LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Met Lenin on a visit to Russia. ... Tried to move to the Soviet Union to work as a laborer ... was a Stalinist and defended Lysenkoism on BBC radio ... was part of a commission investigating whether the US had used biological weapons in the Korean War and was fooled into believing the US had.

It interests me that so many very smart people were enamored with communism to varying degrees. I imagine the atrocities/genocides/purges/gulags/terrors/etc. were not commonly known at the time? But how could that be? I think the most plausible hypothesis is that self-deception/wishful-thinking/filter-bubbles were part of the story here. This should be the default hypothesis anyway, given human nature.

Fair enough.

Great to hear! I'm eager to know how you get on, please keep us up to date :)

I emailed both sources, and County Health Rankings got back! They offer a spreadsheet download here.

I've copied the data to this Google sheet here (under tab "Ranked Measure Data", column BN) for easier access.  What's remaining before we can get it to the statistician:

• Get access to the water database (they might charge for this? not super sure, I just pinged them again)
• Line up counties to zip codes (I think this link should suffice)
• Write a script to combine these into a single zip code (I could probably do this)

Happy for anyone else to jump in too!

We would prefer submissions be private until February 15th.

The fact that they exert some of that power, (an ever increasing amount), through software make the question of the freedom of that software quite relevant to your autonomy in relation to those factors. consider the G0v movement. When working with open government software or at least open APIs civic hackers have been able to get improvements in things like government budgetary transparency, the ease with which you can file your tax forms, the ability to locate retailers with face masks in stock etc. The ability to fork the software used by institutions, do better and essentially embarrass them into adopting the improvements because of how bad their versions are in comparison is surprisingly high leverage.

Data is its whole own complex problem especially personal data that warrants a separate discussion all of it's own. In relation to free software though the most relevant part is open data specifications for formats and data portability between applications so they you are free to take your data between applications.

1. "Bad reporter" = any reporter that gives unambiguously bad answers in some situations (in the ontology identification case, basically anything other than a direct translator)
2. "use knowledge of direct translation" = it may be hard to learn direct translation because you need a bunch of parameters to specify how to do it, but these "bad" reporters may also need the same bunch of parameters (because they do direct translation in some situations)
3. In the "upstream" counterexample, the bad reporter does direct translation under many circumstances but then sometimes uses a different heuristic that generates a bad answer. So the model needs all the same parameters used for direct translation, as mentioned in the last point. (I think your understanding of this was roughly right.)
4. More like: now we've learned a reporter which contains what we want and also some bad stuff, you could imagine doing something like imitative generalization (or e.g. a different regularization scheme that jointly learned multiple reporters) in order to get just what we wanted.

I think the question of whether there is a Faustian effect is the wrong one to ask, and it may in fact be a substitution for the real question (as Kahneman would say).

Your actual question is "should I get the Pfizer booster in the first half of February?" 

I would answer that question (and in fact have answered it for myself) by asking questions like "what do I observe happening to people I know personally who already got boosted?" and "what do I observe happening to people I know personally who did not get boosted?"

If you subdivide the people you know personally category into "people I know personally who do not live in my immediate community" and "people I know personally who live in my immediate community," it also becomes a useful way to distinguish the COVID prevalence/risk in your community from the COVID prevalence/risk in other cities and countries.

Then you can use that information to ask yourself "what do I believe will happen to me if I get boosted?" and "what do I believe will happen to me if I do not get boosted?"

You can also ask "what do I believe will happen to me if I do not get boosted with this particular formulation, and choose instead to wait for a newer model?"

If you consider yourself to be at a lower risk for serious COVID complications but have loved ones within your immediate circle who are at higher risk, you should also ask "what do I observe happening to people I know in terms of spreading COVID to others?" and "what do I observe happening to people in my high-risk loved one's demographic who catch Omicron?"

Those are answerable questions, as opposed to evaluating a potential Faustian Hypothesis against an ever-growing series of secondhand, confounding data.

Yes a lot of in house software has terrible UX, mostly because it is often for highly specialised applications, it may also suffer from limited budget, poor feedback cycles if it was made as a one off by an internal team or contractor, and the target user group is tiny, lack of access to UX expertise etc.

Companies will optimise for their own workflows no doubt but their is often substantial overlap with common issues. Consider the work the redhat/ibm did on pipewire and wire plumber which will soon be delivering a substantially improved audio experience for the Linux desktop as a result of work they were doing anyway for automotive audio systems

I'm not that current with blender but I'm given to under stand there have been some improvements in usability recently as it has seen wider industry adoption and efforts have been directed at improving UX. Large firms with may people using a piece of software are motivated to fund efforts to make using it easier as it makes on-boarding new employees easier. Though given that blender is a fairly technical and specialist application I would not be surprised if it remained somewhat hard to use it's not like there are not UX issues with similarly specialist proprietary apps.

Yes, I know less about Ramsey's life, but he was an incredible talent and interacted with Wittgenstein and Keynes. Paul Dirac and Ronald Fisher also spent part of their careers at Cambridge in this period but I know less about their lives. (There's also G. H. Hardy).