Elizabeth's Shortform

I have a model that:

• human bodies actively maintain an equilibrium that works pretty well for them.
• sometimes you are knocked out of this equilibrium, but the all the maintenance mechanisms still work and you get back to normal. E.g. you get sick and feel like shit for a few days, but your body clears the virus and you recover 100%. 
• For issues like this, treatment is based on the first or root cause. if have strep throat you get antibiotics, if you broke your arm you need it set. Treating symptoms might be nice, but the issue will continue until the root cause is cleared. 
• sometimes you get knocked into a new equilbrium. You start out with externally caused anxiety, but that disrupts your sleep, which makes you anxious, which disrupts your sleep... And this is stable even if you remove the initial issue that made you anxious. You now have Bad Equilibrium Disease.
• Original cause is almost irrelevant when treating Bad Equilibrium Disease. If anxiety gives you insomnia and insomnia gives you anxiety, treating either will shift you to a better equilibrium.

Most of medicine focuses on problems with root causes. Even if you go to alternative modalities, they usually sell themselves as being better at finding root causes. But sometimes there either is no root cause, or it's not directly fixable, and you can still get tremendous gains by moving yourself to a better equilibrium. 

EA organizations frequently ask for people to run criticism by them ahead of time. I’ve been wary of the push for this norm. My big concerns were that orgs wouldn’t comment until a post was nearly done, and that it would take a lot of time. My recent post [EA · GW]  mentioned a lot of people and organizations, so it seemed like useful data.

I reached out to 12 email addresses, plus one person in FB DMs and one open call for information on a particular topic.  This doesn’t quite match what you see in the post because some people/orgs were used more than once, and other mentions were cut. The post was in a fairly crude state when I sent it out.

Of those 14: 10 had replied by the start of next day. More than half of those replied within a few hours. I expect this was faster than usual because no one had more than a few paragraphs relevant to them or their org, but is still impressive.

It’s hard to say how sending an early draft changed things. Austin Chen got some extra anxiety joked about being anxious because their paragraph was full of TODOs (because it was positive and I hadn’t worked as hard fleshing out the positive mentions ahead of time). Turns out they were fine but then I was worried I'd stressed them out. I could maybe have saved myself one stressful interaction if I’d realized I was going to cut an example ahead of time

Only 80,000 Hours, Anima International, and GiveDirectly failed to respond before publication (7 days after I emailed them). 

I didn’t keep as close track of changes, but at a minimum replies led to 2 examples being removed entirely, 2 clarifications and some additional information that made the post better. So overall I'm very glad I solicited comments, and found the process easier than expected. 

reposting comment from another post [LW(p) · GW(p)], with edits:

re: accumulating status in hope of future counterfactual impact.

I model status-qua-status (as opposed to status as a side effect of something real) as something like a score for "how good are you at cooperating with this particular machine?". The more you demonstrate cooperation, the more the machine will trust and reward you. But you can't leverage that into getting the machine to do something different- that would immediately zero out your status/cooperation score. 

There are exceptions. If you're exceptionally strategic you might make good use of that status by e.g. changing what the machine thinks it wants, or coopting the resources and splintering. It is also pretty useful to accumulate evidence you're a generally responsible adult before you go off and do something weird. But this isn't the vibe I get from people I talk to with the 'status then impact' plan, or from any of 80ks advice. Their plans only make sense if either that status is a fungible resource like money, or if you plan on cooperating with the machine indefinitely. 

So I don't think people should pursue status as a goal in and of itself, especially if there isn't a clear sign for when they'd stop and prioritize something else.

ooooooh actual Hamming spent 10s of minutes asking people about the most important questions in their field and helping them clarify their own judgment, before asking why they weren't working on this thing they clearly valued and spent time thinking about. That is pretty different from demanding strangers at parties justify why they're not working on your pet cause. 

Brandon Sanderson is a bestselling fantasy author. Despite mostly working with traditional publishers, there is a 50-60 person company formed around his writing^[1]. This podcast talks about how the company was formed.

Things I liked about this podcast:

1. he and his wife both refer to it as "our" company and describe critical contributions she made.
2. the number of times he was dissatisfied with the way his publisher did something and so hired someone in his own company to do it (e.g. PR and organizing book tours), despite that being part of the publisher's job.
3. He believed in his back catalog enough to buy remainder copies of his books (at $1/piece) and sell them via his own website at sticker price (with autographs). This was a major source of income for a while. 
4. Long term grand strategic vision that appears to be well aimed and competently executed.

1. ^{^}

   The only non-Sanderson content I found was a picture book from his staff artist. 

Abstract issues raised by the Nonlinear accusations and counter-accusations

1. How do you handle the risk of witness tampering, in ways that still let innocent people prove themselves innocent? Letting people cut corners if they claim a risk of tampering sure sets up bad incentives, but it is a real problem the system needs to be able to deal with
2. How do you handle the fact that the process of providing counter-evidence can be hacked, in ways that still let innocent people prove themselves? People can string it out, or bury you in irrelevant data, or provide misleading data that then requires more time to drill into. 
3. How do you handle the risk of true, negative things coming out about the alleged victim? My take is that the first and strongest complaints will come from people who are extra sensitive, fragile, or bad at boundaries regardless of the situation, because duh. If you put two people in the same situation, the more sensitive person will complain more regardless of the situation. That's what sensitive means. 
4. Probably the best thing for the community as a whole is for complete, accurate information to come out about both the victims and the org, but this has high costs for each of them. How do you get victims to share information if doing so leaves them worse off?
5. How do you handle requests or requirements from the victim to help them emotionally, but have epistemic consequences? Such as having a set publication date, or compensating for financial hardship from coming forward (which might be a lot, if accurate, employment-impairing information comes out). 
6. How much do we hold people responsible for offering trades someone else hurt themselves with? How do we do that while preserving the ability to do weird things that are bad for most people but extremely good for a few? If 50% of employees regret working somewhere, that's obviously too high. I tentatively feel that 10% is too high unless you're giving a killer severance package. But I reject in my bones the idea that you can't offer weird trades just because they'd be bad for most people. 
   
   1. On FB someone suggested a "challenging job" label, for which people would have to provide legible evidence they were informed and had good reason to believe they could handle it. Similar to the concept of accredited investor in the US, or professional investor in the UK. This has a lot of challenges in implementation, but I think is worth considering. 
7. Right now you can't casually share bits of negative information in public. You either say nothing or spend half a year's man hours on an airtight legal case that allows no mistakes. That's terrible for everyone. How do we make it okay to share bits of casual negative information?
   1.  Example: In a recent dialogue someone (Thomas Kwa?) had an aside about how working for Nate Soares was difficult. Two other people decided this was their moment to share how awful and abusive Nate was to them. I think it's good all of that information came out but feel bad that it dominated Thomas's Dialogue that he wanted to focus elsewhere. The comment thread was eventually moved to its own post but I expect that was still a bad experience for Thomas. 
   2. A bunch of low level negative information about SBF became much more public after the fraud did. It seems like it would have been good for a number of reasons for that come out earlier even if there was no fraud. It's just good to know when someone is a jerk. 
8. What are the costs of not being able to act (publicly) until you have high certainty? What are the costs of being of not doing that?
9. Who gets anonymity?

↑ comment by Gunnar_Zarncke · 2023-12-23T14:08:51.099Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think you are trying to reinvent law. I think all or at least most of these points have decent answers in a society with working rule of law. Granted, social media makes things more complicated, but the general dynamics are not new.

Replies from: Viliam, Gunnar_Zarncke

↑ comment by Viliam · 2023-12-23T21:34:38.291Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

In ideal case we would like to have something better than law, because currently the law mostly works for people who have approximately the same amount of resources they can spend on law.

If you have lots of money for lawyers, you can threaten people so they will be silent even if you hurt them. If you have lots of money for lawyers, you can say anything you want about anyone with less money than you, and then let the lawyers solve the problem. The easiest strategy is to drag out the lawsuit indefinitely until the other side burns all their resources, then offer them a settlement they cannot refuse (a part of the settlement is them publicly admitting that they were wrong, even if factually they were not).

Law optimizes for a stable society, not for truth. Siding with the rich is a part of that goal.

Replies from: Gunnar_Zarncke

↑ comment by Gunnar_Zarncke · 2023-12-23T22:45:40.489Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If you have lots of money for lawyers, you can threaten people

That doesn't sound like proper rule of law, and indeed, the US is abysmal in that area specifically. Not that the US would be a paragon of rule of law overall.

 

Source:

https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/country/2023/United%20States/Civil%20Justice/ 

Maybe that is why people resort to alternate ways of dispute resolution...

↑ comment by Gunnar_Zarncke · 2023-12-24T13:07:50.733Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Can one of the disagreers explain their reasoning?

EA/rationality has this tension between valuing independent thought, and the fact that most original ideas are stupid. But the point of independent thinking isn't necessarily coming up with original conclusions. It's that no one else can convey their models fully so if you want to have a model with fully fleshed-out gears you have to develop it yourself. 

1 day later, my retraction has more karma than the original humming post

Everyone who waits longer than me to publicly share their ideas is a coward, afraid to expose their ideas to the harsh light of day. Everyone who publicly shares their ideas earlier than me is a maniac, wasting others people's time with stream of consciousness bullshit.

There's a thing in EA where encouraging someone to apply for a job or grant gets coded as "supportive", maybe even a very tiny gift. But that's only true when [chance of getting job/grant] x [value of job/grant over next best alternative] > [cost of applying].

One really clear case was when I was encouraged to apply for a grant my project wasn't a natural fit for,  because "it's quick and there are few applicants".   This seemed safe, since the deadline was in a few hours. But in those few hours the number of applications skyrocketed- I want to say 5x but my memory is shaky- presumably because I wasn't the only person the grantmaker encouraged.  I ended up wasting several hours of my and co-founders time before dropping out, because the project really was not a good fit for the grant.

[if the grantmaker is reading this and recognizes themselves: I'm not mad at you personally]. 

I've been guilty of this too, defaulting to encouraging people to try for something without considering the costs of making the attempt, or the chance of success. It feels so much nicer than telling someone "yeah you're probably not good enough".

A lot of EA job postings encourage people to apply even if they don't think they're a good fit. I expect this is done partially because orgs genuinely don't want to lose great applicants who underestimate themselves, and partially because it's an extremely cheap way to feel anti-elitist. 

I don't know what the solution is here. Many people are miscalibrated on their value or their competition, all else being equal you do want to catch those people. But casting wider net entails more bycatch [EA · GW].

It's hard to accuse an org of being mean to someone who they encouraged to apply for a job or grant. But I think that should be in the space of possibilities, and we should put more emphasis on invitations to apply for jobs/grants/etc being clear, and less on welcoming. This avoids wasting the time of people who were predictably never going to get the job. 

I have a friend who spent years working on existential risk. Over time his perception of the risks increased, while his perception of what he could do about them decreased (and the latter was more important). Eventually he dropped out of work in a normal sense to play video games, because the enjoyment was worth more to him than what he could hope to accomplish with regular work. He still does occasional short term projects, when they seem especially useful or enjoyable, but his focus is on generating hedons in the time he has left. 

I love this friend as a counter-example to most of the loudest voices on AI risk.You can think p(doom) is very high and have that be all the more reason to play video games. 

I don't want to valorize this too much because I don't want retiring to play video games becoming the cool new thing. The admirable part is that he did his own math and came to his own conclusions in the face of a lot of social pressure to do otherwise. 

HEROIC/REACTIVE VS RESPONSIBLE/PROACTIVE AGENCY

A few month's ago, twitter's big argument was about this AITA, in which a woman left a restaurant to buy ranch dressing. Like most viral AITAs this is probably fake, but the discourse around it is still revealing. The arguments were split between "such agency! good for her for going after what she wants" and "what is she, 3?". I am strongly on the side of people doing what they want with their own food, but in this case I think the people praising her have missed the point, and the people criticizing her have focused on the wrong thing.

I think it's weird but harmless to drown all your food in ranch dressing. But it is, at best, terribly rude to leave a date for 20 minutes to run an errand. If it is so important to you to have ranch on all your food, either check with the restaurant ahead of time or just bring a small bottle by default. 

So this woman is agentic in the sense of "refusing to accept the environment as it is, working to bring it more in line with her preferences". But it's a highly reactive form of agency that creates a lot of negative externalities.

I see this a lot in the way rationalists talk about agency.  What gets praised is risky, expensive, reactive actions. The kind of responsible, proactive agency that heads off problems before they get costly receives much less attention.

GET AMBITIOUS SLOWLY

Most approaches to increasing agency and ambition focus on telling people to dream big and not be intimidated by large projects. I'm sure that works for some people, but it feels really flat for me, and I consider myself one of the lucky ones. The worst case scenario is big inspiring  speeches get you really pumped up to Solve Big Problems but you lack the tools to meaningfully follow up. 

Faced with big dreams but unclear ability to enact them, people have a few options. 

•  try anyway and fail badly, probably too badly for it to even be an educational failure. 
• fake it, probably without knowing they're doing so
• learned helplessness, possible systemic depression
• be heading towards failure, but too many people are counting on you so someone steps in and rescue you. They consider this net negative and prefer the world where you'd never started to the one where they had to rescue you. 
• discover more skills than they knew. feel great, accomplish great things, learn a lot. 

The first three are all very costly, especially if you repeat the cycle a few times.

My preferred version is ambition snowball or "get ambitious slowly". Pick something big enough to feel challenging but not much more, accomplish it, and then use the skills and confidence you learn to tackle a marginally bigger challenge. This takes longer than immediately going for the brass ring and succeeding on the first try, but I claim it is ultimately faster and has higher EV than repeated failures.

I claim EA's emphasis on doing The Most Important Thing pushed people into premature ambition and everyone is poorer for it. Certainly I would have been better off hearing this 10 years ago 

What size of challenge is the right size? I've thought about this a lot and don't have a great answer. You can see how things feel in your gut, or compare to past projects. My few rules:

• stick to problems where failure will at least be informative. If you can't track reality well enough to know why a failure happened you definitely* need an easier project. 
• if your talk gives people a lot of ambitions to save the world/build billion dollar companies but their mind goes blank when they contemplate starting a freelancing business, the ambition is fake. 

None of my principled arguments against "only care about big projects" have convinced anyone, but in practice Google reorganized around that exact policy ("don't start a project unless it could conceivably have 1b+ users, kill if it's ever not on track to reach that") and they haven't home grown an interesting thing since.

My guess is the benefits of immediately aiming high are overwhelmed by the costs of less contact with reality.

I've stuck with Amazing Marvin longer than any other project management/todo app. That includes some pretty awful times when 95% of my tasks were medical or basic home care, times I was firing on all cylinders and cranking through ambitious projects, and times inbetween. 

Some things I like about Marvin

• The two failures of project management apps are lacking features critical to your process, and feature clutter coming between you and your work. Marvin avoids this by letting you toggle features on and off (many blatantly stolen from other project management apps).
  • For example, I have enabled the feature to add a point value to my tasks, but have disabled frog ratings (as in "eat that frog"). 
• Separate concepts of due date and do date, and it's very easily and rewarding to look at today's do list. 
• Lots of options for recurring tasks- every X days, X days after I complete it the last time, every 4th Tuesday, etc.
• Pinned tasks/projects let me track common recurring tasks without having to schedule them or recreate every time.
• Infinite nesting of projects. 
• Infinite nesting  of projects, plus single levels of tasks and subtasks, plays really well with what David MacIver calls "14-step coffee days". You can tailor the level of detail in ways that feel natural and leave you energy for the day. 
• Maintains an archive of what was done when so I can look back on accomplishments over time. 
• Smart Lists with shortcuts let me have high-visibility lists besides the today list. I have one for topics I need to discuss with a doctor, and another for tasks for my house cleaner. 
• Their logo does a little dance when I complete an item.

Some things I find lacking about Marvin

• the hotkey shortcuts are bizarre. time should be @ but is +, tags are @ when they should be #, # is for projects.
• Recurring tasks could be a little easier to edit. 
• things not on today's do list can slip out of view. You can fix this with regular sweeps, but then you need to be vicious about backburnering tasks so the most important tasks don't get lost in the shuffle. 

Principles I think are important with these kinds of apps:

• If it's not innately rewarding to use an app, I will eventually stop. Making the app experience self-reinforcing is worth almost any sacrifice. 
  • I have a 5-point daily task to open the app. 
• GTD says to capture everything in one system so your brain is clear. This feels good when I start it, but capturing everything clutters my system so badly it becomes unrewarding to open. 
  • The dancing mascot does help with this, but only as icing on the underlying productivity experience. 

As of October 2022, I don't think I could have known FTX was defrauding customers.

If I'd thought about it I could probably have figured out that FTX was at best a casino, and I should probably think seriously before taking their money or encouraging other people to do so.  I think I failed in an important way here, but I also don't think my failure really hurt anyone, because I am such a small fish.

But I think in a better world I should have had the information that would lead me to conclude that Sam Bankman-Fried was an asshole who didn't keep his promises, and that this made it risky to make plans that depended on him keeping even explicit promises, much less vague implicit commitments.  I have enough friends of friends that have spoken out since the implosion that I'm quite sure that in a more open, information-sharing environment I would have gotten that information. And if I'd gotten that information, I could have shared it with other small fish who were considering uprooting their lives based on implicit commitments from SBF. Instead, I participated in the irrational exuberance that probably made people take more risks on the margin, and left them more vulnerable to the collapse of FTX. Assigning culpability is hard here, but this isn't just an abstract worry: I can think of one person I might bear some responsibility for, and another who I would be almost 100% responsible for, except they didn't get the grant. 

I think the encouragement I gave people represents a moral failure on my part. I should have realized I didn't have enough information to justify it, even if I never heard about specific bad behavior. Hell even if SBF wasn't an unreliable asshole, Future Fund could have turned off the fire hose for lots of reasons. IIRC they weren't even planning on continuing the regrantor project.  

But it would also have been cool if that low key, "don't rely on Sam- I'm not accusing him of anything malicious, he's just not reliable" type of information had circulated widely enough that it reached me and the other very small fish, especially the ones taking major risks that only made sense in an environment where FTX money flowed freely. 

I don't know what the right way to do that would have been. But it seems important to figure out. 

I also suspect that in an environment where it was easy to find out that SBF was an unreliable asshole, it would have been easier to discover or maybe even prevent the devastating fraud, because people would have felt more empowered to say no to him. But that might be wishful thinking. 

Check my math: how does Enovid compare to to humming?

Nitric Oxide is an antimicrobial and immune booster. Normal nasal nitric oxide is 0.14ppm for women and 0.18ppm for men (sinus levels are 100x higher). journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…

Enovid is a nasal spray that produces NO. I had the damndest time quantifying Enovid, but this trial registration says 0.11ppm NO/hour. They deliver every 8h and I think that dose is amortized, so the true dose is 0.88. But maybe it's more complicated. I've got an email out to the PI but am not hopeful about a response clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05109…

so Enovid increases nasal NO levels somewhere between 75% and 600% compared to baseline- not shabby. Except humming increases nasal NO levels by 1500-2000%. atsjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.116….

Enovid stings and humming doesn't, so it seems like Enovid should have the larger dose. But the spray doesn't contain NO itself, but compounds that react to form NO. Maybe that's where the sting comes from? Cystic fibrosis and burn patients are sometimes given stratospheric levels of NO for hours or days; if the burn from Envoid came from the NO itself than those patients would be in agony. 

I'm not finding any data on humming and respiratory infections. Google scholar gives me information on CF and COPD, @Elicit brought me a bunch of studies about honey.

With better keywords google scholar to bring me a bunch of descriptions of yogic breathing with no empirical backing.

There are some very circumstantial studies on illness in mouth breathers vs. nasal, but that design has too many confounders for me to take seriously. 

Where I'm most likely wrong:

• misinterpreted the dosage in the RCT
• dosage in RCT is lower than in Enovid
  • Enovid's dose per spray is 0.5ml, so pretty close to the new study. But it recommends two sprays per nostril, so real dose is 2x that. Which is still not quite as powerful as a single hum. 

Much has been written about how groups tend to get more extreme over time. This is often based on evaporative cooling, but I think there's another factor: it's the only way to avoid the geeks->mops->sociopaths death spiral.

An EA group of 10 people would really benefit from one of those people being deeply committed to helping people but hostile to the EA approach, and another person who loves spreadsheets but is indifferent to what they're applied to. But you can only maintain the ratio that finely when you're very small. Eventually you need to decide if you're going to ban scope-insensitive people or allow infinitely many, and lose what makes your group different.

"Decide" may mean consciously choose an explicit policy, but it might also mean gradually cohere around some norms. The latter is more fine-tuned in some ways but less in others. 

Having AI voices read my drafts back to me feels like it's seriously leveled up my writing. I think the biggest, least replaceable feature is that I'm more less likely to leaves gaps in my writing- things where it's obvious to me but I need to spell it out. It also catches bad transitions, and I suspect it's making my copy editor's job easier.  

Toy model:

a person's skill level has a floor (what they can do with minimal effort) and ceiling (what they can do with a lot of thought and effort). Ceiling raises come from things we commonly recognize as learning: studying the problem, studying common solution. Floor raises come from practicing the skills you already have, to build fluency in them.

There's a rubber band effect where the farther your ceiling is from your floor, the more work you have to put in to raise it further. At a certain point the efficient thing to do is to grind until you have raised your floor, so that further ceiling raises are cheaper, even if you only care about peak performance. 

My guess for why that happens is your brain has some hard constraints on effort, and raising the floor reduces the effort needed at all levels. E.g. it's easier to do 5-digit multiplication if you've memorized 1-digit times tables. 

My guess is the pots theory of art [LW · GW] works best  when a person's skill ceiling is well above their floor. This is true both because it means effort is likely the limiting reagent, the artist will have things to try rather than flailing at random, and they will be able to assess how good a given pot is.

Are impact certificates/retroactive grants the solution to grantmaking corrupting epistemics? They're not viable for everyone, but for people like me who:

1. do a lot of small projects (which barely make sense to apply for grants for individually)
2. benefit from doing what draws their curiosity at the moment (so the delay between grant application and decision is costly)
3. take commitments extremely seriously (so listing a plan on a grant application is very constraining)
4. have enough runway that payment delays and uncertainty for any one project aren't a big deal

They seem pretty ideal.

So why haven't I put more effort into getting retroactive funding? The retroactive sources tend to be crowdsourced. Crowdfunding is miserable in general, and leaves you open to getting very small amounts of money, which feels worse than none at all. Right now I can always preserve the illusion I would get more money, which seems stupid. In particular even if I could get more money for a past project by selling it better and doing some follow up, that time is almost certainly better spent elsewhere. 

[cross-posted from What If You Lived In the Least Convenient Possible World [LW(p) · GW(p)]]

I came back to this post a year later because I really wanted to grapple with the idea I should be willing to sacrifice more for the cause. Alas, even in a receptive mood I don't think this post does a very good job of advocating for this position. I don't believe this fictional person weighed the evidence and came to a conclusion she is advocating for as best she can: she's clearly suffering from distorted thoughts and applying post-hoc justifications. She's clearly confused about what convenient means (having to slow down to take care of yourself is very inconvenient), and I think this is significant and not just a poor choice of words. So I wrote my own version of the position.

Let's say Bob is right that the costs exceed the benefits of working harder or suffering. Does that need to be true forever? Could Bob invest in changing himself so that he could better live up to his values? Does he have an ~obligation^[1] to do that? 

We generally hold that people who can swim have obligations to save drowning children in lakes^[2], but there's no obligation for non-swimmers to make an attempt that will inevitably drown them. Does that mean they're off the hook, or does it mean their moral failure happened when they chose not to learn how to swim?

One difficulty with this is that there are more potential emergencies than we could possibly plan for. If someone skipped the advance swim lesson where you learn to rescue panicked drowning people because they were learning wilderness first aid, I don't think that's a moral failure. 

This posits a sort of moral obligation to maximally extend your capacity to help others or take care of yourself in a sustainable way. I still think obligation is not quite the right word for this, but to the extent it applies, it applies to long term strategic decisions and not in-the-moment misery. 

1. ^{^}

   I don't love the word obligation in general. I'm using it here to convey that whatever morality applies to split-second-decisions also applies to long term planning.

2. ^{^}

   The original Singer parable refers to a shallow pond, I assume to get around this problem.

It's weird how hard it is to identify what is actually fun or restorative, vs. supposed to be fun or restorative, or used to be fun or restorative but no longer is. And "am I enjoying this?" should be one of the easiest questions to answer, so imagine how badly we're fucking up the others.

Projects I might do or wish someone else would do:

• Compare AI research assistants [LW(p) · GW(p)] more intensively.
  • Compare individual Perplexity models
  • Compare paper reading ability across models. 
• Look into that fluoride paper [LW(p) · GW(p)]

A very rough draft of a plan to test prophylactics for airborne illnesses.

Start with a potential superspreader event. My ideal is a large conference,  many of whom travelled to get there, in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation and air purification, in winter. Ideally >=4 days, so that people infected on day one are infectious while the conference is still running. 

Call for sign-ups for testing ahead of time (disclosing all possible substances and side effects). Split volunteers into control and test group. I think you need ~500 sign ups in the winter to make this work. 

Splitting controls is probably the hardest part. You'd like the control and treatment group to be identical, but there are a lot of things that affect susceptibility.  Age, local vs. air travel, small children vs. not, sleep habits... it's hard to draw the line

Make it logistically trivial to use the treatment. If it's lozenges or liquids, put individually packed dosages in every bathroom, with a sign reminding people to use them (color code to direct people to the right basket). If it's a nasal spray you will need to give everyone their own bottle, but make it trivial to get more if someone loses theirs.

Follow-up a week later, asking if people have gotten sick and when. 

If the natural disease load is high enough this should give better data than any paper I've found. 

Top contenders for this plan:

• zinc lozenge 
• salt water gargle
• enovid
• betadine gargle
• zinc gargle
• I'd really like to do humming but haven't yet figured out the logisitics of reminding the treatment group to hum without ruining the control group. 

things I found interesting about this video:

• Brennan's mix of agency (organizing 100 person LARPs at 15, becoming creative director at LARP camp by 19), and mindless track following (thinking the goal of arts school was grades). 
• He's so proactively submissive about starting community college at 14. "Oh man I was so annoying. I apologize to anyone who had to be around me back then". You can really see the childhood bullying trauma.
  • This isn't conjecture, he says outright he still expects every new group he meets to put him in a trashcan.
  • I imagine hearing him talk about this would be bad for a 14yo in a similar position, which is a shame because the introspection around choosing his own goals vs. having them picked for him seems really useful.
• About his recommendation of a social strategy: "Am I lying or telling the truth? I'm telling the truth to myself but you shouldn't do it".
• Frank discussion of how financial constraints affected his life. 
• A happy ending where all the weird side threads from his life came together to create the best possible life for him. 

My sink is way emptier when my todo list item is "do a single dish" than "do all the dishes"

There's a category of good thing that can only be reached with some amount of risk, and that are hard to get out once you start. All of romance risks getting your heart broken. You never have enough information to know a job will always and forever be amazing for you. Will anti-depressants give you your life back or dull your affect in hard to detect ways? 

This is hard enough when the situation is merely high variance with incomplete information. But often the situations are adversarial: abusive partners and jobs camouflage themselves.  Or the partner/job might start out good and get bad, as their finances change. Or they might be great in general but really bad for you (apparently other people like working for Google? no accounting for taste). 

Or they might be genuinely malicious and telling you the issue is temporary, or that their ex wasn't a good fit or you are.

Or they might not be malicious, it might genuinely be the situation, but the situation isn't going to get better so it's damaging you badly. 

You could opt out of the risk, but at the cost of missing some important human experiences and/or food.

How do you calculate risks when the math is so obfuscated?

When I did my vegan nutrition write-ups, I directed people to Examine.com's Guide to Vegan+Vegetarian Supplements. Unfortunately, it is paywalled. Fortunately, it is now possible to ask your library to buy access, so you can read that guide plus their normal supplement reviews at no cost to yourself. 

Library explainer: https://examine.com/plus/public-libraries/

Ven*n guide: https://examine.com/guides/vegetarians-vegans/

A repost [LW(p) · GW(p)] from the discussion on NDAs and Wave (a software company). Wave was recently publicly revealed to have made severance dependent on non-disparagement agreements, cloaked by non-disclosure agreements. I had previously worked at Wave, but negotiated away the non-disclosure agreement (but not the non-disparagement agreement).

But my guess is that most of the people you sent to Wave were capable of understanding what they were signing and thinking through the implications of what they were agreeing to, even if they didn't actually have the conscientiousness / wisdom / quick-thinking to do so. (Except, apparently, Elizabeth [LW(p) · GW(p)]. Bravo, @Elizabeth [LW · GW]!)

I appreciate the kudos here, but feel like I should give more context.

I think some of what led to me to renegotiate was a stubborn streak and righteousness about truth. I mostly hear when those traits annoy people, so it’s really nice to have them recognized in a good light here. But that righteous streak was greatly enabled by the fact that my mom is a lawyer who modeled reading legal documents before signing (even when it's embarrassing your kids who just want to join their friends at the rockclimbing birthday party), and that I could afford to forgo severance. Obviously I really wanted the money, and I couldn’t afford to take this kind of stand every week. But I believe there were people who couldn’t even afford to add a few extra days, and so almost had to cave

To the extent people in that second group were unvirtuous, I think the lack of virtue occurred when they didn’t create enough financial slack to even have the time to negotiate. By the time they were laid off without a cushion it was too late. And that’s not available to everyone- Wave paid well, but emergencies happen, any one of them could have a really good reason their emergency fund was empty.

So the main thing I want to pitch here is that “getting yourself into a position where virtue is cheap” is an underrated strategy.

Problems I am trying to figure out right now:

1. breaking large projects down into small steps. I think this would pay off in a lot of ways: lower context switching costs, work generally easier, greater feelings of traction and satisfaction, instead of "what the hell did I do last week? I guess not much". This is challenging because my projects are, at best ill-defined knowledge work, and sometimes really fuzzy medical or emotional work. I strongly believe the latter have paid off for me on net, but individual actions are often lottery tickets with payouts in an undetermined currency.

2. prioritizing. There's both "what's the top priority?" and "what will reach this priority the fastest?" and they both feel pretty complicated.

"Do or Do Not: There is No Try"

Like all short proverbs each word is doing a lot of work and you can completely flip the meaning by switching between reasonable definitions. 

I think "there is no try" often means "I want to gesture at this but am not going to make a real attempt [LW · GW]" in sentences like "I'll try to get to the gym tomorrow" and "I'll try to work on my math homework tonight". 

"there is no try" means "I am going to make an attempt at this but it's not guaranteed to succeed" in sentences like "I'm going to try to bench 400 tomorrow", "I'm trying to solve the Birch–Tate conjecture" and "I'll try flipping the circuit breaker and see if that helps"

The latter is actively good epistemics and agentiness and we shouldn't invoke a weapon aimed at "yeah I'll get to the gym eventually" on them.

"have one acceptable path and immediately reject anyone who goes off it" cuts you off from a lot of good things, but also a lot of bad things. If you want to remove that constraint to get at the good weirdness, you need to either tank a lot of harm, or come up with more detailed heuristics to prevent it

repurposed from my comment on a FB post on an article criticizing all antidepressants as basically placebos

epistemic status: kind of dreading comments on this because it's not well phrased, but honing it is too low a priority. Every time you criticize insufficient caveating an angel loses its wings. 

medical studies are ~only concerned with the median person. Any unusual success or failure is written off as noise, instead of replicable variability. As conditions get defined they narrow that to "median person with condition X" rather than "median person", but this only helps if you are carving reality at its joints.

E.g. most studies that find no effect in vitamin D don't look at starting value of D, or if it went up with treatment. They're examining the act of a random person taking Vitamin D, rather than trying to inform a model about what constitutes scarcity.

I'm pretty convinced that depression is a set of symptoms with multiple causes, like fever. If we had antibiotics and antivirals to treat fever but not the concept of bacteria or viruses, we might see results pretty similar to what we see in anti-depressants. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, also lots of people get better without either, it seems like kind of a crapshoot.

But barring allergies (and more recently, evolved immunity), people respond pretty similarly to broad-spectrum antibiotics (but even then, some infections require narrower prescriptions). The brain is much more complicated. If you have a condition that's inherently noisy (due to regression to the mean), and a given treatment is very good but only for 5% of people, that can easily get lost in the noise. Obviously you'd rather have a treatment that works for most people, but if it doesn't exist and the condition is bad enough, lots of problems are worth trying 20 meds until one works.

This is especially nasty when you look at FDA standards, which are ~that a new drug must have greater (median) efficacy or fewer (median) side effects than existing drugs. This completely ignores the fact both of those can vary a lot per person, such that a given drug is worse for the mythical median person but much better for some percent of the population, who may not even be able to take the existing drugs.

With depression you additionally have issues of severity. Seems entirely plausible that the drugs work great for severe depression but are lost in the noise for mild depression (my personal experience is wellbutrin is great even for mild depression, but it's also treating my nerve damage, and nothing helps depression like reducing chronic pain).

Additionally, I haven't checked these studies in particular, but many tests for depression aren't very good or sensitive.  

People talk about sharpening the axe vs. cutting down the tree, but chopping wood and sharpening axes are things we know how to do and know how to measure. When working with more abstract problems there's often a lot of uncertainty in:

1. what do you want to accomplish, exactly?
2. what tool will help you achieve that?
3. what's the ideal form of that tool? 
4. how do you move the tool to that ideal form?
5. when do you hit diminish returns on improving the tool?
6. how do you measure the tool's [sharpness]?

Actual axe-sharpening rarely turns into intellectual masturbation because sharpness and sharpening are well understood. There are tools for thinking that are equally well understood, like learning arithmetic and reading, but we all have a sense that more is out there and we want it. It's really easy to end up masturbating (or epiphany addiction-ing) in the search for the upper level tools, because we are almost blind.

This suggests massive gains from something that's the equivalent of a sharpness meter. 

Some things are coordination problems. Everyone* prefers X to Y, but there are transition costs and people can't organize to get them paid. 

Some things are similar to coordination problems, plus the issue of defectors, Everyone prefers X (no stealing) to Y (constant stealing), but too many prefer X'(no one but me steals). So even if you achieve X, you need to pay maintenance costs. 

Sometimes people want different things. These are not coordination problems.

Sometimes people endorse a thing but don't actually want it. These are not coordination problems either.

But sometimes it's ambiguous. In particular if some people genuinely prefer X to Y, and some people endorse X over Y but don't, in their heart of hearts, want it enough to pay the costs, you can spend a lot of time trying to fix a coordination/maintenance problem that doesn't actually exist.

Anyways this week I finally drove someone to shout "because no one likes reading or writing as much as you!" at me and it explains a lot. 

I have a new project for which I actively don't want funding for myself: it's too new and unformed to withstand the pressure to produce results for specific questions by specific times*. But if it pans out in ways other people value I wouldn't mind retroactive payment. This seems like a good fit for impact certificates, which is a tech I vaguely want to support anyway.

Someone suggested that if I was going to do that I should mint and register the cert now, because that norm makes IC markets more informative, especially about the risk of very negative projects. This seems like a good argument but https://www.impactcerts.com/mint seems borked and I don't know of better options. Now this is requiring thought and the whole point was to not have to do that yet.

So I'm crowdsourcing. What are your thoughts on this? What are potential best practices I should support? Counter arguments?

*my psychology is such that there's no way around this that also guarantees speeding up the work. If someone wanted to fund the nice things for Elizabeth project I'd accept but no guarantee I would produce any faster. I *have* asked for funding for my collaborator and a TBD research assistant. 

I will definitely not be sharing the object level project in this thread.

I hurt my hand so if my replies look weird that's why.

I have friends who, early in EA or rationality, did things that look a lot like joining nonlinear. [LW · GW] 10+ years later they're still really happy with those decisions. Some of that is selection effects of course, but think some of it is the reasons they joined were very different.

People who joined early SingInst or CEA by and large did it because they'd been personally convinced this group of weirdos was promising. The orgs maybe tried to puff themselves up, but they had almost no social proof. Whereas nowadays saying "this org is EA/rationalist" gives you a built-in audience. You can prestige hack within EA (and I think nonlinear did^[1]) and convince people they should join you because you're ingroup and can grant them prestige in the group.

Orgs that attract via object-level ideas rather than prestige are probably healthier to work at (although still pretty easy to fuck yourself up with), and people attracted by ideas rather than ingroup prestige are probably more emotionally resilient. They're also more likely to leave if the program isn't good for them. 

1. ^{^}

    E.g. grants programs announced with great fanfare that, in the fine print, had tiny budgets. 

In the spirit of this comment [LW(p) · GW(p)] on lions and simulacra levels I present: simulacra and halloween decorations

Level 1: this is actually dangerous. Men running at you with knives, genuinely poisonous animals.

Level 2: this is supposed to invoke genuine fear, which will dissipate quickly when you realize it's fake. Fake poisonous spiders that are supposed to look real, a man with a knife jumps with a fake knife but doesn't stab you, monsters in media that don't exist but hit primal fear buttons in your brain. 

Level 3: reminds people of fear without ever actually making you concerned for your life (which may still be a little unsettling, depending on your sensitivity, and everything has someone who's deathly afraid of it even in a nonthreatening form). Halloween decorations top out here unless you spend a ton of money at specialty shops. 

Level 4: reminds people of things that induce fear without ever for a second unnerving (most of) them. Goofy looking bat balloons.

I know we hate the word content but sometimes I need a single word to refer to history books, longrunning horror podcasts, sitcoms, a Construction Physics blog post, and themepark analysis youtube essays. And I don't see any other word volunteering. 

Let's say there's a drug that gives people 20% more energy (or just cognitive energy). My intuition is that if I gave it to 100 people, I would not end up with 120 people's worth of work. Why?

Possibilities:

• the energy gets soaked up by activities other than the ones I am measuring. e.g. you become better at cleaning your house, or socializing, or spend more time on your hobby.
• The benefits accrue to other people- you have more energy which means you lose chore-chicken with your partner, who now has slightly more energy for their stuff.
• Energy wasn't the only  limiting reagent on your work. Energy improvements after a certain point are wasted because you need something else.
• the drug might make you worse at those other things. E.g. adderall gives some people more energy and focus but less creativity and collaboration. Made more confusing because the drug can have opposite effects in different people 

I'm convinced people are less likely to update when they've locked themself into a choice they don't really want.

If I am excited to go to 6 flags and get a headache that will ruin the rollercoasters for me, I change my plans. But if I'm going out of FOMO or to make my someone else happy and I get a headache it doesn't trigger an update to my plans. The utilitarian math on this could check out, but my claim is that's not necessary, once I lock myself in I stop paying attention to pain signals and can't tell if I should leave or not. 

I've heard that a lot of skill in poker is not when to draw or what to discard, it's knowing how much to bet on a given hand. There isn't that much you can do to improve any given hand, but folding earlier and betting more on good hands are within your control. 

feels like a metaphor for something. 

Is there a lesswrong canon post for the quantified impact of different masks? I want to compare a different intervention to masks and it would be nice to use a reference that's gone through battle testing.

AFAICT, for novel independent work:

genuine backchaining > plan-less intuition or curiosity > fake backchaining.

And most attempts to move people from intuition/curiosity to genuine backchaining end up pushing them towards fake backchaining instead. This is bad because curiosity leads you to absorb a lot of information that will either naturally refine your plans without conscious effort, or support future backchaining. Meanwhile fake backchaining makes you resistant to updating, so it's a very hard state to leave. Also curiosity is fun and fake backchaining is miserable.

For well-defined work you also have the option of someone telling you what to do, and that can fit anywhere in the comparison depending on their skill level and yours. 

I feel like it was a mistake for Hanson to conflate goodharting, cooperative coordination, accurate information transfer, and extractive deception.

[good models + grand vision grounded in that model] > [good models + modest goals] > [mediocre model + grand vision]

There are lots of reasons for this, but the main one is: Good models imply skill at model building, and thus have a measure of self-improvement. Grand vision implies skill at building grand vision unconnected to reality, which induces more error.

[I assume we're all on board that a good, self-improving models combined with a grand vision is great, but in short supply]

Difficulties with nutrition research:
 

1. ~Impossible to collect information on a population level. We could dig into the reasons this is true, but it doesn't mater because...
2. High variance between people means population data is of really limited applicability
3. Under the best case circumstances, by the time you have results from an individual it means they've already hurt themselves. 

The best way through I see is to use population studies to find responsive markers, so people can run fast experiments on themselves. But it's still pretty iffy. 

Ambition snowballs [LW(p) · GW(p)]/Get ambitious slowly [LW · GW] works very well for me, but sonepeople seem to hate it. My first reaction is that these people need to learn to trust themselves more, but today I noticed a reason I might be unusually suited for this method.

two things that keep me from aiming at bigger goals are laziness and fear. Primarily fear of failure, but also of doing uncomfortable things. I can overcome this on the margin by pushing myself (or someone else pushing me), but that takes energy, and the amount of energy never goes down the whole time I'm working. It's like holding a magnet away from its twin; you can do it, but the minute you stop the system will snap back into place. 

But more than I am lazy and fearful, I am easily bored, and hate boredom even more than I hate work or failure. If I hang around my comfort zone long enough I get bored of it and naturally start exploring outside. And that expansion doesn't take energy; in fact it takes energy to keep me in at that point.

My mom used a really simple example of this on my brother when he was homeschooled (6th grade). He'd had some fairly traumatic experiences in English class and was proving resistant to all her teaching methods. Finally she sat him down in front a computer and told him he had to type continuously for X minutes. It could be literally anything he wanted, including "I can't think of anything to write about", he just had to keep his fingers typing the entire time (he could already touch type at this point, mom bribed us with video games until we got to 60WPM). I don't remember exactly how long this took to work, I think it took her a while to realize she had to ban copy/paste but the moment she did my brother got so bored of typing the same thing that he typed new things, and then education could slip in. 

So I'm not worried about being stuck, because I will definitely gnaw my own leg off just to feel something if that happens. And it's unclear if I can speed up the process by pushing myself outside faster, because leaving comfort zone ring n too early delays getting bored of it (although done judiciously it might speed up the boredom). 

I think it's weird that saying a sentence with a falsehood that doesn't change its informational content is sometimes considered worse than saying nothing, even if it leaves the person better informed than the were before.

This feels especially weird when the "lie" is creating a blank space in a map that you are capable of filling in ( e.g. changing irrelevant details in an anecdote to anonymize a story with a useful lesson), rather than creating a misrepresentation on the map.