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Do you have any examples (or likely examples) of this happening?
Spicy food. Plants evolved capsaicin production in order to deter mammals from eating them, yet many humans (myself included) like eating plants specifically because they contain capsaicin.
This post reads as a call to action (or inaction), but it's not clear what you're saying people should do. Can you be more explicit about that?
Normal subcultures don't have infosec requirements, let alone infosec requirements effective enough for intelligence agencies
This link is broken
How would you recommend shorting long-dated bonds? My understanding is that both short selling and individual bond trading have pretty high fees for retail investors.
Anna: Papa, I have a problem: [explains problem in detail]
Me: Is it a problem you can fix?
Anna: Yes! [Fixes problem]
I need to do a better job of asking myself this question.
An important thing that this analysis leaves out is the uncertainty regarding feedback loops. If e.g. warming causes permafrost to melt and release more greenhouse gasses, there is a possibility of a runaway process that results in catastrophic warming. We don't know how bad the tail risks are, and an analysis that looks at the median case doesn't address that issue.
I'd like to know whether deep canvassing actually works.
The deadline to post your blind mode predictions is coming up on the 10th. This weekend is a great time to do them if you haven't yet.
His 80000 interview suggests that he thought the chance of FTX blowing up is something between 1% and 10%. There he gives 50% odds for making more than 50 billion dollars that can be donated to EA causes.
If someone is saying that his action was negative in expectation, do they mean, that Sam Bankman-Fried lied about his expectations? Do they mean that a 10% chance of this happening should have been enough to tilt the expectation to be negative under the ethical assumptions of longtermism that puts most of the utility that's produced in the far future? Are you saying something else?
I wish I had any sort of trustworthy stats about the success rate of things in the reference class of steal from one pool of money in order to cover up losses in another pool of money, in the hope of making (and winning) big bets in the second pool of money to eventually make the first pool of money whole. I would expect the success rate to be very low (I would be extremely surprised if it were as high as 10%, somewhat surprised if it were as high as 1%), but it's also the sort of thing where if you do it successfully, probably nobody finds out.
Do Ponzi schemes ever become solvent again? What about insolvent businesses that are hiding their insolvency?
I think approximately no one audits people's books before accepting money from them. It's one thing to refuse to accept money from a known criminal (or other type of undesirable), but if you insist that the people giving you money prove that they obtained it honestly, then they'll simply give that money to someone else instead.
This is basically a Quirrell moment in real life; a massive proportion of people on LW are deferring their entire worldview to obvious supervillains.
Who are the obvious supervillains that they're deferring their entire worldview to? And who's deferring to them?
If in a job that's important for the war effort, be a stickler for following all rules and official procedures. Escalate decisions so that things don't get done without official input from higher-ups.
The majority rent (I've lived in a few, all of which, including the one I live in now, rented).
I believe the main reasons for this are:
- People who live in rationalist group houses are disproportionately young and live in expensive areas, which makes it hard to buy a house,
- There's a lot of variability in how long people live in rationalist group houses, and
- Figuring out the ownership structure is complicated.
The first point is fairly self-explanatory, but I'll say a bit more about the other two.
There are several sorts of people who choose to live in a rationalist group house:
- People who would rather live in a rationalist group house than live alone or just with a partner/family,
- People who want to live in a rationalist group house until they find a partner and settle down,
- People who thought they wanted to live in a rationalist group house but decided it wasn't for them (often because they find out they're more introverted than they realized or want more control over their living space than a group house offers),
- People who can't afford to live alone so they live in a group house, and given that they need to live with other people, they'd prefer rationalists, and
- People who are moving to or explicitly temporarily living in a particular city (e.g. to study) who want their housing to come with a rationalist-type social circle,
- Partners of rationalists who themselves aren't rationalists, and
- People in the rationalist community who can live in a rationalist house more cheaply or more conveniently than somewhere else (often but not always because a room is temporarily vacant).
Most of these kinds of people aren't going to stick around very long. That's fine; the temporary (a few months to a year) residents of the rationalist group houses I've lived in have generally been positive additions to the house, so I wouldn't want to exclude them.
Because most of the people who might want to live in a rationalist house won't be sticking around that long, it doesn't make sense for everyone to own it. Which brings us to the question of some subset of the residents owning the house.
Last year, a friend and I looked into buying a house together to turn into a group house (where we would rent the rooms out to other residents). Things I learned from that process were (I expect this to vary a lot by geography, and I know very little about New Zealand's housing market):
- It can be hard to find something that matches multiple people's constraints (in terms of price, location, size, features).
- Co-owning a house with someone (other than a spouse) is legally complicated and requires a good contract and a competent lawyer. Especially if there's also a mortgage involved.
- Touring houses is a lot of work.
- Most houses for sale have a lot wrong with them and the permitting process for transforming them to be the way you want is slow and unpredictable.
- Figuring out whether there'd be sufficient interest in a rationalist group house in a particular location is hard.
There were a couple houses that we came close to want to make an offer on (though we still hadn't figured out the legal issues around co-ownership). Then my friend accepted a job offer in another city, which ended that project.
None of this means you shouldn't buy a house for this purpose under the right circumstances. I think those circumstances are:
- Someone in the group has the ability to buy such a house.
- Enough people are interested and have sufficiently legible requirements regarding price, location, size, and amenities.
- The prospective buyer is ok with the house ending up not being a rationalist group house (and either living in themself not as a group house or turning it into a regular rental property).
There's also an asymmetry between gains and losses, partly due to prospect theory, and partly due to decreasing marginal utility. I bet a lot of people would answer differently if they were asked what they would choose if given the choice between receiving the money vs. going back to the way things were before.
I think it depends on whether you think there will be an omicron booster by the time the next variant comes along. If there is, you'll have gotten Covid for nothing.
Abbot flat out denies the FDA’s claim of potential lowered test sensitivity, says their tests are as effective against Omicron as they were against previous variants.
The link here appears to be a mattress ad.
How often do people talk about tradeoffs between multiple sacred values?
This story makes sense for describing how people might believe conspiracy theories because they oppose lockdowns, but I don't think a similar story would apply for opposition to vaccines. Following this line of thinking, I think the sequence of events is:
- Disease breaks out.
- Public health authorities respond to the disease with high-cost preventative measures.
- People respond to those preventative measures by becoming hostile to public health measures.
- People's hostility to public health measures oppose vaccines even though they're much lower cost and much more effective than the measures that led to them becoming hostile to public health measures in the first place.
An important aspect of this is that it involves a tradeoff between a sacred value (preventing death) and a secular value (avoiding restrictions). When it's not socially acceptable to have a frank discussion of the real costs and benefits of various restrictions, it becomes easier for people who oppose the restrictions to pretend that the benefits of the restrictions don't exist (aka the disease isn't real or isn't serious).
Vaccination with three doses is protective against infection by Omicron, but less protective than vaccines were against Delta. As a rule of thumb I am currently acting as if a booster shot is something like 60%-70% protective against infection but I don’t have confidence in that number. The main protection is still against severe disease, hospitalization and death.
Two questions about this:
- Do you mean that a booster is 60-70% effective relative to being "fully" vaccinated but not boosted, or do you mean that being boosted is 60-70% effective relative to being unvaccinated?
- How did you reach this conclusion? Based on the Pfizer press release, I had been treating being boosted as 95% effective (relative to being unvaccinated) since the level of neutralizing antibodies against Omicron with 3 doses was the same as the level against original Covid with 2 doses, and 2 doses were 95% effective against original.
What was the weather like? I like this idea, and I wonder how well it would work under different weather conditions.
Either it’s bad or weird data, or Omicron somehow puts a ton more virus into the wastewater, and then there’s nothing to see here.
If Omicron somehow puts a ton more virus into the wastewater, that tells us something interesting about the virus. Maybe it somehow infects the digestive tract more effectively than other strains.
How should we determine when there's adequate supply? I imagine calling pharmacies and asking "if, hypothetically, I got Covid, would everyone in my household be able to get Paxlovid?" would work very well.
Facebook discussion on this.
Vietnam
If there are specific problems with those regulations, shouldn't a legislator representing a district with a lot of forestry or ranching be able to propose a sensible solution with little opposition?
The default approach is to try to get the attention of the highest-ranking person they can think of, but this runs afoul of the exact mechanism you mention where attention is precious and the higher the rank, the more fierce the competition for it, and the higher the threshold we need to reach to direct them. But I think this is a power-law distribution, which is to say that as you go down the ladder of hierarchy the attention threshold drops rapidly.
To sum up, we can mitigate the attention problem by aiming as low on the totem pole as possible, and providing as explicit an action as possible.
I wonder if, in this context, that would have meant trying to get the attention of Transportation Secretary Buttigieg rather than President Biden. Or the mayor of Long Beach.
Right, but that impacts whether it's actually profitable to build them.
If you buy one, l assume you can't then rent it out at market rate? What restrictions are there on your ability to resell it? I would expect that to massively decrease these units' value to potential buyers.
As long as we're going off on tangents, does anyone know a name for the bias where Oxonians look like they're doing things effortlessly?
I suspect the following is a common psychological failure mode, and I want a term to refer to it:
- See someone doing something amazing and making it look easy
- Try to do something similar (or imagine trying to)
- Realize (or assume) that it's hard and will take a lot of work
- Conclude that because it's easy for the other person and hard for you, you must be bad at it (when actually it's hard for the other person too, but you just don't see the work that they put into it)
- Since you've concluded that it's hard and you're bad at it, you give up
The intuition might also come from whole grains generally being healthier and darker than refined grains. A naive attempt to generalize that might conclude that the darkest part of the bread is the healthiest.
Given the following charts, statistics, and arguments based on those charts and statistics, point out the important flaws in the arguments and state what unjustified conclusions the arguers are trying to cause you to reach.
For wood and charcoal to be expensive, forests don't necessarily need to be depleted. Instead, it can be due to higher transportation costs (wood and charcoal are heavy). As the empire became less secure during and after the crisis of the 3rd century, I would expect long-distance transportation to have become less safe (due to banditry) and therefore more expensive.
The important question about Alaska opening up vaccines to tourists is whether non-Americans will be able to get in.
Regarding betting on inflation, TIPS already exist.
Is the idea to watch it when the event starts or to watch it beforehand?
But elections determine who appoints the judges and bureaucrats who make most policy. And some areas of policy, e.g. tax policy, are mostly decided by elected officials, not appointed judges or bureaucrats.
A remarkable empirical finding across many scientific fields, at many different scales and levels of abstraction, is that a small set of control variables usually suffices.
I'm skeptical that this is true for most things we care about. It's true in the scientific fields where we have the most accurate models, such as physics, but that's likely because there are so few relevant variables in those fields.
Most new drugs that go into clinical trials fail. Essentially, a pharmaceutical company identifies a variable that appears to be the mediator of a medical outcome, they create a drug that tweaks that variable, and then it turns out not to produce the outcome that they thought it would. There are too many other relevant variables that are poorly understood.
The other thing that makes me skeptical is the effectiveness of machine learning models that use a large number of inputs. It's possible that there's a simple underlying structure to what they're predicting that we just haven't figured out yet, but based on what exists now, it sure looks like there are a large number of relevant variables.
Near the end of the linked malaria article, it says:
Bucala and Geall have placed their vaccine in the hands of the Oxford University institution that facilitated the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. It is one of the only places in the world that is doing phase 1 studies in malaria, meaning researchers infect human volunteers with the disease after immunizing them.
So it sounds like maybe they are in act doing human challenge trials.
Do you have a link to a higher resolution copy of that poster? The text is too blurry for me to read.
Strong upvote even though this is kind of a meh update, because I want to encourage actually gathering the data and reporting on it.
Some people are willing to pay a premium for the ability to buy something legally.
I'm confused why your lab didn't know about sleep as memory post-processing. My high school psych class in 2005 taught that.
Consider a case where someone dies in an industrial accident , although all rules were followed: if you think the plant manager should be exonerated because he folowed the rules, you are siding with deontology, whereas if you think he should be punished because a death occurred under his supervision, you are siding with consequentialism.
That's not how consequentialism works. The consequentialist answer would be to punish the plant manager if and only if doing so would cause the world to become a better place.
In jurisdictions where there's an exam required to graduate high school, let students of any age take the exam, but have a sufficiently higher cut-off to graduate early. Anyone who graduates early is automatically admitted to a university (e.g. in the U.S. it might be to their choice of state university) and received a tuition subsidy at least equal to the amount it would have cost the public school system to keep them in high school.
A school where students spend much of their time in mostly-unsupervised independent work and/or socializing, and they are (individually or in small groups with similar ability) matched with tutors on specific topics. I think this would work much better than the one size fits all model we use now.
An elected office where there's a term limit, and some length of time after someone leaves office (e.g. in the following election), voters vote on how good a job they did, and the former office-holder receives a cash payout or pension based on the result of the vote.
The benefits of this system would be:
- Politicians would have an incentive to focus on how their performance in office will be judged on a longer time-horizon.
- If the payout is large enough, it would incentivize politicians not to take sinecures and "speaking fees" that would be seen as corrupt after leaving office (and thereby make them less useful as an inducement to corruption while they're in office)
- During an election, the question "how did it go last time this party was in charge?" would be top-of-mind, encouraging political parties to optimize more for the long term.
Equity markets for individual products. Essentially, a company with a design for a new product creates a Kickstarter-like campaign where you can back the product, but in addition to (or instead of) getting the product when it's released, you get royalties on each one sold (e.g. a company promises $5 in royalties per unit sold and sells that for $250k, and investors can buy fractions of that).
This would enable companies (and individual inventors?) to de-risk and apply wisdom of crowds to new product development.
Some way to publish a book as an excludable good. For example, you could have a movie theater, but instead of a movie screen, you have temporary access to a book. Someone watches to make sure you don't copy the book.
That sounds like Kindle.