Posts

What is the best day to celebrate Smallpox Eradication Day? 2022-05-09T04:02:02.805Z
AI Forecasting Meetup 2022-04-20T05:41:28.586Z
[Link] Sarah Constantin on RaDVaC 2021-02-05T16:08:41.777Z
What's going on with this failure of Bayes to converge? 2019-12-19T03:58:13.883Z
Taxi Industry Regulation, Deregulation, and Reregulation: The Paradox of Market Failure 2019-12-16T08:05:01.044Z
Pricing externalities is not necessarily economically efficient 2019-11-09T12:07:46.509Z
Meetup Notes: Ole Peters on ergodicity 2019-11-03T23:31:01.889Z
Who captures economic gains from life extension treatments? 2019-10-24T05:17:05.524Z
What economic gains are there in life extension treatments? 2019-10-24T05:12:51.902Z
Stanislav Petrov Day Celebration 2019-09-22T02:19:55.652Z
Rationality Reading Group 2019-05-12T19:56:27.233Z
[Seattle] Rationality Reading Group + Dinner 2019-01-10T06:53:11.450Z
Welcome to The Territory 2019-01-10T06:47:17.081Z

Comments

Comment by Orborde on Dragon Agnosticism · 2024-08-02T18:29:44.967Z · LW · GW

It already seems like we can infer that dragon-existence has, to you, nontrivial subjective likelihood because you don't loudly proclaim "dragons don't exist" and because you regard investigation as uncomfortably likely to turn you into a believer of something socially unacceptable.

If you think it's in fact, like, 20% likely (a reasonable "nontrivial likelihood" guess for people to make), seems like the angry dragons-don't-exist people should be 20% angry at you.

Comment by Orborde on Dragon Agnosticism · 2024-08-02T07:24:44.899Z · LW · GW

You could look into whether dragons exist with the plan that you will never reveal any findings no matter what they are. I get that you probably wouldn't bother because most paths by which that information could be valuable require you to leak it, but it's an option.

Comment by Orborde on simeon_c's Shortform · 2024-05-11T20:07:26.225Z · LW · GW

Mostly for @habryka's sake: it sounds like you are likely describing your unvested equity, or possibly equity that gets clawed back on quitting. Neither of which is (usually) tied to signing an NDA on the way out the door - they'd both be lost simply due to quitting.

The usual arrangement is some extra severance payment tied to signing something on your way out the door, and that's usually way less than the unvested equity.

EDIT: Turns out OpenAI's equity terms are unusually brutal and it is indeed the case that the equity clawback was tied to signing the NDA.

Comment by Orborde on Welcome to The Territory · 2023-10-07T07:02:52.013Z · LW · GW

Nope!

(DMed the most recent residents - they moved out at the end of the lease term about a month ago)

Comment by Orborde on A list of Petrov buttons · 2022-10-26T23:10:51.766Z · LW · GW

I was the co-game-master for 2018 Oxford/Seattle and had to make a call about whether the game-end launch was legit. Your telling is accurate - the guy who pressed the button indeed acted unilaterally and (he claims) thought the button was disabled.

Comment by Orborde on The Redaction Machine · 2022-10-09T10:41:16.697Z · LW · GW

Setting it all up was damned expensive: she died at ninety - about 70 years of redaction time multiplied by a typical human metabolic rate and mass landed you with a lot of redaction entropy. Look at the price of energy, convert the Kilowatt hours and it came to a lot of money. She had to set up an on-death remortgage of her home to cover it even with the subsidies.

 

A typical human consumes maybe 3000 kcal of food per day. Which is about 3.5 kWh. Current price for electricity in the US is about $0.17/kWh. Do all the math, and you get an electricity cost of about $20,000 for a 90-year reversal, if the reversal consumes close to the metabolic energy spent. Which doesn't seem ridiculously expensive compared to what a human can save in their lifetime (ditto 10x that cost, if you imagine that it takes 10J to reverse the entropy of 1J of metabolism).

Are you imagining a much less efficient process?

Comment by Orborde on Should we buy Google stock? · 2022-06-04T05:28:28.086Z · LW · GW

I have sometimes considered this but worry that doing so will lower the cost of capital for AGI-constructing companies and accelerate AGI development.

I'm not sure this is a realistic concern for Google/Alphabet - I think they have not bothered to raise capital since the Google IPO and aren't about to start.

Comment by Orborde on Your Enemies Can Use Your Prediction Markets Against You · 2022-02-14T01:09:39.721Z · LW · GW

The mechanics here are pretty similar to assassination markets.

Comment by Orborde on The Long Long Covid Post · 2022-02-12T16:13:26.909Z · LW · GW

Can you link to your comment?

Comment by Orborde on What would you like from Microcovid.org? How valuable would it be to you? · 2021-12-30T05:43:45.242Z · LW · GW

My policy with microcovid from the very beginning has been to look at the numbers and basically ignore the "high risk / medium risk" designations, because they don't match my risk tolerance and that divergence has only increased over the course of the pandemic (now that I'm vaccinated, 1 uCov is less costly because it carries less risk with it).

 

Not from the very beginning, but for most of this year this is how I've used microcovid.

Comment by Orborde on Seattle, WA – October 2021 ACX Meetup · 2021-10-14T02:14:44.091Z · LW · GW
Comment by Orborde on OpenAI Codex: First Impressions · 2021-08-16T00:40:59.375Z · LW · GW

+1

I finished at 11:44:16 AM and placed #193, and I didn't really start until about 10:30AM. The puzzles were not very hard, so I infer that there were not a very large number of contenders.
 

Comment by Orborde on Arrow grid game · 2021-02-28T15:46:20.486Z · LW · GW

I'm confused about this diagram. Is it plotting out activity preferences?

Comment by Orborde on [Link] Sarah Constantin on RaDVaC · 2021-02-05T16:44:54.155Z · LW · GW

It looks like her objection is that the RaDVaC folks chose some pretty questionable peptides. Presumably you could simply order some different peptides, but I think you'll run into the following problems:

  • You need to pick peptides that will, in the RaDVaC formulation, wind up folded similarly to their conformation in the live virus. I, personally, have no idea how to do that.
  • You don't really have much evidence of immunogenicity for your new RaDVaC formulation and probably need to measure it again (my understanding is that the RaDVaC designers have done some immunogenicity measures in themselves, so the current formulation has some evidence of immunogenicity).
Comment by Orborde on A vastly faster vaccine rollout · 2021-01-13T00:34:18.767Z · LW · GW

A medical worker who tried to sign up for vaccine administration recruitment was confronted with needing 21 pieces of paperwork showing that they had completed various trainings, many of which have nothing to do with vaccination.

Care to paste a source link?

Comment by Orborde on Prize: Interesting Examples of Evaluations · 2020-11-29T02:43:49.261Z · LW · GW

Stress tests

Many systems get "spot-checked" by artificially forcing them into a rare but important-to-correctly-handle stressed state under controlled conditions where more monitoring and recovery resources are available (or where the stakes are lower) than would be the case during a real instance of the stressed state.

These serve to practice procedures, yes, but they also serve to evaluate whether the procedures would be followed correctly in a crisis, and whether the procedures even work.

  • Drills
    • Fire/tornado/earthquake/nuclear-attack drills
    • Military drills (the kind where you tell everyone to get to battle stations, not the useless marching around in formation kind)
  • Large cloud computing companies I've worked at need to stay online in the face of loss of a single computer, or a single datacenter. They periodically check to see that these failures are survivable by directly powering off computers, disconnecting entire datacenters from the network, or simply running through a datacenter failover procedure beginning to end to check that it works.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_test_(financial)
Comment by Orborde on Prize: Interesting Examples of Evaluations · 2020-11-29T02:05:41.459Z · LW · GW

Current open market price of an asset

Public, highly liquid markets for assets create lots of information about the value of those assets, which is extremely useful for both individuals and firms that are trying to understand:

  • the state of their finances
  • how successful a venture dealing in those assets has been
  • whether to accept a deal (a financial transaction, or some cooperative venture) involving those assets
  • (if the assets are stock in some company) how successful the company has been so far
Comment by Orborde on Prize: Interesting Examples of Evaluations · 2020-11-29T01:54:51.051Z · LW · GW
Comment by Orborde on Limits of Current US Prediction Markets (PredictIt Case Study) · 2020-11-27T08:46:55.165Z · LW · GW

PredictIt also limits the number of traders on a given contract to 5,000.

Comment by Orborde on Pricing externalities is not necessarily economically efficient · 2019-11-10T11:54:39.844Z · LW · GW
it assumes that the Pigouvian tax is set to $100,000 instead of the opportunity cost of the pollution (in this case $50,000)

How are you calculating "opportunity cost"? Is it simply the land use conversion cost ($50,000)?

Comment by Orborde on Pricing externalities is not necessarily economically efficient · 2019-11-09T12:08:33.146Z · LW · GW

Posting because the title of this linkpost was a big surprise for me.

Comment by Orborde on Meetup Notes: Ole Peters on ergodicity · 2019-11-04T01:07:21.047Z · LW · GW
even if Peters et al are wrong about expected utility, do you think they're right about the dangers of failing to understand ergodicity?

Not sure. I can't tell what additional information, if any, Peters is contributing that you can't already get from learning about the math of wagers and risk-averse utility functions.

Comment by Orborde on Meetup Notes: Ole Peters on ergodicity · 2019-11-03T23:32:36.440Z · LW · GW

Tangentially: reading about the history of gambling theory (the "unfinished game" problem, etc.) is pretty interesting.

Imagine how weird it was when people basically didn't understand expected value at all! Did casinos even know what they were doing, or did they somewhat routinely fail after picking the wrong game design? Did they only settle on profitable designs by accident? Are blackjack, roulette, and other very old games still with us because they happened not to bankrupt casinos that ran them, and were only later analyzed with tools capable of identifying whether the house had the edge?

Comment by Orborde on What economic gains are there in life extension treatments? · 2019-11-03T23:14:45.649Z · LW · GW

ChristianKI is right - I was speculating that people would stop retiring. Updated my post to make that clearer.

Comment by Orborde on What economic gains are there in life extension treatments? · 2019-10-24T05:22:53.945Z · LW · GW

Relevant book: https://www.juvenescence-book.com

Comment by Orborde on Why didn't Agoric Computing become popular? · 2019-05-03T08:51:28.245Z · LW · GW
While I'm not terribly familiar with the details, I've heard complaints of this happening at one university that I know of. There's an internal market where departments need to pay for using spaces within the university building. As a result, rooms that would otherwise be used will sit empty because the benefit of paying the rent isn't worth it.

This is confusing. Why doesn't the rent on the empty rooms fall until there are either no empty rooms or no buyers looking to use rooms? Any kind of auction mechanism (which is what I'd expect to see from something described as a "market") should exhibit the behavior I've described.