All of Elizabeth's Comments + Replies

We're looking for signals which are widely broadcast throughout the body, and received by many endpoints. Why look for that type of thing? Because the wide usage puts pressure on the signal to "represent one consistent thing". It's not an accident that there are individual hormonal signals which are approximately-but-accurately described by the human-intuitive phrases "overall metabolic rate" or "stress". It's not an accident that those hormones' signals are not hopelessly polysemantic. If we look for widely-broadcast signals, then we have positive reason

... (read more)

How do stimulants affect your ability to update or change your mind? @johnswentworth and I are debating stimulant usage in an unpublished dialogue, and one crux is how stimulants affect one's ability to update. 

People who have used stimulants, please percent-emoji with how they affect your ability to update- <1% for "completely trashed", 50% for neutral, >99% for "huge improvement".  Comments with additional details are welcome. 

Reply1054321
4jimrandomh
Epistemic belief updating: Not noticeably different. Task stickiness: Massively increased, but I believe this is improvement (at baseline my task stickiness is too low so the change is in the right direction).
3Nebulus
(important note: I have a severe depression characterized by low motivation/energy and resistance to treatment) I take relatively frequently moderate doses of amphetamine-class stimulants, which gives me more cognitive bandwidth to work with. As such it's much easier for me to thoroughly examine a belief and update based on that examination, as it takes motivation/energy to do that in my case.
2EffectiveAdvocate
I feel like this is a double-edged sword situation. Stimulants do make you more focused and obsessive, but on a smaller scale, they make me less likely to adapt. For example, it becomes much harder to change my daily priorities when necessary. On the other hand, they allow me to engage with arguments far more deeply than I would otherwise be able to, which has led to a few significantly larger updates over time.
3DirectedEvolution
I drink about 400mg of caffeine daily through coffee and Coke Zero. It helps me process complex ideas quickly, consider alternatives, and lifts my mood. Without it, I get frustrated when I can’t follow arguments or understand ideas, often rejecting them or settling for “good enough.” Caffeine gives me the clarity and energy to stay open to new ideas and better solutions.  
8Jonas Hallgren
I've got a bunch of meditation under my belt so my metacognitive awareness is quite good imo. Stimulants that are attention increasing such as caffiene or modafinil generally lead to more tunnelvision and less metacognitive awareness in my experience. This generally leads to less ability to update opinions quickly. Nicotine that activates acetylcholine receptors allow for more curiosity which allow me to update more quickly so it is dependent on the stimulant as well as the generak timing. (0.6mg in gum form, too high spike just leads to a hit and not curiosity). It is like being more sensitive and interested in whatever appears around me If you're sensitive enough you can start recognizing when different mental modes are firing in your brain and adapt based on what you want, shit is pretty cool.
5Raemon
I haven't really explicitly checked this. I only use caffeine and (questionably counting) wellbutrin. I'll keep an eye out, especially if there's particular evidence about something to look out for. I have observed people on modafinil who seem to get more tunnel visioned and have a harder time reorienting but I haven't used it myself.

Just pushes the trust problem down a level. Lots of recruiting firms advertise positions that don't exist so that they have resumes "just in case"

David Maciver over on Twitter likes a zinc mouthwash, which presumably has a similar mechanism

I didn't read it but trust your assessment that Is Being Sexy For Your Homies was very male-POV. I also agree that LW is male-skewed in general. But I don't think (the way you describe) Being Sexy is representative of the way LW is male-skewed. I think it's more accurate to say most posts (but not Being Sexy) are aiming for some aspect X, and X tends to appeal to men more than women. 

Some things in the cluster of X: systematizing, high-decoupling, math-ey.

I loved the old mealsquares but have been very disappointed in version 2.0. They're similar to Tend bars, nutritionally dense but not filling. 

are you correcting for the year the test was taken? The SAT grading has shifted dramatically over time. 

1Rockenots
This is a good point. I don't think it should make that much of a difference given how young LessWrong is on average, but it can't hurt to try.  My two problem are 1) finding SAT statistics for nationally representative samples, and not just seniors that take the SAT (the latter are obviously selected) is difficult, and 2) I’d need more detailed data than just the SAT averages—I'd have to adjust each person’s SAT z-score based on the year they took the test.

A conversation I had in 2021

Them: Man I wish I could do X, it's so much more valuable then what I'm doing right now, but I can't.
Me: But could you though?

I'd forgotten this, but in 2023 they came up to thank me because they were doing X, were pleased with the choice, and assigned me some credit for it.  I've heard other people spontaneously praise project X, without knowing I'd been involved in any way. 

It's also very common for seeing someone at a conference to move them along the path of hiring me. Rarely from 0-> hired, but maybe from 0-> idea, or from "been meaning to"->hired, or something in the middle.

I'm having trouble parsing but I think the first point is about the mutation rate in humans? I don't expect that to be informative about flu virus except as a floor.

1pandamonium
Ah yes, you're right. I don't know why but I made the mental shortcut that the mutation rate was about the DNA of cows / humans and not the flu virus. The general point still holds : I am wary of the assumption of a constant mutation rate of the flu virus. It really facilitates the computation, but if the computation under this simplifying hypothesis leads to a consequence which contradict reality, I would interrogate this assumption. It's surprising to have so few human cases considering the large number of cows infected if there is a human-compatible viron per cow.  Another cause of this discrepancy could also be that due to the large mutation rate, a non-negligible part of the virons are not viable / don't replicate well / ...  There are papers which show heterogeneity for influenza / RNA viruses but I don't really know if it's between the virus population (of the same kind of virus) or within the genome. And they are like a factor 4 or so in the papers I have seen. So maybe less relevant than expected. Regarding the details, my lack of deep knowledge of the domain is limiting. But as a mathematician who had to modelize real phenomenon and adapt the model to handle the discrepancy between the model's conclusion and reality, that's the train of thought which comes naturally to mind. 

This post was hard for me to read. A few months after I wrote it I developed medical issues that are still ongoing and really sapped my ability to work. Right now I feel on the precipice of developing Large Scale Ambitions, and that I'd probably have taken the plunge to something bigger if I'd hadn't gotten so sick for so long. 

On the other hand, I spent the past 2 years trying to dramatically reform Effective Altruism. I expected to quit in May but got sucked back in via my work with Timothy TL.  I didn't think of this as ambitious, but looking ... (read more)

Thank you for the explanation.

Is there a reason you deflected when I originally asked about AI assistance? To me that's a much bigger deal than the AI assistance itself.

1Haotian
Yes. I have copied my shortform here in its entirety:  To be clear, I no longer think you were trying to avoid making good on your offer. But at the moment I was irked and that's what it felt like from my perspective. 

I think this is a useful concept that I use several times a year. I don't use the term Dark Forest I'm not sure how much that can be attributed to this post, but this post is the only relevant thing in the review so we'll go with that.

I also appreciate how easy to read and concise this post is. It gives me a vision of how my own writing could be shorter without losing impact.

I didn't keep good track of them, but this post led to me receiving many DMs that it had motivated someone to get tested. I also occasionally indirectly hear about people who got tested, so I think the total impact might be up to 100 people, of which maybe 1/3 had a deficiency (wide confidence intervals on both numbers). I'm very happy with that impact. 

I do wish I'd created a better title. The current one is very generic, and breaks LW's "aim to inform not persuade" guideline.

3Martin Randall
If anyone's tracking impact, my family had five people tested due in large part due to this post, of whom five were low and started supplementing. We're not even vegan.

My ultimate goal with this post was to use vegan advocacy as an especially legible example of a deepseated problem in effective altruism, which we could use to understand and eventually remove the problem at the root. As far as I know, the only person who has tried to use it as an example is me, and that work didn't have much visible effect either. I haven't seen anyone else reference this post while discussing a different problem. It's possible this happens out of sight (Lincoln Quirk implies this here), but if I'd achieved my goal it would be clearly visible. 

I suggest putting your proposed dress code at the top. Right now it's only kind of described, somewhere in the middle with no way to jump to it.  

This sounds like a problem with the transcript itself, not placing it in the post vs. a separate link? Which is fair enough, just want to make sure I understand.

I stand by what I said here: this post asks an important question but badly mangles the discussion. I don't believe this fictional person weighed the evidence and came to a conclusion she is advocating for as best she can: she's clearly suffering from distorted thoughts and applying post-hoc justifications.

The conflation of "Duncan's ideal" and "the perfect ideal everyone has agreed to" is what I'm complaining about. 

If Duncan had, e.g., included guidelines that were LW consensus but he disagreed with, then it would feel more like an attempt to codify the site's collective preferences rather than his in particular.

4Ben Pace
I don't think that Duncan tried to describe what everyone has agreed to, I think he tried to describe the ideal truth-seeking discussion norms, irrespective of this site's current discussion norms. Added: I guess one can see here what the algorithm he aimed to run, which had elements of both:

I'm very grateful I found Tristan and we were able to have this discussion.

My series on vegan nutrition epistemics generated a lot of friction and hostility. Tristan was one of very few vegan advocates I felt I learned things from, and the things I learned were valuable and beautiful. The frame of impractical reverence continues to come up and I'm glad I can recognize it now. I am also happy this primed me to recognize what I don't like about reverence as a frame, and refine my articulation of my own values. 

I wish this had been called "Duncan's Guidelines for Discourse" or something like that. I like most of the guidelines given, but they're not consensus. And while I support Duncan's right to block people from his posts (and agree with him far on discourse norms far more than with the people he blocked), it means that people who disagree with him on the rules can't make their case in the comments. That feels like an unbalanced playing field to me. 

3weightt an
Also just on priors, consider how unproductive and messy, mostly talking about who said what and analyzing virtues of participants, the conversation caused by this post and its author was. I think even without reading it it's an indicator of somewhat doubtful origin for a set of prescriptivist guidelines. 
7Ben Pace
I think that Duncan was not aspiring to set his own preferred standards, but to figure out the best standards for truth-seeking discourse. I might agree that he did not perfectly succeed, but I'm not sure this means all attempts, if deemed not perfectly successful, should be called "My Guidelines for My Preferred Discourse".

This is outside the reference class I intended (needed at least one human case), but since I didn't specify that I'll award a token $10. Please let me know what your paypal is.

How sure are you that flu is generally spread through fluids? It seems like the medical system is ~prejudiced against the concept of airborne transmission. 

The use case is a lesswrong post people use to make decisions (which could be written by me, or you, but it's looking like @DirectedEvolution).

Is this partially AI written? The reference to further clinical study seems weird.

1Haotian
I have posted this and following the advice of lesswrong members will clarify, the research was performed by me entirely late at night and passed through an LLM for readability.  You can view the original here, I believe it fulfils your criteria for being credible suggestions: Before: Aspirin is a credible better candidate than Tamiflu. First off safety profile because you need to weigh up risks and benefits. Short term usage (what you're interested in for acute viral infections) is associated with GI upset, but only marginally more than placebo. There are of course other considerations that should be taken into account, but for the majority of users short term usage of aspirin is safe. Special note here about the association with aspirin and Reye's syndrome in children, the incidence of this is extremely low, but it is worth considering if your patient is under 16. In terms of efficacy against H5N1, it has demonstrated great success in vitro and in vivo acting via its NF-κB-inhibiting activity. Methylene blue is also a credible better candidate than Tamiflu. Starting again with safety profile the gist is short term usage is generally safe unless you happen to be contraindicated. There are a few reasons and these briefly (NOT comprehensive do not take medicine based off this comment alone) (i) if you are at risk of serotonin syndrome (ii) known hypersensitivity (iii) severe renal impairment. If you are considering this medication I implore you to read at least the following data sheet. With that out of the way, how well does it work against H5N1? Efficacy-wise it has little-appreciated broad-spectrum antiviral properties. and has specifically demonstrated potent virucidal activity against H1N1 (H5N1 not yet tested to my knowledge). Interestingly, there is also a patent application for this indication. Taken together it could credibly be better.  For balance, Tamiflu is also associated with many of the same common adverse side effects including nausea, vomiting
-8Haotian

I love this detailed list. I've responded in-line to every one, but feel free to ask more questions, here or over email. 

 

  1. Livestock vs. Wild Birds
    The distinction between livestock and wild birds is significant. Livestock are in much closer contact with humans and are biologically closer as well. How granular of an analysis are you interested in here?

I care about wild birds to the extent they're spreading disease to livestock or serve as reservoirs.

I've also heard a wide number of mammals have been infected. I care about this to the extent it affe... (read more)

2DirectedEvolution
Great, that's clarifying. I will start with Tamiflu/Xofluza efficacy as it's important, and I think it will be most tractable via a straightforward lit review.

IIRC my serum iodine after 6 months of gargling and basically-cured hypothyroidism were within a 1% of pre-gargling levels. 

After my last test but before getting the results I started forgetting to gargle, and was resistant to taking my medication in the morning. The test revealed this was correct- I didn't need meds anymore.

I've used iodine a bit to treat infections since then but now that I know water is about as good, I will stick to that unless I start craving iodine again or a test reveals my levels have slipped.

I think the expenses for the website look high in this post because so much of it goes into invisible work like mod tools. Could you say more about that invisible work?

it looks like you're taking the total amount spent per employee as the take-home salary, which is incorrect. At a minimum that amount should include payroll taxes, health insurance, CA's ETT, and state and federal unemployment insurance tax. It can also include things things like education benefits, equipment, and 401k bonuses. Given the crudeness of the budget, I expect there's quite a bit being included under "etc".

(note for readers: I effectively gave >$10k to LW last year, this isn't an argument against donating)

This seems quite modest by EA COI standards.

6habryka
My inside view is that it's about as strong of a COI as I've seen. This is largely based on the exact dynamics of the LTFF, where there tends to be a lot of negotiation going on, and because there is a very clear way in which everything is about distributing money which I think makes a scenario like "Caleb rejects me on the EAIF, therefore I recommend fewer things to orgs he thinks are good on the LTFF" a kind of threat that seems hard to rule out. 

Doesn't EAIF give to other EVF orgs? Seems weird that you would be a conflict of interest but that isn't.

4habryka
Caleb is heavily involved with the EAIF as well as the Long Term Future Fund, and I think me being on the LTFF with him is a stronger conflict of interest than the COI between EAIF and other EVF orgs.

I was part of the 2.0 reboot beta: there are no posts of mine on LW before that

Comments on my own blog are almost non existent, all the interesting discussion happens on LW and Twitter.

(Full disclosure: am technically on mod team and have deep social ties to the core team)

1Czynski
I still prefer the ones I see there to what I see on LW. Lower quantity higher value.

I wanted a datapoint for Czynski's hypothesis that LW 2.0 killed the comment sections, so I checked how many comments your blogposts were getting in the first 3 months of 2017 (before LW 2.0 rebooted). There were 13 posts, and the comment counts were 0, 0, 2, 6, 9, 36, 0, 5, 0, 2, 0, 0, 2. (The 36 was a a political post in response to the US election, discussion of which I generally count as neutral or negative on LW, so I'd discount this.)

I'll try the same for Zvi. 13, 8, 3, 1, 3, 18, 2, 19, 2, 2, 2, 5, 3, 7, 7, 12, 4, 2, 61, 31, 79. That's more active (t... (read more)

Reply3111

Yes. This is not unusually bad for a medical paper but that's not exactly a defense. 

Perplexity is still my daily driver, due to the superior UI. I go to elicit or you.com for harder problems.

Because I don't believe the papers saying that iodine doesn't alter the thyroid.

0ChristianKl
There's a question of how much of the iodine goes to the thyroid and that might produce side effects. On the other hand, the salt water might also have side effects. Do you have reason to believe the salt water to have negligible side effects?

can you elaborate on "this format"?

1df fd
sorry for the late reply, I was travelling here are my guesses as to why the format made me uncomfortable    - The passage is a transcript from a spoken conversation, with incomplete sentences, colloquial phrasing, and less structured presentation compared to a well-edited article. This format can be harder to process, as spoken language often lacks the clarity and conciseness of written language.  - I am neurodivergent so the text's lack of structure, lack of context, and overwhelming detail might amplify discomfort or disengagement.  - The passage reiterates concepts in slightly different words which can feel tedious or redundant.

see also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wiz4eKi5fsomRsMbx/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one

1ROM
This post seems to be arguing that veganism involves trade offs (I didn't read through the comments). I don't disagree with that claim[1] (and am grateful for you taking the time to write it up). The part I take issue with is that the two surveys you conducted were strong evidence, which I don't think they are. 1. ^ Though I do lean towards thinking most people or even everyone should bite the bullet and accept the reduced health to spare the animals. 

There’s a lot here and if my existing writing didn’t answer your questions, I’m not optimistic another comment will help[1]. Instead, how about we find something to bet on? It’s difficult to identify something both cruxy and measurable, but here are two ideas:

I see a pattern of:
1. CEA takes some action with the best of intentions
2. It takes a few years for the toll to come out, but eventually there’s a negative consensus on it.
3. A representative of CEA agrees the negative consensus is deserved, but since it occurred under old leadership, doesn’t think any... (read more)

4Sarah Cheng
Thanks! I'm down to bet, though I don't feel like it would make sense for me to take either of those specific bets. I feel pretty clueless about whether "a CEA representative will repudiate a major project occurring under Zach’s watch". I guess I think it's reasonable for someone who was just hired at CEA to not to be held personally responsible for projects that started and ended before they were hired (though I may be misunderstanding your proposed bet). I also have very little information about the current state of EA university group recruiting, so I wouldn't be that surprised if "more posts similar to Bad Omens in Current Community Building or University Groups Need Fixing coming out in a few years, talking about 2024 recruiting". TBH I'm still not clear on what we disagree about, or even whether we actually disagree about anything. 😅 Apologies if I wasn't clear about this, but my main comment was primarily a summary of my personal perspective, which is based on a tiny fraction of all the relevant information. I'm very open to the possibility that, for example, EA university group recruiting is pressuring students more than I would find appropriate. It's just that, based on the tiny fraction of information I have, I see no evidence of that and only see evidence of the opposite. I would be really interested to hear if you have done a recent investigation and have evidence to support your claims, because you would have a fair chance of convincing me to take some action. Anyway, I appreciate you responding and no worries if you want to drop this. :) My offer to chat synchronously still stands, if you're ever interested. Though since I'm in an interim position, I'm not sure how long I will have the "EA Forum Project Lead" title.

Seeing my statements reflected back is helpful, thank you.

I think Effective Altruism is upper case and has been for a long time, in part because it aggressively recruited people who wanted to follow[1]. In my ideal world it both has better leadership and needs less of it, because members are less dependent. 

I think rationality does a decent job here. There are strong leaders of individual fiefdoms, and networks of respect and trust, but it's much more federated. 

  1. ^

    Which is noble and should be respected- the world needs more followers than leaders.

... (read more)

I'm curious why this feels better, and for other opinions on this. 

2Ben Pace
You could put it in a collapsible section, so that it's easy to get to the comment section by-default.

How much are you arguing about wording, vs genuinely believe and would bet money that in 3-5 years my work will have moved EA to something I can live with?

5Raemon
I definitely wouldn't bet money that EA will have evolved into something you can live with (Neither EA nor the threads of rationality that he affeted evolved into things Ben Hoffman could live with) But, I do think there is something important about the fact that, despite that, it is inaccurate to say "the critiques dropped like a stone through water" (or, what I interpret that poetry to mean, which is something like "basically nobody listened at all". I don't think I misunderstood that part but if I did then I do retract my claim)

The desire for crowdfunding is less about avoiding bias[1] and more that this is only worth doing if people are listening, and small donors are much better evidence on that question than grants. If EV gave explicit instructions to donate to me it would be more like a grant than spontaneous small donors, although I in general agree people should be looking for opportunities they can beat GiveWell. 

ETA: we were planning on waiting on this but since there's interest I might as well post the fundraiser now.

 

  1. ^

    I'm fortunate to have both a long run

... (read more)

Maybe you just don't see the effects yet? It takes a long time for things to take effect, even internally in places you wouldn't have access to, and even longer for them to be externally visible. Personally, I read approximately everything you (Elizabeth) write on the Forum and LW, and occasionally cite it to others in EA leadership world. That's why I'm pretty sure your work has had nontrivial impact. I am not too surprised that its impact hasn't become apparent to you though.

I've repeatedly had interactions with ~leadership EA that asks me to assume ther... (read more)

7Raemon
I think I actually agree with Lincoln here and think he was saying a different thing than your comment here seems to be oriented around. I don't think Lincoln's comment had much to do with assuming there was a shadow EA cabal that was aligned with your values. He said "your words are having an impact." Words having impacts just does actually take time. I updated from stuff Ben Hoffman said, but it did take 3-4 years or something for the update to fully happen (for me in particular), and when I did ~finish updating the amount I was going to update, it wasn't exactly the way Ben Hoffman wanted. In the first 3 years, it's not like I can show Ben Hoffman "I am ready for your approval", or even that I've concretely updated any particular way, because it was a slow messy process and it wasn't like I knew for sure how close to his camp I was going to land. But, it wouldn't have been true to say "his critiques dropped like a stone through water". (Habryka has said they also affected him, and this seems generally to have actually reveberated a lot).  I don't know whether or not your critiques have landed, but I think it is too soon to judge.

This is a good point. In my ideal movement makes perfect sense to disagree with every leader and yet still be a central member of the group. LessWrong has basically pulled that off. EA somehow managed to be bad at having leaders (both in the sense that the closest things to leaders don't want to be closer, and that I don't respect them), while being the sort of thing that requires leaders. 

If people in EA would consider her critiques to have real value, then the obvious step is to give Elizabeth money to write more [...] If she would get paid decently, I would expect she would feel she's making an impact. 

 

First of all, thank you, love it when people suggest I receive money. Timothy and I have talked about fundraising for a continued podcast. I would strongly prefer most of the funding be crowdfunding, for the reason you say. If we did this it would almost certainly be through Manifund. Signing up for Patreon and noting this as the... (read more)

2ChristianKl
Yes, giving money in form of a grant might not be the best way to fund good posts as it makes it harder to criticize the entity that funds you and decentralized crowdfunding is better. Maybe, an EV blog post saying something like: If the problem is as lincolnquirk, describes that in general they don't have much ideas about how to do better and your writing had nontrivial impact by giving ideas about what to do better, that would be the straightforward way forward. 

Reading this makes me feel really sad because I’d like to believe it, but I can’t, for all the reasons outlined in the OP. 

I could get into more details, but it would be pretty costly for me for (I think) no benefit. The only reason I came back to EA criticism was that talking to Timothy feels wholesome and good, as opposed to the battery acid feeling I get from most discussions of EA. 

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