I remember a post where people discussed how people's sense of consciousness differs a lot on Lesswrong. Does anybody know which post I'm pointing to?

Well, it may in fact work, but - you can also buy masks that have been used for decades to protect against asbestos and lead paint dust.  

Masks that are designed for that usecase don't have filters that protect other people from inhaling virus particles that you exhale. If you only interact with other people wearing a mask that might be fine, but if some of your interactions are unmasked such as with people in your household, it's asocial to wear those masks in contexts where other people expect you to be masked because while you look like you are masked you have wents that mean that other people get your unfiltered air. 

Even then it's uncomfortable to wear those masks for social interactions and even if you do wear them more dakka applies.

Which country has only 700 thousand voters but $400 billion GDP? That seems like an order of magnitude is wrong somewhere. 

I would be very surprised if the probability of swinging an election with 700k voters is 1/800. That would suggest that most elections are won with a margin of a lot less then 2000 votes which seems unlikely to me. 

I think the other ingridients are there to kill the virus cells that make it onto the barrier. 

I don't know what the best way to get it in the US happens to be. It's however worth noting that all the ingridients seem to be available and there are compounding pharmacies like Mix Pharmacy that are legal in the US. 

I'm not sure why there's updating based on the fact that peptides from proteins besides the spike protein don't result in antibodies agains the spike protein being build. It seems to me a faily straightforward prediction. I don't see how antibodies against the spike protein would be developed without those peptides. 

Whatever else is going on... the FDA has never been graded on speed, and plenty of ink has been spilled in non-covid times about how many people die, and how many QALYs are lost, because of delays that make little difference to the eventual outcome, but look to the general public like Serious People Making Decisions Carefully. 

The FDA is effectively never graded at all. At the same time, politicians do something push for the FDA to just approve a drug. Big Pharma who hires FDA officials likely also rewards officials for approving their drugs faster.

They permit themselves the time, and with it buy a mantel of authority in the public eye.

This is essentially a conspiracy theory. It might be true that's what happens but as rationalists I don't think we should believe in conspiracy theories without understanding the underlying dynamics. I asked this question because I believe the underlying dymamics are important to judge whether or not it makes sense to believe in that conspiracy theory.

https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-with-covid-vaccines-joe-biden-keeps-america-first-stance/a-56483371 is an article that discusses it. Trump created the export controls and Biden is continuing them.

As far as COVID-19 goes that article refers to another news article. There's no reference to either experimental data that suggests a threshold of exposure for COVID-19 or an explanation of the mechanics of why we should expect such a threshold.

If everything else is constant then a flag is what determines whether a particular hurricane (that exist far enough in the future) happens or not happens. There's a causal chain between the flag and the hurricane. 

If you care about something else besides the causal chain that defines some notion of "key thing" you actually have to say what you mean with "key thing".

Weather inherently isn't stable. Wikipedia writes about the butterfly effect: "The butterfly effect is most familiar in terms of weather; it can easily be demonstrated in standard weather prediction models, for example."

If I thought otherwise, I would never have even tried to write and post comments, much less essays.

It seems that given the physics of our world works you might have to have to refine your ethical system or by okay with constantly violating it.

By your logic I should be careful when interacting with butterflies because of the hurricanes they cause through causal chains.

threshold of exposure leading to infection. 

How do you know that there's a "threshold of exposure"?

The general way to get around the infohazard is to use either historic examples or examples of other cultures and societal contexts. 

You can say that saying "Democracy is good" can cause harm because saying it can motivated people to act politically in totalitarian societies in which they will get punished for it. 

Butterflies famously can cause a lot of harm by flapping their wings as well. That seems to be a way words can cause harm as well.

I think most people can agree that in both of those examples the actions can lead to causal chains that result in harm. The problem is that you play motte and bailey and equate "words can be lead to causal chains that produce harm" with "interlocutors should be more careful with their words". That leads to avoiding any of the cruxes that might come up with "interlocutors should be more careful with their words".

my mobile phone (for which the flat rate usually covers my entire usage), 

Generally knowing the magnitude of mobile phone bills in advance and actually knowing the bill is quite difference. Sometimes mobile phone bills get into high amounts due to bogus rooming charges.

The term honest agreement does a lot of heavy lifting in your argument. There are various ways to change the beliefs that we commonly call dark arts that can help to switch one's beliefs in a desired direction that might be used instead of double crux which is designed to lead to epistemically sound agreements.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/-/scassets/files/org/employer-solutions/covid-19-workplace-safety-faqs.ashx

The best way to have some level of protection is to follow the recommendations of the epidemiologists and be extremely careful about your behavior. 

I would be doubtful that the best way is to listening to someone who hasn't on their list avoiding closed spaces, ventilation and humidity (in closed spaces), avoiding touching common buttons with fingers and recommends cloth masks (as opposed to reused FFP2/3) but has cleaning/desinfection on their list a good source of information.

Then of course we are back to clinical trials which are really the only way to prove this method work. 

Then why do you link to advice that recommends unproven interventions like desinfection and using gloves when serving food? 

Part of the reason the US did well compared to other countries is that they defected and banned exports. US policy that slowed down vaccination in other countries shouldn't be counted in favor of US leadership.

EU policy was really horribe. There's a general believe among EU leaders that they are not supposed to pay as high of a price for drugs as the US does. As a result they negotiated companies down and made their purchase orders to late. European laws often produce stronger regulation then US laws. 

Russia is a sad story. Their policy of both developing a more sophisticated adenovirus vaccine (first and second doses use different adenovirus strains - which means less adverse reactions on the second dose) then the Oxford vaccine and being first to market registering the vaccine early. On the other hand the Russian public doesn't believe the Russian government is good at providing a safe vaccine so despite the vaccine being available to everyone they have low vaccination rates.

I'm disappointed in China. I would have expected the Chinese to ignore the bioethics people, do human challenge trials and bring a vaccine to market relatively soon.

When it comes to Isreal and the United Arab Emirates, it's worth noting that cooperation on vaccines was part of their peace deal. 

According to your policy, Kennedy wouldn't have proclaimed that the US puts a man on the moon. Nixon wouldn't have started the war on cancer. The strategy that Elon Musk users to get his companies to produce the innovation that it does would be outlawed.

We would just have more stagnation because nobody would be allowed to communicate bold visions of the future because some undiscerning people would too much believe in bold visions.

I think our society would benefit from more people who communicate bold visions of the future not less.

When it comes to Obama promises on Guantanamo the video I find has him say things he did do. He did intent to close Gitmo. He did follow through on this intention by doing things to close Gitmo. 

I don't think having a plan for the future where you aren't fully in control of the outcome is necessarily overconfidence. Ambitious plans are valuable. If you think that everybody making an ambitious plan is inherently deceitful, that would mean declaring all startups to engage in deceit. 

I don't think the problems of our time is that too many people have ambitious plans. 

I think if you would ask any presidential candiate whether they think they will be able to implement all of their platform they won't tell you that they are confident that they implement all of their platform. 

I confidently assert that clear and substantial support for this claim exists and is not hard to find (one extremely easy example is presidential campaign promises; we currently have an open Guantánamo Bay facility and no southern border wall)

Both examples are about presidents who set certain goals and used the office of the presidency to persue those goals while being blocked by congress.

They are examples of presidents don't successfully extracting support for their goals from congressional allies of their own party even through they put it on their platform.

They are very different promises then those by either of the president to not support revolving-door-dynamics where it would have actually been in the power of the presidents to fulfill their promises if they wanted to do so. 

For a cryptocurrency I consider Filecoin to be potentially high upside. It makers focused on producing a technology that can do new things (effectively selling storage) instead of hyping it. 

There's an accelerator for projects that build on Filecoin. 

With Amazon deciding to withdraw hosting from Parler there a clear incentive to use decentralized hosting like that provided by Filecoin.

If you want to hold or move money in a manner that is effectively impossible to interfere with are few solutions so democratised as crypto. 

There's a difference between advocating crypto in general and advocating Bitcoin. Bitcoin is technically inferior to the more modern coins which provide different advantages on top. 

Apart from that the Chinese government essentially has control over Bitcoin given that more then half of the mining is in China and they can direct companies to do what they want. It's power is not democratically distributed. 

Specifically, they can threaten your trading partner with reprisals, and the whoke point of crypto is that it keeps a public log of all transactions forever.

Not of all of crypto. Zcash gives you a more private way to transact. That's why you would expect it to outcompete Bitcoin for the usecases where privacy is desireable. 

The amount of money you'd have to be moving to attract that $15 fee would have a vastly greater fee attached for any of the interbank systems.

No, every transaction in bitcoin costs that much.

Rather than take it as evidence that LessWrong itself should have lower karma, I see it as evidence that the shallow and close-minded Reddit approach of thumbs up or down is flawed. 

I think you can easily interpret it here as the LessWrong readers who engaged with the post don't consider it valuable. It's a badly argued post with political implications. Badly argued in the sense that you don't address the tradeoffs. 

I would be willing to discuss that with the people who felt so strongly (and negatively) about the topic. 

Looking at the score, I don't think anybody gave it a strong downvote. 

There's no law that requires no-fault auto insurance. There are laws that require certain minimum liability coverage. Those laws exist because of the possibility of people damaging other people to make them be able to pay.

Businesses in a pandemic don't create damage for other people for which they need liability insurance. 

We generally regulate businesses in a way that businesses are allowed to take risks that make the business go bust.

One of the main idea of why we have the Great Stagnation is that increased regulation. You are advocating that businesses need more regulation and we need to forbid them from taking risks that they are currently taking. 

With pre-Kefauver-Harris laws after Dr. Stöcker gave his himself a vaccine in March that gave him antibodies against the COVID-19 spike protein he could have easily sold it and by winter a large amount of the population would have been vaccinate.

While pandemics are certainly a significant risk, adding specific regulations for insuring against them increases the burden of starting a company which in turn means that it gets harder for businessmen to start companies to solve other problems. 

PoW-coins are a technology for coordination among humans. 

Bitcoin is not effective for transfering wealths among humans with transaction costs of ~15$ per transaction. People buy Bitcoin because they believe it will rise in price and largely not because they want to use it as a payment platform. Even if you want a crypto-currency there are solutions that more effective and don't burn as much unnecessary energy.

How do we articulate what the WHO did wrong here, without using the word Bayesian?

This is the basic problem is the WHO believing in Evidence-based Medicine. In that paradigm you don't use reasons that aren't proper evidence for making medical decisions.

There's a debate between Tyler Cowen and philosopher Agnes Callard around valuing human lives with a number. Tyler Cowen starts by saying that it's actually a complicated issue but that having some bounds that depend on circumstances is useful. Agnes Callard then says that you don't need to put any value on human lives at all to make practical tradeoffs because you can think about obligations. 

After hearing that exchange it seems to me like the position that you have to put monetary values on human lives to be able to make good decisions seems questionable to me and naive due to lack of knowledge of the alternatives about how to make the decisions.

Thinking about social actors making promises to each other and then having obligations to deliever on those promises is a valid model for thinking about who makes effort to safe peoples lives.

There are reason to treat using energy to grow food for people differently then using energy to ship luxury yachts through the ocean. 

Bitcoin seems like wasting energy on high status luxury yachts.

There's a good chance that doubling the price of Bitcoin will actually double the energy wasted on it given that roughly doubles how lucrative mining is. This is worse then doubling the market cap of a company that's generally bad for the enviroment where doubling the market cap usually doesn't mean doubling the enviromental problems.

From an ESG perspective a person investing in crypto would do better to invest it into a different coin then Bitcoin which actually has a plan to be less wasteful with energy. That might be Ethereum, something like Polkadot or even Filecoin (the work that has to be done to mine filecoin is storing files for people which is economically useful).

Then it has no reason to be in this this thread. Generally, if someone wants Anna Salamon to spend time interacting with them and she doesn't think it's worthwhile to spend that time, blocking them  when they use private channels seems very reasonable.

The problem with the question is that it focuses on fighting the last war and not on evaluating what's good policy for creating requirements on business formation. 

Both share the feature that they are easily produced in large quantities while mRNA vaccines aren't. 

Downvoting your comment for being low-quality is not the same as blocking it. 

I don't think the history here is about Dunbar's number.

Rationality hub - demands to understand the craft and have similar values. 

It's my impression that a lot of people who believe this and move to the Bay area find out that they actually are not invited to the parties where the Bay area rationalists hang out.

Should you tell the truth (e.g., doesn't think it suits you) or should you tell a white lie (e.g., you love it)? 

Neither. Rationalism isn't about thinking you should do certain things because you identify a certain way.

I should have looked up the abbreviations again. Having looked up the proper abbreviations again, miRNA seems to be what the RNA immune system uses to block some viral genes from expressing and the RNA that comes with the vaccine doesn't do RNA interference.

Rationalism is concerned with forming accurate models about the world. 

That's not the way the term is primarily used in this community. We generally orient us more towards decision science. From Jonathan Baron's textbook Thinking and deciding:

The best kind of thinking, which we shall call rational thinking, is whatever kind of thinking best helps people achieve their goals. If it should turn out that following the rules of formal logic leads to eternal happiness, then it is “rational thinking” to follow the laws of logic (assuming that we all want eternal happiness). If it should turn out, on the other hand, that carefully violating the laws of logic at every turn leads to eternal happiness, then it is these violations that we shall call “rational.”

When I argue that certain kinds of thinking are “most rational,” I mean that these help people achieve their goals. Such arguments could be wrong. If so, some other sort of thinking is most rational.

I asked the question at the Explain to me like I'm 5 - Reddit and if the answer is correct they do more then just looking at data. According to it they do visits at trial sites and doctors and ask for original patient data to check whether data is authentic.

Question is also on Quora but Quora isn't what it used to be. 

That depends on your model about how much a life coach would help. I'm not sure what EY's experiences with life coaching happen to be. 

The nice thing about "rationalist" is that it's one word and everybody kinda knows what it means. 

Everybody in our community knows what it means but people outside of our community frequently think that it's about what philosophers call rationality. 

The people who donated money are presumably the people who liked the existing LW, and therefore their wish is probably to keep it roughly like it was, only more awesome. 

I think a better historical perspective would be that they liked was LessWrong was in it's first years of existing and felt that LessWrong declined and that there was a potential to bring it back to it's old glory and make it even beter.

I think here it suggests that the website is designed for people with technical abilities for whom registering a throw away Google account wouldn't be an issue. It's an non-for-profit project where people are more interested in the actual intervention then they are interested in working on login forms and they want to use all javascript features when programming.

Consistency and accuracy are both dimensions that are hard to measure. I don't see where you would get numbers for that.

If someone follows what this post proposes people wouldn't offer EY a million dollars for MIRI but ask him: "What's your cheerful price for finishing the fanfic."

If there's no price that would make him cheerful then he might say: "I'm already working on it when my creative engines are going and I don't think additional money would solve the issue" or something similar. 

Non-example: selling something second-hand to a friend - I would just use ebay price minus P&P, possibly with some arbitrary discount

The ebay price is reasonable if the person is clear about wanting to sell the item. There are cases where a person owns something that they don't regularly use. It would be a valid question to ask: "What's your cheerful price for selling this to me?"

If you want more information in crime scenes sequencing the DNA of population is much more effective. It tells you actually who the person is instead of just broad information about them. 

In the UK the NHS has the goal to provide DNA testing to every newborn and as the technology progresses we will likely see more treatments that depend on information from DNA testings. 

It's much easier to explain to policemen who actually enforce the laws why the government has DNA information then explaining why the government secretly put barcodes into people and police loyality matters.

and 2) obviously being the spike protein being present on your cell surfaces is like an interacellular backdoor. But that isn't my area of expertiese at all, just pure speculation on my part :)

The spike protein is only present for a short time (that's why you need the booster shot).