All of XFrequentist's Comments + Replies

Dogs would be interesting - super smart working dogs might even have a viable labour market, and it seems like the evidence of supercanine IQ would be obvious in a way that's not true of any other species (just given how much exposure most people have to the range of normal canine intelligence).

Sort of analogous to what Loyal is doing for longevity research.

Possibly you're thinking about this: https://www.quantifiedintuitions.org/pastcasting

There's a formatting issue with the link, should be: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2634591/

Preventing neural network weight exfiltration (by third parties or an AI itself)

This is really really interesting; a fairly "normal" infosec concern to prevent IP/PII theft, plus a (necessary?) step in many AGI risk scenarios. Is the claim that one could become a "world expert" specifically in this (ie without becoming an expert in information security more generally)?

Indeed, as Vladmir gleaned, I just wanted to clarify that the historical roots of LW & AGI risk are deeper than might be immediately apparent, which could offer a better explanation for the prevalence of Doomerism than, like, EY enchanting us with his eyes or whatever.

I am saddened that this doomerism has gained so much track in a community as great as LW

You're aware that Less Wrong (and the project of applied rationality) literally began as EY's effort to produce a cohort of humans capable of clearly recognizing the AGI problem?

It's probably based on GPT-4.  

Bing literally says it's powered by "GPT 4.0 technology" in this chat, is that synonymous with GPT-4 (genuinely unsure)?

I've actually wondered if some kind of stripped-down sign language could be a useful adjunct to verbal communication, and specifically if a rationalist version could be used to convey epistemic status (or other non-obvious conversational metadata).

In the (outstanding) show The Expanse, a branch of humanity called "Belters" have been mining the asteroid belt for enough generations that they have begun to diverge (culturally, politically, and even physically) from <humanity-main>. They have such an adjunct sign language, originally developed to communi... (read more)

<sarcasm>

And obviously, the entire public health community is up in arms about this…

</sarcasm>

[Narrator: They were not, in fact, up in arms.]

There might be another strain in the future. I don’t know how likely this is, but that’s the most likely way that things ‘don’t mostly end’ after this wave

I agree, and I also don't really have great mental handles to model this, but this seems like the most consequential question to predict post-Omicron life. My two biggest surprises of the pandemic have been Delta and Omicron, so sorting this out feels like a high VOI investment.

Here's a messy brain dump on this, mostly I'm just looking for a better framework for thinking about this.

1. The amount of transmis

The lightcone is such a great symbol. It also kind of looks like an hourglass, evoking (to me) the image of time (and galaxies) slipping away. Kudos! 

you really could have been the first mover on a few of these new enterprises back in 2021 if you had brainstormed a bit. Describe one of them.

Fun!

• Curated data services for forecasting.
• High-trust paid newsletter/research service oriented around interesting markets. Maintain a publicly-verifiable scoreboard linked to market positions to demonstrate reliability.
• Insurance markets - take an extreme position as a catastrophe hedge, use this to subsidize market making.
• Social network - rationales and discussion for various markets. Content discovery algorithms cou

Lots of things, but the biggest win is probably snow removal services.

For $200 a year I save several dozen hours of drudgery, there's no management/coordination overhead to speak of, and my plow guy does a better job than I would have.

The commentary below has focused on child care - a more salient pain point for our demographic, surely - but the "elder care" angle actually seems much more promising. Still labor-intensive, but fewer regulatory nightmares (?).

Note there are some very large regional players in this game, but there don't appear to be any Starbucks-size winners (so says my wife, who often works with the elderly).

Thanks! LW was malfunctioning when I posted this, otherwise I would have.

This.

Also, schlep alert: this might be the densest regulatory thicket outside of healthcare, with huge variation in standards at (at least?) the state/province level. In my little environment of 13 million Ontarians, a recent arbitrary change of the teacher/child ratio allegedly drove a good many daycares out of business.

Also, parents are insane (source: am parent).

Assemble a group of scientists who on their own could eradicate mosquitoes and just do it. Don't wait for official approval.

The appeal of this route is obvious, but I don't think it should be discussed on a public forum.

Agreed! What would be the best approach (I'm a PhD student and vector-borne disease epidemiologist)?

• Writing one or more popular/lay articles
• Writing one or more technical/scholarly articles
• Writing a popular/lay book
• Writing a technical/scholarly book
• Starting an advocacy non-profit
• Performing an explicit cost-benefit analysis
• Modelling to determine the necessary conditions for eradication
• Something else... ?

Yar, have taken the scurvy survey, says I!

Your definition what counts as "AI related" seems to be narrower than mine, but fine. I trust readers can judge whether the linked resources are of interest.

... quite a lot, no?

Well, there's this ...

[ETA: link is to MIRI's research guide, some traditional AI but more mathy/philosophical. Proceed with caution.]

(The alignment of both goals and methods between CFAR and the IC is, I think, under-exploited by both.)

It might be a bit obscure, but it's not LW jargon!

I got waaay too far into this before I realized what you were doing... so well done!

Why limit it to the Americas?

Proof of concept, capacity, and feasibility. I'd love to see this done for all disease-carrying mosquitoes, but you've got to start somewhere.

can a lethal mutation be self-perpetuating?

Yes. I'm actually not sure if this would work at a continental scale (or rather, how many modified mosquito releases would be required, is this number infeasible, etc). This is something I'm interested in modelling.

Aedes aegypti (the "Dengue mosquito") should be eradicated from the Americas by releasing genetically-modified mosquitoes carrying self-perpetuating lethal mutations.

I've delved into this literature a bit while researching a (currently shelved) paper on automation-associated error, and I agree with the title of this post!

Your confusion is a clever ruse, but your username gives away your true motives!

Self-perpetuating area-wide techniques like mass release of modified mosquitoes with gene-drive systems is very probably a superior answer if the problem is "there are too many (ie any) human-feeding mosquitoes".

If the problem is rather "what is the coolest-sounding possible way to wipe out mosquitoes", then drone-mounted lasers are in the running.

I call forth the mighty Cyan!

I credit an undergrad summer job in door-to-door sales for moving my social skills from "terrible" to "good". For that particular job we literally had a points system that was visible to everyone in the office (and determined incentives like fully-paid vacations abroad), and you'd sell enough on a daily basis that you knew roughly how you were doing (ie 5 sales was a decent day, 10 outstanding, 2 bad, out of perhaps 100 interactions), so it was a near-perfect training ground.

I know who this is. If he doesn't out himself I'll PM you with contact info.

Just some epistemic hygiene: Janet Fang is a journalist, this quote is from a (good) non-scientific article, and the basis for this statement is a collection of (mostly expert) opinions.

I happen to share this opinion, but I don't think this quote should be given very much weight in anyone's risk evaluation.

One issue is the same intervention doesn't necessarily affect both. For example, where I live West Nile virus is transmitted primarily by Culex pippiens mosquitoes, while the most abundant nuisance mosquito is Ochlerotatus stimulans.

Controlling one species will not greatly affect the other (they breed in radically different conditions). It's not a matter of scaling up operations; you need an entirely different strategy, with commensurate increase in operating costs, complexity, potential failure points, etc etc.

Give me unlimited resources and global remit and I'll take them all out, absent this prioritisation becomes necessary.

[Hey, I thought I was the token epidemiologist! ;) ]

I largely agree with Anders' comment (leave Pearl be for now; it's a difficult book), but there are some interesting non-causal mathy epidemiology topics that might suit your needs.

Concretely: study networks. Specifically, pick up the book Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World (or download the free pdf, or take the free MOOC).

It presents a smooth slope of increasing mathematical sophistication (assuming only basic high school math at the outset), and is endlessly interest... (read more)

Ooh ooh, do mine!

Done did the survey!

I don't see any reason to only target those that transmit diseases. Target ones that are simply annoying because they string the average person, gives everyone a clear reason to support the proposal.

This is a good point - in fact, a distinction is usually drawn between "nuisance" and "disease vector" mosquito control (they can involve very different operations), and I've heard very knowledgeable people say that the only way to maintain public support for a control program is if there's a strong nuisance component. You may be right on... (read more)

Sleeping sickness is transmitted by the Tsetse fly, which is not a mosquito. Even ignoring this I'm unsure what the effect on sleeping sickness has to do with environmental impact - this is the target effect of the program, no?

(Please take this as constructive, as I very much want to see the global eradication of biting mosquitoes occur.)

I think this specific proposal (an online petition/Facebook activism) is naive and likely counter-productive. I feel like I should be docked several thousand Initiative Points for saying this, but please don't do as you propose.

For starters, you cannot say "mosquitoes" - as others have pointed out, there are ~3500 separate mosquito species, only ~100 bite humans, and only several dozen transmit disease. Narrowness is a virtue here, an... (read more)

That's extremely generous of you!

Me too!

Nice, upvoted.

Are you planning to update this post with NY, Austin, etc, or are these to be separate posts?

Aside: "salon)" maps neatly to a type of semi-social semi-structured meetup that seems to arise pretty often. Glad to have a name for it, thanks!

I'm experiencing this now (with about six months still on the clock). Anything you wish you'd implemented pre-kids?

Me, 95%

That's currently sitting on my desk, staring at me suggestively.

I've got borderline too much stuff on the go right now, but depending on what you're looking for in a partner I might be interested. Just FYI, I don't believe this book contains any exercises (although we could work through the examples).

If you're willing to wait until March to start, I'm definitely interested!

Well, I didn't deliberately disassociate myself from the situation, I was just structurally barred from action.

I guess if "clone" is "Tuesday me" then your description is otherwise a decent abstraction.

Is this a known technique? It sounds useful, kind of Stanovich-ey.

Same story for me this season. Check out SciCast, I have much higher hopes.

Thanks! I liked your article a great deal.