Open thread, Dec. 14 - Dec. 20, 2015

This is almost as much fun as the calibration game.

Who created the game? How can they be contacted?

I've heard it said more than once that you can't teach passion, but I'd always taken that as the empty sputtering of those who simply do not know what passion is or what inspires it.

Could you elaborate on this? You sound very certain for someone whom I wouldn't expect to have much background on the subject.

For AMF it's a lot easier to estimate the effect than it is for anti-aging research. GiveWell purposefully started with a focus on interventions for which the can study the effect.

GiveWell writes:

Medical research : As of November 2011, we are just beginning to consider the cause of medical research. Conceptually, we find this cause promising because it is possible that a relatively small amount spent on research and development could result in new disease-fighting technology that could be used to save and improve many lives throughout the world. However, we do not yet have a good sense of whether this cause has a strong track record of turning charitable dollars into lives saved and improved.

You find a bit of data gathering under http://www.givewell.org/node/1339

More recently GiveWell Labs which then was renamed into the Open Philanthropy project will put more emphasis in that direction.

Articles that were written are:

http://blog.givewell.org/2013/12/26/scientific-research-funding/

Why explore scientific research? We expect it to be a difficult and long-term project to gain competence in scientific research funding.

http://blog.givewell.org/2014/01/07/exploring-life-sciences-funding/

“What are the best opportunities for funders aiming to contribute to progress in life sciences (i.e., biology and medicine)?” This post lays out what we’ve done to date and how we plan to move forward.

http://blog.givewell.org/2014/01/15/returns-to-life-sciences-funding/

“What are the best opportunities for funders aiming to contribute to progress in life sciences (i.e., biology and medicine)?” This post lays out what we’ve done to date and how we plan to move forward.

GiveWell Labs managed get Steve Goodman and John Ioannidis matchmaked with the Laura and John Arnold Foundation at the tune of $6 million.

Meta-Research doesn't sound as sexy as anti-aging research but if we want to have good anti-aging research we need a good basis in biology as a whole.

Anti-aging research is a catch-phrase and it makes sense that it's decently funded but alone it won't work. Biology as a whole needs to progress and chasing after shiny anti-aging targets might not always be the most effective use of money. Do you have a reason why you think it makes more sense to speak about anti-aging research than it makes sense to speak about life-science research?

Buying a 50-second increase in life expectancy for a megabuck seems very doable.

Please do a Fermi estimation of how you arrive at that conclusion.

Ooh, I know! So, Holden is aware of SENS. However, by default, GiveWell doesn't publish any info on charities it looks at and decides not to recommend, if they don't ask GiveWell to. This is to encourage other charities to go through GiveWell's recommendation process--it keeps GiveWell from lowering a charity's reputation by evaluating them.

Anyways, GiveWell did some sort of surface-level look at SENS a while back, and didn't recommend them. I think the only way to get more info about this would be to email Aubrey about his interaction with GiveWell.

When doing the calculations be sure to QA your LYs. Spending an extra week lying doped up and in pain in a hospital bed may not be worth all that much. Also with medical research, you often wind up with a patented drug which then costs $1e5 per patient treated at least for the first decade or two of its use at least as used in the USA and other non-single payer countries. Or it requires $1e5 of medical professional intervention per patient to implement. My priors are that the low-hanging fruit is not in turning 90 year olds into 91 year olds, and won't be for many decades.

I think their argument was that they don't support Pascal's Mugging and they don't see any proof of medical research within reach that could end aging with a significant probability.

EDIT: ...and I should have read the comment in more detail. You are talking about stuff such as donating to curing diseases. I think they just didn't assign analysts to this yet. I guess it's hard to measure scientific progress.

To really test this, we should see if placebo is much smaller in studies where this can't happen (certain chronic diseases for example).

I think this part is a bit too strong, which corrupts one of the main points of the whole post:

The other contribution comes from the get-better-anyway effect. This is a statistical artefact and it provides no benefit whatsoever to patients.

It's not called the stay-the-same-anyway effect, it's called the get-better-anyway effect. The patient who reports lower pain a week later actually is in less pain. Health isn't repeated draws from an urn: if you crack a rock one day it won't regress to the mean. It'll stay cracked. That people heal is not a statistical artefact.

That is, I agree much more with the O'Connell quote (emphasis mine):

If this finding is supported by future studies it might suggest that we can’t even claim victory through the non-specific effects of our interventions such as care, attention and placebo. People enrolled in trials for back pain may improve whatever you do. This is probably explained by the fact that patients enrol in a trial when their pain is at its worst which raises the murky spectre of regression to the mean and the beautiful phenomenon of natural recovery.

Regression to the mean plays a part, especially for chronic variable conditions like lower back pain or depression, but even there natural recovery plays a huge part (otherwise the condition would be a degenerative one).

The placebo group is called such because it receives the placebo treatment, not because medical researchers think all improvement in it is attributable to the placebo effect. Results are reported as improvement in the treatment arm vs. the placebo arm, and never have I seen these differences explicitly reported as treatment effect vs. placebo effect, and I've read hundreds of medical papers. The real magnitude of the placebo effect is almost never of interest in these papers. Some professionals in the medical community could have such a misconception because of the usual lack of scientific training, but I'd like to think they are a small minority.

If the placebo effect is of real importance, I think a more significant problem would be the lack of use of active placebos that mimick side effects since most drugs have them and this is a potential source of breaking the blinding of RCTs.

My n=1 experiment evidences against this. When my son was much younger and complained some part of him was hurting (because, say, he bumped against a wall) I would put lotion on the part and say it was powerful medicine. It usually made him feel better. And I wasn't even lying because the medicine I had in mind was the placebo effect.

Right, which is why the effect in the placebo arm is not called the placebo effect.

Interesting, thanks!

The product of meta-orgs is taste. If boardgamegeek thinks that Twilight Struggle is a good game, then you, not having played it, should expect that it's likely a 'good' game. If Givewell thinks that AMF is a good charity, then you, not having looked at it yourself, should expect that it's likely a 'good' charity.

With games that many people play, a website can average together those ratings and then sort them to generate a solid taste measure. With charities that have done things in the past and have models of what they can do in the future, an organization can evaluate the things done and the models for how things would change and estimate impacts and then sort by those impacts.

But with scientific projects, this seems much more difficult, because you're extrapolating past the fringes of current knowledge. It's not "which board games that already exist are best?" but "which board game would be best, if you made it?" This is a skill that people have to various degree--someone is designing these things, after all--but I think it's very difficult to communicate, and more importantly, for listeners to have a good sense of why they should or should not trust another person's taste.

Another way of looking at this is, with medical research, all of the cost-effectiveness is driven by whether or not the technology works. If the research is to validate or invalidate a theory, the usefulness of that theory (and thus the evidence) is determined by the technologies enabled by that theory (or the attention spared to work on other technologies that do work). But this is the thing that, by definition, we don't know yet, and is the thing that, say, SENS leadership spends its time thinking about. Do we approve this grant, or that grant?

(This comment may oversell the degree to which tech growth is about creating new knowledge / tech rather than spreading old knowledge / tech, but I think the point still gets at what you're talking about here.)

One of the key characteristics of research of the unknown is that you don't know the cost-effectiveness beforehand.

SENS (provisional on SENS still seeming like the best use of funds after more research was done).

What kind of research do you think could prove that claim?

The interesting thing of that claim is the idea that effective anti-aging research is research that's branded as anti-aging. I would guess that one of the most effective investments to further anti-aging research was the NHI decision to give out grants to DNA sequencing companies.

Investigating SENS more closely is also an interesting proposition. Doing so will show that it's over-optimistic and driven by assumptions that are likely wrong. However it scores high in the "clarity of vision" department that YCombinator uses to decide which startups to fund. SENS doesn't have to be right on it's core assumption to produce useful knowledge.

Startups don't profit from highly critical outside scrutiny into how they invest their money. Critical scrutiny might harm SENS.

Isn't it time effective altruists matured to using standardised measures of impact on an individual such as the impact on psychological distress.

EA mostly is about using statistics that are already out there.

The K10 scores has questions that are strongly culturally dependent. 1. During the last 30 days, about how often did you feel tired out for no good reason? depends heavily on what people consider to be "good reasons which differes a lot from culture to culture. It might very well be interpreted by some people as: Did you do anything that produced karma that you have to pay of by being tired

It's weird, of all the people I know who hate the whole process of getting clean dishes, you are the only one who hates loading the dish washer instead of unloading it.
Anyway, I think that loading the dish washer is sufficiently complicated (manipulating fragile objects, allocating weird shapes into boxes efficiently, moving around a human environment, etc.) that only full fledged robotic butler could do it. I'd say more than 10 years, with 0.9 confidence.
In the mean time, you should really not rinse the dishes before putting it in, otherwise the device will have no benefit: just remove the bigger food residues and chuck 'em dishes in as they are.

Where I live you don't often see dishwashers, so I always assumed they were as convenient as it could get.

Washing dishes is less bad if you don't have to wash LOADS of dishes, so you could wash them (and negotiate with your family that everyone ought to do the same) (your plates specifically) right after you're finished with your food. They're also easier to wash when the food had'nt dried to the plates. If you have kids too small to even reach the sink, that's harder.

I don't really know how dishwasher's oughta work, is there some reason one can not load their plates right into it? (after some initial rinsing, I presume).

As for pots, and other stuff for which immediate cleansing is not an option... well, those are still gonna suck, especially since they are the things hardest to clean, and neither would it be clear who would have to clean it (if, as is customary, your missus is the one cooking, it is only proper that you help relieve her from some of the load). If you were always to cook just enough, you could at least clean those while they are easier to, but we specifically tend to make more days worth of food in one go.

Papers with very long titles tend to be about a very narrowly defined problem in a very narrow subfield therefore they get cited less?

Given that all of the correlations reported in the paper are smaller in magnitude than -0.07, and when lumped by journal, smaller than -0.2, I don't think that these observations, statistically "significant" though they are, can be taken as a basis for advice on choosing a title.

The point that you can drive an excitation without resonance is a worthwhile one, but I think this article is too long by about a factor of 3, and the weird over-literal use and repetition of "self-excitation" is detrimental.

What's your credence that Mochizuki's proof will turn out to be correct?

Yes, when you imply that you're smarter than someone, you make them feel bad. And yes, many smart people don't realize that. But such behavior can also be attractive to onlookers, especially on the internet. I think Eliezer's arrogance played a big role in his popularity. Personally, I try to avoid being arrogant, but sometimes I can't help it :-)

You might have been more arrogant when you were young because you might have actually been smarter than most people around you. As people grow up they self select into careers that require intelligence and most of them are no longer smarter than most of their peers and signaling 'I'm smarter than you' becomes unfounded and starts to look silly.

There are probably instances were I do come across as arrogant but I don't think it's an automatic effect of being coimpetent and having high self-esteem.

Valentine from CFAR would be a counter-example. He's competent and self-confident but he has the social skills that prevent it from coming across as arrogant.

I am, of course, an arrogant smartass :-)

I deal with this problem by being aware of it and by having the (apparently rare) ability to shut up. I also find it easy to go meta, so when I notice that the status layer of the conversation becomes tumescent and starts to dominate the subject layer, I adjust accordingly.

This works not all the time, but well enough so that I find it acceptable.

Should is one of those sticky words that needs context. What are your goals for using LW?

Well, it depends on what you mean by "rationality". Here's something I posted in 2014, slightly revised:

If not rationality, then what?

LW presents epistemic and instrumental rationality as practical advice for humans, based closely on the mathematical model of Bayesian probability. This advice can be summed up in two maxims:

1. Obtain a better model of the world by updating on the evidence of things unpredicted by your current model.
2. Succeed at your given goals by using your (constantly updating) model to predict which actions will maximize success.

Or, alternately: Having correct beliefs is useful for humans achieving goals in the world, because correct beliefs enable correct predictions, and correct predictions enable goal-accomplishing actions. And the way to have correct beliefs is to update your beliefs when their predictions fail.

We can call these the rules of Bayes' world, the world in which updating and prediction are effective at accomplishing human goals. But Bayes' world is not the only imaginable world. What if we deny each of these premises and see what we get? Other than Bayes' world, which other worlds might we be living in?

To be clear, I'm not talking about alternatives to Bayesian probability as a mathematical or engineering tool. I'm talking about imaginable worlds in which Bayesian probability is not a good model for human knowledge and action.

Suppose that making correct predictions does not enable goal-accomplishing actions. We might call this Cassandra's world, the world of tragedy — in which those people who know best what the future will bring, are most incapable of doing anything about it.

In the world of heroic myth, it is not oracles (good predictors) but rather heroes and villains (strong-willed people) who create change in the world. Heroes and villains are people who possess great virtue or vice — strong-willed tendencies to face difficult challenges, or to do what would repulse others. Oracles possess the truth to arbitrary precision, but they accomplish nothing by it. Heroes and villains come to their predicted triumphs or fates not by believing and making use of prediction, but by ignoring or defying it.

Suppose that the path to success is not to update your model of the world, so much as to update your model of your self and goals. The facts of the external world are relatively close to our priors; not much updating is needed there — but our goals are not known to us initially. In fact, we may be thoroughly deceived about what our goals are, or what satisfying them would look like.

We might consider this to be Buddha's world, the world of contemplation — in which understanding the nature of the self is substantially more important to success than understanding the external world. In this world, when we choose actions that are unsatisfactory, it isn't so much because we are acting on faulty beliefs about the external world, but because we are pursuing goals that are illusory or empty of satisfaction.

There are other models as well, that could be extrapolated from denying other premises (explicit or implicit) of Bayes' world. Each of these models should relate prediction, action, and goals in different ways: We might imagine Lovecraft's world (knowledge causes suffering), Qoheleth's world (maybe similar to Buddha's), Job's world, or Nietzsche's world.

Each of these models of the world — Bayes' world, Cassandra's world, Buddha's world, and the others — does predict different outcomes. If we start out thinking that we are in Bayes' world, what evidence might suggest that we are actually in one of the others?

Rationality takes extra time and effort, and most people can get by without it. It is easier to go with the flow -- easier on your brain, easier on your social life, and easier on your pocketbook. And worse, even if you decide you like rationality, you can't just tune into the rationality hour on TV and do what they say -- you actually have to come up with your own rationality! It's way harder than politics, religion, or even exercise.

"It's cold-hearted."

This isn't actually a strong argument, but many people find it persuasive.

People discard artificial constructs after they are beaten a few times, and return to simply powering through.

It is hard, sometimes, to follow epistemic rationality when it seems in conflict with instrumental one. Like, when a friend and colleague cries me a river about her ongoing problems, I try to comfort her but also to forget the details, in case I betray her confidence next minute speaking to our other coworkers. Surely epistemic rationality requires committing information to memory as losslessly as possible? And yet I strive to remember the voice and not the words.

(A partial case of what people might mean by 'rationality is cold', I guess.)

Superstition hasn't worked in the past, so it's due to be right soon.

An acquaintance runs http://eye-track.me/ for measuring vision

How nearsighted are you (in diopters)?