Answer on a postcard

while dB is a more objective measure of pressure level.

Quibble: dB is not an objective measure, nor does it purport to be. It uses an objective yardstick (pressure) but it is scaled for hearing according to an approximation of subjective experiences (hearing) of pressure.

I’d also strongly suggest that not only “can” the frequency response measured off the TV be false, it will be false. It’s not just that TV sound has been highly processed, there’s just no way that the audio equipment a news crew uses picks up anything like the true sound of an environment, especially not the sort of full-spectrum noise emitted by an industrial compound. Of most interest here is that the signal picked up by those mics is liable to drop off somewhere below the range of human speech, whereas industrial equipment like that is liable to have big peaks beneath those frequencies and further, descending well past 20Hz (the bottom end of human hearing).

Persistent low frequency and sub-sonic noise is associated with severe mental distress and physical ailments.

In fact this is why it’s important to recognise the subjectivity of the decibels measure: (not only because) the body/brain responds differentially to frequencies across the spectrum, and at different volumes. It also responds according to all sorts of other variables, and these can’t really be untied from the question of noise level. Persistence, locatibility, perceived subjective control of one’s own aural environment - all of these are fundamentally tied to both the “physical” and “psychological” effects of hearing (insofar as these can be untied).

Some of the symptoms described in the article (nausea, vertigo, fainting, panic attacks) can be the result of all of these variables, given a sufficiently persistent uncontrollable sound source. You just can’t untie them and peg them all to objective noise level.

Others (such as hearing loss and fluid leaking out your ears) are associated with prolonged exposure to sub-sonic noise, and again this can be as much an issue of time and persistence as “objective” sound level.

If we want to know “how bad” a noisy environment is for people, we simply don’t have a choice but to look at its effects first. You just have to look at the subjective effects people experience first, or you’re not looking at sound in the first place. You’re grasping at some independent objective measure which won’t ever actually tell you what you want to know, except in the most limited circumstances.

they spend fucking hundreds of collective hours going around in circles on the EA forum debating[1] this shit, instead of actually doing anything useful

how do they, in good conscience, deny any responsibility for the real harms ideas cause, when they continue to lend them legitimacy by entertaining them over and over and over again?

Adderall

Oh fuck. It took me to see the twitter avi to remember but I have Oliver Habryka registered as “absolute psychopath” in my tortured memory box since way back. Nice to see him doing so well but I wish I could remember what triggered the original mental note, assuming that it was ever anything that specific

you just made me extremely aware of where i was, what i was doing, and how i was feeling, when i found out that the yud had an article in Time, and I am going to sue for the whiplash of realising how short a time ago that was

I’d say “what the fuck was a 30 year old man doing on a sugar daddy site” but you answered it pretty aptly

Fun to see gwern in there presumably telling a fib. I wonder what really happened when Metz “ghosted” him? I particularly enjoyed, this time, watching whatever uppers he’s on these days kick in (or wear off?) about halfway through writing the footnote he added to that comment.

I like to picture it as somebody with a polymathic understanding of how to commit a variety of financial crimes crossing jurisdictional boundaries

Now hold on, I don’t want to say he’s WHOLLY wrong about my people

The specific guilty element here is sacrificial war with China, which they know to be a phantasm. Just America First foreign policy in general.

The great philosophical dialogues in English - those by Berkeley, Hume, Lakatos - are few and far between. Perhaps there is a general awareness that only these exceptional stylists could pull off the rare trick of not obviously putting words into their antagonist’s mouths, even insofar as the author clearly took the view of his protagonist. Indeed there is still, two and a half centuries later, debate about whose view in his own dialogue Hume actually took - when the rather obvious and straightforward alternative was just writing down “this is what I fucking think, alright?” that aporetic flourish was precisely what justified writing it down in dialogue form in the first place.

I reply: Because the strength of the material is determined by its weakest link, not its strongest link. A structure of steel beams held together at the vertices by Scotch tape (and lacking other clever arrangements of mechanical advantage) has the strength of Scotch tape rather than the strength of steel.

This is sub-childishly false and he opens with it. Unbelievable.