LessWrong 2.0 Reader

D&D website estimates 13.7m active players and rising.

I don't think the two closed answers of "Have you stopped beating your wife ?" have such a well-defined meaning. Since this is natural language, and I understand a no as meaning "I'm still beating her." and I expect most people to interpret a no the same way as I, then it's not from obvious why this interpretation is incorrect (if we ignore that the sentence is typically used as an example that has no good answer. Use "Will you stop smoking soon ?" which is less standard for the sake of the argument.)

(on the other hand, the inability to condition yourself seems relevant here. It seems like the brain might be not be controlling for whether something is reasonable, but only for whether something is produced by yourself. So maybe exercise counts because it’s under your control, but waterboarding doesn’t count because it isn’t. I wonder if anyone has ever tried letting someone waterboard themselves and giving them the on-off switch for the waterboarding device. Was Hitchens’ experience close enough to this to count? Why would this be different from letting someone hold their breath, which doesn’t produce the same level of panic?)

Hypothesis: the difference is in the failure mode.

If you hold your breath, you can always choose (assuming you are not underwater or in some other environment that prevents proper breathing) to stop holding your breath and save yourself from suffocating. If you are being waterboarded by friendly demonstrators, you can say the safe word and save yourself from "drowning". These may seem the same, but are not. In both cases the longer you hold the weaker you get - the way that weakening affects your ability to stop the ordeal is very different.

The longer you hold your breath the harder it gets to keep holding your breath - until at some point you are no longer able to hold your breath and are forced to breath. Even if you can keep holding your breath past that point - you are just going to pass out, and then you'll just switch to autopilot and breath automatically. Unless you suffer from Ondine's curse, failure will not kill you.

With waterboarding, if you become too weak to properly signal the "torturers" to stop - they won't stop. Sure, in Hitchens' case they noticed that he passed out and stopped it. Because they are professionals. But this is probably too high level for your subconsciousness and your body to rely on - as far as they care, failure can mean death. Holding as long as you can is no longer a safe option - so your body will try to scream at you to stop it as soon as possible.

You say "these are very wide error bars", in reference to the plot of Ct value versus vaccination status, hence casting doubt on the idea that the vaccinated and unvaccinated have similar Ct values.

But I think the boxplots shown represent the distribution of values, NOT the uncertainty in the estimated mean.  With n=84 and n=127 for the two groups, the standard error in the difference in the two means should be around 0.5 (an exact figure isn't obtainable from the displayed data, which shows quantiles, not standard deviations). Whether that's "small" or not is of course a subjective judgement, but it's a lot smaller than the size of the boxes.

However, a serious problem with this plot is that the unvaccinated are lumped together with "unknown" and "not fully vaccinated".  Since unknowns may well be vaccinated, and the partially-vaccinated have a large part of the immunity of the fully-vaccinated, the plot is basically useless.
 

Thank you. I had not seen the follow-up. Edited in original.

Still happened, of course, but harping on it would likely be a distraction.

Summon Greater Player is hilarious. I love it. Bootstrap by adding AIs who cheat?

NIH Director Francis Collins claimed he misspoke, and tweeted to clarify.

Let me clarify the masking message that I garbled on @NewDay this morning. Vaccinated parents who live in communities with high COVID transmission rates should mask when out in public indoor settings to minimize risks to their unvaccinated kids. No need to mask at home.

https://twitter.com/NIHDirector/status/1422654529087189000

Not sure how to feel about the poor communication, but propagating the followup, I think.

Maybe if we can identify an enemy who's going to shoot at us, we can select and instill that level of commitment.  I suspect it comes from a pre-rational part of human motivation, and is not available to the vast majority of rationalists.

bolder -> boulder

Do not let your own troops be such moved.

Should be "so moved" I think.

Probabilistic/inductive reasoning from past/simulated data (possibly assumes imperfect implementation of LCDT):

"This is really weird because obviously I could never influence an agent, but when past/simulated agents that look a lot like me did X, humans did Y in 90% of cases, so I guess the EV of doing X is 0.9 * utility(Y)."

Cf. smart humans in Newcomb's prob: "This is really weird but if I one box I get the million, if I two-box I don't, so I guess I'll just one box."