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I would also expect extraneous details like, "got sick and fell of the wagon" or similar to add significant noise. And with only one data point each, it'd be hard to know the variance to use. I'm guess I'd trust this study more?
To be clear I don't know what I'm doing really. I do think that it failed to get the precise thing I was looking for though.
"Cruxy" is a useful term to have in my vocabulary. I use it relatively loosely to refer to the type of thing I look for in a double crux. A consideration is more "cruxy" if it's closer to a but-for support for a proposition. Interestingly (mildly) this is very similar to the definition of "crucial," and in fact the etymologies are the same.
The California vibes in that video are immaculate. Even mentioning Windham Hill Records!
I'm a big fan of land reclamation, but hadn't heard of most of these barriers, thanks!
You might be interested in this "Best of LessWrong" post, Make more land.
This post is very cute. I also reference it all the time to explain the 'inverse cat tax.' you You can ask my colleagues, I definitely talk about that model a bunch. So, perhaps strangely, this is my most-referenced post of 2022. 🙃
My explanation of a model tax: this forum (and the EA Forum) really like models, so to get a post to be popular, you gotta put in a model.
I've referenced this post several times. I think the post has to balance being a straw vulcan with being unwilling to forcefully say its thesis, and I find Raemon to be surprisingly good at saying true things within that balance. It's also well-written, and a great length. Candidate for my favorite post of the year.
You might be interested in the debate here.
You get paid if Wave does well whether they like you or not.
Private companies can and do prevent people they don't like from selling stock to private buyers. So as an addition to this comment, I'd note that "the ability to cash out before an IPO 5+ years in the future" is a strong reason not to make an enemy of your former startup.
This is really cool.
I've historically said 1-2 weeks of skilled engineering work. That will lower by a factor of 2 after this branch, plus some follow ups, get merged.
Thanks for writing about ForumMagnum! This software is so much of my life, but understandably gets little attention an an object in its own sake.
That's changing a bit now, and more people are reaching out about using it. — I think it's the best forum software out there.
If someone reading this wants to build an instance, feel free to reach out.
Talon Voice, which I use for voice-commanding my computer, is very fast and has a linux version. I don't know if it would run on a small machine, but it seems worth a shot. And it seems perfect for your command-centered use-case. To get more information, I would ask in their slack.
I love this post. Both the content, and the writing — I felt like you were happily telling me about your interest, and it made me happy.
I joined the Patreon!
My mom and her siblings report learning their phone number this way. It's effective enough that I know that the house phone of my grandparents half a century ago ends in seven.
This is extreme JP bait.
Exactly the sort of mild optimization that I will become obsessed with.
I think you and the previous commenter would both do well to read the short, hyperlinked definition. (Sorry.)
We use Asana for this. (It's broadly great, and I don't understand how Jira isn't getting its lunch completely eaten. And I'm not just saying that because of my funder.)
I agree with a lot of this, though I think the mental attitude here is still extremely useful. For example, you may be dealing with something outside of your usual ticket system, or a ball may be smaller than something that would justify an Asana ticket.
I have a classic rationality comment on the EA Forum that's reasonably popular. I thought I'd crosspost here. The context is "What are work practices that you’ve adopted that you now think are underrated?"
***
CEA (my employer) has long had the concept of "who owns this ball."[1] I'm gonna have a hard time in this answer conveying exactly how much this has become a whole encompassing working philosophy for me.
Level 1: The alarm bells about dropped balls
If you are having a conversation and someone's like "we should do X"... Someone should really be the person owning the ball for doing (or not doing!) X.
If there's a "ball" (a task of some sort) that's sitting around and not moving forward, and anyone has any uncertainty about who's responsible for it, they should flag that.
Example: "Ok, who owns the ball of reaching out to GWWC?"
Level 2: Passing balls
Be extremely clear in your communication when you're handing off a ball to someone else, or taking on a ball. This prevents balls from getting dropped in the first place. We use dedicated emoji-jargon for this at CEA:
- 🏈 for handing off a ball
- 🤾 for catching a ball
Example: "I'm not sure what happened there, looks like a bug. 🏈 to you to fix?"
Level 3: Systems that prevent dropped balls
We have a round robin system in our code reviews, to make sure that each code review is assigned to a single reviewer, who knows that it's their job to review that code. The reviewer then assigns the task back to the original developer to address comments and/or merge the code. The code review can literally never be in an ambiguous state. (Ideally anyway. Human be humans, and it happens.)
Both our developers and our moderators has the concept of an "on-call" rotation, both developed by me. Quoting from the moderator on-call doc:
You should be aiming to ensure an efficiently running ship. It’s your job this week to make sure that everything’s running smoothly. That does not mean doing everything yourself. But this week, the buck of dropped balls does stop with you.
***
I think I've done a fair job of communicating the type of thing I mean, but it really goes quite deep and broad for me. As I predicted, moreso than this suggests.
- ^
I wrote this answer, and then realized I needed to give a shout out to @amywilley and the (CEA) events team, who really embody the spirit of this philosophy. Amy at one point bought like 40 styrofoam balls and had CEA write tasks they were worried might be getting dropped on them, and then we went around finding an owner for the balls, or deciding to drop them by choice.
We've been thinking about this for the EA Forum. I endorse Raemon's thoughts here, I think, but I know I can't pass the ITT of a more transparent side here.
This comment feels like wishful thinking to me. Like, I think our communities are broadly some of the more truth-seeking communities out there. And yet, they have flaws common to human communities, such as both 1 and 2. And yet, I want to engage with these communities, and to cooperate with them. That cooperation is made much harder if actors blithely ignore these dynamics by:
- Publishing criticism that could wait
- Pretend that they can continue working on that strategy doc they were working on, while there's an important discussion centered on their organization's moral character happening in public
I have a long experience of watching conversations about orgs evolve. I advise my colleagues to urgently reply. I don't think this is an attempt to manipulate anyone.
I basically probably endorse this for you, but would also suggest whether you could do more automatic red-shifting and dimming of your lights in the evening.
Is that common?
My model was that this is the thing going on for many night owls. I believe I had studies at one point that would back this up, but could not immediately find them.
if you benefit from a visual indication of wake time blacking out the external light and replacing it with light under your control seems much better, if you can get it bright enough?
I'm not in principle opposed. The approach you mention has super conceptual benefits under the model you and I share. In practice, I find my friends often have lights that go from zero to very bright very fast. I expect this to be more equivalent to an alarm clock than a subtle nudge to your sleep cycle mechanism to start moving towards wake-up-land.
When I had the chance to drive an electric car recently, I turned off "one pedal driving". I bet you could in a Tesla. Note for next time!
This sounds like some dark magic to me.
This post was a great dive into two topics:
- How an object-level research field has gone, and what are the challenges it faces.
- Forming a model about how technologically optimistic projects go.
I think this post was good on it's first edition, but became great after the author displayed admirable ability to update their mind and willingness to update their post in light of new information.
Overall I must reluctantly only give this post a +1 vote for inclusion, as I think the books are better served by more general rationality content, but I'm terms of what I would like to see more of on this site, +9. Maybe I'll compromise and give +4.
This is great. Encouragement to turn it into a top level post if you want it.
Spot the problem with this statement:
The Galleri test did not detect DNA methylation patterns that are associated with cancer in your blood sample. In a clinical validation study, fewer than1% of individuals with this result were projected to have cancer.
It seems like a large amount of work of this post is being done by:
So people seem skeptical that we can cover large areas with these lamps.
Maybe the experts are thinking of large-scale deployments in schools, hospitals, airports, conference centers? I feel like numbers seem important.
It would help your signal-boosting if you hit space after pasting that url, in which case the editor would auto-link it.
(JP, you say, you're a dev on this codebase, why not make it so it auto-links it on paste — yeah, well, ckeditor is a pain to work with and that wasn't the default behavior.)
I think the problem with zoom meetings is not the meeting itself, but instead the bounds of the meeting. It's easier to have better coordination if you can freely wander in and out of a casual conversation. It's hard to get super-in-sync over, say, 60 minutes a day of facetime. To put another way, zoom does fine for "full meeting" mode, but much worse for casual, semi-meeting mode. VR does nothing to solve the second category, so I'm skeptical.
I really buy the argument Sinclair makes about reducing trivial inconveniences here. Let’s make a model.
Ambiguity has two main negative effects, according to me:
- Reducing precision in the prediction, because some of the prediction is based around interpretation of the creator’s foibles rather than a “true” resolution of a better-specified question.
- Making the forecaster’s lives worse, because they want to be forecasting world events, not guessing as to the creators behavior in unclear situations.
Let’s set 1. aside for now. 2. seems like a big deal for sure. But also big is the drag on creating prediction markets imposed by Metaculus-style process. The way to balance these two seems to me to be a question that hinges on what you want your impact to be. If you’re trying to make the world as good a place as possible, you might have quite a strong preference for there being plenty of markets that can be made with low overhead. If the experience for forecasters is bad enough, then you won’t get predictions on those questions, but my empirical belief is that Manifold is striking a better balance right now than Metaculus.
As for 1., again, we can answer it according to, what’s most useful for our goals, and again, I want to claim Manifold is doing well here.
tl;dr There are real tradeoffs here.
I like the post btw!
This is really neat. Thanks for helping me build a technical base (eyyyy) for understanding my partner's work.
One thing that wasn't clear to me is: if you can only sequence 150 bases at a time, how do you build a complete picture of a genome? One might come away from your post thinking that next gen sequencing is only useful for getting the edges of the genome, say for simple identification purposes. Based on "chopped up your fragments" and my preexisting knowledge, I expect you do some sort of chopping and then reassembly, but I'd be curious to learn more.
Another thing I'd be excited about reading in a follow-up is even the basics of the technical hurdles of sequencing so much stuff in wastewater and how the NAO intends to overcome it, explained in jefftk-style.
NB: the title no longer appears in bold in the first sentence, contra the style guide.
Bunch of broken images in this one
Sam's talking about the rich text editor.
There is, by coincidence, a recent PR to fix this.
Is there a way to hide the curated sequences from the frontpage?
I disagree here. Every time I've seen someone strong-self-vote their comment, I've felt it was pretty bad. It's rare, and not obviously worth the effort to fix, but I wouldn't agree with Ray's take.
I would also expect less exposure in a normal office meeting than at a dance
How do I square that with:
so I would say our ventilation was successful at keeping us from going above standard indoor exposure despite the number of people and active movement
I think "faces being further apart" is basically what I mean in the final two sentences.
It's much harder to change a tag ontology once created.
I think this is really cool. I nevertheless expect perhaps that I would be that a normal office meeting would result in less exposure than this dance. I'm not actually sure where my intuition is coming from, but I'm going to say it's due in part to the increased exertion of the dancers causing more potential virus to get mixed into the air, and that this effect is bigger than the increase in CO2 from exertion, if you follow me. The other part would be that perhaps the measurement is too far away from the center of the dance? Hypothetically, if I imagine finding out that the CO2 levels stayed below 1000ppm even in the middle of the dancers, I'd be less skeptical.
Tag suggestion: "Air Quality". There's a bunch of things in a cluster of space around here, you could imagine one or more tags. Carbon dioxide, air particulate pollution, and aerosolized respiratory pathogens. The last one may seem a bit of an odd duck, but the techniques for dealing with it are often the same as the others.
I wear a P100 sometimes, and it's incredibly hard for other people to hear what I'm saying when I'm behind one, which would be a factor.
I get an access error for boston-effective-altruists.
I agree with Mingyuan that Google hasn't put a lot of work into making the UI a good user experience in a long time, but agree generally that email lists are probably a good option. I do think organizers should still post on Facebook though?
Economic efficiency and a 5 year old bet
5 years ago, my then-boss and I realized we disagreed about something. He thought the oil and gas sector was clearly on the decline, and would be a bad place to put your money. I was a big fan of the efficient market hypothesis, and though, well, shouldn't that already be priced in?
He was confident and willing to give me good odds, but wanted to be clear he was talking over the very long term. So we agreed: 5 years term, 70% odds. If the O&G sector trailed the S&P 500 by more than 25%, I'd pay him ¢30, if it did better than that, he'd pay me ¢70. (The money being trivial, but the staking of our clear and unambiguous predictions being the important part.)
Now the bet has come to fruition. Take a moment to guess the result if you don't know.
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It wasn't even close. The S&P returned 111% over the last 5 years, or 14.25% per year. The Dow Jones US Oil & Gas Index[1] returned -26%, or -5.5% per year.
Would I take the bet today? One thing I appreciate now that I don't think I understood when I was 24 is that I was betting over a relatively small inefficiency. 5% per year is not an insight that you can get rich on. So the market is not gonna be that efficient. With that insight in mind I probably would have been more humble in my discussion with my boss, and we probably would not have ended up betting. I probably also would have bothered looking at the past 5 years of performance, which I don't remember doing.
However, I miiight still take the bet again? It was pretty good odds, and it's famously very hard to predict the stock market, even over the long term like this.
So there you go, not obvious how much I learned from it, but I liked the experience of looking back on the confident feeling of my past self and seeing how I'd changed.
Readers passably familiar with finance will know that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is famously awful, being weighted by the price of individual shares in the companies, which is an arbitrary number. The Dow O&G index is weighted by market cap instead, like the S&P 500. ↩︎