Suppose you want to collect some kind of data from a population, but people vary widely in their willingness to provide the data (eg maybe you want to conduct a 30 minute phone survey but some people really dislike phone calls or have much higher hourly wages this funges against).

One thing you could do is offer to pay everyone $X$ dollars for data collection. But this will only capture the people whose cost of providing data is below $X$, which will distort your sample.

Here's another proposal: ask everyone for their fair price to provide the data. If they quote you $Y$, pay them $2Y$ to collect the data with probability ${\left(\frac{X}{2Y}\right)}^2$, or $X$ with certainty if they quote you a value less than $X/2$. (If your RNG doesn't return yes, do nothing.) Then upweight the data from your randomly-chosen respondents in inverse proportion to the odds that they were selected. You can do a bit of calculus to see that this scheme incentivizes respondents to quote their fair value, and will provide an expected surplus of $max(X^2/4Y,X-Y)$ dollars to a respondent who disvalues providing data at $Y$.

Now you have an unbiased sample of your population and you'll pay at most $NX$ dollars in expectation if you reach out to $N$ people. The cost is that you'll have a noisier sample of the high-reluctance population, but that's a lot better than definitely having none of that population in your study.

A few months ago I spent $60 ordering the March 2025 version of Anthropic's certificate of incorporation from the state of Delaware, and last week I finally got around to scanning and uploading it. Here's a PDF! After writing most of this shortform, I discovered while googling related keywords that someone had already uploaded the 2023-09-21 version online here, which is slightly different. 

I don't particularly bid that people spend their time reading it; it's very long and dense and I predict that most people trying to draw important conclusions from it who aren't already familiar with corporate law (including me) will end up being somewhat confused by default. But I'd like more transparency about the corporate governance of frontier AI companies and this is an easy step.

Anthropic uses a bunch of different phrasings of its mission across various official documents; of these, I believe the COI's is the most legally binding one, which says that "the specific public benefit that the Corporation will promote is to responsibly develop and maintain advanced Al for the long term benefit of humanity." I like this wording less than others that Anthropic has used like "Ensure the world safely makes the transition through transformative AI", though I don't expect it to matter terribly much.

I think the main thing this sheds light on is stuff like Maybe Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust Is Powerless: as of late 2025, overriding the LTBT takes 85% of voting stock or all of (a) 75% of founder shares (b) 50% of series A preferred (c) 75% of non-series-A voting preferred stock. (And, unrelated to the COI but relevant to that post, it is now public that neither Google nor Amazon hold voting shares.) 

The only thing I'm aware of in the COI that seems concerning to me re: the Trust is a clause added to the COI sometime between the 2023 and 2025 editions, namely the italicized portion of the following:

(C) Action by the Board of Directors. Except as expressly provided herein, each director of the Corporation shall be entitled to one (1) vote on all matters presented to the Board of Directors for approval at any meeting of the Board of Directors, or for action to be taken by written consent without a meeting; provided, however, that, if and for so long as the Electing Preferred Holders are entitled to elect a director of the Corporation, the affirmative vote of either (i) the Electing Preferred Director or (ii) at least 61% of the then serving directors may be required for authorization by the Board of Directors of any of the matters set forth in the Investors' Rights Agreement. If at any time the vote of the Board of Directors with respect to a matter is tied (a "Deadlocked Matter") and the Chief Executive Officer of the Corporation is then serving as a director (the "CEO Director"), the CEO Director shall be entitled to an additional vote for the purpose of deciding the Deadlocked Matter (a "Deadlock Vote") (and every reference in this Restated Certificate or in the Bylaws of the Corporation to a majority or other proportion of the directors shall refer to a majority or other proportion of the votes of the directors), except with respect to any vote as to which the CEO Director is not disinterested or has a conflict of interest, in which such case the CEO Director shall not have a Deadlock Vote.

I think this means that the 3 LTBT-appointed directors do not have the ability to unilaterally take some kinds of actions, plausibly including things like firing the CEO (it would depend on what's in the Investors' Rights Agreement, which I don't have access to). I think this is somewhat concerning, and moderately downgrades my estimate of the hard power possessed by the LTBT, though my biggest worry about the quality of the Trust's oversight remains the degree of its AI safety expertise and engagement rather than its nominal hard power. (Though as I said above, interpreting this stuff is hard and I think it's quite plausible I'm neglecting important considerations!)

(TLDR: Recent Cochrane review says zinc lozenges shave 0.5 to 4 days off of cold duration with low confidence, middling results for other endpoints. Some reason to think good lozenges are better than this.)

There's a 2024 Cochrane review on zinc lozenges for colds that's come out since LessWrong posts on the topic from 2019, 2020, and 2021. 34 studies, 17 of which are lozenges, 9/17 are gluconate and I assume most of the rest are acetate but they don't say. Not on sci-hub or Anna's Archive, so I'm just going off the abstract and summary here; would love a PDF if anyone has one.

• Dosing ranged between 45 and 276 mg/day, which lines up with 3-15 18mg lozenges per day: basically in the same ballpark as the recommendation on Life Extension's acetate lozenges (the rationalist favorite).
• Evidence for prevention is weak (partly bc fewer studies): they looked at risk of developing cold, rate of colds during followup, duration conditional on getting a cold, and global symptom severity. All but the last had CIs just barely overlapping "no effect" but leaning in the efficacious direction; even the optimistic ends of the CIs don't seem great, though.
• Evidence for treatment is OK: "there may be a reduction in the mean duration of the cold in days (MD ‐2.37, 95% CI ‐4.21 to ‐0.53; I² = 97%; 8 studies, 972 participants; low‐certainty evidence)". P(cold at end of followup) and global symptom severity look like basically noise and have few studies.

My not very informed takes:

• On the model of the podcast in the 2019 post, I should expect several of these studies to be using treatments I think are less or not at all efficacious, be less surprised by study-to-study variation, and increase my estimate of the effect size of using zinc acetate lozenges compared to anything else. Also maybe I worry that some of these studies didn't start zinc early enough? Ideally I could get the full PDF and they'll just have a table of (study, intervention type, effect size).
• Even with the caveats around some methods of absorption being worse than others, this seems rough for a theory in which zinc acetate taken early completely obliterates colds - the prevention numbers just don't look very good. (But maybe the prevention studies all used bad zinc?)
• I don't know what baseline cold duration is, but assuming it's something like a week, this lines up pretty well with the 33% decrease (40% for acetate) seen in this meta-analysis from 2013 if we assume effect sizes are dragged down by worse forms of zinc in the 2024 review.
  • But note these two reviews are probably looking at many of the same studies, so that's more of an indication that nothing damning has come out since 2013 rather than an independent datapoint.
• My current best guess for the efficacy of zinc acetate lozenges at 18mg every two waking hours from onset of any symptoms, as measured by "expected decrease in integral of cold symptom disutility", is:
  • 15% demolishes colds, like 0.2x disutility
  • 25% helps a lot, like 0.5x disutility
  • 35% helps some (or helps lots but only for a small subset of people or cases), like 0.75x disutility
  • 25% negligible difference from placebo

I woke up at 2am this morning with my throat feeling bad, started taking Life Extension peppermint flavored 18mg zinc acetate lozenges at noon, expecting to take 5ish lozenges per day for 3 days or while symptoms are worsening. My most recent cold before this was about 6 days: [mild throat tingle, bad, worse, bad, fair bit better, nearly symptomless, symptomless]. I'll follow up about how it goes!

I work on a capabilities team at Anthropic, and in the course of deciding to take this job I've spent^[1] a while thinking about whether that's good for the world and which kinds of observations could update me up or down about it. This is an open offer to chat with anyone else trying to figure out questions of working on capability-advancing work at a frontier lab! I can be reached at "graham's number is big" sans spaces at gmail.

1. ^{^}

   and still spend - I'd like to have Joseph Rotblat's virtue of noticing when one's former reasoning for working on a project changes.

I recommend the Wikipedia article on Puyi, the last emperor of China. He was 6 years old when the 1911 Xinhai revolution forced him to abdicate, and spent the remainder of his life being courted and/or used by various actors who found his support useful to their cause.

I think it's worth reading, though it's fairly long; I think the story of his life is just pretty interesting and gripping, and the article is unusually well-written and presented in a fairly narratively engaging style. (Though I am not particularly well-versed in 20th century Chinese history and am fully deferring to Wikipedia editors on the veracity and neutrality of this account.)

It's an interesting case study of Just Some Guy being thrust into high-stakes political machinations without much independent power - if you've ever wondered how you would fare in a Game of Thrones style political intrigue, I think Puyi's story gives a decent sense: you get puppeted around by much more ruthless actors, accomplish very little of what you want, and generally have a pretty bad time.

I feel a weird mix of emotions towards the guy. He was pretty clearly an awful person almost wholly devoid of any virtue for the first several decades of his life - cowardly, vain, cruel, naive, incompetent, and a rapist. But he never really had a chance to be anything else; it's unclear if he had a single genuine relationship with someone who wasn't trying to manipulate him after age 8, and I'm not sure he had ever encountered a person earnestly doing something for moral reasons. And he lived a pretty unpleasant life during this whole time.

A couple teaser facts to entice you to read the article:

• He was incredibly clumsy. Until middle age he had never once had to do things like brush his teeth, close doors behind himself, or put anything away, because servants simply handled it all for him. Apparently a total lack of having to do things for yourself in childhood can give you a sort of developmental disorder in which you can't really pick up the habits effectively at age 40.
• He has one of the most dramatic redemption arcs of any character I know of in truth or fiction; it seems like he pretty genuinely came to regret his (many) past misdeeds and ended up as a pretty kind and humble man. This redemption arc is slightly tarnished by the fact that it, like everything else in his life, was a calculated manipulation, this time on the part of the newly formed CCP. Though it seems like they mostly just had to expose him to the reality of what he'd been complicit in, rather than any more sophisticated manipulation (and avoid letting him learn about the widespread famines).
• About the only positive influence on his life during adolescence was his English tutor Reginald Johnston, a Scottish guy who really liked monarchy (in the "emperor is basically a god" sense rather than the British sense) and had enormous influence over Puyi as the only person willing or able to say no to him.  

So it's been a few months since SB1047. My sense of the main events that have happened since the peak of LW commenter interest (might have made mistakes or missed some items) are:

• The bill got vetoed by Newsom for pretty nonsensical stated reasons, after passing in the state legislature (but the state legislature tends to pass lots of stuff so this isn't much signal).
• My sense of the rumor mill is that there are perhaps some similar-ish bills in the works in various state legislatures, but AFAIK none that have yet been formally proposed or accrued serious discussion except maybe for S.5616.
• We're now in a Trump administration which looks substantially less inclined to do safety regulation of AI at the federal level than the previous admin was. In particular, some acceleration-y VC people prominently opposed to SB1047 are now in positions of greater political power in the new administration.
  • Eg Sriram Krishnan, Trump's senior policy advisor on AI, was opposed; "AI and Crypto Czar" David Sacks doesn't have a position on record but I'd be surprised if he was a fan.
  • On the other hand, Elon was nominally in favor (though I don't think xAI took an official position one way or the other).

Curious for retrospectives here! Whose earlier predictions gain or lose Bayes points? What postmortems do folks have?

Basically all major world currencies have a base unit worth at most 4 US dollars: 

There’s a left tail going out to 2.4e-5 USD with the Iranian rial, but no right tail. Why is that?

One thing to note is that this is a recent trend: for most of US history (until 1940 or so), a US dollar was worth about 20 modern dollars inflation-adjusted. I thought maybe people used dimes or cents as a base unit then, but Thomas Jefferson talks about "adopt[ing] the Dollar for our Unit" in 1784. 

You could argue that base units are best around $1, but historical coins (backed by precious metals) are inconvenient if small, so they couldn’t shrink enough. But if that’s true, why not make the dime the base unit then? Maybe it’s really useful to have fractional amounts of currency, or it’s unsatisfying for a base-unit coin to be too small?

Another angle is to say that base units should be large, but steady inflation pushes them down over time and it’s inconvenient to change, and a preference for similar exchange rates + a fairly stable world order means no upstart central banks to set a new standard.

This is my current best guess (along with "base units between $1 and $20 are all basically fine") but I don't feel very confident about it (and if people want to match the US dollar then why does the left tail exist?).

[cross-posted from Twitter]

A problem I have that I think is fairly common:

1. I notice an incoming message of some kind.
2. For whatever reason it's mildly aversive or I'm busy or something.
3. Time passes.
4. I feel guilty about not having replied yet.
5. Interacting with the message is associated with negative emotions and guilt, so it becomes more aversive.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until the badness of not replying exceeds the escalating 4/5 cycle, or until the end of time.

Curious if anyone who once had this problem feels like they've resolved it, and if so what worked!