. I WILL VOTE FOR STEPHEN COLBERT FULLY IN CHARACTER FOR THE COLBERT REPORT AT THIS POINT JUST PLEASE LORD SAVE US FROM THIS HELLSCAPE.

The roof is important for torsional rigidity, preventing the car from twisting. Convertibles are pretty much always heavier, because they have to add a lot more reinforcement to the main unibody, and less stiff than the hard top version

There has to be a critical mass to form a community. Beyond some point on any scale the probability of enough people finding each other and building a community is just very low. The scale of the internet made this radically higher but didn't eliminate the fundamental problem.

There are specific people in adjacent spaces that I think are potentially candidates, say gwern, but they don't have real communities and are generally vaguely in the same constellation, ssc, lesswrong, etc, and I'm also just going to be biased by how nuanced their writing is around my interests.

Beyond that, frankly Scott Alexander is more gifted than solely in general cognitive ability. He is extremely well read and a very unusually skilled writer, especially in some specific domains but also with remarkable breadth to draw from. As far as the product of all of those things, general ability at writing nuanced things across all topics, it seems plausible that he could be quite close to the farthest out in the world. Certainly I've never met anyone in real life that is close to that skilled at writing and pontificating about that many things, must be at least 1/100k or so on whatever that axis is, maybe more.

I suppose it's technically possible that there is some private community wholely separated from these communities, and I'm sure there are some particularly interesting private discords or telegram groups or whatever, but as for "community" so above ssc as to not overlap? Idk. I'd guess not.

Having been a degree or two of freedom away I don't think davos is it, at least. Power and intelligence are related but not the same thing. I've spent a nonzero amount of time negotiating with a guy who is friends with world leaders (is himself a billionaire), and a lot of time with people one rung out from that, have frankly been mostly unimpressed. Occasionally impressed by specific people, and definitely above average, but I would say almost certainly not above the average level of sophistication I see in this general corner of the world.

As one of many instantiations of myself as a pandimensional hyperamerican, I have officially chosen to exist in the reality where this is the debate that happened.

I was not optimistic about biden, but I simply cannot believe how bad this is.

This is the best explanation of the underlying problem that I am aware of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo

I would explain but I would not do as good of a job. It is worth the watch for anyone that lives in a representative democracy.

After that, basically both parties are both trying to compete for owl voters while still trying to drive excitement for the farther out voters to turn out.

They've arrived at boring centrist old guy with a long political career trying to pretend to be not centrist to still get turn out of the more engaged people in the party without turning off the centrists, vs very exciting radical old guy from TV trying to steal the populist owl voters while amping the hell out of the farther out part of his wing rhetorically and generally creating a very strangely shaped platform to try to cut people off the specific disengaged parts of the other party, which is what leaves the space in the middle of boring centrist people for boring old guy to take, which is why his party thinks boring old guy fits in the slot well since the other party isn't playing there, and thus they worry about higher risk candidates that might alienate the owl voters, like authentic angry grandpa who is likable and very popular with populists but is a lot more comfortable with the word socialist than most of america, or exciting young entrpreneurship, UBI, AI is taking all the jobs, rethink everything guy from 2016.

The reason why we landed here at all is a result of the 2016, where exciting radical old guy was very much not expected to win the primary, but won it all against unnecessarily polarizing very competent establishment woman because he was so good at getting all of the attention and attention drives elections, then boring old guy won against exciting radical old guy and is now the incumbent, and incumbents have a significant advantage so switching them out is almost always a bad idea, theoretically least of all against a candidate they already beat in the last election.