All of Mike Bishop's Comments + Replies

Thanks for looking into this. Did you happen to model this in log-odds space?

1SimonM
No - I think probability is the thing supposed to be a martingale, but I might be being dumb here.

Researchers should 1) survey participants regarding their possible exposure risks, and 2) ask them whether they think they got the placebo, and with what degree of confidence. Adjusting for these should reduce the problem.

This postmortem is so impressive. Someone should collect all the pandemic related postmortems. I'd be particularly interested in those written by people in the field (broadly construed).

Is this more (or less) comfortable than cloth masks? I support any/all masks but my inclination is to focus on whatever we can get people to adopt. I doubt I'm doing what I can, including tweeting #Masks4All once per day https://twitter.com/thatMikeBishop/status/1246501797512056834

2clone of saturn
I would consider them about the same. I've worn mine for ~5 hours at a time with minimal discomfort.
2Liface
I have one, and it's far less comfortable. Besides, buying these sorts of masks new should be left to healthcare workers or ("essential" workers) and those that most need them. The rest of us should wear cloth masks.

You have experience wearing a mask like above and are telling us it's awful to wear more than 30 minutes?

2Decius
I have experience with wearing 3M masks and I found them comfortable enough for 2 hours at a time, 8 hours per day. My experience is entirely with activated carbon filters, and the inherently higher resistance of the P100 or even P95 particulate with oil filters might impact comfort significantly.
1Yandong Zhang
In amzon, the 2097 filtering is more expensive than before. But still available. https://www.amazon.com/3m-2097/s?k=3m+2097

Is there any reason to worry copper tape might be less effective than the copper used in experiments? (I haven't read methods to see if they describe the source of the copper) For example, a lot of copper is designed to be resistant to oxidation - does that matter?

[UPDATED, thanks to various people who caught errors in V1 and pointed out V2] New NIH study of COVID half-life in aerosol or on surfaces V1 with errors: https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v1 , V2 hopefully error free: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033217v2.full.pdf (H/T @AndyBioTech)

2.4-5.11 hours on copper, in contrast to 10.5-16.1 on steel or 13-19.2 on plastic

Vaniver190

This study describes "detecting viable virus" as having a threshold of 10^0.5 TCID50/mL, and they assume exponential decay of viable virus particles. 

I'm really confused by their numbers, tho; it looks like cardboard has a hundred-fold reduction in 23 hours, from 10^2.5 to their detection threshold of 10^0.5, which I can't square with the 8.5 hour half-life. [Edit: it looks like I'm potentially confused about what TCID50/mL means?]

I also don't know how to compare their detection threshold with the point at which I should be willing to handle a cardboa

... (read more)

What does it mean for a probability not to be well defined in this context? I mean, I think I share the intuition, but I'm not really comfortable with it either. Doesn't it seem strange that a probability could be well defined until I start learning more about it and trying to change it? How little do I have to care about the probability before it becomes well defined again?

3gjm
As soon as the oracle is trying to make predictions that are affected by what the oracle says, the problem she has to solve shifts from "estimate the probabilities" to "choose what information to give, so as to produce consistent results given how that information will affect what happens". In some cases there might not be anything she can say that yields consistent results. Exactly where (if at all) that becomes impossible depends on the details of the situation.

+1 and many thanks for wading into this with me... I've been working all day and I'm still at work so can't necessarily respond in full...

I agree that these problems are a lot simpler if reducing my uncertainty about X cannot help me affect X. This is not a minor class of problems. I'd love to have better information for a lot of problems in this class. That said, many of the problems that it seems most worthwhile for me to spend my time and money reducing my uncertainty about are of the type where I have a non-trivial role in how they play out. Assumi... (read more)

2gjm
The equilibrium probability might not be well defined. (E.g., if for whatever reason you form a sufficiently firm intention to falsify whatever the oracle tells you.) And yes, if the oracle tells you something about your own future actions -- which it has to, to give you an equilibrium probability -- it's unsurprising that you're going to feel a loss of freedom. Either that, or disbelieve the oracle.

hmmm, I guess I missed that. Should I remove this post?

1gwern
If you want to. Yours is longer.

Economist Jeff Ely recently blogged an interesting example of a slippery slope. http://cheaptalk.org/2012/03/27/the-slippery-slope/

Woh, I did allow myself to misread/misremember your initial comment a bit so I'll dial it back slightly. The fact that even at the highest levels IQ is still positively correlated to income is important, and its what I would have expected, so the overall story does not undermine my support for the hypothesis that at the highest IQ levels, higher IQ individuals produce more positive externalities. I apologize for getting a bit sloppy there.

I would guess that if you had data from people with the same job description at the same company the correlation between IQ, patents, and income would be even higher.

I wonder whether there's a correlation between depression and being conflict averse. I would guess that there is, and I'm sure there has been at least some academic study of it. This doesn't really address the issue, but its related.

I also think that keeping a blog or writing in odd corners of the internet may be associated with, possibly even caused by, depression.

Let me put it this way. Before considering the Terman data on patents you presented, I already thought IQ would be positively correlated with producing positive externalities and that there was a mostly one way causal link from the former to the latter. I expected the correlation between patents and IQ. What was new to me was the lack of correlation between IQ and income, and the lack of correlation between patents and income. Correction added: there was actually a fairly strong correlation between IQ and income, just not between income and patents, (... (read more)

7gwern
Yes, but the bonuses I've heard of are in the hundreds to thousands of dollars range, at companies committed to patenting like IBM. This isn't going to make a big difference to lifetime incomes where the range is 1-3 million dollars although the data may be rich enough to spot these effects (and how many patents is even '4x'? 4 patents on average per person?), and I suspect these bonuses come at the expense of salaries & benefits. (I know that's how I'd regard it as a manager: shifting risk from the company to the employee.) And I think you're forgetting that income did increase with each standard deviation by an amount somewhat comparable to my suggested numbers for patents, so we're not explaining why IQ did not increase income whatsoever, but why it increased it relatively little, why the patenters apparently captured relatively little of the value.

It seems someone should link up "Why and How to Debate Charitably." I can't find a copy of the original because the author has taken it down. Here is a discussion of it on LW.. Here are my bulleted summary quotes. ADDED: Original essay I've just learned, and am very saddened to hear, that the author, Chris, committed suicide some time ago.

0RobinZ
Link in discussion post updated - thanks!
0Wei Dai
From that essay: Does anyone know if he did write them up? Even the Internet Archive's mirror of pdf23ds.net is gone now (intentionally purged by the author, it looks like).
0NancyLebovitz
I've noticed that if I notice someone online as civilized and intelligent, the odds seem rather high that I'll be seeing them writing about having an ongoing problem with depression within months. This doesn't mean that everyone I like (online or off) is depressed, but it seems like a lot. The thing is, I don't know whether the proportion is high compared to the general population, or whether depression and intelligence are correlated. (Some people have suggested this as an explanation for what I think I've noticed.) I wonder whether there's a correlation between depression and being conflict averse.

On its own, I don't consider this strong evidence for the greater productivity of the IQ elite. If they were contributions to open-source projects, that would be one thing. But people doing work that generates patents which don't lead to higher income - that raises some questions for me. Is it possible that extremely high IQ is associated with a tendency to become "addicted" to a game like patenting? Added: I think Gwern and I agree more than many people might think reading this comment.

7gwern
Open-source contribution is even more gameable than patents: at least with patents there's a human involved, checking to some degree that there is at least a little new stuff in the patent, while no one and nothing stops you from putting a worthless repo up on Github reinventing wheels poorly. The usual arrangement with, say, industrial researchers is that their employers receive the unpredictable dividends from the patents in exchange for forking over regular salaries in fallow periods... I don't see why you would privilege this hypothesis.

I used cryonics as example because komponisto used it before me. I intended my question to be more general. "If you're trying to market LW, or ideas commonly discussed here, then which celebrities and opinion-leaders should you focus on?"

Sure, convince those you love. I was asking who you should try to convince if your goal is convincing someone who will themselves convince a lot of other people.

Convincing Dawkins would be a great strategy for promoting cryonics... who else should the community focus on convincing?

6MarkusRamikin
Excusemewhat, the community, as in LW? We're a cryonics advocacy group now?
3wedrifid
Friends and family. They are the ones I care about most. (And, most likely, those that others in the community care about most too. At least the friends part. Family is less certain but more significant.)

broken link on "usually correlate"?

Project Follow Through, the study most frequently cited as proving the benefits of Direct Instruction is far from perfect. Neither classrooms nor schools, were randomly assigned to curricula. Its not clear how students ended up in treatment vs. comparison groups but it probably happened differently in different communities. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Follow_Through#Analytical_methods for a bunch of info and more references.

0Owen_Richardson
Yes, Project Follow-Through had some problems, but I don't think it's likely that those problems provided a systematic bias towards DI sufficient to explain away the huge differences as non-significant, especially since similar results were replicated in many smaller studies that were in a situation where better random assignment etc was possible. "Research on Direct Instruction" (Adams and Engelmann, 1996) goes into much better detail on Follow-Through and those other experiments. Actually, it basically covers three different types of studies: * Those dealing with the relative effectiveness of DI compared to other models (in a meta-analysis) * Those pinning down the internal details of DI theory, validating unique predictions it makes (about the effect specific variations in sequencing, juxtaposition, wording, pacing, etc should have on student performance). Only one prediction ever came out differently than expected: That a sequence of examples starting with negatives would be more efficient at narrowing in on a concept for the learner. It was found that while this did hold with more sophisticated older learners, more naive younger students simply interpreted the, 'This is not [whatever]' to mean, 'This is not important, so don't attend to this'. * Those demonstrating 'non-normative' outcomes. For instance, calling Piagetian developmental theory into question. You should be able to find the book at a local university library. Could you get your hands on it? I'd love to hear what you think after reading it!

Claims that the extent to which will power is exhaustible depends on one's belief about it's exhaustibility: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101014144318.htm

4NancyLebovitz
This needs to be checked for the direction of causality-- maybe people have accurate beliefs about how depletable their willpower is.

We should feel good about the fact that some biases of different research designs will cancel each other out, while bad about our inability to weight each study optimally.

I take it Stanovich is doing a lot of experiments where he controls for IQ, or compares performance within and across IQ groups. Here is my concern... there is always measurement error, and the more error in his measure of IQ, the more it will appear he's measuring something distinct from IQ which he terms "rationality."

That said, I also agree that IQ, and G, are often reified. The point is, I'm not sure Stanovich has succeeded in carving cognition skills at their joints, but I don't have anything better to offer.

I don't think we should push too hard on the dichotomy of boy vs. man. I would emphasize that there is individual variation in how well men they can perform/achieve masculinity in their sub-culture. Women face the issue as well.

For many people, their gender is an incredibly important aspect of their identity. One can think of a given subculture as having an ideal performance of masculinity. Men and women both respect that ideal. Certain occupations have been traditionally seen as very good ways of achieving that ideal. If women enter into such an occupation, the occupation is no longer seen as validating mens' manly virtues.

I oppose sex-discrimination in hiring, but there is no denying that this is a very serious loss for some men. Eventually, norms and ideals evolve in a wa... (read more)

1NancyLebovitz
I think that's part of what's going on, but (if it matters), do you think people just happen to have gender performance as a major part of their identity, or are they trained into it?

If you want to be on the cutting edge scientifically, you need to plan on a graduate degree. Find people doing the sort of research you are interested in and ask them for advice. Better yet, try to get a job in their lab. You'll have to get very specialized and the biggest discoveries will probably be using a different approach than whatever approach you're attempting. But hey, that's life, its honorable to give it a shot.

If you're more interested in the business, legal, or public policy, and/or education issues, then the hard science education probably isn't so important.

Bottom line: I suggest you say much more about the careers that interest you.

You say almost nothing about long-term career goals, which most people would determine what credentials are most useful, which is many, if not most, people's primary motivation for earning a university degree.

-2wedrifid
The relevant section is the second half of 3. If you (or anyone else) have any suggestions on what credentials could be important for achieving that goal then they would be welcome. I must confess that I think 'money and connections' are the critical factor. Credentials are great but it may be better just to buy someone who has them.

So you want to do an undergraduate degree but you don't care about earning a helpful credential and you'll attend lectures but not listen to them.

...and I thought I had unusual tastes.

-1wedrifid
Pardon? I will be earning at least one useful credential. You aren't the only person who learns faster studying on their own. I'm almost certain I have tastes that are more quirky than doing studying on my own in lectures. ;)

I plan on devoting very little time studying outside of formal lectures. (This will mean careful use of my time during lectures and all that I know on optimal learning techniques. My philosophy has always been that you either need to attend or you need to study but never both! (Perhaps I should add in IQ and say 'pick two').

Personally, I learn faster studying on my own than by listening to 90% of lectures. I would think this would be especially true for a) classes at the undergraduate level and b) classes where I'm not concerned about my grade so much as I'm concerned about learning what I think is interesting/important.

2wedrifid
Listening? Who said anything about listening? Lectures are just a way to schedule times for independent study, keep tabs on any critical announcements and complete assignments for unrelated subjects as necessary.

If I had to choose a single piece of evidence off of which to argue that the rationality assumption of neoclassical economics is totally, irretrievably incorrect...

Since this is framed as a hypothetical, its not clear exactly what your thoughts are on the subject, but I always encourage people to ask whether a model aids our thinking, or hinders it, rather then whether it is correct or incorrect.

1Psychohistorian
The answer, in this case, is clearly both. It may be better to have an overapplied model than no model at all, but if you've got a model you're clearly overapplying, improvement is a very low-hanging fruit.

care to explain why we should expect sensitivity to initial conditions to matter in the particular example being discussed here?

0realitygrill
I am struggling to convey this, so I'll have to think about it more. For now, though: I do think that differences in the initial conditions would be propagated by adaptive individuals and institutions (rather than smoothed away). That should lead to bifurcations and path dependencies that would generate drastically different outcomes. Enough that averaging them would be meaningless. Why do you think repeating it many times would converge? Are the statistical limit theorem conditions really met? I don't think so.. None of this really explicitly says that you wouldn't be able to at least figure out the sign of the change. It might be computationally intractable but qualitatively determinable in special cases.

I agree that GDP is imperfect. If it were easy to perfect then it would have been done already. Should more resources be devoted to the issue? Probably. I support the use of multiple measures of wealth and well-being. But I do think that when GDP goes up, that usually indicates good things are happening. Other indicators usually track it.

I'm not trying to deny you've noticed a problem, I just think that you're overstating it because even though GDP is imperfect, there is still a lot to be learned from empirical research that uses it.

We were asked a sort of odd question which was which apartment choice would help the economy when not taking into account the individuals preferences about apartments. Those preferences in fact dominate the overall effect on the economy. I wouldn't recommend anyone personally attempting Keynesian stimulus.

Increasing the amount of money changing hands only helps in certain circumstances, and even then it is not necessarily the dominant effect.

What about the examples of intelligent stimulus I offered?

I recommend going to an econ textbook for good questions.

I'm a sociologist*, and there is nothing sociologists like to do more than point out where economists go wrong. So if GDP was a worthless figure, I expect the real world entanglement that one of my fellow sociologists would have convinced me of that already.

I'm not saying economists never overinterpret GDP figures, and I'm not saying the consensus of macroeconomists is always correct.

Though I think we might both be better served by quitting conversation and reading actual experts (I don't claim to be one) I would like to make sure we're on the same page ... (read more)

2SilasBarta
This sounds to me like a case of mistakenly thinking "someone would have noticed!". What exactly would sociologists have noticed and hasn't happened? Remember, "my echo chamber in academia agrees with me" doesn't count as evidence! And, FWIW, sociologists (and a lot of the left in general) do complain about GDP -- they're the ones spearheading the push to use alternate metrics like "Gross National Happiness" and other things. I think a lot of them are nutty, but at least they're identifying values that need to be looked at. But I have read the experts! Top economists like Greg Mankiw, Paul Krugman, and Scott Sumner blog and lay out their arguments in detail, and their (economic basis for making their) arguments are exactly as I have portrayed them! Sumner in particular believes (mistakenly imo) that nominal GDP is a crucial measure. Krugman certainly relies heavily on measuring real GDP growth and equates it with progress. And James_K, who claims to be an economist, just came out of the woodwork and endorsed exactly what I've accused economists of, though asserting (with a basis I'm shaking) that they don't really make that big of a deal out of GDP. With the currently studied data, yes, though with different measures, better progress could be made. In the past I've suggested measuring non-cash and non-market production, subtracting certain "bad" activities from GDP (i.e. things which represent a response to destruction, as it's indicative of merely replacing some capital with other capital), measuring product degradation in calculating CPI, and using insulin as a better inflation gauge. Hey, I'm fine with calling you one if you're fine with calling me an engineer despite just having a bachelors and years of field work but not a P.E. license.

I agree that both a) and b) would have a similar effect in that the widget manufacturer puts to work resources (labor, machines) which would otherwise not be utilized. I wouldn't recommend either a) or b) because there are many more efficient ways to stimulate the economy. One that my father, who happens to be an economist, has promoted is a temporary tax credit for new hires. More detail. If there are some roads you were going to build a couple years from now, speeding up that investment is probably a good idea in an economic downturn. I'm not defendi... (read more)

0SilasBarta
Then why did you say this, in the very comment I was replying to? That's the same as recommending a)! It doesn't matter that you can think of better ways; the problem is with a view of the economy that regards either of a) or b) as "good for the economy". And you in fact hold that view.

To be clear, you are suggesting we might not lose anything by giving up measuring and using GDP figures? I'll side with the majority of the economics profession... they aren't perfect but they mostly use GDP data in a reasonable way.

2SilasBarta
Just so we're on the same page, could you explain what it would look like if economists' collective wisdom were actually so bad that you would agree they use GDP data in an unreasonable way? Because you can't just look at the fact the top economists all agree -- they'd do that even if the field were collectively garbage. There has to be some real-world entanglement which would reveal the failure of their ideas, and I want to know what you expect such a failure to look like.

This is a good point. What happens in this individual case would be dominated by random facts about the individuals directly involved. If you imagine the same situation repeated many times, 100 should be plenty, the randomness cancels out.

0realitygrill
So you might think. Sensitivity to initial conditions!

Never once has it occurred to anyone in the mainstream (and very few outside of the mainstream) that it's okay for people to produce less, consume less, and have more leisure.

  1. Really? Because I hear economists talk about the value of leisure time quite frequently.
  2. IMO, most economists don't fetishize GDP the way you suggest they do.
  3. You seem to be denying the benefits of Keynesian stimulus in a downturn. That position is not indefensible, but you're not defending it, you're just claiming it.
0SilasBarta
Both of these are contradicted by the fact that no economist, in discussion of the recent economic troubles, has suggested that letting the economy adjust to a lower level of output/work would be an acceptable solution. Yes, they recognize that leisure is good in the abstract, but when it comes to proposals for "what to do" about the downturn, the implicit, unquestioned assumption is that we must must must get GDP to keep going up, no matter how many make-work projects or useless degrees that involves. I most certainly am defending it -- by showing the errors in the classification of what counts as a benefit. If the argument is that stimulus will get GDP numbers back up, then yes, I didn't provide counterarguments. But my point was that the effect of the stimulus is to worsen that which we really mean by a "good economy". The stimulus is getting people to do blow resources doing (mostly) useless things. Whether or not it's effective at getting these numbers where they need to be, the numbers aren't measuring what we really want to know about. Success would mean the useless, make-work jobs eventually lead to jobs satisfying real demand, yet no metric that they focus on captures this.

It is certainly true that some people make too much of GDP, but those numbers can be pretty helpful for answering certain research questions. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

0Vladimir_M
To continue on your metaphor, it's not clear to me if there is a baby worth saving there at all. Even if there is, the baby is submerged in an enormous cesspool of filthy and toxic bathwater that's been poisoning us in very nasty ways for a long time.
0SilasBarta
If we're going to do metaphors, then yes, you're right, but we also have to make sure we're not drinking the bathwater. The bathwater is for bathing, not for drinking. GDP should be used a very rough cross-country comparison, not as a measure of how well the economy's general ability to satisfy wants changes over short intervals. Interestingly enough, I was arguing roughly your position a few years ago. But now, seeing how economist deliberately prioritize GDP over the fundamentals it's supposed to measure, I can't even justify defending it for purposes other than, "The US economy is more productive than Uganda's."

Of course, gdp only measures goods and services sold, not "household production."

3Vladimir_M
That's only one of the main problems with GDP. Here's a fairly decent critique of the concept written from a libertarian perspective (but the main points hold regardless of whether you agree with the author's ideological assumptions): http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2010/HendersonGDP.html In addition to these criticisms, I would point out the impossibility of defining meaningful price indexes that would be necessary for sensible comparisons of GDP across countries, and even across different time periods in the same country. The way these numbers are determined now is a mixture of arbitrariness and politicized number-cooking masquerading as science.

I think that a majority of economists agree that in many downturns, it helps the economy if people, on the margin, spend a little more. This justifies Keynesian stimulus. Therefore, the economy would be helped if your choice increases the total amount of money changing hands, presumably if you rent the apartment for $X when X>Y. My impression is that in good economic times, marginal spending is not considered to improve economic welfare.

2SilasBarta
Imagine that the "economy" is sluggish, and that a widget maker currently profits $1 on each widget sale. Now, consider these two scenarios: a) I buy 100 widgets that I don't want, in order "to help the economy". b) I give the widget-maker $100. Then, I lie and say, "OMG!!! I just heard that demand for widgets is SURGING, you've GOT to make more than usual!" (Assume they trust me.) In both cases, the widget-maker is $100 richer, the real resources in the economy are unchanged, and the widget-maker has gotten a false signal that more widgets should be produced. Yet one of those "helps the economy", while the other doesn't? How does that make sense? If you believe that either one of those "helps the economy", your whole view of "the economy" took a wrong turn somewhere.

There is other information you want to consider. Tax rates for example, and whether or not the economy is in the sort of downturn that would benefit from stimulus or not.

Regardless, the effects on aggregate supply and demand will be tiny. How much you and your parents value these alternatives is what matters most.

0cousin_it
I'm not asking about what I should decide, I'm asking about the sign of those tiny effects on the country as a whole. Is it actually a difficult question in disguise? Why? I know next to nothing about economics, but the question sounds to me like it should be really easy for anyone qualified.

I'd like to share introductory level posts as widely as possible. There are only three with this tag. Can people nominate more of these posts, perhaps messaging the author to encourage them to tag their post "introduction."

We should link to, stumble on, etc. accessible posts as much as possible. The sequences are great, but intimidating for many people.

Added: Are there more refined tags we'd like to use to indicate who the articles are appropriate for?

RobinZ110

There are a few scattered posts in Eliezer's sequences which do not, I believe, have strong dependencies (I steal several from the About page, others from Kaj_Sotala's first and second lists) - I separate out the ones which seem like good introductory posts specifically, with a separate list of others I considered but do not think are specifically introductory.

Introductions:

... (read more)

Whole Brain Emulation: The Logical Endpoint of Neuroinformatics? (google techtalk by Anders Sandberg)

I assume someone has already linked to this but I didn't see it so I figured I'd post it.

However, although the comfort that we experience (in the developed world) due to our modern technology is very much a product of the analytic-rational paradigm, that comfort is given roughly equally to everyone and is certainly not given preferentially to the kind of person who most contributed causally to it happening, i.e. to scientists, engineers and great thinkers.

How much have scientists and engineers contributed to our standard of living? Probably a good amount, but why do we have scientists and engineers? My impression is that our current high ... (read more)

4Roko
Even entrepreneurs capture very little of the value they create: I've heard estimates of 5%. Not to mention the massive degree of risk they shoulder (and humans have basically risk averse utility functions).

One vote for the south side (Hyde Park). Is there a meetup or google group? Any way of communicating with other Chicagoans?

3Airedale
I have started a rudimentary Google group for anyone who might like to use that to get reminders or notices about meetups or have other Chicago/Midwest specific discussions.
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