Roko's Shortform

The US FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration)'s current advice on what to do about covid-19 still pretty bad.

Hand-washing and food safety seem to just be wrong, as far as we can tell covid-19 is almost entirely transmitted in the air, not on hands or food; hand-washing is a good thing to do but it won't help against covid-19 and talking about it displaces talk about things that actually do help.

6 feet of distance is completely irrelevant inside, but superfluous outside. Inside, distance doesn't matter - time does. Outside is so much safer than inside that you don't need to think about distance, you need to think about spending less time inside [in a space shared with other people] and more time outside.

Cloth face coverings are suboptimal compared to N95 or P100 masks and you shouldn't wear a cloth face covering unless you are in a dire situation where N-95 or P100 isn't available. Of course it's better than not wearing a mask, but that is a very low standard.

Donating blood is just irrelevant right now, we need to eliminate the virus. Yes, it's nice to help people, but talking about blood donation crowds out information that will help to eliminate the virus.

Reporting fake tests is not exactly the most important thing that ordinary people need to be thinking about. Sure, if you happen to come across this info, report it. But this is a distraction that displaces talk about what actually works.

Essentially every item on the FDA graphic is wrong.

In fact the CDC is still saying not to use N95 masks, in order to prevent supply shortages. This is incredibly stupid - we are a whole year into covid-19, there is no excuse for supply shortages, and if people are told not to wear them then there will never be an incentive to make more of them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210116233855/https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/help-stop-spread-coronavirus-and-protect-your-family

One weird trick for estimating the expectation of Lognormally distributed random variables:

If you have a variable X that you think is somewhere between 1 and 100 and is Lognormally distributed, you can model it as being a random variable with distribution ~ Lognormal(1,1) - that is, the logarithm has a distribution ~ Normal(1,1).

What is the expectation of X?

Naively, you might say that since the expectation of log(X) is 1, the expectation of X is 10^1, or 10. That makes sense, 10 is at the midpoint of 1 and 100 on a log scale.

This is wrong though. The chances of larger values dominate the expectation or average of X.

But how can you estimate that correction? It turns out that the rule you need is 10^(1 + 1.15*1^2) ≈ 141.

In general, if X ~ Lognormal(a, b) where we are working to base 10 rather than base e, this is the rule you need:

E(X) = 10^(a + 1.15*b^2)

The 1.15 is actually ln(10)/2.

For a product of several independent lognormals, you can just multiply these together, which means adding in the exponent. If you have 2 or 3 things which are all lognormal, the variance-associated corrections can easily add up to quite a lot.

Remember: add 1.15 times the sum of squares of log-variances!

There may be no animal welfare gain to veganism

I remain unconvinced that there is any animal welfare gain to vegi/veganism, farm animals have a strong desire to exist and if we stopped eating them they would stop existing.

Vegi/veganism exists for reasons of signalling, it would be surprising if it had any large net benefits other than signalling.

On top of this, the cost to mitigate most of the aspects of farming that animals disprefer is likely vastly smaller than the harms to human health.

Back of the envelope calculation is that making farming highly preferable to nonexistence for beef cattle raises the price by 25%-50%. I have some sources that ethically raised beef cattle has a cost of production of slightly more than $4.17/lb. Chicken has an ethical cost of production that's $2.64/lb vs $0.87/lb (from the same source). But, taking into account various ethics-independent overheads the consumer will not see those prices. Like, I cannot buy chicken for $0.87/lb, I pay about $3.25/lb. So I suspect that the true difference that the consumer would see is in the 25%-50% range. The same source above gives a smaller gap for pork - $6.76/lb vs $5.28/lb.

So, we could pay about 33% more for ethical meat that gives animals lives that are definitely preferable to nonexistence. The average consumer apparently spends about $1000/year on meat. So, that's about 70 years * $333 = $23,000

Now, if we conservatively assume that vegi/veganism costs say 2 years of life expectancy adjusted for quality due to nutritional deficiencies (ignore the pleasure of eating meat here, and also ignoring the value to the animals of their own lives) - with a statistical value of life of $10 million that's a cost of about $300,000.

If we value animal lives at say k% of a human life per unit time, and for simplicity assume that a person eats only $1000 of beef per year ~= 200 lb ~= 1/2 a cow, then each person causes the existence of about 0.75 cows on a permanent basis, each living for about 18 months, which is valued at 0.75k%.$10M. Vegans do not usually give an explicit value for k. Is an animal life worth the same as a human life per year? 1/10th? 1/20th? 1/100th? In any case, it doesn't really matter what you pick for this, it's overdetermined here.

So, veganism fails cost-benefit analysis based on these assumptions, compared to the option of just paying a bit extra for farming techniques that are more preferable to animals at an acceptably elevated cost.

Of course you could argue that veganism is good for human health, but I believe that is wrong due to bias and confounding (there are many similar screwups where a confounding effect due to something being popular with the upper class swamps a causal effect in the other direction). There are, as far as I am aware, no good RCTs on veganism.

In summary, veganism is a signalling game that fails rational cost-benefit analysis.

The Contrarian 'AI Alignment' Agenda

Overall Thesis: technical alignment is generally irrelevant to outcomes, and almost everyone in the AI Alignment field is stuck with this incorrect assumption, working on technical alignment of LLM models

(1) aligned superintelligence that is provably logically realizable [already proved]

(2) aligned superintelligence is not just logically but also physically realizable [TBD]

(3) ML interpretability/mechanistic interpretability cannot possibly be logically necessary for aligned superintelligence [TBD]

(4) ML interpretability/mechanistic interpretability cannot possibly be logically sufficient for aligned superintelligence [TBD]

(5) given certain minimal intelligence, minimal emulation ability of humans by AI (e.g. understands common-sense morality and cause and effect) and of AI by humans (humans can do multiplications etc) the internal details of AI models cannot possibly make a difference to the set of realizable good outcomes, though they can make a difference to the ease/efficiency of realizing them [TBD]

(6) given near-perfect or perfect technical alignment (=AI will do what the creators ask of it with correct intent) awful outcomes are Nash Equilibrium for rational agents [TBD]

(7) small or even large alignment deviations make no fundamental difference to outcomes - the boundary between good/bad is determined by game theory, mechanism design and initial conditions, and only by a satisficing condition on alignment fidelity which is below the level of alignment of current humans (and AIs) [TBD]

(8) There is no such thing as superintelligence anyway because intelligence factors into many specific expert systems rather than one all-encompassing general purpose thinker. No human has a job as a “thinker” - we are all quite specialized. Thus, it doesn’t make sense to talk about “aligning superintelligence”, but rather about “aligning civilization” (or some other entity which has the ability to control outcomes) [TBD]

I am proud to announce that I just solved* AI Alignment.

https://transhumanaxiology.substack.com/p/a-nonconstructive-existence-proof

*(some implementation details were left as an exercise to the reader)