Nition

@sukh_saroy @pangramlabs slop?

A team of researchers in New Zealand followed 1,037 babies from the day they were born for the next 45 years to find out what actually determines a successful adult life, and the strongest predictor they found had almost nothing to do with intelligence or family wealth. The findings have been published in the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. Almost no parent has heard of them. His name is Avshalom Caspi. Her name is Terrie Moffitt. They are a husband and wife research team based at Duke University and King's College London, and the study they have spent their careers running is called the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study. It started in 1972 in a single hospital in Dunedin, New Zealand. Every baby born there in a 12-month window was enrolled. 1,037 of them. The study is still running today. The retention rate is the part that should astonish anyone familiar with how research usually works. After more than 45 years, over 90 percent of the original participants are still being tracked. Most longitudinal studies lose half their sample inside ten years. The Dunedin team has lost almost nobody. They measured everything. Blood. DNA. Brain scans. Income. Criminal records. Romantic relationships. Drug use. Dental health. Sleep. Mental health. Lung function. They flew participants who had moved abroad back to Dunedin every few years for a full day of assessments. Some of those people now live in seven different countries. They still show up. For the first decade of life, the team did something nobody else was doing systematically. They measured each child's self-control. Not IQ. Not family income. Not parenting style. Self-control. They watched 3-year-olds in a research lab and rated their ability to wait, regulate frustration, follow instructions, and resist impulsive reactions. They added teacher ratings. They added parent ratings. They added the children's own self-reports as they grew older. They combined all of it into a single highly reliable score. Then they did the thing nobody else had the patience to do. They waited. When the data came in at age 32, the result was so consistent it should be illegal to teach a child without it. The children who scored lowest on self-control at age 3 grew into adults with worse physical health, more substance dependence, lower incomes, more credit card debt, higher rates of single parenthood, more criminal convictions, and worse mental health than the children who scored highest. The pattern was not subtle. It was a clean gradient. Every step up in childhood self-control produced a measurable step up in adult outcomes across every domain the team could measure. The detail that should disturb every parent reading this is what happened when the researchers controlled for the obvious objections. When they controlled for IQ, the effect held. When they controlled for family income and social class, the effect held. When they compared siblings inside the same family, the sibling with lower self-control still had worse adult outcomes than the sibling with higher self-control. Same parents. Same house. Same dinner table. The trait was running independently of everything researchers expected to explain it. The paper landed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011. The title was as plain as it gets. "A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety." It has been cited thousands of times since. Almost no policy maker has acted on it. The reason most people resist this finding is that it sounds like a sentence handed down before the child could speak. If the trait that determines your adult life is locked in by age 3, the rest of your life is a formality. The Dunedin researchers say that is the wrong way to read the data. They found something else in the same paper that almost nobody quotes. Some of the children whose self-control scores improved between childhood and adolescence ended up with adult outcomes far better than their early scores predicted. The trait is not destiny. It is a muscle. Children who learned to wait, regulate, and resist between ages 5 and 15 caught up with kids who started ahead. Self-control is the one childhood trait nobody seems to teach on purpose anymore. Schools focus on test scores. Parents focus on activities. Coaches focus on performance. The part of the brain that decides between five seconds from now and five years from now is left to develop on its own, and the data shows it usually does not. The most uncomfortable part of the research is the cost calculation Moffitt and Caspi ran. They estimated that if a country could move the bottom 20 percent of children up one rung on the self-control ladder, it would measurably reduce healthcare spending, welfare dependency, and incarceration costs at the national level. The intervention is cheaper than almost any other public health investment available. Almost no country has tried it at scale. The reason adults struggle with money, weight, addiction, and relationships is rarely intelligence. It is the gap between what you want right now and what you want in ten years, and which side of that gap your nervous system is built to listen to. Most people lost that fight at age 4 and never went back to learn the technique. You were not behind because life dealt you a bad hand. You were behind because the part of you that decides between right now and the rest of your life was never taught how to choose. The good news is the muscle is still there. Almost nobody trains it after age 10. You can be the one who does.

@slimer48484 Note: Your #3 and #4 are the same someone.

One of my favorite interactions from LessWrong: * Someone posted their research showing that training AI models to have unpopular aesthetic preferences causes misalignment * David Africa wonders if basically anything would cause it. * Someone jokes about a paper on 'if any old crap' will cause misalignment. * Someone actually ran the experiment, and found out that it does.

@krishnanrohit Having said that, they should hardly need more proof at this point.

@krishnanrohit With the obvious AI photo, I don't understand why they don't just ask him to get on a video call. Then when he mysteriously keeps having terrible connectivity problems that won't let him get on a call, they have their answer.

"But remember, we are in mirror-world: the AI that detects the AI is trained on human writing, so, really, where are we? In the dark." Extraordinary.

@AdemLuz People seem to be missing your point by nitpicking the details here. The thing is it benefits your boss if you do great work, it benefits your parents if you succeed, it benefits your date if you're a great person, it benefits your guests if your joke is hilarious.

Everyone is always rooting for you. Your parents want you to be a great son. Wife wants you to be a great husband. Your boss wants you to be a slam dunk hire. Every first date you’ve ever been on they’ve been rooting for you to get laid. Every time you started to tell a joke people hoped it would have a hilarious punch line. Your proximity to anyone is a reflection of themself, meaning the deck is never stacked against you, and your failures are completely your own

@owenbroadcast You make a really good point that I hadn't thought about before. On the side of not separating art from the artist, Nick Cave had a very good post recently: theredhandfiles.com/considering-hu…

yes, an AI could make a painting that is exactly like bob ross. no, it’s not the same, because bob ross didn’t paint it. correct. however this was also the defense against “my kid could paint that” accusations against modern art. congratulations. you are modern now. its okay.

the people who thought “defending art” meant throwing away the modern idea that the artist, their story, the story behind the art, and the art’s place in history all matter as much as what the end result looks like are now going to embrace these principles as an anti-AI stance.

Redesigned car dashboard for Driving At Night

@JCRhodesbg Both @InvestingAddict and I are just joking.

@Nition Do you think capital availability is actually unlimited in real drawdowns?

Why doesn’t someone create the S&P 5000 which includes the 5,000 biggest companies in America. Wouldn’t that outperform the S&P 500?

My Balatran EP album cover is from a photo that I took looking out over Wellington city in 2005. The whole city used to be in these colours at night.

@Hamzythacreator From Wellington NZ:

Is there any engineer who can help me design a house for this land… It’s what my grandfather left me as an inheritance…

@Striker_UnLtd @NZ_Trav If allowing you to drive through but not stop is a sign of a tyrannical state, wouldn't not allowing driving at all be even more tyrannical?

@NZ_Trav The rocks are either falling or not,if it's too unstable close the area.

Lol this woman has the patience of a saint. I'd get fired on the first day. Homer Tunnel

@krishnanrohit Also not a fan of "every source tells us this is clearly written by AI. I suppose we shall never know."

This is truly embarrassing. I know not everyone is equally proficient or understand how AI works, but seriously, "I asked AI if it was AI" is worse than if they just left it up and stayed out of it.

@YosarianTwo @e0syn Just like mathematics

what the fuck was I on about

@OG_DonQuixote @MarcelDeneuve There are several spots in that one where the smooth textures are on top of the wires, or where the wires look sheared off, but it looks more like image editing errors than generative AI errors to me.

@MarcelDeneuve Sorry bro, you don't use ai exactly for what? 🤡

I dont use ai

@tibbinz @RhoTrans We do (I'm in 🇳🇿). PAper SCISSors ROCK.

@RhoTrans Or paper scissors rock people for that matter

"scissors paper rock" has the far superior trochaic STRONG-weak STRONG-weak STRONG pattern, which is better for timing and ending on the strong "rock" instead of everyone else's "rock paper scissors, shoot"

@tannokasa9 youtube.com/watch?v=Alw5hs…

はよ縦棒入れろや🤣🤣🤣

@liron You could do an even earlier one that just says DRAW MORE TRIANGLES.

It's ridiculous how adjacent tech hype cycles happened to swing Earth's compute from the least to the most valuable application imaginable.

@thePartyPartyUS @giffmana @grok ᛏᚱᚪᚾᛋᛚᚪᛏᛖ ᚹ ᚾᚩ ᚪᛞᛞᛖᛞ ᛣᚩᛗᛗᛖᚾᛏᚪᚱᚣ: ᛖᛚᚩᚾ ᛗᚢᛋᛣ ᛁᛋ ᛗᚪᛞᛖ ᚩᚠ ᛣᚺᛖᛖᛋᛖ

@giffmana pliny gave it. You do it

This is one of the simpler magic tricks:

Every particle is actually a field (more technically, an excitation of a field). The mass of protons and neutrons in the centre of an atom is just more fields. As far as we can tell, it's fields all the way down. Nothing is solid.