I found the original website for Prof. Lipsitch's "Cambridge Working Group" from 2014 at http://www.cambridgeworkinggroup.org/ . While the website does not focus exclusively on gain-of-function, this was certainly a recurring theme in his public talks about this.
The list of signatories (which I believe has not been updated since 2016) includes several members of our community (apologies to anyone who I have missed):
Here is a video of Prof. Lipsitch at EA Global Boston in 2017. I haven't watched it yet, but I would expect him to discuss gain-of-function research: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oKwg3Zs5DPDFXvSKC/marc-lipsitch-preventing-catastrophic-risks-by-mitigating
Here is a data point not directly relevant to Less Wrong, but perhaps to the broader rationality community:
Around this time, Marc Lipsitch organized a website and an open letter warning publicly about the dangers of gain-of-function research. I was a doctoral student at HSPH at the time, and shared this information with a few rationalist-aligned organizations. I remember making an offer to introduce them to Prof. Lipsitch, so that maybe he could give a talk. I got the impression that the Future of Life Institute had some communication with him, and ...
This comment touches on the central tension between the current paradigm in medicine, i.e. "evidence-based medicine" and an alternative and intuitively appealing approach based on a biological understanding of mechanism of disease.
In evidence-based medicine, decisions are based on statistical analysis of randomized trials; what matters is whether we can be confident that the medication probabilistically has improved outcomes when tested on humans as a unit. We don't care really care too much about the mechanism behind the causal effect, just wh...
Thank you so much for writing this! Yes, this is mostly an accurate summary of my views (although I would certainly phrase some things differently). I just want to point out two minor disagreements:
You are correct that someone who has one allergy may be more likely to have an other allergy, and that this violates the assumptions of our model. Our model relies on a strong independence assumption, there are many realistic cases where this independence assumption will not hold. I also agree that the video uses an example where the assumption may not hold. The video is oversimplified on purpose, in an attempt to get people interested enough to read the arXiv preprint.
If there is a small correlation between baseline risk and effect of treatmen...
I very emphatically disagree with this.
You are right that once you have a prediction for risk if untreated, and a prediction risk if treated, you just need a cost/benefit analysis. However, you won't get to that stage without a paradigm for extrapolation, whether implicit or explicit. I prefer making that paradigm explicit.
If you want to plug in raw experimental data, you are going to need data from people who are exactly like the patient in every way. Then, you will be relying on a paradigm for extrapolation which claims that the conditional c...
Suppose you summarize the effect of a drug using a relative risk (a multiplicative effect parameter relating the probability of the event if treated with the probability of the event if untreated), and consider this multiplicative parameter to represent the "magnitude of the effect"
The natural thing for a clinician to do will be to assume that the magnitude of the effect is the same in their own patients. They will therefore rely on this specific scale for extrapolation from the study to their patients. However, those patients may have a different risk pro...
No. This is not about interpretation of probabilities. It is about choosing what aspect of reality to rely on for extrapolation. You will get different extrapolations depending on whether you rely on a risk ratio, a risk difference or an odds ratio. This will lead to real differences in predictions for what happens under intervention.
Even if clinical decisions are entirely left to an algorithm, the algorithm will need to select a mathematical object to rely on for extrapolation. The person who writes the algorithm needs to tell the algorithm what to use, a...
Some time in the next week I'll write up a post with a few full examples (including the one from Robins, Hernan and Wasserman), and explain in a bit more detail.
I look forward to reading it. To be honest: Knowing these authors, I'd be surprised if you have found an error that breaks their argument.
We are now discussing questions that are so far outside of my expertise that I do not have the ability to independently evaluate the arguments, so I am unlikely to contribute further to this particular subthread (i.e. to the discussion about whether there exists an obvious and superior Bayesian solution to the problem I am trying to solve).
I don't have a great reference for this.
A place to start might be Judea Pearl's essay "Why I'm only half-Bayesian" at https://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r284-reprint.pdf . If you look at his Twitter account at @yudapearl, you will also see numerous tweets where he refers to Bayes Theorem as a "trivial identity" and where he talks about Bayesian statistics as "spraying priors on everything". See for example https://twitter.com/yudapearl/status/1143118757126000640 and his discussions with Frank Harrell.
Ano...
Ok, after reading these, it's sounding a lot more like the main problem is causal inference people not being very steeped in Bayesian inference. Robins, Hernan and Wasserman's argument is based on a mistake that took all of ten minutes to spot: they show that a particular quantity is independent of propensity score function if the true parameters of the model are known, then jump to the estimate of that quantity being independent of propensity - when in fact, the estimate is dependent on the propensity, because the estimates of the model paramete...
Ok, I think that's the main issue here. As a criticism of Pearl and Bareinboim, I agree this is basically valid. That said, I'd still say that throwing out DAGs is a terrible way to handle the issue - Bayesian inference with DAGs is the right approach for this sort of problem.
I am not throwing out DAGs. I am just claiming that the particular aspect of reality that I think justifies extrapolation cannot be represented on a standard DAG. While I formalized my causal model for these aspects of reality without using graphs, I am confident that the...
Identifiability, sure. But latents still aren't a problem for either extrapolation or model testing, as long as we're using Bayesian inference. We don't need identifiability.
I am not using Bayesian inference, and neither are Pearl and Bareinboim. Their graphical framework ("selection diagrams") is very explicitly set up as model for reasoning about whether the causal effect in the target population is identified in terms of observed data from the study population and observed data from the target population. Such identification m...
The key issue is that we're asking a counterfactual question. The question itself will be underdefined without the context of a causal model. The Russian roulette hypothetical is a good example: "Our goal is to find out what happens in Norway if everyone took up playing Russian roulette once a year". What does this actually mean? Are we asking what would happen if some mad dictator forced everyone to play Russian roulette? Or if some Russian roulette social media craze caught on? Or if people became suicidal en-masse and Russian roule...
I am curious why you think the approach based on causal diagrams is obviously correct. Would you be able to unpack this for me?
Does it not bother you that this approach fails to find a solution (i.e. won't make any predictions at all) if there are unmeasured causes of the outcome, even if treatment has no effect?
Does it not bother you that it fails to find a solution to the Russian roulette example, because the approach insists on treating "what happens if treated" and "what happens if untreated" as separate problems, and theref...
In my view, "the problem of induction" is just a bunch of philosophers obsessing over the fact that induction is not deduction, and that you therefore cannot predict the future with logical certainty. This is true, but not very interesting. We should instead spend our energy thinking about how to make better predictions, and how we can evaluate how much confidence to have in our predictions. I agree with you that the fields you mention have made immense progress on that.
I am not convinced that computer programs are immune to Goodmans point. AI ...
I am not sure I fully understand this comment, or why you believe my argument is circular. It is possible that you are right, but I would very much appreciate a more thorough explanation.
In particular, I am not "concluding" that humans were produced by an evolutionary process; but rather using it as background knowledge. Moreover, this statement seems uncontroversial enough that I can bring it in as a premise without having to argue for it.
Since "humans were produced by an evolutionary process" is a premise and not a conclusion, I don't understand what you mean by circular reasoning.
Update: The editors of the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology have now rejected my second letter to the editor, and thus helped prove Eliezer's point about four layers of conversation.
Why do you think two senior biostats guys would disagree with you if it was obviously wrong? I have worked with enough academics to know that they are far far from infallible, but curious on your analysis of this question.
Good question. I think a lot of this is due to a cultural difference between those of us who have been trained in the modern counterfactual causal framework, and an old generation of methodologists who felt the old framework worked well enough for them and never bothered to learn about counterfactuals.
I wrote this on my personal blog; I was reluctant to post this to Less Wrong since it is not obviously relevant to the core interests of LW users. However, I concluded that some of you may find it interesting as an example of how the academic publishing system is broken. It is relevant to Eliezer's recent Facebook comments about building an intellectual edifice.
I wrote this on my personal blog; I was reluctant to post this to Less Wrong since it is not obviously relevant to the core interests of LW users. However, I concluded that some of you may find it interesting as an example of how the academic publishing system is broken. It is relevant to Eliezer's recent Facebook comments about building an intellectual edifice.
VortexLeague: Can you be a little more specific about what kind of help you need?
A very short, general introduction to Less Wrong is available at http://lesswrong.com/about/
Essentially, Less Wrong is a reddit-type forum for discussing how we can make our beliefs more accurate.
Thank you for the link, that is a very good presentation and it is good to see that ML people are thinking about these things.
There certainly are ML algorithms that are designed to make the second kind of predictions, but generally they only work if you have a correct causal model
It is possible that there are some ML algorithms that try to discover the causal model from the data. For example, /u/IlyaShpitser works on these kinds of methods. However, these methods only work to the extent that they are able to discover the correct causal model, so it seems disingenious to claim that we can ignore causality and focus on "prediction".
I skimmed this paper and plan to read it in more detail tomorrow. My first thought is that it is fundamentally confused. I believe the confusion comes from the fact that the word "prediction" is used with two separate meanings: Are you interested in predicting Y given an observed value of X (Pr[Y | X=x]), or are you interested in predicting Y given an intervention on X (i.e. Pr[Y|do(X=x)]).
The first of these may be useful for certain purposes. but If you intend to use the research for decision making and optimization (i.e. you want to interve...
Thanks for catching that, I stand corrected.
The rational choice depends on your utility function. Your utility function is unlikely to be linear with money. For example, if your utility function is log (X), then you will accept the first bet, be indifferent to the second bet, and reject the third bet. Any risk-averse utility function (i.e. any monotonically increasing function with negative second derivative) reaches a point where the agent stops playing the game.
A VNM-rational agent with a linear utility function over money will indeed always take this bet. From this, we can infer that linear u...
Because I didn't perceive a significant disruption to the event, I was mentally bucketing you with people I know who severely dislike children and would secretly (or not so secretly) prefer that they not attend events like this at all; or that they should do so only if able to remain silent (which in practice means not at all.) I suspect Anders_H had the same reaction I did.
Just to be clear, I did not attend Solstice this year, and I was mentally reacting to a similar complaint that was made after last year's Solstice event. At last year's event, I did ...
While I understand that some people may feel this way, I very much hope that this sentiment is rare. The presence of young children at the event only adds to the sense of belonging to a community, which is an important part of what we are trying to "borrow" from religions.
While I understand that some people may feel this way, I very much hope that this sentiment is rare.
There are two sentiments here, that I think should both be common:
Children are welcome at community gatherings.
There are times when children should be quiet or absent.
Raemon's solution is a good one here, as is a norm of parents removing children when they get especially loud. (At this event that may have been less practical than normal, given that it was about 40°F outside, but may have been solved by having a designated children's room or somethi...
When I still went to church, there was sometimes a "children's service" that went in parallel to the church service. Young kids who couldn't sit still and their parents were strongly encouraged to go to that one instead. It was a small room far enough away, with the pastor's wife, and I presume they were singing and nursing and changing diapers.
When a little child attended the Leipzig Solstice two years ago, that's basically what we did. She and her parents had their own room for themselves where they could go when she became tired and fussy. Tha...
I agree with you that having community events be family events is a very good idea and am also fully against the idea of banning children. Nevertheless, there is a big difference between some children making some noise during an event and a single child consistently talking and throwing fits interrupting half of the entire presentation while their parents don't remove from hearing range.
From what I've seen, it's not rare at all. I count... myself and at least 7 other people who've expressed the sentiment in private across both this year and last year (it happened last year too). It is, however, something that is very difficult for people to speak up about. I think what's going on is that different people care about differing portious of the solstice (community, message, aesthetics, etc) to surprisingly differing degrees, may have sensory sensitivites or difficulty with multiple audio input streams, and may or may not find children positiv...
I like having a community that supports children, but at the same time let's not close our eyes to the truth. If there actually is a child screaming throughout Solstice and running around rampant it will, in fact, ruin the experience. I don't know what the Bay Solstice was like, so I don't know if this was really the case or if it's an exaggeration.
I'd like each user to have their own sub domain (I.e such that my top level posts can be accessed either from Anders_h.lesswrong.com or from LW discussion). If possible it would be great if users could customize the design of their sub domain, such that posts look different when accessed from LW discussion.
Given that this was posted to LW, you'd think this link would be about a different equation..
The one-year embargo on my doctoral thesis has been lifted, it is now available at https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/23205172/HUITFELDT-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?sequence=1 . To the best of my knowledge, this is the first thesis to include a Litany of Tarski in the introduction.
Upvoted. I'm not sure how to phrase this without sounding sycophantic, but here is an attempt: Sarah's blog posts and comments were always top quality, but the last couple of posts seem like the beginning of something important, almost comparable to when Scott moved from squid314 to Slatestarcodex.
Today, I uploaded a sequence of three working papers to my website at https://andershuitfeldt.net/working-papers/
This is an ambitious project that aims to change fundamental things about how epidemiologists and statisticians think about choice of effect measure, effect modification and external validity. A link to an earlier version of this manuscript was posted to Less Wrong half a year ago, the manuscript has since been split into three parts and improved significantly. This work was also presented in poster form at EA Global last month.
I want to give ...
This is almost certainly a small minority view, but from my perspective as a European based in the Bay Area who may be moving back to Europe next summer, the most important aspect would be geographical proximity to a decent university where staff and faculty can get away with speaking only English.
What do you mean by "no risk"? This sentence seems to imply that your decisions are influenced by the sunk cost fallacy.
Try to imagine an alien who has been teleported into your body, who is trying to optimize your wealth. The fact that the coins were worth a third of their current price 18 months ago would not factor into the alien's decision.
There may be an ethically relevant distinction between a rule that tells you to avoid being the cause of bad things, and a rule that says you should cause good things to happen. However, I am not convinced that causality is relevant to this distinction. As far as I can tell, these two concepts are both about causality. We may be using words differently, do you think you could explain why you think this distinction is about causality?
It would seem that the existence of such contractors follows logically from the fact that you are able to hire people despite the fact that you require contractors to volunteer 2/3 of their time.
The Economist published a fascinating blog entry where they use evidential decision theory to establish that tattoo removal results in savings to the prison system. See http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/08/tattoos-jobs-and-recidivism . Temporally, this blog entry corresponds roughly to the time I lost my respect for the Economist. You can draw your own causal conclusions from this.
Solomonoff Induction is uncomputable, and implementing it will not be possible even in principle. It should be understood as an ideal which you should try to approximate, rather than something you can ever implement.
Solomonoff Induction is just bayesian epistemology with a prior determined by information theoretic complexity. As an imperfect agent trying to approximate it, you will get most of your value from simply grokking Bayesian epistemology. After you've done that, you may want to spend some time thinking about the philosophy of science of setting priors based on information theoretic complexity.
I took the survey
Thanks. Good points. Note that many of those words are already established in the literature with same meaning. For the particular example of "doomed", this is the standard term for this concept, and was introduced by Greenland and Robins (1986). I guess I could instead use "response type 1" but the word doomed will be much more effective at pointing to the correct concept, particularly for people who are familiar with the previous literature.
The only new term I introduce is "flip". I also provide a new definition of effect...
Do you mean probability instead of probably?
Yes. Thanks for noticing. I changed that sentence after I got the rejection letter (in order to correct a minor error that the reviewers correctly pointed out), and the error was introduced at that time. So that is not what they were referring to.
If the reviewers don't succeed in understanding what you are saying you might have explained yourself in casual language but still failed.
I agree, but I am puzzled by why they would have misunderstood. I spent a lot of effort over several months trying to be as...
Three days ago, I went through a traditional rite of passage for junior academics: I received my first rejection letter on a paper submitted for peer review. After I received the rejection letter, I forwarded the paper to two top professors in my field, who both confirmed that the basic arguments seem to be correct and important. Several top faculty members have told me they believe the paper will eventually be published in a top journal, so I am actually feeling more confident about the paper than before it got rejected.
I am also very frustrated with the ...
I think the evidence for the effectiveness of statins is very convincing. The absolute risk reduction from statins will depend primarily on your individual baseline risk of coronary disease. From the information you have provided, I don't think your baseline risk is extraordinarily high, but it is also not negligible.
You will have to make a trade-off where the important considerations are (1) how bothered you are by the side-effects, (2) what absolute risk reduction you expect based on your individual baseline risk, (3) the marginal price (in terms of side...
Why do you want to be able to do that? Do you mean that you want to be able to look at a spreadsheet and move around numbers in your head until you know what the parameter estimates are? If you have access to a statistical software package, this would not give you the ability to do anything you couldn't have done otherwise. However, that is obvious, so I am going to assume you are more interested in groking some part of the underlying the epistemic process. But if that is indeed your goal, the ability to do the parameter estimation in your head seems like a very low priority, almost more of a party trick than actually useful.
I disagree with this. In my opinion QALYs are much superior to DALYs for reasons that are inherent to how the measures are defined. I wrote a Tumblr post in response to Slatestarscratchpad a few weeks ago, see http://dooperator.tumblr.com/post/137005888794/can-you-give-me-a-or-two-good-article-on-why .
Richard, I don't think Less Wrong can survive losing both Ilya and you in the same week. I hope both of you reconsider. Either way, we definitely need to see this as a wake-up call. This forum has been in decline for a while, but this week I definitely think it hit a breaking point.
Interesting. The cynics are jumping ship.
But no. If Richard leaves because a heavily-downvoted article and the comments trying to direct its author to think a little bit deeper offends his sensibilities, that of course is his choice, but it says little about the forum as a whole. Like Ilya, I don't overly mind him, but he's also not a critical piece of the infrastructure; they both did little constructive work, and the forum is oversaturated with people willing to tell low-status members what they're doing wrong anyways, with nobody saying what they're doing right.
How about asking "What is the single most important change that would make you want to participate more frequently on Less Wrong?"
This question would probably not be useful for the census itself, but it seems like a great opportunity to brainstorm..
I run the Less Wrong meetup group in Palo Alto. After we announced the events at Meetup.com, we often get a lot of guests who are interested in rationality but who have not read the LW sequences. I have an idea for a introductory session where we have the participants do a sorting exercise. Therefore, I am interested in getting 3D printed versions of rubes, bleggs and other items references in this post.
Does anyone have any thoughts on how to do this cheaply? Is there sufficient interest in this to get a kickstarter running? I expect that these items may be of interest to other Less Wrong meetup groups, and possibly to CFAR workshops and/or schools?
I don't think the existence of lawlike phenomena is controversial, at least not on this forum. Otherwise, how do you account for the remarkable patterns to our observations? Of course, it is not possible to determine what those phenomena are, but I don't think my solution requires this. It just requires that our sensory algorithm responds the same way every time.