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Should effective altruists donate to fighting Ebola?
Argument against: usually very famous things that make the news are terrible effective altruist causes and you should stick to well-studied things like malaria.
Argument for: Ebola is very underfunded compared to sexier disasters. And it is a disease in the Third World, a category which has brought us most of the best-known effective altruism interventions.
Thoughts: The CDC estimates a best-case scenario of 20,000 cases by January and a worst-case scenario of about 1.5 million cases by January. They do not estimate risks past January. There are also black swan risks in which Ebola spreads to the entire Third World (eg India) and kills tens of millions of people there. However, on the margin individual donations are unlikely to shift the virus from one of these scenarios to another, so it's probably more worth considering how much good the marginal donation does.
Doctors Without Borders is a very well known, GiveWell-approved charity. They are running clinics in the country, but it's hard to tell how much more clinic they can run per dollar. On the other hand, they are also giving out home infection prevention kits by the tens of tho...
The absolute numbers are far far below panic-levels but the underreporting and ridiculously-exponential curve is pretty disturbing. It's showing little sign of saturation in the currently-affected populations (an apparent levelling off of infection rates in Liberia was accompanied by reports of difficulty gathering data), it could spread to other populations, and wherever it goes it brings not just ebola but economic disruption, famine, and disruption of health systems that deal with other, more common chronic diseases like malaria and childbirth complications. As of now the measured doubling time is circa 3.5 weeks (a bit longer than that which the worst-case CDC models used but not by much) with each case infecting about two new ones.
The scary possibility is it getting established in additional poor urban populations. It already might be just starting to set off famines where it already is. All exponentials eventually run into a wall and saturate, but it's unclear exactly which walls will do the job here, behavioral or medical or geographc, and exactly where they are and at what order of magnitude they lay. The possibility of thicker spread through larger populations dominates any discussion of the potential effects of the situation.
My feeling is we will know with more certainty the approximate order of magnitude of the issue by Christmas. In the mean time I somehow managed to save a bit recently... money sent. I hope that was paranoid of me.
A Finnish official covered this question on the news and her answer was that such a mutation has never been observed, and Ebola is already transmitted effectively enough so that there's no selection pressure for more infectivity.
The first part of her answer is true, the second part is nonsense.
It seems like quite a few people on Less Wrong are interested in improving the quality of their writing. "Writing" obviously covers many different pursuits, and perhaps every unhappy document is unhappy in its own way, but I'd like to share my own frustrations in this area and see if this is similar to others. If it is, maybe we can do something about it.
I can write well enough to get distinctions for undergraduate-level essays, but this doesn't seem like a very high bar. If you can comprehend an essay question, form a reasonably coherent answer to that question, and put forward this answer as a structured argument which the reader can follow, you're pretty much set. I understand these are exactly the features an undergraduate essay is testing for, but I want to be better than that. George Orwell didn't get his work back with "96%, Well Done". He got tears and accolades and enduring respect. While I don't want to be George Orwell, I'm not ashamed to admit I'd like those things.
I've read a few introductory-level books on subjects like written composition and rhetorical technique. It's given me a broader vocabulary to describe what's going on, and a selection of t...
I work at a small publishing house specialized in medical literature. This year we had an editor who had majored in Latin, and he urged us to bring the style of the classical humanities to our physical sciences niche. For example, he said we should follow Aristotle's rhetorical advice (announce what you'll say, then say it, then said what you just said), and insisted that the appeal to authority was valid because we always had to cite sources.
Eventually he left the company for his own reasons, but this made me think about the different assumptions about writing that people can have, depending on their background. This guy believed any attempt at communication was unavoidably ambiguous because that's the way language works. I try to make my writing efficient and clear because I believe language should be transparent.
Perhaps what you already believe about language will shape what you will strive for in your writing.
Writing is hard. I know you don’t need me to tell you that, but any discussion on writing should begin with that statement. Writing is hard and studying it needs to be treated with the same seriousness as any other “hard” question. After all, not everyone has a book in them and those who do have to make the book themselves; it’s not pre-baked inside their genes.
The best statement on the difficulty of “studying” writing that I have encountered (everyone has at least one) was by Flannery O’Connor. Paraphrased: “Studying writing by discussing point of view or sentence structure or character development is like trying to describe a face by saying where the eyes, nose, and mouth are.” Everyone writes and learns to write differently. Some people, like E.H. White or C.S. Lewis, thrive on the academic, the grammar, the scholarly themes and canon and dissection. Others, like Jack Kerouac and James Joyce, thrive off raw passion and blatant disregard for distraction.
Your comparison between Orwell and undergrad essays is a good one. An undergrad essay has set parameters that dictate what will be in it and how it will be decided whether it has succeeded in its task or not. Orwell’s books have ...
Thanks for this - it's a very interesting topic. You might want to look into Pinker's Sense of Style, which has been well-received, on this topic (I just started reading it).
I've read a few introductory-level books on subjects like written composition and rhetorical technique. It's given me a broader vocabulary to describe what's going on, and a selection of tips, tricks and patterns.
It would be great if you could give us an overview of what you've learnt, as a starting-point of further discussion.
Also, I think it's important to know what sort of quality writing you're aspiring at. Good scientific writing is very different from good literary writing, for instance.
It would be great if you could give us an overview of what you've learnt, as a starting-point of further discussion.
Here's a very broad, shallow overview:
Classical rhetoric is a lot like TVTropes, except the tropes have names like "tricolon" and "synechdoche" instead of "Sean Connery is Going to Shoot You". If you've ever noticed a common device that speakers and writers use, it probably has a name in Greek. They serve purposes. You might read a draft of what you've written and think "this sentence sounds weak and lacks impact, but [rhetorical device] is bold and punchy, so I'll construct one and stick it on the end".
There's quite a lot of material available on standard essay structures and essay types for different purposes, (exposition, persuasion, etc.) mostly directed at students. My prototypical "smart person" would probably find 70% of the content in one of these "obvious", but I imagine the missing 30% would vary from person to person.
Grammar and linguistic knowledge are a powerful rhetorical tool. A really obvious example is the idea of the passive voice sounding evasive and blame-shifting, (e.g. "mistakes ...
Louie Helm wrote for his own online magazine Rockstar Research that a very popular post he wrote a few years ago, Optimal Employment, has directly led to dozens of rationalists find happy work in Australia, one of whom even started a business based upon Louie's model. I was thinking of using it as an example of a positive externality of Less Wrong, via flow-through effects, for a post I was researching. However, my friend user amcknight pointed out in the comments of the original post that several questions and concerns were raised in the comments that Louie, nor anyone else, answer to the satisfaction of the incredulous. For example, if Louie got his math wrong in his Fermi estimates, chain of conjunctive calculations, etc.
I'm having trouble figuring it out for myself, so: what do you think? Were Louie's recommendations sound back then? If they were, are they still sound now? Has the information, or the environment, changed so much that neither the post, nor its recommendations, are still relevant to, e.g., the rationalist community, or average young Americans?
I'm currently working through Getting Things Done by David Allen and can recommend it to almost anyone, even if you do not have problems with productivity or organisation as you can get a better understanding of what actually makes you work.
For example I finally found out why I like Evernote: It is a trusted system to just put stuff in, in the jargon of GTD.
I'm looking for a short story that someone on here wrote.
It was about free will. The story opens with the main characters approaching a space station built by an old race, operated by a custodial AI. The AI keeps predicting what they're going to do and say in advance. The first mate character gets agitated, the captain keeps her cool. Then there's some sort of disaster (approaching enemy fleet?), they have to get out fast, and the captain makes use of the AI's simulations of them to get a good outcome.
This looks interesting. Abstract:
I analyze the age at death of 121,524 European nobles from 800 to 1800. Longevity began increasing long before 1800 and the Industrial Revolution, with marked increases around 1400 and again around 1650. Declines in violence contributed to some of this increase, but the majority must reflect other changes in individual behavior. The areas of North-West Europe which later witnessed the Industrial Revolution achieved greater longevity than the rest of Europe even by 1000 AD. The data suggest that the 'Rise of the West' originates before the Black Death.
Has anyone successfully communicated their philosophy / sense of life to someone through conversations or letters? I'm familiar with projects to do that through blog posts / books / lectures / etc., but am not that familiar with deliberate attempts to do that with feedback. I've had many conversations in life and forums and so on about small issues, and how those issues deal with principles and philosophies and so on, but it seems to me that there are likely to be good strategies for taking advantage of the feedback that conversations allow that I wouldn't think of myself but can imitate.
(It seems to me that people do a lot of sorting by sense of life or philosophy--"that this person doesn't like X or believe Y is indicative of a deep incompatibility"--but it seems to me that if you're trying to communicate on a deep level with a specific person, you need to find differences and then communicate through them instead of just writing the other person off.)
The Less Wrong Wiki is a valuable resource. Since Eliezer Yudkowsky's original sequences were completed, the Less Wrong community has changed much. This thread is to be used to voice updates Less Wrong users would like to be made to the WIki, especially so it's easier to use it as a reference for introducing a new concept from Less Wrong for the first time.
If you want to start a thread for that task, a discussion post probably makes more sense than a post in the open thread that isn't as long living.
So, the "polymath" thread seems to have ground to a halt. I can't tell whether the discussion just stopped going anywhere (possibly due to elimination of low-hanging fruit), or it dropped off the recent-posts list and people forgot about it, or what. Does anyone have any insight into what's going on?
What's the best way to get (U.S.) legal advice on a weird, novel issue (one that would require research and cleverness to address well)? Paid or unpaid, in person or remotely.
(For that matter, if anyone happens to be interested in donating good legal advice to a weird, novel non-profit organization, feel free to contact me at histocrat at gmail dot com).
I'm happy to specify completely, actually, I just figured a general question would lead to answers that are more useful to the community.
In my case, I'm helping to set up an organization to divert money away from major party U.S. campaign funds and to efficient charities. The idea is that if I donate $100 to the Democratic Party, and you donate $200 to the Republican party (or to their nominees for President, say), the net marginal effect on the election is very similar to if you'd donated $100 and I've donated nothing; $100 from each of us is being canceled out. So we're going to make a site where people can donate to either of two opposing causes, we'll hold it in escrow for a little, and then at a preset time the money that would be canceling out goes to a GiveWell charity instead. So if we get $5000 in donations for the Democrats and $2000 for Republicans, the Democrats get $3000 and the neutral charity gets $4000. From an individual donor's point of view, each dollar you donate will either become a dollar for your side, or take away a dollar from the opposing side.
This obviously steps into a lot of election law, so that's probably the expertise I'll be looking for. We also nee...
I think you might be underestimating the amount of money in politics that comes from large organized contributors who give money to both parties for purposes of making the system in general beholden to them rather than favoring one ideology over the other.
You should probably chat with Sai, of Make Your Laws. (http://s.ai/) He's spent a bunch of time recently petitioning the FEC to answer questions about various crazy ways his organization would like to funnel donations. (Specific technical questions, like: "If someone gives us a donation whose recipient is conditional on a condition that won't be known until 6 months from now, [question about how some regulation applies].") I bet he can at least help you find answers.
This seems to be an example of negative commentary being primarily negative, rather than primarily commentary. One specific concrete claim that stood out to me without needing to unpack:
I seem to recall that Yudkowsky first claimed he didn't need to get a degree [...] because the singularity was so near it would be a waste of time.
is, I believe, simply false.
I agree with your overall characterization of the post, but on the specific concrete claim: one of the commenters there cites this article as saying this:
Yudkowsky's reason for shunning formal education is that he believes the danger of unfriendly AI to be so near -- as early as tomorrow -- that there was no time for a traditional adolescence. "If you take the Singularity seriously, you tend to live out your life on a shorter time scale," he said.
which I think is close enough to DC's claim. I have no way of telling how accurately that article represents EY's position or whether the quotation itself is accurate. Here's EY characterizing another statement in that article as a lie (though for what it's worth I think it can be interpreted consistently with what EY says is the truth -- but of course that doesn't mean it wasn't intended to mislead).
Tangential, but: U-238 is fissionable but not fissile; no amount of U-238 will give you a massive explosion if you bang it together. It's U-235 that's the fissile isotope.
(Even banging that together by hand won't give you a massive explosion, though it will give you a moderately large explosion and an extremely lethal dose of radiation: the jargon is "predetonation" or "fizzle". You need to bring a critical mass into existence hard and fast, e.g. by imploding a hollow sphere with explosive lenses, or a partial reaction will blow the pieces apart before criticality really has a chance to get going.)
Does anyone have interesting ideas for machine learning projects? This would involve obtaining some large dataset and then doing prediction or clustering on it.
I'm doing this as a final project for a college course. Examples of past projects:
Is there convincing evidence either way on Speed Reading? Some people swear by it, others claim that it doesn't actually provide an improvement over skimming.
Steven Poole criticises doubters of human rationality by lauding the virtues of "public reason", which supposedly ensures that "any one thinker can be corrected". It is true that collaborative and, indeed, disputatious reasoning is vital - and the "nudge" theorists he snipes at have never impressed me - but the idea that our societies are efficient self-correcting organisms is plain false. Some influential people think that climate change is a dire threat, for example, and others that it is a mere sham. Some think that state r...
Does anyone have any serious thoughts about anti-Ebola preparations one could take? (Please keep 'it is not a big threat' responses to a minimum - I'm aware of that, but am interested in the question anyway).
have you noticed people adopting the lesswrong terminology and inaccurately priding themselves on being "sane"?
Post-Singularity Worldbuilding Quirks?
If you take it as given that...
... then what random background details might result that are both...
The reason I ask: I'm writing a story in such a setting, and am hoping to tap into the local hivemind to, possibly, help flesh out som...
...a few people survived outside that Singularity...
I'm not sure what this means exactly. Are they returning space explorers who are surprised by recent developments (a la Planet of the Apes)? Luddite survivors who experienced the transition and rejected it? Members of an uncontacted tribe or some primitive culture with ethnographic boundaries respected by the machine? Each of these will interpret a post-singularity world in a very different way, I think.
'Singularity' is code for 'we don't know', so as a writer you're permitted just about anything. But the most fun I've had with post-singularity fiction is when there is a dominant singleton with running themes and strong personality quirks- The Optimalverse is the reigning champion here, in my opinion, but there's also the famous I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Gods are fun to read about when they're mad in some way, or at least when they seem mad from a human perspective. So it's worth thinking particularly about the forces (that is, the choices and personalities) that give internal structure to your post-Singularity world. Randomness is not compelling.
Aside from that, my advice would be to avoid anything that is too...
A while ago Louie Helm recommended buying Darkcoins. After he did the price of a darkcoin went up to more than 10$, but now it's down to 2$. Is it still a good idea to buy darkcoins, that is, is their price likely to go back up?
Currently the tor blackmarkets however only run on bitcoin
Worth noting that a few have tried Litecoin or Darkcoin; today I'm adding to the list a new cannabis market, Diabolus, which claims to support both Bitcoin and Darkcoin.
(However, despite a little dabbling by the black-markets, I don't expect altcoins to supplant Bitcoin anytime soon for them: currently anonymity doesn't matter to the sellers since I still know of no one who has been busted even partially due to tracing coin movements! What they need are ways to cash out, and Bitcoin is king in that respect.)
I've just enrolled in a 1 year applied mathematics Master's program. The program is easy, and I'm mostly doing it because it costs me nothing and a Master's degree is a good asset to have. I plan on working full time and not attending any classes, and I'm certain I still won't have any problems there.
However, coming from a CE background, I have no idea what to do for my thesis. I want it to be something from the fields of AI or Probability/Statistics, but I'm out of ideas. So, any suggestions as to what may be either fun or useful (preferably both) in those areas, that I should dedicate my spare time to?
I'm trying to make Christmas travel arrangements to London, along with a family member who's somewhat spooked by the Ebola thing. I'm ~80% sure that the risk is negligible. I base this mostly on the prior that it's the current media panic and current media panics can usually be ignored, plus a cursory look at the number and location of cases (in particular, nothing in the U.K. yet, although apparently there's some expert noise worrying about the possibility).
Is my judgement correct?
Short answer: Yes.
Let's go through a Fermi estimate. According to Wikipedia there have been only a small handful of Ebola cases in the First World during this outbreak, almost exclusively among people who'd been volunteering in West Africa on missionary or health care assignments. (There has, however, been one case of local transmission in Texas.) Let's be generous and say 20 people with the disease flew in or out of the US over the last month. Now, there are about two million air passengers per day in the US, of which I'm guessing about a quarter are on international flights; that works out to 15 million international passengers over the same month.
Ebola takes close contact to be transmitted; it's not an airborne disease. Since you'll probably be sitting next to each other, that means you'll each only be coming into close contact with one other person on each flight. Let's say that, if they're infectious, that person has a 20% chance of giving you Ebola over the course of the flight (probably an overestimate), and that a case of Ebola in the First World has a 50% chance of killing you. Combined with the ratio of infected travelers we worked out ea...
Can someone explain/articulate why rent-seeking behavior is bad for an economy? Why an economy should be structured to use people's natural greed to motivate them to create wealth.
In particular, I'm thinking about domain sharking. Ie. people who buy domain names in order to sell them rather than use it to develop a site. When the sale happens, money is just moved from the buyer to the seller with no wealth being created. In fact, the net effect is negative because it deters people from starting websites.
This article talks about rent-seeking. However, after...
Can someone help me understand why those who would like to lose weight can't just eat less and exercise more?
Weight loss methods seem to be a topic that have gotten really complex on LW. And I don't get it. I've read quite a bit on LW, et al about weight loss and dieting and just don't get why it's so complicated.
Note: I'm a strong believer in genetic differences in individual metabolism...from my recall something like 25% of BMR is presumed to be genetic. This would be incredibly consequential over time.
I posted this last week but was too late to get any responses, so I'm reposting:
I want to change which charities I donate to, and am looking for transparent, accountable, secular (or at least non-evangelical) Canadian charities that promote democracy, social reform, infrastructure building, rationality, humanism, education, scientific progress, similar principles. Any suggestions for charities worth investigating, or at least a group/organization/website that can help me find what I'm looking for? In the past I haven't properly researched this sort of thin...
I wonder why wanting or having something in the "wrong" century allegedly makes you a morally bad person now; but when the thing you want arrives, works and enough people have or use it to make it socially normalized, they accept it as part of their current standard of living and don't go around disapproving of each other for possessing it.
For example, I've noticed a ramping up lately of propaganda against those horrible people called "billionaires." I would call today's billionaires the early adopters of future living standards, assumi...
For example, I've noticed a ramping up lately of propaganda against those horrible people called "billionaires." I would call today's billionaires the early adopters of future living standards, assuming that we continue to have exponential economic growth.
I don't think this is a good example of the broader phenomenon you are describing. When people criticize the very wealthy, they're primarily making a criticism about relative, not absolute standards of living. I.e. "It is a sin to have so much when others have so little." I wouldn't say this is the only criticism, because I have seen, for example, criticisms of people owning mansions when they have small families (since it creates enormous upkeep costs and the unused rooms have basically no value except as a positional good). But that's the exception; I don't think anyone would consider owning a Maserati immoral (at least on grounds of wealth rather than environmentalism) if there weren't also people struggling to pay for basic necessities.
I would call today's billionaires the early adopters of future living standards
My impression is that what billionaires are resented and propagandized against for is mostly not lifestyle advantages like having huge houses, private jets, the option of not working for a living, etc., but two other things.
I would call today's billionaires the early adopters of future living standards, assuming that we continue to have exponential economic growth.
That's one hell of an assumption.
Are you talking about the Bill Gates-rich or the Paris Hilton-rich? They are both admired and hated for totally different reasons.
I would call today's billionaires the early adopters of future living standards
That's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it works well historically. At which point the lifestyle of hoi polloi started to resemble that of a Roman senator? Does today's middle class live like medieval feudal lords?
We find this idea in science fiction
In the sci-fi from the 50s. Contemporary sci-fi is rather more dystopian (with some exceptions, notably Iain Bank's Culture).
There are domains where it's easy to perform experiments (physics, chemistry) and others where it's unfeasible (biology, economy) or impossible (psychology).
The quality of scientific understanding in these different domains is necessarily different. Has there been any thoughts or study devoted to the subject of doing statistics or Bayesian learning where you can suffer from lack of feedback or hysteresis? Is there a mathematics for doing science in low feedback domains?
Of course. But isn't this the case with anything?
If I decide to consciously commit to any task, there will be obstacles. If I set out to increase my knowledge on a subject, I'll fight boredom, distractions, etc. It will reduce my capacity for other tasks—both mentally and by consuming time.
Losing weight is difficult, but it seems much simpler to me than the discussion (and perhaps consensus) I've seen around here.
I've wondered if it's due to body weight being such a personal issue?
Kinda, but the thing is, there are different levels of difficulty that one faces when trying to do "anything".
Sometimes it's just a matter of establishing a habit.
Sometimes you need to get over a hill and then the activity will provide its own incentives (e.g. runner's high).
And sometimes it's just a hard slog all the way and any time you relax you backslide.