I distinctly remember telling my parents to wear a mask in the airport, based on rationalist sources, and having to argue that actually anonymous people on the internet were more reliable sources than the government, who did not recommend this.

Bright Line Watch, a nonpartisan watchdog group

Is this actually meaningfully the case? As far as I can see, this is basically a group of left-wing academics (some of whom literally worked for the Democrats!) who assembled a list of things they think the current administration might do and called them Threats to Democracy. They omitted any questions which might paint the current administration in a more favourable light, or the prior democrat administration in a negative light.

The scoring also seems pretty biased. For example, for the question about whether the DoJ would override normal procedures to protect the President's family, the Biden Administration is given a (positive) scoring of 'no', even though the DoJ tried to give the President's son a sweetheart plea deal that would protect him from charges of being a drug user in possession of a firearm (and potential lengthy prison sentence), and whistleblowers say the prosecution deliberately slow-walked the process and leaked information to the defense. 

Even the data presentation seems biased. For example, on this question, the Biden administration is scored as 'yes' (i.e. 100%) for 2023-2024. Yet for some reason the bar for 100% is shorter than Trump's bar for 40%? 

I think Patrick's comments are best interpreted as an attempt at hyperstition.

One potentially negative effect would be if fertility is over-rated as a driver of why older people have fewer children - e.g. if parental energy is also a significant effect. If this is the case, people might delay having children in the expectation how using artificial wombs, but then lack the energy to manage multiple kids later on. Alternatively, if the arrival of artificial wombs causes people to delay having children, the temporary reduction in births could contribute to the de-normalisation of parenthood, which could reduce longer term desired fertility.

I doubt the magnitude of these effects are sufficient to fully reverse the sign though.

Thanks, very strange. I definitely selected linkpost; the GUI appears to have forgotten this, possibly when I tried to edit the thumbnail. Fixed.

Thanks, done.

Yes I find it bizarre that many people seem to be simultaneously opposed to the War on Drugs and also support extending it to a new drug. 

A final way the tobacco industry is dodging the rules is with e-cigarettes, or “vapes.” Using marketing that illegally targets children, they peddle vapes as a “safer” way to smoke. This tactic has proved alarmingly successful. 

SMA condemn the tobacco companies for claiming that vapes are safer, but don't discuss whether this key claim is actually true. Yet as far as I can see it clearly is true. There is debate about exactly how much safer they are - e.g. how convincing we should find the NHS claim that vapes are 95% safer - but I haven't seen any credible argument that vapes aren't safer at all. It's not 'dodging' safety rules to release a considerably safer product.

Further, I think vapes are also pretty good evidence again SMA's defense of paternalism. If smoking cigarettes wasn't really a choice, why has the availability of vapes and pouches been associated with a decline in cigarettes? The most natural explanation here is that previously people choose to smoke cigarettes, and then a superior product came along, so people started choosing that instead.

If you think it's merely 'arguable' that OpenAI has had had a significant negative impact through acceleration then I think you are significantly more positive than the median EA.

Thanks for sharing! TruthSocial having more positive engagement is interesting.