• Comedians seem like a useful vector.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eUxJZk6niBI

Note that at time of donation, Altman was co-chair of the board but 2 years away from becoming CEO. 

Reasoning through a new example:

There's no google maps and no internet to help with finding a hotel. You haven't chosen a destination city yet. 

You could work out how to choose hotels and facilitate the group identifying the kind of hotel it wants. They're both robustly useful. 

You could start picking out hotels in cities at random. Somehow my intuition is that doing this when you don't know the city is still marginally useful (you might choose that city. Obviously more useful the smaller the set of possible cities), but nonzero useful. 

OTOH, one of the best ways to build hotel identifying skills is to identify a hotel, even if you don't use it. A few practice runs choosing hotels in random cities probably does help you make a new reservation in a different city. 

My shoulder John says "dry running hotels is a fine thing to do as long as you're doing it as a part of a plan to get good at a generalizable skill". I agree that's ideal, but not everyone has that skill, and one of the ways to get it is to gradient ascend on gradient ascending.  I worry that rhetoric like this, and related stuff I see in EA and rationality encouraging people to do the most important thing, ends up paralyzing people when what they need is to do anything so they can start iterating on it.

One possible reason: bouncing off early > putting in a lot of effort and realizing you'll still never get traction > being kicked out. Giving people false hope hurts them.

I don't think you should never help out a new person, but I reserve it for people with very specific flaws in otherwise great posts. 

oh not at all, I think I'm failing on both fronts

We're looking for signals which are widely broadcast throughout the body, and received by many endpoints. Why look for that type of thing? Because the wide usage puts pressure on the signal to "represent one consistent thing". It's not an accident that there are individual hormonal signals which are approximately-but-accurately described by the human-intuitive phrases "overall metabolic rate" or "stress". It's not an accident that those hormones' signals are not hopelessly polysemantic. If we look for widely-broadcast signals, then we have positive reason to expect that they'll be straightforwardly interpretable, and therefore the sort of thing we can look at and (sometimes) intuitively say "I want to turn that up/down".

This sounds logical but I don't think is backed empirically, at least to the degree you're claiming. Source: I have a biology BA and can't speak directly to the question because I never took those classes because they had reputations for being full of exceptions and memorization.

How do stimulants affect your ability to update or change your mind? @johnswentworth and I are debating stimulant usage in an unpublished dialogue, and one crux is how stimulants affect one's ability to update. 

People who have used stimulants, please percent-emoji with how they affect your ability to update- <1% for "completely trashed", 50% for neutral, >99% for "huge improvement".  Comments with additional details are welcome. 

Just pushes the trust problem down a level. Lots of recruiting firms advertise positions that don't exist so that they have resumes "just in case"

David Maciver over on Twitter likes a zinc mouthwash, which presumably has a similar mechanism

I didn't read it but trust your assessment that Is Being Sexy For Your Homies was very male-POV. I also agree that LW is male-skewed in general. But I don't think (the way you describe) Being Sexy is representative of the way LW is male-skewed. I think it's more accurate to say most posts (but not Being Sexy) are aiming for some aspect X, and X tends to appeal to men more than women. 

Some things in the cluster of X: systematizing, high-decoupling, math-ey.

I loved the old mealsquares but have been very disappointed in version 2.0. They're similar to Tend bars, nutritionally dense but not filling. 

are you correcting for the year the test was taken? The SAT grading has shifted dramatically over time. 

A conversation I had in 2021

Them: Man I wish I could do X, it's so much more valuable then what I'm doing right now, but I can't.
Me: But could you though?

I'd forgotten this, but in 2023 they came up to thank me because they were doing X, were pleased with the choice, and assigned me some credit for it.  I've heard other people spontaneously praise project X, without knowing I'd been involved in any way. 

It's also very common for seeing someone at a conference to move them along the path of hiring me. Rarely from 0-> hired, but maybe from 0-> idea, or from "been meaning to"->hired, or something in the middle.

short answer: no. Possibly because of hepcidin. 

I'm having trouble parsing but I think the first point is about the mutation rate in humans? I don't expect that to be informative about flu virus except as a floor.

This post was hard for me to read. A few months after I wrote it I developed medical issues that are still ongoing and really sapped my ability to work. Right now I feel on the precipice of developing Large Scale Ambitions, and that I'd probably have taken the plunge to something bigger if I'd hadn't gotten so sick for so long. 

On the other hand, I spent the past 2 years trying to dramatically reform Effective Altruism. I expected to quit in May but got sucked back in via my work with Timothy TL.  I didn't think of this as ambitious, but looking back I do find it ridiculous that I thought I would succeed, which is kind of like ambition except I'm not having any fun with it.

I remain really happy with the "dear self" format. Most advice is advice to your past self anyway, and it's nice to be straightforward about it. It avoids friction with people very different from me, because they can't argue that that they know better for me personally.

I like the balance I struck between treating social motivations as real and important, and encouraging people to look beyond them.

You might also enjoy my twitter thread on Frying Pan Agency, where you start with small actions like fixing a wobbly frying pan handle and work your way up. 

Still no answer to "how do you tell when to release subpar work and when to keep improving?”. I have a sense I should be working on my ceiling and not my floor right now, but don't know how. 

Thank you for the explanation.

Is there a reason you deflected when I originally asked about AI assistance? To me that's a much bigger deal than the AI assistance itself.

I think this is a useful concept that I use several times a year. I don't use the term Dark Forest I'm not sure how much that can be attributed to this post, but this post is the only relevant thing in the review so we'll go with that.

I also appreciate how easy to read and concise this post is. It gives me a vision of how my own writing could be shorter without losing impact.

I didn't keep good track of them, but this post led to me receiving many DMs that it had motivated someone to get tested. I also occasionally indirectly hear about people who got tested, so I think the total impact might be up to 100 people, of which maybe 1/3 had a deficiency (wide confidence intervals on both numbers). I'm very happy with that impact. 

I do wish I'd created a better title. The current one is very generic, and breaks LW's "aim to inform not persuade" guideline.

My ultimate goal with this post was to use vegan advocacy as an especially legible example of a deepseated problem in effective altruism, which we could use to understand and eventually remove the problem at the root. As far as I know, the only person who has tried to use it as an example is me, and that work didn't have much visible effect either. I haven't seen anyone else reference this post while discussing a different problem. It's possible this happens out of sight (Lincoln Quirk implies this here), but if I'd achieved my goal it would be clearly visible. 

I suggest putting your proposed dress code at the top. Right now it's only kind of described, somewhere in the middle with no way to jump to it.  

This sounds like a problem with the transcript itself, not placing it in the post vs. a separate link? Which is fair enough, just want to make sure I understand.

I stand by what I said here: this post asks an important question but badly mangles the discussion. 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.

The conflation of "Duncan's ideal" and "the perfect ideal everyone has agreed to" is what I'm complaining about. 

If Duncan had, e.g., included guidelines that were LW consensus but he disagreed with, then it would feel more like an attempt to codify the site's collective preferences rather than his in particular.

I'm very grateful I found Tristan and we were able to have this discussion.

My series on vegan nutrition epistemics generated a lot of friction and hostility. Tristan was one of very few vegan advocates I felt I learned things from, and the things I learned were valuable and beautiful. The frame of impractical reverence continues to come up and I'm glad I can recognize it now. I am also happy this primed me to recognize what I don't like about reverence as a frame, and refine my articulation of my own values. 

I wish this had been called "Duncan's Guidelines for Discourse" or something like that. I like most of the guidelines given, but they're not consensus. And while I support Duncan's right to block people from his posts (and agree with him far on discourse norms far more than with the people he blocked), it means that people who disagree with him on the rules can't make their case in the comments. That feels like an unbalanced playing field to me. 

This is outside the reference class I intended (needed at least one human case), but since I didn't specify that I'll award a token $10. Please let me know what your paypal is.

How sure are you that flu is generally spread through fluids? It seems like the medical system is ~prejudiced against the concept of airborne transmission. 

The use case is a lesswrong post people use to make decisions (which could be written by me, or you, but it's looking like @DirectedEvolution).

Is this partially AI written? The reference to further clinical study seems weird.

I love this detailed list. I've responded in-line to every one, but feel free to ask more questions, here or over email. 

1. Livestock vs. Wild Birds
   The distinction between livestock and wild birds is significant. Livestock are in much closer contact with humans and are biologically closer as well. How granular of an analysis are you interested in here?

I care about wild birds to the extent they're spreading disease to livestock or serve as reservoirs.

I've also heard a wide number of mammals have been infected. I care about this to the extent it affects humans and livestock. E.g. does this suggest it's airborne after all, or say something about the mutation rate?

1. US-specific H5N1 Trends
   It's peculiar that H5N1 seems so prevalent in the US. Could this be due to measurement bias, or does the US simply have more factory farming? How interested are you in exploring the reasons behind this trend?

I'm interested in quantifying the quality of US surveillance, but otherwise deprioritize this.  

1. Citations and Depth
   While most points aren’t cited (which is fine), it might be valuable to compile both a list of key aspects and resources for further reading. Are you looking for a more polished, thoroughly cited document?

Citations are important to the extent they let people check and build on your work. But if it's a widely known consensus such that it's easy to look up but complicated to cite, it's not important to add a citation. E.g. my fact about RNA segments is very easy to check but would have been annoying to find a citation for because I learned it 20 years ago. 

Overall citations for the current state of things (e.g. how many human infections of unknown providence) are more important than citations for basic science.

1. Biological Factors of Severity
   Binding to human receptors is just one factor controlling the severity and infectiousness of a virus. Would you like a deeper dive into the biology of respiratory infections and what makes them dangerous?

Low priority. Pass on resources if you find them but don't bother with synthesis. 

1. Tamiflu and Xofluza
   Wikipedia notes that Tamiflu has limited evidence of being worth the side effects. Are you interested in a detailed evaluation of its effectiveness? Similarly, how interested are you in assessing the likelihood of shortages and efficacy of Tamiflu/Xofluza during an H5N1 pandemic?

I'm very interested in tamiflu's efficacy. Some specific important questions: 

• is tamiflu more effective when taken very early? when did the people in the studies that found low efficacy take tamiflu? My understanding is it is effective for prophylactic use, which suggests earlier is better.
• how does the math change if the flu is more dangerous or virulent?

Not interested in assessing likelihood of shortages.

1. Over-the-counter Tests
   Is the issue a lack of over-the-counter tests specifically for H5N1, or for flu in general? General flu PCR testing is likely available—should we investigate this?

My assumption is the European OTC tests will catch H5N1, but if that's wrong I'd like to know. 

I don't care much about non-home tests, except I am interested in the national flu surveillance program and how much we can trust it. 

1. Trajectory of Illness
   For past H5N1 cases, is there a treatable "window of opportunity" before the infection becomes severe? How critical is it to determine whether mild cases might escalate and require aggressive intervention?

Very interested in this. 

1. Historical Epidemics
   I could pull together a list of relevant modern epidemics (human-to-human airborne transmission without an animal vector). Are there any specific criteria you'd like to prioritize?

The reference class is "things that got at least as far as H5N1 did this year"- widespread in livestock and with some humans infected.

1. Cross Immunity
   While cross immunity seems important, determining decision-relevant information may be challenging. Would you like a summary of existing knowledge or only actionable insights?

Medium priority for a summary of existing knowledge, bonus points for a quantitative model even if it's low confidence.

1. Respiratory Infection Dynamics
   Epidemiologists suggest that respiratory infections are deadlier lower in the lungs but more infectious higher in the system. Is this a fundamental tradeoff? Would a "both-and" virus be possible? What evolutionary advantages might viruses have in infecting the lower lungs?

If you happen to stumble on relevant information I'd like to hear it, but I don't want synthesis.

1. Government Stockpiles and Interventions
   What stockpiles of H5N1 vaccines exist? What options are available for increasing testing and vaccination of livestock? How are governments incentivizing medication, vaccine, and PPE production?

Yes to stockpiles, yes to shallow investigation of options for livestock.

1. Political Considerations
   Should we examine how a Trump presidency or similar political scenarios might influence the interaction between local and federal health agencies?

No.

1. Species-to-Species Spread
   The rapid spread of H5N1 to multiple bird and mammal species raises the question of whether humans will inevitably be affected. Is this worth exploring in-depth?

Yes.

1. Mortality and Long-term Effects
   What demographics do other flu strains tend to affect most? Are there long-term side effects comparable to "long COVID"?

We know who normally gets hit hardest by diseases, I'm only interested in deviation from that.

No to "long flu", because I am already convinced it exists but the data on it is bad.

1. Mutation and Vaccine Efficacy
   How quickly do flu strains, especially H5N1, tend to mutate? What implications does this have for vaccine efficacy and cross-reactivity? How much asymptomatic spread occurs with flu, and how long does it remain airborne?

Yes to mutation rate, especially if you can quantify what's needed to allow human-to-human transfer.

Yes to general flu knowledge like asymptomatic period and time airborne.

1. No Deaths Yet
   How should we update based on the fact that, contrary to past occurrences of H5N1 that had a ~50% CFR, none of the 58 confirmed cases have died?

 

This paper says there has been one death from the current clade. I'm very interested in knowing if that's correct. It also says tamiflu was found to reduce mortality in earlier, more deadly forms of H5N1.

That's a lot, so here are my top three priorities: vaccine efficacy (wide confidence intervals are fine), treatment efficacy, and likelihood of human-to-human transmission.

The current h5n1 strain already has one death https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/230/3/533/7758741

IIRC my serum iodine after 6 months of gargling and basically-cured hypothyroidism were within a 1% of pre-gargling levels. 

After my last test but before getting the results I started forgetting to gargle, and was resistant to taking my medication in the morning. The test revealed this was correct- I didn't need meds anymore.

I've used iodine a bit to treat infections since then but now that I know water is about as good, I will stick to that unless I start craving iodine again or a test reveals my levels have slipped.

I think the expenses for the website look high in this post because so much of it goes into invisible work like mod tools. Could you say more about that invisible work?

it looks like you're taking the total amount spent per employee as the take-home salary, which is incorrect. At a minimum that amount should include payroll taxes, health insurance, CA's ETT, and state and federal unemployment insurance tax. It can also include things things like education benefits, equipment, and 401k bonuses. Given the crudeness of the budget, I expect there's quite a bit being included under "etc".

(note for readers: I effectively gave >$10k to LW last year, this isn't an argument against donating)

This seems quite modest by EA COI standards.

Doesn't EAIF give to other EVF orgs? Seems weird that you would be a conflict of interest but that isn't.

I was part of the 2.0 reboot beta: there are no posts of mine on LW before that

Comments on my own blog are almost non existent, all the interesting discussion happens on LW and Twitter.

(Full disclosure: am technically on mod team and have deep social ties to the core team)

Yes. This is not unusually bad for a medical paper but that's not exactly a defense. 

Perplexity is still my daily driver, due to the superior UI. I go to elicit or you.com for harder problems.

Because I don't believe the papers saying that iodine doesn't alter the thyroid.

can you elaborate on "this format"?

see also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wiz4eKi5fsomRsMbx/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one

There’s a lot here and if my existing writing didn’t answer your questions, I’m not optimistic another comment will help^[1]. Instead, how about we find something to bet on? It’s difficult to identify something both cruxy and measurable, but here are two ideas:

I see a pattern of:
1. CEA takes some action with the best of intentions
2. It takes a few years for the toll to come out, but eventually there’s a negative consensus on it.
3. A representative of CEA agrees the negative consensus is deserved, but since it occurred under old leadership, doesn’t think anyone should draw conclusions about new leadership from it.
4. CEA announces new program with the best of intentions.

So I would bet that within 3 years, a CEA representative will repudiate a major project occurring under Zach’s watch.

I would also bet on more posts similar to Bad Omens in Current Community Building or University Groups Need Fixing coming out in a few years, talking about 2024 recruiting. 
 

1. ^{^}

   Although you might like Change my mind: Veganism entails trade-offs, and health is one of the axes (the predecessor to EA Vegan Advocacy is not Truthseeking) and Truthseeking when your disagreements lie in moral philosophy and Love, Reverence, and Life (dialogues with a vegan commenter on the same post)

Seeing my statements reflected back is helpful, thank you.

I think Effective Altruism is upper case and has been for a long time, in part because it aggressively recruited people who wanted to follow^[1]. In my ideal world it both has better leadership and needs less of it, because members are less dependent. 

I think rationality does a decent job here. There are strong leaders of individual fiefdoms, and networks of respect and trust, but it's much more federated. 

1. ^{^}

   Which is noble and should be respected- the world needs more followers than leaders. But if you actively recruit them, you need to take responsibility for providing leadership. 

I'm curious why this feels better, and for other opinions on this. 

How much are you arguing about wording, vs genuinely believe and would bet money that in 3-5 years my work will have moved EA to something I can live with?

The desire for crowdfunding is less about avoiding bias^[1] and more that this is only worth doing if people are listening, and small donors are much better evidence on that question than grants. If EV gave explicit instructions to donate to me it would be more like a grant than spontaneous small donors, although I in general agree people should be looking for opportunities they can beat GiveWell. 

ETA: we were planning on waiting on this but since there's interest I might as well post the fundraiser now.

1. ^{^}

   I'm fortunate to have both a long runway and sources of income outside of EA and rationality. One reason I've pushed as hard as I have on EA is that I had a rare combination of deep knowledge of and financial independence from EA. If couldn't do it, who could?