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Yes, this is a good point, I suspect most long COVID studies probably have the same flaw
Thats a fair point. I don’t think the data does distinguish between the two so maybe I’ve overstated the case here.
I think it’s important to distinguish between “is consistent with” and “implies that”. I think the belief hypothesis should be given a much lower prior than just Covid causing long Covid symptoms plus some additional cases for belief on top of that.
I looked into the French long COVID study and I don't think the conclusions are justified by the data. A more sensible analysis of the same data supports Scott's positions in Long COVID: Much more than you wanted to know.
See post for more details.
No real idea, possible obviousness?
Have an upvote to compensate :)
I think this could work in small groups. However pre-commitment to non-collusion requires trust between the entire electorate, whereas collusion requires trust only between the two people who are colluding.
Fact vs opinion is taught at my kids' school (age ~7 from memory). The lesson left them with exactly the confusion that you are talking about. Talking to them I got the impression that the teacher didn't really have this sorted out in their head themself.
My way of explaining it to them was that there are matters of fact and matters of opinion but often we don't know the truth about matters of fact. We can have opinions about matters of fact but the difference is that there is a true answer to those kinds of questions even when we don't know. This seemed to help them but I couldn't help but feel that it is kind of an unhelpful dichotomy.
All these people saying that they've tried it are clearly simulated beings and have no base reality person to return to.
It seems Netherlands summer holidays depend on which region you're in (North, Central, South) each of which is separated by a week (10th, 17th, 24th July respectively). However it seems that no matter which region you look at the peak is pretty close to the 17th.
Possibly with enough mixing between the regions this still kinda works but I feel like it's a strike against the theory.
One piece of evidence in favour of this is that the Scottish schools finish earlier than the English schools. Correspondingly, the Scottish case rates started dropping earlier than the English rates.
However the Northern Ireland dates don't appear to match up so nicely - they have an early summer holiday but the case rates peaked roughly when England's did.
So I'm not really sure!
Another consideration on the ratio between infections of unvaccinated vs vaccinated is the extent to which the different groups react to the current prevalence of Covid.
If vaccinated people relax more when prevalence is low but are much more cautious when prevalence is high then that would tend to make the ratio increase as witnessed.
This would make sense to me - being unvaccinated will be correlated with generally being less concerned about covid
Agreed.
I expect that resistance to long covid is somewhere between resistance to infection and resistance to hospitalisation. This might roughly double the expected numbers of deaths / long covid.
Even if all the Georgetown undergraduates were somehow infected by Delta
and
mRNA reduces these both by .9.
mRNA vaccines don't decrease hospitalisation by .9 given someone has become infected, they decrease it by .9 compared to an unvaccinated person given typical community exposure. So I think your calculation is more like "Even if all the Georgetown undergraduates were exposed to Delta in a way which would be sufficient to infect them if they were unvaccinated".
I would estimate that to get back to your original scenario we probably have to multiply by 3-5 (depending on how much of the resistance to hospitalisation you think is purely resistance to getting infected in the first place).
Is there a story behind the PC results 2008-2011 where they deviate from the fairly straight line?
Nitpick: There’s an issue with Magnus Carlsen’s ratings - he became a GM at 13 in 2003, not 21 in 2011 or in 2009 as shown in the graph (famously he was the second youngest ever GM at the time).
I don’t know if all incoherent creatures value everything the same amount - it seems like it should maybe be possible to just have a restricted region of incoherence in some cases, but I haven’t thought this through.
This puts me in mind of sacred vs secular values - one can be coherent and the other incoherent as long as you refuse to trade between the 2. Or, more properly, as long as only 1-way trade is allowed which seems like the way sacred vs secular values work.
That’s super-helpful - thanks!
One thing the negative meta-study noted was the variation in doses between studies (12 - 210mg).
Very interesting.
Is it possible to compare the transportation and/or assembly costs to the manufacturing costs? And in fact to compare these to the costs of manual threshing? I think this would give good context to the scale of the problems.
It seems like there would be a business to buy a machine and take it round various farms in the local area (assuming assembly really is easy-ish).
Yes, I think this definitely had some effect (I misread 10th May as 10th March originally!).
I also think the fundamental search must have been better in #1. Of the 13 present in #1 but missing in #2 6 were from 2020, 7 from 2021 (I haven't looked at specific dates for the 2021 ones but I'd guess some of them are from before March 22nd).
For #1 the original search turned up 1237 articles then 95 full text analysed leading to the 19 included. Corresponding numbers for #2 are 256, 12 & 10.
I had a quick look and essentially it seems the latter found fewer studies (10 vs 19) and therefore fewer patients (1173 vs 2768)*
They have similar central estimates for RR of all cause mortality (0.37 vs 0.31) but due to having more patients the former has tighter CI (0.15 to 0.62) and concludes that there is an effect but the latter has wider CI (0.12 to 1.13) and concludes that there isn't an effect.
The latter could claim that there is as yet insufficient evidence of an effect based on the studies in their analysis but not that these isn't an effect. I especially take issue with the claim that "IVM is not a viable option for treating COVID-19 patients" when they themselves take such pains to talk about how low quality much of the evidence is!
The two meta-analyses also differ on their ratings of different papers - for instance the largest study (n=400, Lopez-Medina et al.) is rated as High quality (7 out of 7) in the former but at high risk of bias in the latter (due to deviations from intended interventions).
Scanning the paper there are a few issues. For the most part the problems are mitigated but there could still be issues:
- There was a period of 17 days where the placebo group were receiving ivermectin(!)
- The people from these 17 days were excluded from the primary analysis and additional subjects were enrolled
- The primary outcome was changed during the study
- This occurred ~30% through the study.
- The reasoning for changing from the old outcome seems reasonable
- It's hard to comment on whether the selection of the new outcome could have seen bias
- Placebo was changed during the study from dextrose water to something tasting more like ivermectin
- This was ~25% through the study
- Results did not differ much between the 2 placebo groups
- I don't feel like this would make a massive difference but I'm not sure
This paper is fairly typical of the quality of the studies (according to meta-analysis 2) or on the top end of study quality (according to meta-analysis 1) which causes me some concern.
In conclusion, if I was offered Ivermectin I would take it at this point (side effects seem to be small) and might even look to sign up to a trial if I had COVID - in the UK some people would be eligible for this one.
* 6 studies were common to both analyses.
Great collection of results. I particularly found the interactive graph useful.
I'm slightly confused by the trend lines (especially for Games and Other) - they don't seem intuitively the best fits. It looks like they place a lot of importance on the high parameter recent models (possibly the cost for each datapoint is in parameter space rather than log(parameter) space?
My hypothesis - Apologising is low status.
Possibly this is no longer the case (apologising first is often seen as a sign of maturity) but I can certainly see this being the case in the ancestral environment.
This would match my experience that apologising is feels awful even when it is entirely my fault.
I guess if the other person has already apologised then me also apologising just puts our status back roughly where we started which is why going second feels much easier.
A previous calculation on LW gave 2.4 x 10^24 for AlphaStar (using values from the original alphastar blog post) which suggested that the trend was roughly on track.
The differences between the 2 calculations are (your values first):
Agents: 12 vs 600
Days: 44 vs 14
TPUs: 32 vs 16
Utilisation: 33% vs 50% (I think this is just estimated in the other calculation)
Do you have a reference for the values you use?
Or, alternatively, did Oxford really find a pharmaceutical company so incompetent that they did this by mistake, on top of giving an entire trial segment the wrong dose of vaccine the first time around? These are some rather epic screwups.
My experience working for a large company makes me not particularly surprised by this and I would give a decent amount of probability to this being an accident. I don't know enough about the specific procedures to be hugely confident but it does seem most likely to me.
If we're fairly confident that the wrong dose thing was an accident - I can't think of any reason to do this deliberately and then try to cover it up - then AstraZeneca obviously have the potential to make big mistakes.
One scenario would be that the person requesting / approving the press release is not the same as the person running the project but rather their boss or their bosses boss or even in another department. The press release approver is less involved in the minutiae and has remembered the 79% figure, maybe even goes so far as to check their e-mails that this is the correct figure (or check with someone else who checks their e-mails). Probably none of these people were in the meeting with the safety board.
I have had this experience myself on many occasions where my superiors have given information to customers that is outdated just from them not being as up to date or forgetting the latest results. Obviously I'd like to think something like this would have more care taken about it but the dosing debacle is suggestive that checking things isn't AstraZeneca's strong suit.
That combined with the 0% chance of this not being noticed suggests to me that this wasn't on purpose.
There is a system for describing human facial expressions - Facial Action Coding System.
This has also been expanded for some animals (chimps, macaques, gibbons, orangutans, dogs, cats, horses). Alas, no dolphins.
I wondered whether a decent amount of the cost increase was in changing from a hatchback to a sedan but I see that this is only $1,000 to go from the Mirage hatchback to sedan. And the Mirage sedan is the same size as a 90's Ford Escort sedan/station wagon so size doesn't explain it either.
Yeah, I didn't actually answer q18 either (possibly knite maybe used my list as a basis?) for exactly that reason. Scott just put me in as the same as him for that question for the purposes of making an apples-to-apples comparison which seemed fine - no idea what I would have put if I had answered!
I'm kicking myself on #16 - I don't know enough about epidemiology to make such a strong guess.
Yeah, I did a similar thing on #38 where I was similarly overconfident on an economy question which I don't know nearly enough about.
On #16 itself I was lower than I should have been because I was using "virus" as a reference class rather than "respiratory virus" which was an obvious mistake looking back at it.
It looks like you're using the correct formula but maybe with a mistake of what the "p" in the formula means so that your scores on questions where the result was "false" are incorrect.
I think you maybe used ln(probability put on "true")-ln(.5) and then multiplied the result by -1 if the actual answer was false?
The formulation Scott used was ln(probability put on the correct answer)-ln(.5)
So for q3 for example the calculation shouldn't be
but should be
One for older / more interested kids - the Monty Hall problem.
I remember my uncle spending a long time going through this with me and having to actually run the scenario a few times for me to believe he was right!
Welcome to the predictions fun!
Im impressed with how little you put on 14&15, those were particularly good predictions IMO.
I think there might be an error on your calculation sheet - for instance your score for 3 should be the same as your score for 5?
Looking at the study it doesn’t look like the participants in the trial were randomised - rather if you wanted to use Taffix you could.
If I’m right I’m not sure what to make of it - you could have selection bias either way. More conscientious/concerned people took it or people with jobs where they had higher exposure levels took it. I would guess the former effect would be larger but not sure.
- Yes, I agree Russia was unlikely to be above US for population reasons, I mentioned them more as an example of how bad under-reporting can be - I can't think of a way other than Covid to get 147k unaccounted for excess deaths but I could be missing something. I had concerns about this in all 3 of China, India and Brazil (although I guess there's the chance that we wouldn't get (accurate) excess deaths numbers anyway). 85% for 6 seems right but only dropping 5% for 17 seems low.
- A commenter on Scott's post has made a case for India deaths being higher than US (enough to convince Scott it seems).
- p(17|16) = p(17) / p(16) = 0.2 / 0.7 ~ 0.29 (as p(17|¬16) = 0)
- Its possible / likely that I'm still missing how difficult it is to win a parlay but:
- Given Covid is seen as seasonal by the end of the year, there was very likely some wave in Autumn - the main question is whether it meets the conditions set out in 17
- At the time of prediction it seemed almost certain that we would get below the thresholds with the next month or two
- I expected (but wasn't certain) that a second wave would take us back above one of those thresholds.
- There remains the question of having a wave in the middle (Autumn wave is therefore not second wave). This was somewhere that my model was expecting a profile in the US more like what happened in the UK/Europe where cases/deaths were at a very low level for most of the Summer. This is a common thread in a few of my other predictions about US numbers - I generally underpredicted slightly but noticeably and this was a significant cause for that. So yeah, definitely an oversight from me in that regards.
- Its possible / likely that I'm still missing how difficult it is to win a parlay but:
I was going to write up my thoughts on this but it would be easier to just comment here.
I agree with your assessments for almost all of these. I was most impressed by your understanding of the politics in Q9 & 11 (China and Hydroxychloroquine) and the predicting the lack of consensus for Q14 & 15.
A couple where I have a question:
1. On 6/7 (US highest toll official & unofficial) I had a bit more probability on Brazil (similar to India, more than China) – given large population (2/3rds US) and approach of the government.
Regarding official vs unofficial, you only mention deliberate lying but I had more expectation of insufficient / bad testing hiding true amounts than lying. According to WSJ Russia’s excess deaths are 4.8x higher than their official deaths (compared to 1.7x for US). This isn’t enough to overtake the US but I think this gives an idea of the scale of the potential problem. Mexico’s excess deaths are higher than Brazil’s despite having 35% fewer official cases. (India isn’t included in those numbers - excess deaths stats aren’t available I think).
Does that change your mind as to what a good prediction would have been?
2. On q17 (second wave) your prediction for p(17|16) is ~29%. Given that we are in a world where there is a general consensus that summer made things less bad, 29% seems low for a second wave even given the difficult operationalisation? My corresponding number was 50% which still seems better to me (although I messed up q16 so we actually predicted the same for 17 itself). In terms of which way it resolves, I think just numbers of deaths resolves this as clearly true (assuming by Autumn we mean 22 Sep – 21 Dec), both in terms of official result and intent:
Was there a second wave in Autumn? Yes, in late Autumn running into early Winter.
The problem is the notice given which results in the low correlation you mention. (by audit I don't really mean financial audits as I don't have experience of those - I'm more thinking of quality audits)
I find it interesting that company audits (that I’ve experienced anyway) suffer from the same problem as ofstead inspections.
It is perhaps worth noting that Ofstead inspections are nowadays done with a day advance warning and can be done with no warning.
The question of how much more infectious B.1.1.7 is is pretty useless without also referencing a generation time estimate.
Generally true, but in using contact tracing data the English analysis is answering the "how much more infectious" question directly rather than relying on inferring from relative growth rates and estimated generation times.
The 37% error does revise my estimate a bit for how confident I should be that it is <50% (although even correcting that it is probably still under 50% according to Zvi) but I still expect it to end up that side of the equation. If I was answering that survey now I'd be at 20% or so.
If, however, you previously had accepted that the English strain was more infectious, and the question was how much more infectious, then news of the answer could be good or bad. In this case, it’s good.
This is an estimated 37% increase in infectiousness.
Interesting to look back on the English strain prediction from December. It looks likely now that this will resolve in the negative (37% agrees with contact tracing results from England (30-45%) and Netherlands data (40%)).
This is interesting.
Trying to think when logarithmic thinking makes sense and why humans might often think like that:
If I am in control of all (or almost all) of my risks then a pandemic where I am only taking a 0 person risk is very different from a pandemic where I am taking a 99 person risk. So moving from 0 to 1 in the presumably-very-deadly-pandemic where I am being super-cautious is a very bad thing. Moving from 99 to 100 in the probably-not-too-bad-pandemic where I'm already meeting up with 99 people is probably not too bad.
So thinking logarithmically makes sense if my base level of risk is strongly correlated to the deadliness of the pandemic. The more sensible route is to skip the step of looking at what risk I'm taking to give me evidence of how bad things are and just look directly at how bad things are.
In the 2 examples you give there are external reasons for additional base risk and these are not (strongly) correlated with the deadliness of the pandemic.
Trying to quantify these effects:
1. Salaries can't add much, especially if you're looking at mass producing. If you're creating 500 vaccines then maybe it takes a couple of hours? Say $20/hour (looking at local job listings for this kind of role) we get 8c/dose on salary. As you scale this is only going to go down.
2. It seems like vaccine trials can be done for a few hundred million although there is a big variation and I'm not completely sure whether the numbers given there include some manufacturing build up. If a large pharma company is going to be making lots of vaccine it seems like they should be able to achieve that for less than $1/dose.
3a. Taxes may add a decent few percent but can't be a main driver of cost
3b. Shipping costs for refrigerated goods are maybe 5c per 1000 miles per kg. That data is from a while back (1988!) and costs might be a bit higher for colder temperatures but I can't see this being a large fraction of the cost.
4a. For liability I note that at least AstraZeneca have struck deals in most countries to be exempt from such liabilities. It seems that in the US all COVID vaccines will benefit from this.
4b. Some companies (at least AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson) have said that they will be selling their COVID vaccines at cost. Even lacking this, I wouldn't expect corporate profits to be huge, even just from a PR point of view.
Additionally:
5. Risk of failed vaccine trials. If you only expect to have a 1 in 3 chance of successful stage 3 trial then the $1/dose from 2 becomes $3/dose to expect to break even. I'm not sure whether this risk is covered by governments - I think it was to some extent but am not confident.
Given Dentin's comment that the material cost if something like 10c/dose (which makes sense given how little it cost to double John's peptides order) then I think most of the cost looks like it is in the trials and risk of failure thereof but this isn't enough to explain why companies aren't doing this. Its probably too late now anyway as vaccines already approved should have the pandemic under control before any new trials would be complete.
Thanks.
One thing I've been thinking about regarding animal noises is the actual animal noise and the not-quite-phonetic spelling of the noise. My slightly late talking youngest son makes realistic animal noises rather than saying "moo" (which I think most children would say). Even now when I think of what noise a cow makes I initially think "moo", rather than of the actual noise itself.
I'm not sure that actually means anything - just an observation!
Say my life expectancy from now is 50 years and I work at an hourly salary of $30 (~$60k yearly salary) then I implicitly value the remaining 310,250 hours of my waking life at something like $9.3m total. This breaks down if offered larger probabilities of death and larger amounts of money (e.g. opportunity cost) but $10m seems like a sensible place to start for a Fermi calculation.
In this case we don't even have to worry about larger probabilities of death - the calculation here is essentially an expected gain of 1.2 days of life for $1000 which comes to about $50 per hour of waking life. Instead of making a vaccine only for myself I would be better just to take half a week unpaid leave and gain the same amount of time for a cost of only $600.
Obviously this has some assumptions baked in (like that I don't value my job) but If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing With Made-Up Statistics.
Great, informative post - my youngest is fairly late at talking so this was helpful.
Note: animal sounds and speech are two different parts of the brain!
This was surprising to me - do you have a reference?
I think it is almost certain you would need to do this repeatedly
- You only need one person with long lasting COVID infection to potentially restart the pandemic.
- Animals can have COVID so all susceptible animals would need to be likewise isolated (or culled).
- You would need to do this in every country that you trade with and every country that they trade with (if we're trying to prevent damage to the economy). The proposal is even harder to implement in some countries.
I guess the question would be how long respite would this give you before having to repeat.
Say we're going back completely to normal after the firebreak. Doubling times with the English strain were a little over a weak with the fairly strict December measures. With no measures say it speeds up to doubling every 4 days. This might be optimistic given how fast the original strain spread early in the pandemic.
If we have 10 cases that we've failed to eradicate then we get to 10,000,000 cases in about 11 weeks. So we have to repeat this 4 times a year?
10 months ago there was the coronavirus justified practical advice thread.
This resulted in myself (and many many others) buying a pulse oximeter.
Interested to hear now that these are now being provided in the to people in the UK who have COVID but are not in hospital and who are in a high risk category.
I note that there was some discussion on LW about how useful they were likely to be as people would probably notice difficulty in breathing which usually comes with low oxygen levels. It turns out that with COVID oxygen levels can get low without people noticing - this was mentioned later on LW (April).
Probably nowadays what Shorty missed was the difficulty in dealing with the energetic neutrons being created and associated radiation. Then associated maintenance costs etc and therefore price-competitiveness. I chose nuclear fusion purely because it was the most salient example of project-that-always-misses-its-deadlines.
(I did my university placement year in nuclear fusion research but still don't feel like I properly understand it! I'm pretty sure you're right though about temperature, pressure and control.)
In theory a steelman Shorty could have thought of all of these things but in practice it's hard to think of everything. I find myself in the weird position of agreeing with you but arguing in the opposite direction.
For a random large project X, which is more likely to be true:
- Project X took longer than expert estimates because of failure to account for Y
- Project X was delivered approximately on time
In general I suspect that it is the former (1). In that case the burden of evidence is on Shorty to show why project X is outside of the reference class of typical-large-projects and maybe in some subclass where accurate predictions of timelines are more achievable.
Maybe what is required is to justify TAI as being in the subclass
- projects-that-are-mainly-determined-by-a-single-limiting-factor
or
- projects-whose-key-variables-are-reliably-identifiable-in-advance
I think this is essentially the argument the OP is making in Analysis Part1?
***
I notice in the above I've probably gone beyond the original argument - the OP was arguing specifically against using the fact that natural systems have such properties to say that they're required. I'm talking about something more general - systems generally have more complexity than we realize. I think this is importantly different.
It may be the case that Longs' argument about brains having such properties is based on an intuition from the broader argument. I think that the OP is essentially correct in saying that adding examples from the human brain into the argument does little to make such an argument stronger (Analysis part 2).
***
(1) Although there is also the question of how much later counts as a failure of prediction. I guess Shorty is arguing for TAI in the next 20 years, Longs is arguing 50-100 years?
Flying machines are one example but can we choose other examples which would teach the opposite lesson?
Nuclear Fusion Power Generation
Longs: The only way we know sustained nuclear fusion can be achieved is in stars. If we are confined to things less big than the sun then sustaining nuclear fusion to produce power will be difficult and there are many unknown unknowns.
Shorty: The key parameters are temperature and pressure and then controlling the plasma. A Tokamak design should be sufficient to achieve this - if we lose control it just means we need stronger / better magnets.
Given how fast we cross orders of magnitude these days, that means we are in the era of the Wright brothers.
I think this assumes the conclusion - it assumes that we know enough about intelligence to know what the key variables are and how effective they can be at compensating for other variables. Da Vinci could have argued how much more efficient his new designs were getting or how much better his new wings were but none of his designs could have worked no matter how much better he made them.
I don't disagree with you in general but I think the effect of Longs' argument should be to stretch out the probability distribution.
Also, the vaccine takes ~10 days to start having an effect. Plus say there is ~7 days delay from infection to test. 17 days ago Israel had vaccinated 6% so we wouldn't expect to see much effect in the case numbers yet.
On increased infectiousness of the UK strain, analysis of contact tracing data in the UK gives 30-50% more infectious (although looking at the data 30%-45% with central estimate of 35% is probably a better summary - see pages 14-16).
Here’s the data from Denmark, suggesting 59% additional infectiousness.
If I'm understanding the link correctly the 0.59 refers to the UK rate, the Denmark rate is 0.45. I'm also not sure whether the "0.45" and "0.59" are percentage increases or absolute increases in R - I think probably the latter (although if R=1 for the old strain as seems to be approximately true in Denmark then these are the same thing).
The paper he cites gives 72% increased infectiousness but with wide confidence interval:
The observed development in the occurrence of cluster B.1.1.7 in Denmark corresponds to an infection rate that is 72% (95% CI: [37, 115]%) higher than the average of other virus variants circulating in Denmark. (Google translate)
I suspect that this may come down as via regression towards the mean - region specific early data will bias towards regions where the new variant is growing fastest.
Am I being naive in thinking that most of the 50x comes from manufacturing the vaccine? In 1947 they had 650k vaccines ready to go, then got 7 pharma companies across the country to work round the clock to get them the rest. They were aiming to vaccinate 6.35 million, we are aiming to vaccinate 328 million just in the US (57x more doses needing to be manufactured). We'd expect to have more total capacity today of course but we have fewer companies doing the manufacturing.
I guess the mRNA vaccines are also more difficult to manufacture. Based on the cost the P/B is 5x more expensive than O/A viral vector. The latter is planning on producing more than twice as many in 2021 (I don't know how the size and number of facilities compare but Pfizer are the bigger company).
Say we were giving every dose procured by the US evenly spread across the country - how many would we be doing a day in NYC?
I have tried something similar but not with money (I find my kids aren't very motivated by money - not sure why). In our case the losing party usually has to formally acknowledge the victor with some silly phrase - "Dad is an amazing human / genius" or "Mark is a pro and I'm a noob". This doesn't allow for different odds (maybe I could tailor different phrases to achieve this?) although I will sometimes offer it without them being held to anything if I am sufficiently confident.
I do think there is some risk with this approach that the child will have a bad time just to get the money
I was worried about this too but similarly haven't actually experienced it - I don't think my kids have the willpower / concentration to keep this up for long enough!