All of theme_arrow's Comments + Replies

Very interesting story. One question: you said that the prognosis is "many rounds of heavy-duty antibiotics to hopefully induce periods of remission," but my understanding was that UC was autoimmune, and that the standard treatment was steroids or other immune system modulators? That's certainly what the Mayo Clinic says. Did the specialist mention any of these kinds of medications to you?

2wslafleur
Oh, yeah. I should probably amend that. It's basically steroids, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories (whichever flavor you can handle) and a strong recommendation that you increase your fiber intake. I mentioned having been given each of these in roughly equal portions, but then failed to include it as a part of the prognosis. My experience with corticosteroids was hit-or-miss, and I had severe, acute depression as a side-effect (I have never experienced anything like depression before or after, so it was pretty blatant). In any case, I don't really see steroids as being much better, since AFAIK, pretty much everyone relapses w/ steroids as well, and then they have to be adjusted.   EDIT: I'm not specifically trying to be overly pessimistic/fatalist here, it's just that I've had a very bad time w/ traditional approaches to treatment for IBD. Take everything I say with a grain of salt, obviously. I think that people should do whatever they can to feel better. I'll update the post, and thank-you for the reply.

AI has a history of surprising us with its capabilities. Throughout the last 50 years, AI and machine learning systems have kept gaining skills that were once thought to be uniquely human, such as playing chess, classifying images, telling stories, and making art. Already, we see the risks associated with these kinds of AI capabilities. We worry about bias in algorithms that guide sentencing decisions or polarization induced by algorithms that curate our social media feeds. But we have every reason to believe that trends in AI progress will continue. AI wi... (read more)

1trevor
the first sentence counts as a one-liner

Very very interesting, thanks for putting this together! On the initial question (does activated charcoal reduce blood alcohol levels), this seems like a case where a bit of N=1 science could quickly produce some useful results. A few shots of vodka + Gwern-style blinding + a breathalyzer might tell you a lot after a few goes. 

Strongly upvoted! I found this to be very informative, if disturbing in places. Thank you for putting this together, and I look forward to any future posts looking at the questions you outlined. 

With regards to mandates, something that happened this week is that big federal contractors, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, formally announced their plans to comply with the contractor mandate.

Minor note: it looks like you misspelled Merck as "Merrick"in the second sentence and executive summary, and as "Merrik" later in the text. 

Hmm I think you're right that digital voice protocols aren't allowed on in 462-467 MHz FRS band. But there are a couple regions of the 900-1000 MHz portion of the spectrum that are allocated to commercial two-way radio, which allows digital and might be usable for this application if you were trying to actually manufacture and sell this kind of product. 

If one were trying to do this as a homebrew project, either the 902-928 MHz ISM band used by the XBEEs or the 420-450 MHz band used for ham radio could work (with a ham radio license). 

3jefftk
I think at that point you might as well use a cell phone watch?

I don't think it's an impossible idea! XBEE radios in the form factor of a large watch can give you 200 kbps at 1000 ft in an indoor/urban environment, drawing 229 mA at 3.3 V. That seems to be about twice the data rate needed for clear voice communication. A 400 mAh li-ion battery is about 1x1.5 inch, so in the right ballpark. Add a 1/4 watt for a mini speaker and you'd get you about 25 minutes of talk time, and if you halved the data rate, you'd get 1500 ft of range. It would be pretty unwieldy and probably not quite the performance you'd hope for if you... (read more)

2jefftk
I don't think digital is allowed? For example, these walkie-talkies use FRS which is FM

Wow, I've read a decent amount of GPT-3 content, but this still surprised me with how good it was. I spent the whole time reading it half-expecting that there would be some kind of twist at the end about how you generated it. Very impressive!

The responses are cherry-picked, so this is way better than what GPT-3 is capable of. See the discussion in the downvoted subthread.

Unfortunately for this explanation, COVID cases in the UK appear to be rising once again. At this point I'm at a loss for potential explanations of what could have caused the rapid rise, fall, and rise again in cases. 

It's possible that seasonality is a factor, but temperature doesn't seem like it would be it. July and August are very similar temperatures in London, and both are slightly hotter than June. 

9Neel Nanda
The thing we care about here is the actual weather in the UK over the last few weeks, not the average climate data. In the last few weeks there's been a bit of a heatwave, and everything has been dry and sunny (at least, in London).

I actually don't think the high level of antibodies should be such a surprise. I updated my original comment to clarify, but much of that is from vaccination, not from natural infection. Between high rates of vaccination plus historical infections, it's not surprising to me that such a high fraction of adults in the UK have antibodies.

3samshap
I think I agree. I hadn't realized the UK vaccination rates were so high. In that case I'll lean towards the pockets of unvaccinated reaching herd immunity + shorter incubation period hypothesis.

Sure, the UK had high vaccination rates going into this wave, but the emergence of the delta variant (plus loosening of restrictions) greatly increased COVID transmission. So you'd expect a growth in case numbers. But if there aren't that many fully susceptible people to infect, the case counts wouldn't peak at a high number before turning around because of population immunity. 

However, I want to be clear that I think this is just one factor, not the only thing going on. If you play around with SIR model parameters, you can see that you can't get quit... (read more)

2ChristianKl
R fell from something like 1.4 to 0.7 in a week. If we would be talking about a change from 1.2 to 1.1 in a week basic immunity seems like a reasonable explanation. For the change we are seeing it doesn't seem to be. 

Okay I see what you're saying here. But do you think that that a substantial number of negative utilitarians would agree with that argument? I don't think they would, because I think integral to many conceptions of negative utilitarianism is the idea that there's a qualitative difference between suffering and lack of pleasure. 

2andrew sauer
Okay, maybe the NUs wouldn't interpret the problem as I phrased it in this way, but the problem can be slightly changed to have a similar conclusion, by saying that the sadists are mildly annoyed when the guy isn't being tortured, instead of wanting it for their pleasure.

One factor I've heard discussed is the UK's very high rate of prior immunity (from both infection and vaccination). About 90% of adults in the UK have COVID antibodies (either from vaccination or infection), meaning the fully susceptible population is very small. Obviously breakthrough cases are possible in people with antibodies, especially if they've only got one dose of the AZ vaccine, but R in that population will be much lower. Given the high initial rates of prior immunity, it would be expected that R will drop pretty quickly as COVID "buns though" the remaining susceptible population. 

2theme_arrow
Unfortunately for this explanation, COVID cases in the UK appear to be rising once again. At this point I'm at a loss for potential explanations of what could have caused the rapid rise, fall, and rise again in cases. 
4samshap
I agree that this seems to explain it, but it raises a new question: how did the antibody rate get so high? Is it possible that part of Delta's contagiousness is that it has a lot more carriers who don't get sick?
6ChristianKl
I don't see how that explains the drastic shift. The UK also had high vaccination rates in the beginning of July.

You might be correct, but I'm not convinced that all negative utilitarians would agree with you. I think that some formulations (e.g. potentially NHU as described here) would describe the person not getting tortured as producing a reduction in pleasure for the sadists, and thus not ascribe any moral value to the sadists' preferences not getting fulfilled.

I'd be curious to read more about your comment that "Positive and negative utilitarianism are equivalent whenever UFs are bounded and there are no births or deaths as a result of the decision." Do you have some resources you could link for me to read? 

1andrew sauer
I'm referring to the fact that utility functions are equivalent under positive affine transformations (if you add a constant and multiply it by a positive constant, the UF remains the same in the sense that it has the same preference in every situation) Assuming we are computing the utility of an outcome by assigning a utility to each person and then summing them, adding a constant value to any person's utility doesn't change the comparison between outcomes, because the net effect is just to add a constant to the utility of each outcome(as long as the person we are adding a constant value to exists in every outcome). Therefore, we can convert the situation to negative utilitarian without functionally changing it, by subtracting the maximum utility from each person, ensuring that everyone's utility will be negative in every outcome. We can also convert it to positive utilitarian by subtracting the minimum in a similar way. This analysis assumes that there is a maximum and a minimum utility, and that every outcome has the same set of people in it, so if these assumptions break there may be relevant differences.

Ah you’re right, sorry. Edited.

I think negative utilitarianism is the most common ethical framework that would cause someone to choose the torture in the specks vs. torture case and no torture in this case. That's because in the specks vs. torture case involves people being harmed in both cases, whereas this case involves people gaining positive utility vs. someone being harmed. Some formulations of negative utilitarianism, like that advocated for by Brian Tomasik, would say that avoiding extreme suffering is the most important moral principle and would therefore argue in favor of avoid... (read more)

3andrew sauer
I'm not sure how negative utilitarianism changes things. Positive and negative utilitarianism are equivalent whenever UFs are bounded and there are no births or deaths as a result of the decision. Negative utilitarianism interprets this situation as the sadists suffering from boredom which can be slightly alleviated by knowing that the guy they hate is suffering.
2Neel Nanda
Do you mean negative utilitarianism would get them to choose torture, rather than dust specks? I would have considered both to be forms of suffering.

I broadly agree with your point here about controlled burning, but I have two comments that I think add worthwhile context to the issue.

First, PG&E has an extremely poor track record when it comes to maintenance on transmission lines. Even with more controlled burning, it's not a good idea to be shooting off sparks in the middle of the dry season. So an optimal balance probably involves both PG&E spending more money on its infrastructure and doing more controlled burning. 

Second, a lot of the deaths and injuries related to fires are the result... (read more)

I had two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. I experienced a sore arm that went away after ~1 day after the first dose and moderate aches and chills that went away after ~12 hours after the second dose. 

I know around 10 people in my age group (20-35 years old) that have gotten one of the MRNA vaccines and none of them had a significantly more severe reaction than I did.  

To expand on this a bit, I think that people with working partners would be the group most likely to be deterred from working at MIRI if it was in either Bellingham or Peekskill. The two-body problem can be a serious constraint, and large metro areas tend to be much easier to find two jobs in. That may be getting better with the rise of remote work, but I do think it's worth keeping in mind. 

5dspeyer
Less of a constraint if matters are arranged such that living in NYC is practical.  Expensive, of course, but no worse than the Bay.  It's a long-ish commute, but not too terrible by mostly-empty train (the full trains will be running the opposite direction).  Easier still if WFH a few days a week is supported.

My experience with elementary and middle school was that small numbers of snow days were not made up at the end of the year, but if more than a week or so was lost due to snow days, then the year would be extended. This appears to be the case in at least some other parts of the country as well. From a quick search: in Michigan "schools can be closed for up to six days before they must make up time to receive full funding from the state."

In defense of the position df fd took, you're playing a very asymmetric game here. Advertisers are investing very large sums of money and lots of person-hours of work to figure out how to change people's preferences with those 15-second ads. There's not a comparable degree of investment in developing techniques for making sure your desires aren't manipulated. I think it's hard to be totally sure that ads aren't subtly creating new associations or preferences that are intended to benefit the advertiser (potentially at the reader's expense). 

Taking a bi... (read more)

To add a bit more detail to your comment, this form of housing used to exist in the from of single room occupancy (SRO) buildings, where people would rent a single room and share bathroom and kitchen spaces. Reformers and planners started efforts to ban this form of housing starting around the early 20th century. From Wikipedia:

By the 1880s, urban reformers began working on modernizing cities; their efforts to create "uniformity within areas, less mixture of social classes, maximum privacy for each family, much lower density for many activities, buildings

... (read more)
9ozziegooen
A bit more info; I lived at 20Mission, which was technically an SRO. I enjoyed the setting quite a bit, though I've heard they've had trouble recently with COVID. That said, most of the other SROs I know of nearby (in the Mission, SF), are really not nice places. (lots of drugs and some violence). https://www.20mission.com/ There's been discussion of having "Micro-Units" in SF, but they're heavily regulated. It seems like small progress is being made. https://socketsite.com/archives/2012/11/microunits_approved_for_san_francisco_capped_for_market.html

Yes! We had a nice discussion in the comments of your "Fun with +12 OOMs of Compute" post.

5Daniel Kokotajlo
Welcome! I recognize your username, we must have crossed paths before. Maybe something to do with SpaceX?

This is an interesting idea and I appreciate you putting this together. A few comments: 

  1. I'm a bit skeptical of your comment in part 3 that "none of the biological/medical community has started doing something like this," as that just seems unlikely to me. I'm less deeply involved in biology than it sounds like you are, but how confident are you that these kinds of modeling efforts don't already exist?
  2. You say "I also (without a mechanism) believe that Aβ plaques (and smaller soluble aggregates) have some feedback effect which further damages glucose me
... (read more)
2J Bostock
Thanks for the feedback! 1. You may be right there, and I would certainly be pleased to hear of any projects like this. 2. I believe the model could work without it, but AD seems to be an attractive state that many human brains fall into with various genetic associations. The main evidence for it is that mutations in Aβ precursor protein can have very high penetrance (i.e. everyone who has the mutation develops early-onset AD  (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11920-000-0061-z.pdf). You are definitely right that I was too specific in my assessment of exactly how Aβ plaques cause a feedback mechanism, thanks for catching that. I have amended the post to fix that. 3. Lastly what do you mean specifically by prion-like? Amyloid fibrils are a prion-like structure in the sense that the growth of existing fibres is much, much more favourable than the formation of new ones. (this leads to exponential growth as long fibres break apart leaving new open ends for new protein molecules to add) However Aβ plaque formation was reversed in the mice given EET-A which means that at some physiologically achievable concentrations of free Aβ, the amyloids dissipate due to un-misfolding of Aβ (at least in mouse models). This would suggest that the cause of AD is various factors pushing the brain over a threshold where Aβ can accumulate. (which could be metabolic, or mutations which make Aβ more likely to accumulate) This is in contrast to "classical" prions where the original misfolded protein is able to continuously cause the misfolding of normal protein at normal physiological conditions, and the only barrier to a prion disease occurring is that no misfolded protein is present. The paper which you sent also postulates a feedback loop between Aβ and Tau which is interesting. I had considered the Aβ feedback into the earlier mechanism as an afterthought but perhaps it is more important than my model suggested.

This is a lovely companion writeup to Julia's. I especially liked your section on respect, I think that it's critical to not become Machiavellian when using this kind of method to shape the world. 

I also wanted to add some personal thoughts related to your comments on fun. Part of my work involves being a mission controller for spacecraft. Training for that is long and daunting process involving going from being a trainee during simulated rehearsals, then being in a non-lead role during actual operations, then being in a lead role in simulations, and ... (read more)

I don't want to get too into the weeds here. But I think that someone in the top few percent of their school would be smart. The kind of kid who might be feeling without intellectual peers and posting here about it could be the smartest in their school or their town (or they could not). But I don't think that really changes the conclusions. 

8lsusr
You have used the word "feel(ing)" twice. The core question isn't whether he feels he has intellectual peers he can talk to. It is whether he genuinely does or doesn't have intellectual peers of his caliber. I believe this high school student when he implies he doesn't have anyone near his intellect at his school and at other programs he has tried out. You do not. I think this is the crux of our disagreement. I put so much effort into standard deviations because "smart" papers over a broad range of intelligences. Someone with an IQ of 115 is "smart". Someone with an IQ of 175 is "smart". The difference between someone with an IQ of 115 and someone with an IQ of 175 is four standard deviations. Four standard deviations is huge. It is equal to the difference between a PhD in science and someone hovering on the edge of an intellectual disability. It would be absurd for a PhD in science to look for intellectual peers in the same place as someone bordering on the edge of intellectual disability. The same goes for someone with an IQ of 115 verses someone with an IQ of 175.

I think of "smart" as (at least approximately) referring to g. 

1lsusr
When you say "a smart kid in high school", what threshold or range of g are you referring to? (Insofar as "smart" refers to g.) A kid with a g two standard deviations below the mean isn't smart. A kid four standard deviations above the mean is smart. Where do you draw the cutoff?

As I read this post, I couldn't help but feel like it crossed over from reasonable advice into elitism. I wouldn't argue with the basic idea of surrounding yourself with smart, interesting people who will help stimulate you intellectually and push you to grow. But spending your time worrying about how many standard deviations above the mean everyone's IQ is seems like it's crossing a line from reasonable to excessive, particularly when you describe normal life as "living among the monkeys." 

So what I'd say to this is that yes, finding and befriending ... (read more)

1lsusr
What, precisely, do you mean when you use the word "smart"?

Thanks for this writeup. Could you share a bit more about how you got into using Vim and why you've found it to improve speed so much? I occasionally need to use vi when there's nothing else installed on a system, but the clunkiness and high barrier to entry has never made me tempted to use Vim as my primary editor.

Keyboard shortcuts are faster than the mouse. Keys accessible from homerow are faster than distant keys like the arrow keys. Keyboard shortcuts you can combine are more powerful than standalone keyboard shortcuts. As gianlucatruda mentioned, the important thing is Vim keybindings, not the editor itself. You can get a similar speed boost by installing Vim keybindings on your favorite editor.

I learned Vim very early in my programming career because I knew the upfront investment would pay itself over many times—and it has. Vim has paid my initial investment b... (read more)

From Twitter, it looks like the rates of clotting-related issues in UK recipients of the AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines are essentially indistinguishable.

1theme_arrow
An update to this comment: there is now some evidence to suggest the rates of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis are substantially different in UK recipients of the two vaccines. It is a very low rate (30 in 28 million), but there does seem to be a real difference there.

The new Apple M1-based mac mini appears to be able to do 2.6 teraflops on a power consumption of 39 W. That comes out to 0.000066 W/petaflop, or ~4x the efficiency of Fugaku. 

Your comment about Crystal Nights makes sense. I guess humans have evolved in a word based on one set of physical laws, but we're general purpose intelligences that can do things like play videogames really well even when the game's physics don't match the real world's. 

Really interesting post, I appreciate the thought experiment. I have one comment on it related to the Crystal Nights and Skunkworks sections, based on my own experience in the aerospace world. There are lots of problems that I deal with today where the limiting factor is the existence of high-quality experimental data (for example, propellant slosh dynamics in zero-g). This has two implications:

  1. For the "Crystal Nights" example, I think that our current ability to build virtual worlds that are useful for evolutionarily creating truly transformative AIs may
... (read more)
3Daniel Kokotajlo
Thanks! Yeah, I basically agree with you overall that Skunkworks could be undermined by our lack of understanding of real-physics dynamics. We certainly wouldn't be able to create perfectly accurate simulations even if we threw all 35 OOMs at the problem. The question is whether the simulations would be accurate enough to be useful. My argument is that since we already have simulations which are accurate enough to be useful, adding +12 OOMs should lead to simulations which are even more useful. But useful enough to lead to crazy transformative stuff? Yeah, I don't know. For Crystal Nights, I'm more 'optimistic.' The simulation doesn't have to be accurate at all really. It just has to be complex enough, in the right sort of ways. If you read the Crystal Nights short story I linked, it involves creating a virtual world and evolving creatures in it, but the creators don't even try to make the physics accurate; they deliberately redesign the physics to be both (a) easier to compute and (b) more likely to lead to intelligent life evolving.

I finally got around to making these! I was very pleased with the result, they were tasty and distinct from anything I've had before. While I thought they were about as delicious as most homemade cookies, my partner who is not generally a huge fan of cookies liked them much more than previous cookie attempts and kept coming back for more. 

I agree with the other commenters who've suggested that like with most homemade cookies, they're better than store-bought cookies because they don't have to last for months on a store shelf. But I am surprised it's not a more popular home recipe in the US as it's about the easiest recipe for tasty cookies I've come across. 

This comment (and the whole discussion) really resonated with me. I think a hard part of this is that if I try and totally remove the activities that allow for opting out of being (video games, mindless reddit scrolling etc.), it tends to only work for a short time before I relapse all at once into them. It seems like this is a case where moderation might be the answer for me personally rather than abstinence.

One unexpected positive of Hammertime is that I've noticed my desire to play video games gradually decreasing over the last month. This might be an interesting case where the solution to the problem is to solve other life problems, at which point the desire to cease to exist simply fades away.

Overestimation: Interacting with external reviewers/customers at work. I thought I had useful things to contribute to discussions with external folks starting maybe 4-5 months into my job. I didn't understand how to handle those interactions tactfully (and overestimated the chillness of by bosses) and got slapped down pretty hard.  

Underestimation: Research ability as an undergrad. I kept thinking I was a fraud and doing terrible work right up until the day I won the research top prize in my department. 

Done well: I really like the daily prompts to comment, I think they've done a lot to encourage me to stick with it. They've also been nice because I get to see everyone else's responses. 

Done badly: I wish more days had direct connections to the bug list (i.e. more challenges directly of the form "pick a bug from the bug list and apply today's technique to it"). It's harder to motivate myself to tackle challenges on the bug list when it's implicit that today's technique can be applied to them than it is when it's explicit. 

I applied the method of exhaustion to my course final project this semester, breaking it into 9 steps. It was a fun exercise, and I appreciated it!

It's interesting, you definitely see failure rates that look logarithmic in marriages and bankruptcies, but I do think that some of that is what tcheasdfjkl said - some of that is just from the fact that things that fail early don't get a chance to fail later. In my personal experience, I think there are two big places where my plans fail: before they start and at the first major setback. I think that usually if... (read more)

Interestingly enough, five minutes wasn't enough for me to get any improvement in typeracer or the arithmetic game. I started at 80 WPM and got results both above and below that on my subsequent tries. Similarly I got 20 on my first attempt at the arithmetic game, 23 on the second attempt, and 17 on the third. I don't think that makes speed impossible to train, it just suggests that it'll take longer than 5 minutes!

Here are some of my proudest speed records: 

  • Performance on exams when time is tight. For example, I had an undergraduate materials science
... (read more)

I do think I've gotten better at achieving my values over the course of Hammertime. the biggest way that's manifested has been in how I'm spending my time. I'm spending more time reading books and talking to friends rather than aimlessly browsing the internet or playing videogames. Interestingly enough, I've actually been spending less time working, which I wasn't consciously trying to do but I think is positive, as I generally work somewhat too hard. 

Reflecting back on the bug list for the second time, I only came up with a modest number of additiona... (read more)

This was a great post, and I fully agree with the idea that working to make our interactions with others positive is an important part of making life good. I found that a good additional exercise to go with this post was to set a Yoda timer and reach out to friends who I haven't talked to in a bit. 

I like your weakened version of TDT, it feels like it does really capture something salient about human decision-making. I recognize that the exact number isn't really important, but I think I'd describe it as close to a one-percent shift than a ten-percent shift for myself. I feel like I personally have taken a very long time to go from the first few times I do something to that thing feeling natural. I wonder if that's something that tends to differ a lot between people or different kinds of actions. 

I like Noah Smith and enjoyed that post, but I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions. I think I agree more with the critique from Applied Divinity Studies than I do with Noah. There are definitely areas for optimism, but I haven't seen anything that looks like we're actually getting increases in productivity growth in the US or similar countries. Moreover, I have seen no indications that cost disease has slowed (see healthcare costs for example, other than the decrease in care due to COVID lockdowns, there's no real evidence of a slowdown). And beyond al... (read more)

3jasoncrawford
I'm not convinced by the optimists, either, and ADS made some good points. This post was laying the foundation for my response. With this framework I think you can analyze things in at least a slightly more rigorous way.

Listing all of the times I've improved rapidly in the past was a very interesting exercise. Many of the times where I made a really big improvement stemmed from making a decision that was hard to make in the moment, but locked me into a path toward something good. That's very much in line with the basic principle is "take advantage of willpower now to put yourself on a course in which you don't need willpower to do the right thing later."

Another idea that seems common to a number of the examples I can come up with is an idea that I might call "seize the mo... (read more)

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