Epistemic status: just speculation, from a not very concrete memory, written hastily on mobile after a quick skim of the post.
My guess is that these results should be taken with a large grain of salt, but if I'm wrong, I'd be interested in hearing more about why.
Specifically, I think the "alignment researcher" population and "org leader" populations here are probably a far departure from what people envision when they hear these terms. I also expect other populations reported on to have a directionally similar skew to what I speculate below.
An anecdote f...
Would anyone like the domain alignai.org ? Otherwise I'll probably let it expire (bought for a previous org, which doesn't want it).
Some lawyers claim that there may be significant (though not at all ideal) whistleblowing protection for individuals at AI companies that don't fully comply with the Voluntary Commitments: https://katzbanks.com/wp-content/uploads/KBK-Law360-Despite-Regulation-Lag-AI-Whistleblowers-Have-Protections.pdf
Very quick, likely highly flawed and inaccurate Fermi on the worthwhileness of riding in SUVs or vans instead of sedans:
~50% safer per mile maybe
~20% more expensive to buy / rent / rideshare
~1 day per year gained in expectation for a 35 yo
~$10k spent on vehicle travel per year per person
Cost: ~$2k / day of life gained
Worthwhile if valuing a year at: ~$600k or greater
For injury prevention (and can help with exercise efficiency as well): use machines, not free weights.
The advice I've seen elsewhere is that machines are all very well for specialised physiotherapy needs, but outside of that, always to use free weights or bodyweight exercises. The machines fix all the degrees of freedom but one, so you don't engage all the muscles needed to control the movement, so those muscles and the control they give you get no training. To avoid injury, don't use weights heavier than you can control. Don't expect to go from bench-pressing 60 kg on the machine to a 60 kg barbell, or from that to a pair of 30 kg dumbbells. Thus have I heard, but I am not an expert.
I don't know what it said pre-edit but your description sounds like it was directionally accurate (depending on how strongly it was worded).
There’s a decent argument that Cryonics takes on greater importance now.
There’s a lot of COVID going on my family right now, and my father’s birthday that three of us flew in for is tomorrow. I’m trying to figure out who (if anyone) is safe to spend time with him, and to what degree.
My father: 77 years old and in very good health for his age. Four Moderna shots, has never caught COVID. He’s the one we’re trying to protect from our infections.
Me (mid-30s): Triple vaxed (Moderna). Symptoms started Sunday June 19th and had a rapid test positive Sunday. Started Paxlovid Monday. Negative rapid test w/ throat swab yesterday and toda...
Providing air support for Ukraine by sending in "little green men in little green airplanes". Considered to be escalatory but has been done before in the Korean war by the Soviets at just as tense a time as today, when both superpowers were already nuclear-armed
What does this mean?
During their brief masking-optional pilot, the school reported that “smiling is more contagious than covid-19,” and a survey of students found that 70 percent said the policy improved their experience, including their ability to learn.
That only 70% of kids said that getting rid of an annoying thing was good from their point of view is to me surprisingly low, and an update in the opposite direction vs what was seemingly intended by those who shared that result.
Then again, none of these statistics ever mean much at all without looking at the survey instrument and such.
It's interesting that you cite last year as evidence of your trading going well, at a 13.5% gain, while the S&P 500 (SPY) total return for 2021 was 28.7%. Can you elaborate on your perspective given that the market performed so well in general?
FWIW I’ve had a pretty opposite experience of what you describe with CI.
Bringing over the outcome of a lot of recent discussion I've had on Facebook and some research I've done regarding the Narwall Mask:
I believe there's currently a lot of uncertainty as to the effectiveness of the Narwall, with multiple meaningful reasons for there to be uncertainty. A lot of effectiveness outcomes would not surprise me. I do not believe it has been well-tested nor well-analyzed, at least compared to those that meet NIOSH standards.
I think there's enough information out there to statistically estimate its effectiveness with some reason
there's paid tools that estimate this, probably poorly
I’m quite skeptical that improvements will be realized by this methodology. Not clear that there are health improvement gains in expectation.
Thought about the timing of Pfizer pill availability for ~2 minutes, current guess is that it will be similar to the vaccines last year. Late this year very limited availability, becoming more and more available in the early months next year, easy to get around April or May.
A better time until sunburn calculator: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vX2GP2fiFnkrWfNpw/a-better-time-until-sunburn-calculator (with some related discussion)
The tone of strong desirability for progress on WBE in this was surprising to me. The author seems to treat progress in WBE as a highly desirable thing; a perspective I expect most on LW do not endorse.
The lack of progress here may be a quite good thing.
As many other people here, I strongly desire to avoid death. Mind uploading is an efficient way to prevent many causes of death, as it is could make a mind practically indestructible (thanks to backups, distributed computing etc). WBE is a path towards mind uploading, and thus is desirable too.
Mind uploading could help mitigate OR increase the AI X-risk, depending on circumstances and implementation details. And the benefits of uploading as a mitigation tool seem to greatly outweigh the risks.
The most preferable future for me is the future there mind...
But even if I’m wrong about that, that is, as I said, none of the FDA’s damn business. The FDA’s damn business is whether the booster shots are safe and effective or not.
Is this defined somewhere? I see the FDA and CDC doing this frequently, so I’ve assumed part of their medical mandate is indeed to consider questions such as global supply. It is an odd separation of powers, with ambiguous overlap, where different groups decide on donation of vaccines… even across different types of vaccine (eg the CDC seems to have donated HPV vaccines, indirectly, in ...
My understanding is that global public policy, and supply chains, and so on have nothing to do with the FDA's official powers.
However, the whole thing is a dumpster fire, and the FDA technically has a legislative mandate to control the legal right to buy "water hoses", which makes them the focal point during the dumpster fire.
In a deep sense, every person who dies because of a legally delayed treatment, or delayed testing, or very expensive manufacturing that putting life saving medicine out of their reach... is dead because of the FDA.
Since the FDA itself...
It’s very likely that the CDC is overcounting asymptomatic cases, so we’ll continue using our ⅓ number for now.
Shouldn't this say "undercounting"?
Thanks for sharing the idea. I think I'd find this inconvenient, but I do expect the inconvenience of various changes will vary significantly between people.
Be much more wary of COVID when hospitals are full
Keep an eye on confirmed COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in your area, and put effort into avoiding catching or transmitting COVID-19 if it looks like hospitals in your area will be overloaded 2-4 weeks from now.
I’ve had a vague impression that this hasn’t meaningfully led to worse outcomes, though I could be wrong. Know of any analysis on it?
Additionally, even if we added the hospitalization % to the death percent (pretended all hospitalizations were deaths), I think impact would still be dwarfed by long COVID?
There seems to be a strong consensus that the Mayo Clinic study was highly flawed (assuming this is the source for your Pfizer vs Moderna claim… it’s paywalled). I haven’t seen many people actually address their takeaways beyond that, except one in our community who said they’d bet on ~equal effectiveness still rather than Moderna having higher effectiveness.
I’d be interested in additional takes, or maybe I’ll look into this myself.
My mother is immunocompromised, so we’ve discussed this with 4 doctors who specialize in assessing immuno-affecting conditions.
3/4 felt that the information gain from doing this would be negligible. 2 of those 3 have generally had strong epistemics during her treatment. The fourth (who has generally been least impressive, but sounded like she maybe had a good idea on this?), thought it may be mildly useful.
EDIT (7/27/23) After very preliminary research, I now think "telling people to ride in SUVs or vans instead of sedans" may turn out to be worthwhile.
As I’m working on derisking research, I’m particularly aware of what I think of as “whales”... risks or opportunities that are much larger in scale than most other things I’ll likely investigate.
There are some things that I consider to be widely-known whales, such as diet and exercise.
There are others that I consider to be more neglected, and also less certain to be large scale (based on my priors). Air qual...
Yeah that may be an interesting extension of it for version 2. Not sure how straightforward it would be to implement; haven’t looked into that yet.
Intersections are what kill mostly.
This doesn't appear to be true. Using the same data I used above I get:
I recently had what I thought was an inspired idea: a Google Maps for safety. This hypothetical product would allow you to:
First, I wanted to validate that such a tradeoff between safety and efficiency exists. Initial results seemed to validate my prior:
I think that’s a quite interesting topic / question. I may see if I can find any info on it, but for now am less informed than you.
Yes, latitude and more.
This is a follow-up to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RRoCQGNLrz5vuGQYW/josh-jacobson-s-shortform?commentId=pZN32PZQuBMHtM8aS , where I noted that I found the following sentence in an article about an Israeli study on 3rd shot boosters:
About 0.4% said they suffered from difficulty breathing, and 1% said they sought medical treatment due to one or more side effect.
worrisome, and how I reconciled it.
When I posted that, I reached out to Maayan Hoffman, one of the authors of the original Israeli article, with these observations. She found these interest...
Surgical options may be useful for some as well. https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/32/4/567.short
This is really interesting; I’d never heard of it before… thanks for sharing. I’m excited to research it more.
Sunscreen lengthens the amount of sun exposure needed to synthesize a given amount of Vitamin D; I wonder if this does as well.
Indeed, the results for which warnings are thrown should be disregarded; the non-monotonicity of out-of-bounds results is a situation I noticed as well.
The authors were quite clear about the equation only being useful in certain conditions, and it does seem to act reliably in those conditions, so I think this is just an out-of-bounds quirk that can be disregarded.
But even so it still doesn't explain why I don't notice while reading the summary but do notice while reading the opinion. (Both the summary and opinion were written by someone else in the motivating example, but I only noticed from the opinion.)
Ah, this helps clarify. My hypotheses are then:
Even if you "agree" with an opinion, perhaps you're highly attuned, but in a possibly not straightforward conscious way, to even mild (e.g. 0.1%) levels of disagreement.
Maybe the word choice you use for summaries is much more similar to others vs the word choi
How confident are you that this isn’t just memory? I personally think that upon rereading writing, it feels significantly more familiar if i wrote it, than if I read and edited it. A piece of this is likely style, but I think much of it is the memory of having generated and more closely considered it.
Yes, and they are public, and others have highlighted similar things to them and publicly.
GiveWell is now starting to look into a subset of these things:
To date, most of GiveWell’s research capacity has focused on finding the most impactful programs among those whose results can be rigorously measured. ...
...GiveWell has now been doing research to find the best giving opportunities in global health and development for 11 years, and we plan to increase the scope of giving opportunities we consider. We plan to expand our research team and scope in order to
Up until “Fuck The Symbols” I’m with you. And as an article for the general public, I’d probably endorse the “Fuck the Symbols” section as well.
In particular:
it’s usually worth at least thinking about how to do it - because the process of thinking about it forces you to recognize that the Symbol does not necessarily give the thing, and consider what’s actually needed.
To the extent this is advocacy, however, it seems worth noting that I think the highly engaged LW crowd is already often pretty good about this, (so I’d be more excited about this being re...
You're pointing to a good problem, but there's more to it than a slider between "pay more attention to Symbols" and "pay less attention to Symbols". I was thinking about writing a whole other post on this, but I'll give a short version here.
First, suppose some group of people repeatedly says "Fuck the Symbols" and then manages to do the corresponding things without the Symbols, across a bunch of different areas. How does this parse to others, through a social lens? Basically, it's countersignalling. It sends a message of "we are so good that we can do the ...
I haven’t fully understood why weight loss drugs are so little used in the US given the health effects of being overweight/obese either. I think it’s good that you’ve shined a light on this and your overview is helpful guidance to someone getting oriented. Many aspects of this feel aligned with my research on the topics.
That said, Plenity (https://www.myplenity.com/) is a non-drug option that looks particularly promising and should potentially be at the top of the list here.
I haven’t looked into the longevity effects of weight loss yet myself, but the trea...
An article published today on Reuters and elsewhere reads, "Israeli survey finds 3rd Pfizer vaccine dose has similar side effects to 2nd." Buried within this article is the following:
About 0.4% said they suffered from difficulty breathing, and 1% said they sought medical treatment due to one or more side effect.
This seemed quite bad to me and like a worrisome result. I sought information on how many sought medical treatment after the second shot. I could not find this information, but I did find:
...only 51 of some 650,000 people to have received the Pfi
Gawande discusses institutions, practices, and evidence that points to an alternative vision — of nursing homes that provide more autonomy; of hospice care that does not prolong life at extreme costs to its quality;
I don’t understand this; my understanding of hospice is that life-prolonging treatment is absolutely not allowed while being in hospice care (you have to exit hospice).
~2 weeks ago, the FDA added a warning to the J&J Covid shot regarding increased risk of developing Guillain-Barré Syndrome.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the history with blood clots, my quick check of prevalence finds that reports of developing GBS following J&J vaccination are actually less than would be expected otherwise.
My very basic analysis: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wDFrDq0E6Q096E97XzU7ndP53mYC0Paf9Wyun-XxmWA/edit?usp=sharing
Numbers from: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-vaccine-guillain-barre-syndrome
EDIT: Analyzed anot...
It's not just about Vitamin D. An example:
...Liu et al. 201487 found that hypertension is reduced by UVR-induced nitric oxide independent of vitamin D. They showed that stores of nitrogen oxides in the human skin are mobilized to the systemic circulation by exposure of the body to UVA radiation, causing arterial vasodilation and a resultant decrease in blood pressure independent of vitamin D, confirming the hypothesis of Feelisch et al. 2010.88 These results correlate with the findings of Afzal et al. 201477 that genetically low 25(OH)D levels were associat
See responses to later bounty request on this topic as well, in particular the response linked: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fBGzge5i4hfbaQZWy/usd1000-bounty-how-effective-are-marginal-vaccine-doses?commentId=Rd3f3KiAMFNvpJAhu
I entertained a similar hypothesis, but I now feel comfortable not including that to a meaningful extent in my decision making.
There's some evidence against this that I consider significant:
I read ~3 doctors' takes on this question regarding a third dose; they all thought this sort of potential negative effect was very highly unlikely. At least one of them had a detailed explanation as to why that sounded reasonable to me (I'm not a medical professional), and that made that take a bit more additionally meaningful to me than those takes without explanati
That’s awesome, thanks!
Thanks for signal-boosting, I had missed this. I'll pay at least $300 for it. (The fact that it already had been written 12 days ago seems like a point in its favour!)
It seems valuable to LOUDLY NOTE that Microcovid.org has not been updated for the Delta variant https://github.com/microcovid/microcovid/issues/869 and that the adjustment should be quite significant.
I'd be interested in perspectives on what adjustment should be implemented.
Cryopreservation doesn't have to cause damage. For instance, Aldehyde Stabilized Cryopreservation (on pigs) doesn't https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cryobiol.2015.09.003
I don't think this is done at any of the main cryonics organizations, right? Their methods are damaging in perhaps less predictable ways than this mechanism.
I think the statement
Cryopreservation doesn't have to cause damage
is deceptive and I wouldn't want it being shared without further context. I had a conversation with my expert-friend about this method and the type of damage it ca...
I went with https://hyperkey.app/