LessWrong 2.0 Reader

links 11/08/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/11-08-2024

• https://agingbiotech.info/about/ a database of aging biotech companies compiled by Karl Pfleger
• https://longevitylist.com/longevity-industry-database/ a database of aging biotech companies compiled by Nathan Cheng, includes somewhat different picks
• GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs reduce all-cause mortality -- so what diseases or causes of death do they prevent?
  • https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50199-y kidney disease (in type-2 diabetes patients with kidney disease)
  • https://www.ajmc.com/view/glp-1s-reduce-cardiovascular-risk-equally-in-patients-with-overweight-obesity-regardless-of-diabetes cardiovascular disease (in overweight or obese patients)
    • https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/17562864241281903
  • https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adn4128 (sadly I couldn't find the full article)
  • https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ben/cdr/2018/00000014/00000003/art00008 cardiovascular disease (in diabetics)
• https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D176;jsessionid=C53D7110417D14C262ECD70F0091 what are the leading causes of death in 2023?
  • heart disease, cancer, accidents, stroke, COPD, Alzheimer's, diabetes, kidney disease, liver disease, COVID-19, suicide, influenza & pneumonia, hypertension, septicemia, Parkinson's
  • surprised suicide was so high and that COVID-19 was still so deadly (I assume mostly in the elderly)
• https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/bioage-brings-almost-200m-ipo-obesity-biotech-joins-nasdaq BioAge IPO
• I forgot that Sam Altman invested in Retro Bio
  • https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/08/1069523/sam-altman-investment-180-million-retro-biosciences-longevity-death/
  • the man has good taste. like, it's not blindingly original to appreciate Retro, but it is eminently reasonable.
• there's a lot of moderate-Democrat post-election resignation to the effect of "this is what the country wanted; the median voter is in fact pretty OK with Trump" and "the progressive apparatus was more interested in staying in its comfort zone than winning elections"
  • https://substack.com/home/post/p-151278372 Jesse Singal
    • he was saying similar things all along: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/democrats-should-acknowledge-reality
• I'm also seeing a fair number of women going "ok, sure, there are things to criticize about feminist dogma, but actually I have experienced traditionalist religious mores and they were Not Good", which I think is a needed corrective these days
  • https://substack.com/home/post/p-141175575 here's Audrey Horne
• https://backofmind.substack.com/p/incompetence-is-a-form-of-bias Dan Davies says incompetence is a form of bias -- the people who have the social skills and clout to get their problems fixed, will.
• Dan Davies on politics and populism...i'm not sure where he's going here but this is intriguing.
  • https://substack.com/home/post/p-151264334
• https://esmeralda.org/ Esmerelda, Devon Zeugel's Chautauqua-inspired village in California

Why do most humans in 2041 still need to work 40 hours a week? The answer is complicated, but to keep this comment simple, let's focus on a few factors that even a hypothetical reader from 2024 would understand.

In most countries, government regulation requires humans in the loop. These might seem like bullshit jobs, but that doesn't make the competition for them any less fierce. An average person cannot get a good job without good credentials (required for regulatory reasons), and good credentials are expensive; it often takes a lifetime to pay back the school debt. It doesn't matter whether the things taught at school are useful in any practical sense (the few remaining human teachers mostly agree that they are not), but they are required by law. The official reasoning is that general education keeps us human (note: this is simplified to the level of strawman, but I am trying to keep it simple for the hypothetical 2024 reader unfamiliar with the culture wars of 2041).

With the exception of a few things such as rent, most things today are significantly cheaper than they used to be in 2024. On the other hand, there are new expenses, many of them related to AI. Some aspects of life got complicated, for example contracts of all kinds. To put it bluntly, you need the latest AI to safely navigate the legal minefield created by the latest AI. Trying to save money by using a cheaper version of AI that is several weeks obsolete is generally considered a very bad idea, and will probably cost you more in long run, because you have no idea what you sign (and you should generally assume that the form was optimized to extract as much value from you as legally possible, otherwise the company would be leaving money on table). You either spend a large part of your income on AI services... or you risk joining the underclass at the first accident; there is not much of a middle way. If you can't afford the "business version" of the latest AI, you can get one that is supported by advertising -- the less you pay for it, the more you should expect the AI agent to optimize for the goals of the advertisers rather than your personal goals. (Oh, "advertisement" today no longer means trying to influence the humans. Humans are mostly irrelevant. It means influencing the AI agents that make most of the everyday decisions. As a simple example, you can pay the AI agents to buy your products rather than your competitor's products, even if they are somewhat more expensive or worse, and to defend this choice to human users using individually optimized arguments.)

There is increasingly addictive... well, basically everything. I am afraid that a far [? · GW]-mode description will fail to convey how strong the effect is when experienced in near mode, but basically: The salesmen of old have used only a few dozen simple techniques (such as smiling at you, looking in your eyes, repeating your name, trying to anchor you to a higher price and then giving you a discount, creating a false sense of urgency, etc.) which were only statistically effective and often failed or backfired for you, the modern ones come to you with a full AI-powered analysis of your personality (yes, there are regulations against this, but they are trivially circumvented), and they have probably already spent a few previous months trying to influence you in all known ways (bots pretending to be humans contacting you on social networks and nudging you in the desired direction, advertising in your AI agent if you use the cheaper version, subliminal advertising on the streets flashing when the screen detects you looking at it, etc.) which makes is almost impossible to resist; in many cases the humans believe that the interaction was actually their own idea, and quite often they fall in love with the salesperson.

Some people suggest that this is a problem humanity should focus on solving, but the respected economists (and more importantly, their AI advisors) mostly shrug and say: "revealed preferences".

Yudkowsky has written about it:

(...) In standard metaethical terms, we have managed to rescue 'moral cognitivism' (statements about rightness have truth-values) and 'moral realism' (there is a fact of the matter out there about how right something is). We have not however managed to rescue the pretheoretic intuition underlying 'moral internalism' (...)

You can't trust exit polls on demographics crosstabs. From Matt Yglesias on Slow Boring:

Over and above the challenge inherent in any statistical sampling exercise, the basic problem exit pollsters have is that they have no way of knowing what the electorate they are trying to sample actually looks like, but they do know who won the election. They end up weighting their sample to match the election results, which is good because otherwise you’d have polling error about the topline outcome, which would look absurd. But this weighting process can introduce major errors in the crosstabs.

For example, the 2020 exit poll sample seems to have included too many college- educated white people. That was a Biden-leaning demographic group, so in a conventional poll, it would have simply exaggerated Biden’s share of the total vote. But the exit poll knows the “right answer” for Biden’s aggregate vote share, so to compensate for overcounting white college graduates in the electorate, it has to understate Biden’s level of support within this group. That is then further offset by overstating Biden’s level of support within all other groups. So we got a lot of hot takes in the immediate aftermath of the election about Biden’s underperformance with white college graduates, which was fake, while people missed real trends, like Trump doing better with non-white voters.

To get the kind of data that people want exit polls to deliver, you actually need to wait quite a bit for more information to become available from the Census and the voter files about who actually voted. Eventually, Catalist produced its “What Happened in 2020” document, and Pew published its “Behind Biden’s 2020 Victory” report. But those take months to assemble, and unfortunately, conventional wisdom can congeal in the interim.

So just say no to exit poll demographic analysis!

Finally, note to self, probably still don’t use SQLite if you have a good alternative? Twice is suspicious, although they did fix the bug same day and it wasn’t ever released.

SQLite is well-known for its incredibly thorough test suite and relatively few CVEs, and with ~156kloc (excluding tests) it's not a very large project, so I think this would be an over-reaction. I'd guess that other databases have more and worse security vulnerabilities due to their attack surface—see MySQL with its ~4.4mloc (including tests). Big Sleep was probably now used on SQLite because it's a fairly small project of which large parts can fit into an LLMs' context window.

Maybe someone will try to translate the SQLite code to Rust or Zig using LLMs—until then we're stuck.

(Perhaps you're thinking of this https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EKu66pFKDHFYPaZ6q/the-hero-with-a-thousand-chances [LW · GW])

Intelligence also has costs and has components that have to be invented, which explains why not all species are already human-level smart. One of the questions here is which selection pressures were so especially and exceptionally strong in the case of humans, that humans fell off the cliff.

https://www.google.com/search?q=spx futures

I was specifically looking at Nov 5th 0:00-6:00, which twitched enough to show aliveness, while manifold and polymarket moved in smooth synchrony.

Sure, if Muslim Americans voted 100% for Harris, she still would have lost (although she would have flipped Michigan). However, I just don't see any way Stein would have gotten double digits in Dearborn if Muslim Americans weren't explicitly retaliating against Harris for the Biden administration's handling of Gaza.

But 200,000 registered voters in a state Trump won by 80,000 is a critical demographic in a swing state like Michigan. The exit polls show a 40% swing in Dearborn away from Democrats, enough for "we will vote Green/Republican if you give us what we want" to be a credible threat, which I'm seen some (maybe Scott Alexander?) claim isn't possible, as it would require a large group of people to coordinate to vote against their interests. Seemingly irrational threats ("I will vote for someone with a worse Gaza policy than you if you don't change your Gaza policy") are entirely rational if you have a track record of actually carrying them out.

On second thought, a lot of groups swung heavily towards Trump, and it's not clear that Gaza is responsible for the majority of it amongst Muslim Americans. I should do more research.

Although possibly the red candidate would care more about CATXOKLA red issues and the blue about CATXOKLA blue issues, so it just increases variance rather than expected satisfaction?