The existence of these meta-analyses is much less convincing than you think. One, because a study of the effect of sodium reduction on blood sugar combined with a study of the effect of antihypertensive medications don't combine to make a valid estimate of the effect of sodium reduction on a mostly-normotensive population.

But second, because the meta-analyses are themselves mixed. A 2016 meta-meta-analysis of supposedly systematic meta-analyses of sodium reduction found 5 in favor, 3 against, and 6 inconclusive, and found evidence of biased selective citation.

I strongly disagree with the claim that sodium reduction does more good than harm; I think interventions to reduce sodium intake directly harm the people affected. This is true everywhere, but especially true in poorer countries with hot climates, where sodium-reduction programs have the greatest potential for harm.

(This is directly contrary to the position of the scientific establishment. I am well aware of this.)

The problem is that sodium is a necessary nutrient, but required intake varies significantly between people and between temperatures, because sweating costs 1g/L. That's why people have a dedicated taste receptor for it, and why they sometimes crave it and at other times find it aversive.

If you sweat a lot and don't consume salt, you will become lethargic; if you drink something with salt in it, you'll immediately bounce back. If you're a manual laborer, and someone sneakily removes some salt from your diet, you'll either compensate by getting more salt elsewhere, or your productive capacity will drop.

If you look at the published studies on sodium through this lens, you will find that they are universally shoddy. Most are observational but measure sodium intake via urine, causing them to be confounded by exercise. Of those that have interventions, basically all of them start by removing people's ability to self-regulate. I don't think I've seen any that check for negative effects not related to hypertension, but I know the negative effects are there because I can remove the salt from my own diet and experience them.

Props for investigating and doing quantitative analysis. If you do proceed from this intermediate report to a deep-dive report or an intervention project, I hope you'll consider the negatives that the academic research thus far has swept under the rug. I think a properly-conducted RCT, one that reduced sodium intake in a vulnerable population and then accurately reported the harms experienced, could have a significant positive impact.

People hate being taxed for doing things they like

It's much worse than that; in hotter climates, salt isn't a luxury, it's basic sustenance. Gandhi wasn't being figurative when he said "Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life."

My understanding is that they strongly prefer you do it between 5 and 7 pm in your local timezone, so that responding officers nominally working a 9-5 schedule can collect overtime payments.

It samples unread posts from a curated list, then when that list is empty samples weighted based on karma. Unfortunately if you read posts logged out, or on a previous version of the site, then old posts won't be marked-as-read so they'll come up again.

I didn't make that claim in the grandparent comment, and I don't know of any specific other deceptive statements in it. But, on consideration... yeah, there probably are. Most of the post is about internal details of FHI operations which I know little about and have no easy way to verify. The claim about the Apology is different in that it's easy to check; it seems reasonable to expect that if the most-verifiable part contains an overreach, then the less-verifiable parts probably do too.

In my experience, there's a pattern, in social attacks like this, where critics are persistently, consistently unwilling to restrain themselves to only making criticisms that are true, regardless of whether the true criticisms would have been enough. This is a big deal and should not be tolerated.

reducing existential risk by .00001 percent to protect 10¹⁸ future humans

Very-small-probability of very-large-impact is a straw man. People who think AGI risk is an important cause area think that because they also  think that the probability is large.

I roll to disbelieve on these numbers. "Multiple reports a week" would be >100/year, which from my perspective doesn't seem consistent with the combination of (1) the total number of reports I'm aware of being a lot smaller than that, and (2) the fact that I can match most of the cases in the Time article (including ones that had names removed) to reports I already knew about.

(It's certainly possible that there was a particularly bad week or two, or that you're getting filled in on some sort of backlog.)

I also don't believe that a law school, or any group with 1300 members in it, would have zero incidents in 3-5 years. That isn't consistent with what we know about the overall rate of sexual misconduct in the US population; it seems far more likely that incidents within those groups are going unreported, or are being reported somewhere you don't see and being kept quiet.

They aren't currently shown separately anywhere. I added it to the ForumMagnum feature-ideas repo but not sure whether we'll wind up doing it.