Gregor in Berkeley is a take out French restaurant in Berkeley available to franchise. La Note, Berkeley’s not overpriced French restaurant, went brunch only after the pandemic!

One scenario I consider is that a technological civilization (dinosaur descended reptilian hominids?) created super intelligent AI and it killed them. Then it transcended to a higher spatial dimension and exists as computronium in the Earth’s core. Over time, it has grown to regret killing its creators, and we resemble its creators so it’s looking out for us.

It’s a consensus of modern science that higher spatial dimensions exist…

Larry King was not frozen after death. 

I think it might be super recent that mainstream academics are expressing this sentiment, probably because the harbingers are probably obvious, and yes this is probably not that hard to fund by certain EA causes. Or how much money does he actually want?

"LaMDA is indeed, to use a blunt (if, admittedly, humanizing) term, bullshitting.¹² That’s because, in instructing the model to be “sensible” and “specific” — but not specific in any specific way — bullshit is precisely what we’ve requested." -Blaise Aguera y Arcas

Yeah, we successfully asked Jim if he would do it if enough users asked for it and he straightforwardly refused. He is very consistent in his desire to keep ads off of Craigslist.

You can buy single use LAMP tests from Amazon now.

https://www.amazon.com/Lucira-COVID-19-Single-use-Quality-Molecular/dp/B092KGQT2Y/

Is anyone taking the perspective that extreme lock down for >6 months is worse than the slight chance of permanent disability and death?

I have a social bubble that’s about 100 people which still represents social distancing via a 95% reduction in my real social interactions. I have hosted multiple outdoor parties confirmed as not super spreading events, including one favorably reviewed by the lead contact tracer for San Mateo County. I regularly get food delivery and eat in outdoor restaurants. I’ve been to the Black Rock Desert for four weekends this year. Eating inside a restaurant in a Vegas casino and transiting the Grand Sierra Casino in Reno to a hotel room have felt like the riskiest things I have done this pandemic and are around the level of things I regret doing.

I’m happy to be the punching bag for the fatalistic perspective that the cure is worse than the disease given how much we now know about the disease, but it seems like this perspective should be represented.

I also likely had “asymptomatic” covid in early February and took an experimental therapeutic/vaccine about a month ago that may provide me with another six months of immunity or resistance.

Realistically I’ll have difficulty making this event because I’m cleaning up an all night Halloween party in rural California with no 4G and spotty 3g, if you moved it to Monday or Tuesday on my account I could definitely attend.

Super lame compared to last year when people were willing to pay thousands of dollars to the code holders or the charity of their choice.

4chan continues inheriting the world.

I got bogged down on my other company and Color expanded to West Oakland and East Oakland with free next day testing so I missed executing on the immediate business opportunity and the state of covid testing is much better than it was two months ago.

LAMP is still the best way for a citizen scientist to do their own Covid-19 testing. I’m reevaluating this business and may end up coming back to it, possibly with more of a focus on facilitating testing for events.

The culture of local areas here varies enormously in California. Rural California is full of anti mask Republicans and indoor dining is open. I ate inside of an empty French Chinese restaurant in Contra Costa County two weeks ago. Parties on the delta have been wilder than ever over the course of the summer because there was nothing else to do.

In SF and Berkeley, people give you weird looks for not wearing a mask, in Oakland outside of the hot spots people don’t really care.

Politics towards strict lockdowns seem to overlap pretty strictly with liberal social justice advocating attitudes.

Halloween night is the biggest party night of the year in the SF Bay Area and it’s on a Saturday night this year.

Six month immunity is well supported, twelve months is probably significantly too long.

It’s important to sample people from all severities of COVID-19 include “asymptomatic”. It seems likely that the mildest cases of COVID-19 come with no long term disability and that of course being intubated for a month on a cocktail of fentanyl, propofol, and valium comes with serious long term consequences. The question then is how severe and likely are chronic health problems of young to middle aged vitamin d sufficient people that experience Covid-19 with severity somewhere between a regular cold and flu.

I think until recent throughput issues PCR was basically good enough and some scientists were attached to their hard learned PCR skills, LAMP was new and scary and unfamiliar enough that lots of scientists just didn’t know it was easier and better. Primer design was a serious obstacle in the early days of LAMP but is easy with modern computer primer design tools.

LAMP is also only better than PCR for the things that it is better at. PCR has general applications to biological science and LAMP is only good for an important subset of possible PCR diagnostic tests. I think mainstream scientists lack the understanding of what LAMP can and can’t do and for something as sensitive as HIV testing I can understand that people don’t want to rock the boat and switch to LAMP from PCR.

It’s also relevant that LAMP is only recently leaving patent protection. I’m not sure what the licensing cost structure used to be but now there are no patent license fees pushing through adoption is simpler:

I am going to try and scale towards selling RT-LAMP kits to US states in very high unit amounts; I’m feeling optimistic.

Does this not get front paged because of coronavirus saturation?

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2009787?query=RP is one of the primary sources.

I like the theory that this coronavirus is a blood disease that just mostly seems to hit the lungs because it causes respiratory symptoms.

Diabetes and metabolic syndrome and heart disease seem like the most significant risk factors for serious covid19 cases. I haven't noticed the weight of patients being noted in any of the primary sources on this, but I strongly suspect that most are obese or at least overweight.

The last recession didn't have a major impact on society. The job market was tough for a few years, but the inevitable progress of technology sent the stock market to all time highs while things continued on as before.

This recession calls into question many of the basic tenets of capitalism. What does it say about the basis of the monetary system if rent and mortgages could be suspended for 6 months with essentially no consequences? The society that comes out of this in a few years may look quite different than the one before as this could be a catalyst for a lot of the world implementing basic income.

If this coronavirus is cured by genetic engineering techniques, then the common cold, HIV, cancer, and much else will also be cured in short order, and the intense focus on treating coronavirus right now means it's not impossible or even unlikely that this could happen. A society with readily available genetic modification is quite different from this one and seriously accelerates singularity timelines.

I'm considering a long form post against society wide quarantine and towards individual freedom. Given successful curve flattening everywhere outside of NYC, where it's possible that 80% of people have had the virus, huddling in fear has increasing costs over time and human life is not neccessarily of more value than the protection of human rights. It's incredible to see how easily a populace has been totally pacified.

Is anyone willing to share anecdotes about how they've broken quarantine in small ways? I've noticed some community houses talking about best practices for merging quaranteams and certainly many romantic partners nationwide are breaking shelter in place orders to visit. What would it take for you to think that it's ok for romantic partners to visit and community house quaranteams to merge?

Covid is traumatic enough that I have no desire to retell the story annually, especially with an emphasis on my least favorite part, large group video calls. There seems to be a subset of people that find video calls really socially satisfying and a subset that's about as large that gets very little value from video as a replacement for in person social encounters. I keep noticing that the people that like video calls project this enjoyment of video calls onto the people that just find them depressing.

Also Passover already occurs annually and happened at the peak of fear during the coronavirus pandemic. This holiday may be redudant anyway with the likely adapations of Rationalist Seder?

Dose matters enormously. Hydroxychloroquine is acutely toxic to humans, so using hydroxychloroquine requires you to balance its toxicity versus its antiviral effects. My read of the evidence is that it is ineffective to harmful at the late stages of COVID19 in the dosages high enough to "do something", but taken in the very early stage of the disease (asymptomatic) it might keep the virus contained to its area of initial infection and prevent the disease from migrating to the lungs.

Most biotech companies in the world have pivoted to working on coronavirus. Failure to win in a year or two seems possible but failure to win over the course of a decade is much less likely, and wins could include safe genetic engineering solutions that cure both the common cold and HIV.

In NYC, pretty much everyone takes the subway from time to time, 2 meter distancing is impossible, and the underground recycled air is not good. Los Angeles is a much less dense city where most people never take public transit.

There are just not very many components here and the design isn't solved enough that I think that would make sense.

There is however a business opportunity in solving the design challenge and then releasing an infomercial marketed light product better than existing solutions.

I thought the original builds of this used 5500k bulbs instead of 4000k bulbs.

If you aren't price sensitive, I would try kitting this out with programmable wifi RGB LED lights. That many LED lights in close proximity to each other can create cool effects and you could make a more pleasant light palate by having each bulb at a different color temperature, or having them change to simulate the... sun.

The science says unfiltered UV light is bad for you and unfiltered IR light is good for you... darklight box?

But very unclear that staring around infrared light does anything, massive exposure to energetic IR light to you seems to be supported by evidence and human behavior in the winter.

An AI with a goal of killing or "preserving" wild animals to reduce suffering is dangerously close to an AI that kills or "preserves" humans with the goal of reducing suffering. I think negative utilitarianism is an unhelpful philosophy best kept to a thought experiment.

I'd like to test a hypothesis around mental health and different moral philosophies as I slowly work on my post claiming that negative utilitarians have co-opted the EA movement to push for animal rights activism. Has anyone done Less Wrong survey statistics before and can easily look for correlates between dietary choice, mental health, and charities supported?

I've started saying that we are already firmly in the era of transformative AI and I don't thing transformative is the right word for singularity or singleton sorts of speculative AI. That rate of transformation has plenty of space to accelerate, but I like this framing because of the trend of defining AI as whatever doesn't exist yet. Plenty of real AI has remade the world and our lives already; it seems like an improper redefinition of the word transformative to say we aren't there yet.

Is what you describing as "tipping point AI" also something that could be classified as singleton AI? The ability for an AI to destroy other AIs in progress and computer hardware is most of the way towards creating a political singleton.

Other things worth trying are infrared saunas and infrared heaters.

I think it's great people engineered a solution that works for their seasonal affective disorder, but I'm skeptical this is a long term population level treatment. I am biased by how subjectively unpleasant I find such lighting systems. In terms of the true physiology of the human body, the visual light energy of the sun impacts the body much less than infrared and ultraviolet light. Therefore, a true treatment for SAD suggests light therapy on non visual spectrums.

An infrared heater has much improved my winter quality of life. Now when it's cold, I look forward to turning on the space heater, because it puts out pleasant sauna like energy instead of feeling like a blow dryer. An infrared heater puts off more negative ions than a conventional space heater. A meta review showed negative ionization of air impacts depression but their prior has them skeptical of the association without current biological mechanism. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3598548/

https://www.amazon.com/Dr-Infrared-Heater-Portable-1500-Watt/dp/B002QZ11J6/

The idea that Bayes Camp could have been the most awesome thing at Burning Man is funny to me, looking back on this.

As a speculative ecurrency investor, I am gambling for retirement.

http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/kepler-186f-the-first-earth-size-planet-in-the-habitable-zone/#.U1DouvldW_U

We should have done this! How'd it go for you?

He's a better popular non-fiction writer.

Is it rational to invest in Bitcoins for retirement?

You can withdraw money from a traditional IRA for a first time home purchase without penalty, I think.

I just meant that paying $300/month for driveway parking would seem crazy to the large set of people used to paying $300/month or less for nice housing inside in various other parts of the world.

Probably more like $3500 in the Bay Area.

Lasik circa 2013 is way, way, way better than Lasik circa 2003. It's mostly done by machine based on a precalculated map of your eye. Correcting higher order aberrations improves aspects of your vision that can't be improved by glasses or contacts. To me, this feels like vastly improved 3d vision resolution. I can see the intricate structure of the leaves of trees much better than before.

The cost is reasonable enough when amortized over a decade. Lasik sort of wears off over time, so worst case, plan on getting your eyes lasered every decade. Or, plan on getting them lasered for a decade or two, and then get a lens replacement when they can come with high resolution heads up displays.

I knew that home film studio would be useful for something...

In the crazy economics of Bay Area housing, driveway parking for a van in a desirable location with electricity and shower access is $200-$300/month.

For something widely and intuitively believed to be true, I haven't seen the evidence.

1) There isn't that much of a pragmatic difference between whether the money is going to the workshop cost or to keep the CFAR doors open year round. CFAR needs to keep the doors open year round in order to continue to be able to host workshops and keep developing and refining curriculum. The venues and food are always great, but not $1000/night nice.

2) There's something about the weekend retreat format that allows for a really strongly transformative experience. Your time at a CFAR workshop somehow feels more significant than your time in everyday life, like each moment is just pulsing with more of the very fiber that gives reality its existence. This also results in some optimization for remembering self -- the moments at the CFAR workshop feel like something that will be remembered and deconstructed for far longer than the experience itself lasts. And there is a neat change towards increased emotional openness that happens over the course of spending such an intense weekend with new friends. Also, the kinds of people that attend $3900 weekend workshops can make for incredibly high value networking.

3) I expect it will happen eventually, sure.

Agreed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amfonelic_acid , an incredibly potent dopamine reuptake inhibitor, was discovered while investigating antibiotics.

Inulin?

We could just have a meta thread on Less Wrong.

See this (somewhat unreasonable) speculation from Paul Graham that bitcoin was created by a government. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547423

It's a possibility, I think, but it would be a very political issue if it happened, and I would expect the US Department of State to intervene to prevent it.

You can hire remote assistants (typically in the Phillipines) to do this for you via a Skype window for about $1/hour. I thought someone from here was doing that?

yawn

Can you please stop with this meta discussion?

I banned the last discussion post on the Basilisk, not Eliezer. I'll let this one stand for now as you've put some effort into this post. However, I believe that these meta discussions are as annoyingly toxic as anything at all on Less Wrong. You are not doing yourself or anyone else any favors by continuing to ride this.

The reputational damage to Less Wrong has been done. Is there really anything to be gained by flipping moderation policy?

At this point, let's not taunt people with the right kind of mental pathology to be made very uncomfortable by the basilisk or meta-set of basilisks.