I think many people have gotten to a point where they have one thing figured out and limit themselves to doing that one thing.

I feel pretty safe and happy as long as I am allowed to just keep doing the job I have been doing for a few years, and live in my house, and not get exposed to any weird and challenging situations. I am very lucky that I have a job I can keep doing indefinitely, and some friends and partners I really like so I don’t need to worry about finding more. Having a job and a partner seems to be all society really demands of me, so as long as neither of those things implode I feel pretty happy and able-to-handle-stuff. If either of them ever disappeared or something out of the ordinary happened, I would definitely be panicking and flopping around like a fish out of water.

I don’t know if there are people who just feel completely secure in general and ready for everything. I assume that there are. People’s minds seem to differ a lot and it would be weird if nobody wasn’t neurotic. As attractive as it is to imagine Genghis Khan riding into every battle thinking “OH GOD OH GOD I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING”, it seems easier to believe he was calm and composed than that he was a really good faker.

Man, I don’t know. I think during that scene I was thinking that I would leave without the watch, then have a friend get it a few weeks later and mail it to me. I know that’s a cop-out answer, but cop-out answers are all I’ve got.

But if I did, I definitely wouldn’t stay around to make Pop-Tarts.

Officially, beta-blockers are not very good for social anxiety. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1558463 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8201073 .

I find this result kind of hard to believe and I would encourage you trying them as a cheap test. The only one I have any experience using is propranalol, because I work in a boring hospital that never lets me do fun things, but this seems to work pretty well.

I am not an expert, but I don’t think beta-blockers should cause heart problems in otherwise healthy people. Some studies suggest they do increase risk of diabetes, though. Some people say that Coreg doesn’t do that, but that sounds like the sort of thing that Coreg manufacturers might pay people to say.

I think you’re right to ask “Is there a sense?”

That is, the naive answer is like the story of the economists in the bar. Bill Gates walks in, and the economists start dancing and cheering, shouting “Hooray! On average, everyone in this bar is really rich right now!”

A lot of worries about immigration sound kind of like economists in a bar, and then a homeless guy walks in, and then they start crying and sobbing because now on average the people in the bar are poorer.

I think there are some people kind of developing the intellectual work it would take to be more sophisticated than this - like Garett Jones - but I’m not convinced that actual immigration opponents have read them or are familiar with them.

I don’t think Less Wrong would be an appropriate place for this. If you really want to do it, maybe /r/unsong or /r/slatestarcodex.

Request fewer of these “you are wrong and bad but I will not explain why” asks.

Some examples -

Coyote Run:

Turisas:

Decemberists:

Ayreon:

Arcade Fire:

I have Greg Cochran on my blogroll. I’m less sure than I once was that this means I can never get elected to anything, but I’m pretty sure it still means I can never get elected in Berkeley.

I understand that @uncrediblehallq is considering running for office someday with a pretty reasonable and EA-influenced platform. He seems like a much better candidate, and if he runs then of course I will support him in any way I can.

I don’t know.

I recently learned that the main reason planes haven’t been getting any faster lately is because there’s a really nonlinear discontinuity in fuel requirements as you get close to the speed of sound, to the point where it becomes economically prohibitive. This seemed really interesting to me as an example of apparent technological stagnation actually having a meaningful physical-sciences explanation (although poorly-written regulation around sonic booms doesn’t help either). It does seem to me that we’ve cracked certain easy diseases where your thyroid is ten times normal size or something, and we’re left with really complicated things that require full knowledge of the immune system.

I don’t want to rule out “science has gotten worse” either. Now that Peter Thiel is Official Shadow President, I hope he does something useful about this. Maybe make Michael Vassar Secretary of Energy.

Overregulation of drugs is really bad, but I doubt it’s to blame. Drug companies still really really want good blockbuster drugs and if there were really good ones they would spend whatever it took to push it through. Overregulation of the pharmaceutical industry probably prevents a lot of marginal drugs from existing, and makes existing drugs cost much more, but I doubt it’s the reason we haven’t cured schizophrenia.

I’m not sure I have this thing. Or, I mean, my eye has a corner, and it itches sometimes, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a specific thing there that can be cut out. Am I missing something?