All of Ramiro P.'s Comments + Replies

It turns that the truth is more bizarre. From Matt Levine's Money Stuff:

But today at the Wall Street Journal Hannah Miao, Gregory Zuckerman and Ben Eisen have the actual, horrifying explanation, which is that the Fed’s computers go to bed at 4 p.m. and you can’t wake them up until the next morning

The point I stressed before on government bonds was right: SVB could have borrowed against them. But it seems like I was wrong: it could have borrowed against Agency MBS, too.

in a nutshell (I don't have the time to write a treatise on this, every word I write is 20w i could have read instead): I'm pretty confident (status: ~ .6) that if SVB had 90bi in gov bonds HTM instead of MBS and the like, it wouldn't have failed. You can say it would have had losses (especially in 2022), it would likely have been bought, but not failed. I know of no bank that has suffered a run because they had too much gov long term bonds (from the corresponding government, and unless the gov defaulted, ofc) in the last century (if you have an example, p... (read more)

Because I work for a regulator and am not allowed to do that? Also, many investors won't have enough incentives to read beyond what other investors are reading... except if, as you mentioned, u work w shortselling And shortsellers did make money in this case. So in this sense, the system works... but when it happens to a bank, that's not so cool

and the whole world will care a lot more about this term in bank reports, basically forever.

I'm usually astonished w how seldom investors and supervisors read the fine print in annual reports. I don't think "this time will be different". Unless GPT-like automated report-readers step in (or maybe precisely because humans will leave this boring details to machines), we'll see it happen again.

Btw, I just noticed that $9.3bi of these $15.2 are MBS - yeah, the same type of security associated w the great crisis of 2007-2008. And the HTM total more than U$90 bi,... (read more)

Well, I'm kinda sure climbers wouldn't like to brain-upload to a utopia simulation, so maybe there's some connection between this and AI alignment.
(Curiously, just read today Will MacAskill's WWOTF mentioning he used to climb buildings in Glasgow in his teens, until he was almost cut open by glass...)

Thanks, I believe you are right. I really regret how much time and resources are wasted arguing over the extension / reference of a word.

I'd like to remark though that I was just trying to explain what I see as problematic in FiO. I wouldn't only say that its conclusion is suboptimal (and I believe it is bad, and many people would agree); I also think that, given what Celestia can do, they got lucky (though lucky is not the adequate word when it comes to narratives) it didn't end up in worse ways.

As I point out in a reply to shminux, I think it's hard to s... (read more)

Possibly. I said this AGI is “safer and more aligned”, implying that it is a matter of degree – while I think most people would regard these properties as discrete: either you are aligned or unaligned. But then I can just replace it with “more likely to be regarded as safe, friendly and aligned”, and the argument remains the same. Moreover, my standard of comparison was Celest-IA, who convinces people to do brain uploading by creating a “race to the bottom” scenario (i.e., as more and more people go to the simulation, human extinction becomes more likely –... (read more)

My concern, which I interpret as being TAG's point (but with different words), is that your example of water vs. XYZ is immediately traceable (at least for anyone who knows the philosophical discussion) to Putnam's Twin Earth experiment. The way you express your point suggests you disregard this thought experiment - which is surprising for someone acquainted with it, because Putnam (at least when he wrote the paper) would likely agree that a substance with the same basic chemical properties of water would be water. He actually aims to provide an argument f... (read more)

LW is quoted (in a kind of flattering way) in Simon Dedeo's awesome piece on the last Nautil.us issue. For spoiler lovers:

[...] Rationality is my ticket out. The only reason I can trust you is that you seem rational enough to talk to. But now you’re telling me that rationality is just a layer on top of the System—it’s just as irrational as the people I’m trying to escape. I don’t know which is worse: being duped by someone else’s priors, or being a biological machine.

Teacher: Don’t go too far. You’re a smart kid—you can iterate faster than most. You can ma

Strict liability in tort law seems to be a pretty obvious example, doesn't it? I mean, I guess a lot of corporate law can be seen as "vicariously holding a group accountable"

Kialo is totally underrated.

I've seen news about this study, but no preprint. It'd be really helpful if we could get it.

Does anyone have any idea / info on what proportion of the infected cases are getting Covid19 inside hospitals? This seems to have been a real issue for previous coronavirus.

I'd say there might be a stark difference between countries / regions in this area. Italian health workers seem to have taken a heavy blow. Also, 79 deaths in Brazil (total: 200) came from only one Hospital chain/ health insurer, which focus on aging customers (so, yeah, maybe it's just selection bias?).

(Epistemic status: low, but I didin't find any research on that aft... (read more)

I noticed CDC claims 9 deaths from Diamond Princess, but I didn't find support in their source. WHO is still counting 8 deaths. I guess you're right, but I'd appreciate if you could provide the source.

They write "at the time of testing." The study I cite followed up with what happened to patients.

I know that. If you follow this discussion up to the beginning, you'll see that all I'm claiming is that the number of documented cases has been affected by selective bias, because asymptomatic / pre-symptomatic etc. cases are un... (read more)

Maybe CDC screwed their data, but they say 46.5% of the Diamond Princess cases were asymptomatic when tested: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e3.htm?s_cid=mm6912e3_w

I believe this might be a confusion between asymptomatic and pre/mildly symptomatic - but whatever: the claim at stake is that there's a ton of undocumented cases out there, not that they're asymptomatic

I'm sorry, I'm not sure if I understood the relevance of asymptomatic : symptomatic ratio here. I think what's at stake in this article is the ratio undocumented : documented cases; it'll include not only asymptomatic, pre-symptomatic or mildly symptomatic people, but people who got really sick but couldn't be tested until Hubei had largely improved their testing capabilities.

I do think a 50:1 rate is surprising, though not impossible.

If 50% of the cases in South Korea are asymptomatic and so don't get tested, their true death... (read more)

True, but Diamond Princess is full of oldies, and, despite South Korea massive testing, there might be selection bias - I guess people would only get tested if they had some symptom or contact with other infected persons (perhaps you're referring a more specific study?). Notice that, if the science study claiming 86% of the cases in Wuhan were undocumented were right, this would already imply a fatality rate of about 0.6%, below South Korea estimates.

Yet, I agree the fatality rate is surprisingly low, and it's just a statistical model.

If you grab your mobile with your dirty hands, then wash them, and then use your device again, you just recontaminated them; and if you never clean its surface (how do we do it effectively?), it'll accumulate pathogens. This seems to be a serious problem in hospitals.

(I'm not sure if I follow your reasoning; it apparently implies that, if you never shake hands with someone else, you never have to worry about washing them. Of course, it does reduce the potential for transmission.)

We should take into account the welfare of others, too. Besides protecting me from disease, washing my hands prevents me from transmitting it to someone else. It's pretty much analogous to vaccines.

I 've seen somethings concerning how dirty cellphones are - and how they can worsen interpersonal disease transmission. I wonder if there's any advice on how to keep it clean (and how useful would it be).

I find LeCun's insistence on the analogy with legal systems particularly interesting, because they remind me more Russell's proposal of "uncertain objectives" than the "maximize objective function" paradigm. At least in liberal societies, we don't have a definite set of principles and values that people would agree to follow - instead, we aim at principles that guarantee an environment where any reasonable person can reasonably optimize for something like their own comprehensive doctrine.

However, the remarkable disanalog... (read more)

So far, LW is still online. It means:

a) either nobody used their launch codes, and you can trust 125 nice & smart individuals not to take unilateralist action - so we can avoid armageddon if we just have coordinated communities with the right people;

b) nobody used their launch codes, because these 125 are very like-minded people (selection bias), there's no immediate incentive to blow it up (except for some offers about counterfactual donations), but some incentive to avoid it (honor!... hope? Prove EDT, UDT...?). It doesn't model the proble... (read more)

My opinion ("epistemic status"): dunno.

I remember an issue in The Economist in 2013 about it. There's some argument among economists on the absence of productivity improvements, despite the buzz over AI and ICT; Erin Brynjolfsson argues that it takes some time for global pervasive technologies to have an impact (e.g.: electricity). However, the main point of Thiel & Weinstein is that we haven't found new breakthroughs that are easy to profit from.

But it reminds me Cixin Liu's Dark Forest context, where:

humankind stalled because... (read more)

Your argumetn is sound. For me, it's curious that development economists almost never mention the temperature x productivity relation - except for J. Sachs (who mixes it with other geographical factors) and Nordhaus (who got a Nobel Prize for reasoning about it).

Ok, but the point is: how do you aggregate this in a prediction market? You have no incentive to bet on Earth's doom

There's a cool name for this donor's action: blindspotting (yeah, it's written like this) - after a Roy Sorensen book from 1988.